Across the field the gulls were circling over the dump, Long Island Sound a blue line beyond.
“Want to try it again?”
Part of him did not. His father despaired of his ever excelling at this game, he knew: a lot of people had long since decided Biddy just did not have the instincts for baseball. He squinted, defiant, and scratched his thigh with his glove and nodded. Louis trotted back to right field and Mickey to third. They were practicing the play at the plate on a sacrifice fly. Dom lifted the bat and ball and turned to face Louis, and Biddy adjusted the catcher’s mask, the thick padding comforting against his cheeks. A bee swirled low across the infield, its drone distracting in the heat. His father stood on the mound, wiping sweat from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. The cool blue Sound beyond was soothing, and Biddy flexed back and forth in his catcher’s crouch to relieve the stiffness. His knees ached. He wanted to salvage a tail boom and fly out of this dust bowl, letting his relaxed legs flap in the jetstream. His father lobbed the ball in and Dom swung under it, sending it off into the sun.
Out in right Louis took a step back, two forward, and pulled the ball in. As he did Mickey exploded from third, his breath whooshing down the line at Biddy, and Louis’s throw came in high and hard and to the left, bouncing once, and Biddy lunged for it feeling it sock into his glove and tumbled into Mickey’s slide, catching him on the chest and face with the tag before being jarred onto his shoulder in the dust.
He rose to all fours, one foot still tangled in Mickey’s sprawl, sweat stinging his left eye, the ball tight in his glove and the dirt dry beneath his hand. Dom, standing over him, called the out as flamboyantly as any umpire ever had, and he rose from the plate happy to have made people happy, and tired and ready to go home.
They thumped into the house hot and dirty and wearing their gloves to find everyone sitting around the kitchen table as if they’d never left. Louis and Mickey trooped into the TV room.
“Had enough of a workout?” his mother asked. He shrugged.
“It’s not the kids’ workout, it’s theirs,” Ginnie said, nodding toward the men.
Biddy slipped onto the counter, his back against the cabinets. There was some leftover tortellini on the stove.
“Get off the counter,” his mother said. “Sit at the table.” Her arm glided past coffee cups, a dessert tray, and a bottle of anisette. She’d arranged the apricot cookies in a mound and sat beside them, her brown hair cut short and her tan pronounced. She was not completely enjoying herself, he could see, not completely allowing herself to relax. Dom and Ginnie they always seemed to have time for, she often told him, but his father never seemed ready to visit any of her sisters. Dom and Ginnie had no idea how much it bothered her, Biddy guessed, watching her as hostess. He’d told her once he never would have known, and she’d said simply, “You have people over, you don’t treat them like that. I’m not a cavone.” He watched her, wondering at her control, at the impenetrability of those around him.
Dom sat opposite her, eating black olives. He was Biddy’s godfather, his father’s closest friend. He worked in a sporting-goods store. He dressed like it, Biddy’s father used to say. He ate a good deal and afterward made squeaking noises between his teeth with his tongue. Biddy remembered a picture he’d glimpsed of Dom’s high-school football team: someone had written across the top “Roger Ludlowe Football 1952 8–0 Go Lions.” In the corner he’d found Dom, number 77, his heavy black hair combed to the side, big gap in his front teeth. He’d had dirt on his nose and a comically tiny leather helmet perched uselessly on his head. Someone had circled the head and had written “Ginzo” in the margin.
“You have to sit up there?” his father said. “Get a folding chair from the porch.”
He said it was okay.
“I wish he wouldn’t sit on the counter,” his mother said.
“What’s wrong with sitting on the counter?” he asked.
“You like it? Fine. Sit on the counter. I don’t care where you sit,” his father said. “Sit on the refrigerator.”
“Sit on the refrigerator, Biddy,” Dom said.
“They just sit up there because they know it bothers you,” Ginnie said. “Right, Biddy?”
Biddy shrugged at her. Turkey, he thought.
Dom was talking about his encephalogram. “This guy’s putting the needles in, you know, like he’s getting a commission. He’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and all the while he’s humming ‘O beautiful for spacious skies’—you know, ‘America, the Beautiful.’ I’m sitting there with this guy sticking these things in humming ‘America, the Beautiful.’”
There was general laughter, his mother laughing more quietly than the rest, and he caught her eyes and smiled.
“So I go, ‘Look, Doc, whenever you’re ready here, you know,’ and he goes, ‘What, are they bothering you, Mr. Liriano,’ and I go, ‘Shit no, you know, just point me north and maybe we can pick up Hartford.’”
Everyone laughed and Biddy clumped his heels on the cabinet doors beneath him for no reason, through the noise. Cindy was smiling up at him and he looked away quickly. This was an engagement party of a sort for her, and she was being teased again about the way she looked. Milanese, Dom speculated. Fiorentino. A big shot, from the north. But not Napolitan. Her hair was too blonde, her complexion too light. “My mother used to say, ‘Whose bambin is this, eh? Tedesc?’”
She blushed. She wore light colors and delicate fabrics in summer, with two thin gold chains from her fiancé always around her neck, rich and subdued at the base of her throat.
“Too pretty for a Liriano,” Dom said. “Liriano women look like they play for the Bears. You — I’ll tell you what happened. Princess Grace came to me, she was retiring, she had a problem. You and Caroline didn’t get along in the bassinet.”
“You never told me your mother looked like she played for the Bears,” Ginnie said.
“She did play for the Bears,” Dom said. “Under the name Joe Fortunato. Look it up.”
Biddy continued to watch Cindy’s eyes moving swiftly from speaker to speaker.
“Look at the Head of Covert Operations over there,” his father said. Everyone looked at him. “The watcher. We’re going to call him the watcher.”
He smiled, embarrassed and unhappy, and Dom suggested he was getting psyched for the Air Show. Biddy’s mother asked not to be reminded.
“Don’t you think you can handle it, Jude?” Dom had three olives in one cheek and looked like a squirrel. “You only invited the immediate family. What’s that, six hundred thousand?”
“Every one of them ready to put away twice his own weight in pasta,” Biddy’s father said.
“Well, what do you think, those chibonies are interested in the Air Show? Uh-huh. Locusts. It’s like having locusts over. The only way your Uncle Tony’s gonna see the Air Show is if something crashes into the gnocchi.” He poured some beer. “Oh, they’re gonna see the Air Show, all right. They’ll be through the homemade stuff and into the Gallo before the Blue Whatevers take off.”
“Angels,” Biddy said.
“Yeah, Angels. They’ll be so snockered it might as well be.”
His parents fought after the Lirianos left. He’d heard it coming just in the sharpness with which they put things away, and he hesitated, stupidly, before coming upstairs from the cellar. Dom was fine, the kids were fine, all of his father’s friends were fine, his mother said. Everybody was fine except Judy and her family. Judy and her family got treated like shit. When he came upstairs, his mother was gone. His father sat looking at the coffee cups, food trays, and beer glasses.