by Philip Roth
Probably the fans themselves could not have explained what exactly it was that held them there sometimes five and ten minutes on end watching Chico suffer so. It was not pity—Chico could quit and go back to Mexico if he wanted, and do down there whatever it was Mexicans did. Nor was it affection; he was, after all, a spic, closer even to a nigger than the Frenchman, Astarte. Nor was it amusement, for after three hours of watching the Mundys on what even for them was an off day, you didn’t have the strength to laugh anymore. It would seem rather that they were transfixed, perhaps for the first time in their lives, by the strangeness of things, the wondrous strangeness of things, by all that is beyond the pale and just does not seem to belong in this otherwise cozy and familiar world of ours. With the sun all but down and the far corners of the stadium vanishing, that noise he made might have originated in the swaying jungle foliage or in some dark pocket of the moon for the sense of fear and wonder that it awakened in men who only a moment earlier had been anticipating their slippers and their favorite chair, a bottle of beer and the lovely memories they would have forever after of all those runners they’d seen galloping around third that afternoon. “Hear it?” a father whispered to his young son. “Uh-huh,” said the little boy, shifting on his little stick legs. “Hear that? It can give you the goose bumps. Chico Mecoatl—you can tell your grandchildren you heard him make that noise. Hear it?” “Oh, Poppy, let’s go.”
So home they went (home, to their homes!), leaving Chico, who hardly ever got anybody out anymore, to fill the bases two times over, and the relentless home team to clear them two times over, before, mercifully, the sun set, the field disappeared, and the disaster being played out now for the sake of no one, was called on account of darkness.
3
IN THE WILDERNESS
3
Containing a description of how it is to have your home away from home instead of having it at home like everybody else. Mister Fairsmith informs the team of the moral and spiritual benefits that can accrue from wretchedness. With predictable cynicism, Big John elucidates the advantages of homelessness. Frenchy forgets where he is. An insinuating incident in which a man dressed like a woman takes the field against the Mundys. A lively digression on the Negro Patriot League, the famous owner of the league, and a brief description of some fans, containing a scene which will surprise many who believe Branch Rickey the first major league owner courageous enough to invite colored players into organized baseball. The Mundys arouse the maternal instinct in three Kakoola spinsters and succumb to their wiles with no fight at all. Big John and Nickname visit the pink-’n-blue-light district, wherein Nickname gets what he is looking for, thus concluding the visit to Kakoola, in which city the Mundys will suffer more than the humiliation of their manliness before the downfall is complete. The Mundys are followed on a swing around the league and the particular manner in which they are intimidated in each of the league cities is described, including the train ride in and out of Port Ruppert, which, though short, may draw tears from some eyes. A victory for the Mundys in Asylum turns into another defeat, containing, for the curious, a somewhat detailed account of baseball as it is played by the mad. In this chapter the fortunate reader who has never felt himself a stranger in his own land, may pick up some idea of what it is like.
SWINGING AROUND THE LEAGUE for the first time in 1943, the Mundys were honored on the day of their arrival in each of the six P. League cities with a parade down the main commercial thoroughfare and a pregame ceremony welcoming them to the ball park. Because of war shortages, the vehicle which picked them up at the train station was, as often as not, borrowed for the hour from the municipal sanitation department. The twenty-five Mundys, having changed into their gray “away” uniforms on the train, and carrying their street clothes in suitcases or paper bags, would climb aboard to be driven from the station down the boulevard to their hotel, while over the loudspeaker fixed to the truck came the voice and guitar of Gene Autry doing his rendition of “Home on the Range.” The record had been selected by General Oakhart’s secretary, not only because the words to the song seemed to her appropriate to the occasion, but because it was reputed to be President Roosevelt’s very own favorite, and would thus strengthen the idea that the fate of the Mundys and of the republic were inextricably bound together. Weary to death of the whole sordid affair, General Oakhart consented, for all that he would have been happier with something time-honored and to the point like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Though it had been hoped that people in the streets would join in singing, most of the pedestrians did not even seem to realize what was going on when a city garbage truck drove past bearing the team that had finished last in the league the previous year. Of course, the tots out shopping with their mothers grew excited at the sound of approaching music, expecting, in their innocence, that they were about to see Santa or the Easter bunny; but excitement quickly faded and in some instances even turned to fear when the truck appeared, jammed full of men, most of them old and bald, waving their baseball caps around in the air, and singing, each in his own fashion—
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Judging from the racket they made, it couldn’t be said that the Mundys were unwilling to give it the old college try, at least at the outset. Obviously a refuse van (as Mister Fairsmith preferred to call it) was not their idea of splendor anymore than it is yours or mine; still, scrubbed clean, more or less, and tricked up with red, white, and blue bunting, it was not really as bad as Hothead could make it sound when he started in, as per usual, being outraged. “Why, it looks to me like they are carting us off to the city dump! It looks to me as if they are about to flush us down the bowl!” cried Hot. “It looks to me like a violation of the worst sort there is of our inalienable human rights such as are guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence to all men including Ruppert Mundys!”
