by R. D. Rosen
“When we were skinny-dipping,” Mickey was saying now, “you stayed out in the water longer than we did, and Rudy and I wrapped ourselves in towels and sat talking on the rocks. I asked him if he had a girlfriend, and I remember he said, ‘Thousands,’ and I told him to be serious, and then he said, ‘Yeah,’ and he got all wistful. Then he said, ‘It’s not working out.’ I asked him if the problem was that he didn’t really love her, and he said, ‘I love her, all right. It’s just that I’m not the only one who does.’”
“He could’ve been talking about you, Mick.”
“That’s what Ms. Modesty here thought, too. I said to him, ‘You’re not trying to tell me something, are you, Rudy?’ And he said, ‘Slavin, if I thought I had half a chance in the world, but I don’t, so I’m afraid you’re not the lucky girl. Besides,’ he said, ‘the Professor’ll take better care of you than I ever could.’”
“Maybe it was someone in the Providence chapter of the Rudy Furth Fan Club,” Harvey said.
“You’re going to make me cry again,” Mickey said. She glanced at the alarm clock over Harvey’s shoulder. “Oh, Jesus, I’ve got to go.” She rose to her knees on the bed. “I’m doing the eleven o’clock. Let me take your car, will you?”
She dressed in the living room, where they had discarded their clothes, and came back in, plowing a brush through her thick hair. “I know when things are sinking in and when they’re not,” she said, kissing him too maternally on the forehead. “And this isn’t sinking in yet.”
At eleven, Harvey sat naked in the living room watching the news. The first story was Rudy. They ran some videotape of him in action during a recent game, some shots of the clubhouse and the whirlpool, and a pro forma interview with Detective Linderman. Harvey’s attention wandered during the reports of the tax cuts, the debate over a forthcoming vote on the sale of arms to a tribal Middle Eastern nation, the local run on air conditioners, and five minutes of a man in a red sports jacket standing in front of a map that had a picture of a thermometer with a face. Finally, Mickey appeared in her lavender blouse, her hands folded neatly in front of her. A slide of a smiling Rudy Furth was chroma-keyed on the screen behind her shoulder.
“When they talk about violence in professional sports,” she began reading off the TelePrompTer at a somber, easy tempo, “they almost never talk about the game of baseball, and they almost never talk about murder. But today witnessed a violent tragedy in baseball that will be remembered and mourned long after all the football injuries and ice hockey brawls have been forgotten. Providence Jewel relief pitcher Rudy Furth was found murdered this morning in the team’s clubhouse at Rankle Park.”
Harvey cringed at the memory of the whirlpool, of how unfair he had been to Rudy. “Sadly,” Mickey continued, “other athletes throughout the years have died as a result of the sports they played, and a few have even been murdered. But the death of Rudy Furth is different: it was brutal, and so far it appears to have been meaningless. I knew Rudy Furth, and I grieve at the untimely death of a fine man and a fine athlete. Let us all hope there is a swift solution to this ghastly crime.”
Harvey had to hand it to her. She must have composed the commentary in her head on her way to the studio. Now she turned to camera two.
“In light of today’s event, other sports news seems insignificant, but here are the scores in major league baseball action.” And then Mickey Slavin, not looking in the least like she had left the bed of the Providence Jewels’ center fielder little more than an hour before, spoke of Reds and Cubs and Dodgers and Phillies, Twins and Royals and Yankees and A’s.
“PUT FELIX ON, WILL you?” Harvey said when Dunc answered the clubhouse phone the next morning. It was an off-day on the schedule, and Harvey didn’t know if Felix expected the team for practice.
Felix’s voice had the consistency of hot cereal. “I thought we’d take some B.P. at noon. Just a light workout. It might do everyone some good, but if you’re not in the mood, Professor, take the day off and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you at noon. How’re you holding up, Felix?” With him, it was never an idle question. After nine consecutive losing seasons managing five different major league teams, Felix Shalhoub was not a well man. In May he had disappeared from the club for three weeks. Buzzy Stanfill, the Jewels’ public relations director, had informed the press that Felix was home with a severe pulmonary infection, but anyone who had played under him had the right to speculate that Felix’s ailments were located not in his lungs, but in his head and his liver.
