Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  The word scared Grudeck. What if the Syracuse girls came forward because of the speech? Hypocrite.

  “What if I canceled everything?” he asked.

  “To prove what? That you’re a reformed star? That you’re swearing off your celebrity? Then what? You going to return the millions you made playing ball?”

  Grudeck was quiet, and Sal softened his approach even further.

  “And so here’s the next big question. Say you get up there and you say all this. Then what? What will it change?”

  Grudeck again shifted in his chair, thinking what to say.

  “Let me answer for you, then,” Sal said after a few beats. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Let me tell you what will happen. SportsCenter will clip your speech and show excerpts and God knows what it will end up sounding like. Sincere. Flip. Stupid. Whatever they decide. A couple of sports columnists and TV guys will say Joe Grudeck is absolutely right, and a couple will say you’re completely full of shit. In the end, nothing changes. Nothing good comes of it. The truth is, it’s too far gone, Joe. The good old days ain’t coming back.”

  Grudeck shook his head.

  “It’s not that simple, Sal, it’s—”

  “It is that simple, Joe,” Sal said. “Don’t complicate it. You’re a ballplayer, not a sociologist. That’s what people love you for. Baseball, not social commentary.”

  Grudeck felt dismissed, and it fired his temper. He wanted to point to the pictures on the wall, the mahogany desk and the cherry leather furniture, and remind Sal who made it all happen. Sal was studying him, and knew that Grudeck was struggling to keep himself in check.

  “Go ahead, say it,” Sal said.

  Grudeck leaned up in his chair.

  “You know, I’m just trying to do something good, goddamnit, and you make me feel like an idiot,” Grudeck said. “Like it’s the stupidest idea ever.”

  “Lookit, Joe. I’m just afraid you’ll come across as self-righteous. You want out? Fine. But you don’t want to go out like this. Americans hate hypocrites as much as they love athletes. And trust me, once one of the media jackals rips into you, the pack will follow and tear you apart.”

  Grudeck shifted in his chair, trying to think of the right words, but was distracted by pain in his hips and thoughts of Syracuse becoming public. In his gut, he knew Sal was right. No good could come of it. But Stacy admired him for wanting to do it. Could he punk out now? Things needed to be said. Maybe there was a better way to say it.

  Sal must have read his mind.

  “Talk to your girlfriend. Try to lighten it up a little. Less pontification. Speak from your heart, not the pulpit,” Sal said, then paused. “But Joe, kid, promise me something.”

  “What, Sal?”

  “Think about your reputation. If you want to run off and be a hermit, fine. Just don’t tear down the guy you built up on the way out. People love Joe Grudeck. You don’t want to kill that guy.”

  “What if I’m not that guy?” Grudeck asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. Not to your fans. Not to the rest of the world. To them, you’re the guy they think you are. Let ’em think it.”

  * * *

  GRUDECK WAS SLOUCHED in a corner of Stacy’s sofa, with her in his arms. She was curled up facing away, so her breasts rested near his hand. He opened it up wide, spanning both, nonchalantly, and she relaxed against him. In his pocket were two pills, just in case, wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. But with the warmth of Stacy’s body, and the way her breathing resonated in his lap, he didn’t think he would need them. Not to get started, anyway.

  Wayne Jr. was at his father’s for the night, and Stacy had made a simple dinner of kraut and kielbasa.

  “That’s what you want?!” Stacy said.

  “Yeah. Like my mother used to make. You don’t get that at the club.”

  Now it was evening, and the light in the room had turned gray, muting the pastel walls and Stacy’s paintings. Only the neon of the carnival scene held its color in the diminishing light.

  Stacy offered to turn on a lamp.

  “No, this is nice,” Grudeck said, then bent his head to kiss her hair, then moved to nuzzle her ear. He stroked her neck with his other hand.

  She made a soft sound, one that went right to Grudeck’s soul.

  “Come with me to Cooperstown,” he said.

  The suddenness surprised her, and she reacted with another involuntary murmur.

