by Marge Piercy
In my junior year, I didn’t lose a game. My parents and I were invited to ride in the backseat of a yellow convertible in the Fourth of July parade. My mother was suddenly David Greene’s mom to every merchant in town. My father mail-ordered a new baseball glove and a pair of white leather baseball shoes from Herman’s Wonderful World of Sports. We were invited to the annual Lynch family barbecue.
Georgie said I had the closest thing to a perfect fastball he had ever seen. He had watched Koufax pitch and Larry Sherry and said I had their speed, their power. He convinced my father that he should be given time off from work at the factory to be my coach. It was an investment, Georgie insisted, because when I graduated, I would get a bonus to sign with a professional team.
Georgie went out drinking with the scouts. He was being wooed by the Cubbies, the Pirates, the Mets, who competed to earn my family’s trust. He told me stories about athletes who had been swindled out of every dollar they ever made. Every time my fastball cracked into the catcher’s mitt, every time I struck out a batter, I glanced at Georgie in the stands. In my senior year, twelve major league teams had scouts at every game. I was working on a string of shutouts. I was throwing at close to eighty miles an hour, putting batters down in five pitches. As the string grew to four, reporters from the big city newspapers interviewed me in my living room at home. When no team scored off me in six games, the front office men arrived. “You’re the man,” Georgie whispered, rubbing my shoulder. I didn’t think about blowing the string because I had never blown it, because I was the only kid in school who didn’t have to take gym. (I could hurt myself.) The only kid from Saltash who had ever been asked to speak in front of the Masons (who recruited my father, their first Jew). The batters had heard of me and swung nervously, trying to kill my pitches, or cowered when I hurled a warning shot near their heads. They weren’t facing a pitcher but a legend, a seventeen-year-old who had never fixed himself a meal—“What if you burned yourself?” my mother said—whose arm had been kissed by God.
I signed with the Chicago Cubs for the largest bonus ever paid to a kid from my state. I was assigned to play in Wytheville, in the Appalachian League. I was given a going-away party by the entire town. There were fireworks at the pier. Local restaurants served free franks and potato salad. The bandstand was decorated with streamers and a sign was strung across Commercial Street, DAVEY GREENE SALTASH’S PITCHING MACHINE.
Out of the million and a half guys who graduated high school, I was one of only five hundred signed to a professional contract—and every single one of them was a local legend. I was facing the best athletes in America. Like every other rookie, I had good days and bad. Only, I’d never had bad days before. I was shaken by the crack of bat meeting ball, the sight of the coaches’ narrowed eyes on the hitters, not on me, the jeers of the home team crowd when I walked a man after twelve pitches. I felt every hit off me as a whiplash across my back, a stinging pain that left me waiting for another. One night, after walking the streets of some town whose name I couldn’t even remember, I called Georgie from a phone booth, pleading for help. “What’s the matter with me?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“But I stink.”
“Did the coaches say that?”
“No.”
“’Course not, ’cause they know it takes time. How long did it take Koufax to find himself?”
“Six years, but—”
“But nothing. What did he lead the league in in ’fifty-eight?”
“Wild pitches.”
“Fucking right. He was a maniac out of control. Remember that. You gotta have patience. You’ve got the best stuff I’ve ever seen. You’re Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine.”
But my best was only good, not great. In this league they waited out my pitches. They understood the physics of the game, the slow rising trajectory as the ball picked up steam; they didn’t try to crush the pitch before it crossed the plate. At first Georgie was right, the coaches weren’t concerned. They’d seen a thousand kids like me. I was just another rookie getting his lumps.
But I wasn’t. I was the pitching machine. The kid who got his father invited to be a Mason, who gave his parents a reason not to get divorced. Other guys played cards after the games or picked up girls. I commandeered a catcher and pitched. The harder I worked, the more I tired my arm, but I didn’t know what else to do. On my best days, I’d pitch three or four decent innings then walk four men, hit a batter, send a pitch into the dirt before I was pulled. I went back to Saltash in October with a record of two wins, nine losses.
