Independence Day

10

“You know, Jerry, the truth is I just began to realize I didn’t care what happened to me, you know? Worry and worry about making your life come out right, you know? Regret everything you say or do, everything seems to sabotage you, then you try to quit sabotaging yourself. But then that’s a mistake. Finally you just have to figure a lot’s out of your control, right?”

“Right! Thanks! Bob from Sarnia! Next caller. You’re on Blues Talk. You’re on the air, Oshawa!”

“Hi, Jerry, it’s Stan….”

Out my window a tall, blond, bronze-skinned, no-shirt, chisel-chest hombre of about my own age is working a big chamois cloth over a red vintage Mustang with what looks to be red-and-white Wisconsin plates. For some reason he’s wearing green lederhosen, and it is his loud and blarey radio that has shaken me awake. Crackling morning light and leafy shadow spread across the gravel and the lawns of neighborhood houses behind the inn. It’s Sunday. The lederhosen guy’s here for the “Classic Car Parade,” which rolls tomorrow, and doesn’t want the dust and grime to get ahead of him. His pretty plump-as-a-knödel wife is perched on the fender of my car, sunning her short brown legs and smiling. They’ve hung their bright red floor mats off my bumper to dry.

Another American — Joe Markham, for instance — might snarl out at them: “Getyerfuckinmatsoffyaasshole.” But that would spoil a morning, wake the world too early (including my son). Bob from Sarnia has already put it well enough.

By eight I’ve shaved and showered, using the clammy, tiny-windowed, beaverboard cubicle, already hot and malodorous from the previous user (I spied the woman with the neck brace slipping in, slipping out).

Paul is twisted into his covers when I rouse him with our oldest reveille: “Time’s a wastin’ … miles to go … I’m hungry as a bear … hop in the shower.” We’ve checked out when we checked in and now have only to eat and beat it.

Then I’m down the stairs, hearing church bells already, as well as the muffled sumptuary noises of belly-buster breakfasts being eaten in the dining room by a group of total strangers who have only the Baseball Hall of Fame in common.

I’m eager to call Ted Houlihan (I forgot to try again last night), and get him ready for a miracle: the Markhams have crumbled; my strategy’s borne fruit; his balls are as good as gone. Though the choking-man diagram, here again above the phone as I listen to ring after ring, reminds me unerringly of what realty’s all about: we — the Markhams, the bad apples at Buy and Large, Ted, me, the bank, the building inspectors — we’re all hankering to get our hands around somebody’s neck and strangle the shit out of him for some little half-chewed piece of indigestible gristle we identify as our “nut,” the nitty gritty, the carrot that makes the goat trot. Better, of course, to take a higher road, operate on the principle of service and see if things don’t turn out better….

“Hello?”

“Hey, good news, Ted!” I shout straight into the receiver. The breakfast club in the next room falls hushed at my voice — as if I’d gone hysterical.

“Good news here too,” Ted says.

“Let’s hear yours first.” I am instantly wary.

“I sold the house,” Ted says. “Some new outfit down in New Egypt. Bohemia, or something, Realty. They got it off the MLS. The woman brought a Korean family over last night around eight. And I had an offer in hand by ten.” When I was gabbing with Paul about whether or not he’s truly hopeless. “I called you around nine and left a message. But I really couldn’t say no. They put the money in their trust account night deposit.”

“How much?” I say grimly. I experience a small, tight chill and my stomach goes corked.

“What’s that?”

“How much did the Koreans pay?”

“Full boat!” Ted says exuberantly. “Sure. One fifty-five. I jewed the girl a point too. She hadn’t done anything to earn it. You’d done more by a long shot. Your office gets half, of course.”

“My clients just don’t have anyplace to live now, Ted.” My voice has lowered to a razor-thin whisper. I would be happy to choke Ted with my hands. “We had an exclusive listing with you, we talked about that yesterday, and at the least you were going to get in touch with me so I could put a competitive offer in, which is what I’ve got authorized.” Or nearly. “One fifty-five. Full boat, you said.”

“Well.” Ted pauses in a funk. “I guess if you want to come back at one-sixty, I could tell the Koreans I forgot. Your office would have to work it out with Bohemia. Evelyn something’s the girl’s name. She’s a little go-getter.”

“What I think is, Ted, we’re going to have to probably sue you for breach of contract.” I say this calmly, but I’m not calm. “Have to tie your house up for a couple of years while the market drops, and let you convalesce at home.” All baloney, of course. We’ve never sued the first client. It’s business suicide. Instead, you simply bag your 3 %, of which I get half, exactly $2,325, maybe make a worthless complaint to the state realty board, and forget about it.

“Well, you have to do what you have to do, I guess,” Ted says. I’m sure he’s standing once again at the rumpus room window in a sleeveless sweater and chinos, mooning out at his pergola, his luau torches and the bamboo curtain he’s just breached in a big way. I wonder if the Koreans even bothered to walk out back last night. Although a big lighted prison might’ve made them feel safer. They aren’t fools.

“Ted, I don’t know what to say.” The noisy eaters in the next room have started back tink-tink-tinking their flatware, mouths full of pancakes, blabbing about how the berm-improvements work between here and Rochester’ll “impact” on driving times to the Falls. Suddenly my chill is over and I’m hot as a sauna bath.

“You might just feel happy for me, Frank, instead of suing me. I’ll probably be dead in a year. So it’s good I sold my house. I can go live with my son now.”

“I really just wanted to sell it for you, Ted.” I am made lightheaded at the unexpected arousal of death. “I’ve got it sold, in fact,” I say faintly.

“You’ll find them another house, Frank. I didn’t think they much liked it here.”

I push my fingertips hard onto the stack of year-old Annie Get Your Gun tickets. Someone, I see, has slid the copy of Achieve Super Marital Sex underneath the stack, with old Mr. Pleasure Unit’s happy face peeking upward. “They liked it a lot,” I say, thinking about Betty Hutton in a cowboy hat. “They were cautious, but they’re sure now. I hope your Koreans are that reliable.”

“Twenty thousand clams. No contingencies,” Ted says. “And they know there’s other parties interested, so they’ll follow up. These people don’t throw money away, Frank. They own a sod farm down around Fort Dix, and they want to move up in the world.” He would like to burble on about his good fortune now that he’s started, but doesn’t out of politeness to me.

“I’m just really disappointed, Ted. That’s all I can say.” Though I’m inventorying my mind for an acceptable fallback, sweat beginning to prickle out of my forehead. I’m to blame for this, for getting diverted from standard practices (though I don’t know that I have any practice I could class as standard).

“Who you voting for this fall?” Ted says. “You guys all pull for business, I guess, don’t you?” I’m wondering if some computer wizard at Bohemia has hacked into our office circuitry. Or possibly Julie Loukinen, who’s new, is double-dipping on our potentials list. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen her with a scruffy Eastern European-looking boyfriend. Though most likely Ted just listed his house as “exclusive” with everybody who came to the door. (And who can be surprised in a free country? It’s laissez-faire: serve your granny to the neighbors for brunch.) “You know neither Dukakis or Bush wants to put out a budget. They don’t want to deliver any unhappy news in case it might offend somebody. I’d much rather they told me they were about to fuck me so I wouldn’t tense up.” Randy new lingo for Ted, the successful house seller. “You want me to take that sign down, by the way?”

“We’ll send somebody out,” I say glumly.

Then suddenly my line to Penns Neck goes loud with fierce papery static so that I can barely hear Ted jibbering on, half gassed, about fin de siècle qualms and something or other, I don’t know what.

“I can’t hear you now, Ted,” I say into the old gunk-smelling receiver, frowning at the stick-figure man signaling me he’s choking, his own hands at his throat, a look of rounded dismay on his balloon face. Then the static stops and I can hear Ted starting in about Bush and Dukakis not being able to tell a good joke if their asses depended on it. I hear him laugh at the whole idea. “So long, Ted,” I say, sure he can’t hear me.

“I read where Bush accepted Christ as his personal savior. Now there’s a joke …,” Ted’s saying extra loud.

I set the receiver gently in its cradle, understanding this bit of life — his and mine — is now over with. I’m almost grateful.

My sworn duty is of course to call the Markhams in a timely manner and break the news, which I try to do, though they’re not in their room at the Raritan Ramada. (No doubt they’re going through the brunch buffet a second time, cocky for making the right decision — too late.) No one comes on the line after twenty-five rings. I call back to leave a message, but a recording puts me on hold, then leaves me out in murky “hold” purgatory, where an FM station is playing “Jungle Flute.” I count to sixty, my hands getting clammy, then decide to call back later since nothing’s at stake anymore.

There are other calls I should make. A hectoring, early-bird “business” call to the McLeods, with an innuendo of unspecified pending actions regarding matters of rent irrespective of personal financial pinches; a call to Julie Loukinen just to let her know “somebody” has let Ted swim through the net. A call to Sally to reaffirm all feelings and say whatever comes into my head, no matter how puzzling. None of these, though, do I feel quite up to. Each seems too complicated on a hot morning, none likely to be rewarding.

