Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  The third throw arrived at a spot where my head would have been had the door not been closed. The wood absorbed most of the blow, but the object embossed a fist-sized impression.

  “Strike three,” the old man hollered. From his pocket, he produced a tailor’s measuring tape and held it against the width of the door. Twenty-two inches, though I could have told him that, had he asked. Part of the occupational training for an architect is to be able to estimate with high accuracy dimensions in space. He rolled up the tape and put it back in his pocket, and then he placed his hands on my shoulders in order to address me in a direct and sober manner. “Can you be brave? Can you face the foe and not flinch, despite all instinct? You know that I am on your side, and I have taken careful measures and done the necessary geometry to reckon the angles, so I ask merely for your unwavering trust and confidence.”

  I nodded my approval to his unstated plan, and he positioned me just in front of the door. “Stand here, and don’t move a muscle, no matter what happens after I open this door. Do you think you can do this? Good boy.”

  Before I had the chance to think, he flung open the door. In the threshold waited a young woman in a green dress with a baseball bat resting on her shoulder. Her eyes widened when she saw me standing there, and as if awaiting a pitch right down the middle of the plate, she drew back and swung the Louisville Slugger straight at my bean. The fat end of the barrel connected with the doorjamb, sending a stinging vibration down the bat and right into her hands. With a small yelp of pain, she dropped the baseball bat, and the old man stepped on the handle with a bare foot. He jerked his thumb into the air. “You’re out!”

  The old man examined the baseball bat and, to my surprise, gripped the handle like an experienced hitter, gave a halfhearted swing, and then tossed it in the corner with the war club, the miner’s pick, and the other weapons of my destruction. The woman at the door ticked like a furnace as her anger cooled. Like the others, she was beautiful—a straw-colored blonde with verdigris eyes and pale, almost translucent skin, set off starkly against the green dress she wore. A vein snaked along her left temple, and her full lips radiated pink health against that porcelain complexion. One would deduce from her appearance that her forebears hailed from some Scandinavian town. She had a northern composure, a skim of ice around her heart.

  “Your swing leaves much to be desired,” the old man said. “But you have a helluva fastball.”

  On the outside of the door, now visible to all, two deep impressions pocked the surface, but on her third pitch, the one aimed at my head, the baseball stuck in the wood, its red stitching bright as a scar.

  She laughed in a four-note measure. “Those first two were just warm-ups. I brought the high heat on the last one.”

  The old man asked, “Where did you learn to throw like that?”

  “From watching the old ball game. From a beau—”

  “Ain’t that always the kick in the teeth,” Flo interjected.

  The other women murmured their assent, and a ripple of solidarity zipped from woman to woman and fizzled when it reached me. No rancor was directed toward the old man, only me. In fact, he seemed in cahoots with them, so I looked to the baby for moral support. He was busy trying to eat his fist.

  “She’s the singer,” I said, suddenly recalling her face. “The one from the recital, the opera singer.”

  “Are you sure?” the old man asked. “The singer is usually a bit more zaftig, and Miss …”

  “Adele,” she said.

  “Miss Adele is in fine shape, eh? Probably from all that baseball.”

  Certain now, I insisted. “Florence there was seated at the piano, and Adele was crooning ‘The Laughing Song,’ I believe, and later, when the mermaids sang, her voice was truer, more clear and pleasing than the others. This bird can sing.”

  “Is this right, Adele? You can sing as well as sling the old horse hide?”

  She flushed from her chest and along her throat, and in a hesitant voice, she said, “One can love both.”

  “Love?” The old man looked like he was about to spit out his teeth. “One can love any number of things at once. I love a good Buster Keaton film, crêpes suzette, and flying kites in the March winds. But if what Sonny says about you is true, you have more than love. You have passion, you have a gift. And I’ve seen you pitch. Sister, that ain’t love. That’s talent.”

