Of course they lost. No pitching. Deacon Phillippe was asked to pitch for the fifth time in eight tries, but he was out of steam. Leever’s arm was hurt. Kennedy and the other pitchers, no go. Half that team was beat up, and even Wagner threatened to quit the game altogether. And Doheny was gone for good. He died of TB thirteen years later, never left the asylum. Imagine that.
For days after the Boston triumph, Adele expected Pat to appear suddenly, swaggering up the avenue, or at least to hear by telegram or letter. But the train carrying the Pittsburg team back to the city dispersed half its passengers along the way. Kitty Bransfield went home to Worcester. Ginger Beaumont lit off for a hunting trip in Wisconsin. Jimmy Sebring, the first person to hit a home run in the history of the World Series, departed near Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with his new bride. Claude Ritchey headed out to his folks’ farm in Venango County. Pat could have jumped off anywhere between here and there. Of the few that made the Pittsburg area their home, none could remember seeing Patrick Ahearn aboard the train at all. A query to the Boston police later that fall was unsatisfactory. The only unknown or missing person from around the dates in question was a tramp found in an alley behind the Vendome Hotel, penniless and drunk, and beaten to death by a baseball bat, and the hotel itself reported that Patrick Ahearn had skipped out on his bill and would the responsible party kindly remit $12. His brother Christy seemed to think, however, that Pat was too clever for such a fate, though he himself was killed two years later by a single blow to the head by a baseball bat outside of Exposition Park. He left behind a young wife, pregnant with their first child. Helen Ahearn named her boy Eddie, after the poor pitcher who had also seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.
Eventually Adele stopped waiting for Patsy to come back. Some nights she imagined the scene in Boston—Patsy confronting the Boston gamblers, trying to fight his way out of trouble, and the Boston boys ambushing him with baseball bats, and making him pay for his debts with his life. The next summer she was back at Exposition Park, but it was not quite the same. Still, a girl had to look out for herself, make the best of her prospects. When Charlie Wells proposed in the winter of ’04, he offered at least some connection to the halcyon past. The Pirates finished fourth that year, nineteen back of the Giants, and did not make it back to the World Series till 1909 against Detroit. Despite Charlie’s objection, she wore the diamond stickpin to the ballpark. Exposition Park was gone by that time, and the Pirates played out in Oakland at the brand-new Forbes Field in what was now known as Pittsburgh with an h on the end. Only Clarke and Leach and Wagner made it from that first championship club, and they were old men by the standards of the game. Adele’s daughter wore the diamond flag to the 1925 World Series against Washington, but she lost it on the last rainy day, when the fans could barely see the finale, and the boys had no business playing baseball, no business at all.
The baseball that had been stuck in the door dislodged, falling to the tiles with a wet splat and rolling across the room to the little boy, who picked it up at once, considered biting the sphere as though it were a red-seamed white fruit, thought better of the idea, and then threw it with great exuberance against the porcelain side of the bathtub, the ricochet sending the ball spinning back through the opening into the hallway, smacking a newel post on the banister, and bounding down the staircase two or more steps at a time, caroming off the wall, till it reached the front door where it stopped with a bang. Surprised by his own strength and the physics set in motion, the tot blinked and clapped for himself, uncertain as to what had just happened. I recognized the shocked perplexity on the boy’s face and felt a sense of kinship, for I had been in that same semiconfused state from the moment I struck my head, or, should I say, my head was struck for me.
We all stared at Adele. Just above her heart, tattooed on the bare skin of her left breast, were two crossed baseball bats.
“Bad odds about your fella,” the old man said. “A tough break, but at least you didn’t wait your whole life like our friend Dolly.”
With the heel of her hand, Adele rubbed the tip of her nose to fight back the impulse to cry. “No, I didn’t wait. But I never forgot him, brash as he was, and the way he made me feel, and I never forgave him for it either. And what makes you think I wanted Charlie Wells, always on the wrong end of the bargain? Why did you go and have to lose your temper and challenge those men with the bats?”