The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  Except, he thought, it hadn’t counted. It would go into the books as nothing, or would never go into the books at all.

  After he went down in right field and lay on the ground waiting for the gurney to wheel him into the clubhouse, the hail had stung his face and torso. On the gurney, bouncing across the field, the bumps sent shooting pains up and down his leg. By the time he was under cover, in the tunnel from the dugout to the clubhouse, the umpires and players rushing in filled the tunnel with the dense scent of wet polyester and perspiration. They waited for two hours, he learned from the newspaper, before the umpires finally called the game, one out shy of being official.

  He tried not to think about it, lying in his hospital bed, tried to concentrate on the good that would come later, his chances for next season, but the optimism faded. He was like Moses, the story he remembered from religion class, about sinning so that God did not allow him to enter the Promised Land, only led him up a hill so that he could gaze down upon it before he died. Was that going to be his experience in the major leagues, the only thing he had ever wanted? To spend years bouncing around blacktop roads in an old bus, playing in bandbox parks sometimes in front of a few hundred people, most of whom had probably come for the bonus entertainment: the toddlers’ race around the bases between innings, the old man who called himself a “baseball clown” and who imitated the umpires, his rubber limbs flapping, the giveaways of Frisbees or a dozen do-nuts?

  He wondered again if any of his team would come to see him. He knew none of them well. Hell, most called him by what he had on the back of his shirt—his name if he was wearing a game jersey, his number if he was wearing the practice one. “Hey, sixty-six,” someone would call if it was his turn to hit in the cage. He had a roommate, a left-handed pitcher who had been with the team for two weeks longer than Edward Everett, someone who had come from the Philadelphia minor leagues in a trade in the middle of June. But the pitcher and he shared little more than the same room on the road; he was from Boston, from what Edward Everett’s mother would call “Real Money,” and he and Edward Everett didn’t socialize. No, the pitcher wouldn’t come to see him, would probably not even notice when Edward Everett wasn’t in the room, would look over at the other empty double bed and mutter, “Huh. Something’s different.”

  Except, Edward Everett realized, the bed wouldn’t be empty, might not even be empty as soon as tonight, when the team went to Chicago for a series with the Cubs. The Cardinals would have already called up someone else from Springfield, probably Cook, a big kid from Arizona who didn’t run well but who was moving up through the system because he could hit for power.

  He thought of Cook in the bed in the Chicago Palmer House that should have been his, saw the clubhouse attendant putting a swatch of masking tape inscribed “Cook” in bold marker over the locker that should have been his, saw the powder blue road jersey with “Cook” spelled out across the yoke hanging where his jersey should have been, saw Cook coming in to pinch-hit in Wrigley Field, which, because of the winds, they called “the friendly confines”; they wouldn’t ask him to lay down a bunt but let him swing away, and he’d jack one out of the park onto Waveland Avenue, where joyous boys would chase the ball as it bounded away from them: a home run that rain wouldn’t wash away.

  Cook would be a success, Edward Everett thought, and when February came, it would be Cook the team would keep on the big league roster, not Edward Everett. He would go back to Springfield, and that would be where he would stay. He felt suddenly foolish for the optimism he had let wash over him: the feeling of grace was nothing but another side effect of the painkillers.

  There was a radio on the bedside table, and he switched it on, turning the knob to scan the frequencies, to see if he could find the ball game although, at the same time, he didn’t want to hear it. They were playing a doubleheader, to make up for the game that had been washed out the day before, and it should be the middle of the second game by then. He picked up the familiar ambient sounds of a game, the slight background thrum of a small crowd, a vendor near the broadcast booth calling out “Labatt,” but the call was in French, and so he scanned further until he found an English language play-by-play. It was the seventh inning of the second game and he could tell by the announcer’s voice that the Cardinals were winning. He was indifferent as he called the balls and strikes, as if the Expos were so far down they could never come back. Indeed it was so: as the home half of the inning ended, the score was eight–one, and the Cardinals were going for the sweep, having won the first, two–nothing.

  He turned it off, depressed by their success. He would not be missed, not at all. On the flight to Chicago, the team would be loud and brash, as they were after a good series. They still would be behind the division-leading Phillies but in the hunt. They would be thinking, Win two of three in Chicago, and two of three from here until the first weekend of October, and they would have a chance. It would stand before them, a done deal. They would do it without him and he wouldn’t even be a tickle in their brains, just the man who had never been there.

  Until that moment, he hadn’t wanted to call anyone, certainly hadn’t wanted to call his mother; she would want to come to Montreal to see him, and he hadn’t wanted to see her look when she saw his leg in the plaster, or hear her Oh, honey making him feel five again: Come kiss my boo-boo, Mommy. But he didn’t know whom else to call, so he reached over to pick up the phone, snagging its cord with his right hand and pulling it to him clumsily, first the receiver and then dragging the base behind it. He dialed the number and as it rang, he thought of his mother. It would be near dinnertime; she would be in the kitchen, peeling potatoes: roast beef, mashed potatoes and corn every Sunday he could remember. But, no, the picture was false, he realized: his mother wouldn’t cook such an elaborate dinner for one. He hung up after the third ring.

