Pagan Heaven

by Ruth Rouff

  “I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than call headquarters,” he said.

  After the hubbub of the store closing, Jeannie relocated back to North Carolina and began working for a Kmart down there. I felt it was high time to put my BA in English to use, so I turned down Dave’s offer to manage at another Kmart. Instead I went to work for a book distribution company and then got a job as an apprentice teacher with the School District of Philadelphia. I went to Saint Joseph’s University after the school day to earn my certification and master’s in education.

  I don’t know what was more grueling—working for Kmart or teaching in inner-city schools. I used to joke that retail would be fun were it not for the customers. I sometimes thought education would be fun, without the kids. I now teach part-time at a GED program and write part-time for an educational publishing company. I have written two nonfiction books geared to young adults, which the company has published. I haven’t seen Jeannie in seventeen years.

  Recently, however, the sight of all those paperback romances laid out upon tables at Bargain Book Warehouse led me to Google her. I found her on Facebook. In her photo, she’s standing in a nicely appointed kitchen, a smile on her face. There is a pretty granite kitchen island in front of her and handsome-looking pots and pans behind her. She’s put on a little weight. Her hair is dyed a rusty red. She’s clearly in her element. I can imagine she eats steak anytime she wants. I didn’t bother to “friend” her. I had wasted too much time enamored of her.

  Still, knowing Jeannie was one of the better parts of my tenure with Kmart. Our relationship wasn’t a romance. But it wasn’t bad.

  Cute

  My mother died a few years ago, in a nursing home near where she had lived for over fifty years—in Gloucester County, New Jersey. She spent only a month and a half in the nursing home. Before that she had spent three years in an assisted living facility in another town. When she began to have difficulty swallowing even pureed food, the people at the assisted living place advised my brother and me that she needed to be placed in a nursing home. They said that she was choking on her food more and more often during meals. What was not entirely clear to me at the time was that my mother was at the point of aspirating her food. Aspiration occurs when aged throat muscles grow so weak that swallowed food gets into the lungs, inevitably causing infection and death. When death came for my mother, the assisted living people didn’t want it to be at their place, on their watch.

  So late one winter afternoon, a medical transport van came to take my mother from assisted living to the Willow Valley Nursing Facility. I had already researched Willow Valley via the Internet and found it had gotten good reviews. In fact, it had gotten four stars. Also, I had learned by word-of-mouth that it was a well-run place. Still, of course, the transition was unwelcome. Although my mother was somewhat senile, she knew what was happening. The nursing home was to be the last stop on the road to oblivion. Willow Valley, indeed.

  “When are they taking me?” she had asked me the day before.

  “Tomorrow,” I had told her. There was little time to prepare her emotionally for the transition because a bed had just “opened up” at Willow Valley. You’ve got to say yes quickly when beds open up in reputable nursing homes. Otherwise, you lose out.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow, too,” I assured her.

  By this point, my mother knew the move was inevitable. That didn’t mean she liked it. I’ll never forget the frightened look in her eyes as she was lifted into the transport van. It was one of those vans that have a lift, so the person being transported never has to get out of her or his wheelchair. It was a frigid evening. It was December. I had dressed my mother warmly in her sweater, knit hat, and red wool coat, but she still looked frail and vulnerable, her white hair reflecting the cold glow of the streetlights.

  I had assured her I would follow the van to Willow Valley, and I did. But on the way, we were separated by a red light, and I wound up taking another, slightly longer route. By the time I arrived, the head duty nurse and her assistant were already checking my mother in. This meant, in part, that they were checking her body for bedsores. They didn’t want to be held responsible if the assisted living place had let things get out of hand.

  “She’s so cute!” they were exclaiming. I found this comment a little odd. Here, my mother was ninety-five years old. “Cute” wasn’t an adjective I would have used to describe her. Old, decrepit, somewhat senile, nearly deaf and blind, incontinent—yes. But cute?

