Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  “To my daughter, Olivia, and my attorney Casper Gaines, and everyone else this concerns: You’re right about me; I can be a bit of a bastard most of the time. But I’m also a cranky old man who hasn’t quite been prepared to meet his maker. I have a feeling that Saint Peter will send me south instead. ‘When was the last time you saw your daughter?’ he’ll ask me. I’ve lived a long one, but life is still too short, Olivia. Time sneaks up on you, and you’ve got liver spots on your hands, and hair on your ears when you still see yourself as wet behind them. I blew my chance to make it up to you because I was a stubborn shit, and have no one else to blame for my lousy behavior but myself. And I’ve got a granddaughter somewhere out there whom I’ll never know because of it. The reasons for the separation between you and I and you and she may be different ones, but the results are the same. Our family circle has been fractured, and I am responsible for it. If I had accepted you twenty-one years ago, Olivia, when you were pregnant out of wedlock, perhaps you would not have chosen the same path and severed the ties to your own child. I broke the circle, but you can close it by finding your daughter. Love her, listen to her, and most of all, try to understand her, even if—and especially if—you disagree about something. Do that and the Bronx Cheers are yours. And may you derive as much joy from them as I have. August deMarley.”

  Judge Randazzo refolded the letter and placed it in the envelope. “Well, Mr. Gaines, the court congratulates you on your prescience. Shall we proceed?”

  No one could have been as relieved as I to learn that the whole damn thing was an anticlimax.

  But had that dream been sufficiently achieved? Mr. Weinstock was hell bent on proving to the court that it hadn’t.

  I was called to the stand as the first witness. Sure enough, Sherman Weinstock actually asked me what Sophie’s favorite flavor of ice cream was.

  “That’s a trick question, sir,” I replied. “My daughter’s a vegan. She doesn’t eat anything containing dairy products.” There was laughter from the Ashes, and the judge cautioned them—and the rest of the people present—not to react to the testimony or they’d be asked to leave the courtroom.

  “What would you say you have learned the most about your daughter?” Cap Gaines asked me on redirect.

  “That she’s as stubborn as I am,” I said. “And that’s a compliment. “She may not know what she wants from one minute to the next sometimes, but whichever way she’s swinging, she’s one hundred percent committed to it.”

  Right after the words came out of my mouth, I second-guessed myself and regretted having said them.

  When Sophie took the stand, she referred to all the points of synchronicity she’d discovered. “I read this book about birth mothers and the children they give up for adoption. And like, sometimes, it turns out that they’re so much like their birth mothers even though they were raised from the get-go by someone else.”

  “Can you give us an example?” Cap Gaines asked.

  “Oh, yeah, sure, dude. Like the first time Livy met my parents—Joy and Glenn—she tossed salt over her shoulder before she took the first bite of her omelet. Now, I’ve been doing that all my life and I never got that from the Ashes. In fact they always used to get mad at me for spilling salt all over the rug. Well, not mad-mad at me—but you know what I mean.”

  “Objection!” exclaimed Sherman Weinstock.

  “Overruled.”

  “Anything else?” asked Mr. Gaines. “Any other points of synchronicity, as they’re called?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sophie replied. “We both are midnight cereal munchers.”

  Gaines nodded approvingly. “Would you clarify for the court what you mean by that, Ms. Ashe?”

  Sophie did, to which Mr. Weinstock naturally raised another objection.

  “Overruled.” Judge Randazzo seemed amused.

  “See! Livy and I were like bonded to each other always! We even both really need to take a nap at around three o’clock every day.”

  “Objection!” thundered Sherman Weinstock, jumping out of his seat. “You can’t inherit a nap!”

  Bottom of the Fourth

  Dusty Fredericks sounded tired and worn, which annoyed Linda deMarley because she expected people to give her their undivided attention when she phoned them. “It’s not a good time for me, Mrs. M,” he sighed, finally getting a word in edgewise. What was it she and Marty were asking him to do? Spy on Olivia and her kid so he could testify against them in court, opening the door for her idiot husband to gain the controlling interest in the team he’d devoted half his life to managing? He thought about telling her that if she wanted to play cloak-and-dagger games with Secret Decoder rings, she was on her own, but he lacked the stomach for sarcasm at the moment.

