The night at Fenway where a man was beaten bloody by two Southie thugs, in front of his two little boys. Grudeck saw it so clearly. The Brewers were in town and the boys were wearing Milwaukee hats. A tourist family, a vacation nightmare.
The Sunday afternoon in New York where they passed an inflatable sex doll around Yankee Stadium like a beach ball, and the drunks who took turns abusing it, pretending to fuck it or have it blow them, or punched it repeatedly in the face. Grudeck remembered the look on one woman’s face, a mother with two young teenaged girls and a prepubescent boy. It was a look of terror more than revulsion. At that moment, he remembered thinking, if she only knew the truth about her son’s heroes in the dugout.
He was restless in bed, and in pain. Sweat pooled on his sternum. How do you tell the truth? He thought of the other induction speeches, and all the good-old-days stuff about the brotherhood of teammates. These days, teammates came and went. Mercenaries. Grudeck, the Last of the Mohicans, stayed. Grudeck, the last of the gold-watch men, twenty-some years in the same organization, the only organization. All those years, no best friend, no longtime teammate. No Billy and Mickey and Whitey. Just Grudeck. Joe Lonely, like Stacy said.
He flipped over and pounded his pillow, mad at the ingratitude even in his own mind. Somewhere along the line, he forgot how lucky he was. Lucky to be discovered, lucky to be brought up, luckiest to stick around as long as he had. A dream life. Without it, he’d probably be teaching phys ed and coaching at some high school somewhere, trying to mold spoiled kids and placate misguided parents.
But what was the cost? Seeing her, he wondered how “bad” a normal life would have been. To come home to the same place every night. Same woman, same four walls. Not whoever you picked up, not to whatever team hotel. How many women, how many nights? And now this golf course condo felt like an extension of that life. Rooms like those in an extended-stay suite hotel, maid service, meals out, Darlena for the in-home “massage.” Grudeck being Grudeck, the ballplayer. Except now it was on a golf course, not the diamond. Was this it? If he wanted something different, time was running out. He decided their next session would be at Stacy’s house. He concentrated on her face and tried to sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
“I changed over the years,” Grudeck said at Stacy’s kitchen table, watching her cut the stems of the spring flower bouquet he’d brought.
“So beautiful, Joe. Thank you,” she said, then sat down with the same legal pad from the week before. “So where were we?”
“I was thinking about how they built fences at spring training to keep the fans off us,” he said. “I keep coming back to it.”
Grudeck told her about the All-Star game at Wrigley. It was his third; he was a recognizable, authentic star, no flameout.
There were chest-high, metal crowd-control fences at the hotel where the players stayed. Regular Chicago cops—the ones with the checkerboard caps—were stationed along the way. There were two guarding the players-only elevator, which was programmed to go to the players-only floor, and one at each stairwell door. For the two days, the fans lined these fences, reaching over with photos, balls, and bats to sign.
On the first day, Grudeck stopped to sign for a family with two boys, Cub Scout age.
“They had these little notepads, nothing fancy, and the pages were all blank,” Grudeck told Stacy. “That’s why I stopped. Those blank pages.”
Grudeck shook fingers with the boys through the steel mesh and started to sign, then heard the father yelling, “Hey . . . hey . . . hey!” A crowd of grown men and older kids raced in, with bats, balls, and glossy shots they shoved at Grudeck. He knew what they were: memorabilia dealers looking to make a buck off his name. The family was being crushed, so Grudeck chicken-scratched their notepads and moved on, with calls of “Hey, Joe! No fair! . . . Joe, overhereoverhereoverhere . . . C’mon, Joe, don’t be an asshole . . . You suck anyway, Grudeck, shoulda been Sanchez, not you . . .’’ at his back.
“Here’s the point,” Grudeck said. “It was the first time I felt caged. The bigger I got, the more . . .”
“You became a prisoner of your fame,” Stacy said.
“Exactly. It was everywhere you went. People clawing at you, and if you gave yourself to them every time, there’d be nothing left. And when you refused them, they walked away thinking you were an asshole.”