Marshall Levy had handed the reins over to Campy Strulowitz in the interim, but Campy was soon joined in the dugout by Frances Shalhoub. Levy liked her—and her master’s degree in business administration from Columbia—and apparently, as a courtesy to Felix, he had agreed to let her be closer than usual to the team in Felix’s absence. The press reacted with amusement, then indignation, and for a couple of weeks stories on the order of “First Woman Manager in Major Leagues?” enlivened the sports pages in the cities where Providence played. But since Frances had been in the public relations business for many years, the prevailing rumor was that her presence in the dugout was nothing more than a badly needed publicity stunt. She denied, to all who asked, that she was even remotely connected with any managerial decisions.
After Felix returned to the team, looking gaunter than usual and complaining pointedly of a lingering cough, Frances remained in the dugout during the games, charting pitches on a clipboard. The commissioner, who fancied himself something of a feminist, was unbothered by this breach of protocol, and only a few of the players were indiscreet enough to kick about it, and none of them to the press. There was no reason to believe Felix found in his wife’s presence in the dugout anything but consolation.
Felix’s spinelessness, an object of concealed scorn among the ball players, was the quality that had kept him in the majors so long, despite his penchant for losing; front offices liked a man they could push around. Harvey enjoyed a closer relationship with Felix than most of the players did, and he was afraid that Rudy’s murder would unhinge him.
“I’m in a distressed posture, Professor,” Felix was saying. “How could anyone do such a thing? I’ve seen some sick things in my years in baseball, but this is the sickest. I can’t take it, Professor. I haven’t had an easy time of it in the majors. Nine seasons, I won five hundred six games and lost nine-fifty-two. It’s a miracle I’m still here. For that I can thank a lot of people. But that’s beside the point. The point, Professor, is that in those nine seasons, I’ve never known anything like this. Someone murdered my goddamn relief pitcher. It’s sick. I ask myself, why did it have to be me? Why me? I’m fifty-three years old. I’m too old to have my goddamn relief pitcher murdered in my clubhouse.” He caught his breath. “How’re you holding up?”
“I’m sick about it, Felix.”
“I can’t sleep, Professor. I’ve been in a baseball posture my whole life. Why couldn’t it have happened to a manager with a winning record?” He was shouting, and Harvey held the receiver away from his ear. “This team doesn’t get along too good as it is. Until they find who murdered Rudy, everybody’s going to be running around looking at everybody else sideways.”
“Felix, take it easy. Don’t take it personal. You’re talking like you were to blame.”
“You think I had something to do with it? Is that what—”
“Felix! I said it’s got nothing to do with—”
“That’s all I need, Professor. My mind can’t take anymore.”
“Listen to me, Felix. It had nothing to do with you. The cops’ll take care of it. Life’ll go on. Get a grip on yourself.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice subsiding. “All right. I’m getting a grip on myself. Let’s reach down and play them one at a time. All right, let’s bear down.”
When Harvey arrived at the clubhouse half an hour later, Dunc was sitting at the long table in the middle of the locker room where the players sat before games to p
lay cards or autograph balls for disadvantaged children and men at the V.A. hospital. He was ironing strips of black tape on the left sleeves of the Jewels’ uniforms. While Harvey slipped into his practice uni, three teammates were talking behind him. The conversation smelled of agents and lawyers.
“I was talking to a friend of mine on the White Sox, who shall remain nameless,” Happy Smith, the Jewels’ backup catcher, was saying, “and he was telling me that his agent got him a clause in his contract that every time he gets an extra base hit in the last three innings, it’s a cool five grand. That’s what I need, an agent like that, so I can get a little gravy when I re-sign.”
“You’ll be lucky to re-sign, period,” Steve Wilton, the right fielder, said. “Don’t you ever get tired of riding the bench and wish you were doing something useful in life?”
