His daughter turned the chair around to face me and bundled him back into it. “Daddy, I’ll get Adelaide to bring you and your guest something to drink, but I have to get back to the papers in your den. I’ve left all the photographs you were interested in on the table here, and Adelaide will find me if you need anything else.”
“It’s a pity my daughter didn’t want to go into baseball,” Villard said. “She’s such a brilliant organizer, she’d have whipped the Cubs into a World Series or two by now.”
His daughter kissed his cheek. “Daddy, it’s enough I take flak for wearing my Cubs gear in Diamondback country. Anyway, someone has to stay on top of getting you packed and moved.” She looked at me. “I live in Tucson and I can’t stay away too long; I’m the associate dean of the nursing school down there. My sister’s flying in from Seattle next week to finish up.”
She was off, her jeans making a rustling sound that conjured an old-fashioned starched white uniform. A few minutes later another woman came in—Adelaide, who was Mr. Villard’s attendant, not, as I’d supposed, another daughter. She was as unhurried in her movements as the daughter had been brisk, but she managed to make Mr. Villard comfortable without taking anything from his dignity.
Besides his diabetes, Villard’s fingers were swollen and distorted by arthritis. Adelaide brought over a table that fitted onto the front of the easy chair and opened the box of photos for him. I pulled up a chair next to him and helped him start turning over pictures.
They were all taken either at Wrigley Field, or were candid shots at players’ homes or on trips to away games.
“My girl found these in the attic yesterday. I don’t really want to leave this house, so I’m having trouble concentrating on the job. My wife and I, we lived here together for forty-seven years. We raised our family here. We used to have magnificent Christmas parties—you can see here—this was the year before she died—it was so sudden, cancer of the pancreas, it came like a grand piano crashing down from the sky onto our heads—this was her last healthy year and she was in magnificent form.”
I admired the pictures of his wife, a handsome woman in her older age, who was laughing joyously with Andre Dawson and another man—a neighbor, Villard said.
Adelaide brought ginger tea for me, gin and tonic for Villard. We went through Christmas photos, and grandchildren photos, and finally came to the spring day that Boom-Boom and Frank had gone to Wrigley Field. The pictures I’d seen at the ballpark had all been with the would-be prospects, either in the dugout or on the field, but these were more candid shots, some in the stands or the locker room. Boom-Boom was in many of them.
The official photos in the dugout had been in color, but this set was in black-and-white. It wasn’t my cousin’s face that made me stop and carry one to the window for more light, but the young woman in the frame. Annie Guzzo, in jeans and a man’s white shirt, grinning up at Boom-Boom from the bottom row of the bleachers, a look that dared him to chase her.
I had forgotten what she looked like, and anyway, I’d never seen her like this, face alive with high spirits, with sexuality. I’d never seen her with my cousin, either, not like this, I mean. Maybe Boom-Boom had been in love with her. Maybe she’d been in love with him.
She’d been seventeen the day they were at the park together. Seven months later she would be dead. I wanted to be able to go inside that picture, that day, and warn her—stop, don’t look so carefree, your mother (your sister-in-law?) is about to murder you.
Villard saw my face. “That young lady—she’s someone you know?”
My mouth twisted involuntarily. “Her older brother was one of the guys who came to try out that day. I didn’t realize she’d been there, too—no one ever mentioned it to me. She’s been dead a long time; it’s wrenching to see her looking so vital. She wasn’t in the dugout shots.”
“No,” Villard said. “Family weren’t allowed in the dugout or on the field. She’d have been watching from the stands. The photographer took a liking to her, or maybe he was a fan of your cousin, because he seemed to follow the two of them around the park.”
There were nine shots that included Annie and three more of Boom-Boom alone, two seen from behind in what looked like a narrow passageway. Villard picked these up, shaking his head over them in puzzlement.
“I don’t know why I never noticed these before. Maybe because that was the spring my wife . . . I thought I was so tough, unbeatable, coming in to work every day, but I couldn’t pay attention to much of anything, I see now.