Parker Field (21 page)

T
HURSDAY

T
he seven fifteen a.m. flight to Albany seems like cruel and unusual punishment for a man who cut his evening short by a good three hours in order to embark on what stands a good chance of being a wild goose chase.

I get to the airport by five thirty and barely make my plane. I look down, as I’m in my seat, and realize I’ve left my belt in the plastic tray where I deposited it and pretty much everything else on my person to appease the smiling, friendly security folks. Ah, well. They probably sell belts at the Albany airport. Then, having hurried up, we wait. Somebody sneezes in Chicago and the whole aviation system loses two hours. But flying beltless and late beats the hell out of driving all the way to Wells, Vermont.

We land before noon, even with the change in Newark, and my rental car and I are on the road, headed east.

I
CALLED
August Harshman last night. On about the sixth ring, someone picked up.

“Yes,” he said. “What is it? Whatever you’ve got, I don’t want any.”

I assure Mr. Harshman, who sounds hale enough to be irritable, that I am not a telemarketer. I tell him about my story, on a minor-league baseball team nearly fifty years in the rearview mirror.

“I was told that your niece, Frances Fling, er, Flynn, was friends with one of the players on that team who is now deceased.”

There is a long silence.

“You know that my niece is long since dead, I presume.”

I tell him that I do. I have the feeling that he’s about to lump me with the solicitors for the Deputy Sheriff’s Benevolent Society and hang up.

“But a man who worked for the team back then told me what a wonderful girl she was, and I wanted to hear more about her, for the story.”

Maybe he knows I’m blowing smoke up his ass. Maybe he just wants to get me off the phone but doesn’t want to hang up on me. Finally, he agrees that, if I come by tomorrow, he thinks he can find a few minutes to talk to me about his late sister’s late daughter.

It would have been impolite, to say nothing of stupid, to wonder out loud why an eighty-seven-year-old man is so pressed for time that he can only spare a few minutes. But if he knew me, he’d know I’m like cockroaches. Once you let me in the door, it’s damn hard to get rid of me.

I
FIND
the house on only the third drive through Wells. The locals give me directions that seem to presume that I know the names of every person and identity of every tree and bush in the neighborhood.

I stop a man walking to his car from the hardware store. He describes a route that seemingly would take me through the majority of the New England states. When I point out that, according to my map, the Harshman estate seems to be somewhere on the gravel road somewhere up ahead, he throws his hands in the air and says, “Well, go that way then, if you want to!”

Finally, on that gravel road within eyesight of such Wells, Vermont, as there is, I see the mailbox, half-hidden by a rose bush, with “Harshman” painted on the side.

August Harshman’s house is halfway up a sizable hill. I cross a bridge over a creek that seems to be about one thunderstorm short of overflowing. The house, a wooden Victorian, faces west, and the view of the mountains makes me wonder what housing prices are like up here.

I knock and, after a minute or so, I can hear a faint tapping that grows louder. Finally, the door opens.

“You’re late,” August Harshman says, leaning on his cane. He turns his back to me, and I follow him, very slowly, inside. He’s a tall man, still over six feet despite what I assume is some octogenarian shrinkage. He’s thin, and I sense that he’s always been thin. An old dog of mixed ancestry with a suspicion of strangers looks up from the wooden floor with yellow, baleful eyes. When he tries to bark, he sounds as old as Harshman. Harshman tells him to hush, and he does. A small and welcome fire crackles.

He offers me nothing. When he sits, in a Barcalounger that has adjusted to his contour and absorbed his smell, I take the next-most-comfortable option, a straight-backed wooden dining-room chair. It is a poor second, but at least I’m in the door, talking to Frannie Fling’s nearest living relative that I’m able to track down.

I ask Harshman if he lives there alone. He says he has a daughter who lives in San Francisco.

“She comes to see me twice a year,” he says, “and she doesn’t want to do that. I can tell.”

Have you thought, I want to ask him, about buying her a more comfortable second chair? Might make a difference.

He does allow, though, that his daughter would like him to move out west with her.

