50 (14 page)

A few days later, Karen called the Broeden apartment looking for a book she needed for school and Broeden said he would drop it off. Doug went down to wait for him.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Broeden said and came out of the car.

“I told Susan and I’m telling you. My kids are grounded.”

“Do you think I’d take chances with them?”

“I don’t know what you’d do for your life-style.”

“You may not be able to understand this, but I don’t take orders from you.”

“You do about the kids. If they ever set foot in a light plane with you flying—”

“What?”

“Don’t try it.” Doug took the schoolbook out of Broeden’s hand and for emphasis he gave a little kick to the tire of Broeden’s car.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t you kick my car. I want an apology.”

“I’ll dictate one in the office.”

Doug turned to leave and Broeden grabbed him by the shoulder.

“I mean it,” Broeden said. He had not let go of Doug’s shoulder. Doug pushed away Broeden’s arm. Broeden shoved him. Doug shoved him back. They began shoving each other with increasing intensity. Broeden was slightly taller than Doug, younger, his movements swifter. Hockey players. That was the best comparison Doug had for this, the kind of dumb brawl hockey players had. Using a hockey move, Doug grabbed Broeden’s jacket and pulled it over his head and shoved him again. Broeden got free of the jacket and tried to twist Doug’s arm. In pulling away, Doug’s feet became entangled with Broeden’s and he fell, Broeden falling with him.

“Would you like your new wife to see you like this?” Doug asked as they were sprawled on the ground.

“You don’t look so wonderful yourself,” Broeden answered, and they picked themselves up.

“It’s a good thing we don’t do this for a living,” Doug said, walking back to the house.

Doug doubted the skirmish would qualify for “Greatest Fights of the Century.” He returned to the apartment and the children, embarrassed. Like a bimbo, I’ve just been battling your mother’s husband in the street. He tried to whistle his way through the rest of the evening, trying to ignore the pain in his left shoulder, his bad shoulder, from overextending his arm in the shoving, and the bruised hip from the fall to the pavement.

A middle-aged body did not like to be pummeled and flopped to the ground. It liked to keep steady hours without violent surprises. And it did not respond quickly to warm baths. Doug conceded he shouldn’t have kicked the tire. But Broeden made the first physical intrusion. What kind of hothead was he? Doug toyed with a
Rocky
fantasy. He would get Moe Askin, a boxing trainer he knew, to give him instruction. He would work out, run up the steps of the Forty-second Street Library, punch pastramis, and if Broeden ever shoved him again, he would get decked by Kid Pastrami.

He heard nothing about any further plane trips. The children returned to camp for the summer, Andy working as a junior counselor. Doug and Nancy rented a car for visiting day. Susan and Jerry were on the grounds when they arrived, Susan in a white dress, Broeden in a white suit, white shirt, white shoes and a Panama hat. Claudia Cardinale had been joined by Marcello Mastroianni. Doug and Nancy hugged the children. The two couples stiffly acknowledged each other. Andy was nearly Doug’s height now, dark and good-looking. Several of the girl campers giggled their way past him. Karen was growing taller and more womanly. Did any of the boys here try to take her to the boathouse at night? the father speculated. They all visited Karen’s bunk and went to the arts-and-crafts shed where she was working on an oil landscape of the campgrounds. While the others were content with general words of approval for a lovely painting, Marcello said, “Nice light. Good greens. Reminiscent of the Hudson Valley School.” Andy brought them to his bunk where he worked with the youngest children in the camp, 8-year-olds. When the children saw Andy, three of them gathered around to meet his family. Doug noticed that when Andy talked to the children, he dropped to one knee to be on their level. He had done that with Andy, who was followed by these children as if he were the Pied Piper. You’re going to be a good Daddy one day.

Karen took them to see a new ball machine installed on the tennis courts, and Broeden raced off to make a change, appearing for tennis with a T-shirt that said “Flash.” He tested the ball machine and declared it “acceptable,” and played with Karen for so long he was asked by other parents to leave the court so they could have some playing time with their children. “I want to see it all, do it all,” Broeden said as they toured the grounds. He kept up his high energy throughout the day, and while they were watching Karen in a girls’ volleyball game, Broeden cheering loudly, Nancy walked over to him. They exchanged a few words away from the others. She came back toward Doug, a grim expression on her face.