I worked indoors with Georgie all winter, determined to make my reputation come spring. The club liked what they saw and sent me up two notches, to Winston-Salem in the Carolina League, where we took chartered buses to our away games instead of school buses and stayed in motel rooms two to a room instead of four. But as soon as I got behind on the count, I began to panic, to lose control, to throw harder, and harder still, until my arm ached. The coaches assured me that fastball pitchers took time to develop, that more important than strength, every movement of the arms, the kick, the follow-through, had to be in sync. I had to grow into my pitch, they told me. It would take years.
But I couldn’t wait years. I needed the applause of the crowd like I needed air. I needed the envy of my teammates, my coach’s arm around my shoulder as we walked to the clubhouse, the special wink that set me off from the other players, the fear in the batter’s eyes.
When I was sent down to Peoria, my manager swore the club still had confidence in me, that I was a second-year rookie who needed to grow into my pitch, my body; to mature, he kept saying. But all I felt was shame. The Peoria Chiefs were a Single A club; the dung heap of baseball. I imagined my old teammates laughing at me; the Corkie Pughs back in Saltash waiting for me to return a failure. I could not keep on losing.
Working with an old reliever who had spent nine years with the Cubbies, I learned how to throw change of speed pitches, curveballs, sliders. I wouldn’t give up. I could still win. I dropped my fastball like an unfaithful lover. Instead of overpowering batters, I would psych them out, use strategy. When I finally won a game, I slept the night through for the first time in a year.
Georgie was disappointed I’d abandoned the fastball; he said I’d had a pure talent for it. But Georgie was a small-town shipping clerk, I told myself. Fine with a high school pitcher, ignorant about the reality of the majors.
The following season I was assigned to the Double A Pittsfield Cubs. We trained in Florida with the big club, played our games on the same field. We stayed in single rooms in a hotel with room service. I took my meals in the same restaurants as Billy Buckner, Bruce Sutter, and Dick Tidrow. But what I’d hoped was a minor problem of timing began to recur. My leg twisted when I started my wind up, my shoulder dropped too soon. My hips and feet could not coordinate. All my old moves, my fastball moves, returned. Ten years of memory encoded in my muscles superimposed itself on my newly learned style.
At away games, the crowds cheered in ecstatic disbelief. At home, the fans booed. I no longer had a fastball or a change of speed. My arm was a slingshot with a mind of its own. My manager winced as he watched me wind up. The simplest rhythms were beyond me. The more I concentrated, the more deliberate my movements became, and the more awkward. I was like a man who had forgotten how to walk.
On the morning after blowing a fourteen inning tie with a wild pitch, I found my name on the barracks pink sheet, unconditionally released. I stuffed my suitcase and talked to no one, drove off in a cloud of shame and stopped at the exit with nowhere to go. I’d been selected to do one thing in this world and failed. In a way, the talent had never belonged to me, but to Georgie; to my father and mother. Without the Pitching Machine, there was no Davey Greene. The sports pages were my mirror: without them I didn’t have a face.
On those rare occasions when I attempted to make sense of my baseball career, I wrote it off to being young. I’d destroyed my talent by not staying with it
; swapped something difficult for the easy way out. But time would tell that this was a deeper flaw, a thin crack in strong cedar that would widen with age. Fifteen years later I was to repeat the mistake, and ruin more lives than my own.
DAVID
I remember my first night in Judith’s office. I remember watching her middle finger trace the rim of her wineglass around and around lightly, the way we seemed to be circling each other. It was mid-January and the world outside was brittle as glass. After dark, the streets along the waterfront seemed to radiate a frozen phosphor of road salt and snow. She had invited me over to talk politics, but her questions were all about me.
Most people listened to my story with thinly disguised pleasure. Everyone loves the tale of a hero fallen on hard times. Not Judith. “You must have been so lonely,” she said, as if she knew how it felt to lose something you loved.
She had begun by asking me a simple question about growing up in Saltash, and I blurted out the story of my life. “In all those years of baseball, I had never held a real job or written a check or cooked myself a meal. I felt like a released convict.”
