“Table, folks?”
“Not while there’s a bar rail,” Francis said.
“Step up, brother. What’s your quaff?”
“Ginger ale,” said Pee Wee.
“I believe I’ll have the same,” said Helen.
“That beer looks tantalizin’,” Francis said.
“You said you wouldn’t drink,” Helen said.
“I said wine.”
The barman slid a schooner with a high collar across the bar to Francis and looked to Rudy, who ordered the same. The piano player struck up a medley of “She May Have Seen Better Days” and “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” and urged those in the audience who knew the lyrics to join in song.
“You look like a friend of mine,” Francis told the barman, drilling him with a smile and a stare. The barman, with a full head of silver waves and an eloquent white mustache, stared back long enough to ignite a memory. He looked from Francis to Pee Wee, who was also smiling:
“I think I know you two turks,” the barman said.
“You thinkin’ right,” Francis said, “except the last time I seen you, you wasn’t sportin’ that pussy-tickler.”
The barman stroked his silvery lip. “You guys got me drunk in New York.”
“You got us drunk in every bar on Third Avenue,” Pee Wee said.
The barman stuck out his hand to Francis.
“Francis Phelan,” said Francis, “and this here is Rudy the Kraut. He’s all right but he’s nuts.”
“My kind of fella,” Oscar said.
“Pee Wee Packer,” Pee Wee said with his hand out.
“I remember,” said Oscar.
“And this is Helen,” said Francis. “She hangs out with me, but damned if I know why.”
“Oscar Reo’s what I still go by. folks, and I really do remember you boys. But I don’t drink anymore.”
“Hey, me neither,” said Pee Wee.
“I ain’t turned it off yet,” Francis said. “I’m waitin’ till I retire.”
“He retired forty years ago,” Pee Wee said.
“That ain’t true. I worked all day today. Gettin’ rich. How you like my new duds?”
“You’re a sport,” Oscar said. “Can’t tell you from those swells over there.”
“Swells and bums, there ain’t no difference,” Francis said.
“Except swells like to look like swells,” Oscar said, “and bums like to look like bums. Am I right?”
“You’re a smart fella,” Francis said.
“You still singin’, Oscar?” Pee Wee asked.
“For my supper.”
“Well goddamn it,” Francis said, “give us a tune.”
“Since you’re so polite about it,” Oscar said. And he turned to the piano man and said: “‘Sixteen’ “; and instantly there came from the piano the strains of “Sweet Sixteen.”
“Oh that’s a wonderful song,” Helen said. “I remember you singing that on the radio.”
“How durable of you, my dear.”
Oscar sang into the bar microphone and, with great resonance and no discernible loss of control from his years with the drink, he turned time back to the age of the village green. The voice was as commonplace to an American ear as Jolson’s, or Morton Downey’s; and even Francis, who rarely listened to the radio, or ever had a radio to listen to in either the early or the modern age, remembered its pitch and its tremolo from the New York binge, when this voice by itself was a chorale of continuous joy for all in earshot, or so it seemed to Francis at a distance of years. And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet… here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.
The insight raised in Francis a compulsion to confess his every transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his own character, however minor. What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?
When Oscar segued perfectly into a second song, his talent seemed awesome to Francis, and the irrelevance of talent to Oscar’s broken life even more of a mystery. How does somebody get this good and why doesn’t it mean anything? Francis considered his own talent on the ball field of a hazy, sunlit yesterday: how he could follow the line of the ball from every crack of the bat, zap after it like a chicken hawk after a chick, how he would stroke and pocket its speed no matter whether it was lined at him or sizzled erratically toward him through the grass. He would stroke it with the predatory curve of his glove and begin with his right hand even then, whether he was running or falling, to reach into that leather pocket, spear the chick with his educated talons, and whip it across to first or second base, or wherever it needed to go and you’re out, man, you’re out. No ball player anywhere moved his body any better than Franny Phelan, a damn fieldin’ machine, fastest ever was.
Francis remembered the color and shape of his glove, its odor of oil and sweat and leather, and he wondered if Annie had kept it. Apart from his memory and a couple of clippings, it would be all that remained of a spent career that had blossomed and then peaked in the big leagues far too long after the best years were gone, but which brought with the peaking the promise that some belated and overdue glory was possible, that somewhere there was a hosannah to be cried in the name of Francis Phelan, one of the best sonsabitches ever to kick a toe into third base.
Oscar’s voice quavered with beastly loss on a climactic line of the song: Blinding tears falling as he thinks of his lost pearl, broken heart calling, oh yes, calling, dear old girl. Francis turned to Helen and saw her crying splendid, cathartic tears: Helen, with the image of inexpungeable sorrow in her cortex, with a lifelong devotion to forlorn love, was weeping richly for all the pearls lost since love’s old sweet song first was sung.
“Oh that was so beautiful, so beautiful,” Helen said to Oscar when he rejoined them at the beer spigot. “That’s absolutely one of my all-time favorites. I used to sing it myself.”
“A singer?” said Oscar. “Where was that?”
“Oh everywhere. Concerts, the radio. I used to sing on the air every night, but that was an age ago.”
“You should do us a tune.”
“Oh never,” said Helen.
“Customers sing here all the time,” Oscar said.
“No, no,” said Helen, “the way I look.”
“You look as good as anybody here,” Francis said.
“I could never,” said Helen. But she was readying herself to do what she could never, pushing her hair behind her ear, straightening her collar, smoothing her much more than ample front.
“What’ll it be?” Oscar said. “Joe knows ‘em all.”
“Let me think awhile.”
Francis saw that Aldo Campione was sitting at a table at the far end of the room and had someone with him. That son of a bitch is following me, is what Francis thought. He fixed his glance on the table and saw Aldo move his hand in an ambiguous gesture. What are you telling me, dead man, and who’s that with you? Aldo wore a white flower in the lapel of his white flannel suitcoat, a new addition since the bus. Goddamn dead people travelin’ in packs, buyin’ flowers. Francis studied the other man without recognition and felt the urge to walk over and take a closer look. But what if nobody’s sittin’ there? What if nobody sees these bozos but me? The flower girl came along with a full tray of white gardenias.