The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  The third batter was left-handed, someone who didn’t hit for much average but had some power, seventeen home runs already, and Edward Everett drifted back slightly. The rain was falling harder; from two hundred feet behind the infielders, he felt separated from them by a liquid silver curtain that shifted in the wind. At the plate, the hitter stepped out, and even from where he was, Edward Everett could tell he was making some remark to the umpire about the lunacy of playing in such weather, but the umpire gestured him to step back in, and he did.

  Because of the wind and the rain and the distance, Edward Everett could see him swing at the one-ball, two-strike pitch, but the sound of the bat striking the ball got swallowed up and came muffled a moment later, and he had no idea how to judge it; he saw a flash of beige arcing toward him and he wondered, Come in or drop back? He hesitated, unable to figure its trajectory, watching it push through the rain—was it climbing or falling, climbing or falling?—and then he picked it up, descending, and he started to run in to catch it, before realizing he had misjudged it. He backpedaled, tripping momentarily over his own feet but keeping his balance, his eye on the ball, until he felt the change in the ground beneath him, grass no more, but clay and cinders, the warning track, and then his back was pressed against the eight-foot-high chain-link fence and he knew if he jumped, he could catch it for what he knew would be the end of the game, five full innings in the books, his cycle safe, not erased by the rain.

  He locked his fingers into the chain link to give himself balance for his leap and then he jumped, reaching for the ball, knowing he had gauged the flight of it impeccably, but then he was twisting, falling away from it, one of his spikes caught in the fence, and he was flailing, still reaching for the ball, although he knew it was beyond him, out of the park, and he was falling to the ground, his cleat still caught in the fence, his right knee twisting in a direction he never thought it could go, and still the fence held him, dangling, his shoulder on the wet track, gravity pulling him against his own body, until the fence finally let him go, and he lay there, pain slicing his knee.

  Then he was two people: the body lying there, pelted with rain and something else, hail the size of peas, and the self saying to the body, All right, get up now, and the body saying No. He was laughing, he realized, the body of him was laughing, and the other self was thinking, You’re in shock, you’re in shock, and the pain rolled in waves up his leg, into his hip, and then rose higher on his body, seeming to swallow him for the briefest of moments. He blacked out.

  Chapter Three

  Years later, he thought of that moment when he was caught in the chain-link fence in another country as a kind of border defining the geography of his life. There was his self on the far side of the line, the major league ballplayer, and his life on the other side, where he was an exile from the country where he wanted to be.

  “You brood about it too much,” his second wife said to him on one of the days when he was more taciturn than usual, a day not long before he came home from a trip and found she’d moved out. “I’m not thinking about what you think I’m thinking about,” he protested, although he was.

  He didn’t want to be one of those men whose lives were all about missed opportunities and regret, men like his father, for example, who stayed in the same high school coaching job for more than twenty years but who was haunted by what he saw as his moment of failure, when Woody Hayes invited him to be one of his assistants when he left high school football to coach a bad Denison University team; his father had turned him down because it was too risky: what if he went to Denison and they failed there? He remembered too well the Depression, his own father sullen and unemployed for three and a half years, his family renting out their house to a family who did have a husband and father with a job, and moving into the basement; his own father sitting in a basement corner staring angrily at the ceiling, grimacing every time the other family made a noise upstairs in what should have been his home, their feet clomping on his floors, their scraping a chair across his dining room. Worse yet were the days on which the family upstairs had a party: the door opening and closing and opening and closing as they admitted their friends; the explosion of laughter or the high chatter of children. Edward Everett’s father remembered that all too well and didn’t want to become his father, an exile in his own home, and so he said no to Woody Hayes. The first year, when Hayes’ team went two and six, it seemed a shrewd decision, but then Hayes became a coaching god at Ohio State. And so Edward Everett’s father did become his own father, unhappy in his life, waking up on a Saturday morning after yet another loss by his own poor high school football team, sitting in the living room, not wanting to tune in the Ohio State game on the radio but doing so, and then turning it off and then on again, thinking about the country that could have been his life, instead of the one that was: the coach of a mediocre high school team. Until he hung himself from a ceiling joist in his office just off the locker room in the high school.

  “It’s not the same,” Edward Everett’s wife told him that day shortly before she left. “It wasn’t as if you walked away from the major leagues.”

  “No, I was carried off the field away from them,” he said, and she shook her head in what he thought was a gesture of mock frustration but which, in the end, was real.

  In the hospital, he had his own room that looked out across the street to a church he later learned was called Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal. From his bed, all he could see was part of its green bronze dome rising above a thick stand of trees and the cross at its apex, but all through Sunday morning he listened to its resonant bell clanging the call to Mass. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer anymore; the idea of getting up early on a Sunday to go to Mass when he was with the team embarrassed him. On his first Sunday when he was in rookie ball, eighteen and full of self-consciousness, he was awakened at dawn by the sound of one of the three teammates who shared his room moving around—the click of his suitcase latch, the huff when he opened it, the clang of his belt hitting the bureau. Edward Everett was lying on the carpet where he’d slept the night before. The room had two double beds, but no one shared them: first two men in the room took the beds, the other two earned the floor. He realized it was Sunday, and thought, I ought to go to Mass. But before he could get up, another of his teammates snapped, “Jesus Christ, Turner, keep it down.” Turner apologized and left; as the door closed, the player who’d complained spat out, “God damn holy roller.” Edward Everett debated for less than a second, thought about the damnable offense it was not to go, and then got off the floor and fell into the bed Turner had left, plumped the pillow, thinking Mattress! and went back to sleep.

