A Midsummer Madness

by Guy Franks

  “There’s not much too it. Kind’a boring.”

  “Does it have a bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, and we can have leftover Kung Pao Chicken for breakfast.”

  Dane’s mother was still a beautiful woman. At age forty-eight, her honey blonde hair looked the same as it did when she was in her twenties. She did not color it or touch it up and wore it shoulder length with a natural wave and curl to it. Her striking blue-green eyes were wide-set, and together with her arched eyebrows gave her a slightly sultry look. Lauren Bacall came to mind when you first saw her and like the famous actress she wore her clothes in a style fashion designers would call “studied carelessness.” She was graceful in her manner and had grown comfortable with her good looks (which meant she didn’t mind men looking at her), but she rarely smiled and projected an aura of guardedness as though she wore an invisible shield.

  “Decided yet?” asked her son as they sat looking at their menus.

  “Nearly.”

  Dane was anxious to order and get their food so they could get down to business—the business of talking about his two fathers—but he knew his mom well and knew that no serious talk would begin until she was composed and settled in.

  She set her menu down and on cue the waiter appeared and took their order. When he left, she took a sip of her white wine and regarded her son.

  “How’s Delia doing,” she asked him.

  “Fine.”

  “You two still dating?”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, ‘you guess’? Either you are or you aren’t… Really, Dane. You need to treat her better. She’s a wonderful girl, but if you don’t think so then you must break it off and stop stringing her along. You can’t wonder if she’s your girlfriend while you keep having sex with her. I mean, really.”

  Dane shrugged his shoulders. His mom had a way of succinctly putting things, and the fact that she talked about his sex life didn’t surprise him. They were forthright and at times blunt with each other, and bringing up his sex life was as normal to him as if she had brought up his height and weight. Theirs was a close relationship.

  “I don’t want to talk about Delia,” he said flatly.

  She nodded once and looked around the restaurant. “Chili Leonard. Who would have thought?” she said almost to herself. “It was great to meet him. He seems like a great guy. Not stuck up like some professional athletes. And Hank Prince. He seems like a nice kid. But I’m a little worried about him. Do you hang out with him at all? I’m not sure he takes the game seriously. Like you do. He seems to be going in the wrong direction. Maybe Chili will talk some sense into him.”

  “Maybe,” he said quickly after she paused between sentences. She was meandering, he thought to himself. It’s what she did when she didn’t want to talk about something unpleasant to her.

  “I was very proud when you got named to the All-Star team.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “But you deserve it. You work hard and take the game serious. Of course, you take everything serious.”

  The waiter brought their appetizer—a plate of spring rolls with sweet and sour dipping sauce—and Dane watched her pick up a roll and dip it. They’d been sitting here long enough, he told himself, and now it was time.

  “Who’s my real father?”

  She chewed her bite of spring roll and set the other half down on her plate. After she swallowed, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I will start at the beginning,” she said calmly, opening her eyes. “And listen to me without interrupting or judging me. Let me tell it all before judging me.” And here she quoted Paulina from Winter’s Tale:

  It is an heretic that makes the fire,

  Not she which burns in’t.

  Dane did not answer her and simply sat back and waited.

  “I met your real father in college and fell deeply in love with him. We were going to get married and we talked about getting married and having a family almost every day. I was so sure—so sure that we were going to get married that I got careless with my birth control. But I’m getting ahead of myself… We were in love as deeply as two people can be in love. At least I thought so, and I still think so. He was—is—the love of my life. I was ready to give up my Masters Program, get married and follow him on the road into the minors. He just got drafted. You see? Your real dad was a professional baseball player. Isn’t that funny? And when I tell you his name you’ll…

  “A baseball player?”

  “Yes, and I was all set to move to Fresno or Springfield or Timbuktu, it didn’t matter. Just as long as we were together. But it was all a dream, ‘Too flattering sweet to be substantial’. He had a friend, his best buddy, who used to hang out with us all the time and I thought the right thing to do was to do the same—treat him like my best buddy. So I did. I held hands with him and joked with him and treated him just like a close friend, but it back-fired. It went terribly wrong. Your dad thought we were cheating on him and he went crazy. Crazy with jealousy. He said horrible things to me, called me a whore, and broke it off…

  She stopped abruptly and waited as more dishes were set down on the table. After the waiter left she got ready to resume but Dane interrupted her.

  “He must have found out the truth sooner or later. Didn’t he try to apologize?”

  “No… I don’t know. It was too late by then. He said things you can’t take back—at least I thought so then. I moved back home with my parents and transferred my Master’s Program to Cornell and moved to Ithaca. That’s where I met Brian.”

  “But you were pregnant by then.”

