The Rail

by Howard Owen

  A small crowd of children and some parents gathered around him, asking for autographs, the adults offering insight into what was wrong with the Indians, telling him about their own sons who were tearing up one youth league or another.

  At his father’s command, David chose the highest of the three pitching speeds, which, it soon became apparent, was faster than anything he would face in a Little League game.

  “You won’t learn anything hitting powder-puff pitches,” Neil told him. He instructed from behind the fence.

  Move closer to the plate. Don’t put your foot in the bucket. Choke up a little. Don’t close your eyes, for God’s sake.

  It was inevitable that the audience would take all this in, and almost as inevitable that Neil would, without thinking about it, turn a morning with his son into a community batting practice lesson, with David as the “before” who could, with work, be turned into a hitter.

  “Now, see there,” Neil said, turning to the two older boys who had used all their quarters and now were watching David being overmatched by the pitching machine. “He’s bailing out, putting his foot in the bucket. You’ve got to keep both feet in there, got to stay squared away toward the pitcher.… OK now, swing! See, he closed his eyes.”

  “Can’t hit what you can’t see,” one of the older kids observed, and there was general agreement and a few laughs.

  This went on for half an hour. Twice, David tried to leave, but Neil sent him back, putting more quarters into the slot, giving more free advice.

  When it was over, Neil had provided a couple of dozen Chagrin Falls boys with a free batting lesson from a future Hall-of-Famer, which was what they already were calling him in the newspapers.

  “You’re lucky to have a dad like that,” one adult said to David as he left the batting cage, finally permitted to quit. “You listen to him, and you’ll be a good one, too.”

  Neil Beauchamp was not a quick study of humanity in those days, but even he realized he had lost sight of the morning’s goal. David seemed to be striving mightily not to cry as they went back to the car.

  Neil knows now what he only dimly perceived then: Almost none of the hard lessons he brought to adulthood seemed to be of any use to his more sensitive, less athletic son. Neil would have crawled over broken glass as a boy if someone had taken him aside for a rough but loving lesson in the finer points of baseball. By the time Neil was under the wing of an adult male who cared enough for such instruction, he already knew almost as much about baseball as his high school coach.

  That day, driving back home, he tried to tell David that, but the man who was overmatched against the Polish Sausage was not much better with his own son.

  Finally, he told David that they would go back again, early in the morning when no one else was there, just the two of them.

  And then he had to rush inside to get ready for the long drive to the park.

  They never went back to the pitching machines.

  When they get to the parole office, they find that the appointment that had been arranged for Neil before he left Mundy has been postponed. Neil’s parole officer has the flu, the unapologetic secretary tells them, and he won’t be back again until the next Monday.

  The two men leave. It’s past lunchtime, and David pulls into a hamburger stand that has been given a ’50s retro look, with much tile and neon. The patrons apparently are expected to eat in their cars, because there are no public doors, only small windows for ordering.

  Small metal tables have been placed outside, and Neil asks if they can eat their burgers and fries there, in the open.

  “You know,” David tells him as Neil works away with speed and efficiency at the meal before him, elbows to the side, head down, “we’re in no hurry.”

  Neil understands and tries to slow down, but before he even realizes it, he is eating almost as fast as before. He stops himself again.

  “It’s going to take awhile,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  David wipes his mouth with a napkin. It is strange to hear the Virginia Rail apologize for anything.

  “It’ll come back to you,” he says.

  On the six-lane boulevard in front of them, there is a squealing of brakes and a slight bump, an almost-delicate tinkling of glass. One car, stopped at a red light, has been pushed partly into the nearest intersection by a minivan. The car’s driver stays behind the wheel while the other man gets out slowly, as if he’s trying to remember the protocol or devise a plan for minimum loss.

  David turns to watch. Within a minute, a police car arrives and an officer gets out to direct the already gridlocked lunch hour traffic at the intersection.

  When David resumes eating, he sees that his father has spilled some of the soft drink he was holding. He looks pale, and old.

  “That’s why I don’t like to drive just yet,” Neil says.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get you back in the saddle soon enough. No hurry. You’ll get the hang of that, too.”

  Neil nods in the affirmative, to be polite.

  He barely saw the trooper that night. He remembers him more from the feel, the solid thump, harder than the deer, because the car caught him full on, the whole bottom half of his body absorbing the metal punishment.

  He wouldn’t know until later that the man had been killed on the spot. Lacy Haithcock was 24 years old, and he left behind his parents, his fiancée and two sisters. He had been all-region in football and wrestling, and he had asked nothing more from life than to be a Virginia state trooper.

  “It was all he ever wanted to do,” Lacy Haithcock’s father had said at the sentencing hearing, looking at Neil Beauchamp when he said it.

  When the judge had said five years, with three suspended, the Virginia Rail thought, despite the horror he felt at finally, suddenly arriving at the place to which he had seemed destined to land for 20 years, that this was only fair. Somebody ought to pay more than this for Lacy Haithcock’s young, wasted life.

  They throw their trash away and are back at the car when a middle-aged man approaches tentatively.

  “Excuse me,” he says, “but are you Neil Beauchamp?”