  I tried to look at my mother through their eyes. She was very little, shrunken from what had been an already petite five-foot frame. But she was still a rather pretty woman. She had good bone structure and a pink, unblemished complexion. She had a certain refinement that was hard to describe—a quiet, self-containment that suggested a complex inner life. Plus, she was meek. Always intimidated by authority, she let the nurse and her assistant examine her without saying a word.

  “Her skin hasn’t broken down,” the head nurse Karen assured me after they had put her into bed.

  This wasn’t exactly news to me. I knew they had taken good care of her at the assisted living place. They had been paid big bucks to do so.

  “Oh, she’s just so cute!” Karen’s assistant Lisa again exclaimed. Before Karen and Lisa left the room, Karen said they would send someone around with a tray of food, since my mother seemed too tired to go to the dining room this evening.

  My mother watched from her bed as I unpacked some of her clothes and began to put them away. I had also brought some of the family photos we had displayed at the assisted living place.

  “Here’s Father,” I said, handing her a framed photograph of my father, her husband of thirty years. She held it in her hands. Then she brought it to her lips and kissed it fiercely. After she handed it back to me, I placed it on the nightstand beside her.

  I had also brought some photographs of her great-grandchildren—Ona, Roberto, and Braun. These went on the TV stand up above the TV. I knew that my mother, with her macular degeneration, wouldn’t be able to see these photos from her wheelchair or bed, but there was nowhere else to put them. I also took out my mother’s teddy bear and placed it on a chair. It had been a Christmas gift from my sister, Laura. My mother had asked for it. It seemed a comfort to her in her extreme old age.

  A few minutes later, a young red-haired woman came by with a tray of pureed food—mashed potatoes and some kind of pureed meat and a vegetable, plus thickened juice.

  As she sat spoon-feeding my mother, the young woman suddenly turned to me and said, “Your mother’s so cute!”

  I must have looked amused.

  “We have some residents around here who are really difficult,” the young woman quickly explained. “But your mom seems darling . . . so pleasant and easy-going!”

  I had to smile at this. My mother had always put her best face forward with strangers. But there had been many times in my youth when she had been anything but darling.

  “Not all the time . . .” I began to say.

  “Oh, well everyone’s mother is like that sometimes,” countered the young woman.

  It was clear she liked taking care of my mother. That was a good thing. It saddened me to watch my mother eat, though. It was so slow, so hard for her. And a few short weeks from now, the food that should be nourishing her would begin getting into her lungs, leading to the inevitable decline and fall.

  After a little while, the young woman asked my mother if she had had enough.

  My mother nodded.

  A few minutes after the young woman left, I kissed my mother and said good-bye. I told her I would visit her again the next day.

  “Alright,” she agreed. She seemed comfortable—calmly resigned to her new surroundings.

  It took me several minutes to find my way out of Willow Valley. I’ve never had a very good sense of direction, and I found myself wandering down the same corridor more than once—looking for the exit. As I did, I noticed the residents. Although some still seemed in
relatively good shape, others were decrepit, with drooping heads and dazed eyes. One woman, whose hair was incongruously black, had a large bandage over her nose and cheek that made her look clownish. Still, she smiled at me as I walked past her for the third time, looking for the exit. She must have thought I was demented.

  Finally, I did find an exit. It was past the main dining area. As I walked outside into the parking area, past piles of snow, under the cold moon, I decided that there were far worse things to be called than “cute.” I guessed the people at Willow Valley had the right idea about my mother. Although they would never know what she had been at her best, they would treat her gently, as if she were a delicate doll.

  Since my mother had to go, as everyone must, I supposed she might as well do it here.

  The Phillies, Dick Allen, and Me

  It was the morning of September 7, 1964, and I was sick with excitement about attending my first Phillies games: a Labor Day doubleheader against the Dodgers. This doubleheader took place two weeks before the ten-game losing streak that would cost the Phils the pennant. Sometimes I think their monumental ’64 collapse scarred me for life. Other times I think it taught me the meaning of life.