But just as I turn to go shake Paul loose from his dreams again, I feel a sudden, flushed, almost breathless urge to call Cathy Flaherty in Gotham. Plenty of times I’ve considered just how welcome (and gratifying) it would be were she just to appear on my doorstep with a bottle of Dom Perignon, demanding an instant barometer reading on me, take my temperature, get the lowdown on how I’ve really been since we last made contact, having naturally enough thought about me no fewer than a million times, with multiple what-ifs embedded everywhere, finally deciding to hunt me down via the Michigan Alumni Association and show up unannounced but “hopefully” not unwelcome. (In my first-draft of the script, we only talk.)

As I was thinking in my room at Sally’s two days ago, few things are as pleasing as being asked to do basically nothing but having all good things come to you as if by right. It’s exactly what poor Joe Markham wanted to happen with his Boise “friend,” except she was too smart for him.

As it happens, I still have Cathy’s number committed to memory from the last time I heard her voice, after Ann announced four years ago that she and Charley were tying the knot and taking the kids, and I was tossed for several loop-the-loops, landing me in the realty business. (Back then I only heard Cathy’s recorded message and couldn’t think of one of my own to leave other than to shout “Help, help, help, help!” and hang up, which I decided against.)

But almost before I know it, I’ve dialed the old number in old 212—a place once guaranteed to work a strange, funkish, double-whammy of low self-regard on me when I worked there as a sportswriter and life was coming unglued the first time. (Now it seems no stranger than Cleveland; such are the freeing, desanctifying fringe benefits of selling real estate.)

More avid cafeteria-eating noises, commingled with mirthless laughter, rise and ebb from next door. I wait for the 212 circuits to lock in on a ring and an answer to occur to someone — honey-haired, honey-skinned Cathy, I’m happily hoping, by now a bona fide M.D., doing her something-or-other, highly competitive specialty whatchamacallit up at Einstein or Cornell, and conceivably willing (it’s also my hope) to take me on for a few moments’ out-of-context, ad hominem-pro bono phone “treatment.” (I’m actually counting on reverse spin here, by which the sound of Cathy’s voice will at once make me feel smart — as can happen — but also feel that I’d better get cracking or face being plowed under by advancing generations with ice water in their veins.)

Ring-ring-ring-a-jing. Ring-ring-ring. Then click. Then a brusque mechanical whir, then another click. It’s not promising. Then, finally, a voice — male, young, smug, as yet undisappointed, an insufferable smart aleck for whom outgoing messages are nothing but chances to gloatingly entertain himself, while demonstrating what an asshole he is to us blameless callers-in. “Hi. This is Cathy and Steve’s answering mechanism. We’re not home now. Really. I promise. We’re not lounging in bed making faces and laughing. Cathy’s probably at the hospital, saving lives or something like that. I’m probably down at Burnham and Culhane, slicing out a bigger piece of the pie for myself. So just be patient and leave us a message, and when time permits one of us will call you back. Probably it’ll be Cathy, since answering machines really kind of bug me. See ya. Bye. Of course wait for the beep.”

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep, click, then the yawning, paralyzing opportunity to leave the most appropriate of messages. “Hi, Cathy?” I say, exhilarated. “It’s Frank.” (Less exhilarated.) “Um. Bascombe. Nothing special, really. I’m, uh, it’s the Fourth of July, or right about then. I’m just up here in Cooperstown, just happened to think about you.” At 8 a.m. “I’m glad to know you’re at the hospital. That’s a good sign. I’m pretty fine. Up here with my son, Paul, who you don’t know.” A long pause while the tape’s running. “Well, that’s about it. By the way, you can tell Steve for me that he can kiss my ass, and I’d be happy to beat the shit out of him any day he can find the time. Bye.” Click. I stand a moment, the receiver in my sweaty hand, assessing what I’ve just done in terms of how it has left me feeling, and also in terms of its character as a small but rash act, possibly foolish and demeaning. And the answer is: better. Much better. Unaccountably. Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

I hike back upstairs to pack, roll Paul out and get the day whacking, since at least for my main purpose (the Markhams aside) it still has some rudiments of promise based on last night’s edgy rapprochement and in any case will end soon enough far from here, with Sally at Rocky and Carlo’s.

Paul meets me at the head of the stairs, hauling along his Paramount bag and wearing his Walkman ear calipers on his neck. He’s groggy and wet-haired, but he’s put on fresh baggy maroon shorts, fresh Day-Glo-orange socks and a big new black tee-shirt that for reasons I know nothing of says Clergy in white on the front (possibly a rock group). When he sees me coming up he offers me his fat-cheeked, impassive expression, as if knowing about me was one thing but seeing me quite another. “I’m surprised to see a fart-smeller like you up here,” he says, then makes a little throaty oink and passes on down the stairs.

In five minutes, though, after making a check for telltale wetness in Paul’s sheets (nothing), I’m back downstairs with my suit bag and my Olympus, ready for breakfast, except the big dining room is still packed with poky breakfasters and Paul is standing at the doorway, staring in with amused disdain. Charlane, in a tight tee-shirt and the same faded jeans from last night, is serving more plates of flapjacks and bacon and bowls of steaming instant scrambled. She looks at me but seems not to recognize me. So that I quickly decide there’s no use waiting (and being ministered to spitefully by Charlane) when we can just as well stash our gear in the car, hike to Main and scare up breakfast for ourselves before the Hall of Fame opens at nine. In other words, let the old Deerslayer sink into history.

Though it hasn’t been that bad a place, lack of an honor bar notwithstanding. Inside its walls, I may have ended the seemingly unendable with Ann, dodged a ricochet with Charlane and, possibly, set things on the rails with Sally Caldwell. Plus, Paul and I have skirmished nearer each other’s trust, and I have been able at least to speak a few of the way-pointing words I’d prepared for that purpose. All noteworthy accomplishments. With only slightly better luck, the Deerslayer could’ve become a hallowed and even sacred place where, say, early next century, Paul could come back alone or with a wife or girlfriend or his own troublesome brood, and tell them this was a place he “used to come with his late dad,” where life-altering wisdom that made all the difference in later life was passed along — though he might not be able to say with complete certainty what the wisdom was.

Several munching breakfasters (I see no one I recognize) have raised wintry eyes up from their plates to where Paul and I are standing at the dining room door, briefly transfixed by deep currents of good coffee, smoked sausage, hash browns, sticky buns, pancake syrup, scrapple and powdered eggs. Their guarded eyes say, “Hey, we won’t be hurried.” “We’ve paid for this.” “We’re entitled to our own pace.” “It’s our vacation.” “Waitchyerturn.” “Isn’t that the joker who was shouting on the phone?” “What about this ‘Clergy’ shirt?” “Something’s fishy here.”

Paul, though, his Paramount bag slung to his pudgy shoulder, suddenly sets both his hands palms out against the invisible wall and begins sliding them place to place, here and there, up, down, side to side, a look of empty-mouthed horror contorting his sweet boy’s face, and whispering “Help me, help me. I don’t want to die.”

“So I don’t think there’s room at the inn for us, son,” I say.

“Please don’t let me die,” Paul continues softly, so only I can hear. “Just don’t drop the tablet in the acid. Please, warden.” He is a sweet, tricky boy and after my heart — my ally just when (or almost when) I feel most in need.

He turns his dying-man’s face of hollow-yap horror up to me, his hands now to his cheeks in silent, stricken astonishment. No one in the room has the will to look at him now, their noses back in their vittles like jailbirds. He makes two plainly audible eeecks that seem to come out of the bottom of a shallow well. “Alias Sibelius,” he says.

“What’s that mean?” I hike my suit bag up, ready to roll.

“It’s a good punch line. I can’t think of the joke, though. Mom puts arsenic in my food since she got a boyfriend. So my IQ’s dropping.”

“I’ll try to talk to her,” I say, and then we are off, no one noticing as we step together out into the morning’s hot brilliance, bound for the Hall of Fame.

Church bells now clang and clatter all over town, rounding ’em up for morning worship. Well-dressed, pale-faced family groups of three, four and even six march two abreast down every village sidewalk, veering this way toward the Second Methodist, that way toward the Congregationalists, across to Christ Church Episcopal and the First Prez. Others, less well turned out — men in clean but unpressed work khakis and polo shirts, women in red wraparounds, no stockings and a scarf — exit cars to dash into Our Lady of the Lake for a brief and breathless brush with grace before heading off to a waitress job, a tee time or an assignation in some other village.

Paul and I, on the other hand, fit in well with the pilgrim feel of things temporal — nonworshipful, nonpious, camera-toting dads and sons, dads and daughters, in summery togs, winding our certain but vaguely embarrassed way toward the Hall of Fame (as if there were something shameful about going). Cars are moving by us, the Gay Nineties trolleys toting “senior groups” to the town’s other attractions — the Fenimore House and the Farmers’ Museum, where there are displays and demos of things as they used to be when the world was better. Plus, all the shops are open, ice cream’s for sale, music’s in the air, the lake’s full of water, nothing a visitor could want wouldn’t be taken into at least partial account by somebody.

We have parked our gear in the car behind the inn and hiked by dead reckoning down to the marina and into a booth in a little aqua-blue eatery with oversize windows called The Water’s Edge, built right out over the water like Charley’s studio, only on creosote pilings. Inside, though, it’s so rigidly cold that the cheese fries and Denver omelet aromas seem as dank as the inside of an old ice chest, making me feel, in spite of scenic lake views, that we would’ve been smarter to wait for a place where we’d already paid.

