Once Upon a Fastball Read online

  “Top drawer,” she whispers, gesturing toward the night table. “For you, my dahlink.”

  “For me, bubby?”

  Seth opens the top drawer and removes from it a square package wrapped in crinkled brown paper. A yellowed envelope taped on top reads, in Papa Sol’s strong master carpenter’s hand: For Setharoo. With love, Papa Sol.

  A lump forms in Seth Stein’s throat. No one but his Papa Sol ever called him Setharoo.

  “I found this one day in his drawer,” Elsie says, her voice crackling, a second tear forming in the corner of her left eye. “Until now, I kept hoping your Papa Sol would return and give it to you personally.”

  Elsie helps herself to another tissue. “I still can’t believe he disappeared without a word. I mean, after fifty-eight beautiful years of marriage, no warning, no good-byes, just poof!”

  Elsie’s words catapult Seth back into the unremitting quandary that has gnawed at him for the past two years: How could his hero, his pal, his role model—this amazing, upbeat, inspiring grandfather, father figure, and human being—have simply vanished? How could a man so beloved by his wife and his grandson and his great-grandson not have at least had the decency to speak to them, to let them know his reasons for leaving? If some tragic accident had befallen him, surely they would have been informed by the authorities.

  And if this was a simple case of disappearance and change of identity…then why? Sol had given neither Elsie nor Seth the vaguest hint of unhappiness or dissatisfaction. Only love, affection, kindness, and sacrifice. An unsolved mystery that has left them both brokenhearted, devastated, starving for the truth.

  “I know, I know, Elfie,” Seth says. “Just poof!” Seth injects the harrowing word with a dose of onomatopoeic fun by puffing out his cheeks, expelling the four letters into the air through his protruded lips, and emitting a high-pitched, comical yelp. It is the kind of facial gesture and sound effect that Elsie has herself used to cheer up Seth all these years.

  Seth’s performance elicits a hint of the old elfin Elsie, and her smile floods the bedroom.

  But not for long. Grandma Elsie looks up at her flesh and blood with weary eyes red and filmy from today’s frustration and sadness. They are the eyes of a prizefighter that are searing into the soul of a referee who has stopped the fight for no apparent reason, begging him for answers.

  “You need to rest, bubby,” Seth says. “Shall I open the package now?”

  “No, dahlink. This is between you and your Papa Sol. Take it home with you and open it up when it feels right. I’m sure that’s the way he would’ve wanted it.”

  Elfie closes her eyes and ekes out a smile just as Seth plants a life-confirming kiss on her right cheek.

  On the drive home, Seth’s brain is engorged with questions. How long can Grandma go on like this? Why did Papa Sol do this to her? Why did he do this to me? Did something terrible happen to him? And if not, where is he now? Did he take his own life? If so, what did he withhold from us that was making him miserable enough to do that? What could he have left me in that package?

  Damn you, Papa Sol! I miss you, Papa Sol!

  Jeze is still sweating oil as she limps to and plops herself down at her spot at the curb on Harvard Street, in front of Seth’s town house. Gotta get that leak fixed one of these days, he mutters as he inserts the key in the door.

  In his study, Seth tosses his yellow-and-navy parka and trusty Red Sox cap on the floor and pours himself a generous Balvenie. Rocks (three), twist, half splash of soda. Just like Papa Sol had taught him after his high school graduation. An essential rite of passage, this Scotch thing. Sol’s drink of preference, then Seth’s. One of many treasured batons passed on from grandfather to grandson.

  Nothing like a Balvenie before dinner to excite the palate. To prepare the appetite. Mostly, to unjangle the nerves and calm the psyche. Been a long day for Seth, between a tight morning squash match he’d lost to best pal Gordon Stewart (15–13 in the mind-numbing fifth), all that work on the final structuring of his book and the gestation of that nettlesome opening chapter “In Search of Lost Time,” the minor quarrel he’d had with sweetheart Kate, the bittersweet visit with Elsie.

  Oozing into his chocolate-colored Naugahyde La-Z-Boy, he takes his first sip of the single-malt elixir he has grown to relish, ever since Sol had introduced him to it and educated him about its vast superiority to “ordinary” Scotch whisky. Ah, that first sip! Producing rapture on the approximate order of that first prebreakfast sip of joe and that first postdinner puff on a Cohiba Esplendidos (another baton passed to him by Papa Sol).