“What just happened?”

“I thought I’d say something to him. I told him, ‘Why don’t you ease up a little?’ He knew exactly what I meant, but he looked at me with a look I recognized very well from business, a look that says, ‘We hire and fire lawyers around here,’ and he said to me, ‘I’m not paying for your advice.’ ”

Doug had eagerly looked forward to seeing the children, but he could not wait for this day to end.

49 years old. He hadn’t thought about how he was going to deal with his birthday; the best idea he had was to ignore it. The children hadn’t mentioned celebrating and this was all right with him, the only relevance he could find for 49 was that it was one year from 50. He came to Nancy’s apartment. They were planning to go out for a casual dinner and he walked into a surprise party which she had organized. Karen and Andy were there, the Kleinmans, Jeannie, Marty and Ellen, Doug’s parents. Nancy and the children had worked together on a gift for Doug; the children had secretly removed from a file box in Doug’s apartment clippings of his pieces dating back to his earliest news stories. Nancy made copies and had the collection bound in a leather volume. If he had been asked, he would have declined a celebration. He was grateful to Nancy, though, for doing all that, for being more celebratory than he would have been. But 49? 49 going on 50.

“National outlook. Those are the key words this month, Doug. When you sit there thinking about what you’re going to write, ask yourself, am I being too provincial?”

“Probably. I’m Kid Pastrami.”

“How’s that?”

“Robby, what’s my quota this time?”

“Don’t be so sensitive. No quota. Just think national outlook. Will it play to all our readers out there?”

“Doug?” Bill Wall came on the line.

“Yes, Bill.”

“If you have any doubts about a column not being national enough, we’ve got a new way of pretesting your columns
before
they appear. We can’t do this with all columns because of timing. But since you usually have a few in reserve, we can pretest some of them, then you can go back and actually tailor the pieces for maximum demographic impact.”

“A little from the sides, a little from the waist.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I was being too New York again.”

Karen and Andy were at the Broedens, and when Doug called to speak to them, he learned from Andy that Karen was away for the day. She and Broeden had gone to Westhampton in his plane. In what was apparently a concession to Doug, Broeden had hired a professional pilot. Doug called back later. Karen was home, she was fine. But later on he imagined the children in the plane, and while Broeden was congratulating himself about being above the common citizenry, the plane would crash and they would die. Or Broeden would take them on a fancy vacation to the Caribbean, scuba diving, and the apparatus would fail, or skiing, and the chair lift would break. The worst images were those where Broeden lived and the children died, where they were in a situation they never would have been in but for Broeden, but for his money and life-style, and Susan’s, Susan was part of it, although it was mainly Broeden and his wealth that led them to the death of rich children.

By morning he managed to purge himself of these thoughts, accepting that accidents could happen unconnected to money, they could happen any time, anywhere, they could happen when the children were not with Broeden, but with him. He wasn’t sure of his own motives any longer. Was he looking to ground them out of concern for their safety or because of that excited look in Karen’s eyes as she described flying above traffic, the obvious delight she was taking in the deliciousness of her new life with Smiling Jack? He called Teterboro Airport. He had to know how much the plane cost that Broeden owned. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I put up with Houston and surveys and little messages on the computer to make enough money to meet my expenses and stay competitive with His Flashness and I have as much chance of matching him as Rosselli’s turtles have of getting on
Wide World of Sports.
I run out to get a big-screen television, and he’s got the television and the apartment and the car and the house and a goddamn
plane.

T
HE MESSAGE ON DOUG
’
S
screen was, “Good. Let’s have some more like this.” He had written a column for “national outlook,” the attention given to sports figures from important media cities at the expense of others less well placed.

“The diabolical part of his operation is that he can send the messages to you. You can’t send a message to him,” he told John McCarthy while they were having lunch together.

“I’ve got a suggestion. You grab a couple hundred a week extra money, Hopalong gets you down, you go out and buy some new clothes or whatever makes you happy. TV is the answer.”