“So she can take care of me,” he says, spitting it out like she’d cursed him. “I won’t do it, though. They’ll never get me west of the Hudson, I can tell you that.”

I let him talk awhile. I thought New Englanders were supposed to be a close-mouthed bunch, lots of ay-ups followed by long silences. I certainly would have expected that of August Harshman. Like a lot of tight-lipped people, though, once you get him going, he’s like the damn Energizer Bunny. Just keeps going and going.

His sister, he says, married beneath her. The Flynns were “shanty Irish,” but the late Eleanor was taken by Willie Flynn’s charm and good looks, “so-called.”

“Frannie, she was beautiful,” he says, his tone softening. “She had that wild streak, though, just like her father. Willie drank, you know. Grown man named Willie, not William or Bill, you had to know he was the irresponsible type. No offense.”

I opt not to tell Mr. Harshman that Willie’s my given name. It would just get in the way of the information, which is what I’m here for.

I spend a couple of hours with August Harshman, and he tells me as much as anyone living could about Frances Flynn.

She was, as I’ve already been told by Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon, a good student who decided that her future did not include Wells, Vermont.

“They would have sent her to college,” Harshman says. “Mary and I had offered to help, but not long after that, she ran away.”

The Flynns didn’t hear from their daughter for some months.

“She had done some things that didn’t set well with her parents, or at least with Eleanor, and I think there had been a falling out.”

By the time Frannie came back to Wells with her tail between her legs, it soon became obvious that she was pregnant.

“Eleanor was funny,” Harshman says. “She married this fella who was about two steps up from the town drunk, but she had this moral side. Maybe she just wanted Frannie to have a better life than she’d had.

“We tried to stop her from kicking Frannie out, and I know Willie was against it. But Eleanor ran that house. She controlled everything except Willie’s drinking. Nobody could control that.”

And so Frannie went to live in the home of a friend whose parents weren’t quite as judgmental.

“And then, that spring, we heard she was gone again, back down south.”

When notified of Frannie’s death, Eleanor Flynn went from hard-hearted mother to avenging angel. She threatened a lawsuit and more or less called down the wrath of God on the New York Yankees.

“Nineteen sixty-five, that was a sad year,” Harshman says as he gets up to stoke the fire and put another couple of pieces of wood on it. The dog follows him with his eyes wherever he goes.

“We lost Frannie in March, and then Willie … well, I think it killed him. He’d never needed much of an excuse to drink, and now he had every reason in the world to try to drink the world dry.”

Willie Flynn died that November. They found his frozen body by the same creek I drove over on the way to Harshman’s house. His widow was so angry at him that she had him cremated and his ashes thrown away, Harshman says.

“He should have been stronger. If nothing else, he should have thought about the boy.”

“The boy?”

He looks at me like I’m slow. Maybe it’s my southern accent.

“Her brother. Dairy. He was the only one they had left, and instead of getting closer to him, holding him tighter, they all just seemed to go their separate ways.”

His name was Adair. Adair Enoch Flynn. Adair had been his father’s mother’s last name. Enoch was his mother’s father’s name. Hell of a moniker to put on a kid.

Dairy Flynn was eight years younger, so he was ten when Frannie went south the first time, eleven when she died.

“He was real fond of his big sister,” Harshman says. “In some ways, I think it was worse on him than on Eleanor and Willie. He kept a picture of her in his room until after she died and Eleanor came in one day and threw it away. They had a big fight over it, she told me. She said he came after her with a baseball bat. Willie had to take it away from him.”

August Harshman sighs.

“You know,” he says, “they were too hard on her. I heard about how she went back down there to get that fella, that ballplayer, to marry her. But I really think that, if they had took her in and accepted that girls do get that way sometimes, no matter how well you raise them, and offered to take care of that child like it was their own, she would have stayed up here and none of what happened would have happened.

“But it was 1964. You didn’t get pregnant until you got married, although some did and just took care of things without a lot of fuss.”

He says Eleanor told him once, many years later, that she would have given anything to have saved Frannie, if she had known how it was going to turn out.

“Didn’t stop her from doing what she did about Dairy, though.”

