The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Ten





His uncle began letting him take the lead on some sales calls, although he botched many at first. While his uncle knew unit prices and shipping lead times, Edward Everett had to page slowly through tabbed sections of the catalog binder his uncle had given him and calculate quantity breaks by doing math on a scratch pad tucked into the binder. Often, in his haste to quote a price, he made an error and it was only after he had told it to the customer that he would realize he had forgotten to carry a digit from one column to the next or had forgotten that two thousand pounds made a ton, not one thousand. Still, his uncle was patient and explained his awkwardness using baseball references, calling him “Rookie,” joking about giving him a tryout. His income continued to rise. By March, his check was for nearly fifteen hundred dollars.

They went to a men’s clothing store in Braverton, where his uncle helped him pick out three suits: a charcoal pinstripe, a navy blue and a tan. A tiny man who may have been in his eighties measured Edward Everett, standing on tiptoe to stretch the tape from shoulder to shoulder. His touch was so delicate and he moved the measuring tape from shoulder to arm and around his neck so quickly, Edward Everett wondered if he was merely making a show of it, but when he picked up the suits they fit him better than anything else he had ever owned. It came to more than five hundred dollars but when he flinched at the bill, his uncle said, “It’s not an expense; it’s an investment.”

He moved out of his mother’s house, renting an apartment upstairs from the weekly paper; every Tuesday morning at three, the roar and vibration of the press shook him from his sleep. He bought a car, a four-year-old Ford Maverick. “Buy American,” his uncle advised. “A lot of these guys fought in the big one and wouldn’t like to see you pull up in a piece of Jap crap.” Despite his car, his uncle still picked him up in the morning because it made little sense for them to drive separately, since they were going to the same bakers and grocers and purchasing agents’ offices.

On the first Monday in April, his uncle brought Edward Everett to his house so he could begin teaching him the bookkeeping part of their work. Edward Everett had never been to his uncle’s house—not this one anyway. When his father was alive, his uncle had lived not far from them, in a modest three-bedroom place on a tree-filled lot. Some years before Edward Everett began working with him, however, he had bought ten acres that had been part of a prosperous dairy farm that once belonged to the district’s congressman, who had to sell it to pay legal bills when he got into trouble for skimming campaign contributions for a D.C. townhouse for his mistress. Edward Everett’s uncle and aunt had built a sprawling ranch house on the property: three bedrooms, three full baths, a large dining room with a vaulted ceiling. His uncle’s office was at the back of the house, where a large picture window looked out onto a pond the congressman had stocked with trout.

It was after seven in the evening and the sun was setting on the other side of a windbreak of maples on the far edge of the pond. Three ducks settled onto the water and paddled lazily. Edward Everett could hear his aunt in the kitchen, making dinner: the creak of the hinges on the broiler as she opened it to turn the steaks they were going to eat, and then the juices of the steaks sizzling. As she worked, she sang a song quietly but still loud enough that Edward Everett could make out that she didn’t know many of the words: “The moment I dada before I dada dadada, I say a little prayer for you.” At his desk, Edward Everett’s uncle leafed through a thick red-and-black ledger, each page a neat line of names and columns of quantities, dollars and dates. His uncle invited him to sit in his leather chair to enter the day’s orders and gave him a fountain pen, a gold-and-tortoise Visconti that weighed more than any pen Edward Everett had ever held. He took his time, as if he had never written a letter or a figure before, making each stroke deliberately, nervous about ruining the precision of the other lines on the page. The totals staggered him: he knew they had been selling what he considered a lot of flour but, adding the figures, he saw that their sales over the two and a half weeks recorded on that page approached fifty thousand dollars.

“Hon, I’m making a Manhattan for myself,” his aunt called from the kitchen. “Can I make one for you and Ed?”

“Sure,” his uncle said, not waiting for Edward Everett to answer.

Edward Everett’s aunt brought the drinks to the office and they sipped them, his aunt and uncle side by side on a leather couch, Edward Everett in a matching upholstered wing chair. His aunt and uncle chatted but Edward Everett didn’t really listen, catching only snatches of their conversation: a banquet at which his uncle was going to receive some sort of award from the diocese for fund-raising, a friend who’d had quadruple bypass surgery and who, three days out of the hospital, was already smoking a pack a day. His aunt, who was heavy with a round face, was not what he would think of as an attractive woman, but it was obvious his uncle loved her by the way he touched one of her plump knees to make a point or when he laughed at a story she told him about a misunderstanding at the butcher’s.

The drink relaxed Edward Everett and he watched the evening soften and darken. He thought, If I stick this out, take over my uncle’s territory when he retires, I could have my own house overlooking a pond, where my own wife would bring me a Manhattan just as I finished recording the evidence of our good fortune.



That month, as his uncle suggested, he began buying stock in the company. Many evenings, he went home to his apartment, showered, changed into Levi’s and a T-shirt, and walked down the block to a diner, stopping at a newspaper box just outside to buy a copy of The Wheeling Intelligencer. He sat in a booth beside the front window and, after ordering, turned first to the stock pages and, running his finger down the column of agate type, found the symbol for the mill, GnFlr, to check the closing price for the day before. It rarely varied more than a quarter point, but was up three of every five days. It gave him satisfaction: partly it was watching his investment growing, but also partly because he had a sense that he was participating in something larger than himself, something he couldn’t understand fully, owning pieces of the American economy. Within two years, he estimated, the value of his stock would reach several thousand dollars, nearly as much as he earned for some seasons in the minor leagues: so much money for doing nothing, checking a box on a form that sat in a file drawer in an office somewhere he’d never been. In five or six years, he could cash it in and buy a house—a small one, yes, but a house nonetheless. It struck him that he had been foolish to give so many of his years to a game that gave so little back, realizing that, only half a year removed from it, he was already thinking of his life in terms of investment and return. If he’d gone to work for his uncle six or seven years ago, he’d have that house now.

As he ate his dinner—generally fried chicken and mashed potatoes but sometimes a chopped steak and fries—he went through the newspaper, reading nearly every page: the national and international news, the local news, the features, the comic strips, but avoiding the sports section. Merely glancing at an article about baseball was something painful, even as he thought he’d moved beyond it, like seeing the published engagement announcement of a girl he once dated. It was enough to remind him that, for the first time since he’d been eighteen, he wasn’t part of the baseball machinery in some way. In the past, he had a sense of the game as a giant Rube Goldberg mechanism, with every player, himself included, a cog: a third baseman in Atlanta tears a hamstring trying to beat out a ground ball and goes down for six weeks; the Braves trade with the White Sox for a third baseman and a shortstop from Richmond. In the Sox system, a pitcher and a middle infielder get their release to make room for the players the Sox acquired. And on and on, gears turning, levers pulling, the machinery grinding, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye, hello, good-bye.