  She turned in his lap and looked up at him, unsure what it all meant.

  “Come with me to Cooperstown,” he said. “I want you there. It’s the biggest day of my life, and I want you there.”

  Stacy reached up and touched his cheek.

  “That’s very sweet, Joe. Very sweet.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But I’m not sure I belong there.”

  “Why not? You’ll be my guest. We can bring Wayne Jr. Front-row seats.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, imagining photographers taking pictures of the three of them together, Joe Grudeck’s insta-family.

  “Why? What?” Grudeck hadn’t been prepared for this. “It’ll be fun.”

  “It’s your day, Joe. It’s your thing,” she said, now sitting up.

  “But I want you there.”

  “And I’d want to be there if . . .”

  “If what, Stace?”

  “I don’t know . . . if we were further along. If we get further along. You know what I mean.”

  “C’mon. It’ll be fun. And you’ll probably get on TV. They always show the guy’s family when he speaks,” Grudeck said.

  “That’s exactly the point,” Stacy said.

  She sat up and tried to face him, but Grudeck pulled her in close and guided her head to his shoulder. He didn’t want to see the look on her face when she started to explain herself.

  “It just seems like the place for a family, a wife,” she said.

  “Or girlfriend,” Grudeck offered.

  “No, not a ‘girlfriend,’ ” she said. “Girlfriends come and go. The person with you should be someone who was by your side all along, who supported you, who held things together when you were on the road half the year. That wasn’t me.”

  “But you helped with the speech.”

  “But it’s your speech, Joe. It was your life, Joe. Not mine. I wasn’t part of your baseball life; neither of us wanted that. If we did, it would have happened. But it didn’t. You went off, and I didn’t chase you. There was a reason for that. Do you know what that reason was?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it, Joe,” Stacy said, now moving away to look at him. “What did I always tell you back in high school?”

  “That you didn’t want to be just another girl to me?” Grudeck said.

  “That was only part of it. The other part was that I didn’t want to be swallowed up . . . by your hugeness,” she said, and playfully slapped her hands against his chest, trying to lessen what she feared was an emotional blow. “That wasn’t your problem. It was mine. I knew you were going to be big. Bigger than any of us. But I had my own dreams, and maybe I was too afraid that if I became Joe Grudeck’s girl, that was all I would ever be.”

  Grudeck thought this over, thankful the faded light masked what he felt was a stupid look on this face.

  “So instead you became Mrs. Wayne . . . ,” he said, and the “I’m sorry” came even before he got the last name out. “That was a shitty thing to say.”

  “Yes, I married another man, and had a child, and tried to be a family,” Stacy said flatly. “And maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing, or the best thing, but it was the thing I did. But along the way . . . oh, never mind.”

  “What?” Grudeck said. “Don’t do that, Stace. What?”

  Stacy shook her head. What could he possibly understand about her life, and all it had entailed since high school? She felt herself getting irritated. He went off to play baseball, and detached himself from all else. He had no wife, no child. He never held a little, helpless l
ife in his hands and felt the unrelenting burden of its survival. He never had to please a woman beyond their chemical-attraction expiration date, or partner with her for the long haul. He never made himself vulnerable; he never stuck around long enough to get dumped, or cheated on, or to feel the relentless, obsessive emotional pain of a broken heart. There was no “she” in his history, no relationship regrets, no “one that got away.” Stacy wanted to ask him: Did he ever long for anybody? Did he ever lie there at night, feeling the distance, arms empty, with that feverlike sensation of abject loneliness in the chest? Did he ever cry over a woman?

  And then there was the day-to-day drudgery. Did he ever struggle to pay bills? Make a doctor’s appointment? Grocery shop? Keep a junker running? Did he lie awake some nights, worrying about how he would pay for his kid’s college or his parents’ nursing home?

  No, he played baseball. Sal took care of his taxes and expenses. The team carried his bags. He ate in hotels or in the clubhouse. His mother cooked for him in the off-season. Retirement didn’t change much; the clubhouse was now the country club.

