by Rick Wilber
As the game progressed, Fidel’s own personal game, the game of pitcher and batter, settled into a pattern. Fidel mowed down the batters after Bush in the order with predictable dispatch, but fell into trouble each time he faced the top of the order, getting just enough outs to bring Bush up with men on base and the game in the balance. He did this four times in the first seven innings.
Each time Bush struck out.
In the middle of the seventh, after Bush fanned to end the inning, Mays sat down next to Fidel on the bench. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Mays was the only player on the Giants whose stature rivaled that of the Franchise. Fidel, whose success came as much from craft as physical prowess, could not but admit that Mays was the most beautiful ballplayer he had ever seen. “I’m shutting out the Washington Senators in the fourth game of the World Series,” Fidel said.
“What’s this mickey mouse with Bush? You trying to make him look bad?”
“One does not have to try very hard.”
“Well, cut it out—before you make a mistake with Killebrew or Sievers.”
Fidel looked him dead in the eyes. “I do not make mistakes.”
The Giants entered the ninth with a 3—0 lead. Fidel got two quick outs, then gave up a single to Sievers and walked Lemon and Killebrew to load the bases. Bush, at bat, represented the lead run. Schmidt called time and came out again. Rigney hurried out from the dugout, and Mays, to the astonishment of the crowd, came all the way in from center. “Yank him,” he told Rigney.
Rigney looked exasperated. “Who’s managing this team, Willie?”
“He’s setting Bush up to be the goat.”
Rigney looked at Fidel. Fidel looked at him. “Just strike him out,” the manager said.
Fidel rubbed up the ball and threw three fastballs through the heart of the plate. Bush missed them all. By the last strike, the New York fans were screaming, rocking the Polo Grounds with a parody of the Washington chant: “Sen-a-TOR, Sen-a-TOR, BUSH, BUSH, BUSH!” and exploding into fits of laughter. The Giants led the series, 3—1.
9
George made the cabbie drop him off at the corner of Broadway and Pine, in front of the old Trinity Church. He walked down Wall Street through crowds of men in dark suits, past the Stock Exchange to the offices of Brown Brothers, Hardman. In the shadows of the buildings the fall air felt wintry. He had not been down here in more years than he cared to remember.
The secretary, Miss Goode, greeted him warmly; she still remembered him from his days at Yale. Despite Prescott Bush’s move to the Senate, they still kept his inner office for him, and as George stood outside the door he heard a piano. His father was singing. He had a wonderful singing voice, of which he was too proud.
George entered. Prescott Bush sat at an uptight piano, playing Gilbert and Sullivan:
Go, ye heroes, go to glory
Though you die in combat glory.
Ye shall live in song and story.
Go to immortality!
Still playing, he glanced over his shoulder at George, then turned back and finished the verse:
Go to death, and go to slaughter,
Die, and every Cornish daughter With her tears your grave shall water.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
George was all too familiar with his father’s theatricality. Six feet, four inches tall, with thick salt-and-pepper hair and a handsome, craggy face, he carried off his Douglas Fairbanks imitation without any hint of self-consciousness. It was a quality George had tried to emulate his whole life.
Prescott adjusted the sheet music and swiveled his piano stool around. He waved at the sofa against the wall beneath his shelf of golfing trophies and photos of the Yale Glee Club. “Sit down, son. I’m glad you could make it. I know you must have a lot on your mind.”
George remained standing. “What did you want to see me about?”
“Relax, George. This isn’t the dentist’s office.”
“If it were, I would know what to expect.”
“Well, one thing you can expect is to hear me tell you how proud I am.”
“Proud? Did you see that game yesterday?”
Prescott Bush waved a hand. “Temporary setback. I’m sure you’ll get them back this afternoon.”
“Isn’t it a little late for compliments?”
Prescott looked at him as calmly as if he were appraising some stock portfolio. His bushy eyebrows quirked a little higher. “George, I want you to sit down and shut up.”