Yet, as the Mundys knew better than anyone in the game, there was a war on, and you had to make do with the makeshift for a while. It just did not help to complain. And hopefully, said Jolly Cholly T., hopefully the more they sacrificed, the sooner the war would be over and they would be home—and not home on the range either, but back in New Jersey, where they had been beloved and where they belonged.
Around the league the city officials were of course free to welcome the Mundys with a speech of their own composition; invariably, however, they chose to follow to the letter the text that had been composed for the pregame ceremony by General Oakhart’s office, which also supplied the papier-mâché “key to the city” that was awarded at home plate to Mister Fairsmith, in behalf of the local fans. “Welcome Ruppert Mundys,” the speech began, “welcome to ———, your home away from home!” Here the word “PAUSE” appeared in the prepared speech, capitalized and tucked between parentheses. Though the officials always correctly inserted the name of their fair city in the blank provided, they repeatedly read into the microphone at home plate the parenthetical direction intended to allow time for the fans to rise to their feet to applaud, if they should be so inclined. Fortunately nobody in the ball park ever seemed to notice this error; either they took the word for an electronic vibration coming over the p.a. system, or they weren’t paying that much attention to the dronings of the nameless functionary in a double-breasted suit and pointed black shoes who had been dispatched by the mayor to take his place at the ceremonies. All the fans cared about was the ball game, and seeing the Mundys clobbered by the hometown boys. The Mundys, on the other hand, had become so accustomed to the ritual, that when, midway through the first road trip, a Kakoola city official neglected to make “PAUSE” the twelfth word in his welcoming speech, a contingent of disgruntled Mundys, led by Hot Ptah, accused the city of Kakoola of deliberately treating them as inferiors because they happened to be a homeless team. In point of fact, by actually pau
sing in his speech rather than just saying “PAUSE,” Bridge and Tunnel Commissioner Vincent J. Efghi (brother to Boss Efghi, the mayor), had managed to evoke a ripple of applause from the crowd; nothing thunderous, mind you, but at least a response somewhat more sympathetic than the Mundys had received in those cities where the address was delivered by the local ward heeler, parenthetical instructions and all.
After the game that day, with Hot and his disciples still riled up, Mister Fairsmith decided to hold a meeting in the Mundy locker room, and give the team their first sermon of the season on the subject of suffering; for the first time since they had hit the road, he attempted to instruct them in the Larger Meaning of the experience that had befallen them, and to place their travail within the context of human history and divine intention. He began by reminding them that even as they were playing their baseball games on the road, American boys were bleeding to death in jungles halfway around the globe, and being blown to bits in the vast, uninhabited skies. He told them of the agony of those who had been crushed beneath the boot heel of the enemy, those millions upon millions who had lost not just a home in the world, but all freedom, all dignity, all hope. He told them of the volcanic eruptions that had drowned entire cities in rivers of fire in ancient times, and described to them earthquakes that had opened up beneath the world, delivering everything and everyone there was, like so much mail, into the churning bowels of the earth; then he reminded them of the sufferings of Our Lord. By comparison to such misery as mankind had known since the beginnings of time, what did it matter if the Bridge and Tunnel Commissioner of bridgeless and tunnelless Kakoola had neglected to read even half the welcoming speech to the Mundys? Solemn as he could be—and as he daily grew more venerable, that was very solemn indeed—Mister Fairsmith asked what was to become of them in the long hot months ahead, if they could not bear up beneath the tiny burden that they had had to shoulder thus far? What if they should have to partake of such sufferings as was the daily bread of the wretched of the wretched of the earth? “Gentlemen, if it is the Lord’s will,” he told them, “that you should wander homeless through this league, then I say leave off disputing with the Lord, and instead seize the opportunity He has thrust upon you to be strong, to be steadfast—to be saved.”
“Horse shit!” snorted Hothead, after Mister Fairsmith had passed from the locker room in meaningful silence.
“Ah, forget it, Gimp,” said Big John Baal. “It is only a word they left out of that speech there, you know. I mean it ain’t exactly a sawbuck, or even two bits. If it was dough, that would mean somethin’. But a word, why it don’t mean a thing that I could ever see. A whole speech is just a bunch of words from beginning to end, you know, that didn’t fool nobody yet what’s got half a brain in his head. Ain’t that right, Damur?” he said, tossing his jock in the face of the fourteen-year-old whose guardian and protector he’d become. “A nose by any other name would smell as much sweat, ain’t that so, niño? You fellers care too much about what folks say. Don’t listen is my advice.”
“You don’t get it, Baal,” snarled Hot. “You never do. Sure it starts with only a word. But how it ends is with them doin’ whatever they damn well please, and kicking all your dreams down the drain.”
“Hot,” said John, leering suggestively, “maybe you is dreamin’ about the wrong sort of things.”
“Is justice the wrong thing? Is gettin’ your rights like last licks the wrong thing?”
“Aww,” said Big John, “it’s only a game, for Christ’s sake. I’m tellin’ ya: it don’t mean nothin’.”
“To you nothin’ means nothin’.”
“Worryin’ over shit like ‘justice’ don’t, I’ll tell you that much. I just do like I want anyway.”
“Justice ain’t shit!” Hot told him. “What they are doin’ to us ain’t fair!”