  But now something was changing and she understood. His induction, his so-called sports immortality, was really the first step to obscurity. He knew it, and he was scared, and he wanted to be grounded. With her. A mirage from the past. The first thing that came along. Just like that. Easy, like everything else that came his way.

  “What, Stace? What?” he asked again.

  “Joe, sweetie, this is your thing. Not mine. You go. You give your speech. And when you come back, and you have some time to absorb it all—where you are in your life and where you think you want to be—I’ll be here, and we’ll see what’s what.”

  Grudeck fell asleep holding her, but woke when she, also sleeping, nestled down in his lap. Her head rested in his crotch, and he came up, throbbing. He stroked her hair, softly enough to not wake her but enough to put gentle pressure on his erection. He didn’t want to leave her, and go home alone. Since they started up, he felt lonelier than ever when he was by himself. He was afraid of the nights, when he returned to his empty condo, determined to keep faithful to her but with no warm body to cling to. All those women, even when he paid. They all staved off the isolation he’d always felt. But now his fear of being alone was becoming oppressive and left him short of breath at times. And now this moment, peaceful as it was, brought him closer to that fear. He would have to leave her house soon, and return home. Alone.

  He had decisions to make. About himself. About her. About the speech. But he didn’t know how. All his life, he went where his talent took him. He didn’t make decisions; he just followed along. When he decided to sign with the Red Sox, he never gave her a second thought. He wanted to wake her now and apologize, and confess that he was the one who created the distance, staying just out of reach. Not just from her, from everybody. From his high school friends to all the women to all the fans. He mastered being there, but not being there. He did it so long he wasn’t sure if there was a “there.” Stacy wanted more; he knew that. And now in the dark, with her head resting on him, he didn’t know if he had it. He felt empty inside and was clinging to the hope he could fill the hole with Stacy. But she had turned down Cooperstown. It was his moment, like she said, but she didn’t want to share it with him. Maybe it was her first step away. How did she say it? “We’ll see what’s what.” And who he was, or wasn’t. He was paralyzed by fear and life suddenly felt harder than ever. After a few minutes, the weight of Stacy’s head made his hips hurt and he squirmed to find a place of less pain.

  Soon, he would go home alone.

  He would go to Cooperstown alone.

  What did Sal say? The whole party, just for him.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When schools let out, the summer season at the farm museum officially began, and Horace was duty-bound to trudge up the grounds from the blacksmith shop several times a day to give the Cardiff Giant presentation. As much as he first dreaded it, it soon became his favorite part.

  It got him out of the smithy, a slab stone building where the masonry walls sweated in the summer humidity. Their natural coolness was overcome by the hearth fire when the bellows pushed the coals to metal-melting temperatures and transformed the shop into a smokehouse sauna.

  The walk to the Giant’s circus tent near the carousel gave Horace a chance to breathe deeply some fresh air, and let the valley breezes evaporate the perspiration from his shirt and cool his skin. The tent itself was bright and airy; the yellow and white stripes cast a light, ambient glow and the large doorway flaps at either end, when pulled back, let the Otsego Lake breezes flow.

  On a table near the entrance was a stack of Horace’s revised archival treatise, reworked with sharper teeth. He’d renamed it: “American Rubism: The Cardiff Giant and the Birth of Pop Culture.” Some visitors picked it up, scanned it, and put it back down. But more kept it, folding it into a back pocket or purse.

