The Might Have Been

CHAPTER Twenty-three





For a dozen years, Julie sent him photographs of the boy, which was the only way he had of thinking about him—“the boy”—since there was never a note, nothing about what his name was. Edward, after him? A name from her father, uncle, a pop star crush: Bobby, Davey, Paul? So he remained “the boy.” The boy in someone’s arms, wearing a white christening gown with a blue cross embroidered at the neck, squeezing his eyes closed against the sun, one plump fist raised as if someone had startled him from a sleep he very much did not want to leave. The boy, still an infant, in a yellow sleeper, wearing a red-and-green felt elf cap topped with a small bell, held up by someone before a Christmas tree, torn wrapping paper scattered in the background. The boy in a high chair, his face, slightly blurred, averted from the camera, as if something had distracted his attention just at the moment the shutter clicked. The boy asleep in a dim room on a wide bed covered by coats. The boy, naked except for a diaper, squatting in the arc of a lawn sprinkler. The boy at five or six, holding a lunch box, his hair slicked back, wearing a beige windbreaker, slouching on the porch of a house. The boy at seven, in a white jacket and black slacks, on the step of an altar in a church. The boy in a suit at a table in a white-linen restaurant, raising a glass aloft as if in a toast. The boy on the banks of a river, green swim trunks exposing skinny legs and a thin torso, reaching back to throw a stone into a lake. The boy at a kitchen table, schoolbooks before him, chewing on the eraser of a pencil, looking intently at a worksheet. The boy, seated on a bicycle, his back to the camera, head turned toward it, his right foot on a pedal, his left on the ground, as if he was about to push off, ride away.

That was the last picture he received. Until then, they came at the rate of two or three a year after the first, the Polaroid of the infant in the hospital nursery, all addressed to him in care of whatever minor league team he was with: Erie, Peoria, Raleigh, Topeka, Little Rock, Cedar Rapids, Medicine Hat, Carbondale, Sioux City, Providence, Omaha, Cumberland. Each came like the first, folded into a blank sheet of paper, in an envelope with no return address. Most carried a Chicago postmark but two were from Bloomington, Indiana, and one from St. Louis.

For a long while he looked for them, Julie and the boy without a name. In ballparks in Decatur, Springfield, Iowa City, Rockford, Peoria, he would study the crowd, looking for young women cradling infants. In Peoria, he was certain he’d found them, sitting five rows behind the visitors’ dugout, a redheaded woman in a denim jumper alone with a baby. He spotted them in the third inning as he trotted in from left field, the woman balancing the infant on her lap, holding on to its hands as it stood on her legs, bouncing up and down in an excited fashion. As he crossed the first base line, she seemed to wave. He felt a lurch in his chest and raised his hand to wave back but she seemed not to notice and was, instead, looking beyond him. When he turned around, he saw the Peoria shortstop waving back at her: his wife, his child.

Another time, in Duluth, as he sat on the bus, leaving town after a Sunday afternoon game, they stopped at a traffic signal beside a Dairy Queen. Through the plate-glass window, he was certain he saw her in one of the booths, spooning ice cream into the mouth of a child in a high chair. As the bus idled there, the woman turned to the window and squinted out into the day as the light changed and the bus pulled away. When they arrived at their next town, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he called directory assistance for Duluth, asked for listings under her last name but there were none.

He developed a ritual: whenever they arrived in a new town, he would take the white pages from his room, carry it to a phone booth and call everyone sharing Julie’s last name, thinking: I may not find her, but certainly a cousin, an aunt, an uncle. He tried to remember if she had siblings. Her name was not common and, as it was in Duluth, often there were no listings, but occasionally there were. Once, in Racine, he thought he’d found her. It was during a bad stretch for him, a handful of hits in he-didn’t-want-to-think-how-many at-bats. Two days before, his manager—Mike Norman, then—had called him into his office for what he thought was going to be yet another death sentence in yet another organization but it wasn’t; he was in a professional coma, on life support: Norman was sitting him down for a few games—he’d been pressing, was too conscious of everything when he was at the plate; had his hands always been an inch from the knob of the bat or was it three-quarters? No matter where he put his feet, his stance felt off balance. It all distracted him, slowing his swing a few-hundredths of a second; even on curves that didn’t break and which he should have driven hard, he was popping meekly to the second baseman.

He had begun to think that his looking for a woman and a baby he’d never find would mean the end to his career; he vowed to give it up. She knew where he was; she kept sending him the photographs. If she wanted to see him again, she could. But, in the room, the phone book was already sitting on the desk and he flipped it open and found a listing there: “Aylesworth,” initial “J,” and thought, all right, once more, and called it. A woman answered. There was considerable noise where she was, music and voices, as if a party was going on, and the thought struck him that he could not remember when, exactly, his son had been born, and so, maybe in some grand coincidence, he had called on his birthday, when Julie and her family were celebrating.

