The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  “Why not?” Mike wept. “I’ve seen him every night, in my sleep, since 12 September 1898.”

  “‘O say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free, and the home—’”

  “Play ball!” the fans were shouting, “Play the God damn game!”

  It had worked. The General had turned sixty-two thousand savages back into baseball fans with the playing of the National Anthem! Now—if only he could step in behind the plate and call the last pitch! Or bring the field umpire in to take Mike’s place on balls and strikes! But the first was beyond what he was empowered to do under the Rules and the Regulations; and the second would forever east doubt upon the twenty-six strike-outs already recorded in the history books by Gamesh, and on the forty-one victories before that. Indeed, the field umpire had wisely pretended that he had not seen the last Gamesh pitch either, so as not to compromise the greatest umpire in the game by rendering the call himself. What could the General do then but depart the field?

  On the pitcher’s mound, Gil Gamesh had pulled his cap so low on his brow that he was in shadows to his chin. He had not even removed it for “The Star-Spangled Banner”—as thousands began to realize with a deepening sense of uneasiness and alarm. He had been there on the field since the last pitch thrown to Iviri—except for the ten minutes when he had been above it, bobbing on a sea of uplifted arms, rolling in the embrace of ten thousand fans. And when the last pack of celebrants had fled before the flying hooves, they had deposited him back on the mound, from whence they had plucked him—and run for their lives. And so there he stood, immobile, his eyes and mouth invisible to one and all. What was he thinking? What was going through Gil’s mind?

  Scrappy little Joe Iviri, a little pecking hitter, and the best lead-off man in the country at that time, came up out of the Tycoon dugout, sporting a little grin as though he had just been raised from the dead, and from the stands came an angry Vesuvian roar.

  Down in the Greenback dugout, the Old Philosopher considered going out to the mound to peek under the boy’s cap and see what was up. But what could he do about anything anyway? “Whatever happens,” he philosophized, “it’s going to happen anyway, especially with a prima donna like that one.”

  “Play!”

  Iviri stepped in, twitching his little behind.

  Gamesh pitched.

  It was a curve that would have shamed a ten-year-old boy—or girl, for that matter. While it hung in the clear September light, deciding whether to break a little or not, there was time enough for the catcher to gasp, “Holy aloha!”

  And then the baseball was ricocheting around in the tricky right-field corner, to which it had been dispatched at the same height at which it had been struck. A stand-up triple for Iviri.

  From the silence in Greenback Stadium, you would have thought that winter had come and the field lay under three feet of snow. You would have thought that the ballplayers were all down home watching haircuts at the barber shop, or boasting over a beer to the boys in the local saloon. And all sixty-two thousand fans might have been in hibernation with the bears.

  Pineapple Tawhaki moved in a daze out to the mound to hand a new ball to Gamesh. Immediately after the game, at the investigation conducted in General Oakhart’s office, Tawhaki—weeping profusely—maintained that when he had come out to the mound after the triple was hit, Gamesh had hissed at him, “Stay down! Stay low! On your knees, Pineapple, if you know what’s good for you!” “So,” said Pineapple in his own defense, “I do what he say, sir. That all. I figger Gil want to throw drop-drop. Okay to me. Gil pitch, Pineapple catch. I stay down. Wait for drop-drop. That all, sir, that all in world!” Nonetheless, General Oakhart suspended the Hawaiian for two years—as an “accomplice” to the heinous crime—hoping that he might disappear for good in the interim. Which he did—only instead of heading home to pick pineapples, he wound up a derelict on Tattoo Street, the Skid Row of Tri-City. Well, better he destroy himself with drink, than by his presence on a Patriot League diamond keep alive in the nation’s memory what came to be characterized by the General as “the second deplorable exception to the Patriot League’s honorable record.”

  It was clear from the moment the ball left Gil’s hand that it wasn’t any drop-drop he’d had in mind to throw. Tawhaki stayed low—even as the pitch took off like something the Wright Brothers had invented. The batter testified at the hearing that it was still picking up speed when it passed him, and scientists interviewed by reporters later that day estimated that at the moment it struck Mike Masterson in the throat, Gamesh’s rising fastball was probably traveling between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty miles per hour. In his vain attempt to turn from the ball, Mike had caught it just between the face mask and the chest protector, a perfect pitch, if you believed, as the General did, that Masterson’s blue bow tie was the bull’s-eye for which Gamesh had been aiming.

