“I remember that suit,” Annie said, lifting the sleeve of a gray herringbone coat. “You wore it for dress-up.”
“Wonder if it’d still fit me,” Francis said, and stood up and held the pants to his waist and found out his legs had not grown any longer in the past twenty-two years.
“Take the suit downstairs,” Annie said. “I’ll sponge and press it.”
“Press it?” Francis said, and he chuckled. “S’pose I could use a new outfit. Get rid of these rags.”
He then singled out a full wardrobe, down to the handkerchief, and piled it all on the floor in front of the trunk.
“I’d like to look at these again,” Annie said, lifting out the clippings and photos.
“Bring ‘em down,” Francis said, closing the lid.
“I’ll carry the glove,” Daniel said.
“And I’d like to borry the use of your bathroom,” Francis said. “Take Billy up on that shave offer and try on some of these duds. I got me a shave last night but Billy thinks I oughta do it again.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Billy,” Annie said. “You look fine.”
She led him down the stairs and along a hallway where two rooms faced each other. She gestured at a bedroom where a single bed, a dresser, and a child’s rolltop desk stood in quiet harmony.
“That’s Danny’s room,” she said. “It’s a nice big room and it gets the morning light.” She took a towel down from a linen closet shelf and handed it to Francis. “Have a bath if you like.”
Francis locked the bathroom door and tried on the trousers, which fit if he didn’t button the top button. Wear the suspenders with ‘em. The coat was twenty years out of style and offended Francis’s residual sense of aptness. But he decided to wear it anyway, for its odor of time was infinitely superior to the stink of bumdom that infested the coat on his back. He stripped and let the bathwater run. He inspected the shirt he took from the trunk, but rejected it in favor of the white-on-white from the junk wagon. He tried the laceless black oxfords, all broken in, and found that even with calluses his feet had not grown in twentytwo years either.
He stepped into the bath and slid slowly beneath its vapors. He trembled with the heat, with astonishment that he was indeed here, as snug in this steaming tub as was the turkey in its roasting pan. He felt blessed. He stared at the bathroom sink, which now had an aura of sanctity about it, its faucets sacred, its drainpipe holy, and he wondered whether everything was blessed at some point in its existence, and he concluded yes. Sweat rolled down his forehead and dripped off his nose into the bath, a confluence of ancient and modern waters. And as it did, a great sunburst entered the darkening skies, a radiance so sudden that it seemed like a bolt of lightning; yet its brilliance remained, as if some angel of beatific lucidity were hovering outside the bathroom window. So enduring was the light, so intense beyond even sundown’s final gloryburst, that Francis raised himself up out of the tub and went to the window.
Below, in the yard, Aldo Campione, Fiddler Quain, Harold Allen, and Rowdy Dick Doolan were erecting a wooden structure that Francis was already able to recognize as bleachers.
He stepped back into the tub, soaped the long-handled brush, raised his left foot out of the water, scrubbed it clean, raised the right foot, scrubbed that.
o o o
Francis, that 1916 dude, came down the stairs in bow tie, white-on-white shirt, black laceless oxfords with a spit shine on them, the gray herringbone with lapels twentytwo years too narrow, with black silk socks and white silk boxer shorts, with his skin free of dirt everywhere, his hair washed twice, his fingernails cleaned, his leftover teeth brushed and the toothbrush washed with soap and dried and rehung, with no whiskers anymore, none, and his hair combed and rubbed with a dab of Vaseline so it’d stay in place, with a spring in his gait and a smile on his face; this Francis dude came down those stairs, yes, and stunned his family with his resurrectible good looks and stylish potential, and took their stares as applause.
And dance music rose in his brain.
“Holy Christ,” said Billy.
“My oh my,” said Annie.
“You look different,” Daniel said.
“I kinda needed a sprucin’,” Francis said. “Funny duds but I guess they’ll do.”
They all pulled back then, even Daniel, aware they should not dwell on the transformation, for it made Francis’s previous condition so lowly, so awful.
“Gotta dump these rags,” he said, and he lifted his bundle, tied with the arms of his old coat.
“Danny’ll take them,” Annie said. “Put them in the cellar,” she told the boy.
Francis sat down on a bench in the breakfast nook, across the table from Billy. Annie had spread the clips and photos on the table and he and Billy looked them over. Among the clips Francis found a yellowed envelope postmarked June 2, 1910, and addressed to Mr. Francis Phelan, do Toronto Baseball Club, The Palmer House, Toronto, Ont. He opened it and read the letter inside, then pocketed it. Dinner advanced as Daniel and Annie peeled the potatoes at the sink. Billy, his hair combed slick, half a dude himself with open-collared starched white shirt, creased trousers, and pointy black shoes, was drinking from a quart bottle of Dobler beer and reading a clipping.
“I read these once,” Billy said. “I never really knew how good you were. I heard stories and then one night downtown I heard a guy talking about you and he was ravin’ that you were top-notch and I never knew just how good. I knew this stuff was there. I seen it when we first moved here, so I went up and looked. You were really a hell of a ball player.”
“Not bad,” Francis said. “Coulda been worse.”
“These sportswriters liked you.”
“I did crazy things. I was good copy for them. And I had energy. Everybody likes energy.”
Billy offered Francis a glass of beer but Francis declined and took, instead, from Billy’s pack, a Camel cigarette; and then he perused the clips that told of him stealing the show with his fielding, or going four-for-four and driving in the winning run, or getting himself in trouble: such as the day he held the runner on third by the belt, an old John McGraw trick, and when a fly ball was hit, the runner got ready to tag and head home after the catch but found he could not move and turned and screamed at Francis in protest, at which point Francis let go of the belt and the runner ran, but the throw arrived first and he was out at home.
Nifty.
But Francis was thrown out of the game.
“Would you like to go out and look at the yard?” Annie said, suddenly beside Francis.
“Sure. See the dog.”
“It’s too bad the flowers are gone. We had so many flowers this year. Dahlias and snapdragons and pansies and asters. The asters lasted the longest.”
“You still got them geraniums right here.”
Annie nodded and put on her sweater and the two of them went out onto the back porch. The air was chilly and the light fading. She closed the door behind them and patted the dog, which barked twice at Francis and then accepted his presence. Annie went down the five steps to the yard, Francis and the dog following.
“Do you have a place to stay tonight, Fran?”
“Sure. Always got a place to stay.”
“Do you want to come home permanent?” she asked, not looking at him, walking a few steps ahead toward the fence. “Is that why you’ve come to see us?”
“Nah, not much chance of that. I’d never fit in.”
“I thought you might’ve had that in mind.”
“I thought of it, I admit that. But I see it couldn’t work, not after all these years.”
“It’d take some doing, I know that.”
“Take more than that.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah? Name one.”
“You going to the cemetery and talking to Gerald. I think maybe that’s the strangest thing I ever heard in all my days.”
“Wasn’t strange. I just went and stood there and told him a bunch of stuff. It’s nice where he is. It’s pretty.”