“Are you a fanatic?” Pat asked. “Have you ever been to see the Pittsburg boys? Our Pirates?”
Blushing, she bowed slightly and then faced forward and marched her third graders as briskly as union men in the Labor Day parade. The very thought of traveling across the river to Allegheny City for a mere baseball game filled her with incredulity, and though she knew some young women—such as her best friend, Helen—who had been to Exposition Park for the spectacle, it was not altogether respectable somehow, and Adele wondered what her parents would have to say to such a proposition, and the fact that he, a total stranger, had more or less invited her moments upon first meeting heated her blood to a boil. The very idea. He was simply too brazen to further consider one jot. By the time she herded the children into the classroom, Adele felt damp and thirsty. This will not do, she told herself, but all night long she could not help speculating if he had, in fact, asked her or intended to ask her to come along. Helen would know what to do. She would have to ask Helen about this baseball man, this brazen Irishman, this Patrick Ahearn.
“Oh look,” the old man said, “a new film.”
The clickety-clack of the projector whirred into motion and a rectangle of light flashed on the wall before the image introduced itself. The sprocket holes on the edges fluttered madly, then disappear, and the figures lighten, darken into focus and life. Two young women in their linen dresses sit side by side on a porch swing in the good old summertime. A black-and-white mutt, curled up like a cinnamon bun, lounges just out of reach of their feet. Perched on the windowsill are a sweating glass ewer of lemonade and two empty glasses. A breeze is blowing, for a dance of shadows and light pours through the branches of a tree and onto their faces. They are as intimate as two sisters in conversation. One of these young maidens is our Adele, her honey-colored hair piled high into a bouffant in the fashion of the day, but there’s no doubt of that face, those features. The other, whose dark hair rises to a mountain of curls, is her friend Helen, aptly named, for she is stunning.
“The friend is a looker,” I whispered to the old man.
“A Gibson girl,” he replied behind the back of his hand. “So named for the artist who drew the original. A kind of personification of the idealized female, though there’s a bit of satire in it all, a poke at the masculine tendency to sexualize half the human race. Look at that waist, for goodness’ sake. A wasp has a bigger belly. No surprise you think her the more beautiful of the two.”
As the young women rocked on the swing and chatted, the sound of piano music filtered through the bathroom fan. Some vital bit of information was being conveyed, and the camera zoomed in. Adele on the wall grew particularly animated, and the title card stated: “I had no idea he had a brother.” Helen smiled broadly, the heavy pancake makeup visible in close-up. She says something and winks. The intertitle reveals a moment later: “And he is sweet on me!”
The title card on the wall reads: “Her First Game” and dissolves into a static shot of the crowd making its way down School Street and into Exposition Park. The twin spires decorating the roof of the wooden grandstand point into the smog, but the men and boys and few women rush forward, a sea of hats and caps. Spurred on by the prospect of the duel at three o’clock against the New York Giants, the crowd is electric with happiness. The few women in the queue are dressed as finely as any gentlemen, and Helen and Adele wear matching straw toques with a peacock’s feather, one in blue and one in red, in honor of the hometown team. Caught in the instant looking back at the camera, Adele holds on to her hat with one hand as she is swept away.
When the film concluded, she picked up her story.