The Great American Novel (53 page)

General Oakhart now read into the microphone the names of the Mundys whom he was suspending that day from the Patriot League for their Communist activities. Full files, he said, were available on each and every one of these cases, and had been turned over that morning to the F.B.I., along with the files on another thirty-six Communists and pro-Communists presently active in the league. In that the Thirty-Six hadn't yet been afforded an opportunity, in closed session with the General, either to refute the charges or to make a full confession, General Oakhart said that he did not consider it “fair play” to make their names known to the public at this time. To date, he reported, not a single one of the Mundy Thirteen that he had interrogated in his office had been able to disprove the allegations to the satisfaction of himself or Mrs. Trust, who had served throughout as his associate in this investigation; and so far only one Mundy—after having laughingly denied his Communist affiliations in the morning—had returned to the General's office in the afternoon and made a clean breast of his lifelong service as an agent of the Soviet Union. He was John Baal, the Mundy first-baseman. Having confessed to his own conspiratorial role, he had then proceeded to confirm the identities of his twelve Communist teammates, who were, in alphabetical order, Jean-Paul Astarte, Oliver Damur, Virgil Demeter, coach Isaac Ellis, Carl Khovaki, Chico Mecoatl, Eugene Mokos, Donald Ockatur, Peter Ptah, George Skirnir, Cletis Terminus, and Charles Tuminikar.

General Oakhart concluded his remarks with the assurance that the Patriot League would be cleansed of its remaining thirty-six Communists and the plot against American baseball destroyed before the week was out.

Now Gamesh, his left arm in a sling beneath his Ruppert warm-up jacket, stepped to the microphone. After being accorded a standing ovation by the assembled reporters (with one notable exception), he delivered himself of the story he had previously told the General in the old family hovel in Docktown. At the request of the reporters, he twice recounted his experience in the radio room of Soviet Military Intelligence, where he had listened one night to the first Yankee-Tycoon World Series game while snow fell upon the Communist capital he never could call home. “I feared that some day I would pay with my life for the longing that had drawn me to that room. And so,” said Gamesh, as the reporters (with one notable exception) scribbled furiously, “I nearly did, two days ago. My fellow Americans, that the Communists should have chosen from their ranks former Patriot League umpire Mike Masterson to be my assassin is an indication of just how shrewd and cynical is the enemy secretly conspiring against us. For had I been killed two days back by the bullet that has instead only shattered my arm, it would have appeared to the world that I was the victim of an act of vengeance taken against me and me alone by a crazed and senile old man who could never find it in his heart to forgive and forget. And it would have been assumed, as indeed it has been until this moment, that Roland Agni was merely an unintended victim of the homicidal umpire's bullets. But the truth is far more tragic and far more terrifying. Mike Masterson, the umpire who never called one wrong in his heart, was no less a dupe of the Communists than I was—and in his obedience to his Communist masters, deliberately and in cold blood destroyed the life of a very great American—a great hitter, a great fielder, and a great anti-Communist crusader. I am speaking of the youngster I came to know so well, and admire so deeply, in the few brief weeks I was privileged to be his manager. I am speaking of the one Mundy who did not jump to the bait that I dangled before his teammates to determine just which were the Red fish swimming in the Ruppert Mundy sea. I am speaking of the young American who the Communists so feared that in the end they ordered his execution, the youngster who fought the Reds at every turn, at times blindly and in bewilderment, but always armed with the conviction that there was only one way to play the game, and that was the way Americans played it. I am speaking of the player, who, had he lived in happier times, would have broken all the records in the book and surely one day would have been enshrined in Cooperstown with the greats of yesteryear, but whose name will live on nonetheless in the Anti-Communist Hall of Fame soon to be constructed here in Tri-City by Angela Whittling Trust: I am speaking of Ruppert center-fielder Roland Agni.”

Here Gamesh turned to the parents of the slain young man. The elder Mr. Agni, no less impressive a physical specimen than his son, rose to his feet and extended a hand to Roland's mother; together the bereaved father and his petite and pretty wife stepped to the microphone. Mr. Agni's voice was husky with emotion when he began, and his wife, who had been so brave all along, now gave in to tears and wept quietly at his side while he spoke. Mrs. Trust, in a gesture recorded in the Pulitzer Prize photograph of that year, reached up and with her own withered hand took hold of Mrs. Agni's arm to comfort the younger woman.