“Were you?” Stacy laughed.
“I tried not to be. But I changed. I became, what’s the word . . .”
“Aloof. Distant.”
“Yes. It was fun for a few a years, but after a while it seemed like my whole life revolved around keeping bloodsuckers off me.”
Grudeck told her how he didn’t do much in Boston but get to Fenway early, work out, then kill time before on-field batting and stretching. Once the game was over, he drove home past lines of autograph seekers, right into his building’s garage. Going out to dinner, going for a walk, going for a run, going to a bar for a pop, all out of the question unless you wanted to be accosted. He ordered food in, using a phony name. He built a home weight room to avoid the health clubs, even though the camaraderie of the gym was something he enjoyed from the first time he stepped into the Union Y. Everything he did was geared to keeping his privacy. He did not tell her that’s why he chose Asian massage parlors. The girls knew nothing about him except he was a very big man who said very little and tipped very well.
“At first, I thought, ‘It’s sick to live like this,’ but the years went by and I got used to it,” Grudeck said. “The years kept going by, and it just became who I was. Who I had to be, I guess.”
“So, this price of fame, is it worth it?” Stacy asked, earnestly.
“This is part of what I want to say in my speech.”
He paused, then said, “You want to hear something crazy? When I retired I did these ‘Legends’ autograph shows, and there would be players who had retired ten, fifteen years before me. And I would hear the fans say things like, ‘Jesus, so-and-so got old.’ As if he wasn’t supposed to. I even had the same reaction when I saw guys like Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio. Ted Williams. That’s when it hit me.”
“What?”
“We’re not real to people. Not real humans. Just the images they see on TV, on baseball cards, at the ballpark. Sometimes I feel that way about myself.’’
He wanted to tell her about all the girls and the pressure and, now, the blue pills. He wanted to say how tired he got, 182 games a year at least, of controlling his face because he never knew if a camera was on him, and the snapshots and cell phone shots and video clips, and life being one long highlight reel from which he felt so strangely detached.
Instead, he just said, “I mean, look at my life.”
Stacy absorbed that one for a good beat. His life. She wondered where it was going. He talked like it was over; that he wanted this speech to be like a eulogy for his career. But where to, after that? To her? She tried to envision it. He was, at heart, a good guy. And he cared about her. But something was missing. He talked about being one-dimensional in the eyes of the fans, but she wondered how much there really was to him. Sure, there were glimpses of sensitivity and thoughtfulness, but he was lost and was grasping for something. Stability? Love? A future different than his past. He’d said it once: “I’m tired of being Joe Grudeck.” But who did he want to be? Mr. Stacy Milo? Suddenly, she felt a responsibility for him, and his feelings, that she did not want to take on. Joe and her; she did not see it. Not yet, anyway, because in his current state—in this suspension between being Joe Grudeck, ballplayer, and whoever it was he wanted to become—he was incomplete. He was falling for her, she knew, based on his romantic version of a casual, kissy-face, puppy-love thing from long ago. But she was done with her past; Grudeck, she knew, was trapped in his. Fame did that. It had stunted his emotional growth.
“Joe, what do you want? What do you really want?”
The suddenness of his answer surprised her.
“I want not to be forgotten
.”
“By who? Everyone?”
“No, by someone.”
Stacy knew she was the one. She just didn’t know what to do about it.
Chapter Nineteen
Now it was late spring, and Horace was alone. Sally said they both needed time to sort things out and Horace didn’t disagree. She moved into a furnished condo in town with Michael, a sublet owned by a SUNY professor in Europe on sabbatical.
Horace knew Sally was going, but was still dismayed to come home from work one Saturday and find a note on the kitchen table with her new address. It was like the death of the terminally ill; expected, but sad just the same.
Horace walked through the house. He remembered the first time he saw it with a Realtor, how the creaks of planks reverberated through the empty halls and rooms. And now came those lonely cries again; echoes of a place unlived in.
