It began with a lawn sprinkler. A simple lawn sprinkler. It was on an October day in 1960. Eunice was washing the dinner dishes. Outside, daylight lingered, Henry played in the backyard, and Jerome sat on the back steps, staring at everything, seeing nothing. Or so Eunice thought.
She did not hear Jerome come into the kitchen. Since the bankruptcy, he had a way of moving around the house like an odorless, gray vapor. Eunice seldom heard him come or go; she had to be looking at him to know he was there. This particular day, however, she sensed his presence and turned. There he was, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and back porch, looking at her. She stared back at him and waited.
He cleared his throat. “Come on out here for a minute.” These were the first words he had spoken to her since before Henry was born.
Jerome talked at work, of course, but as little as possible, and the townsfolk, knowing who he had been and what he had endured, put up with his brutal frankness. In a perverse way, Jerome’s use of the truth to flay his listeners actually kept the Steeles from starving. The ranchers and farmers knew Jerome would always tell them exactly what was wrong with a used vehicle or piece of farm equipment. “This pickup’s a pile o‘ rusty crud,” he’d growl. Or, “This here reaper ain’t worth cow chips.” Increasingly, his customers trusted him, so that when he grumbled, “This heap’ll run fairly good if you get the owner of this two-bit outfit to put in a new drive shaft afore you putcha money down,” they believed him, and bought from him.
But he never spoke to Eunice at home. Now, here he was, asking her to come outside.
“What is it?” she asked.
He turned, went out, and stood on the back steps, staring at Henry playing in the backyard grass.
Eunice followed Jerome outside and for a puzzled minute stood ‘beside him, alternately looking at nun and then at the target of his fascination—Henry, playing with the lawn sprinkler.
“What is it?” she said again. “If you don’t want the baby to play with that thing, tell him to stop. Or I’ll tell him. He plays with it all the time.”
Jerome stared at her as if she were blind. “Just look,” he said.
Again, Eunice looked at Henry. This time she saw what Jerome saw. It was amazing.
The lawn sprinkler had three arms on it. At the end of each arm were water-holes. When the water was on, the pressure of the liquid coursing through the hose and out the water-holes caused the arms to rotate so fast they could hardly be seen.
Now, however, the water was off and little Henry sat with his legs spread wide, the lawn sprinkler on the grass between them. The child’s game consisted of grasping one of the sprinkler arms in a small hand, deftly whirling it so fast that the arms rotated in a blur, looking down at the blur and—flick!—catching two of the sprinkler arms in each of his unbelievably quick hands, as cleanly as a toad’s tongue captures a fly in flight. While his parents stood and watched, the absorbed baby performed his feat unerringly, time after time. Spin. Catch. Spin. Catch. So rapt was the child’s concentration that he was unaware of their presence. His gray-blue eyes never left the spuming sprinkler.
Jerome whispered, “I tried it myself. Couldn’t even do it once. When I reached in to catch them arms, they bumped my fingers ever’time. He catches it clean. Ever-time.” Henry did it again. Spin. Catch. “Catches it clean as a whistle. Ever‘ blamed time!”
Eunice gaped at her husband. When Elijah first saw the chariot of fire, she thought, he must’ve looked like Jerome does right now. Never saw a man so taken.
Searching for a way to continue the conversation, she said stupidly, ‘That’s cute, J’rome.“
“Cute?” He took his eyes off Henry just long enough to wither her with a glance. “I never seen coordination like that in man life. Hands n‘ eyes. Workin’ perfect together. I never seen reactions like that there boy’s got.”
Sudden anger drove her to snap, “That there boy, as you call him, has a name. His name is Henry, J’rome.” The pain in his gray face silenced her. She hated herself for an instant. Jerome had spoken to her. The Lord only knew what torment he had overcome in order to finally break his silence, to share this moment with her. And here she was about to drive him away again. His eyes—they were the same color as Henry’s—told her he was sorry.
She smiled at him. For a moment the muscles in both their necks tightened, their throats ached, they could not swallow. They fought hot tears. And then he forced himself to smile back, a rusty, aching smile.
