“Does that make any difference throwing an inshoot?”
“Sure does, but not to me. I don’t throw no more at all. Never was a pitcher, you know, but talked with plenty of ‘em. Walter Johnson was my buddy. You know him? The Big Train?”
The boy shook his head.
“Don’t matter. But he taught me how it was done and I ain’t forgot. Put your first two fingers right on the seams, like this, and then you snap your wrist out, like this, and if you’re a righty-are you a righty?”-and the boy nodded- “then the ball’s gonna dance a little turnaround jig and head right inside at the batter’s belly button, assumin’, acourse, that he’s a righty too. You followin’ me?” And the boy nodded again. “Now the trick is, you got to throw the opposite of the outcurve, which is like this.” And he snapped his wrist clockwise. “You got to do it like this.” And he snapped his wrist counterclockwise again. Then he had the boy try it both ways and patted him on the back.
“That’s how it’s done,” he said. “You get so’s you can do it, the batter’s gonna think you got a little animal inside that ball, flyin’ it like an airplane.”
“Let’s go outside and try it,” Daniel said. “I’ll get another glove.”
“Glove,” said Francis, and he turned to Annie. “By some fluke you still got my old glove stuck away somewheres in the house? That possible, Annie?”
“There’s a whole trunk of your things in the attic,” she said. “It might be there.”
“It is,” Daniel said. “I know it is. I saw it. I’ll get it.”
“You will not,” Annie said. “That trunk is none of your affair.”
“But I’ve already seen it. There’s a pair of spikes too, and clothes and newspapers and old pictures.”
“All that,” Francis said to Annie. “You saved it.”
“You had no business in that trunk,” Annie said.
“Billy and I looked at the pictures and the clippings one day,” Daniel said. “Billy looked just as much as I did. He’s in lots of ‘em.” And he pointed at his grandfather.
“Maybe you’d want to have a look at what’s there,” Annie said to Francis.
“Could be. Might find me a new shoelace.”
Annie led him up the stairs, Daniel already far ahead of them. They heard the boy saying: “Get up, Billy, Grandpa’s here”; and when they reached the second floor Billy was standing in the doorway of his room, in his robe and white socks, disheveled and only half awake.
“Hey, Billy. How you gettin’ on?” Francis said.
“Hey,” said Billy. “You made it.”
“Yep.”
“I woulda bet against it happenin’.”
“You’da lost. Brought a turkey too, like I said.”
“A turkey, yeah?”
“We’re having it for dinner,” Annie said.
“I’m supposed to be downtown tonight,” Billy said. “I just told Martin I’d meet him.”
“Call him back,” Annie said. “He’ll understand.”
“Red Tom Fitzsimmons and Martin both called to tell me things are all right again on Broadway. You know, I told you I had trouble with the McCalls,” Billy said to his father.
“I ‘member.”
“I wouldn’t do all they wanted and they marked me lousy. Couldn’t gamble, couldn’t even get a drink on Broadway.”
“I read that story Martin wrote,” Francis said. “He called you a magician.”
“Martin’s full of malarkey. I didn’t do diddley. I just mentioned Newark to them and it turns out that’s where they trapped some of the kidnap gang.”
“You did somethin’, then,” Francis said. “Mentionin’ Newark was somethin’. Who’d you mention it to?”
“Bindy. But I didn’t know those guys were in Newark or I wouldn’t of said anything. I could never rat on anybody.”
“Then why’d you mention it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s how come you’re a magician.”
“That’s Martin’s baloney. But he turned somebody’s head around with it, ‘cause I’m back in good odor with the pols, is how he put it on the phone. In other words, I don’t stink to them no more.”
Francis smelled himself and knew he had to wash as soon as possible. The junk wagon’s stink and the bummy odor of his old suitcoat was unbearable now that he was among these people. Dirty butchers go out of business.
“You can’t go out now, Billy,” Annie said. “Not with your father home and staying for dinner. We’re going up in the attic to look at his things.”
“You like turkey?” Francis asked Billy.
“Who the hell don’t like turkey, not to give you a short answer,” Billy said. He looked at his father. “Listen, use my razor in the bathroom if you want to shave.”
“Don’t be telling people what to do,” Annie said. “Get dressed and come downstairs.”
And then Francis and Annie ascended the stairway to the attic.
o o o
When Francis opened the trunk lid the odor of lost time filled the attic air, a cloying reek of imprisoned flowers that unsettled the dust and fluttered the window shades. Francis felt drugged by the scent of the reconstituted past, and then stunned by his first look inside the trunk, for there, staring out from a photo, was his own face at age nineteen. The picture lay among rolled socks and a small American flag, a Washington Senators cap, a pile of news- paper clippings and other photos, all in a scatter on the trunk’s tray. Francis stared up at himself from the bleachers in Chadwick Park on a day in 1899, his face unlined, his teeth all there, his collar open, his hair unruly in the afternoon’s breeze. He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.
But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.
And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.
The ball still flies.
Francis still lives to play another day.
Doesn’t he?
The boy noticed the teeth. A man can get new teeth, store teeth. Annie got ‘em.
o o o
Francis lifted the tray out of the trunk, revealing the spikes and the glove, which Daniel immediately grabbed, plus two suits of clothes, a pair of black oxfords and brown high-button shoes, maybe a dozen shirts and two dozen white collars, a stack of undershirts and shorts, a set of keys to long-forgotten locks, a razor strop and a hone, a shaving mug with an inch of soap in it, a shaving brush with bristles,intact, seven straight razors in a case, each marked for a day of the week, socks, bow ties, suspenders, and a baseball, which Francis picked up and held out to Daniel.
“See that? See that name?”
The boy looked, shook his head. “I can’t read it.”
“Get it in the light, you’ll read it. That’s Ty Cobb. He signed that ball in 1911, the year he hit.420. A fella give it to me once and I always kept it. Mean guy, Cobb was, come in at me spikes up many a time. But you had to hand it to a man who played ball as good as he did. He was the best.”
“Better than Babe Ruth?”
“Better and tougher and meaner and faster. Couldn’t hit home runs like the Babe, but he did everything else better. You like to have that ball with his name on it?”
“Sure I would, sure! Yeah! Who wouldn’t?”
“Then it’s yours. But you better look him up, and Walter Johnson too. Find out for yourself how good they were. Still kickin’, too, what I hear about Cobb. He ain’t dead yet either.”