  From outside his room he could hear that visiting hours had begun. Across the hall, an excited voice exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness, Johnny,” and that was followed by other animated voices giving greetings.

  If he hadn’t broken up with Julie, he thought, she might be someone who would exclaim in delight when she saw him, someone who could comfort him for his injury and not have it be a boy-thing but a man-thing, a man tended to by his woman. Telling himself she wouldn’t want to hear from him and would have no sympathy for him, he nonetheless dialed her number.

  Chapter Four

  He had met her the previous summer, after her freshman year at Springfield College, a tall redhead from an even smaller town in Illinois than he came from in Ohio.

  She had gone to a ball game with her roommate, Audrey, and Audrey had flirted with him from the bleachers as he warmed up between innings. But Edward Everett had been more struck by Julie, who seemed embarrassed by Audrey’s aggressiveness, keeping her head down, her hands folded in the lap of the brown jumper she wore over a yellow blouse. It reminded Edward Everett of the uniforms the girls at his grade school wore and when Audrey asked to meet him after the game, he agreed. “Hell,” he said, “why don’t you both come along?” The three of them went to a pizza restaurant not far from the park, but up close, Audrey became more shy the longer they sat there and Julie said little, while around them the restaurant buzzed with conversations and the jukebox blared Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Finally, when a lone slice of pepperoni pizza lay on the serving plate in the middle of the table, Julie said quietly something that Edward Everett couldn’t hear, except for the end of her sentence, “convention of Carmelites.”

  “What?” he asked.

  She blushed. “I said, ‘I feel like I am at a convention of Carmelites.’ ” Edward Everett laughed, partly out of relief that someone had broken the silence.

  Audrey said, “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s,” Julie said, “an order of nuns who take a vow—”

  “Of silence,” Edward Everett said.

  Julie looked at him with interest for the first time.

  “You thought I wouldn’t kno
w what they were,” Edward Everett said. “My mother, she’s pretty into the whole Catholic thing.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Ten minutes later, they were outside the restaurant, buffeted by other parties coming in and going out. Edward Everett wondered if he should just leave them there, but the manners his mother had bred in him wouldn’t allow that, and so he offered to walk them to their car.

  “We didn’t drive,” Julie said. “We only live a few blocks away.”

  “Home, then,” he said. They set off to the apartment building where Julie and Audrey lived. It was past midnight. Off the main drag, the city was quiet, most of the homes dark. In a few yards, gas lamps burned dimly. Edward Everett tried to conjure something to say, but all he managed was “Carmelites,” giving an embarrassed laugh.

  When they reached the apartment building, he stood at the curb until the women went inside, waving to him just before the door closed behind them. Two nights later, restless after a game, he went impulsively to their building again, and stood in the lobby studying the mailboxes. None said “Julie,” but one had two names embossed by a label maker, “J. Aylesworth, A. Humphrey,” and he went up the stairs looking for the number that corresponded with the names. As he knocked, he realized it was past ten-thirty; he had no idea whether Julie would be home, or whether it would be Audrey he’d find there, but Julie answered, opening the door as far as the chain lock would allow, and peered into the hall.

  “Audrey’s not—” she said.

  “Actually, I came to see you,” he said.

  “Oh,” she replied, blushing.

  “It’s late,” he said, but, after hesitating for a moment, she slipped off the chain.

  “I can’t keep you in the hall,” she said. “But I have work tomorrow, so you can come in for just a minute.”

  He asked for her phone number so he could invite her on a proper date and they began seeing each other whenever he was in town; in the off-season, when he went to Grand Rapids to work installing flooring for a company a teammate’s father owned, they talked long-distance twice a week and picked back up when the new season began. After games, she waited outside the ballpark with the other players’ wives and girlfriends and he would take her to a late dinner; on off-days, he waited outside her classroom building, sitting on a concrete bench the college had put there in memory of someone named Bartholomew Wesley, holding a book open in his lap so that people might mistake him for a student. Neither owned a car, and so they walked everywhere: to Abraham Lincoln’s house, to a small botanical garden, to a café called Oscar’s where the waitress came to recognize them and sometimes brought them plates of broken muffins the shop couldn’t sell. They could not go to Edward Everett’s place: he lived in a rooming house owned by an elderly woman whose husband had pitched a season with Springfield in the 1930s, when it was a Brooklyn farm club, and who made money after baseball as a paper wholesaler. The house had at one time been a splendid three-story Victorian in which the widow and her late husband had intended to raise, in her words, “a passel of kids,” but they’d never had any and after he died she started renting to ballplayers. She was strict, forbidding women in the players’ rooms, and the one time Edward Everett brought Julie over on a rainy Sunday, to visit in the living room, she hovered: straightening books on the shelves, plumping cushions and watering plants until finally Edward Everett took Julie home.

  Because of Audrey, neither could they have privacy at Julie’s apartment: if Audrey came home and found Edward Everett there, she would give an embarrassed apology and go to her room and shut the door, but Edward Everett could hear her shuffling papers, sometimes typing, listening to some sad girl singer on her stereo, going into a sneezing fit because of her allergies.

