The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  He hid in the hyperfocus required by baseball and fishing; most nights after ballgames, he returned to the hotel where he lived— he never purchased a home in Boston—and tied fishing flies alone. He preferred to spend off-seasons in the woods or on the water. Once, he arrived late to spring training because he lost track of time while hunting wolves in a cold northern forest, and the media focused so much on the process story of the tardiness that nobody seemed to notice the window Williams had briefly opened into his truest self: He sought peace in the wilderness with wolves.

  * * *

  —

  Ted Williams hated his childhood home, leaving before graduation the same as Claudia, never going back. His lifelong feud with the press began when a writer asked rhetorically in a column what kind of boy didn’t go home in the winter to visit his mother. How could he be expected, then, to create a family when he despised his own so much?

  “I was for shit as a father,” he confided once to a cousin.

  On the day his only son, John-Henry, was born, Ted was salmon fishing in Canada. He’d been retired for eight years. That night, like always, he wrote in his fishing log. Ted wrote about the water temperature (70–72 degrees), his friends who came up to fish, and details of the trout and arctic char he caught while casting for salmon. He never mentioned a pregnant Dolores, and he never mentioned the boy.

  To the public, he was a success, but to himself, he was a failure, consumed with shame and regret. Bobby-Jo came into the world first, in the middle of his career. When she was young, he got so mad at her that he spit a mouthful of food in her face.

  Ted drove her back to her mom’s house in Miami once, and when they arrived, it transpired that Bobby-Jo had forgotten her keys, and Ted, raging, kicked her out of the car and left her standing alone there in the dark, exactly as his mother had done to him.

  Instead of Bobby-Jo becoming the first Williams to graduate from college, which Ted wanted as desperately as he wanted to hit a baseball, she got pregnant. Rather than tell her father, she slit her arm from the wrist to the elbow. She entered a psych ward, which he paid for, and got an abortion, which he paid for, and when her scars taunted him—physical proof that he’d become his mother—he paid for plastic surgery too. He couldn’t buy her peace. Doctors diagnosed manic depression, and she moved from booze to pills, cheating on her husband with a neighbor and giving herself another abortion with drugs and alcohol. Doctors gave her electroshock therapy. She threw plates and knives. Her voice turned childlike whenever she spoke to him, a thin “Daddy.” She asked for money and begged for help. She never held a job. At the funeral for Williams’s longtime girlfriend, Louise Kaufman, Claudia recognized her half sister, Bobby-Jo, whom she’d never met, simply by seeing a familiar wave of fear register on Bobby-Jo’s face at the sound of Ted’s voice: He boomed in the next room, sucking up all the oxygen, and two women, born 23 years apart, flinched.

  “You must be Bobby-Jo,” Claudia said.

  “Claudia?” she replied.

  Ted talked with Bobby-Jo moments later.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  “Are you still smoking?” he asked.

  “I’m down to one pack a day,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he said, then he walked away.

  By the time Eric Abel came into the Williams inner circle as the family attorney, Ted had already excommunicated Bobby-Jo. At Ted’s request, Abel wrote her out of the will, and Abel said over the nine years he spent around Williams, he heard him mention Bobby-Jo maybe three times, and every time he called her a “fucking syphilitic cunt.”

  He called Claudia a “cunt” too, and a “fat bitch,” and told John-Henry he was the “abortion I wanted.” They tried to understand his rages and why they’d even been born. “I mean, he had [me] at 53 years old,” Claudia says, her voice wavering. “Right from the start, we knew we weren’t gonna have much time, you know? The lessons that he had to teach us, we didn’t have the time to learn. . . . We’re desperately trying—I say ‘we’ like John-Henry’s still around—but we’re desperately trying to figure out what made him tick.”