  The blood rushed to her face again, and she had no answer for him. When the initial embarrassment faded, two rosettes lingered on her cheeks. Taking her by the elbow, the old man led her to the center of the room. From his bottomless pocket, he retrieved a cream-colored baseball cap with a short blue bill and an old-fashioned blue P emblazoned on the peak. He jammed the cap over his silver spiked hair and then reached deeper into that pocket and procured an ancient leather mitt, barely bigger than his left hand, and he put it on and pounded the palm with his right fist. “I’m ready now,” he told her. “Give us your best stuff. Fire that yarn right here, baby.”

  Behind her, projected on the tiles of the shower, a large sepia-toned photograph sharpened into focus. Two young men in high collars and boaters lounged on the steps of a city brownstone on a summer’s day. They looked like brothers, and the older one had tossed something in the air, but the aperture of the camera transformed the object into a white blur. Only upon inspection could it be guessed that the object in motion was a baseball. Adele began her story.

  She already knew he was a crank before she ever met him. He and his brother Christy were just fiends for baseball. Went to every game they could, those boys, over in Exposition Park across the river. In fact, that’s where Pat courted her, in the ballpark, just one of several thousand cranks, rooters, and fans come out to cheer.

  The photograph on the wall whirred into motion, and the ball that the young man had been tossing fell into his hand. Just like an old silent movie, the film jerked in time, depending upon the action of the cameraman, and scratches, flecks of dust, and moments of underexposure and overexposure darted by. A sound track started, an old-timey piano to accompany the action. But nothing much happened in the scene. The camera did not move, nor did the actors. A title card flashed on the screen: “Patrick Ahearn and his younger brother Christopher ‘Christy,’ Pittsburg, Penna., 1903.”

  Beckett piped in from the peanut gallery. “Hey, I thought there was an h at the end of Pittsburgh.”

  “Not in Aught-Three,” she said. “They spelled it differently.”

  On the film, Christy lights a cigarette and appears to smoke it in superfast motion, as the film must have been undercranked. Pat tosses the baseball again and again till he mugs for the camera. His hair is slicked back and parted as though with a knife. He stops slouching against the balustrade and stands up straight. Confidence pours from his gaze. He tosses the ball again, and the image fades to black.

  The year following her graduation from the twelfth grade, Adele helped the Sisters at St. Luke’s, making sure the little ones had proper coats and gloves, mending the torn books, and teaching the children’s choir. Two of her younger sisters, Katie and Grace Ann, were still in school there, and it gave her the chance to play mother during the day. Sometimes she thought of entering the convent herself, but she never heard the call, and spending time among those children, she couldn’t help but want a family of her own. But that’s another story, isn’t it? That spring, one of the poor third-grade boys was struck by a tram and killed, and the whole class was expected to be at the funeral, but Sister Aloysius couldn’t bear her grief and asked Adele to escort the students in the procession from the school to the cemetery.

  The children were more unruly than had nuns taken them, and for all but a few, it was a lark, a parade in the sunshine. Two lines, the twelve girls in pairs, the nine boys paired as well, with the odd one, Frankie Day, as her companion. They had been hushed and chastened on the way to the church, but after the Mass and once that little box had been lowered in the hole, the children were a terror. Girls refusing the h
ands of their partners in the lines. Boys being boys, stepping on the heels of those walking in front of them, chittering like sparrows, and one boy fingering a lump in his trousers, looking suspicious as a squirrel. Turns out he had a baseball in his pocket, and whenever Adele’s back was turned, he took it out and tossed it to his best friend.

  The procession passed right in front of the two men on the stoop, and she noticed the older one watching her; his gaze nearly burned a hole in her skirt. Behind her, a boy cried out, and given the circumstances, of course she spun around quickly to see to his safety.

  Like a flock of angels, the boys and girls materialize in the photograph on the shower tiles. Posed as though for a class picture, they appear somehow more adult and alien than the eight-year-olds of today. Perhaps it is the formality of fashion. The boys are as neat and clean as bankers, still in short pants or knickerbockers with knee socks, and their buttoned shirts shine bright. The girls have done their hair in ribbons and curls and sit primly in short dresses or simple skirts and blouses. They are poor, but appearances matter. An empty chair stands next to a dour nun, and I reckon it once contained the lost child. Written in white below the children is “St. Luke’s Third Grade, May 1903.”