  Let me backtrack a bit: before spring, 1964, baseball didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t understand the unique geometry of the game . . . the diamond path around the bases, the balls and strikes, why some balls hit into the field were considered hits while others were outs. Understanding baseball was like fiddling with binoculars—after some adjustments, suddenly a clear image swims into view.

  My love of baseball came as a surprise to my older sister Laura.

  “Ruth likes baseball because she wants to win Steve’s approval,” I heard her sagely telling my mother. Steve was my older brother. Laura was a clinical psychologist who took her marching orders from Freud. A naturally girly girl, she believed in traditional sex roles. Accordingly, the idea that a girl could love baseball for its own sake was beyond her ken.

  “Why don’t you play with the little girls?” she’d ask me when I’d come home all grimy from playing baseball with the boys. The implication was that I was doing something wrong in hanging with the boys. I guess in her mind I was upsetting the Freudian apple cart. At that time I didn’t have enough worldly wisdom to tell her that it wasn’t playing ball with the boys I loved so much as simply playing ball.

  I also loved watching baseball on TV. Steve and I watched Jim Bunning’s Father’s Day perfect game against the Mets on our black- and- white Olympic while sipping homemade lemonade in our recreation room. Steve, who would be going away to college in the fall, was a font of baseball lore.

  “This will be the first perfect game in the National League in eighty-four years,” he enthused. “Don Larsen was the last major leaguer to pitch one, in the 1956 World Series.”

  Steve also clued me in to the fact that players on the pitcher’s team weren’t supposed to talk about the possibility of a perfect game. That would be jinxing it.

  We both idolized Jim Bunning, a veteran who had come to the Phillies in an off-season trade with the Detroit Tigers. Bunning was six-foot-four and lanky. After the ball left his hand, the momentum of his sidearm delivery nearly caused him to fall off the mound. His best pitch was a devastating slider. When Bunning struck out John Stephenson to end the game in the long shadows of Shea Stadium, we shouted so loudly that my mother came to the top of the stairs to see what was happening.

  “That’s wonderful!” she said when we told her.

  It was icing on the cake when Bunning took a bow on the Ed Sullivan Show that night. To see a Philadelphia Phillie recognized on national TV was as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth.

  Steve was no fair weather Phillies fan. He had begun following the team in 1961, when they lost twenty-three games in a row, still a major league record.

  “I just wondered when they’d ever win a game,” he later told me. After 1961, he had witnessed the slow arc of the Phillies’ rise to respectability. One big reason they were lousy for much of the 1950s and the early 1960s was that when other teams were signing players like Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks, the Phillies adamantly weren’t.

  Phillies owner Bob Carpenter primly explained, “I’m not opposed to Negro players. But I’m not going to hire a player of any color or nationality just to have him on the team.” Evidently he thought he would be doing black ballplayers a big favor by signing them to a Phillies contract. Those Negroes . . . they’re just such poor athletes!

  In 1957, a full ten years after Jackie Robinson made his Major League debut, the Phillies signed a black journeyman by the name of John Kennedy. When he failed to distinguish himself, they released him and hired a few more mediocre black players . . . mostly from outside the United States.

  By the early 1960s, however, Carpenter had seen the light long enough to sign a black phenom named Richie Allen. By 1964 Allen, a clear Rookie of the Year favorite, was not only hitting tape measure homeruns, but was among the league leaders in batting average. The rest of the team was much improved also. Power-hitting right fielder Johnnie Callison had hit a three-run homerun to win the All-Star Game for the National League. On the mound, right-handed ace Jim Bunning was on his way to nineteen victories, while fire-balling Chris Short stood second only to Sandy Koufax among National League lefthanders. Managing them was Gene Mauch, the “Little General.” Mauch’s knowledge of the game was formidable, as was his temper. After one loss, he famously upset a tableful of food in the clubhouse, splattering gravy on outfielder Wes Covington’s suit.