Paul, on our walk over through the short, lakeside back streets lined with homey blue-collar abodes, has raised himself to the best good humor of the trip, and once we’re in our red booth has commenced a wide-ranging discourse of what it’d be like to live in Cooperstown.

Working over his Deluxe Belgian, piled with canned whipped cream and gelid strawberries, he declares that if we were to move here he would definitely invest in a “big paper route” (in Deep River, he says, this is an industry bossed over by “Italian greasers” who kick ass on whitebread kids who try to horn in). He likewise says, all sarcasm gone, gray eyes sparkling while he eats, that he’d feel obligated to visit the Hall of Fame once a week until he had it memorized—“Why else live here?”—and that he would eat here at The Water’s Edge “religiously every Sunday morning,” just like now, would find out all about the Cardiff Giant (another local attraction) and the Farmers’ Museum, possibly even work there as a guide, and would probably go out for baseball and football. He also surprisingly informs me, while I’m plowing through my own fast-congealing “Home Run Plate” and occasionally gazing out at a flock of mallards mooching popcorn from boat dock tourists, that he’s decided to read all of Emerson when he gets home, since he’ll probably be on probation and have more time for reading. He muddles his liquefying whipped cream around over his waffle cleats, getting it conscientiously into all sectors while explaining to me, head down, his Walkman still on his neck, that as a “borderline dyslexic” (this is news to me) he notices more than most people in his age bracket, since he doesn’t “process” things as fast and ends up having more opportunity to consider (or get completely derailed by) “certain subjects,” which is why he reads the labor-intensive New Yorker—“klepto’d out of Chuck’s crapper”—and why in fact he’s come to believe I need to ditch the realty business—“not interesting enough”—and move away from New Jersey — ditto — possibly to “a place sort of like this one,” and maybe get into a business like furniture stripping or bartending, something hands-on and low-stress, and “maybe get back to writing stories.” (He has always respected the fact that I was briefly a writer and keeps a signed copy of Blue Autumn in his room.)

My heart, needless to say, leaps to him. Beneath the turmoiled surfaces he means everyone everywhere all the best, security guards included. Cooperstown, even before he’s stepped through the doors of its magical Hall of Fame, has won a magical victory over him by inducing a stress-free idyll of small-pond-big-fish ordinariness he would dearly love to be his. (Seemingly all his bad-fitting rings have spun down into happy congruence.) Though I can’t help wondering if this brief flight of empire-sketching might not be the happiest moment of his life, and in a twinkling he may look back on it with no clarity, no grasp of the details. It may in fact turn out to cause him even greater anxiety and wider warping since he’ll never summon up such an idyll again in just this way and yet will never completely forget it or stop wondering about where it’s gone. This is the cautionary view I took when he was small and talked to people who weren’t there, a view I might’ve thought would protect him. I should’ve known, however, as I know now and as it ever is with kids and even those who’re older: nothing stays as it is for long and, once again, there’s no such thing as a false sense of well-being.

I should raise my Olympus now and snap his picture in this official happy moment. Only I can’t risk breaking his spell, since soon enough he’ll look again on life and conclude like the rest of us that he used to be happier but can’t remember exactly how.

“But look,” I say, staying in the spell with him, my hands cold, gazing at the top of his gouged head while he studies his waffle, his mind springing and lurching, his jaw muscles dedicatedly seeking the best alignment for his molars. (I love his fair, delicate scalp.) “I like real estate a lot. It’s both forward-thinking and conservative. It was always an ideal of mine to combine those two.”

He does not look up. The old skinny-armed fry cook, wearing a stained tee-shirt and a dirty sailor’s topper, leers at us from behind the row of empty counter stools and salt-and-pepper caddies. He senses we’re locking horns — over a divorce, a change in private schools, a bad report card, a drug bust, whatever visiting dads and sons usually bicker over within his earshot (usually not a father’s midlife career choices). I flash him a threatening look that makes him shake his head, hang a damp cigarette from his snaggly mouth and reconsider his grill.

Only three other diners are here with us — a man and woman who aren’t talking, merely sitting by a window staring at the lake over coffee, and an older, bald man in green pants and green nylon shirt playing an illegal poker machine in the dark and farthest corner, once in a while scoring a noisy win.

“You know the tightrope walker act? About falling off and having that be your great trick?” Paul is ignoring what I’ve declared about the delicate balance between progressivism and conservatism, with the fulcrum being the realty business. “That was just a joke.” He looks up at me, narrows his eyes over his three-quarters scarfed waffle and blinks his long lashes. He is a smarter boy than any.

“I guess I knew that,” I lie, clamping eye contact back on him. “But I took you seriously, though. I was just pretty sure you knew that making wild changes didn’t have much to do with real self-determination, which is what I want you to have, and which is really pretty much a natural sort of thing. It’s not that complicated.” I smile at him goonily.

“I’ve decided where I want to go to college.” He inserts one finger in the slick residue of maple syrup, which he’s moated all around his waffle, drawing a circle, then licking the sweet off with a pop.

“I’m all leers,” I say, which makes him give me an arch look; one more of our jokes from the trunk of lost childhood, Take it for granite. A new leash on life. Put your monkey where your mouse is. He, like me, is drawn to the fissures between the literal and the imagined.

“There’s this place in California, okay? You go to college and work on a ranch and get to brand cows and learn to rope horses.”

“Sounds good,” I say, nodding, wanting to keep our spirit level high.

“Yep, it is,” he says, a young Gary Cooper.

“You think you can study astrophysics on a cayuse?”

“What’s a cayuse?” He’s forgotten about being a cartoonist. “Aren’t we going fishing?” he says, and quickly moves his gaze outward to where the big lake extends from the boat slips toward folded indistinct mountain headlands. On the dock’s edge a girl is seated wearing a black bathing suit and an orange float vest, a pair of short water skis fastened to her feet. A sleek speedboat with her friends inside, two boys and a girl, rocks at idle fifty feet out, its motor gurgling. All in the boat are watching her on the dock. Suddenly the girl flags her hand up and wide. One boy turns and guns the boat, which even through our window glass gurgles loudly, then roars, seems for an instant to hesitate, then surges, almost leaps to life, its nose up, its rear sunk in foam, catching the thick rope-slack and yanking the girl off the dock and onto her skis, lariating her forward over the water’s mirror top away from us, until she is — faster than would seem possible — small upon the lake, a colorless dot against the green hills. “That’d be the butt, Bob,” Paul says, watching fiercely. He has seen this, almost exactly, on the Connecticut yesterday, but offers no sign of remembering.

“I guess we’re not going fishing,” I admit reluctantly. “I don’t think we’ve got time now. I had a big imagination. I just thought we had forever. We may have to miss Canton, Ohio, and Beaton, Texas, too.” It doesn’t matter to him, I think, though I wonder bleakly if one day he’ll be my guardian and do a better job. I also wonder just as bleakly if Ann actually has a boyfriend, and if so where she meets him, and what she wears and if she lies to truth-teller Charley the way I used to lie to her (my guess is she does).

“How many times do you think you’ll get married?” Paul says, still watching the faraway skier, not wanting to trade eyes with me on this subject — one he does care about. He looks quickly around behind the grill at the big wall-size color photo of a hamburger on a clean white plate, with a bowl of strangely red soup and a fountain Coke, all coated with grease enough to hold a fly captive till Judgment Day. He has asked me this question as recently as two days ago, I think.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Eight, nine times before I’m good ‘n’ done, I guess.” I shut my eyes, then slowly open them so he is in dead center. “What the hell do you care? Have you got some old bag in the stripping business you want me to meet down in Oneonta?” He, of course, knows Sally from our visits to the Shore but has remained significantly silent about her, as he should.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says almost inaudibly, my fear — the ordinary and abiding parent’s fear that he’ll miss his childhood — clearly unfounded, given the look on his face. Though Ann’s fear, of harm and of his frailty, rises to my mind’s view like a warning — a boating mishap, a collision at a bad intersection, a kid’s punch-out whereby his tender forehead kisses a curb. Letting him sly away into the dark unguarded last night would definitely be frowned on by the experts, might possibly even be seen as abusive.

He is pick-picking at the duct tape that holds together The Water’s Edge’s ancient plastic booths. “I wish we could stay here another day,” he says.

“Well, we’ll have to come back.” I’m out with my camera then in half a second. “Lemme make yer pitcher to prove you really came.” Paul quickly looks behind him as if to find out who’ll mind having his picture taken. The coffee drinkers have slipped away and wandered off down the dock. The poker player has his back humped over his machine. The cook is occupied whipping up a breakfast of his own. Paul looks back at me across the little table, his eyes troubled by a wish for something more, for more to get in the picture — me, possibly. But that’s not possible. He is all there is.

“Tell me another good joke,” I say in behind my Olympus, through which his girlish boy’s face is small but fully captured.

“Have you got the hamburger in the picture?” he says, and looks stern.

“Yeah,” I say, “the hamburger’s in.” And it is.