  Their mom, Dolores, and Ted didn’t last long. He got his freedom, fishing every day. She got the kids. Claudia remembers growing up with a mother increasingly bitter over her failed love affair, on a Vermont farm without a television, isolated by their environment and the fame of their absent father. The children created their own world, and only they understand what it felt like to live in it. All they had was each other, and both longed to decode their dad and maybe find themselves in the process. Whenever they’d ask questions about his childhood, or his life, he’d scowl and grumble, “Read my book.”

  * * *

  —

  Claudia loves dragons. She especially loves movies about dragons. On the living room cabinet, there’s a ceramic statue of Toothless, the star of the animated movie How to Train Your Dragon. She got it as a gift. Her voice changes and her eyes and face soften when she says, “Toothless.”

  A few years ago, she and Eric’s teenage daughters from his first marriage went to see a movie called The Water Horse, about a boy who raises a Loch Ness Monster—which is close enough to a dragon for Claudia—then releases the beast to save its life. It is named Crusoe, and as the movie ended, Eric’s girls looked over and saw Claudia weeping, shoulders rocking up and down, distraught over the boy taking the dragon out to sea.

  “You were sobbing,” says Eric’s daughter Emma, now 22, grinning as she tells the story. Claudia smiles.

  “My heart hurt,” she says.

  That night, after Eric cooks steaks and Emma bakes sugar cookies, everyone piles onto the sofa for movie night. Claudia picks How to Train Your Dragon, bringing another round of catcalls and laughter. Everyone settles in, and the movie starts.

  “Toothless!” she coos.

  “He’s real to you, isn’t he?” Eric asks, kindly. No one is laughing now, and Claudia reaches for Eric’s hand from time to time. Every now and again, she sighs. The story is about a boy trying to live in the shadow of his powerful and domineering father—about a child searching for his place in the world. Watching her watch a dragon movie makes it all make sense.

  Sitting on her couch, she cries when the dragon saves the little boy.

  “You won’t always be there to protect him,” a character in the movie tells the father, and Claudia smiles, turns to Eric, and says, “John-Henry would’ve loved this movie.”

  * * *

  —

  John-Henry Williams loved frogs.

  He loved anything small and weak. During storms, driving up the hill toward their house in Vermont, he’d jump out of the car in the pouring rain, trying to get the frogs to move before they died beneath the wheels of the car. Like any damaged person, he took his protection too far. He saved a wild duck he found, and countless other birds. If they bit him, he’d tap their beaks to scold them, as if they loved him with the same intellectual fervor he loved them. Claudia still remembers Bangor the Cat. Driving back from visiting Ted’s compound in Canada, Dolores and John-Henry stopped in Maine to spend the night in sleeping bags at a rest stop. In the night, he heard a kitten crying, and after searching for and finding her, he tucked the cat, fleas and all, into his bag.

  At home, he brought her back to health and felt hurt when she wanted to roam outside. Always scared of being abandoned, he fit a dog harness on a long leash and tied Bangor to his bed. Claudia tried to get him to release the cat, but he refused to listen.

  He protected Claudia too. The first time they visited Ted in Florida together, he made sure she knew not to annoy him, advising her to use the bathroom before leaving the airport. At Ted’s place in Islamorada, in the Keys, she got a terrible sunburn. Terrified of Ted raging at them, John-Henry quietly fed her ice chips and got her ginger ale when she vomited from sun poisoning. She was about 9. He was 12. John-Henry rubbed Vaseline on her shoulders and t
old her not to cry.

  That was three decades ago. There is only one picture of John-Henry in her house. It hurts too much. When he got leukemia a year after Ted died, she donated bone marrow, and when he needed another transplant and her blood count was too low, she begged the doctors to try anyway. She screamed at them in the blood lab. An agnostic, she stopped in a church near the Los Angeles hospital and got on her knees and begged. It was the first and only time she has prayed. She asked God to take her instead. John-Henry died on a Saturday, and as he requested, his body was suspended at Alcor, too, in the same tank as his dad.

  Eleven years he’s been gone.