  The calamity-sized black headline MOUTH DEAD; GIL BANISHED proved to be premature. To be sure, even before the sun went down, the Patriot League President, with the Commissioner’s approval, had expelled the record-breaking rookie sensation from the game of baseball forever. But the indestructible ump rallied from his coma in the early hours of the morning, and though he did not live to tell the tale—he was a mute thereafter—at least he lived.

  The fans never forgave the General for banishing their hero. To hear them tell it, a boy destined to be the greatest pitcher of all time had been expelled from the game just for throwing a wild pitch. Rattled by a senile old umpire who had been catching a few Zs back of home plate, the great rookie throws one bad one, and that’s it, for life! Oh no, it ain’t Oakhart’s favorite ump who’s to blame for standin’ in the way of the damn thing—it’s Gil!

  Nor did the General’s favorite ump forgive him either. The very day they had unswathed the bandages and released him from the hospital, Mike Masterson was down at the league office, demanding what he called “justice.” Despite the rule forbidding it, he was wearing his blue uniform off the field—in the big pockets once heavy with P. League baseballs, he carried an old rag and a box of chalk; and when he entered the office, there was a blackboard and an easel strapped to his back. Poor Mike had lost not only his voice. He wanted Gamesh to be indicted and tried by the Tri-City D.A.’s office for attempted murder.

  “Mike, I must say that it comes as a profound shock to me that a man of your great wisdom should wish to take vengeance in that way.”

  STUFF MY WISDOM (wrote Mike the Mouth on the blackboard he had set before the General’s desk) I WANT THAT BOY BEHIND BARS!

  “But this is not like you at all. Besides, the boy has been punished plenty.”

  SAYS WHO?

  “Now use your head, man. He is a brilliant young pitcher—and he will never pitch again.”

  AND I CAN’T TALK AGAIN! OR EVEN WHISPER! I CAN’T CALL A STRIKE! I CAN’T CALL A BALL! I HAVE BEEN SILENCED FOREVER AT SEVENTY-ONE!

  “And will seeing him in jail give you your voice back, at seventy-one?”

  NO! NOTHING WILL! IT WON’T BRING MY MARY JANE BACK EITHER! IT WON’T MAKE UP FOR THE SCAR ON MY FOREHEAD OR THE GLASS STILL FLOATING IN MY BACK! IT WON’T MAKE UP (here he had to stop to wipe the board clean with his rag, so that he would have room to proceed) FOR THE ABUSE I HAVE TAKEN DAY IN AND DAY OUT FOR FIFTY YEARS!

  “Then what on earth is the use of it?”

  JUSTICE!

  “Mike, listen to reason—what kind of justice is it that will destroy the reputation of our league?”

  STUFF OUR LEAGUE!

  “Mike, it would blacken forever the name of baseball.”

  STUFF BASEBALL!

  Here General Oakhart rose in anger—“It is a man who has lost his sense of values entirely, who could write those two words on a blackboard! Put that boy in jail, and, I promise you, you will have another Sacco and Vanzetti on your hands. You will make a martyr of Gamesh, and in the process ruin the very thing we all love.”

  HATE! wrote
Mike, HATE! And on and on, filling the board with the four-letter word, then rubbing it clean with his rag, then filling it to the edges, again and again.

  On and on and on.

  Fortunately the crazed Masterson got nowhere with the D.A.—General Oakhart saw to that, as did the owners of the Greenbacks and the Tycoons. All they needed was Gil Gamesh tried for attempted murder in Tri-City, for baseball to be killed for good in that town. Sooner or later, Gamesh would be forgotten, and the Patriot League would return to normal …

  Wishful thinking. Gamesh, behind the wheel of his Packard, and still in his baseball togs, disappeared from sight only minutes after leaving the postgame investigation in the General’s office. To the reporters who clung to the running board, begging him to make a statement about his banishment, about Oakhart, about baseball, about anything, he had but five words to say, one of which could not even be printed in the papers: “I’ll be back, you ———!” and the Packard roared away. But the next morning, on a back road near Binghamton, New York, the car was found overturned and burned out—and no rookie sensation to be seen anywhere. Either the charred body had been snatched by ghoulish fans, or he had walked away from the wreck intact.