“That’s what I was worried about,” he says, then brightly, wonderfully smiles at me.

And that is the picture I will keep of him forever.

Up the welcomingly warm morning hill we trudge, side by each, bound finally for the Hall of Fame. It’s 9:30, and time is in fact a-wastin’. Though when we round the corner onto sunny Main, a half block from the Hall — red brick, with Greek pediments and dubious trefoils on the gable ends, an architectural rattlebag resembling the building-fund dream of some overzealous flock of Wesleyans — something again is amiss. Out front, on the sidewalk, another or possibly the same cadre of men and women, boys and girls, is marching a circle, hoisting placards, sporting sandwich boards and chanting what from here — the red-white-and-blue-buntinged corner by Schneider’s German Bakery — sounds again like “shooter, shooter, shooter.” Though there seem to be more marchers now, plus an encircling group of spectators — fathers and sons, larger families, assorted oldsters, alongside normal every-Sunday parishioners just sprung by Father Damien down at Our Lady — all crowding and observing the marchers and spilling back into the street, slowing traffic and jamming the building entry, the exact coordinates Paul and I are vectored for.

“What’s this happy horseshit again?” he says, scowling at the crowd and its nucleus of noisy protesters, which suddenly blossoms into two circles rotating in opposite directions, so that ingress to the Hall is essentially stoppered.

“I guess something is worth protesting at the Hall of Fame,” I say, admiring the protesters, their (from here) illegible signs jutting in the air and their chants becoming louder as stronger-voiced marchers rotate our way. To me it all has a nice collegial feel of my Ann Arbor days (though I was never involved back then, being a scared-stiff, Dudley Doright frat-rat possessor of a highly revocable NROTC scholarship). Yet it feels laudable today that a spirit of manageable unrest and disagreement can be alive still on the fruited plain, even if it’s not associated with anything important.

Paul, however, doesn’t know what to say in the face of other people’s dissension, accustomed only to his own. “So okay, what’re we supposed to do — wait?” he says, and crosses his arms like an old scold. Potential new Hall visitors are drifting past us but stopping soon to take in the spectacle. Some Cooperstown police are standing across Main Street, two bulky men and two small, blue-shirted, terrier women, thumbs in their belts, amused by the whole event, now and then pointing toward something or someone they think is especially comical.

“Protests never last very long, in my experience,” I say.

Paul says nothing, only scowls and raises his hand to his teeth and gives his wart a delicate but incisive bite. All this is making him uneasy; his good-kid spirit has gone with the dew. “Can’t we just go in around ’em?” he says, tasting his own flesh and blood.

No one, I notice, is getting through or even trying. Most of the spectators, in fact, are looking entertained and talking at the protesters, or taking their pictures. It’s nothing too serious. “The idea is for us to be inconvenienced a while, then they’ll let us go on in. They have some point they want to make.”

“I think the cops oughta arrest ’em,” Paul says. He makes one emphatic little eeeck midway down his throat and grimaces. (Clearly he has spent more time with Charley than is healthy, since his human-rights attitude favors bulldozer privilege: faced with a blind beggar suffering an epileptic seizure in the revolving door of the University Club, you damn well find a way to bowl through for your court time in the sixty-and-over double-elimination consolation round.) I could easily pose a canny analogy to our nation’s early days, in which legitimate grievances were ignored and a crisis followed, but it would fall on uncaring ears. However, I mean to respect the protestors’ line even without knowing what it’s about. There’s time enough for the little we hope to do.

“Let’s take a walk,” I say, and set my hand on my son’s shoulder like a regular ole dad and guide us both out into crowded Main toward the Cooperstown Fire and Rescue station, where glistening yellow vehicles sit out in the driveway on Sunday display, uniformed firefighters and paramedics lounging around the bay doors watching Breakfast at Wimbledon. More church cars and several packed Gay Nineties trolleys are stacking up noisily, a few drivers willing to lean on their horns and poke heads irritably out windows to find out what’s what. Paul, I can see, is plainly troubled by this delay and mixup, and I’d like to get us out of the action and avoid another run-in of our own. So I proceed us up the sidewalk against the pedestrian traffic, past more storefronts with sports paraphernalia and trading cards, two open-early taprooms showing nonstop World Series games from the Forties, a movie theater and the tweedy realty office I saw yesterday from the car, with snazzy color snapshots in the window. Where we’re headed, I don’t know. But unexpectedly as we walk across an open side alley, there, straight left and down the narrow passageway, which widens out at the other sunny end, sits Doubleday Field, hallowed and deep green and decidedly vest pocket in the midmorning light — a most perfect place to see and play a ball game (and distract your bad-tempered son). From somewhere nearby and right on cue, a tootling steam organ begins to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” as if our aimless activities were being watched.

“What’s that for, Little League?” Paul says, still disapproving and unavailable, done in by his simple failure to gain the Hall of Fame on the first try, though in no time we’ll be inside, soaking up the full wonderment: cruising its exhibits, roaming its pavilions, ogling Lou Gehrig’s vanity license plate, the Say-Hey Kid’s actual glove, Ted Williams’s illustrated strike zone and the United Emirates baseball stamp display, while chuckling at Bud and Lou doing “Who’s on First” (again) — just the way we did it back in Springfield, only much, much better.

“It’s Doubleday Field,” I say, warmly admiring it. “Those brochures I sent you explained the whole deal. It’s where the Hall of Fame game’s played when the new inductees are enshrined in August.” I try to think of who’ll be ushered in next month, but can’t think of any baseball name but Babe Ruth. “It holds ten thousand people, was built in 1939 by the WPA when the country was on its knees and the government was helping to find jobs, which would be nice if it’d do today.”

Paul, however, is staring at three public batting cages that are just outside the grandstand wall and from which we both can hear a sharp Coke-bottle poink of aluminum meeting horsehide. A small black kid employing a Joe Morgan elbow-trigger stance is at the plate and making repeated, withering contact in what is probably the “fast” cage. It occurs to me, as I’m sure it occurs to Paul, that it is Mr. New Hampshire Basketball again, lording it over everybody in yet another sport, in another town, and that he and his dad are on the same well-intentioned father-son circuit as we two and are having much more fun. Here, though, he’s Mr. New Hampshire Baseball.

Though of course it’s not. This kid has buddies, white and black, hanging on the cage rungs outside, jeering and insulting in a comradely way, encouraging him to miss so they can jump in and take their big-time cuts. One of these is a skinny, bad-posture Hacky Sack punk from yesterday — one of the lowlifes I imagined Paul bonding with last night over cheese fries and burgers. They seem much older than Paul now, and I’m certain he wouldn’t know how to address them (unless they communicated by barking).

We walk a ways down the widening alley to the point behind the old brick buildings on Main, where it turns into the Doubleday Field parking lot and where several men — men my age — dressed in new-looking big-league uniforms are departing cars with their gloves and bats, hurrying on noisy cleats toward the open grandstand tunnel, as though they were showing up late for a twin bill. Two teams’ uniforms are in evidence: the flashy yellow and unappetizing green of the Oakland A’s, and the more conservative red, white and blue of the Atlantas. I look for a number or a face I recognize from my years in the press box — somebody who’d be flattered to be remembered — but no one looks familiar.

In fact, two “A’s” who pass right by us—R. Begtzos and J. Bergman stitched to their backs — have sizable Milwaukee goiters and seam-splitting butts, which argue against their having played anytime in recent memory.

“I’m clueless,” Paul says. His own outfit is no more appetizing than Bergman’s and Begtzos’s.

“It’s an important part of the whole Cooperstown experience to take a look inside here.” I begin moving us toward the tunnel behind the “players.” “It’s supposed to be good luck.” (This I’ve made up on the spot. But his euphoria has now burned off like ether, and I’m back to conflict-containment drills and getting through our last hours as friendly enemies.)

“I’ve got a train to catch,” he says, following along.

“You’ll make it,” I say, less friendly myself. “I’ve got plans of my own.”

When we walk through to the end of the tunnel we could easily stroll straight out onto the field where the players are, or else turn and climb steep old concrete steps into the grandstand. Paul shies off from the field as though warned against it and takes the steps. But to me it’s irresistible to walk a few yards into the open air, cross the gravel warning track and simply stand on the grass where two teams, ersatz Braves and ersatz A’s, are playing catch and limbering stiff, achy joints. Gloves are popping, bats cracking, voices sailing off into the bright air, shouting, “I could catch it if I could see it,” or “My leg won’t bend that way anymore,” or “Watch it, watch it, watch it.”

Un-uniformed, I venture far enough that I can see up to the blue sky from within my shadow and all the way out to the right-field fence, where the numbers spell “312,” and bleacher seats and treetops and neighborhood rooflines are beyond, and above that a shining MOBIL sign revolves like a radar dish. Heavy, capless men in uniforms sit in the grass below the fence palings, or lie back staring up, taking in moments of deliverance, carefree and obscure. I have no idea what’s up here, only that I would love to be them for a moment, complete with a suit and no son.