  “When I moved home I was but I didn’t know it yet. When I got to Cornell I knew it but I wasn’t going to turn around. Call it what you will—anger, stubbornness—I wasn’t going to turn around. Then I met Brian and he didn’t care that I was pregnant with another man’s child. He wanted to marry me and raise you as his own. Just remember this was the early sixties. A woman didn’t just have a child out of wedlock and not pay for it in some way—with her parents, with her career. So Brian was a godsend and the whole thing became easy…”

  His mom paused here and fingered the small golden crucifix that hung around her neck. She always did that when she felt sad or guilty about something and it reminded him once again how much religion played a part in her life. They were not particularly religious when he was growing up, and certainly not church-goers, but a few years after his father’s suicide she rediscovered her Catholic upbringing and embraced the Church. She asked him early on in her re-awakening (as he called it) whether he wanted to go to church with her. He was fifteen and said no and she never asked him again but now, at this instance, he was reminded once more how much her faith colored her picture of the world.

  “Maybe not the right thing,” she added sadly, “but the easy thing.”

  “But you didn’t love him.”

  “I did… In my own way,” she replied in a way that bared her soul to him. “It was just not the way he wanted me to love him.”

  He was going to ask her “Is that why he killed himself?” but he didn’t. He already knew the answer to that and to make her say it would only be cruel. There was really only one thing more he wanted to know.

  “So who’s my real father? The pro ball-player? He’s retired by now, right?

  “No.”

  “He’s still playing? How can that be?”

  “He’s a manager.”

  “What’s his name?”

  With a breath she revealed her lover, and sighed the name of Shakespeare Glover.

  21

  CHAPTER

  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

  You cataracts and hurricanoes

  King Lear

  Sunday was a double-header to make up for an earlier rain-out against the Indians. It was a single ticket
double-header, which meant two-seven inning games, and the Kingsmen had Kid Curry going in the first game and Basset in the second. Shake planned to start Leonard in the first game but sit him out in the second. The double-header gave him a chance to play his reserves—guys itching to get some at bats—and he’d give both Ortiz and Svoboda starts in the outfield in the second game and give Leonard and Burks a rest. Manning would catch the second game and Deer would go to first. A core of players—Prince, Hamilton, Goff and Hoffman—would start both games.

  The Kingsmen lost the first game 5-2. Leonard hit a homerun and went three for four and Prince stole two bases but it wasn’t enough to overcome fourteen hits by the Indians and two key errors by Hamilton. His first error in the third was on a tailor-made double play ball that went through his legs. As Shake looked out in disbelief, Burton said wryly that “He played every bounce right except for the last one.” In the top of the ninth, with the score still close at 3-2, he misplayed another grounder that cost them two runs.

  Over a long season, everybody had a bad game or two. Mental fatigue, bad luck, even just the law of averages eventually caught up with you to throw you off your game. Normally Shake wouldn’t be too concerned with errors by his star second baseman, but given the fact Hamilton went O for three at the plate and seemed to be acting a bit “out-of-it” caused his concern meter to tick up a bit. More than once he’d caught the young man staring at him. Knowing his history, Shake wondered if Hamilton was once again stewing over world events but he couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary. There was apartheid in South Africa, violence in Northern Ireland, trouble in the Middle East—the same ol’ same—and Shake couldn’t imagine what it could be. Whatever it was, he expected a better effort out of him in the second game.

  During the break between games, Shake went looking for Rex Lyon. He was curious to know why his oldest daughter was lurking about. Before the game he noticed Rae and Ed Cornwall, along with a couple suits, taking a tour of the ballpark. Potential buyers, he wondered. As a shareholder in New Britain Professional Baseball Incorporated he had a right to know. He couldn’t find Rex so he asked Orson who told him the old man was up in the press box. Shake figured he’d see him later so let it go.

  In the second game Basset was lights out. He carved up the strike zone and had a no-hitter going into the eighth that was ruined by a duck snort to short left field. He finished with a one-hit shutout and the Kingsmen won 6-0. It was a quick game, barely two hours, which was a good thing since a surprise summer storm complete with thunder and lightning was closing fast.

  Besides the win, Shake was pleased by two things. First, despite a throwing error in the first, Hamilton shook it off, beared down, and played better including the key hit in the fifth that broke the game open. And second, Prince went four for four, stole three bases, and flashed the leather by making a spectacular running catch in the gap. In the dugout he sat next to Chili Leonard and listened intently as the veteran talked to him about game situation, tendencies and the art of base-stealing. It warmed Shake’s heart to see it.

  After the game, Shake managed by walking around and touching bases with all his players. He congratulated Basset on his one-hitter and told him within earshot of all his teammates that he thought he was “ticketed for a September call-up.” He acted awed by Prince’s running catch and told him that he was sure Hank would “shatter the league’s stolen base record.” Manning “called a helluva game,” Deer was his “human hitting machine,” and Goff played “the hot corner like he was born there.” He stopped next to Hamilton, who was slowly undressing, and put his hand on Dane’s shoulder.

  “A rough start but a strong finish,” said Shake with a smile. The young man looked up at him and stared intensely into his face as though he was confronting a ghost. Shake found it a bit unsettling.

  “Thanks,” he replied, and Shake thought for a moment that the young man wanted to say something more, but he didn’t and instead bent over to unlace his cleats. Shake took that as a cue to move on but he suddenly remembered something.

  “Weren’t you going to bring your mom by to meet me?” he asked.