  GIL KILLED? the headlines asked, even as the stories came in from people claiming to have seen Gamesh riding the rails in Indiana, selling apples in Oklahoma City, or waiting in a soup line in L.A. A sign appeared in a saloon in Orlando, Florida, that read GIL TENDING BAR HERE, and hanging beside it in the window was a white uniform with a green numeral, 19—purportedly Gil’s very own baseball suit. For a day and a night the place did a bang-up business, and then the sallow, sullen, skinny boy who called himself Gil Gamesh took off with the contents of the register. Within the month, every bar in the South had one of those signs printed up and one of those uniforms, with 19 sewed on it, hanging up beside it in the window for a gag. Outside opera houses, kids scrawled, GIL SINGING GRAND OPERA HERE TONIGHT. On trolley cars it was GIL TAKING TICKETS INSIDE. On barn doors, on school buildings, in rest rooms around the nation, the broken-hearted and the raffish wrote, I’LL BE BACK, G.G. His name, his initials, his number were everywhere.

  Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Gil Gamesh. In the winter of ’33–’34, men and women and even little children, worried for the future of America, were talking about one or another, if not all three. What was the world coming to? What catastrophe would befall our country next?

  The second deplorable exception to the honorable record of the Patriot League was followed by the third in the summer of 1934, when it was discovered that the keystone combination that had played so flawlessly behind Gamesh the year before had been receiving free sex from Tattoo Street prostitutes all season long, in exchange for bobbling grounders, giving up on liners, and throwing wide of the first-base bag. Olaf and Foresti, both married men with children, and one of the smoothest double-play duos in the business, were caught one night in a hotel room performing what at first glance looked like a trapeze act with four floozies—caught by the Old Philosopher himself—and the whole sordid story was there for all to read in the morning papers. They hadn’t even taken money from the gamblers, money that at least could have bought shoes for their kiddies; no, they took their payoff in raw sex, which was of use to nobody in the world but their own selfish selves. How low could you get! By comparison the corrupt Black Sox of 1919 fame looked like choirboys. Inevitably the Greenbacks became known as “the Whore House Gang” and fell from third on the Fourth of July to last in the league by Labor Day.

  And whom did the fans blame? The whoremongers themselves? Oh no, it was the General’s fault. Banishing Gil Gamesh, he had broken the morale of Olaf and Foresti! Apparently he was supposed to go ask their forgiveness, instead of doing as he did, and sending the profligates to the showers for life.

  And that wasn’t the end of it: panic-stricken, the Greenback owners instantly put the franchise on the market, and sold it for a song to the only buyer they could find—a fat little Jew with an accent you could cut with a knife. And, to hear the fans tell it, that was General Oakhart’s fault too!

  And Mike the Mouth? He went from bad to worse and eventually took to traveling the league with a blackboard on his back, setting himself up at the entrance to the bleachers to plead his hopeless cause with the fans. Kids either teased him, or looked on in awe at the ghostly ump, powdered white from the dozen sticks of chalk that he would grind to dust in a single day. Most adults ignored him, either fearing or pitying the madman, but those who remembered Gil Gamesh—and they were legion, particularly in the bleachers—told the once-great umpire to go jump in a lake, and worse.

  BUT I COULD NOT CALL WHAT I DID NOT SEE!

  “You couldn’t a-seed it anyway, you blind bat!”

  NONSENSE! I WAS TWENTY-TWENTY IN BOTH EYES ALL MY LIFE! I HAD THE BEST VISION IN BASEBALL!

  “You had it in for the kid, Masterson—you persecuted him to death right from the start!”

  TO THE CONTRARY, HE PERSECUTED ME!

  “You desoived it!”

  HOW DARE YOU! WHY DID I OF ALL UMPIRES DESERVE SUCH INSULT AND ABUSE?

  “Because you wuz a lousy ump, Mike. You wuz a busher all your life.”

  WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE FOR THAT SLANDEROUS REMARK?

  “Common knowledge is my evidence. The whole world knows. Even my little boy, who don’t know nothin’, knows that. Hey, Johnny, come here—who is the worst ump who ever lived? Tell this creep.”

  “Mike the Mouth! Mike the Mouth!”

  NONSENSE! SLANDER! LIES! I DEMAND JUSTICE, ONCE AND FOR ALL!