  As the Balvenie slides down his throat, both shocking and soothing his system, he squeezes his lips together tight until they disappear completely, exposing his top six front teeth, and scrunches up both cheeks until they hurt—just the way Bogie does whenever he has a belt onscreen.

  The study is so Seth: Tornado would best describe it. Squash racquets and sneakers here, guitar there (a Martin 000-28EC), in every cranny pages filled with names, places, dates, data—typed and with copious marginal notes that are handwritten in red uni-ball. Word puzzle books, thesauri, dictionaries, foreign dictionaries, dictionaries of slang and of etymology and of synonyms and of cultural literacy. But mostly history books, some his own and some withdrawn from Widener Memorial Library, wall to wall and floor to ceiling: thrown pell-mell on shelves between cinder blocks, piled up in untidy stacks on the floor, strewn in random clumps across his large Solomon Stein–built cherry desk.

  Spread on the surface of a small oak table in one corner of the study is a chaotic yet artful still life of baseball bric-a-brac that would have made Cézanne mighty proud. Encyclopedias, old yearbooks and game programs, yellowed newspaper clippings. A Rawlings PM1 glove that had been Papa Sol’s in the fifties. A black-and-white photo of Bobby Thomson’s famous home run from the deciding ’51 pennant game, the ball frozen in midflight, inside a simple black metal frame. A group photo of the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox. And the most special bric of all, an old baseball encased in Plexiglas, the one Papa Sol caught off the bat of Giants second baseman Davey Williams on June 28, 1954. Charity game against the Bosox. Leo Kiely on the mound vs. the Giants’ Paul Giel. The home run hitting contest between the Say Hey Kid and the Splendid Splinter before the first pitch. A game Papa Sol recounted to Seth frequently at bedtime, and especially how he plucked Davey’s foul out of thin air with his strong carpenter’s right hand.

  The pungent odor that pervades the room and makes it uniquely Seth’s suggests somewhere between a library and a locker room.

  He takes a second lingering sip of his Balvenie and examines first the package Papa Sol has left for him, then the yellowed envelope. Feels slightly catatonic, not from the Scotch, but from the shock of being face to face with the two bequests. As if his grandfather were right there with him once more, poised to speak.

  A third sip, and he is finally in the frame of mind to open the envelope. Slowly and with care. After all, this is History, the past brought to life. In an instant, Sol will be speaking to him from a place and a time that are not here and not now.

  Seth withdraws from the envelope a yellowed page. The words on it are written neatly, in Papa Sol’s virile hand, stacked in irregular lines that look, curiously, like the right half of Vulcan’s anvil and read like a vers libre poem. He enunciates the lyrical words, one at a time and aloud, chanting them as they trip, one after the other, off his tongue:

  My dearest Sylvan one,

  My spirit hears nothing if not ditties of no tone.

  My forehead burns, my tongue is parched.

  Can a soul ever return from the silent streets of a little town?

  Your legacy is in the Attic.

  That is all you need to know.

  With all my love, Your Papa Sol.

  P.S. What will you do after the ball?

  Huh?

  Seth reads the note again, even more deliberately. Then a third time. He takes another sip, cradling his chin betw
een left thumb and forefinger.

  Huh?

  Reading it once more, appreciating the beauty of the words but still clueless as to their meaning, Seth searches for answers, line by line.

  Why “Sylvan”? Why the capital S? Why compare me to a forest?

  Why the negativity? (Papa Sol was generally so upbeat.) “Ditties of no tone”?

  Was Papa Sol very sick, without anyone’s knowing it? Stranded on a desert island?

  He always lived in a city—New York, San Francisco, Boston. So why the reference to the “little town”? Did he ever spend time in one?

  Legacy? In the Attic? Gotta go look in Grandma’s attic in the morning…

  “All you need to know”? Why the throwaway line?

  “After the ball”?