She held back a smile. “With a sixty thousand dollar bonus.”
“By the time I was thirty-two, I had blown every cent, ruined my marriage, lost my son and failed at the one thing I ever wanted to do with my life.”
“Precocious, weren’t you? Takes most men till forty.” She avoided causing me embarrassment by averting her eyes. She fussed with her necklace, resettled herself like a bird on its perch, momentarily fluttering. There was something birdlike about Judith. She was small. She moved quickly. Her almost-black eyes were watchful, alert to trouble. She stopped to think before she laughed. Something most people would regard as funny seemed to cause her concern, as if worried the joke might be on her. She looked my age but acted much older. She wore wool and fine leather; I doubt she owned a pair of sweatpants. She was never Judy, always Judith.
I assumed she came from an affluent family because of her elegance, but the past she told me in snippets was of a hardworking immigrant mother, of growing up in a slum. Most women I knew complained of their mothers. Judith spoke of hers with deep affection and respect.
The wind had picked up. A sheaf of ice slid off the roof to the parking lot below. When I was a kid, this old building near the wharf had been a boathouse and after that a feed store; something called the Rainbow People’s Gallery when the first hippies moved to town, then abandoned for years. Judith had renovated it into an office suite downstairs and one enormous loft-style apartment above, in which we sat, overlooking the harbor, frozen solid since New Year’s and dry as a salt flat in the clear light of the moon. Everything in the apartment was the color of fire; the stuffed chairs burnt orange, the walls vermilion, the shaggy wool rug a slash of yellows and reds. I remember three sources of light: a table lamp, a gas fire in the grate, and Judith’s face, which seemed to absorb them both and cast a glow of its own.
She was known as one of the best lawyers on the Cape. It was tough luck if she wouldn’t represent you; disaster if she was on the other side. She had argued zoning cases before the Supreme Judicial Court and had a loyal clientele among those involved in the drug trade, but the specialty that gave her a demonic aura with the men in town was divorce law and custody cases. She had the reputation of getting a good deal for discarded wives.
I felt large in Judith’s presence, which was strange. Despite wide shoulders and a blocky frame, I was small for a pitcher. At five-foot-ten, my nickname was Little Chief. I have some Tartar from my mother’s side, causing a slightly Asian cast to my eyes. I have long black hair. In summer, when my skin bronzed, my pitching coach for the Winston-Salem Spirits said I looked like a fair-eyed Indian.
“You’re suddenly quiet,” she said. “Something the matter?”
“Maybe I’m feeling kind of unsure.”
“About what?” She wasn’t going to make this easy.
“About what we’re doing. How we got here like this.”
“You drove here in your big red truck.”
“I think you know what I mean.”
“We’re becoming better friends, David. I assume we are.”
For a professional athlete, even at my level, there had always been women. But no one like Judith Silver. No one who studied foreign languages for pleasure or was quoted every week in the paper. No one who was happily married to a man with cancer.
I had first met Judith through my sister Holly. Holly always told people she was my business partner, but it was her husband Marty’s money behind the nursery. I didn’t know a thing about the landscaping business when I moved back to Saltash. I had no skills, no savings; only an ex-wife in Florida and a child I was permitted to see twice a year.
My brother-in-law Marty was a syndicated humorist whose work hit too close to home to make me laugh. My sister was training as a geneticist when she married him. Next to science, she’d always loved the outdoors. She told people that she bought McCullough’s Nursery and Garden Center to keep herself from becoming a mad housewife. Nobody who knew her husband laughed. Marty’s twice-weekly column appeared in over a hundred newspapers nationwide. He wrote frequently for GQ and two of his books had been best-sellers. His shtick was a nervous dad’s response to a society out of control: there wasn’t a man alive better qualified.