Paul sits alone on an old grandstand bench, affecting timeless boredom, his Walkman earphones clutching his neck, his chin on a pipe railing. Little is afoot here, the place being mostly empty. A few kids his age are far up in the drafty back rows, cackling and cracking wise. A scattering of chatty wives are below in the reserved seats — women in pantsuits and breezy sundresses, sitting in pairs and threes, viewing the field and players, laughing occasionally, extolling a good catch or merely occupying themselves with the neutral subjects they each are at ease with. And happily — happy as linnets in a warm and gentle wind, with nothing better to do than twitter.

“What’d the bartender say to the mule when he ordered a beer?” I say, coming down the row of seats. I feel I have to break new ground again.

He turns his eyes to me disparagingly without moving his chin off the pipe rail. This won’t be funny, his look indicates. His “insect” tattoo is visible. An insult. “Clueless,” he says again to be rude.

“‘I’m sorry, sir, what seems to be bothering you?’” I sit beside him, wanted or unwanted, and muse off down the first-base line in silence. A tiny, antique man in a bright white shirt, shoes and trousers is pushing a chalk wheel down the base path. He stops midway and looks where he’s been in estimation of his trueness, then resumes toward the sack. I raise my camera and take his picture, then squeeze one off at the field and the players seemingly readying themselves to play, and finally one of the sky with the flag raised but motionless above the “390” sign in center.

“What good is it to come to some beautiful place?” Paul says broodily, his chin still resting on the green pipe, his heavy, downy-haired legs splayed so as to reveal a scar on his knee, a long and pink and still scabby thing of unknown origin.

“The basic idea, I guess, is you’ll remember it later and be a lot happier.” I could add, “So if you’ve got some useless or bad memories this’d be a great place to start off-loading them.” But what I mean is obvious.

Paul gives me the old dead-eye and shuffles his Reeboks. The hatless ballplayers who have been running sprints and stretching in the outfield are walking in together now, some with their caps on backward, some with arms on each other’s shoulders, a couple actually walking backward and clowning it up. “Come ahnnn, Joe Louis!” one of the wives shouts, getting her sports and heroes confused. The other wives all laugh. “Don’t yell like that at Fred,” one says, “you’ll scare him to death.”

“I’m sick of not liking stuff,” Paul says, seeming not to care. “I’m ready for a big change.”

News not unwelcome, since a move to Haddam may be on his horizon. “You’re just getting started,” I say. “You’ll find a lot of things to like.”

“That’s not what Dr. Stopler says.” He stares out at the wide, mostly vacant ballyard.

“Well, fuck Dr. Stopler, then. He’s an asshole.”

“You don’t even know him.”

I fleetingly consider telling Paul I’m moving to New Mexico and opening an FM station for the blind. Or that I’m getting married. Or that I have cancer.

“I know him well enough,” I say. “Shrinks are all alike.” Then I sit silent, resentful of Dr. Stopler for being an authority on all of life — mine included.

“What is it I’m supposed to do again if I’m not supposed to be a critic of my age?” He’s been studying this subject since last night. The thought of a whole new leash on life might in fact have inspired his short-lived euphorics.

“Well,” I say, watching the players coalesce into two rival but friendly “teams,” as a hugely fat man with a tripod and box camera emerges slowly out of the runway, his one leg stiff. The cameraman appraises the sun, then starts to set up in accordance. “I’d like you to come live with me a while, maybe learn to play the trumpet, later go to Bowdoin and study marine biology; and not be so sly and inward while you’re there. I’d like you to stay a little gullible and not worry too much about standardized tests. Eventually I’d like you to get married and be as monogamous as possible. Maybe buy a house near the water in Washington State, so I could come visit. I’ll be more specific when I have time to direct your every waking movement.”

“What’s monogamous?”

“It’s something like the old math. It’s a cumbersome theory nobody practices anymore but that still works.”

“Do you think I was ever abused?”

“Nothing I was personally involved in. Maybe you can remember a few minor cruelties. Your memory’s pretty good.” I stare at him, unwilling to be amused, since his mother and I love him more than he (of all people) will ever know. “Do you want to file a complaint? Maybe talk to your ombudsman about it on Tuesday?”

“No, I guess not.”

“You know, you shouldn’t think you’re not supposed to be happy, Paul. You understand that? You shouldn’t get used to not being happy just because you can’t make everything fit down right. Everything doesn’t fit down right. You have to let some things go, finally.” Now would be the moment to bring to light what a quirky old duck Jefferson was — the practical idealist qua grammarian — his whole life spent gadgeting out the mysteries of the status quo in quest of a firmer foothold on the future. Or possibly I could borrow a baseball metaphor having to do with some things that happen inside the white lines and those that happen out.

Only I am suddenly stopped cold. Not what I’d planned.

The A’s and Braves have formed two team-photo groups down the third-base line, taller men behind, shorter men kneeling (Messrs. Begtzos and Bergman are shorter). The kneeling men have their gloves and a fan of wooden bats arranged prettily on the grassy foreground. A low, portable signboard has been wheeled out and placed in front of them. O’MALLEY’S FAN-TASY BASEBALL CAMP, it says in red block letters, and below it, in temporary lettering: “Braves vs. ’67 Red Sox — July 3, 1988.” The sign makes all the Braves laugh. None of the Red Sox seem to be present.

Pictures are quickly snapped. The man who has chalked the base paths supervises wheeling the sign over to the canary-suited A’s, where he jiggers the letters to read O’MALLEY’S FANTASY BASEBALL CAMP: “Athletics vs. ’67 Red Sox — July 3, 1988.”

All clap when the pictures are done, and players begin straying toward the dugout and down the baselines, or just wandering out onto the infield in their too-tight uniforms, looking as if something wonderfully memorable had just happened but they’d missed it or it wasn’t enough, this even though the big game with the BoSox, the whole megillah, what it’s all about, is still to come. “You look great, Nigel,” a husky-voiced wife shouts out from the stands in a yawky Aussie accent. Nigel, who’s a big, long-armed and bearded “Brave,” with a thick middle and turned-in toes that make him seem shy, pauses on the dugout steps and lifts his blue Atlanta cap like ole Hank on his glory day. “You look damn good,” she shouts out. “Damn good on you.” Nigel smiles introspectively, nods his head, then ducks into the shadows along the bench with his mates. I should’ve taken his picture.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

A dead spot now seems to be where these two days have delivered us — not even inside the Hall of Fame yet, but to an unspectacular moment in a not exactly bona fide ballpark, where two spiritually wrong-footed “clubs” make ready to play a real team whose glories are all behind them, and where by some system of inner weights and measures I have just run out of important words, but before I’ve said enough, before I’ve achieved a desired effect, before the momentum of a shared physical act — strolling the hallowed halls, viewing the gloves, license plates, strike zones — can take us up and carry us to a good end. Before I’ve made of this day a memory worth preserving.

I’d have done better to have us wait with the crowd until the doors were cleared, instead of seeking one more chance at quality time and risking this flat-footed feeling of nothing doing, with our last point of significant agreement being that I had probably not abused my son. (My trust has always been that words can make most things better and there’s nothing that can’t be improved on. But words are required.)

“People my age are on a six-month cycle,” Paul says in a reflective adult voice. The “A’s” and the “Braves” mill the sidelines, wanting something to happen, something they’ve paid good money for. I still wouldn’t mind joining them. “Probably the way I am now will be different by Christmas. Adults don’t have that problem.”

“We have other problems,” I say.

“Like what?” He looks around at me.

“Our cycles last a lot longer.”

“Right,” he says. “Then you croak.”

I almost say, “Or worse.” Which would send his mind off inventorying Mr. Toby, his dead brother, the electric chair, being fed arsenic, the gas chamber — on the hunt for something new and terrible in the world to be obsessed by and later make jokes about. And so I say nothing. My face, I suspect, bears promise of some drollery about death and its too, too little sting. But as I said, I’ve said all I know.

I hear the steam organ begin tootling away on “Way down upon the Swanee River.” Our little ballpark has a lazy, melancholy carnival fruitiness afloat within it now. Paul looks at me shrewdly when I don’t answer as expected, the corners of his mouth flickering as if he knows a secret, though I know he doesn’t.

“Why don’t we head back now?” I say, leaving death unchallenged.

“What are those guys doing down there?” he says, looking quickly to the level playing field, as if he’d just now seen it.

“They’re having a great time,” I say. “Doesn’t it look like fun?”

“It looks like they’re not doing anything.”

“That’s how adults have fun. They’re really having the time of their lives. It’s just so easy they don’t even have to try.”

And then we go. Paul first, down the aisle behind the wives, then struggling over the stumpy steps to the runway; and I, having a last fond look at the peaceful field, the men at loose ends but still two teams with games on tap.

We walk through the tunnel’s shadows and out into the sunny parking lot, where the steam-organ music seems farther away. Up on Main Street cars are moving. I’m certain the Hall of Fame is open, its morning crises resolved.

The batting cage boys have now shoved off, their metal bats leaned outside the fence, all three cages empty and inviting.

“I believe we have to take a few chops, whatta you think?” I say to Paul. I am not at full strength but am ready, suddenly, for something.

Paul estimates the cages from a distance, his clumsy feet turned out now, as slew-footed as the least athletic of boys, heavy and uninspirable.

“Come on,” I say, “you can coach.” Possibly he makes a tiny double eeeck or a fugitive bark; I’m not certain. Though he comes.