Said Mr. Agni: “My wife and I have lost our nineteen-year-old son. Of course we cannot but grieve, of course our hearts are heavy. But I should like to tell you that we have never in our lives been prouder of him than we are today. To others Roland was always a hero because he was a consummate athlete—to us, his parents, he is now a hero because he was a patriot who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country and for mankind. Where is there an American mother and father who could ask for anything more?”

The last word that afternoon was Mrs. Trust's. It was her answer to the Communists, and it was “Applesauce!”

*   *   *

As General Oakhart had promised, within the week thirty-six more Communists and Communist sympathizers were suspended from the Patriot League and their names released to the press: nine Reapers, eight Greenbacks, seven Keepers, six Butchers, four Blues, and two Rustlers. Even more shocking than this list of thirty-six was the exposure of the Communist owners, Frank Mazuma and Abraham Ellis, as well as the Soviet “courier,” Ellis's wife Sarah. When both owners immediately issued statements in which they categorically denied the charges—calling them outrageous, nonsensical, and wickedly irresponsible—General Oakhart traveled to Chicago to confer with Judge Landis. The incensed Commissioner had already informed reporters that he for one did not intend to do the job of “rodent extermination” for General Oakhart that the P. League President should have been doing for himself while the Communists were infiltrating his league over the last decade; nonetheless, following their three-hour meeting, Landis made a brief statement to reporters in which he announced that Organized Baseball lent its “moral support” to the General's decision to suspend from league play the Kakoola Reapers and the Tri-City Greenbacks until such time as the accused owners either proved their innocence or divested themselves of their franchises. But in the matter of any legal suits resulting from the suspension of the two teams, Judge Landis made it altogether clear that they would be the sole responsibility of those who had gotten themselves into this mess to begin with.

Thereafter chaos reigned in General Oakhart's league. The teams decimated by suspensions had to call on local high school boys to fill out their rosters, if, that is, they could find high school boys of any ability whose fathers were foolish enough to compromise their sons' prospects by associating them with a P. League club. The suspended players meanwhile loudly proclaimed their innocence in bars and poolrooms all over the country—causing brawls aplenty—or else, following the example of Big John Baal, willingly admitted to whatever it was they were being charged with in the hope that an admission of guilt and a humble apology (“I'm just a country boy, I didn't know no better”) would lead to reinstatement. Frank Mazuma did go ahead and bring a damage suit for four and a half million dollars against the Patriot League President, but the Ellises seemed virtually to acknowledge their guilt by locking the gates to Greenback Stadium and disappearing from Tri-City without leaving a trace. Even dedicated P. League fans indifferent to the dangers of Marxist-Leninism (and there were many) grew increasingly exasperated by the shifting schedule, by fourteen- and fifteen-year-old relief pitchers, and by the vociferous American Legion pickets forbidding them entrance to the bleachers. Consequently, by the end of the '44 season there wasn't a team in the league, not even the untainted Tycoons, who could draw more than three hundred people into the park to watch them play baseball.

The day after Max Lanier picked up the final Cardinal victory in the '44 World Series, the House Un-American Activities Committee began hearings on Communist infiltration of the Patriot League in Room 1105 of the federal court house in Port Ruppert, New Jersey. The Vice President of the United States, Mr. Henry Wallace, in a speech that very morning before the convention of the East-West Educational and Rehabilitation Alliance of the Congress for the Promotion of Humanitarianism in the United Post-War World, described the investigation as “a despicable affront to our brave Russian allies,” and Mrs. Roosevelt, in her daily newspaper column, agreed, calling it “an insult to the people and the leaders of the Soviet Union.” F.D.R. was reported to have laughed the whole thing off as so much “electioneering.” “By whom, Mr. President?” “Doug Oakhart,” the Chief Executive was supposed to have said. “The old war-horse still wants my job.”

Each day hundreds of Port Ruppert citizens congregated near the statue of Lincoln at the foot of the Port Ruppert court house steps to watch the subpoenaed witnesses arrive; so did they once line the sidewalk ten and fifteen deep outside the Mundy clubhouse door to catch a glimpse of the great Gofannon as the shy star exited Mundy Park in an open-neck shirt and overalls at the end of a good day's work. Only the crowd back in those days was head over heels in love.