  I couldn’t wait to see these Phillies in person. I was going along with Steve and his best friend, Ed Patterson.

  Getting to the game, however, would take some doing.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to go to the stadium?” my mother asked Steve. She was worried because a race riot had broken out in the vicinity of the ballpark just a week earlier over an incident of police harassment. Over 300 people had been injured, 770 had been arrested, and over 200 businesses were damaged or destroyed.

  “It’ll be broad daylight,” Steve reassured her. “There’ll be cops around. And the bus lets out right in front of the stadium.”

  It took about an hour for our bus to wend its way north along Route 45 from our hometown of Mantua, through rural Gloucester County and on into Camden County. As the bus drew closer to the city of Camden, past the soon-to-be shuttered New York Shipyard, the landscape grew ever more urban and ever more depressed. Even then, Broadway in Camden was a chastening sight to a ten-year-old from the sticks. Although the main drag was still lined with businesses, the businesses had that down-at-heels look to them. There were stores that sold furniture that even I could tell was junky, storefronts with grimy, outmoded signs and metal gates, the battered stucco of McCrory’s Five and Ten . . . The people, mostly black and Puerto Rican, looked poor and harried. By now white flight was in full swing, eventually transforming Camden from a thriving industrial city to the poorest, most dangerous city in the country. Of course I didn’t understand sociology in 1964. All I knew was that to get to the ball game, you had to first go through some “bad” neighborhoods. Our trip then took on the characteristics of a trek.

  In downtown Camden, we transferred to the “Phillies Express,” a chartered bus that took us over the Ben Franklin Bridge and up Broad Street to North Philadelphia. North Broad Street had been shabby for years. Now—drained by the loss of manufacturing jobs—it was quickly getting worse. As the bus lumbered through city traffic, we seemed to be catching every red light. When the bus turned left onto Lehigh, I could see signs of devastation—burned out businesses, abandoned row houses, junked cars. However, when we finally made it to 21st, I gazed up at the red brick façade of Connie Mack Stadium and was surprised to see that it looked just like a regular building. I don’t know what I was expecting—something more sporting? When the Phillies televised home games, they never showed you the outside of Connie Mack. Locat
ion, location, location wasn’t something the ownership wanted to stress.

  As we joined the crowds heading toward the home plate entranceway, grayish men with carts hawked souvenirs—pennants, buttons, balloons, inflatable Phillies dolls . . . anything Phillies. I could well imagine these men had done the same thing for decades, back when the park and neighborhood were in their heyday. With the couple of dollars my mother had given me, I bought a large white button emblazoned with the words “Go Phillies Go!” in red and blue. I still have it.

  Many baseball writers have described their first hallowed view of a major league diamond in almost religious terms. Walking through the turnstiles, up the concourse ramp and into the stands was certainly a revelation to me. The emerald field was as immaculate as the stands were grungy. It was a green jewel framed by colorful signs.

  As Bruce Kuklick relates in his wonderful history, To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia: 1909-1976, Connie Mack Stadium had once been a pleasure palace. When it was christened Shibe Park in 1909—after an A’s owner—its concrete and steel construction was state-of-the-art—far more impressive than the Phillies’ rinky-dink Baker Bowl. As such, it symbolized the comparative status of the two clubs. Led by manager-part owner Connie Mack, the Philadelphia Athletics were among the elite of the American League, winning five World Championships while the Phillies were barely holding their own in the senior circuit.

  But the Athletics fell into decline in the mid-1930s, and for much of the 1940s and 1950s they were in last place or close to it. By this time, the Phillies had moved out of tiny Baker Bowl and had begun sharing Shibe Park with the A’s. After the Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1954, the Phillies’ millionaire owner Bob Carpenter reluctantly bought the stadium, which had been rechristened Connie Mack, simply because there was no other place for his team to play.