  “Well, you’re gettin’ it, slow but sure. See ya, Mouth.”

  * * *

  When General Oakhart was advised in January of ’43 that the Mundy brothers had reached an agreement with the War Department to lease their ball park to the government as an embarkation camp, he knew right off that it was not an overflow of patriotic emotion that had drawn those boys into the deal. They were getting out while the getting was good—while the getting was phenomenal. After all, if the fortunes of the Patriot League had been on the wane ever since the expulsion of Gamesh, they surely couldn’t be expected to improve with a world war on. In the year since Pearl Harbor, the draft had cut deep into the player rosters, and by the time the ’43 season began, the quality of major league baseball was bound to be at its all-time low. With untried youngsters and decrepit old-timers struggling through nine innings on the diamond, attendance would fall even further than it had in the previous decade, with the result that two or even three P. League teams might just have to shut down for the duration. And with that, who was to say whether the whole enterprise might not collapse?… So, it was to guard against this disastrous contingency (and convert it into a bonanza) that the Mundy brothers had leased their beautiful old ball park to the federal government to the tune of fifty thousand dollars a month, twelve months a year.

  The Mundy brothers had inherited the Port Ruppert franchise from their illustrious dad, the legendary Glorious Mundy, without inheriting any of that titan’s profound reverence for the game. Right down to the old man’s ninety-second year, sportswriters who in his opinion hadn’t sufficient love and loyalty for the sport were wise to keep their distance, for Glorious Mundy was known on occasion to take a swing at a man for treating baseball as less than the national religion. He was a big man, with bushy black eyebrows that the cartoonists adored, and he could just glare you into agreement, if not downright obedience. When he died, they buried him according to his own instructions in deep center field, four hundred eighty-five feet from home plate, beneath a simple headstone whose inscription gave silent testimony to the humility of a man whose eyebrows alone would have earned him the reputation of a giant.

  GLORIOUS MUNDY

  1839–1931

  He had something to do with

  changing Luke Gofannon from

  a pitcher into a center-fielder

  It was clear from the outset that to his heirs baseball was a business, to be run l
ike the Mundy confectionary plant, the Mundy peanut plantations, the Mundy cattle ranches, and the Mundy citrus farms, all of which had been their domain while Glorious was living and devoting himself entirely in his later years to the baseball team. The very morning after their father had died of old age in his box behind first, the two sons began to sell off, one after another, the great stars of the championship teams of the late twenties—for straight cash, like so many slaves, to the highest bidder. The Depression, don’t you know … they were feeling the pinch, don’t you know … between excursions with their socialite wives to Palm Beach and Biarritz!

  In 1932, when they took one hundred thousand dollars from the Terra Incognita Rustlers for the greatest Mundy of them all, Luke “the Loner” Gofannon, a tide of anger and resentment swept through Port Ruppert that culminated in a march all the way down Broad Street by thousands of school-kids wearing black armbands that had been issued to them at City Hall. The parade was led by Boss Stuvwxyz (and organized by his henchmen), but somewhere around Choco-Chew Street (named for the Mundy candy bar), somebody remembered to give Stuvwxyz his cut, and so he was not present when the police broke up the rally just before it reached the ball park.

  Luke the Loner—gone! The iron man who came up in 1916 as a kid pitcher, and then played over two thousand games in center field for the Ruppert club, scored close to fifteen hundred runs for them, and owned a lifetime batting average of .372—the fella who was the Mundys to three generations of Rupe-it rootas! Unlike Cobb or Ruth, Luke was a silent, colorless man as far as personality went, but that did not make him less of a hero to his fans. They argued that actually he could beat you more ways than Ruth, because he could run and steal as well as hit the long one; and he could beat you more ways than Cobb, because he could hit the long one as well as drive you crazy on the base paths and race around that center-field pasture as though it weren’t any bigger than a shoebox. Oh, he was fast! And what a sight at bat! In his prime, they’d give him a hand just for striking out, that’s how beautiful he was, and how revered. Luke kept a book on every pitcher in the business and he studied it religiously at night before putting out his light at 9 P.M. And as he said—on one of the few occasions in his career that he said anything—he loved the game so much, he’d have played without pay. Surprising thing was that the Mundy brothers didn’t take him up on that, instead of selling his carcass for a mere hundred grand.