  “I said it wasn’t a good time for me, Linda.” He paused, not for dramatic effect, but because he was choking on his tears. “I buried Rosa this morning.”

  Linda hung up the phone in slow motion. So much for her plan B. She tossed back her head with an “after all, tomorrow is another day” defiance and called into the bedroom, where her husband was watching some moronic television program on extreme bass fishing. She knew they never should have bought that Direct TV package. “Marty!” she practically shouted, “Is your winter suit pressed?”

  I never knew Rosa Fredericks, but I thought it was the right thing to do to attend her memorial, since she was a member of the Cheers’ extended family. And I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to send a mass card, since Dusty’s religion was baseball, but I took a chance and mailed one anyway. The funeral itself had been a very private affair. “I don’t want nothing fancy-shmancy when I check out,” Rosa had told Dusty when she’d first learned her lymphatic system had essentially processed a summons from the Pearly Gates. And so Rosa Fredericks had been formally mourned at Our Lady of Mercy by an audience of one.

  The more public gathering wasn’t much of a memorial; it was more like the Jews do when they sit shivah; everyone came over to Dusty’s house on City Island and ate cold cuts, except, as Rosa was a Roman Catholic, the mirrors weren’t covered and no one sat on wooden crates.

  His home smelled vaguely antiseptic. “Rosa wanted to spend her birthday with me, instead of at the hospice. She knew it was going to be her last.” Dusty couldn’t look anyone in the eye as he spoke about Rosa. I had a feeling it was his way of preventing himself from breaking down again in front of company. “They…uh…scrubbed the place the morning after she passed. Fifty-two years she was on this earth. And I’m blessed to have known her for twenty-six of them.”

  Barry Weed nodded into his glass of scotch. “She was a saint,” he said, as though concurring with a sentence Dusty never spoke.

  “Jeez, is this Cookie delFlorio’s hundredth home-run ball?” Marty asked, running his fingers over a glass dome.

  “Give it a rest, Marty,” Linda muttered under her breath. “You’d think it was the effing Shroud of Turin! And you’re at a memorial for God sakes.” She grabbed hold of his black serge sleeve and drew him closer with a sharp tug. “Show some respect. I know you thought Rosa was a stick-in-the mud because she hated to travel with the team, but at least act like you’re in mourning. Everybody loved the woman. And everybody loves Dusty. Sooo,…if you want to get anywhere…” she added between her teeth, dropping a not-so-veiled hint to her husband, “you’d better act sadder than Va-Va-Venus, and she didn’t even know Rosa Fredericks. Haven’t you ever heard of King Lear?” she whispered.

  “Didn’t he pitch for the 1997 Mud Hens?”

  Linda snorted in disgust. Marty winked at his wife. “Snap!”

  “You’re such a child, Marty.”

  There’s nothing wrong with my hearing; I caught Linda’s every hissed syllable, though I was halfway across the room admiring some hand-painted glassware. It stymied me how they stayed married. If I’d been either of them, I’d have killed the other one years ago.

  “You like that, huh?” Dusty was suddenly at my side. I felt badly that I kind of towered over him
in my heels. He was probably about five-eight, and his husky build made him appear somewhat shorter.

  I nodded. “They’re very unusual. Very delicate. Where’d you get them?”

  “Oh, Livy, bless your heart for making me laugh today! Get them? I made them!”

  “You—”

  “Yeah, me.” His face crinkled into a smile. “And don’t act so surprised that a middle-aged geezer like me paints pretty little birds on water tumblers.” His smile evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared, and his gray-blue eyes once again began to mist over. “Rosa. It was my Rosita. She got me into it. She was a birder from way back. Used to get me up at the crack of dawn to go bird-watching with her. And by and by, I kinda got to like it. So one day she’s got some catalog in front of her and it’s got something kinda like you see here. And she says to me, “Dusty, what do you think of these? I think I’m gonna order a set for the kitchen.’

  “‘You like ’em that much?’” I asked her. ‘Yeah,” she says, “I like ’em that much.’