  Then there was the stone man himself, the historic relic, mute and unaware of all the fuss he had once caused. Horace developed a protective affinity for him, like a treasured possession. Sometimes he got to the tent early or stayed late, just to study him. He saw what Hull meant about the feet; large and heavily flat, as if they had walked thousands of miles on the earth’s unforgiving terrain, bearing the burden of the Giant’s great weight. He stared hard into the Giant’s face, and understood how the post–Civil War rubes might have wondered if there was once a man under that contoured-rock coat of armor. The Giant’s bed was a wooden platform, surrounded by a white picket fence, and his posture looked as uncomfortable as the oak planks that served as his mattress. His left arm was pinned to his side, his right crossed over his body, almost touching the opposite hip, which jutted in the air, making his left leg rest on top of his right. This was not a relaxed pose. It was twisted, like a soldier who had fallen where shot. At times Horace wanted to reach over and wrestle free the limbs of the Giant’s wrenched and contorted body, like some nursing home orderly trying to bring comfort to a geriatric patient in the final, fetal stages of Alzheimer’s. The anguished face, the “silent scream” George Hull described, added to that image.

  And yet, even as Horace told the story of fraud and deceit, visitors looked at the Giant as if he were once alive and they were laying eyes on a mummified human, like something out of the ancient Egyptian tombs. All these years later, Horace thought, the Giant still delivered George Hull’s original intent.

  “Step right up and see what was once the most famous man in America,” Horace told them. “A national sensation. Featured on page one of every major newspaper. People traveled miles—by foot, by horse-drawn carriage, by steam-powered train—just to see him. They lined up for country miles and city blocks and paid their hard-earned money to watch him . . . do absolutely nothing. In this respect, he was America’s first ‘reality’ star. Not only was he a celebrity with no talent, he wasn’t even alive!”

  This always got a few laughs from the crowd, especially the middle-aged.

  “Yes, folks, you are looking at the Cardiff Giant! The American Goliath! The Onondaga Colossus! And, yes, the Great American Hoax! The Leviathan of Flim-Flam! The Behemoth of Humbug! The year was 1869 . . . Does anyone know what happened in 1869?”

  And this being sports-driven Cooperstown, someone might raise their hand and mention the Cincinnati Red Stockings, or the first college football game.

  And Horace, being Horace, grabbed the moment to say, “Yes, 1869 was the birth of diversion, the American economy of entertainment as we know it today.”

  He checked off his evidence, supplied by the lovely Natalia, like a lawyer’s opening statement: baseball, football, Broadway theaters, the explosion of newspapers and magazines, tawdry gossip. A record year, fourfold, for patents of consumer products and gadgets; Edison’s cylinder phonograph and the creation of recorded music was coming, as was his kinetoscope to show moving pictures.

  “Our modern American entertainment industry was being hatched, lik
e some medieval dragon that would parch the countryside,” Horace concluded.

  “The year was 1869, and the nation began its march away from the simplicity of ‘God and country’ to the so-called sophistication of consumerism and city life. The figure that lies before you, the Cardiff Giant, the LaFayette Wonder, epitomizes all that. He is a small parable of a larger story.

  “The year was 1869 and a New York State cigar maker named George Hull wanted to make fools of the God-fearing, religious fundamentalists of the rural heartlands, so he tricked them into thinking this sculpture was a fossilized man from the biblical race of Goliath.”

  At this point, Horace studied the faces in the crowd; some would nod in approval, others would be impassively disguising their discomfort, as he delivered the punch line of “a first example of the nation shucking its Christian roots, a process that continues today.”

  Horace knew these were dangerous times to talk about religion publicly, so he was not surprised when he was called to Grundling’s office a week or so into his presentations.

  “Horace, I’ve gotten a few complaints,” Grundling said, while turning the Conestoga wagon over in his hands. “I’m sure you can guess why.”

  “Yep. I stepped on one of the third rails,” Horace said. “Religion. Race. Homosexuality. And to think, we were once a free-speech nation.”

  “This is a public venue,” Grundling said. “Well, not exactly, but we take public grants, so we have to be a little more . . . benign.”

  “And what about historical accuracy, John,” Horace said. “Doesn’t that count in the world of being . . . benign?”

  “Is it accuracy? Or are you getting into the gray area of interpretation?” Grundling said.

  Horace wasn’t in the mood.

  “You asked me to rewrite the paper. I did, and you approved it. The talk is based on the paper,” he said.