“Well, like Ulysses S. tole you boys, that’s good for you that it ain’t fair. That’s gonna make champs out of you, if not in this here season, then in the next. Wait’ll next year, boys! Haw! Haw!” Here he took a slug out of the liniment bottle that sat at the bottom of his locker. “You want me to tell you boys somethin’? This bein’ homeless is just about the best thing that has ever happened to you, if you only had the sense to know it. What do you care that you don’t have a home and the hometown fans that go with it? What the hell is hometown fans but a bunch of dodos who all live in the same place and think that if we win that’s good for ’em and if we lose it ain’t? And then we ain’t none of us from that there town to begin with—why, it could just as easy say PORT SHITHOLE across your uniform as the name of the place you only happen to be in by accident anyway. Ain’t that so? Why, I even used to pretend like that’s what it did say, years ago, instead of RUPPERT. I’d look down at my shirt and I’d say to myself, ‘Hey, Jawn, ain’t you lucky to be playin’ for PORT SHITHOLE and the glory of the SHITHOLE fans. Boy, Jawn, you sure do want to do your best and try real hard so you can bring honor to the SHITHOLE name.’ You damn fools,” he said, “you ain’t from Rupe-it! You never was and you never would be, not if you played there a million years. You are just a bunch of baseball players whose asses got bought up by one place instead of the other. Come on, use your damn heads, boys—you were visitors there just like you are visitors here. You are makin’ there be a difference where there ain’t.”
The Mundys went off to the shower in a silence that bespoke much confusion. First there had been Hothead to tell them that the word dropped from the welcoming speech was only the overture to the slights, insults, and humiliations that were to be visited upon them in the months to come. Then there was Mister Fairsmith to warn them that slights and insults weren’t the half of it—they were shortly to begin to partake of the suffering that was the daily bread not just of the wretched of the earth, but of the wretched of the wretched. And now Big John informing them that the Rupe-it rootas, for whom they had all begun to long with a feeling more intense than any was even willing to admit, had been some sort of mirage or delusion. Of course, that the son of Spit and the grandson of Base should speak with such contempt for their old hometown hardly came as a surprise to any of his teammates; having been raised in the sordid netherworld of Nicaraguan baseball, he no more knew the meaning of “loyalty” than of “justice” or “pride” or “fair play.” Still, on the heels of Hothead’s warning and Mister Fairsmith’s apocalyptic prophecy, it was not reassuring to be told that the place to which you longed to return had never been “yours” to begin with.
“Well,” cried Mike Rama, over the noise of the shower, “if we ain’t never been from Rupe-it, then the Reapers ain’t from Kakoola, either. Or the Rustlers from Terra Inc. Or the Blues from Independence. Or nobody from nowhere!”
“Right!” cried Nickname. “They’s as worse off as we is!”
“Only then how come,” said old Kid Heket, toweling himself down, “how come the Kakoolas is here in Kakoola and we ain’t there in Rupe-it, or goin’ back there all season long? How come instead of headin’ back to Jersey, we are off to Independence and then all around the league to here again, and so on and so forth for a hundred and fifty-four games?”
“But what’s the difference, Wayne,” said Nickname, who was continually torn between parroting Big John, whose blasphemous nature had a strong hold upon a fourteen-year-old away from home for the first time in his life, and siding as any rookie would with the rest of the players against the Mundy renegade—“so what if we ain’t goin’ back there? It’s more fun this way anyway. Stayin’ in all them hotels, eatin’ hamburgers whenever you want—winkin’ at them girls in the lobby! And all them waitresses in them tight white un-ee-forms—wheee!”
“Nickname my lad, soon you will discover that it ain’t ‘fun’ either way,” said the old-timer, “it’s only less confusin’, that’s all, wakin’ up and knowin’ where you are instead of where you ain’t.”
So, not much happier than when they went off to the shower, they returned to the locker room, there to be confronted by Fre
nchy, standing fully dressed before his locker, though not in his baggy brown suit and beret. No, the Frenchman was off in never-never land again. Half a dozen times already this season, one or another of the Mundys had come upon Frenchy making faces at himself in the washroom mirror, a grown man in need of a shave doing what little kids do when they want to look like something out of Charlie Chan—jutting his upper teeth out over his lower lip and holding back the flesh at the corner of either eye with an index finger. “Hey!” his teammate would shout, to wake him out of the trance he was in. “Hey, number one son!” and, caught in the traitorous act, Frenchy would run to hide in a toilet stall. What a character! Them foreigners!
But now it was not funny faces he was making in the mirror; no, nothing funny about this at all. There was Frenchy, dressed in the creamy white flannel uniform that none of them had worn all year, the Mundy home uniform, with the faint red chalk stripe and RUPPERT scrawled in scarlet across the chest, the final “t” ending in a flourish nearly as grand as John Hancock’s. And what was so sad about it was how splendid he looked. The Mundys were stunned—so accustomed had they become to seeing one another in the drab gray “away” uniforms, they had nearly forgotten how stylish they used to be. No wonder they were beloved by the Rupe-it rootas, even in the worst of times. Just look how they’d looked only the season before!