  “Grief is weird,” Claudia says, riding at night through the dark neighborhoods around their house. “The first seven years, any time I would have a break, any fun, one moment—inevitably, guilt. Just horrible guilt. Like I didn’t deserve to be happy.”

  “I’m the one who reached down to keep pulling you up,” Abel says, driving. “Still do. I love you. When you laugh—”

  She interrupts him. A heavy rain is falling, blurring the streetlights reflecting off the asphalt, and she looks out into the glare of the headlamps and sees something move.

  “Did you see the frog?” she says suddenly. “You gotta watch for him!”

  “No,” he says.

  “I don’t know if you ran over him,” she says.

  “Did I hit one?” he asks.

  She starts slapping his arm.

  “Stop! Stop!” she cries.

  He presses hard on the brakes, and she gets out. In the rain, in the glow of their house, she shakes her foot along the pavement, clearing a path, making sure no frogs get caught beneath the tires of the approaching car.

  * * *

  —

  A mile away, a secret remains locked in one of Ted Williams’s safes.

  On a shelf above a Desert Eagle .44, his fishing logs tell a different story from the one he gave his fans and his children. In public, he seemed to revel in the solitary pursuit of baseball greatness, then fishing greatness, but really, his lonely existence was a self-imposed exile, not because he didn’t want to know his children but because he was scared of hurting them, and of being hurt.

  Something happened to Ted Williams in the years after his son came into the world. “What’s incredible as an observer was to watch him in love with his kids,” says Abel, now 52. “The vulnerability of having love for your children. You could see it just gnaw. It was everything against his grain to succumb to this outside influence of children. Love had control over him. He felt vulnerable. A vulnerability he never had in his life. I think he hated that vulnerability of feeling guilt.”

  In his logs, John-Henry and Claudia began to make appearances.

  First, just simple mentions, when they were little: “Claudia, John Henry took canoe ride to Gray Rapids.” Soon Ted gave them praise that would never reach their ears. By 1979, when they were 10 and 7, he practically gushed in his upright, loopy handwriting. On June 14, he wrote about his son: “His casting is better than I expected so he must have been practicing some. After an aching rest and a few blisters on his casting hand, he is getting a little uninterested. Finally he got his first fish. A grilse. Enthusiasm revived. 3 grilse, caught his first salmon. 10 pounds. Big day in a young fisherman’s life.”

  Claudia and John-Henry would have given anything to know this. It might have changed their lives. Near the safe in his old house is a note Ted saved, dated December 10, 1983, when Claudia was 12. It’s a contract she wrote—the Williams family loves handwritten contracts—with her mother at a Howard Johnson’s somewhere: “When I grow up I will never have a child. If I do I will pay my mom 1,000 dollars.”

  Less than a year later, Ted sat before a stack of posters, doing one of the bulk signings familiar to all famous athletes. At some point during the session, instead of signing his name, he wrote a note to Claudia, one he knew she’d discover someday. He signed the rest, and the whole box went into storage. She found the note three years ago, 10 years after he died, going through memorabilia. Trembling as she held the poster in her hand, she finally read the words she wanted so badly to hear as a child: “To my beautiful daughter. I love you. Dad.”

  * * *

  —

  Ted wanted to change. Trouble is, nobody knew how to start to repair something so completely broken. It began with Claudia. About 20 years ago, she graduated from college. He asked her what she wanted as a gift, and she said she wanted time. The three of them flew together to San Diego and drove up the Pacific Coast. It was a do-over. So many firsts happened on that trip. She and her brother saw the house on Utah Street. The three of them laughed, and they asked Ted questions, and he told stories and asked them questions too. For years, she’d thought her father had stopped maturing when he became famous at 20, and now they’d both reached his emotional age, equals and running buddies for the first time. He never lost his temper or spun off in a rage. He wasn’t angry, and they weren’t scared.