“When I re-sign,” Happy said, “I know one thing I’m going to get in my contract. I’m going to get a clause that says I don’t ever have to be within fifty feet of you.”
“Man, this organization just nickels-and-dimes you,” Les Byers, the third baseman, broke in. “When I send my shirts out with Dunc, they come back with heavy starch and broken buttons. I’m gonna call my agent and tell him I want a clause next year that says light starch, man, and no broken buttons. Those shirts don’t come back right, I want them replaced. Then I want me some incentives like this guy on the Sox, but I mean real incentives. I want it in writing that any time I got to leave my feet to make a play at third, it’s a couple thousand bucks right there. Hey, man, if I’m going to dirty myself up, I want to be compensated, hear? And then, like if I get hit with a pitch, man, risking my life up there, I want a new car with a quadrophonic tape deck. I’m serious about this.”
“You’re forgetting the masseuses, Lester,” Happy said, laughing. “We got to have masseuses in every hotel room on the road. How they expect us to play good ball if we don’t have masseuses?”
Harvey stood next to them, shaking his head. “What’s the matter, Professor?” Steve Wilton said. “You need some incentives, too?”
“You guys are really something,” Harvey said, pulling a terry-cloth sweatband on his wrist.
“Hey, man, everyone deserves a spoonful of the gravy,” Les said.
“I mean, one of your teammates was murdered two days ago, and you guys are throwing a party.”
“We were just goofing around,” Les said. “No harm, my man, no harm.”
“I didn’t kill the guy,” Steve said.
Harvey bent down to tie his spikes. “You guys are assholes.”
“We didn’t mean anything,” Happy said.
“Look,” Harvey said, “I know you guys didn’t think Rudy was the greatest thing since free agency, but the man was murdered in our clubhouse. Do any of you guys find that weird, let alone a little disturbing?”
“Yeah, man, I find that weird,” Les said, “and that’s why I’m trying not to think about it. Look, Professor, I’m sorry your roomie was killed—”
“My roomie? Les, you really surprise—Look, it’s not like Rudy was some total stranger. The least you guys could do is—Oh, screw it.”
“We told the cops everything we know,” Steve said, with his hands out. “What do you want us to do, wear black?”
When Harvey stepped into the batting cage to take his cuts off Tony Cantalupa, he wanted something to be different. But the park was the same, the pocking of wood against horsehide, the smacking of horsehide against leather, the pitchers running wind sprints along the warning track, their spikes kicking up small clumps of dirt behind them. There was no sign that Rudy was missing. Harvey stroked a couple of Tony’s pitches to center and watched them tail lazily.
Campy Strulowitz leaned on the aluminum frame of the cage behind him. “Bring it to him, Tony,” he yelled to Cantalupa on the mound. “Come to this guy with some heat, Tone, hum-a-now, be a hitter, Harv, be a stick up there, you’re the kid.” Harvey slammed one through the hole at short. “Way to come to the ball, way to come.” Harvey flattened a couple more to left, then lofted one into the left field seats. “Just a bingle, babe, just a bingle.” Harvey moved over to the left side of the plate and sliced one down the left field line. He jumped on the next one, too, and the ball arched down the right field line, climbing as if under its own power, and curling around the 339 FT sign at the foul pole. He was smoking. Tony mopped his face with the back of his glove and reached into the basket for more baseballs. Campy was still at it. “That’s the sweet,” he said, “that’s the stroke, babe, way to be, you’re the kid.”
Harvey topped the next two pitches feebly toward the mound and turned to Campy. “Not today, Campy,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”
“All right, babe,” Campy said, “no chatter, big batter, no chatter, you’re the one,” and then he fell silent.
After Harvey took a few more of Tony’s pitches—big, fat, sweeping curves now—and hoisted them deep against the fences, Les Byers called out, “Hey, man, don’t hurt the fences. Save something for us two-thirty hitters, hear?”
On his way back to the dugout, Harvey was startled to see Ronnie Mateo in a first-row box seat, eyes closed and sallow face tilted toward the midday sun. He was wearing a muted green leisure suit with five-inch lapels and chrome buttons. It looked more like a ’58 Buick than an article of clothing.