  Papa Sol used to fall asleep in his favorite easy chair, holding some volume of poetry or another against his chest, Seth recalls. True, he was in fact a poet, in the way he lived life and in his carpentry. Used to call himself “the Bard of Wood.” Maybe that explains the form of the note. But why such dense poetic language? Why the secrecy? Did Papa Sol, as he often used to do, want to push me to the limit, to egg me on, to encourage me to figure things out for myself, to struggle through difficulty in order to attain goals? Per aspera ad astra, Papa Sol used to spout. “To the stars through adversity.”

  Sol’s note also awakens within Seth the cherished memory of those challenging word games his grandfather used to play with him and that he grew to love: poetry writing, puzzles, etymological searches, secret codes, palindromes and anagrams, linguistic brainteasers.

  An ache fills Seth’s head, a dull pounding, the relentless hammer in the old Anacin commercial. Conflicting feelings of resentment at Sol’s disappearance and love for his lost mentor swirl around and through his cerebral creases.

  But back to the note. Reminds him of the Latin passages he used to have to translate in high school, from Vergil or Ovid perhaps, the sense of which always seemed obfuscated at first, by the strangeness of the words and the weird syntax. But he always managed to figure out the meaning, by dint of perseverance and the use of both his left and right brains.

  Seth is feeling bone weary, the Balvenie is beginning to take effect, his desire to decode Papa Sol’s cryptic note is being trumped by his curiosity to discover the contents of the package.

  Gingerly, he opens the brown paper wrapping.

  Emerging from it, like Venus rising from the sea foam and every bit as lovely, is a square wooden box.

  Seth caresses its sensuous surface with his fingertips, as if the wood were the soft, warm belly of Aphrodite herself. The box is dark brown, probably some kind of oak, perhaps mahogany. It is, beyond a doubt, a Solomon Stein. You could always recognize one by its intricate floral patterns and by the distinctive delicacy of the craftsmanship.

  The image of Papa Sol’s hands appears before Seth’s eyes. With most people, you tend to remember a facial characteristic—hair or eyes or nose or lips or smile, maybe a subtle physical deformity. With Sol, it was the hands. They always reminded Seth of the hands of Michelangelo’s David. Powerful and slightly too large for his body, yet delicate and expressive. Strange, Seth never actually saw his grandfather in the act of chiseling or gouging or filing. One of Sol’s peculiar idiosyncrasies. But he could imagine how those mighty hands were capable of fashioning delicate objects of such extraordinary splendor.

  Superseding Sol’s hands is the vision of a statue of the lovely Pandora—the one from the Greek mythology book Papa Sol used to read to him—clad in toga and sandals, and holding in her hands, chest high, her infamous box.

  What would Sol’s box unleash?

  The moment has arrived, and Seth opens the wooden box with caution. The hinged top concludes its 180-degree backward trajectory, revealing a round pale yellow leather object, nestled in its custom-made, green-felt niche. It is a baseball.

  Excuse me?

  Happily, Seth has a drink nearby.

  He takes a languorous sip of Balvenie, considers the ball. Why did Sol leave him a baseball? Why this particular one? Did the note have anything to do with it? The P.S.?

  He scours the ball for clues. First thing he notices is the stamped writing, faded and barely legible:

  *Official*

  National*League

  Ford C. Frick Pres.

  Then, under the crimson herringbone stitching:

  THE CUSHIONED CORK CENT

  MARCA REGISTR

  SPALDI

  The letters that are missing at the end of these last three lines—which he assumes to be “ER,” “ADA,” and “NG”—have become part of a palimpsest, as they are obscured by a nasty one-inch-long, one-half-inch-thick blackish scuff mark, draped horizontally across the surface of the baseball, the ball’s personal badge of honor spreading itself out like some proud eye patch announcing, “I have suffered.” The scuff mark, Seth presumes, is the result of violent contact with a bat. Very violent, he deduces, as on closer inspection, he observes a number of tiny shreds of leather that have grafted themselves onto the ebony laceration, like scar tissue coalescing to cover over a wound.

  The ball looks to be pure horsehide, but to be certain of its authenticity, he counts the stitches. Yep, 108 of those red beauties, consistent with MLB standards.

  Okay, so Papa Sol obtained a ball that was hit very hard at a National League game. He must’ve gotten more than a few in his time, so why leave me this one?