Marty lived with an almost paralyzing fear of everyday life. When the family had a home in the Boston area, he was afraid of schoolyard abductions. He demanded Holly drop their girls at their classroom every morning and pick them up in the afternoon. He carefully examined all toys with moving parts and insisted that Holly soak the family’s fruits and vegetables no less than twenty minutes in a soapy solution before serving. After the random murder of a law professor in their neighborhood, Marty moved the family to Saltash. Doing lectures, promotions and television, he was on the road part of every week. He installed a fax machine in the girls’ bedroom and corrected their homework assignments from hotels around the country. He bought Holly a cellular phone for her birthday so he could reach her anywhere, day or night.
I was out of baseball before Marty met my sister, but it pleased him that I had been a professional athlete. It meant his children would have strong genes. “We’re Jewish,” he said. “We need all the help we can get.” Although I had grown up in a rural Christian area where I never felt more than a grudging tolerance of my religion, it would be accurate to say that my most intimate contact with anti-Semitism came from my brother-in-law, who sincerely hated himself.
I arrived at their kitchen door one night to ask Holly to sign some checks, when Marty summoned me to the dining room. “Sit down, David. Have you eaten? You have to eat. Hol? I asked your brother to stay. He can’t eat if he doesn’t have a plate.”
Besides the girls—Kara, eight, and Allison, six and a half—there were two other people at the table. The man was much older than Marty and Holly. He had a long rectangular face, folds of skin like melting candle wax beneath glittering dark blue eyes. His voice was resonant and he had been holding court until I entered the room, interrupting himself with bouts of a frightening cough. The woman I guessed to be around my age was dark-haired and petite, a reserved Audrey Hepburn to his big-voiced John Huston. They were introduced to me as Gordon, a former professor of Marty’s, and Judith.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t stay.”
Marty insisted, “Have a little something, have a lot of something. Take a doggie bag, back up your truck. Your sister made enough to feed an army. It’s her Jewish obsession with food.”
“An obsession?” I noticed a tremor in the older man’s hand. “Or a survival technique?”
“Here he goes,” Marty said excitedly. “I want to start my tape recorder whenever he opens his mouth.”
“Before the expulsion from ancient Israel, the Jews were an agrarian people. On sacred holidays, they congregated outside the Temple to offer a ritual portion of their harvest as thanksgiving. When the Temple was destroye
d and the Jews dispersed, the rabbis decreed that each family’s dinner table represent the altar of the Temple. Food became more than something to eat. It was a ritual connection to history.”
“And that,” Marty raised his index finger, “is how we became the Chosen. Eleven million people chosen to eat too much.”
“Why can’t you stay?” Holly said.
“Just need your signature.” I held up the check register.
“For your nursery?” Judith seemed interested for the first time.
“You can call it that,” Marty said. “I call it my wife’s plan to save me from writer’s block. She spends everything I make so I have to work harder.”
“Don’t believe him,” Gordon said. “Sounds like a column to me.”
“Herr Professor, on the money again.” Marty touched his face to the table, as if bowing. When he raised his head, there was a bit of mashed potato on the tip of his nose and the girls burst into uncontrollable giggles. “It’ll run next Monday,” Marty said.
“Folks.” I backed away. “Pleasure to meet you. Holly, sign this, please. And this.” I was out of there.
Holly had bought the nursery at auction after the McCullough family lost it to the bank. The place had a reputation for skinny trees at Christmas and spring seedlings that died as soon as they left the greenhouse, but Holly turned it around. In the nursery Holly effervesced confidence. Around Marty she seemed subdued. That had been the case since they were dating. But at work she was my kid sister again: full of energy and attitude, brown hair braided down her back, her face darkly tanned. She set up a farmer’s market to sell apples and fall produce. She lured customers in with a Thanksgiving turkey raffle. As I was standing up the twenty-foot Scotch pine that arrived from Canada every December, she wondered why we couldn’t have a menorah and told me to build one, a big silver and gold painted job made of plywood. Holly and I were on our own turf again; we sang oldies in the greenhouse and traded dirty jokes with the McCullough brothers, whom she’d kept on as a landscaping crew. She teased me mercilessly about my sex life.