  They talked about spending the night together often before they finally did, on a Friday in April when Audrey went home for her mother’s fiftieth birthday party. Until then, Julie had been shy about sex. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “it’s just that the nuns get in your head, you know?” Before then, they had advanced to the point at which she would take off her blouse and bra, but even when they were like that, on the couch, bare torso to bare torso, she would worry Audrey would come home early. It was frustrating but she was sweetly apologetic, promising him, “One of these days, look out, mister.”

  On the Friday, Edward Everett came over after the game, self-consciously carrying a small overnight case holding a change of clothes and his razor and toothbrush. Julie opened the door, gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and looked past him into the hall—to see if any of her neighbors were observing them, he knew. Inside, she took his case into the bedroom and they had dinner, baked chicken and brown rice with a salad and wine. She had set the table formally—or as formally as she could on her undergraduate’s budget—with a green tablecloth and two white tapers in candleholders that didn’t match, one clear cut glass, the other a miniature yellow porcelain lady’s slipper. He talked about the game he’d played, one in which he hadn’t had a hit but had reached base on an error by the shortstop. Julie told him about a paper she was writing for Sociology, an observation of the relationships between the cooks and waitresses at the Big Boy restaurant where she once worked.

  After a second glass of wine, he felt warm in a satisfied way and regarded her across the table from him. She was a pretty girl, he thought: it wasn’t that he hadn’t appreciated it before but he saw her afresh, this attractive woman with whom he was having a relationship. She had, he realized, very fine eyebrows, which made him wonder if they were naturally so or if she plucked them; her nose was dusted with freckles and her chin came to a point that he found charming.

  “What?” she asked, coloring slightly.

  “I was just looking at you,” he said, and she covered her face with her hand in a manner that caused some pleasant feeling he couldn’t name, and he wondered if he was in love with her. He hadn’t told anyone that since he was sixteen and, racked with confusing adolescent passions, had said it to the girl he took to the junior prom, a sophomore cheerleader with nearly waist-long black hair that her mother had set in ringlets. They were dancing to something slow, revolving in tidy circles, his arms locked around her waist and hers around his neck. He was thinking about how she would be naked later, their first time, and was wondering what her breasts would look like and how her skin would smell, and had said quietly, without really thinking about it, that he loved her, and she had purred in a throaty voice that she loved him back. They broke up four weeks later, after he behaved badly when she told him—not accurately, thank God—that she might be pregnant and he saw his hopes of baseball replaced by a job as a stock boy at Connor’s grocery until he was old enough to go down into the mines. After that, he was careful about, as his friends put it, “mistaking his dick for his heart,” and promised no one anything.

  Watching Julie blush from his attention at dinner, he thought it must be the true thing: he was an adult now, settling into what would be his career, baseball, and maybe it was time and she was the one. So many of his teammates were married already; one had four children with a wife he’d married when he was seventeen. He saw himself living forever across the dinner table from her, talking about his games, her talking about whatever she did as a career, and so the words fell out as if he’d been holding them in his mouth so long they needed to spill out if he was going to be able to take in a breath.

  They, too, broke up weeks later when he came back from a trip through Kansas and Iowa, during which he had met a woman in Wichita with whom he hadn’t slept but had wanted to because she was funny in a brassy way, and his teammate with the four children got a call from his wife saying she had to borrow money from her uncle because doctors had found a hole in their second child’s heart and another teammate got a Dear John letter from his fiancée, who had fallen in love with her dentist.

  In the hospital in Montreal, as his teammates were scoring another three runs in the eighth inning, during which Cook (already!) didn’t hit
a home run but did double in two runs in his first major league plate appearance—in the hospital, then, he knew it had been a mistake to stop seeing Julie because of a momentary flirtation and a bout of fear.

  Before he could tell himself not to, he dialed her number, thinking he should hang up, wondering if she had found a new boyfriend since he had stopped calling her, wondering if perhaps they were in bed right now, Julie and the imaginary boyfriend, someone smarter than he, more well read, wittier.

  She answered on the fifth ring.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Ed?”

  Then he wasn’t sure what to say to her; how foolish it was to call her. What did he expect, that she would give him sympathy after the way he had treated her?

  “Ed? Are you all right?”

  “I’m great,” he said. “No, that’s not true. I actually got hurt.”

  “I thought—I thought I’d never hear from you again,” she said, as if he hadn’t told her about being hurt. “I wrote to you and …”

  He had forgotten about the letter she’d sent, but now he remembered seeing the pale blue envelope on the mail table in his rooming house, and her neat handwriting that made clear she had paid attention to her Palmer penmanship classes as a girl. “I don’t know why you stopped calling me. I can live with not seeing you, but I need to know why.” He had thought about responding, but the team left town the next day, and by the time he got back a week later, he had put the letter out of his mind.

  “I’m in Montreal,” he said.

  “It’s been almost two months.”

  “I know. I just—”

  “Montreal? What are you doing in Montreal?”

  “Baseball, playing baseball.”