  Neil nods yes, and the man shakes his hand.

  “I used to follow you all the time, in Cleveland and Detroit,” he says. “You were as good as any of ’em.”

  Neil thanks the man, who produces a mustard-smeared napkin and ballpoint pen. Neil writes his name, the letters bleeding into the soft paper.

  The man thanks him, and Neil senses what’s coming next. They always wait until they have the autograph, as if he wouldn’t grant it otherwise.

  “You can still pull yourself together, Rail,” he says, Mr. Familiarity now, comfortable as a boyhood pal. “We’ve all had our share of screw-ups. Make us proud of you again.”

  Neil nods, saying nothing, as the man turns and walks away, a spring in his step, eager to tell his co-workers the priceless advice he gave Neil Beauchamp.

  When he was in his prime, it amazed Neil that so many people thought they owned a piece of him. It was flattering in a way, when he was on top. Later, the same people seemed to feel somehow robbed, as if they had wasted all those cheers, all those days following the box scores, all that belief.

  Before, their disappointment focused on things like diminishing productivity, divorce, booze and bankruptcy. What will it be like now? Maybe, he thinks, hopes, he’s let everyone down so badly that they eventually will leave him alone.

  TEN

  The car is in a different spot when they return to Garner’s. David can’t believe how his heart leaps at such minor progress.

  The morning mechanic apparently did not show at all, and the afternoon one has on the telltale camouflage pants of the deer hunter. There is a dark stain on the right leg just above the knee. He says the car is fixed. When David goes to start it, though, after charging almost $200 on his VISA card, it nearly catches the first time, then grows progressively weaker with each prayerful turn of the key and pat of the accelerator.

  Th
e mechanic, a young man barely out of his teens, opens the hood and looks inside with what seems depressingly like incomprehension.

  “Come back around five,” he says at last. “I think I know what’s wrong with this thing. Damn Jap car.” David wants to tell him that he has never had anything go wrong with a Japanese car in his 15 years of owning them that a competent mechanic couldn’t fix in under an hour, but he fears he might never escape Penns Castle if he speaks his mind.

  “That’ll still give me time to get back home by eight,” David says when he returns to the truck, and Neil nods.

  No one seems to be home at the castle, but then, when they walk to the glass-paned doors at the back of the great room, they see Blanchard in the garden. She is wearing jeans and a burgundy silk blouse. She seems to be examining the remains of fall—a few mums, purple and gold, some geraniums and pansies still seeking precious heat in half-barrels along the side. The huge, thick stone walls flanking the plants catch the sun and block the wind, a gift of two extra weeks for Blanchard’s garden.

  In the dwindling light, her hair shines golden, and David is stirred by her figure as she bends over to pick one of the mums.

  “That,” he says to Neil, “is a fine-looking woman, even if she is my aunt.”

  “Half-aunt,” Neil says. He is watching her, too.

  Blanchard Penn wakes up some mornings and doesn’t know where she is.

  She likes the tingle she gets delaying the moment when her mind gains traction and it comes back to her. It is not unpleasant, not at all, to be lost. There are worse things.

  Even in the middle of the day, she might stop after writing a letter and wonder for a moment what to put for a return address.

  When the cancer finally took her father last year, and when his net worth was found to be somewhat less than she had imagined, so much less that something had to be sold, she put the West Avenue townhouse on the market and moved back to Penn’s Castle.

  People she knew in Richmond, including her lawyer, tried to talk her into staying in the city, wondering out loud what she would do with herself “out there.” But she knew Neil Beauchamp, and she knew he would not be happy living a few feet from strangers, prying eyes everywhere. He had told her enough about prison that she knew what was best for him.

  “There’ll be enough to live on, after we sell the townhouse,” she assured Betsy Traywick, with whom she had lunch twice a month. “And it’ll be good for Neil. It’s half his, you know. He’s my brother, and I’m going to see that he’s looked after for as long as I can.”

  Blanchard’s small handful of friends were more worried about her than they were about the homecoming prisoner she called her brother, but nobody really knew how to broach the subject. Blanchard could be so high-strung.

  When she told Neil about his inheriting half of Penn’s Castle, he was surprised. He had not spoken with James Blackford Penn since he left home, more than 40 years before.

  “He was always sorry,” Blanchard had said, holding his hands in the crowded visitors’ room at Mundy, where the two of them were always surrounded by other prisoners, their families and the guards. “He wanted to make things right before he died.”

  Neil did not necessarily want to live in the old house with its memories. He had gotten prideful satisfaction out of it for some time, driving past on rare visits home and seeing it deteriorate, as much as something of solid English stone could. The process had started even before James and Virginia and their daughter abandoned it for Richmond in 1956.

  Now, though, he supposed that he and Penn’s Castle were a match for each other. The house, with Blanchard ploughing much of her remaining money into its revival, probably was holding up better than the Virginia Rail.

  He acted grateful, even if the deed was in both their names. He didn’t tell Blanchard how uneasy he was with it all, how he would have done otherwise if there had been an otherwise.