Jerome went out in the yard and sat in the grass next to Henry, who stopped playing and studied his daddy. It was the first time Jerome had ever displayed human interest in his son. Confused, the child looked to his mother. Jerome gently reached into the baby’s lap and twirled the sprinkler arms. Henry’s eyes went from the sprinkler to Jerome’s face and back again to the sprinkler. And back to Jerome’s face. Suddenly, the little boy laughed, delighted with his burly new playmate. Henry peered down at the blur in his lap, intent as a chickenhawk upon a hen, then—flick!—his small hands shot out and caught two of the sprinkler arms with absolute precision. Henry laughed again. Jerome laughed and ruffled his son’s hair.
Eunice went back into the house and stuffed a dish-towel against her mouth to keep them from hearing her sobs. For another half-hour, as she peeped at them through the kitchen window, Jerome and Henry played their silly game with the sprinkler. She wept the entire time. No one heard; no one knew.
They’ve found each other, she thought. I’m so happy. Maybe now Jerome and I will be like we were.
As she admitted later she had not learned her lesson about happiness.
==========
A couple of months after the lawn-sprinkler incident, Jerome brought Henry an armful of cheap dime-store games of skill for Christmas. A set of small bowling pins with a plastic ball. Tiddlywinks. A junky little pinball machine. A child’s oilcloth-covered punching bag that stood on one flexible metal leg connected to a masonite base; the light bag, when struck, bounced to the floor, then came swiftly up again. A clown’s face inside a round glass-topped case. Where there should have been eyes and teeth, the clown’s face had holes, and the tiny steel balls in the case had to be rolled around until all the holes were filled.
Henry was delirious with excitement. He adored games, perhaps because he was unbelievably skillful at them. It took him less than twenty seconds to fill the clown’s eyes ‘and teeth with the steel balls. Each time he swung at the bouncing punching bag, he connected solidly with his small fists. At first Eunice was unimpressed with this feat, until Jerome bellowed at his uncomprehending wife, “Okay, then, you try it, Eunice,” She tried it. Several tunes she missed completely, and when she did manage to connect with the swooping bag, it was only glancingly. From that moment, she looked at her manchild with the knowledge that his reflexes were prodigious.
She realized that Henry was extraordinary in another way, too. His attention span was phenomenal. The child never seemed to be bored. Hour after hour, he would play with his tiddlywinks, snapping one colored button after another into the plastic cup. Seldom missing. When he did miss, she noticed, he would try the muffed shot again and again, until he hit five, ten tunes in a row. Only then would he shoot from another distance.
And when Jerome was nearby, Eunice saw, Henry would look at his daddy after each try, as if success was meaningless without his daddy’s smile of approval.
==========
Basketball.
When he had mastered all the store-bought games Jerome brought home, the child created games. One Saturday night, when Henry was only five, he and Jerome watched a basketball game on tv. When it was over, Henry found a wire clothes hanger, bent it into a circle, closed his bedroom door, climbed up on a chair, and jammed the hook part of the hanger tightly into the crack at the top so that the newly formed hoop stuck out. For a basketball, that first day, the child took an odd sock of his daddy’s and stuffed it tightly with newspaper. Later, he shot anything he could get his chubby ha
nds on through that hanger hoop: oranges, old tennis balls, marbles, acorns, paper grocery bags crumpled into balls.
Jerome watched Henry’s addiction to the hoop without comment, listened silently to the tales Eunice related ‘ about Henry’s daily, virtually nonstop basketball game at the bedroom door. One Saturday, a few weeks later, Jerome came home from work with a large mail-order carton from Sears. In the box were an honest-to-good-ness backboard, a basket and a basketball.
When Eunice came home from church the next morning, the backboard and basket were mounted over the entrance to the garage. They are still there.
==========
Why basketball? Why not baseball, or football, or track?
It could very easily have been baseball, but Jerome had an argument with Henry’s little league coach. When Henry was eight he tried out for the Elroy little league team, even though all the other boys were from ten to twelve years of age.