Despite himself, George sat. Prescott got up and paced to the window, looked down at the street, then started pacing again, his big hands knotted behind his back. George began to dread what was coming.
“George, I have been indulgent of you. Your entire life, despite my misgivings, I have treated you with kid gloves. You are not a stupid boy; at least your grades in school suggested you weren’t. You’ve got that Phi Beta Kappa key, too—which only goes to show you what they are worth.” He held himself very erect. “How old are you now?”
“Thirty-five.”
Prescott shook his head. “Thirty-five? Lord. At thirty-five you show no more sense than you did at seventeen, when you told me that you intended to enlist in the Navy. Despite the fact, that the secretary of war himself, God-forbid-me,
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, had just told the graduating class that you, the cream of the nation’s youth, could best serve your country by going to college instead of getting shot up on some Pacific Island.”
He strolled over to the piano, flipped pensively through the sheet music on top. “I remember saying to myself that day that maybe you knew something I didn’t. You were young. I recalled my own recklessness in the first war. God knew we needed to lick the Japanese. But that didn’t mean a boy of your parts and prospects should do the fighting. I prayed you’d survive and that by the time you came back you’d have grown some sense.” Prescott closed the folder of music and faced him.
George, as he had many times before, instead of looking into his father’s eyes looked at a point beyond his left ear. At the moment, just past that ear he could see half of a framed photograph of one of his father’s singing groups. Probably the Silver Dollar Quartet. He could not make out the face of the man on the end of the photo. Some notable businessman, no doubt. A man who sat on four boards of directors making decisions that could topple the economies of six banana republics while he went to the club to shoot eight-handicap golf. Someone like Prescott Bush.
“When you chose this baseball career,” his father said, “I finally realized you had serious problems facing reality. I would think the dismal history of your involvement in this sport might have taught you something. Now, by the grace of God and sheer luck you find yourself, on the verge of your middle years, in the spotlight. I can’t imagine how it happened. But I know one thing: you must take advantage of this situation. You must seize the brass ring before the carousel stops. As soon as the Series is over, I want you to take up a career in politics.”
George stopped looking at the photo. His father’s eyes were on his. “Politics? But, Dad, I thought I could become a coach.”
“A coach?”
“A coach. I don’t know anything about politics. I’m a baseball player. Nobody is going to elect a baseball player.”
Prescott Bush stepped closer. He made a fist, beginning to be carried away by his own rhetoric. “Twenty years ago, maybe, you would be right. But, George, times are changing. People want an attractive face. They want somebody famous. It doesn’t matter so much on what they’ve done before. Look at Eisenhower. He had no experience of government. The only reason he got elected was because he was a war hero. Now you’re a war hero, or at least we can dress you up into a reasonable facsimile of one. You’re Yale educated, a brainy boy. You’ve got breeding and class. You’re not bad looking. And thanks to this children’s game, you’re famous—for the next two weeks, anyway. So after the Series we strike while the iron’s hot. You retire fr
om baseball. File for Congress on the Republican ticket in the third Connecticut district.”
“But I don’t even live in Connecticut.”
“Don’t be contrary, George. You’re a baseball player; you live on the road. Your last stable residence before you took up this, this—baseball—was New Haven. I’ve held an apartment there for years in your name. That’s good enough for the people we’re going to convince.”
His father towered over him. George got up, retreated toward the window. “But I don’t know anything about politics!”
“So? You’ll learn. Despite the fact I’ve been against your playing baseball, I have to say that it will work well for you. It’s the national game. Every kid in the country wants to be a ballplayer, most of the adults do, too. It’s hard enough for people from our class to overcome the prejudice against money, George. Baseball gives you the common touch. Why, you’ll probably be the only Republican in the Congress ever to have showered with a Negro. On a regular basis, I mean.”
“I don’t even like politics.”
“George, there are only two kinds of people in the world, the employers and the employees. You were bom and bred to the former. I will not allow you to persist in degrading yourself into one of the latter.”