  But in the hospital in, he realized, a foreign country, with his right leg in a cast from above the knee to the middle of his shin, he longed for the comfort of the ritual and surprised himself by beginning to weep. It was the injury, he knew, as well as the effect of the painkillers and the fact that, despite the drugs, he’d slept not at all. At the same time he realized that he nonetheless felt like a child and told himself to stop what his mother called a “pity party”: Break out the hats and favors, she’d exclaim when he sulked as a boy. Pity party; can I come, too?

  Sunday was the longest day he could remember. Through the window, he could see that the poor weather of the previous two days had passed and the sky was a deep blue. When the nurse had come in with his breakfast at seven o’clock, she’d pulled up the blinds and cranked open the casement window, saying something in French he couldn’t understand but which he took to mean “fresh air.” The breeze that came in was warm and every once in a while a gust pushed into the room, the blinds clanking against the window frame. All he could do was lie there, listening to the sounds of the life outside: the cathedral bell, the traffic, muted singing during one of the Masses and then, when the service was over, the rise and fall of human conversation from the street, the occasional shriek of a child.

  Around noon, a nurse came in with his lunch on a tray, a different nurse t
his time, a slip of a girl, sixteen or seventeen. Maybe she wasn’t even a nurse, but a Canadian version of a candy striper. Setting the tray on his bedside cart and removing the plastic cover, she gave him a shy smile. Thinking noise would mute the evidence of outside life, he asked for the TV remote, but she gave him a look that made him wonder if she spoke English, and so he gestured toward the TV, repeating, “The remote, the remote,” as if she were a pet who would learn commands through repetition. She flushed but gave him the remote, holding it toward him in a way that their hands would not meet even accidentally, and fled the room.

  He turned on the television and clicked through the channels; there were only two that came in with any clarity, one that showed a program that appeared to be about gardening, a white-haired woman standing behind a rosebush, shears in her hand. It was in French, and he could understand none of it. The other program, also in French, had four well-dressed men in a studio, arguing animatedly.

  He turned off the television and, after deciding he didn’t want to eat, pushed the bedside cart away and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t because of the sunlight and the noise pouring in through the open window. He wondered if anyone from the team would come to see him. It was twelve-thirty, half an hour before the game, and so they would all be at Jarry Park, in the clubhouse, changing from their batting practice jerseys into their powder blue road game jerseys, going through their before-the-game rituals, he knew, after living side by side with them for only three weeks, close enough that they were living in one another’s jocks, as the joke went: checking the rawhide knots in the fingers of their gloves, some of them shaving, some taping weak ankles.

  At one point, a priest came to his door and tapped on the frame. He might have been eighty or more, skinny and slightly hunched, almost entirely bald, save for thin wisps of hair over his ears and on the back of his head. He carried a small ragged black zippered leather case and Edward Everett wondered if he was also a doctor.

  “May I enter?” he said in accented English, wheezing slightly. When Edward Everett told him he could, the priest pulled the room’s one armchair up to the bedside, then consulted a piece of paper he unfolded after removing it from his pants pocket. The tips of his index and middle fingers were stained yellow and he reeked of stale tobacco.

  “Monsieur Yates,” he said, glancing up from the paper.

  “Yes,” Edward Everett said.

  “You have indicated Roman Catholic. Do you wish to receive the Eucharist?”

  It had been since early February that he had set foot into a church, still playing the dutiful son when he visited his mother before the season started, but he said yes. The priest nodded and unzipped the case and took out a wrinkled white stole, kissed the cross embroidered near one end of it and draped it around his neck.

  “You are in a state of grace?” the priest asked. From down the hall, a child let out a gleeful laugh, and a woman shushed him. Edward Everett thought of telling the truth, that he wasn’t in a state of grace, but then he might leave and Edward Everett didn’t want to be alone. The priest nodded at his assent, snapped open a small pewter case, extracted a thin host and held it in his hand a moment, inviting Edward Everett to recite the Our Father with him, before extending the host for him to take onto his tongue. The priest groaned slightly from the exertion as he leaned closer to Edward Everett to give him Communion. As he took it on his tongue, he tasted nicotine from the priest’s fingers and considered for a moment the sin he might be committing, but thought, You’re not a boy any longer.

  While the priest sat beside him with his head bowed in a moment of reflection, a nurse came to the door and said, in a grave tone, that she had to close it for a moment, and did. He wondered why she’d had to do that. As if the priest could read his thoughts, the old man said, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact tone, as if he were commenting on the weather, “Someone died. They close the doors because they don’t want the patients to see them removing the departed.” Indeed, in the hall, beyond his closed door, a gurney rattled past, a wheel squeaking. The priest began murmuring something in French in a low voice: a prayer, Edward Everett realized, the Hail Mary, perhaps. When he finished, he looked up at Edward Everett and coughed slightly.