  The young Blanchard Penn had several more “spells” after the first one, and she could, if left alone, sit and stare at one spot, in the woods behind her house, or at the beach or up on the Parkway, for hours at a time, so deep into wherever she had gone that it often took more than words to bring her back.

  But by the ninth grade, she seemed to have outgrown the ghosts, seldom visited the “zones,” as Virginia called them only when talking with her husband.

  She was an excellent student and a beautiful girl, blonde and angular with a wide mouth and thick, full lips. She tanned well, and her skin, as sleek as she was, had a softness to it that hinted of a deeper lushness. She was warm to the touch, as if she had found a way to store the summer sun within her.

  Blanchard was energetic and athletic. And, though some suspected her of secret snobbery because they couldn’t see how it could be otherwise, she possessed impeccable manners.

  They sent her to St. Catherine’s her last two years of high school, at the same time James moved his family to Richmond. She seemed to do even better there; she was in her element among the city girls and the ones from other parts of the South whose parents sent them to Virginia to breathe the air of Lee and Jackson.

  She did have to leave Sweet Briar once, her freshman year, after an unfortunate incident involving a boy from Washington and Lee, but the zones didn’t really start reappearing until after she moved to New York.

  James and Virginia were sure that Blanchard’s “spells” were exacerbated by Manhattan psychiatrists who sent them bills on a regular basis. But Blanchard had been certain, after she was graduated with a degree in English, that she was going to New York. She caught on at a publishing house, working at a salary that, for the first two years, required that her parents subsidize her.

  But Blanchard refused to live anywhere else for long. She went through two marriages, to a basketball coach at Long Island University and then to an English professor at NYU. Both marriages took her to the suburbs, first to Long Island and then to New Jersey. Both divorces took her right back to Manhattan.

  The truth she never shared with anyone was that her principal horror was becoming the Tragic Southern Belle, something out of Tennessee Williams. She had seen women like that, growing up, women whose genes, rarefied upbringing and inclination to look back instead of forward had combined to make them hiders behind closed blinds, writers of irate letters to the newspaper editor, heeding voices that others never heard. It scared her how much she was like them, how easy it would be to become them.

  She knew she sometimes did not act in a sane and responsible manner, but she and her analyst were working on it. She was certain, for a long time, that she was better off in New York, where somehow her eccentricities, her middle-of-the-night appearances in friends’ lobbies, her diatribes against imagined demons, her zones, seemed more exotic, less pathetic, than they might have in a place like Richmond, where she would only remind others of an aunt in Staunton or a cousin in Southside.

  The second marriage failed the day Blanchard came home early from her job as an editor at Random House and found a naked NYU coed in her bed. The girl smiled dreamily at her, stoned, while her husband’s happy voice boomed out from the shower; he was singing a Beatles tune they’d once sung together, spontaneously, on a southbound train. The other passengers had clapped when they finished.

  Blanchard was 44 the day she found the girl in her bed. She had really cared for the professor, with whom she had lived for 10 years. She had gone from full-time to part-time editing to please him. She was satisfied not to have children, because she knew he didn’t want any. He was younger than she yet looked older, and he had added four sizes to his waist in their decade together, but she credited him with saving her after her first marriage fell apart.

  But the naked coed, and the subsequent zone into which Blanchard fell, undid her. It resulted in the girl running down three flights of stairs, wearing only a bed sheet and seeking refuge behind the guard’s desk from a middle-aged woman wielding a rather large butcher knife.

  Blanchard was “hospitalized” f
or several days, and when she returned to the apartment, her husband, all his belongings and some of hers were gone. They only talked by telephone after that, and nothing came of it. Blanchard, given time and sanity enough to think, faced the truth: No matter what her husband said, it was close to impossible that she had come home early, for the first time in months, on the single day he had chosen to seduce one of his students.

  She didn’t have to be taken home to Richmond until almost a year later.

  She had been erratic, off her medication and drinking heavily, yet she somehow kept her job and was even allowed to work full-time again as an editor. Some of her friends tried to help her and some disappeared. She told the ones who tried to help that she was fine, that she would snap out of it any day.

  But then, in 1985, she was arrested for walking down Amsterdam Avenue at three in the afternoon, naked and singing a Beatles tune. She explained to the policeman who tried to cover her that she was too hot. It was mid-November.

  And so, just in time for Thanksgiving, Blanchard Penn, who had re-assumed her family name after the first divorce and had never given it up again, was brought back south, accepting at last her fate. She lived with James and Virginia, who were already 72 and 66 and less thrilled to have their only daughter come home than they might have been 20 years before.

  She told Betsy Traywick, one of the few old classmates who had stayed in touch since St. Catherine’s days, that she needed to come home and take care of her mother and father. Everyone knew, though, that the care was essentially a three-way affair: The one most capable on any given day looked after the other two.

  ELEVEN

  David leaves Blanchard and his father in the garden. He wants to call Carly and tell her that the car is not yet fixed, and see if anyone has called about a job interview. He would not be averse to a little sympathy.

  He’s irritated that she’s not in her office at the moment. His concern is greatly aggravated because the secretary, a young woman not long out of a two-year community college with an associate degree in secretarial science, explains, “To tell you the truth, she’s out showing a house right now.”