“Dad, really, I appreciate your trying to look out for me. Don’t get me wrong, gratitude’s my middle name. But I love baseball. There’s some big opportunities there, I think. Down in Chattanooga I made some friends. I think I can be a good coach, and eventually I’ll wear a manager’s uniform.”
Prescott Bush stared at him. George remembered that look when he’d forgotten to tie off the sailboat one summer up in Kennebunkport. He began to wilt. Eventually his father shook his head. “It comes to me at last that you do not possess the wits that God gave a Newfoundland retriever.”
George felt his face flush. He looked away. “You’re just jealous because I did what you never had the guts to do. What about you and your golf? You, you— dilettante! I’m going to be a manager!”
“George, if I want to I can step into that outer office, pick up the telephone, and in fifteen minutes set in motion a chain of events that will guarantee you won’t get a job mopping toilets in the clubhouse.”
George retreated to the window. “You think you can run my life? You just want me to be another appendage of Senator Bush. Well, you can forget it! I’m not your boy anymore.”
“You’d rather spend the rest of your life letting men like this Communist Castro make a fool of you?”
George caught himself before he could completely lose his temper. Feeling hopeless, he drummed his knuckles on the window sill, staring down into the narrow street. Down below them brokers and bankers hustled from meeting to meeting trying to make a buck. He might have been one of them. Would his father have been any happier?
He turned. “Dad, you don’t know anything. Try for once to understand. I’ve never been so alive as I’ve been for moments—just moments out of eleven years—on the ball field. It’s truly American.”
“I agree with you, George—it’s as American as General Motors. Baseball is a product. You players are the assembly-line workers who make it. But you refuse to understand that, and that’s your undoing. Time eats you up, and you end up in the dustbin, a wasted husk.”
George felt the helpless fury again. “Dad, you’ve got to—”
“Are you going to tell me I have to do something, George?” Prescott Bush sat back down at the piano, tried a few notes. He peeked over his shoulder at George, unsmiling, and began again to sing:
Go and do your best endeavor,
And before all links we sever,
We will say farewell for ever
Go to glory and the grave!
“For your foes are fierce and ruthless,
False, unmerciful and truthless.
Young and tender, old and toothless,
All in vain their mercy crave.
George stalked out of the room, through the secretary’s office, and down the corridor toward the elevators. It was all he could do to keep from punching his fist through the rosewood paneling. He felt his pulse thrumming in his temples, slowing as he waited for the dilatory elevator to arrive, rage turning to depression.
Riding down he remembered something his mother had said to him twenty years before. He’d been one of the best tennis players at the River Club in Kennebunkport. One summer in front of the whole family, he lost a championship match. He knew he’d let them down, and tried to explain to his mother that he’d only been off his game.
“You don’t have a game,” she’d said.
The elevator let him out into the lobby. On Seventh Avenue, he stepped into a bar and ordered a beer. On the TV in the corner, sound turned low, an announcer was going over the highlights of the Series. The TV switched to an image of some play in the field. George heard a reference to “Senator Bush,” but he couldn’t tell which one of them they were talking about.
10
A few of the pitchers, including Camilo Pascual, the young right hander who was to start game five, were the only others in the clubhouse when George showed up. The tone was grim. Nobody wanted to talk about how their season might be over in a few hours. Instead they talked fishing.
Pascual was nervous; George was keyed tighter than a Christmas toy. Ten years of obscurity, and now hero one day, goat the next. The memory of his teammates’ hollow words of encouragement as he’d slumped back into the dugout each time Castro struck him out made George want to crawl into his locker and hide. The supercilious brown bastard. What kind of man would go out of his way to humiliate him?
Stobbs sauntered in, whistling. He crouched into a batting stance, swung an imaginary Louisville Slugger through Kralick’s head, then watched it sail out into the imaginary bleachers. “Hey, guys, I got an idea,” he said. “If we get the lead today, let’s call time out.”