Like a militant camp counselor, I lead us straight across to the fenced cages, which are fitted out with fifty-cent coin boxes and draped inside with green netting to keep careening balls from maiming people and injuring the pitching machines, which are themselves big, dark-green, boxy, industrial-looking contraptions that work by feeding balls from a plastic hopper through a chain-drive circuitry that ends with two rubber car tires spinning in opposite tangency at a high rate of speed and from between which each “pitch” is actually expelled. Signs posted all around remind you to wear a helmet, protective glasses and gloves, to keep the gates closed, to enter the cage alone, to keep small children, pets, bottles, anything breakable including wheelchair occupants out — and if none of these warnings is convincing, all risk is yours anyway (as if anybody thought different).

The three metal bats leaning on the fence are identically too short, too light, their taped grips much too thin. I tell Paul to stand clear while I “test” one bat, holding it up in front of me like a knight’s sword, sighting down its blue aluminum shaft (as I used to do long ago when I played in military school) and for some reason waggling it. I turn sideways of Paul — my camera still on my shoulder — cock the bat behind my ear in a natural-feeling Stan Musial knees-in stance and peer straight at him as though he were Jim Lonborg, the old BoSox righty, ready to rare, kick and fire.

“This is how Stan the Man used to stand in there,” I say over my left elbow, my eyes hooded. I trigger a wicked swing, which feels clumsy and ridiculous. Some necessary leverage between my wrists and shoulders feels sprung now, so that my swing could only possibly contact the ball with a slapping motion that wouldn’t drive a fruit fly out of the phone booth but would absolutely make me look like a girl.

“Is that how Stan the Man swung?” Paul says.

“Yeah, and it went a fuckin’ mile,” I say. I hear shouts, a chorus of “I got it, I got it,” from inside Doubleday Field. I look around and above the grandstand where we were five minutes ago; white balls arch through the sky, two and three at once, all to be caught but invisible to us here.

Each cage has a title to colorfully reflect the speed of its pitches: “Dyno-Express” (75 mph). “The Minors” (65 mph). “Hot Stove League” (55 mph). I have no reservations about trying my skills in the “Dyno-Express” and so give Paul my camera and two quarters, leaving the batting helmets on their fence hook. I step right inside, close the gate, walk to the batter’s box and look out toward the mean green machine as I seek out solid footing a bat’s length from the outside corner of the regulation rubber plate that’s planted between two scruffy rectangular AstroTurf pads put there to make things look authentic. I once again assume my Musial stance, make a slow, measuring pass of the bat barrel through my putative strike zone, square my knuckles on the handle, rotate the trademark back and line my deck-shoe toes with the center-field flag (though of course there is no flag, only the pitching machine itself and the protective netting, behind which is a sign that says “Home Run?”). I take and release a breath, once more deliberately extend the bat over the plate, then slowly bring it back.

“What time is it?” Paul says.

“Ten. There’s no clock in baseball.” I glimpse him over my shoulder through the diamond fence wires. He is looking up at the sky and back at the grandstand entrance, where a few fantasy players and their young-looking wives are strolling happy-go-lucky into the sunshine, gloved hands draped over soft shoulders, ball caps turned sideways, everyone ready for a beer, a bratwurst and a few yucks before the big game with Boston.

“Weren’t we supposed to do something else?” he says, and looks at me. “Something about a hall of fame?”

“You’ll get there,” I say. “Trust me.”

I again have to establish my stance and settle on a proper balance and repose. But once I’m fixed I say loudly to Paul, “Slap the money in the box,” and he does, after which and for a long moment there is calm as the machine radiates a kind of patient human immanence, though this is broken after several seconds by a deep mechanical humming during which a heretofore unnoticed red bulb begins to brighten on top, after which the plastic hopper full of balls begins to vibrate. The machine gives no other sign it means business, but I stare riveted at the black confluence of rubber tires, which have not moved.

“Those greaseballs fucked it up,” Paul says behind me. “You wasted your money.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, keeping my balance and stance, my calm intact, bat back, eyes to the machine. My palms and fingers squeeze the bat tape, my shoulders stiffen, though I feel my wrists begin to bend back in a way Stan would deplore but that feels necessary for the raised bat barrel to descend quickly enough to the plane of the ball for me to avoid the girlish slap motion I don’t want to be “my swing.” I hear someone shout out, “Look at that asshole,” and can’t resist a quick look to see who’s being referred to but see no one, then quickly return my gaze to the machine and the two tires, where there’s still nothing happening to indicate a “pitch.” Until I slightly relax my shoulders to avoid “binding,” and it’s then the machine makes a more portentous, metallic whirring noise. The black tires start to spin at an instantly great rate. A single ball teeters in full view down a previously unremarked metal channel, then goes “underground” into a smaller slot, after which it or one just like it is viciously spit from between the spinning rubber rings and crosses the plate at a speed so fast and at a distance so easily reachable that I don’t even swing, merely let the ball whang the fence behind me and bound back through my legs and out toward an unobserved concrete bunker in front of me whose duty is to route balls back to the hopper. (The basketball version was much jazzier.)

Paul is silent. I do not even turn his way, refixing instead like a sniper on what is my opponent, the slit between the spinning tires. Another interior whirring sound becomes audible. I watch as another ball wobbles down the metal track, disappears and then is shot through space, hissing across the plate directly under my fists and again whanging the fence behind me, untouched and unswung at.

Paul again says nothing. Not “Strike two” or “It sounded high” or “Just try and make contact, Dad.” No chuckle or raspberry or fart noise. Not even a bark of encouragement. Only adjudicating silence.

“How many do I get?” I say, merely to hear a sound.

“I just got here,” he says.

Though just as I’m picturing the numeral five as the likeliest number, another orange-stitched ball comes rocketing across the plate and rattles the screen, suggesting the machine has possibly quick-pitched me.

Sweat has now appeared upward of my hairline. For ball number four, I extend the stubby bat barrel like a gate barrier straight out into my strike zone and hold it there stiff until the machine generates another pitch, which hits the bat and ricochets off the metal sweet spot with a dink-poink, and fouls off against one of the warning signs, finally bouncing back and actually striking me on the heel.

“Bunt,” Paul says.

“Fuck you, bunt. Bunt when it’s your turn. I’m up here to hit.” I’m not looking at him.

“You should be wearing your windbreaker,” he says. “You’re a windbreaker.”

I frown out into the now sinister black crease, twist my fists into the tape, straighten my wrists into a properer Stan-like trigger cock, shift my balance to the ball of my right foot, and ready my left to rise and stride toward contact. The machine whirs, the red light glows, the ball teeters down its metal chase, drops from view, then spanks out from between the rings fast and in full view, at which instant I lunge, flail the blue barrel down into the ordained space, hear my wrists “snap,” actually see my arms extend, my elbows nearly meet, feel my weight shift as my breath gushes — all just as my eyes squeeze tightly shut. Only this time the ball (unseen, of course) squalls off the bat straight up into the netting, pinballs off two rankled fence surfaces, then falls back to the asphalt in front of me and drains off toward the bunker, leaving me with a ferocious handful of bees I’m determined not to acknowledge.

“Strike five, you’re history,” Paul says, and I glare back at him as he snaps my picture with my camera, disdainful concentration on his plummy lips. (I can’t help seeing what I’ll look like: bat slumped to the side, my cheeks sprouting sweat, my hair awry, face distressed by a frown of failure endured in a dopey cause.) “The Sultan of Squat,” Paul says, snapping another picture.

“Since you’re the expert, you need to try it,” I say. Bees are burning my hands.

“Right.” Paul shakes his head as though I’d spoken the most preposterous of words. We are completely alone here, though more ersatz players and their real-life wives and kids are strolling carefree and happy across the hot parking lot, their voices crooning praise and good motives. Balls still rise above and arc down upon Doubleday Field. This is the small, consoling music of baseball. For a man to entice his son into a few swings would not be mistreatment.

“What’s the matter?” I say, letting myself out of the cage. “If you miss it you can say you meant to miss it. Didn’t you say that was the best trick?” (He has already denied this, of course, but for some reason I don’t mean to let him.) “Don’t you eat stress for lunch?”

Paul holds my camera at belly level below “Clergy” and takes another picture, with an evil smile.

“You’re the daredevil tightrope walker, aren’t you?” I say, leaning the bat back against the fence, the big green machine now silent behind me. A warm breeze kicks up a skiff of parking lot grit and sweeps it by my sweaty arms. “I think you’re walking way too narrow a line here, you need to find a new trick. You have to swing if you’re going to hit.” I’m wiping sweat off my forearms.

“Like you said.” His smile becomes a smirk of dislike. He is still snapping my camera at me, one picture after the next — the same picture.

“What was that? I don’t remember.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh. Fuck me. Sorry, I did forget that.” I come toward him suddenly, pity and murder and love each crying for a time at bat. It is not so rare a fatherly lineup. Children, who sometimes may be angels of self-discovery, are other times the worst people in the world.

When I get in reach of him, I don’t know why but I grapple him behind his head, my fingers achy from squeezing my bat, my shoulders weightless as if my arms were nothing. “I just thought,” I say, strenuously holding him, “you and me could experience a common humiliation and go off with our arms draped over our shoulders and I’d buy you a beer. We could bond.”