“I’m looking for Julie Aylesworth,” he said.

“This is her,” she said, and his stomach tightened.

“This is Ed—” he began, and she interrupted him.

“Ed? We’ve been waiting for you.”

“Ed!” several voices in the background exclaimed. “Finally!”

“Are you coming?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know where you are,” he said, his heart racing. He saw himself calling a cab, giving the driver Julie’s address, being dropped at the curb, the door opening, a swarm of people, his son standing there in a paper birthday hat.

“Oh, God,” the woman said. “Are you drunk?” Then she said to someone where she was, “He’s so drunk, he doesn’t remember his way.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not drunk. I—” But where the woman was, a doorbell chimed and the woman said, “Ed! How can you be here and on the phone?”

“I think there’s a mistake,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I was looking for another Julie.”

“Who’s Julie?” the woman said. “This is Judy. Ju-dee.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but she had hung up.

At one point, he realized that the boy would no longer be a boy but a young man. This was when he was in Montana, a bad year, a year out of baseball after the Angels organization fired him the January following his one season managing their low-A team at Missoula, too late for him to find work with another franchise. He was seeing a woman who was a photographer for the Missoulian, Melissa Hun-gate, the widow of a firefighter who had gotten trapped in a paper mill fire, and when Edward Everett lost his job, he took it as a sign that he should settle down and they went to Las Vegas over a weekend and married. “Second time’s a charm,” she exclaimed optimistically when he suggested it. He took a job delivering the newspaper, up at two-thirty in the morning, hurling papers out of the window of a four-wheel-drive Jeep in the dark before dawn. After his route, he and Melissa met for coffee and eggs in a diner called “Le Café” and once while he sat waiting for her, watching the snow fall outside the window, thinking it was most likely time to get out the tire chains, a kid came in—eighteen, maybe nineteen—wearing insulated coveralls and an orange hunter’s vest. He sat at the counter and something about him caught Edward Everett’s attention: the way he slung his left leg over the stool as he sat, akin to the way Edward Everett imagined one mounted a horse; he remembered his own father had done that when he used to take Edward Everett to Tucker’s for pie after football practices when Edward Everett was a boy. He watched, a prickle raising the hair on his arms, as the kid set a stainless steel thermos onto the counter, unscrewed the cap and slid it across toward the teenaged waitress so she could fill it with coffee. When she returned it to him, the kid leaned toward her. The notion came to Edward Everett: This is my son, and he realized he was holding his breath, thinking, What do I say? The door to the outside opened, the bell above it jingling, and a middle-aged man, wearing identical insulated coveralls and an orange hunter’s vest, paused at the threshold to stomp the snow off his boots. “The deer ain’t waiting, son,” he said in a jovial manner, and the kid and waitress exchanged a brief kiss and then he was gone.

Then, after four months of being married, Melissa came to him to say it had been a mistake and besides she had discovered she was in love with her late husband’s brother. “His spirit is in there,” she had said wistfully when she left, and Edward Everett went back to baseball, managing in independent ball in Limon, Colorado, the lowest rung on the ladder, but back in baseball, nonetheless, and again he thought he’d found the boy: an outfielder from Illinois who was fast, fast, fast, the only thing keeping him out of organized ball a lack of discipline at the plate, but it was a lack of discipline that came from a fire that reminded Edward Everett of his own that year in Springfield before the Cardinals called him up. For half the season, Edward Everett worked with him so closely that the other players called him “teacher’s pet,” sitting beside him on the bench and explaining the nuances of the game: when to play shallow and when to play deep; the counts and situations when a pitcher was more likely to throw a breaking ball and the times when Edward Everett could nearly guarantee he’d see a fastball; how to determine what sort of pitch was coming in by the direction the seams spun.

It helped—the Giants picked him up in early July, assigning him to their single-A team in Tucson—but then his parents came to Colorado to help move him to Arizona and Edward Everett saw that the player was the spitting image of the man he introduced to Edward Everett as his father, had the same way of ducking his head when he made a joke and waited for a laugh. The father was effusive when he met Edward Everett, shaking his hand enthusiastically. “I can’t say enough about what you did for my boy,” he said, his voice nearly identical to his son’s, slightly high-pitched. “We’ll remember you for this.”

What were the chances the boy in the Polaroids would end up in professional ball anyway? Fifty-million-to-one? Yet, for years, he often felt the same prickle he’d felt in the café in Missoula—a shortstop at Quincy, an opposing pitcher when he was managing at Rockford, another outfielder when he was in Lansing. None were his son, of course, and then he was in Perabo City, moving through his fifties while the baby, toddler, boy in the Polaroid snapshots would be moving on through his twenties into his thirties—too old to be playing ball at the level Edward Everett managed—and he stopped looking for him.