  He has seen hundreds of baseballs, no, probably thousands, up close. Balls Sol and he had had catches with, balls Sol had hit fungo to him with, balls he’d hit and pitched and fielded with his pals in Little League, balls he’d seen during BP at Candlestick and Fenway. But this one seems special, for some reason, and not just because it was left to him by Papa Sol. Just something about it.

  Seth puts on his historian’s Sherlock Holmes cap and invokes his encyclopedic reservoir of baseball knowledge. Let’s see, Ford Frick was president of the NL from…1935 to 1951, the year in which he became commissioner of Major League Baseball and ceded his NL presidency to…Warren Giles. Ergo, Papa Sol had to have been between the ages of seven and twenty-three (he was born in 1928) when he somehow acquired the hard-hit baseball at some National League game.

  Okay, so exactly where and when and how did he acquire it?

  Seth is stuck, unable to deduce anymore. From the trying day, the Balvenie, and now this.

  He finishes his drink, sucks an ice cube into his mouth, chomps on it, takes another gander at the ball. So much to absorb. First the note, then the ball. What does it all mean? How Papa Sol loved baseball! How he passed on his passion to me! Papa Sol, I miss you! So why the hell did you leave this ball for me?

  Why?

  Seth touches the ball for the first time, rotates it with his fingertips, allows it to settle in his palm, and the room begins to spin, nearly imperceptibly at first. Is it the Balvenie? He looks even more intently at the ball, as though by staring it down, he could somehow unlock the secret it holds, could listen to what Sol is trying to tell him from some different, distant place and time.

  The spinning accelerates. Can’t be the Balvenie. Only had one.

  What is this, a dream? A nightmare? A hallucination? A tale straight out of Poe? H. G. Wells? Kafka?

  Faster and faster the room turns, clockwise. Seth takes a deep, self-preserving ujjai breath, tries to hang on. Sheesh. Am I having a stroke? Another coronary infarction?

  He takes his pulse, it seems normal. Phew.

  The rotation of the spinning tightens, narrows, and Seth feels like he is going down—could it be?—the rabbit hole. Curiouser and curiouser.

  No, it is more like being in the eye of a tornado: calm inside, swirling outside. He hears a strain of music within the turbulent vortex, the same music that is playing while Dorothy is being transported via tornado to Oz. Dah-de-lah-de-lah. But he didn’t get bumped on the head, like Dorothy did. And he didn’t munch on a madeleine infused in linden tea, either, like
Marcel in Proust’s opus. So what was the genesis of this upheaval?

  Could it be…Papa Sol’s baseball?

  In the midst of the chaos, Seth is no longer feeling panic, but a sudden calm. The calm after the storm.

  Another musical riff starts up, this time, yes, it’s from the Beatles’ tour de force “A Day in the Life.” He knows the song by heart, has studied its place in History. Even knows that this riff, the one that starts low and builds higher and higher and higher in intensity and volume and octaves, occurs twice during the song—between 1:54 and 2:16, then between 3:59 and 4:19.

  As the music—itself sounding like a swirling twister—intensifies, building to a fever pitch, so accordingly does the maelstrom’s velocity, but oddly the calm inside, where Seth is, remains constant.

  Without warning, all around the inside perimeter of the cylinder, rotating counterclockwise past Seth’s eyes one by one, like a spectacular, larger-than-life slide show, are people—figures from History!—and places, too, from the past.

  Good God, there’s the invention of the wheel! And Hammurabi and his Code of Laws in Mesopotamia! And Stonehenge being built and King Tut being buried at Thebes and Moses’ exodus from Egypt and Alexander the Great and the Great Wall of China and Jesus’ crucifixion…

  First the panic, then the calm, now the ecstasy. Seth is beside himself with joy: He’s not sure what’s going on, or why, or why him, but surrounded by History itself, he is filled with an inebriating sensation he’s never known.

  There’s Mohammed with the Koran and William the Conqueror at Hastings and the signing of the Magna Carta and Genghis Khan invading China and Columbus setting out on his voyage and Michelangelo on his Sistine scaffold and Martin Luther at Wittenberg and Galileo with his telescope and the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and Louis XIV at Versailles and Ben Franklin with his bifocals and the signing of the Declaration of Independence…