  “‘How much they want for ’em?’ So she looks back at the catalog and she tells me they want $39.99 for a set of four. And that was back in the seventies. So I tell her, ‘I’ll go down to the hardware store, buy as many tumblers as you like for forty-nine cents apiece. And I’ll paint whatever birds you like on ’em.’ She thought I was kidding. But the truth is, I never paid much attention in school. I was a doodler. And I guess I got some artistic talent in this old noggin somewheres. You show me most things, I can draw ’em pretty good.”

  “I’m impressed.” I smiled. “My Sophie’s like that. She showed me her portfolio from the art classes she took at Clarendon. Perfect—to my eye, anyway—imitations of some of the great masters: Cézanne, Picasso, Manet, Vermeer. I told her she could be an art forger if she never breaks into sports broadcasting.”

  Dusty shook his head. “I dunno what the market’s like for women these days.”

  “Yeah. I hope she doesn’t get her heart broken,” I sighed. “You see a few on the field now and again, but you still don’t see too many women in the commentators’ booth.”

  “I was talking about art forgery!” Dusty gave me a friendly little poke in the ribs. “Aww, you gotta get used to my sense of humor, kiddo.”

  Kiddo? He couldn’t have been more than a dozen years my senior. I gently touched his arm. “I plan to. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, soon.”

  He steered me into the kitchen, out of earshot. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Livy, but it’s a good thing Rosa’s dead. Cuz I don’t think she would have liked you.”

  “That wasn’t terribly reassuring—or flattering!” I said, appalled.

  “Nah,” he replied. “Take it as a compliment.”

  Boy, I wondered what their marriage was really like! Dusty wiped his eyes again, trying to hide his tears from me. “Don’t get me wrong. I miss the gal. There’ll never be another one like her. But I didn’t walk through life with blinders on, like the colt I put ten bucks on last Wednesday in the third at Aqueduct. Rosa could be a pain in the patoot.”

  “Everybody can be,” I said reassuringly. “Doesn’t mean you love them any less.” I thought about my dad and added, “Most of the time it doesn’t mean anything, anyway.”

  Dusty cocked his head like an old terrier. “Venus,…come take a walk with me. I can call you Venus, can’t I?”

  “My best friends do,” I smiled. “Then again, so do a lot of people who seem to hate my guts.”

  The back door to his kitchen slapped shut, a metal screen against an old wooden door frame. We stood for a moment on the little cement stoop. A damp March wind blew off the Long Island Sound, bringing with it the unmistakable odors of sea air—salt and brine—an organic smell you could almost taste in the back of your throat.

  “A lotta people don’t know what to make of you,” Dusty said, ambling down the steps.

  “Do you have arthritis?” I asked him solicitously. He seemed to be favoring his right hip.

  “Naw. Slid into second one afternoon against the Durham Bulls back in seventy-four. I went in wrong and ended up on my side. Only thing was I didn’t have a map to tell me about the rock that was embedded in the base path about a foot from the bag. But…,” Dusty winced, “I figure I’ve lived with it for thirty-four years, God or whoever willing, I can live with it for another thirty-four. You ever get hip trouble?”

  “Nope. In my profession you gyrate so much you keep the axles pretty well greased.” I winked at him, and he chuckled.

  “Well don’t ever get it. Hip trouble, I mean. And while you’re at it, don’t ever get old, neither.”

  “By my math, you’re only fifty-three. Old to be playing a little boy’s game, maybe, but not ‘old’ in real life.”

  Dusty sighed. “They say coaches and managers are people who never wanted to grow up once they hadda give it up. I mean whatever sport they’re coaching and managing. I mean, what must it look like to some people—a grown guy with gray hair and a beer gut wearing a little league uniform, basically. A Halloween costume. Only way people take you seriously is when you win. Otherwise, you’re just a big fat gray-haired joke.”

  “And the Cheers haven’t had a winning season since 2001. And even then, they didn’t make the playoffs.”

  “I get what you’re saying,” Dusty said. “Follow me.” We’d been walking along the sidewalk behind his house; now we ducked through a hole in some metal fencing that opened on to the back of a boatyard. “You like boats?”

  I shrugged. “They’re okay.”