One of Ronnie’s eyelids eased open, and Harvey heard him say in a low voice as he passed, “That was a horrible thing happened to your roommate, Professor.”
Randy Eppich, the Jewels’ starting catcher, was sitting on the bench with Bob Lassiter, babbling about the effect of the murder on “the team as a whole.” He sounded as if he could have been speaking about the effect of groin pull to a key player.
At the end of the bench, filing her nails, was Frances Shalhoub. She was a tall woman, in a navy skirt, white blouse, and spectator pumps. Her long brown hair was streaked with blond and her face had a fine, disdainful beauty, something designed to be admired rather than touched. Her wide green eyes were set above severe cheekbones. Her nostrils, thin as shells, always looked flared. She reminded Harvey of a well-groomed Afghan hound with earrings.
To explain her thirteen-year marriage to Felix, you had to believe that Frances at twenty-seven had been a naive or desperate young woman, neither of which seemed likely, or that Felix at forty possessed charms no longer apparent. Because she looked younger than her years and Felix older, together they gave the impression of a kindly father with his stunning oldest daughter proudly in tow. They had no children. All the men on the team guessed much more about the Shalhoubs’ marriage than they actually knew.
She was a businesslike woman. For the last three years, while Felix managed the New York Mets, Frances ran a public relations firm in Manhattan, selling it over the winter in order to accompany her husband to Providence. She had helped Marshall Levy and the public relations director, Buzzy Stanfill, devise some publicity gimmicks for the team. On Ring Night, the first five thousand fans to pass through the turnstiles received a Pro-Gem ring with black and green stones—the team colors. Fifteen thousand had shown up, but after that, attendance dropped again.
Twice during the summer, the Shalhoubs had invited the players and their wives to barbecues at their rented home in Barrington. At the first, in May, Frances and Harvey had found themselves alone in the garden. Harvey, indicating her simple black dress and thin gold belt, had said, “You look like an expensive Dunhill lighter in that outfit.”
“That’s a better line than I expect from a baseball player.” She smiled and swirled the ice in her gin and tonic.
“That’s what college will do for you.”
“You know, Harvey,” she said, “I just want to say that we’re glad to have you.”
“I’m glad to be here,” he said. “It’s a nice house.”
“No,” she said, grazing his arm with her free hand, “I mean on the team. I can’t for the life of me understand why the Red Sox didn’t protect you in the draft.
How many years were you with them, five? All right, for them you may not have been the hitter you’ve turned out to be for us, but you had consistent RBI production, you know how to advance a baserunner, and you’ve got a gun for an arm out there in center field. You weren’t having problems with the owners, were you?”
Harvey shook his head and finished chewing a boiled shrimp.
“You’re good for at least four, five more years, barring injury, of course,” she continued. “This is what I want to say. We’re an expansion team, and frankly, I don’t care much if we win a whole lot of ball games this first year. I’d be happy with sixty, tickled with seventy. Now, what I want to see is Felix begin building a solid franchise for next year and the years after that. We need a solid nucleus. Every winning team has that. And you’re a big part of the nucleus. If you ever lose a step or two in center, we can always move you to left, and when you’re old and gray”—she actually winked at him—“we can always keep first base open for you. You know, I can almost see you as one of baseball’s elder statesmen, bringing along the younger guys.”
Harvey picked at the deviled egg on the cocktail napkin in his left hand. It was before Felix’s absence from the team, and since Harvey had only the vaguest idea about her interest in baseball or in the Jewels in particular, her speech came as a refreshing surprise.
“All right,” she said, “you’re part of the nucleus. You and a few others. I can level with you, can’t I? I like what I see of Chuck at short—I can never pronounce his last name. I think Randy is a major league catcher. We have to be strong up the middle. Every winning team is strong where it counts. Dan Van Auken is part of the nucleus. What is he, twenty-four, twenty-five? In a year or two, he’ll be one of the premier lefties in the league. We’ve already got Bobby Wagner. They’re all part of the nucleus.