But they didn’t get the lead. By the top of the second, they were down 3—0. Pascual, on the verge of being yanked, settled down. The score stayed frozen through six. The Senators finally got to Jones in the seventh when Allison doubled and Killebrew hit a towering home run into the bullpen in left center: 3—2, Giants. Meanwhile the Senators’ shaky relief pitching held as the Giants stranded runners in the sixth and eighth and hit three double plays.
By the top of the ninth the Giants still clung to the 3—2 lead, three outs away from winning the Series, and the rowdy New York fans were gearing up for a celebration. The Senator dugout was grim, but they had the heart of the order up: Sievers, Lemon, Killebrew. Between them they had hit ninety-four home runs that season. They had also struck out almost three hundred times.
Rigney went out to talk to Jones, then left him in, though he had Stu Miller up and throwing in the bullpen. Sievers took the first pitch for a strike, fouled off the second, and went down swinging at a high fastball. The crowd roared.
Lemon went into the hole 0-2, worked the count even, and grounded out to second.
The crowd, on their feet, chanted continuously now. Fans pounded on the dugout roof, and the din was deafening. Killebrew stepped into the batter’s box, and George moved up to the on-deck circle. On one knee in the dirt, he bowed his head and prayed that Killer would get on base.
‘He’s praying!” Castro shouted from the Giants’ dugout. “Well might you pray, Sen-a-tor Bush!”
Killebrew called time and spat toward the Giants. The crowd screamed abuse at him. He stepped back into the box. Jones went into his windup. Killebrew took a tremendous cut and missed. The next pitch was a change-up that Killebrew mistimed and slammed five hundred feet down the left-field line into the upper deck—foul. The crowd quieted. Jones stepped off the mound, wiped his brow, shook off a couple of signs, and threw another fastball that Killebrew slapped into right for a single.
That was it for Jones. Rigney called in Miller. Lavagetto came out and spoke to George. “All right. He won’t try anything tricky. Look for the fastball.”
George nodd
ed, and Lavagetto bounced back into the dugout. “Come on, George Herbert Walker Bush!” Consolo called. George tried to ignore the crowd and the Giants’ heckling, while Miller warmed up. His stomach was tied into twelve knots. He avoided looking into the box seats where he knew his father sat. Politics. What the blazes did he want with politics?
Finally, Miller was ready. “Play ball!” the ump yelled. George stepped into the box.
He didn’t wait. The first pitch was a fastball. He turned on it, made contact, but got too far under it. The ball soared out into left, a high, lazy fly. George slammed down his bat and, heart sinking, legged it out. The crowd cheered, and Alou circled back to make the catch. George was rounding first, his head down, when he heard a stunned groan from fifty thousand throats at once. He looked up to see Alou slam his glove to the ground. Miller, on the mound, did the same. The Senators’ dugout was leaping insanity. Somehow, the ball had carried far enough to drop into the overhanging upper deck, 250 feet away. Home run. Senators lead, 4—3.
“Lucky bastard!” Castro shouted as Bush rounded third. Stobbs shut them down in the ninth, and the Senators won.
11
SENATOR BUSH SAVES WASHINGTON! the headlines screamed. MAKES CASTRO SEE RED. They were comparing it to the 1923 Series, held in these same Polo Grounds, where Casey Stengel, a thirty-two-year-old outfielder who’d spent twelve years in the majors without doing anything that might cause anyone to remember him, batted .417 and hit home runs to win two games.
Reporters stuck to him like flies on sugar. The pressure of released humiliation loosened George’s tongue. “I know Castro’s type,” he said, snarling what he hoped was a good imitation of a manly snarl. “At the wedding he’s the bride, at the funeral he’s the dead person. You know, the corpse. That kind of poor sportsmanship just bums me up. But I’ve been around. He can’t get my goat because of where I’ve got it in the guts department.”
The papers ate it up. Smart money had said the Series would never go back to Washington. Now they were on the train to Griffith Stadium, and if the Senators were going to lose, at least the home fans would have the pleasure of going through the agony in person.