I think about Peggy, about how she must have felt, younger even than Frances Flynn, when her parents told her she had to leave with her bastard, mixed-race baby in tow. I am here either because Peggy was a stronger person than Frannie Flynn or because of plain damn good luck.

After Willie Flynn froze to death in the late fall of 1965, Eleanor moved with her son to Worcester, Massachusetts, where a cousin was able to get her a job as a secretary. Despite the fact that she was in her early forties, she was still apparently quite an attractive woman. Within two years, she had caught the eye of one of her bosses, Roger Fairchild, and within four years, he was divorced and they were married, in 1969.

It turned out, Harshman tells me, that Roger Fairchild wasn’t really in the market for a package deal. He was more than happy to take the mother, but when it came to Dairy, it was “no sale.”

“Dairy was kind of difficult. He got in some trouble down there in Worcester. Never did learn all about it. He’d come up here and stay with us for a week in the summer, and even that long, he could be a pill. Damn near burned the barn down last time he visited.”

Roger and Eleanor Fairchild soon started a belated family of their own, adopting two kids. By the time Dairy turned eighteen, he was a high school dropout who was too old anymore for anyone to even try to control.

“They kicked him out. Just told him he’d have to live somewhere else. Eleanor told me later that Roger said it was either Dairy or him.”

And so, for the second time in seven years, Eleanor evicted her own child. I’m wondering how the Fairchilds’ two youngest children turned out.

When I hear all this crap, and I think about how Peggy took care of her own unforgiving mother in her later, helpless years, I want to take the next plane south and give my old dope-addled mom a very big hug.

“We kind of offered to let him stay here,” Harshman says, but I can’t imagine the offer was especially heartfelt, given Dairy’s track record.

Instead, Harshman says Dairy stayed in Worcester, rooming with some friends, doing whatever work a high school dropout with an attitude problem could find.

“And then, he just disappeared.”

His mother would try to keep in touch, which understandably wasn’t easy. One day, Harshman says, she realized it had been eight months since anyone had seen him. His friends said they always figured he would come back. He had a tendency to disappear for weeks if not months on end, then come back with outrageous stories about adventures on fishing boats or scamming tourists out on Cape Cod.

The cops didn’t seem to have much interest in finding him. Nobody had much interest, I’m thinking but not saying. After a while, everyone forgot about Dairy Flynn.

“Later on, Eleanor never wanted to talk about him. I tried a couple of times, but she’d just cut me off, say something like, 'we couldn’t save him,’ and the conversation would be closed.”

He gets up once, to show me a photograph of Dairy Flynn, circa 1971. He looks a little like his sister. He also looks pissed off.

I see no sense in mentioning the fate of the 1964 Vees to August Harshman, other than to mention that most of them have gone on to their reward.

He gives me directions to the cemetery where Frances Flynn is buried.

“Oh,” he says, as I’m leaving, “did you want something to drink. Some water, maybe, or coffee?”

I tell him no thanks, and not to bother to get up. I can let myself out. He and his dog are more than willing to take me up on that.

The cemetery is easier to find than Harshman’s house was. Frannie’s grave is a challenge, though. The graves aren’t in any sort of order, not parallel or perpendicular to each other for the most part, just rambling all over the hill that overlooks the town.

Finally, I find it. Harshman said he hadn’t been out to see her grave for a couple of years. “I go to enough funerals as it is without keeping up with all the already dead.” But Frannie’s grave looks better kept than most of the ones around it. There are no other Flynns residing here that I can see. I know from my afternoon interview that her father isn’t buried anywhere, and that Eleanor is resting in peace back in Worcester.

Somebody, though, has sure as hell been here.

Frances Flynn’s gravestone seems to be of the cut-rate variety, and it’s adorned only by her name and dates of birth and death. On top of it, though, slowly wilting in the Vermont April that feels like Virginia February, are two dozen yellow roses.

I
HAVE
an eight
P.M
. flight back to Richmond, and it’s four thirty already when I start toward Albany. I’m barely out of Wells when my cell phone goes off.