Underworld by Don DeLillo
Farish said, “What baseball?”
Sims was looking at me. He was finished with his food and was untubing a panatela, a simple exercise that he surrounded with detailed ceremony.
Glassic gave me a final melting look and turned to Sims.
“Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object.”
Sims took his time lighting the cigar.
“Nobody owns the ball.”
“Somebody has to own it.”
“The ball is unaccounted for,” Sims said. “It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we’d know it.”
“Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First,” Glassic said, “I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball.”
“Nobody has the ball,” Sims said. “The ball never turned up. Whoever once had the ball, it never surfaced. This is part of the whole—what? The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed up and made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up, each with a ball, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Second, the dealer told me how he’d traced the baseball almost all the way back to October third, nineteen fifty-one. This is not some fellow who turns up at baseball shows looking for bargains. This is pathological obsession. A completely committed guy. And he convinced me to a probability of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent that this is the baseball. And then he convinced Nick. And Nick asked how much. And they worked out a deal.”
“You got rooked,” Sims told me.
I watched the Dodger shortstop field a grounder and make a wide throw to first.
Glassic said, “The guy spent many years tracing the thing. He probably spent more money in phone calls, postage and travel miles, I’m exaggerating, than Nick paid for the baseball.”
Sims had a derisive smile, a fleer, and it grew meaner by the second.
“Whole thing’s phony,” he told me. “If that was the authentic ball, how could you afford to buy it?”
“I will count the ways,” Glassic said. “First, the dealer wasn’t able to provide absolute final documentation. That cut the price. Second, this was before the market boom in memorabilia and the auctions at Sotheby’s and the four hundred thousand dollars that somebody paid for an itty-bitty baseball card.”
“I don’t know,” Sims said.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
Farish finally got her wine. She looked at me and said, “How much did you pay?”
“My shame is deep enough. Let’s not examine the details.”
“What shame?”
“Well, I didn’t buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It’s not about Thomson hitting the homer. It’s about Branca making the pitch. It’s all about losing.”
“Bad luck,” Glassic said, spearing a potato on my plate.
“It’s about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don’t know. I keep saying I don’t know and I don’t. But it’s the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own.”
“A shameful secret?” Farish said.
“Yes. First to spend serious money on a souvenir baseball. Then to buy it for the reason I bought it. To commemorate failure. To have that moment in my hand when Branca turned and watched the ball go into the stands—from him to me.”
Everyone laughed but Sims.
Glassic said, “Even his name. Somber Ralph Branca. Like a figure out of an old epic. Somber plodding Ralph slain in something something dusk.”
“Dark-arrowed,” said the woman.
“Very good. Except it’s not a joke of course. What’s it like to have to live with one awful moment?”
“A moment in a game,” she said.
“Forever plodding across the outfield grass on your way to the clubhouse.”
Sims was getting mad at us.
“I don’t think you fellows see the point.” The way he said fellows. “What loss? What failure are we talking about? Didn’t they all go home happy in the end? I mean Branca—Branca’s got the number thirteen on his license plate. He wants us to know he was the guy. Branca and Thomson appear at sports dinners all the time. They sing songs and tell jokes. They’re the longest-running act in show business. You fellows miss the point.” Making us sound like scrubbed boys in preppy jackets. “Branca’s a hero. I mean Branca was given every chance to survive this game and we all know why.”
A little pall fell across the table.
“Because he’s white,” Sims said. “Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you.”
Glassic shifted in his chair.
Sims told the story of a pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife. Donnie Moore was black and the player who hit the home run was black. And then he shot and killed himself. He shot his wife several times, nonfatally, and then shot himself. He took a dirt nap in his own laundry room, Sims said. Sims told this story to the Englishwoman but it was completely new to me and I could tell that Glassic barely remembered. I’d never heard of Donnie Moore and missed the home run and didn’t know about the shootings. Sims said the shootings came a few years after the home run but were directly traceable. Donnie Moore was not allowed to outlive his failure. The fans gave him every grief and there weren’t any skits at the baseball dinners.
Sims knew a lot about the shootings. He described the shooting of the wife in some detail.
Farish shut her eyes to see it better.
“We hear what you’re saying,” Glassic said. “But you can’t compare the two events on the basis of color.”