Henry’s first day out, the coach made him the team’s pitcher. Jerome and Henry were elated. At dinner that night, for the first time in years, Jerome chatted cheerfully. Slowly and painfully, he was shaking off the humiliation of going under, was becoming a human being again. He still did not talk much, never showed open affection to Eunice or Henry; he still slept on the sofa. But Jerome doted on his son. He played catch with him for hours, or watched Him shoot baskets all day on a Sunday, participated in just about ‘any silly game Henry devised—throwing pennies into coffee cups, or crumpled paper balls into an ashcan. And if Jerome was not warm to Eunice, at least he was no longer hostile. Those were pleasant years for her; there was peace in the house. But she was unaware that she was losing her son.
The trouble began when the little league coach tried to teach Henry to throw a curveball. The child had already delighted the coach with his fastball, as well as all the old-timers who gathered those pleasant April afternoons at the red clay diamond to watch the children work out.
And then Jerome’s best, and only, friend came to one of the work-outs. The man, aside from ‘being the town drunkard, was a part-time mechanic at the auto agency where Jerome sold used vehicles. In his youth, Jerome’s friend had been a baseball pitcher of talent, enough to earn him a contract with the White Sox. When he observed the little league coach teaching eight-year-old Henry how to throw a curve, the sot sought out Jerome, pulled him ’aside and whispered fervently, “See what that fool-is doin‘ to your boy? Curveballs!”
He shook Jerome to emphasize each bourbon-tainted word. “Don’t let your younker throw no curveballs!” he grated. “Not ‘til he’s growed up and his bones is strong and set! I ruined my arm with curveballs, J’rome! Tha’s why I ain’t in the Bigs right now! Curveballs what did it! They’ll ruin your boy’s arm for sure! For ’always!”
Jerome marched onto the field, placed himself between his startled, wide-eyed son and the coach, and barked, “I don‘ wan’ Henry here throwin‘ none o’ them curveballs.”
“Why not, Mr. Steele?” the surprised coach asked.
“Don‘ make no diff’rence why not.”
“Well, lookee here, Mr. Steele, I’m the coach of this team, and—”
“You gonna teach Henry to throw a curveball?”
“Well, sir, I might not, or I might. What I’d like to find out from you is what—”
“Come on, Henry,” Jerome said.
He led the now solemn child off the field. At age eight, Henry Steele said goodbye to baseball.
When Henry was nine, he went out for peewee football. And, yes, the coach made Henry his quarterback immediately. Henry could pass a football thirty yards right through a tire hanging from a tree limb, and he was so shifty of foot, possessed such a good sense of balance, that he was hard to tackle. Jerome knocked off work to watch the peewee team’s first scrimmage of the season. Henry was tackled on an early play and another young player accidentally stomped on his hand. Jerome marched into the field, examined his son’s superficial cut, wrapped the hand in his kerchief, and led Henry off the field and away from football forever.
As for track, Henry simply did not run that fast. He was fast, but not blindingly fast. His strengths were quickness, finesse, precision, brains. He could fake and feint. He could throw a ball and hit what he meant to hit. His hands, his feet, his entire ‘body coordinated with his eyes and mind.
In short, one game in particular was his destiny.
Basketball.
==========
A week or so after Jerome aborted Henry’s football career, he bought a book, written by a famous coach and published by a sports magazine, on how to play basketball.
The ‘book was written like a military manual, complete with detailed instructions and step-by-step drawings, diagrams, charts and photographs.
Every week Jerome and Henry took up a different page. How to dribble. How to pass. How to rebound. How to shoot free throws. Jump shots. Hook shots. How to hold your wrist, your elbow, your shoulder. How to pivot. How to cut. Set a pick. A screen. How to weave. Glide. Drive the baseline. Press.
The book was like a foreign language to Eunice when she rifled through it, but it was like a bible to her two men. Their basketball “court,” the driveway in the backyard, was the crossroad of her activities as she traversed her domain—from clothesline to garbage cans to garden, from lawntending to gossiping over the back fence. Her kitchen window was a ringside seat overlooking the “court.” Even in her living room and bedroom, as she watched tv or tried to lose herself in a library book, the resounding thump-thump-thump of the dribbled basketball jarred her. The scrapes and squeaks of Henry’s sneakers as he cut and pivoted grated her spine and made goosebumps on her skin, the sudden woinggggg of the ball hitting the basket’s rim echoed inside her head.