He opened the door to Michael’s room, and saw that all his electronics and entertainment boxes were gone. Left were remains of the boyhood Horace wanted for him: fossil-dusting and rock-collecting kits, a book on the Greek gods in astronomy, another on Otsego County geology, a pamphlet from the Fenimore Art Museum for an exhibition on the American flag used in Plains Indian art. In his bedroom, Sally’s closet and chest were empty, her jewelry boxes gone.
Horace sat on the bed and looked around. She left. He knew that was the hardest part, the extrication, so he knew she was never coming back. That life was lost. This life, this house, was now his, alone.
For dinner, he boiled water and cooked a half box of Dutch noodles and smeared it with butter. Simple enough. As the sun set over the ridges beyond the lake, a chill settled into the house and Horace decided to fire up the woodstove.
He had used the last of the old newspapers to ball up under the kindling, so he searched the kitchen drawers for some paper. It was there he found Sally’s folders, hidden under the woven placemats. He opened the envelopes, and the stern warnings bled before his eyes.
Legal action.
Foreclosure.
Tax lien.
Balance due.
Immediate attention required.
Attempts to collect.
“Jesus Christ, what has she done?” The numbers sank in. Credit-card debt alone equaled four or five months of his salary. She had taken out a second mortgage of $15,000 and maxed it out. All the years, all the work, and now this. The house would have to go, and there was no equity in it. Underwater, as they say. The mortgage-bundling recession saw to that.
Contact our loss-mitigation department, the letters said.
Loss mitigation. From here on, that’s all that was left. Everything else was gone.
* * *
HE PULLED THE ESCORT up to the garden apartment and saw Michael peeking out of an upstairs window. Sally opened the door a crack before he knocked, and looked down to see the envelopes and papers in his hand.
“Let me in, Sally,” Horace said. When inside, he waved the bills at her. “Is this why you left?”
“You know why I left,” she said.
Horace shook his head.
“All this time, you’ve been working against me,” he said. “Against us. You kept buying the things you knew I thought were worthless, knowing we were broke.”
“We’re not broke, just behind. And please lower you voice, we have neighbors now. And Michael.”
“No, Sally, we’re broke. Tapped out, flat fucking broke! They’re coming for the house! And you didn’t tell me?”
“Horace, please . . . Michael,” she said.
“Michael should know, goddamnit. Life is a cautionary tale,” Horace said. “He should understand how corrosive debt is. He should understand you just can’t have everything.”
He was seething and Sally moved away from him to the living room couch and sat down. Horace looked around the room. The couch was covered in a dark green plaid fabric, but still looked dirty. The recliner was beige velour. In the kitchen was a Formica-topped table and four wooden chairs.
“Is this what you want?” Horace said, his hands sweeping the room.
“I want a fresh start, Horace. This is just a first step.”
“And what about the house? Our home.”
“It was never my home, Horace. It was what you wanted. Now it’s yours. Do what you want. The bank will work with you. They certainly don’t want it.”
Horace moved toward the door; he felt the fuzzy weightlessness of anger in his head and hands. He gripped the knob to tether himself, to keep away from her. He wanted to break something. He wanted to punch himself in the face, to grab her by the throat. All was lost. Why not more? He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the door and took two deep breaths. Sally said nothing, and everything was still except the buzz of the fluorescent kitchen light.
“So, that’s it?” Horace finally said, and Sally was relieved by the calm tone.
“I’m sorry, Horace.”
“And Michael?”
“He’s old enough to decide what he wants. You can see him anytime you want. I’ll never stop you from being his father.”
Two thoughts came to Horace: You already did and You never will.
But he said neither and left.
