Pressed against her temple, the glass of iced lemonade did nothing to cool off Adele. It was a hot and muggy night.
Through the screen window, light flashed, and thunder sounded in the distance. It had been a hot and muggy night, and perhaps that explains why I was naked when I landed on the bathroom floor. Usually I wear something to bed, unless pajamas prove uncomfortable when it is too early to air-condition but too humid for a good night’s sleep. The sudden spike in moisture must have made me strip. Now, with a thunderstorm threatening, I wondered if I should call the cat inside and close all the windows in the house in case of torrential rain.
“Not to worry,” the old man said. “We can turn it off or on by will.”
“You mean it’s not going to rain tonight?”
“Special effects,” he said. “Even as a little boy, you were prone to rather vivid imaginings.”
How could he know about my childhood, especially if he is the Irish playwright who wrote his masterpieces in French? I began to suspect that he was not who I imagined him to be. But if not Beckett, then who? The child at his feet was pretending that a bar of soap was some kind of aircraft that he could fly at the end of his hand, and he aimed the jet straight for the face of the commode, before swiftly turning at the last possible moment to avoid a crash, all the while making the sound of a sputtering engine. The old man had become distracted by the child’s play. “Bbbrum-bbrum-brum,” Beckett said to the boy.
The sound of his blubbering lips transformed into the sound of a movie projector. All of us except Adele turned our faces to the light. The young men in their antique costumes trotted the bases, hit the ball with their wooden sticks, and spun their arms like windmills before delivering the pitch. The big German, Wagner, stands poised at shortstop, and the batter’s hit skips sharply toward his left. He digs for it and throws a shower of dirt and pebbles out of which the baseball emerges tailed like a comet and lands in the first baseman’s mitt. Behind Adele, the game goes on, unabated by her continuing narrative.
Love is sweetest as it ripens, and they were in that pleasant interlude between awkward shyness and any formal engagement, though Adele, when he pressed his case, strongly implied the necessity of such a promise before she surrendered even a hint of her virtue. From time to time, his anger bested his good judgment, but he never took out any frustrations on her. Rather, Pat boiled over and started moving, doing something, going somewhere—tossing a medicine ball to his brother, hitting a punching bag, walking the whole way from Exposition Park to Birmingham, crossing two rivers along the way, or once or twice going to a shooting range to try one of the rifles his father had stashed in the attic. But mostly, Pat was a perfect gentleman, and when the Pirates came back into town for their September games, he was readily distracted by the baseball and the chance to place bets among his fellow fanatics. Unrelenting August had given way and soon enough the heat had broken. Even the southpaw Eddie Doheny had rejoined the team after a few weeks, though all the cranks said he was not quite the same. Charlie Wells and the other sports would guy him on, but Pat would have no part of any such talk, thought the whole matter bad luck. His intuition proved correct when Doheny started acting out again and became unmanageable. His brother, a preacher, came to town on the twenty-second and took the pitcher back to Massachusetts. “Poor man,” Pat said when he read the news. “Some fellas can’t take the stress.”
The loss of Doheny, however, was overshadowed by the Pirates clinching the National League pennant for the third year in a row, and the talk was that they would accept a challenge from the best finisher of the American League for a world’s championship series.
“It’s going to be the Bostons,” Christy said at the ballpark. “There’s nobody even close.”
“The Beaneaters?” Helen asked.
“Not them,” said Christy. “The ones from the American League. The Boston Americans.”
“They should be called the Jumpers,” Pat said. “That’s all they are, that whole American League ain’t nothing but a bunch of contract jumpers and money grabbers, and them boys will put the dollar above team loyalty or their fans.”
“So you think our Pittsburg boys can beat ’em? Best five out of nine?” Christy asked. “Without Doheny and banged up as we are?”
“Brother,” Pat said, “we’ll beat them senseless. And if they go, I’m going with them. All four of us go up to Boston, what do you say?”
Helen laughed and scoffed at the idea. “Why, Mr. Ahearn, you sound as if you are making a proposal for yourself and on your brother’s behalf to Miss Hopkins and myself.”
“A proposal?” Christy stammered.
“How else could we accompany you on a train trip to Boston?” Helen asked. “Surely you mean to be fully respectable and take us as your wives?”