  “Huh? Oh… yeah,” he said straightening up. “She couldn’t. Maybe another time.”

  “Love to meet her. Let her know.”

  Dane nodded and rubbed his chin while Shake moved on to his next player.

  Shake was in his office finishing up his paperwork when he heard the first distant roll of thunder. By the time he was done the thunder was nearly on top of the stadium. It cracked loudly and the roaring thunder shook the walls of his office. Just then Orson burst into his office wet with rain.

  “Shake!” he cried. “I need your help! It’s Rex!”

  Shake shot out from behind his desk and followed Orson down the hallway and out the door into the parking lot. It was blowing rain and the air felt electric. As they raced across the empty parking lot, the dark violet sky erupted in a flash of white followed immediately by a deep booming thunder. Shit, thought Shake, we’re going to get electrocuted, but he didn’t stop chasing after Orson. They went out a gate into a field that sat between the stadium and the woods. Orson slowed his pace and Shake could see they were approaching two figures—one kneeling and another bending over the other. It was Rex and Speed.

  A lightning bolt struck into the woods and Shake lowered into a crouch as though he were under fire. When he got to Rex he could see that the old man was drenched with rain. Speed was calmly talking in his ear while trying to get him to stand up. Rex was having none of it. He had a maniacal look on his face, and as the thunder roared he roared back at it.

  Rex

  Have at it! Come get me! I’m right here! Don’t waste your bolts on trees, hit me here—right here in the head!

  Speed

  Come one, sir. Please. Rant and rave inside where it’s nice and dry. Where’s there’s no lightning to kill you. Whoa! See? Lightning bolts don’t care who they hit. They’ll fry rich and poor alike.

  Rex

  Let it fry me! Come on, right here! I won’t fault you, do your job! Strike me dead and end the life of a sick and hated old man!

  Shake

  We need to get him out of here.

  Speed

  He won’t get up.

  Shake

  Then we’ll all carry him.

  Rex

  Who’s that there!?

  Speed

  A rich man and a poor man.

  Rex

  Who’s that?!

  Speed

  Shakespeare and Kent.

  Rex

  Shakespeare? Fuck Shakespeare! It’s all his fault! … No, let me go! Let me go!

  Shake

  He’s getting away. Grab his leg!

  Orson

  I can’t. Ouch! He’s got old man strength.

  Shake

  Speed! Goddammit! Hold his arm.

  Speed

  His arm is like the army. It fights back!

  Orson

  We need to get him inside before we all get hit by lightning.

  (A lightning flash))

  Holy Shit!

  Rex

  Show it all! Let me see my enemies. Rae! My own daughter. You’ve killed me! Murderer! You’ve killed me. My own daughter! Rae! You can’t hide from the light! God can see you! … Corey! Where’s my Corey… Corey, Corey, Corey!

  Shake

  You got him? Okay. To my car! Hear me? My car!

  (The three of them carry Rex across the field and place him in the backseat of Shake’s car where they attend to him.)

  Rex

  (To Speed)

  Speed. My boy. I think I’m losing my mind. You’re all wet. Aren’t you cold?

  Speed

  Yes, sir. I’m wet and cold, cold and wet. Can’t have one without the other. Like power and corruption. Can’t ha
ve one without the other.

  Rex

  (weakly)

  Ha…True…

  Orson

  He’s shivering all over. He doesn’t look good. Should we get him inside?

  Shake

  No. Speed, go run and get some towels and blankets.

  (To Orson)

  Here—start my car and crank the heater up.

  (Speed exits)

  Rex? Rex? Do you hear me? Let’s get you warmed up.

  Rex

  Where’s my Corey? Have you seen her?

  Shake

  I’ll call her. I’ll get her here. I promise.

  Rex

  Who… are you? Oh, Glover… My friend… You’ll find Corey? Bring her here?

  Shake

  I will.

  Rex

  Thank you… Shake… Which President threw out the… the first… (he passes out)

  Shake

  (To Orson)

  We need to get to a hospital. You drive. Conn Central, on Grand. You know it?

  Orson

  Got it.

  Shake

  (Cradles Rex in his arms)

  Taft… It was William Howard Taft.

  At the hospital, the ER Doctor came out to look at Rex as they were lifting him up onto the gurney. He felt his pulse, looked into his eyes, and barked at the orderlies to take Rex straight to ICU. Shake and Orson walked into the waiting lobby and Shake found a pay phone. From there he called Corey and told her what happened—told her, too, that her father was calling for her—and he heard the phone drop as she rushed out the door. He also called his coaches and told them to stand by for news. Rick Burton said he was coming down to the hospital. Shake thought about calling the Cornwalls but didn’t.

  Corey showed up ten minutes later and had a million questions that Shake couldn’t answer. She was naturally high-energy, and with the news that her father was in ICU it was like trying to contain a small tornado. She badgered the receptionist, quickly way-laid any nurse that walked through the lobby, and generally rattled everyone’s cage. Shake got her to sit down and tried to calm her. Burton came in, saw them and disappeared, bringing back coffee a few minutes later.