“Fuck you! I can’t drink. I’m fifteen,” Paul says savagely into my chest, where I’m still clutching him.

“Oh, of course, I forgot that too. I’d probably be abusing you.” I pull him in even more harshly, finding his rough buzzed hairline, his Walkman earphones and his neck tendons, forcing his face into my shirtfront so his nose pokes my breastbone and his warty fingers and even my camera push and dig my ribs in rejection. I don’t entirely know what I’m doing, or what I want him to do: change, promise, concede, guarantee me something important will be better or pan out, all expressed in language for which there are no words. “And why are you such a little prick?” I say with difficulty. I may be hurting him, but it’s a father’s right not to be pushed, so that I squeeze him even harder, intent on keeping him till he gives up the demon, renounces all, collapses into hot tears only I can minister to. Dad. His.

But that is not what happens. The two of us begin awkwardly scuffling on the pavement beside the batting cages, and almost immediately, I realize, to attract the interest of tourists and churchgoers out for a Sunday stroll, plus lovers of baseball on their way, as we should be, to the famous shrine — except that we’re struggling here. I can almost hear them murmur, “Well, hey now, what’s all this about? This can’t be good and wholesome. We need to call somebody. Better call. Go ahead and call. The cops. 911. What’s the goddamned country coming to?” Though of course they don’t speak. They only stop and gaze. Abuse can be mesmerizing.

I loose my grip on my son’s neck and let him break away, his fleshy face gray with anger and disgust and shame. My grip has ridden into his cut ear and got it bleeding again, its little bandage rucked off. When I see it, I look in my hand and there is beet-red blood down my middle finger and smeared in my palm.

Paul gapes at me, his left hand — the other’s still holding my camera, with which he has gored me in the ribs — gone fiercely into the pocket of his baggy maroon shorts as if he is trying to look casual about being furious. His eyes grow narrow and shiny, though his pupils widen with me in their sight.

“All in fun. No big deal,” I say. I flash him a lame, hopeless grin. “High fives.” One hand is up for a slap, the other, bloody, one finding my own pocket. Sunglassed tourists continue observing us from forty yards out in the parking lot.

“Gimme the cocksucking bat,” Paul seethes and, ignoring my high fives, goes tromping past me, grabbing the blue bat off the fence, kicking the gate open and entering the cage like a man come to a task he’s put off for a lifetime. (His Walkman earphones are still on his neck, my camera now lumped in his shorts pocket.)

Inside the “Dyno-Express” cage he stalks to the plate, the bat slung back over his shoulder, and peers down as if into a puddle of water. He suddenly turns back to me with a face of bright hatred, then looks at his toes again as though aligning them with something, the bat still sagging in spite of one attempt to keep it up. He is not a hitter to inspire fear. “Put in the fucking money, Frank,” he shouts.

“Bat left, son,” I say. “You’re a southpaw, remember? And back off a little bit so you can get a swing at it.”

Paul gives me a second look, this time with an expression of darkest betrayal, almost a smile. “Just put the money in,” he says. And I do. I drop two quarters in the hollow black box.

This time the green machine comes alive much more readily, as if I had previously wakened it, its red top light beaming dully in the sun. The whirring commences and again the whole assembly shudders, the plastic hopper vibrates and the rubber tires start instantly spinning at a high speed. The first white pill exits its bin, tumbles down the metal chute, disappears then at once reappears, blistering across the plate and smacking the screen precisely where I’m standing so that I inch back, thoughtful of my fingers, though they’re stuffed in my pockets.

Paul, of course, does not swing. He merely stands staring at the machine, his back to me, his bat still slung behind his head, heavy as a hoe. He is batting right-handed.

“Step back a bit, son,” I say again as the machine goes into its girdering second windup, humming and shuddering, and emits another blue darter just past Paul’s belly, again thrashing the fence I’m now well back of. (He has, I believe, actually inched in closer.) “Get your bat up to the hitting position,” I say. We have performed hitting rituals since he was five, in our yard, on playgrounds, at the Revolutionary War battlefield, in parks, on Cleveland Street (though not recently).

“How fast is it coming?” He says this not to me but to anyone, the machine, the fates that might assist him.

“Seventy-five,” I say. “Ryne Duren threw a hundred. Spahn threw ninety. You can get a swing. Don’t close your eyes” (like I did). I hear the steam organ playing: “No use in sit-ting a-lone on the shelf, life is a hol-i-day.”

The machine goes again into its Rube Goldberg conniption. Paul leans over the plate this time, his bat still on his shoulder, gazing, I assume, at the crease where the ball will originate. Though just as it does, he sways an inch back and lets it thunder past and whop the screen again. “Too close, Paul,” I say. “That’s too close, son. You’re gonna brain yourself.”

“It’s not that fast,” he says, and makes a little eeeck and a grimace. The machine circuits then into its next-to-last motion. Paul, his bat on his shoulder, watches a moment, and then, to my surprise, takes a short ungainly step forward onto the plate and turns his face to the machine, which, having no brain, or heart, or forbearance, or fear, no experience but throwing, squeezes another ball through its dark warp, out through the sprightly air, and hits my son full in the face and knocks him flat down on his back with a terrible, loud thwock. After which everything changes.

In time that does not register as time but as humming motor noise solid in my ear, I am past the metal gate onto the turf and beside him; it is as if I had begun before he was hit. Dropped to my knees, I grab his shoulder, which is squeezed tight, his elbows into his sides, both his hands at his face — covering his eyes, his nose, his cheek, his jaw, his chin — underneath all of which there is a long and almost continuous wheeee sound, a sound he makes bunched on the plate, a hard, knees-contracted bundle of fright and lightning pain centered where I can’t see, though I want to, my hands busy but helpless and my heart sounding in my ears like a cannon, my scalp prickly, damp, airy with fear.

“Let’s see it, Paul”—my voice a half octave too high, trying to say it calmly. “Are you all right?” I am hit by ball number five, a sharp blow like a punch off the back of my neck and scalp, skipping smartly on into the netting.

“Wheeee, wheeee, wheeee.”

“Let’s see, Paul,” I say, the air between him and me oddly red-tinted. “Are you all right? Let’s see, Paul, are you all right?”

“Wheeee, wheeee, wheeeeee.”

People. I hear their footsteps on the concrete. “Just call right now,” someone says. “I could hear it halfway to Albany.” “Oh boy.” “Ohhh boy.” The cage door clanks. Shoes. Breathing. Trouser cuffs. Someone’s hands. An oiled-leather ball-glove smell. Chanel No. 5.

“Ohhhh!” Paul says in a profound exhalation conceding hurt, and writhes sideways, his elbows still pinned to his sides, his face still covered by his hands, his ear still bleeding from my having grabbed him too hard.

“Paul,” I say, all the air still reddish, “let me see, son,” my voice giving way slightly, and I am tapping his shoulder with my fingers as if I could wake him up and something else could happen, something not nearly as bad.

“Frank, there’s an ambulance coming,” someone says from among the legs, hands, breaths all around me, someone who knows me as Frank (other than my son). A man. I hear other footsteps and look up and around, frightened. Braves and A’s are outside the fence, gawking in, their wives beside them, their faces dark, troubled. “Wasn’t he wearing his helmet?” I hear one inquiry. “No, he wasn’t,” I say out loud to anyone. “He wasn’t wearing anything.”

“Wheeee, wheeee,” Paul cries out again, his face covered with his hands, his brown head of hair resting squarely on the filthy white plate. These are cries I don’t know, cries he has never cried in my hearing.

“Paul,” I say. “Paul. Just be still, son.” Nothing feels like it’s happening to bring help. Though not very far away I hear two sharp bwoop-bwoops, then a heavy engine roar, then bwoop-bwoop-bwoop. Someone says, “Okay, great.” I’m aware of more feet scuffling. I have my hands pressed tight into Paul’s shoulder — his back is to me — feeling how hard his body has become, how unambiguously concentrated on injury it is. Someone says, “Frank, let’s let these people try to help. They’ll help him. Let them get where you are.”

This. This is the worst thing ever.

I stand dizzily and step backward among many others. Someone has my upper arm in his big hand, assisting me gently back, while a stumpy white woman in a white shirt, tight blue shorts, with a huge butt, and then a thinner man in the same clothes but with a stethoscope on his neck, slip past and get onto their hands and knees on the AstroTurf and begin to practice on my son procedures I can’t see but that make Paul scream out “Nooooo!” and then “Wheeee” again. I push forward and find myself saying to the people who are here now all around, “Let me talk to him, let me talk to him. It’ll be all right,” as if he could be persuaded out of being hurt.

But whoever it is here who knows me — a large man — says, “Just stay here a second, Frank, stay still. They’ll help. It’ll be better if you just stand back and let them.”

And so I do. I stand in the crowd as my son is avidly worked on and helped, my heart battering its walls, right to the top of my belly, my fingers cold and sweating. The man who has called me Frank holds onto my arm even yet, says nothing, though I suddenly turn to him and look at his long, smooth-jawed Jewish face, large black eyes with specs and a slick tanned cranium, and say as if I had a right to know, “Who are you?” (Though the words do not actually sound.)