  They visited Alcatraz, and Ted used a Walkman for the first time, befuddled by the technology, and they all laughed. Something happened to Ted Williams’s face when he laughed; most pictures show him stern, in concentration, but when he giggled, his jowls would hang and his eyes would squint and he looked, for just a moment, nothing like one of the most famous men in America. He looked anonymous and happy. When the boat docked back at Pier 39, they walked down the boards looking for dinner. A man at a card table was reading palms. Claudia saw him first, and she and John-Henry dragged their father over.

  The fortune-teller sat on a low stool. He traced his finger over the old man’s wrinkled palm. Ted laughed and made a joke about it feeling good, and the inside of his hand was soft, the calluses he cultivated during baseball long gone smooth. John-Henry snapped photos, forever documenting every moment he spent around his dad. Claudia leaned in and watched. Everything that would happen began in these moments, but none of them could see the future, not even the fortune-teller.

  He looked up at the old man.

  “You have heavy burdens you’re still carrying,” he said. “It’s time to let them go.”

  Ted Williams tried to follow that advice. He really tried.

  * * *

  —

  Nine months after that trip, he had a stroke. His health declined steadily for nearly the next nine years. John-Henry and Claudia cared for him every day, and every day they discovered new levels of understanding and knowledge. They sought out anything that might buy him more time—no matter how experimental, unorthodox, or just plain weird. They paid $30 a pill for vitamins and pumped oxygen-rich air into his room. They tried bee pollen and acupuncture and hired a therapist to work through his anger. John-Henry bought a dialysis machine so Ted could get the treatment at night. Nothing worked.

  Father and son had epic fights, bad enough that the caretakers called protective services. Investigators came to the house and interviewed both men, asking whether Ted was being made to sign autographs against his will, before determining there was no abuse. John-Henry wanted to control his father—his latest Bangor—and his father rebelled. About once a year, Abel would get called to the house to mediate a bizarre dispute, usually about Ted showering to ward off infection, or taking his medicine regularly.

  “You could see an internal struggle,” Abel says. “‘Goddamn, that’s my son. He loves me, I love him. Fuck. I wanna say no so goddamn bad. Everything about me says no. But I love him.’ You could just watch it rage.”

  Even now, Abel laughs about the scene he’d find upon entering the house.

  “Dad, you have to take this medicine,” John-Henry would be saying. “You have to take these pills.”

  “I’m not taking this shit,” Ted would growl, seething. “Fuck you.”

  Abel would write up a contract on a napkin or a piece of scratch paper, which is what Ted liked, and negotiate a settlement: Ted agre
ed to take the pills every day, and John-Henry agreed to let him shower only four times a week. Both would sign it, and the crisis would be averted.

  Even as he fought him, Ted knew John-Henry was struggling to find his place in the world. He worried about his son. Once, when Abel was flying to San Diego to meet with the Upper Deck baseball card company, Ted pulled him aside.

  “See if you can help John-Henry get a job,” Williams asked. “I know Claudia will be fine.”

  The guilt Ted carried slipped away when he did something to help his kids. Looking back, Claudia wishes she’d let him get her into Middlebury, because it was the only thing he knew how to do. In those last years, she taught him how to be a father to a daughter. When Claudia went through a breakup, instead of keeping her pain a secret like she’d done as a teenager, she explained how to comfort her.

  “Please don’t be mad,” she said. “Just please listen to me. I’m hurting.”

  She could hear him grinding his teeth.

  “What the hell do you want me to do about it!” he yelled. “I can’t do a fucking thing!”

  “Just tell me you love me,” she said.

  “JESUS CHRIST!” he yelled. “I love you more than you’ll ever know.”

  The outside world slipped away, and the universe shrank to the three of them: a dad looking for absolution, a son who needed a dad to show him how to be a man, a daughter who’d always craved a family, which they at long last became. A strange family, to be sure, but a family nonetheless, with a patriarch who’d found escape from his guilt and his shame in the company of his children.