“Love?” The old man looked like he was about to spit out his teeth. “One can love any number of things at once. I love a good Buster Keaton film, crêpes suzette, and flying kites in the March winds. But if what Sonny says about you is true, you have more than love. You have passion, you have a gift. And I’ve seen you pitch. Sister, that ain’t love. That’s talent.”
The blood rushed to her face again, and she had no answer for him. When the initial embarrassment faded, two rosettes lingered on her cheeks. Taking her by the elbow, the old man led her to the center of the room. From his bottomless pocket, he retrieved a cream-colored baseball cap with a short blue bill and an old-fashioned blue P emblazoned on the peak. He jammed the cap over his silver spiked hair and then reached deeper into that pocket and procured an ancient leather mitt, barely bigger than his left hand, and he put it on and pounded the palm with his right fist. “I’m ready now,” he told her. “Give us your best stuff. Fire that yarn right here, baby.”
Behind her, projected on the tiles of the shower, a large sepia-toned photograph sharpened into focus. Two young men in high collars and boaters lounged on the steps of a city brownstone on a summer’s day. They looked like brothers, and the older one had tossed something in the air, but the aperture of the camera transformed the object into a white blur. Only upon inspection could it be guessed that the object in motion was a baseball. Adele began her story.
She already knew he was a crank before she ever met him. He and his brother Christy were just fiends for baseball. Went to every game they could, those boys, over in Exposition Park across the river. In fact, that’s where Pat courted her, in the ballpark, just one of several thousand cranks, rooters, and fans come out to cheer.
The photograph on the wall whirred into motion, and the ball that the young man had been tossing fell into his hand. Just like an old silent movie, the film jerked in time, depending upon the action of the cameraman, and scratches, flecks of dust, and moments of underexposure and overexposure darted by. A sound track started, an old-timey piano to accompany the action. But nothing much happened in the scene. The camera did not move, nor did the actors. A title card flashed on the screen: “Patrick Ahearn and his younger brother Christopher ‘Christy,’ Pittsburg, Penna., 1903.”
Beckett piped in from the peanut gallery. “Hey, I thought there was an h at the end of Pittsburgh.”
“Not in Aught-Three,” she said. “They spelled it differently.”
On the film, Christy lights a cigarette and appears to smoke it in superfast motion, as the film must have been undercranked. Pat tosses the baseball again and again till he mugs for the camera. His hair is slicked back and parted as though with a knife. He stops slouching against the balustrade and stands up straight. Confidence pours from his gaze. He tosses the ball again, and the image fades to black.
The year following her graduation from the twelfth grade, Adele helped the Sisters at St. Luke’s, making sure the little ones had proper coats and gloves, mending the torn books, and teaching the children’s choir. Two of her younger sisters, Katie and Grace Ann, were still in school there, and it gave her the chance to play mother during the day. Sometimes she thought of entering the convent herself, but she never heard the call, and spending time among those children, she couldn’t help but want a family of her own. But that’s another story, isn’t it? That spring, one of the poor third-grade boys was struck by a tram and killed, and the whole class was expected to be at the funeral, but Sister Aloysius couldn’t bear her grief and asked Adele to escort the students in the procession from the school to the cemetery.
The children were more unruly than had nuns taken them, and for all but a few, it was a lark, a parade in the sunshine. Two lines, the twelve girls in pairs, the nine boys paired as well, with the odd one, Frankie Day, as her companion. They had been hushed and chastened on the way to the church, but after the Mass and once that little box had been lowered in the hole, the children were a terror. Girls refusing the hands of their partners in the lines. Boys being boys, stepping on the heels of those walking in front of them, chittering like sparrows, and one boy fingering a lump in his trousers, looking suspicious as a squirrel. Turns out he had a baseball in his pocket, and whenever Adele’s back was turned, he took it out and tossed it to his best friend.