“I’m Irv, Frank. Irv Ornstein. Jake’s son.” He smiles apologetically and squeezes my arm more tightly.

Whatever has turned the air red now ceases. Here is a name — Irv — and a face (changed) from far away and past. Skokie, 1964. Irv — the good son of my mother’s good husband #2, my stepbrother — gone after my mother’s death, with his father in tow, to Phoenix.

I do not know what to say to Irv, and simply stare back at him like a specter.

“This is not the best time to meet, I know,” Irv says to my voiceless face. “We just saw you on the street this morning, over by the fire station, and I said to Erma: ‘I know that guy.’ This must be your son who got hurt.” Irv is actually whispering and casts a fretful eye now at the medics kneeling over Paul, who screams “Noooo!” again from beneath their efforts.

“That’s my son,” I say, and move toward his cry, but Irv reins me in once more.

“Just give ’em a couple minutes more, Frank. They know what they’re doin’.” I look to my other side, and here is a dishy, tiny, wheat-haired woman in her thirties, wearing a tight yellow-and-peach plastic-looking single-piece outfit that resembles a space suit. She has a grip on my other elbow as if she knows me as well as Irv does and the two of them have agreed to prop me up. Possibly she’s a weight lifter or an aerobics instructor.

“I’m Erma,” she says, and blinks at me like a hatcheck girl. “I’m Irv’s friend. I’m sure he’s going to be fine. He’s just scared, poor thing.” She too looks down at the two medics huddled over my son, and her face goes doubtful and her lower lip discreetly extends sympathy. Hers is the Chanel I whiffed.

“It’s the left eye,” I hear one of the medics say. Then Paul says, “Ohhhh!”

Then I hear someone behind me say, “Oh, ugh.” Some of the Braves and A’s are already starting to back away. I hear a woman say, “They said it’s his eye,” and someone else say, “Probably wasn’t wearing protective eye covering.” Then someone says, “It says ‘Clergy.’ Maybe he’s a minister.”

“Where are you now, Frank?” Irv says, still whispering confidentially. His hand seems to encircle my upper arm, his hold on me firm. He is a big, tanned, hairy-looking engineer type, wearing blue designer sweatpants with red piping and a gold cardigan with no shirt under. He is much bigger than I remember him when we were college age, me at Michigan, he at Purdue.

“What?” I hear my own voice sounding calmer than I feel. “New Jersey. Haddam, New Jersey.”

“Whaddaya do down there?” Irv whispers.

“Real estate,” I say, then look at him again suddenly, at his broad forehead and full, liver-lipped but sympathetic mouth. I remember him absolutely and at the same time have no idea who in the hell he is. I look at his hairy-fingered hand on my arm and see that it has a diamond pinkie ring on its appointed finger.

“We were just coming over to speak to you when your boy got hit,” Irv says, giving Erma an approving nod.

“That’s good,” I say, staring down at the wide, maxi-brassiered back of the fireplug female medic, as if this part of her would be the first to indicate something significant. She struggles to her feet at this very moment and turns to search among us and the two or three others who are still gathered around.

“Anybody responsible for this young man?” she says in a wiry, south Boston nyak accent, and extracts a large black walkie-talkie out of her belt holster.

“I’m his father,” I say, breathless, and pull away from Irv. She holds her walkie-talkie up toward me as if she expects me to want to speak into it, her finger on the red Talk button.

“Yeah, well,” she says in her tough-broad voice. She is a woman of forty, though perhaps younger. Her belt has a blizzard of medical supplies and heavy gear fastened on. “Okay, here’s the thing,” she says, gone totally businesslike. “We need to get him down to Oneonta pretty fast.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I say this too loudly, terrified she’s about to say his brain has been rendered useless.

“Well, what — did he like get hit with a baseball?” She clicks her walkie-talkie trigger, making it produce a scratchy static sound.

“Yes,” I say. “He forgot his helmet.”

“Well, he got hit in the eye. Okay? And I can’t really tell you if he’s got much vision in it, because it’s swollen already and got blood all in it, and he won’t open it. But he needs to see somebody pretty quick. We take eye injuries down to Oneonta. They’ve got the staff.”

“I’ll drive him.” My heart makes a bump-a-bump. Cooperstown: not a real town for real injuries.

“I’d have to get you to sign a form if you take him now,” she says. “We can get him down in twenty minutes — it’d take you longer — and we can get him stabilized and monitored.” I see her name on her silver nameplate: Oustalette (something I need to remember).

“Okay, great. Then I’ll just ride with you.” I lean to the side to see Paul, but can see only his bare legs and his lightning-bolt shoes and orange socks and the hem of his maroon shorts behind the other paramedic, who’s still kneeling beside him.

“Our insurance won’t permit that,” she says, even more all-business. “You’ll have to travel by separate vehicle.” She clicks her red Talk button again. She is itchy to go.

“Great. I’ll drive.” I smile awfully.

“Frank, lemme drive you down,” Irv Ornstein says from the side and with full authority, gripping my arm again as if I were about to escape.

“Okay,” Ms. Oustalette says, and instantly begins talking tough into her big Motorola without even turning away. “Cooperstown Sixteen? Transporting one white male juvenile ADO to A.O. Fox. Ophthalmic. BP….” There is a moment when I can hear the motor idling on her ambulance, hear two bats pop in quick succession from over the fence in the ballpark. Then all at once five immense jet planes come cracking in over us, low and ridiculously close together, their wings steady as knife blades, their smack-shwoosh eruption following a heart’s beat behind. All present look up, shocked. All the planes are deep blue against the morning blue sky. (Would anyone believe it was still morning?) Ms. Oustalette doesn’t even look up as she awaits her confirmation.

“Blue Angels,” Irv says into my deafened ear. “Pretty close. They’ve got a show here tomorrow.”

I step away from Irv’s grip, my ears hollowed, and move toward Paul, where the other medic has just left and he is on his back alone, pale as an egg, his hands covering his eyes, his soft stomach, bare beneath his Clergy shirt, rising and settling heavily with his breath. He is making a low, throaty grunt of deep pain.

“Paul?” I say, the Blue Angels roaring off in the distance over the lake.

“Uhn,” is all he says.

“That was just the Blue Angels that flew over. This is gonna be okay.”

“Uhn,” he says again, not moving his hands, his lips parted and dry, his ear not bleeding now, his “insect” tattoo the thing I can see best — his concession to the next century’s mysteries. Paul smells like sweat, and he is sweating freely and is cold, as I am.

“It’s Dad,” I say.

“Uhn-nuh.”

I reach into his shorts pocket and delicately slide my camera out. I consider removing his Walkman phones but don’t. He makes no motion, though his shoes waggle one way and the other on the phony turf. I put my fingers on the blond-fleeced tan line of his thigh. “Don’t be afraid of anything,” I say.

“I’m fine now,” Paul says woozily from under his covering hands, but distinctly. “I’m really fine.” He takes a deep breath through his nose and holds it a long, painful moment, then slowly lets it go. I can’t see his smacked eye and don’t want to, though I would if he asked. Dreamily he says, “Don’t give Mom and Clary those presents, okay? They’re too shitty.” He is too calm.

“Okay,” I say. “So. We’re going to the hospital in Oneonta. And I’m going down there, too. In another car.” No one, I assume, has told him he’s going to Oneonta.

“Yep,” he says. He removes a hand from one damp gray eye, the one not injured, and looks at me, his other eye still guarded from light and my view. “You have to tell Mom about this?” His one eye blinks at me.

“It’s okay,” I say, feeling lifted off the ground. “I’ll just make a joke out of it.”

“Okay.” His eye closes. “We’re not going to the Hall of Fame now,” he says indistinctly.

“You never can tell,” I say. “Life’s long.”

“Oh. Okay.” Behind me I hear creaky-squeaky sounds of a stretcher and Irv’s deepened official voice saying, “Give ’em some room, give ’em some room, Frank. Let ‘em do their job now.”

“You just hang on there,” I say. But Paul says nothing.

I stand up and am moved back, my Olympus in hand. Paul goes out of sight again as Ms. Oustalette begins to slide a litter board under him. I hear her say “All right?” Irv again is pulling me back. I hear Paul say “Paul Bascombe” to someone’s question, then “No” to the subject of allergies, medications and other diseases. Then he is somehow up onto the collapsible stretcher and Irv is still hauling me farther out of the way, clear to the side of the batting cage we are still in. There are but a few people now. A “Brave” and his wife look in at me warily from outside the cage. I don’t blame them.

Someone says, “Okay? Let us out.”

And then Paul is on his way out, under a blanket, one hand still covering his damaged eye like a war casualty, through the cage door and across the asphalt to the blinking, clicking yellow Life Line ambulance — a Dodge Ram Wagon with antennas, flashers, lights rotating all over.

I watch with Irv as the stretcher is loaded, the doors go closed, both attendants walk around and enter in no great rush. Two more loud bwoop-bwoops sound as their stand-clear, then the engine makes a deep reverberant rumble, lurches into gear, more lights go sharply on, the whole immense machine inches forward, stops, wheels turn, then it is going again, gathering itself, and is quickly gone in the direction of Main without benefit of siren.