One by one the Mundys whom General Oakhart had suspended arrived with their lawyers to testify before the Committee.

“Traituh!”

“Toincoat!”

“Spy!”

In that entire week only one Port Rupe-it roota was seen weeping, a midget in a messenger's uniform who broke from between a policeman's legs at the sight of Ockatur stepping out of his taxi, and called in a high, breaking voice, “Say it ain't so, O.K.!”

“It ain't, you little asshole!” replied Ockatur, and waddled arrogantly up the steep court house steps one at a time.

Of the thirteen, ten maintained their innocence right down to the end, despite repeated warnings from the chairman that they were testifying under oath and if found guilty of perjury would receive stiff fines and heavy jail sentences; at least half of these ten would undoubtedly have made a confession too, had it not been for Ockatur, who emerged as the strong man of the group, tongue-lashing the fainthearted like Skirnir and appealing to the conscience of the preacher, Demeter, in nightlong arguments at their hotel. Of the three who admitted to being Communists, Big John Baal had of course done so prior to being called before the Committee—indeed, he had just gone around the corner from General Oakhart's office and after an hour in a bar “seen the light”: “Sure I was a Communist for the Communists,” he told the press. “Sure I was trained by the Reds down there in Nicaragey—hell, they wuz all over the place. Sure the Mundys is mostly Commies. I think some of 'em is queers, too. Ha ha ha ha!” The two who changed their story at the hearings and admitted to affiliations they had previously denied, and of which they were now deeply ashamed, were Nickname Damur (reportedly whipped by his daddy till he told the truth) and Chico Mecoatl, who testified with the aid of an interpreter. At the conclusion of their testimony, in which they fingered not only themselves but the other Communist members of the team, they were lauded by the Committee chairman. “Mr. Damur, Mr. Mecoatl, we appreciate your cooperation with our Committee,” said Congressman Dies. “It is only through the assistance of people such as you that we have been able to make the progress that has been made in bringing the attention of the American people to the machinations of this Communist conspiracy for world domination.”

“Muchas gracias, Señor Dies,”
said Chico, but Nickname wept.

The most troublesome of the Mundy Thirteen were the coaches, Isaac Ellis and O.K. Ockatur, both of whom created such commotion at the hearings that they had to be forcibly removed by federal marshals and subsequently were found in contempt of a Congressional committee and each sentenced to a year in jail, Ockatur to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Isaac to a farm for delinquent boys in Rahway, New Jersey, where, within a month of his arrival, he was beaten to death in the shower by his entire dormitory, apparently for suggesting that the great Mundy martyr, Roland Agni, had been involved with him in feeding doped-up breakfast food to his teammates toward the end of the '43 season.

Frenchy Astarte was the only other Mundy to die after giving testimony to the Committee, he by his own hand on the family farm at Gaspé.

The “surprise” witness called by the committee in Port Ruppert was the sports columnist of the Finest Family Newspapers, Word Smith, who refused to answer questions having to do with purported friends of his, “highly placed officials in the executive branch of the government” allegedly involved in the leasing of Mundy Park by the War Department, in accordance, it now turned out, with the Soviet plot to destroy the Patriot League.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Smitty, after supplying his name, his address, and his occupation, “this Committee and its investigation is a farce. I refuse to be a party to it. I refuse to answer any more of your questions, particularly questions about my associations, past, present, or in the life to come. I refuse to answer any questions having to do with my political beliefs, my health habits, my sex habits, my eating habits, and my good habits, such as they are. I refuse to apologize or explain or verify any remarks I have ever made to anyone over the telephone, face to face, in my sleep, in my cups, or in my solitude. I refuse to participate in this lunatic comedy in which American baseball players who could not locate Russia on a map of the world—who could not locate
the world
on a map of the world—denounce themselves and their teammates as Communist spies out of fear and intimidation and howling ignorance, or, as is the case with that case named Baal, out of incorrigible human perversity and curdled genes. Truly, sir, I have never seen anything in sixty years of astonishment to compare with these shameful shenanigans. Over the past two seasons it has been my misfortune to follow the Patriot League through one incredible and ludicrous crisis after another. Things have happened on the field of play that I would not have believed if I had not been there to see them with my own eyes. Frankly, I still don't believe them. But for sheer unabashed, unabetted, unabridged, unaccountable, unadorned, unallayed, unamusing, unanticipated, unassailable—”