Yet she took pleasure in what Jerome and Henry were doing. Now the Steeles were a family. Her husband and son had this strong bond between them, a cause in common. When Jerome was home the house was no longer oppressive with hate. The place buzzed with energy, with activity.
She even took pleasure in the uncanny hold Jerome had over Henry. Though at times it hurt her feelings that the child treasured one small nod from his daddy more than all her loving hugs and kisses, she rationalized by thinking it was’because she had always approved of everything Henry did, while Jerome approved of perfection only. How that boy wants to please his daddy! she thought. The week Henry and Jerome undertook the left-handed dribble, Henry spent four hours every day after school for five days, plus all day Saturday—almost thirty relentless hours of thump-thump-thump—just to show Jerome on Sunday morning how perfectly he had mastered bouncing a ball with his left hand. When Jerome reacted to Henry’s proud demonstration with a small smile and nod, Eunice thought the boy looked as if he had just found the golden grail.
As Eunice told her neighbor one day over the back fence, “when I hear on the radio and tv about those hippies burnin‘ and riotin’ on the streets of Chicago durin‘ the Democratic convention, and cursin’ at the police, and takin‘ dope, and despisin’ their parents, I thank God Henry is the way he is. My son might be only ten, but it’s easy to see he loves his daddy and would never hurt him. Always honor and obey him. And, after all, what more can any mama want of her son?”
==========
By 1970, however, when Henry was twelve, Eunice was sincerely convinced that both her husband and son were mentally ill. Basketball had become their obsession. It was seemingly all they lived for, spoke about, thought about. In every kind of weather, there was Henry after school, dribbling and shooting in their backyard driveway, going one-on-one with anyone who would play him. In the evenings, when Jerome came home from work, he would sit on the back porch, over-coated in winter, short-sleeved in summer, and watch his son practice. Occasionally, Jerome would position himself where Henry requested so the boy could practice rebounding. Jerome’s height advantage was invaluable to the twelve-year-old Henry, who would strain and stretch to jump higher than his father could reach flatfooted.
&nbs
p; The cold war between Eunice and Jerome over Henry ended and the hot war began one freezing February afternoon. On that day she nagged Henry into coming indoors and forsaking his basketball practice. When Jerome came home that night, Eunice defiantly informed him that it was too cold for the boy to be outdoors.
Jerome’s reaction confirmed Eunice’s feelings about his mental state. He was furious. He scolded her in front of the child the way he had once dressed down city-born Army privates. Eunice fought back, expressing her doubts about Jerome’s sanity, her fears about his influence on Henry’s normality.
Henry had never before seen or heard his parents quarrel. The child’s frightened eyes brimmed with tears.
“Honest, Ma, I’ll wear warm clothes. Please let me practice,” he said.
Eunice relaxed her bantam-rooster stance and knelt before the child to reason with him. But one glance at his pleading grayblue eyes and she knew she might as well try to reason with a shot deer.
“I’ll wear mittens, Ma,” Henry sniffled, sensing victory.
She hugged and kissed him. “You promise?”
“Oh, yes’m.”
She knew that if she fought further she would lose more than the battle. Her -son’s love was at stake.
“All right. If you wear mittens.”
Henry gave her the sweetest hug he had given her in years.
And Henry did wear mittens when he practiced basketball outdoors. He wore them all winter, everytime he played. He wore them all summer as well. That was because Henry and Jerome had heard a basketball star say in a tv interview that playing basketball with gloves on gives a player a “feel” for the ball, an ability to control it by balance and the ball’s own momentum, rather than by tactile adhesion. It was said, years later, that Henry’s practicing with mittens on was instrumental in making him the best ballhandler ever to play Texas high-school basketball.
That was Eunice’s only contribution ever to his career.
==========
Segal, Jerry Page 3