Back at the house, Horace took all the bills, late notices, and foreclosure warnings, and stacked them in the stove. He took two handfuls of dried oak splinters, hatcheted down from quarter logs for kindling, and laid them across the crumpled papers in an X pattern. Dusk was settling in, leaving the room, furniture, stove, and Horace, too, in various tones of gray. He took the box of kitchen matches he kept on the mantel, lit one, and an orange glow flared through the room. He put the match to the paper in three places, each end and the middle. What was it she said? A fresh start. Here it was. All those bills, all that debt, turned to ashes. Up in smoke. Dissipating, disappearing, bellowing up the smokestack. Horace put on a few logs, sat in a chair, and watched the fire through the bars of the metal grate, as it roiled and spat hot embers, like an angry prisoner. Within minutes, the room was warm. He went to bed, but the stillness and silence of his house was almost unbearable. He couldn’t wait for summer, to hear the throaty conversations of the cicadas. He lay there, as the night closed in, and found himself short of breath. His heart was banging hard, too. He checked his pulse and it was strong, but too fast. Scary fast. He felt like he was being smothered and sat up, then stood. He took deep breaths and felt around his chest, as if searching for the absent pain. His hands hurt, as always, but they weren’t numb. Anxiety attack, he thought. Of all the fucking things. He lay back down and began to calm himself with his morning prayer: “God, help me continue my meaning.” He repeated it, over and over, if nothing but to regulate his breathing and try to drift off into an unconsciousness that would decelerate his head and heart. Finally, he relaxed and his mind moved to the quiet, early dream state of sleep. It was then that he heard a bare whisper in his ear.
“Dad.”
It was the higher, softer voice of a child.
“Dad” was all it said.
Chapter Twenty
Monday was a dead day at the museum and Horace was always off. He would spend a few hours in the woodpile, replenishing the cords for winter. It was never too early to start, and now, in the late spring as the musky smell of wild hyacinths filled the air, Horace felt restless and unsettled. He took his log-splitting tools out to the pile and began to work. In a short time his hair was matted with sweat and weighed like a damp towel around his face and neck. He chopped and hammered for hours, and the skin on his hands, scarred and toughened as it was, turned red and tender, and the yellowed, hardened calluses began to crack.
He worked, thinking of how much he wanted Michael with him, outdoors like this. Working, and traipsing into the woods behind their house, for sticks and logs, taking what the winter had timbered.
Horace thought back to the times when Michael was little, before sports, when they hiked the trails of Glimmerglass State Park at the north end of Otsego Lake. Along the Bea
ver Pond Trail, in spring and summer, on days just like this, Horace would point out to him the plant species with whimsical names that sounded like they came out of a Beatrix Potter book: devil’s beggartick and Parlin’s pussytoes, bearded sprangletop and Kinnikinnick dewberry. Michael’s face lit up at the funny names and he squeezed Horace’s hand as they walked, quick-stepping to keep up through the forest.
“Trees are just like people. A lot of different kinds live together in the same place. If one falls, it can hurt the others,” Horace said as he showed him the leaves and needles of different maples and pines.
In the fall, when the autumn leaves blazed in contrast against the soft, refracted evening light, Horace made Michael giggle as he pretended to be confused over the colors.
“Now let me get this straight,” Horace would say. “There’s yellow leaves on the black oak and white ash, and red leaves on the silver maple and black gum, and brown leaves on the red and white oak . . .”
They searched the soft forest floor for deer and bear tracks, scanned the skies for dive-bombing hawks and circling turkey vultures. Michael especially loved spotting the skittish woodland critters: gray squirrels, striped chipmunks, and, at dusk, the first nocturnal showings of the possum and skunk. They found mammal and bird skeletons, but it was the carcasses, animals deflated to skin over bone by maggots, that at once most fascinated and horrified Michael, who would poke them with a stick. Horace explained the food chain. The decay of the dead creature creates bacteria that feed plants that feed animals that die in the woods and continue the cycle again and again.
“Now, this is real,” Horace would say. “Real life. Real death. Real colors, real sounds. Not the made-up stuff you see on TV.”
Horace guided Michael to see the natural world’s yield of forest colors and sunset shades: a painter’s palette array of autumnal leaves. Hues of reds and yellows unnamed by man, the torch-fire glow of the western skies at dusk, where orange and pink faded seamlessly into sky blue and light purple, and clouds burned or cooled with such colors, depending on their distance from the horizon.
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