“What else is there?”
“The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day. The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way. Because it’s not in competition for our attention with a thousand other pieces of action. Because it’s something that’s preserved and unique. Donnie Moore—well I’m sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?”
“The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened,” Sims said, “to the parties involved. We’re talking about who lived and who died.”
“But not why,” Glassic said. “Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?”
“Unhistorical,” I said.
“Then we realize there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we’ll never know or understand.”
Sims called us fellows again. I switched sides several times and we ordered another round of drinks and went at it some more. We were not talking to Jane Farish now. We didn’t notice her reactions or encourage her interest. Sims called us fellows many times and then he called us chaps. It began to get a little funny. We ordered coffee and watched the game and Farish sat in a thoughtful knot, arms and legs crossed, body twisted toward the window, yielding to the power of our differences.
“Buying and selling baseballs. What heartache. And you never told me,” Sims said.
“It was some time ago.”
“I would have talked you out of it.”
“So you could buy it yourself,” Glassic said.
“I deal in other kinds of waste. The real stuff of the world. Give me disposable diapers by the ton. Not this melancholy junk from yester-year.”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“What do you do, take the ball out of the closet and look at it? Then what?”
“He thinks about what it means,” Glassic said. “It’s an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and the sweetest of good fortune to
“He got taken big-time,” Sims said. “He’s holding a worthless object.”
We paid the bill and started filing out. Sims pointed to a photograph over the bar, one of dozens of sporting shots. It was a recent photo of a couple of gray-haired ex-players, Thomson and Branca, dark-suited and looking fit, standing on the White House lawn with President Bush between them, holding an aluminum bat.
We went out and sat in the company box for ten minutes so Glassic could hear the crowd noise. Then we walked down the ramp and headed for the parking area. Farish had some questions about the infield fly rule. Sims and Glassic were able to get together on this by the time we got out to the car. It was an unexpected boon for the BBC.
I sat in back and looked at the city flowing past and I thought of Sims the kid running down a street in St. Louis. He’s wearing dungarees with the lower legs rolled into bunchy cuffs that are paler than the dark denim twill of the outer cloth. He’s waving his arms and shouting that he’s Bobby Thomson.
4
* * *
I sat with my mother in her room and we talked and paused and watched TV We paused to remember. One of us said something that roused a memory and we sat together thinking back.
My mother had a method of documentary recall. She brought forth names and events and let them hang in the air without attaching pleasure or regret. Sometimes just a word. She spoke a word or phrase that referred to something I hadn’t thought about in decades. She was confident in her recall, moving through the past with a sureness she could not manage to apply to the current moment or hour or day of the week. She made fun of herself. What day is it? Do I go to mass today or tomorrow? I drove her to mass and picked her up. This was the steadiest satisfaction of my week. I learned the mass schedule and the types of mass and the length of service and I made sure she had money for the basket. We sat in the room and talked. She seemed untouched by sentiment. She’d summon a moment that struck me with enormous force, any moment, something ordinary but bearing power with it—ordinary only if you haven’t lived it, if you weren’t there—and I saw how still she sat, how prudent she was in her recollecting.
I used to tell my kids when they were small. A hawser is a rope that’s used to moor a ship. Or, The hump in the floor between rooms, I used to say. This is called the saddle.
We set her up with the dresser and the air conditioner and a hard mattress that was good for her back. She brought forth names from the family passional, the book of special suffering, and we paused and thought. Her hair was still partly brown in places, gone wiry and iridescent, goldshot in bright light, bobby-pinned, and we sat there with the TV going. I knew she would not say too much or remember carelessly. She was in control here, guiding us safely through the pauses.
After the riots in Los Angeles my son started wearing baggy shorts and a cap turned backwards and sneakers with bloated tongues. Before this he used to be nondescript, sitting in his room with his computer, a quiet kid just turned twenty. He dressed the same way all the time. He dressed for a job interview the way you’d dress to walk your dog—it was one continuous thing to him.
We designed and managed landfills. We were waste brokers. We arranged shipments of hazardous waste across the oceans of the world. We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations. I almost mentioned my line of work to Klara Sax when we had our talk in the desert. Her own career had been marked at times by her methods of transforming and absorbing junk. But something made me wary. I didn’t want her to think I was implying some affinity of effort and perspective.
