“Hey!” Dolly objected to this oblique reference to her man.
The light dimmed, the moving picture moved again. The crowds moved in and out of the ballyard. Rain fell. The ballplayers appeared tired and out of sorts. One by one, the title cards revealed the sad outcome of the games:
Pittsburg 5 Boston 4 (cheers)
Boston 11 Pittsburg 2
Boston 6 Pittsburg 3
Boston 7 Pittsburg 3
The losses happened so quickly that she was not sure how the Bostons had managed to go from being down three games to one to being on the verge of ending the whole championship series. With each contest, Pat grew angrier and increasingly frustrated. During the seventh game, the Royal Rooters and their hired band began to play and the hundred or so Boston fans began to sing to the tune of “Tessie”:
Honus, why do you hit so badly?
Take a back seat and sit down.
Honus, at bat you look so sadly,
Hey, why don’t you get out of town?
The boys on the field, even the Dutchman, got a kind of perverse kick out of the cranks’ shenanigans, but in the stands, the Pittsburg crowd howled and started singing their own ditties. Charlie Wells came by, backing Boston and looking for a wager, and Pat nearly came to blows with his old chum. Even his brother steered clear of Pat, and only Adele’s presence brought his temper under control. She sensed his jitters as they waited on the platform for the train to take both clubs and their followers back to Boston.
“Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me before you go.”
He kissed her politely on the cheek. She pressed her forehead against his cheek so hard that he could still feel the pressure days later.
“You don’t understand, Adele. I put it all on Pittsburg when we were up there. All our money, not just mine, but money from Christy and from my friends and some of the sports. And then I doubled up when the Pirates went ahead. Bet more than I had. More than I could possibly raise—”
“But Pittsburg will certainly win.”
“That’s just it. They’re all beat up. No pitchers left. Fred Clarke even sent Eddie Doheny his uniform, but the poor sap is in the nuthouse in Danvers. That’s where I’ll end up, or worse. I’ll owe a small fortune to some very angry men.”
“Surely, I could help. We could sell this pin,” she said and removed the diamond stickpin from her lapel. “We could find the money.”
“Don’t lose the flag,” Pat said. “That wouldn’t cover a tenth of what I might lose.”
The locomotive rolled into the station, and the travelers climbed aboard. He kissed her distractedly and failed to wave from the window of his carriage, despite the fact that she waited for him and kept calling out his name long after the wheels on the train had gone round and disappeared.
“Round and round, round and round,” the little boy sang.
The flick flickered to life. A car pulls up to the Danvers Insane Asylum in Andover, Massachusetts, and a solitary man exits quickly and runs to the entrance, dodging puddles. Hard to recognize Fred Clarke without the baseball cap and uniform, but his features are clearer when he doffs his hat and shakes off the rain at the front door.
The film’s point of view cuts to interior, a patient’s room, white and sterile, and there is Eddie Doheny in the bed. His young wife sits in a chair beside him. A small bouquet rests on the night table, courtesy of Mr. Dreyfuss. Beyond her shoulder, the window is slightly ajar, and the rain drums on the sill. The young wife twists a handkerchief into a butterfly, and the camera zooms in as she speaks. The title card: “He thought he could play when you sent him his baseball uniform.” And Fred Clarke answers: “We only wanted to cheer him.” Mrs. Doheny: “His nerves snapped! When you boys lost for the fourth time, he beat his nurse, Mr. Howarth, with the leg off a stove. He just needs a rest.” She hands the Pirates’ manager a message. Cut to interior of the Vendome Hotel, Boston, where the team is gathered in a bedroom. Clarke opens the envelope and two bills slip out. In close-up, the letter reads: “As they were taking away my husband, Eddie said, ‘I owe only two dollars, and that to Claude Ritchey. Won’t you pay him?’ ” Ritchey says nothing, leaves the money on the bedspread. A few of the boys have tears in their eyes as they depart for the ball game.