“TV?”

“Sports Cable Network. They need a guy for a Saturday show. I’ve got so much on my desk I can’t think about it. You read some scores, do a little commentary. Piece of cake. I’ll recommend you.”

“Do I get to sing?”

“You really should think about it. Or you can tell Hopalong to shove it and write
The Donna Blayton Story.
Her life in swimming and drugs.”

“Esther Williams, where are you? I can’t risk freelancing. I couldn’t live with Flash Broeden picking up a share of my tab.”

During the summer Nancy had been working on two pro bono projects in her office, helping an artists’ cooperative buy a loft building and securing space for a child-care program on the Lower East Side. On a July Saturday, walking through a street fair on Third Avenue, he and Nancy passed a booth for Bronx Educational Services, which ran a literacy-training program for adults. Doug talked to their director, responded to what they were doing and as a means of raising funds and publicizing the group, arranged a media event for their next street-fair booth. He contacted the New York Yankees, and Dave Winfield, Ricky Henderson and Don Mattingly appeared at the booth, the press seizing upon this photo opportunity. On a variation of the idea, he secured a commitment from the Mets’ pitching staff to pose for pictures on behalf of Literacy Volunteers. Doug may have thought of these ideas on his own, but he had Nancy as an example. His giving help to these organizations was a result, he believed, of having this person in his life.

The last two weeks in August they had rented a house together in the Berkshires for their vacations. They went to concerts at Tanglewood, ate at country inns. One morning they were walking along a road holding hands and Nancy rested her head on Doug’s shoulder.

“Oh, that’s it,” he said. “Where has that been? I seem to have misplaced it.”

“What?”

“That feeling. To be with a woman and be happy.”

They were beginning to deal with parental restlessness. Nancy’s parents wanted to meet Doug, and she suggested they all go to a ball game.

“My parents like baseball and it will put you in the most favorable light,” she teased.

They went to Yankee Stadium for a Saturday-afternoon game. Nancy’s father, Joe Bauer, was a trim man of five feet seven with graying hair and the prominent family nose. He was wearing a sports shirt, sports jacket, twill slacks and a vintage Yankee baseball hat. Her mother, Ruth, was a slender brunette, wearing sensible clothing, a cotton turtleneck, slacks, a golf jacket and sturdy walking shoes. They had come to play. Both of them knew the game; Joe, in particular, was pleased about seats in the press section. He talked to Doug about his memories of ball games, the dynasties in Yankee Stadium, and games at the Polo Grounds, the Giants with Mel Ott and his kickout batting motion, slow-footed Ernie Lombardi hitting the left-field wall and only reaching first base. Following the game they went to Nancy’s apartment for dinner. Nancy’s parents were both high school history teachers in Rockville Center. They had gone to a ball game, and that was fun, and now it was the conversation segment. With Doug, a sportswriter, present, they had a topic for dinner and they pursued it—“Sports in America.”

After they left, Doug said, “They’re a very doughty pair. You get the feeling they should be from Scotland.”

He stayed overnight at Nancy’s apartment in the glow of his passing marks with the teachers. He was thinking of them as one of those sweet, energetic older couples who go to lecture series in New York. Then he did his arithmetic. Mel Ott. Ernie Lombardi. Those were not names out of a period of sports history Doug had read about. He saw those ballplayers, too. Joe Bauer had married Nancy’s mother when he was 20. He’s 58. I’m 49. I’ve got them as a sweet, older couple—and the man who is the father of the woman I’m sleeping with is practically my contemporary!

Bob Kleinman concluded the million-dollar deal he had been working on, a settlement between two large law firms. The weekend following the settlement he and Sarah went to East Hampton and bought a house with a swimming pool.

“If you don’t make it by fifty, you haven’t made it,” he said to Doug at lunch. “I made it. Barely.”

“We have to celebrate your birthday.”

“I told Sarah and I’m telling you, no celebration. I don’t have to commemorate the fact that I’m getting closer to the grave.”

“Are you going to make it through this meal? Because if you’re not, I’d like to settle the check now.”