Famous people don’t want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there’s something crawling in their clothes.
My father’s name was James Costanza, Jimmy Costanza—add the letters and you get thirteen.
At home we removed the wax paper from cereal boxes. We had a recycling closet with separate bins for newspapers, cans and jars. We rinsed out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their proper bins. We did tin versus aluminum. On pickup days we placed each form of trash in its separate receptacle and put the receptacles, from the Latin verb that means receive again, out on the sidewalk in front of the house. We used a paper bag for the paper bags. We took a large paper bag and put all the smaller bags inside and then placed the large bag alongside all the other receptacles on the sidewalk. We ripped the wax paper from our boxes of shredded wheat. There is no language I might formulate that could overstate the diligence we brought to these tasks. We did the yard waste. We bundled the newspapers but did not tie them in twine.
Sometimes we used the pauses to watch TV. We looked at reruns of “The Honeymooners” and my mother laughed when Ralph Kramden flung his arms and bellowed great complaints. It was about the only time I could expect to hear her laugh. She must have felt a certain clean release, looking at the sadly furnished apartment, at wife Alice in her apron or dowdy cloth coat, at Norton the neighbor with a bent fedora on his jerky head—things that were close to what she knew. Superficially of course. Close to what she knew in an apparent rather than actual way. A closeness that was shallow but still a bit touching and maybe even mysteriously real. Look at the picture on the screen, flat and gray and staticky with years, not unlike memories she carried to her sleep. She slept in a room in Arizona and how strange this must have seemed to her. But Jackie Gleason on the screen made the place more plausible—he drew her toward a perceptible center.
A hawser is the thing you tie around a bollard.
I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.
Marian wanted to know me at seventeen, see me at seventeen, and there were small shrewd things she asked about, and they talked about my father and I listened, in the deep lull after dinner. My mother said things I already knew but I listened from the living room with a magazine in my face. He was a bookmaker famous for his memory, never wrote a number on a piece of paper. This was the legend of the street. I was eleven years old when he walked out the door and I heard the story later, that he remembered everything, made his rounds of the barbershops and sweatshops, downtown, in the garment district, the street corners, the hotel lobbies, strictly small-time, and that he never had to commit a figure to paper because he was able to retain the details of every bet. This is the story that settled around his name. It was part of the awe that trails a violent death or an unexplained disappearance.
She posed in the doorway in stately profile and we turned off Interstate 10 and entered one of those death marathons of mall traffic and finally found their little street and there she was, pregnant to beat the band.
My mother said things to Marian, a story now and then in her Bronxy half brogue, and I sat and listened fitfully behind the body-throb of the dishwasher. We gave her room a coat of fresh green paint, Lainie’s old room, pale and restful. We fixed her up with the TV set and the resilvered mirror and the good hard healthy bed and we laid in a case of flavored seltzer—lemon-lime, I think.
In my office in the bronze tower I made gangster threats that were comically effective. I said to a consultant who was late with a report, “I’m telling you once and for all that I, me, Mario Badalato, I’ll sever your fucking family’s head off.” This in a scraped-raw voice faithful to the genre and evilly appreciated by the others in the room.
In Holland I went to VAM, a waste treatment plant that handles a million tons of garbage a year. I sat in a
He was the kind of person you’d have trouble describing if you saw him in the commission of a crime. But after the riots he put on an L.A. Raiders hat and an ultralong T-shirt that had a pair of sunglasses slung from the pocket. Nothing else changed. He lived in his room, disappearing into chips and discs, the same shy boy but physically vivid now, a social being with a ghetto strut.
We sat in the room watching reruns, my mother and I. He left her for a time before I was born. This is why I carry her name, not his. She didn’t think he’d ever come back and she told me she saw a lawyer, who did some finagling. The courts tend to rule that a child must retain his father’s name until he reaches legal age, at which time he can choose for himself. But the lawyer finagled an exception out of some judge and this is why my birth certificate says Shay. Then he came back and stayed a long time before he went out for cigarettes, ten years or so. He was a man from nowhere, she said, slightly resigned, as if this was all she could expect fate to offer us—her and me and my brother—or maybe I misread the tone and she meant this is where he came from and this is where he went, inescapably, given the rhyming slang of life.