  “How can you not like boats?” Dusty was incredulous. “Rosa hated boats,” he added ruefully. “Called ’em stinkpots. And she was always threatening to throw up over the side whenever I brought her onboard.”

  “I don’t dislike them. And I don’t throw up. Even after too much tequila.”

  We stopped in front of a red and white outboard; it had been shrink-wrapped for dry-dock storage. Dusty began to peel back some of the plastic, then pointed to a cinderblock resting by the port side of the stern. “Hop in.” Dressed in mourning and high heels, I hoisted my sheath dress high enough to enable me to swing my leg over the side and climb aboard. “I do my best thinking in here,” Dusty said.

  “What’s its name?” I asked him.

  “Her name. A boat is always a she. Don’t ask me why. It probably has to do with something sexist from a hundred centuries ago, so don’t blame me. Anyways, her name is RosAmor. You know, for Rosa and love in Spanish.” Dusty’s eyes misted over once again. “So now I don’t have Rosa no more, but I’ll always have RosAmor. Until she sinks, anyways, or until I get canned from the Cheers, which I suppose could happen as early as the end of the year, if we don’t get back in the plus column. Which brings me to another thing,” he said, lighting up a cigar and leaning back to look up at the gray sky, “Who are you, Venus deMarley? What are you? And why the hell should we consider listening to you in the coming season—assuming in the next two months you and Sophie ‘close the circle’ as far as the judge is concerned?”

  “Because I’ll be your boss, that’s why,” I replied smoothly.

  “But, with all due respect, you don’t know shit about baseball.”

  “And with all due respect right back at you, you veteran experts—yourself, Barry Weed, Peter Argent and Dick Fernando, and my dear departed Daddy—haven’t had a winning season in—remind me again—seven years, I believe it is. So, if you don’t listen to me, not only will you be insulting the major shareholder of the team—never a very good idea—but you’ll no doubt repeat all the same mistakes you’ve been making since ’01. And one thing I learned a hundred years ago in my sophomore stats class is that if you keep doing the same thing over and over, in exactly the same way, odds are—you’ll get the same result!” I grinned at him.

  Dusty shook his head. He wasn’t buying. I batted the air with my hand to chase away the wispy ribbons of brown-blue cigar smoke.

  “As far as the guys go, I�
�ll give it to you straight; they’re not too crazy about the idea of you owning the team.”

  I laughed. “Gee. Ya think?” I chuckled. “Amazing how it took two lawsuits for me to get the hint.”

  “Yeah. I think. In fact I know. Even if the judge rules in your favor, they want you to prove yourself before they’ll respect you.”

  “Nice. And how am I expected to prove myself if they won’t let me prove myself?”

  Dusty exhaled another stinky puff of smoke. “You’re starting to sound like Yogi.”

  I could have teased him further, and made him believe I thought he was talking about some swami guru instead of Yogi Berra, but I bit my tongue. After all, the guy just lost his wife. I couldn’t rag on him too much, except to try to lift his spirits. “So, you brought me out here to tell me I’m going to have a tough row to hoe with the Cheers.” I gazed at him. “And yet I can’t tell whose side you’re on exactly. Not yet, anyway. Why’d you do it? Warn me, I mean.” Dusty swatted away some of his own smoke. “That stuff’ll kill you, you know,” I told him.

  “Why did I ‘warn’ you? Because, unlike Weed and Argent and Fernando, I don’t entirely dislike you. On the other hand, I know you can’t possibly do my job, so you’re not exactly a threat to the old profession, here.” He cracked a wan smile. “Uh-course you could always can my ass halfway through the season if the kids aren’t up to snuff this year…but I’m hoping you’ll remember this conversation and cut me a little slack if things are hairy.”

  “I can’t make any promises, you know.” I rested my hand gently on Dusty’s shoulder. “Business is business. On my watch no one will be safe at home unless the Cheers are kicking ass.” Dusty looked grim. “Hey, you fired a warning shot over my bow, I’m sending a salvo right back atcha,” I said, co-opting his cadences.

  His cigar had gone out. He pulled the metal tube from his jacket pocket and stashed the stogie. As we walked back toward the house I felt like we were moving in slow motion.