  As Adele continues her story, the image changes, almost imperceptibly at first, for it is still the same group of twenty-one children seated in the same chairs, but they have aged. In 1909, another chair is empty. By 1918, young men and women, but the nun is gone, and three boys are missing, perhaps the Spanish flu or the Great War. Three others are dressed as doughboys, and one of the young women wears a nurse’s white uniform. They are in the prime of life in 1929, half the men in suits, the others working men, but all the women looking older than their years. Only fifteen of the original group remain. The years roll on, and the empty chairs increase. By midcentury, less than half the chairs are filled. In another decade, there are but two men and six women. Across the room the old man is counting, too, and I wonder if he is pulling for the survivors. In 1972, there is one boy left, a white-haired man who wears a Nehru jacket and a braided ponytail. Surrounding him are four women in shapeless dresses and sensible shoes. One by one they begin to fade from the photograph, and by 1981, one man and one woman keep company. They are holding hands. Another year passes, and he sits alone, shrunken but still too big for the children’s chairs, bewildered by his longevity. The calendar turns, he waits. The final frame is the empty classroom with a single paper curling on the floor.

  Straightening the collar of her green frock, Adele continued.

  When the boy cried out, she was shocked, you understand, for they had just come from the graveyard and were supposed to be in their prayers, and what does she see instead, but the young man tossing a ball in one hand, and three of her students surrounding him, silently beseeching him for its return. Cool as you please, the man just kept taunting them, for he knew full well that the ruckus would bring her over soon enough.

  He took off his hat like a real gentleman when Adele approached, and the boys parted to make way, and he stepped forward and offered her that infernal baseball. “One of your charges,” he said. “A bit too full of mischief.” Their fingertips grazed as she took it from him, and Adele nearly jumped through her skin. Having no bag or pocket, she kept the ball in her grip. The miscreant boys wandered back into line. All of the children were spying on them. “But aren’t you just a bit older than these young chiselers yourself? Sure, but you are too young to be a Sister.”

  “I am fully nineteen, and I am not one of the nuns. I teach the children how to sing and am only helping out today … with the funeral.”

  When he smiled at her answer, he seemed to show too many teeth, but they were straight and white. His skin was clear and bore no pocks, and his black hair was neat and lightly oiled in place. But his eyes did her in. As brown as chestnuts, his eyes fixed on hers, and she could feel him looking at her even when she averted her gaze. “The best news of the day, Miss.”

  “Adele,” she answered. “Adele Hopkins.”

  “I’m Patrick Ahearn, at your service. That’s quite a grip you’ve got on that baseball, Miss Adele. Do you play?”

  The children were watching. “I must be going. They’re expecting us back at St. Luke’s.” She nearly knocked little Frankie to the ground as she turned, for he had been beside her all along, hiding behind her skirts. With a stern look, she ordered the boys and girls to form their columns, and they were about to resume their procession.

  “Are you a fanatic?” Pat asked. “Have you ever been to see the Pittsburg boys? Our Pirates?”

  Blushing, she bowed slightly and then faced forward and marched her third graders as briskly as union men in the Labor Day parade. The very thought of traveling across the river to Allegheny City for a mere baseball game filled her with incredulity, and though she knew some young women—such as her best friend, Helen—who had been to Exposition Park for the spectacle, it was not altogether respectable somehow, and Adele wondered what her parents would have to say to such a proposition, and the fact that he, a total stranger, had more or less invited her moments upon first meeting heated her blood to a boil. The very idea. He was simply too brazen to further consider one jot. By the time she herded the children into the classroom, Adele felt damp and thirsty. This will not do, she told herself, but all night long she could not help speculating if he had, in fact, asked her or intended to ask her to come along. Helen would know what to do. She would have to ask Helen about this baseball man, this brazen Irishman, this Patrick Ahearn.