  “They will open it when they are finished,” he said. “How did you …” He nodded toward Edward Everett’s leg that was in a cast.

  “Playing baseball,” Edward Everett said.

  “Ah.” The priest nodded. “For your college?”

  “No, for the Cardinals.”

  “The Cardinals?” the priest said, cocking his head in a quizzical manner.

  “The St. Louis Cardinals.”

  The priest chuckled. “Naturally, I was thinking the College of Cardinals.”

  Naturally, Edward Everett thought.

  “I imagined you performing on a field of play before the Princes of the Church, entertaining them with your athletic skill.”

  The picture came to Edward Everett out of the man’s assumption and his stiff manner of speaking: himself doing leaps and somersaults in the middle of a wide meadow while a cluster of older men in crimson vestments sat in bleachers, applauding politely.

  Then they were in an uncomfortable silence for a while longer, until Edward Everett blurted out, “I lied before.” He hadn’t meant to say it and was surprised as the words welled up in his throat on their own, as if the priest were some sort of magician, finding coins behind Edward Everett’s ears and producing Ping-Pong balls from his mouth, coins and balls and admissions he hadn’t known were there.

  The old priest closed his eyes and nodded. “Would you like to make a confession?”

  Edward Everett considered the question. It had been how long since his last confession? Since before he had gone off to play ball. The previous December, when he’d gone home for Christmas, his mother asked him about receiving the Sacrament of Penance, and Edward Everett had left the house on a Saturday afternoon, telling her he was going, and drove off toward the church, but instead went to Memorial Park, where he parked overlooking a frozen lake where a teenage girl was teaching a half-dozen small children how to iceskate. He sat in his car, watching the children stutter-step and fall on the ice, drinking coffee he’d bought at a gas station, as snow swirled like dust across the frozen water. After an hour, he went home. Was there a statute of limitations on forgiveness, a point at which he had accumulated too many sins and it had been too long since his last confession?

  But he began, “Bless me, Father. My last confession was eight years ago,” and then paused to see if the priest would blanch, would say, yes, any hope he had of absolution had expired. But the priest merely nodded, and Edward Everett began telling him of his life, beginning with the lies he had told his mother about going to confession; about the times he had gone to Communion although he was not in a state of grace; about how he had slept with so many women whose names he could no longer remember, had taken amphetamines to wake himself up for a game after long and uncomfortable bus rides, had not kept the Sabbath—the sins tumbling out in no particular order, as if he were some sort of spiritual bag of marbles that had gotten torn and the aggies and cat’s eyes were bouncing madly around the room; he had been envious of teammates who had been called up before him, had once slept with a teammate’s girlfriend after the teammate had been promoted ahead of him, from single-A to double-A. He had done it, he knew even at the time, while the girl undressed in the dark room, less for the sex and more for the anger he felt at being passed over. She, of course, had done it out of her own anger, knowing her boyfriend would not come back for her. But still it was a violation: one did not sleep with a teammate’s girlfriend.

  When Edward Everett finished his litany, he realized he was weeping quietly, and the priest was handing him a tissue from the box on the bedside table. As he wiped his cheeks, and said his Act of Contrition, the priest traced the sign of the cross through the air and told him to say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as his penance before giving him the final admonis
hment: “Go and sin no more.”

  Not long after the priest left, what turned out to be the last Mass of the day let out across the street, and the chatter of the faithful floated through his window. He imagined them going home to mow lawns or off to restaurants for pleasant Sunday brunches. He thought, I am one of them again, a good and true Catholic, and fell asleep.

  When he woke, it was evening and a soft rain fell. Cars shushed by in the wet street and in a breeze the limbs of the maple outside his window shook, showering the screen with spatters. He felt a kind of gratitude. Perhaps this was why he hurt his leg, so that he could find grace again, he thought. He would miss the rest of the season, the doctor had told him. In six weeks, in September, he could begin physical therapy. If he worked at conditioning over the winter—running, regular stints in the batting cage at his old high school, playing catch in the gym—he could be ready for spring training in February. Maybe the injury would turn out to be a blessing: he would show up in Florida in the best shape of his life.

  Maybe the Cardinals would keep him on the big league roster. He had shown them something in the three weeks he had been there; he had hustled in warm-ups, had raced after fly balls when he patrolled the outfield during batting practice. While other players had been nonchalant about it, had caught the ball if it came within a few paces of where they stood, joking with one another, he set out after balls as if it were crucial that he catch them, leaping and sprawling out on the turf. “They don’t do highlight films of BP, kid,” one had said to him, but it didn’t dissuade him and when he came back into the dugout, to drop his glove and grab his bat when it was his turn to take his cuts, he looked at the manager out of the corner of his eye, to see if he would say something to him: I like your hustle, but he never gave him a sign. In his first game, when they asked him to sacrifice, he’d done it, and when they had put him into the lineup, he had responded then as well: four hits in four times to the plate, a cycle.