  “Oh look,” the old man said, “a new film.”

  The clickety-clack of the projector whirred into motion and a rectangle of light flashed on the wall before the image introduced itself. The sprocket holes on the edges fluttered madly, then disappear, and the figures lighten, darken into focus and life. Two young women in their linen dresses sit side by side on a porch swing in the good old summertime. A black-and-white mutt, curled up like a cinnamon bun, lounges just out of reach of their feet. Perched on the windowsill are a sweating glass ewer of lemonade and two empty glasses. A breeze is blowing, for a dance of shadows and light pours through the branches of a tree and onto their faces. They are as intimate as two sisters in conversation. One of these young maidens is our Adele, her honey-colored hair piled high into a bouffant in the fashion of the day, but there’s no doubt of that face, those features. The other, whose dark hair rises to a mountain of curls, is her friend Helen, aptly named, for she is stunning.

  “The friend is a looker,” I whispered to the old man.

  “A Gibson girl,” he replied behind the back of his hand. “So named for the artist who drew the original. A kind of personification of the idealized female, though there’s a bit of satire in it all, a poke at the masculine tendency to sexualize half the human race. Look at that waist, for goodness’ sake. A wasp has a bigger belly. No surprise you think her the more beautiful of the two.”

  As the young women rocked on the swing and chatted, the sound of piano music filtered through the bathroom fan. Some vital bit of information was being conveyed, and the camera zoomed in. Adele on the wall grew particularly animated, and the title card stated: “I had no idea he had a brother.” Helen smiled broadly, the heavy pancake makeup visible in close-up. She says something and winks. The intertitle reveals a moment later: “And he is sweet on me!”

  The title card on the wall reads: “Her First Game” and dissolves into a static shot of the crowd making its way down School Street and into Exposition Park. The twin spires decorating the roof of the wooden grandstand point into the smog, but the men and boys and few women rush forward, a sea of hats and caps. Spurred on by the prospect of the duel at three o’clock against the New York Giants, the crowd is electric with happiness. The few women in the queue are dressed as finely as any gentlemen, and Helen and Adele wear matching straw toques with a peacock’s feather, one in blue and one in red, in honor of the hometown team. Caught in the instant looking back at the camera, Adele
holds on to her hat with one hand as she is swept away.

  When the film concluded, she picked up her story.

  Pure chance, though sooner or later, they were bound to meet. The Ahearn brothers were West End Irish, but they had moved into town for a place of their own nearer to work. Pat finished early in the morning, and Christy was on nights, so they had nothing to do on summer days but go to the ball games. By June, the four of them would go together, and Adele put aside her reservations just to be near the brash fellow.

  At the gates, Pat paid the two-bit admission each for all four of them, as if a dollar was nothing, and he gave the man another dollar to find them seats in the grandstand beneath the shelter of the roof. The afternoon sun shone brightly, and she nearly swooned the moment she first saw the brilliant green field. Cut into the manicured expanse was a keyhole between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, and the paths around the bases were similarly shaped in dirt. In their cream-colored uniforms and brown hats and stockings, the New Yorks were practicing, throwing the ball with such effortless grace and impossible speed. Bordering the great lawn was a fence plastered with advertisements for everything from hair tonic to downtown restaurants. Just beyond ran the railroad, and beyond the tracks, barges and paddleboats sailed the Allegheny River, and on the other side of the water lay Pittsburg proper, the Point, and the hubbub of the city. She felt well away from all that in Exposition Park, almost as if out in the country for a summer’s picnic. The men had asked, and permission was granted, to remove their jackets, and they sat in their shirtsleeves like two stevedores. A negro in a white coat came by and offered to sell them a bag of roasted peanuts. Every few minutes, someone would wave or shout greetings to Pat and Christy, who seemed to know all of Pittsburg and Allegheny City. One such fellow in a derby and dark suit kept passing in the aisle near their bench, uncertain as to whether he might approach, until he became a thorough distraction. Finally, he caught Pat’s eye and made his way over.