Ragtime (17 page)

He condemned himself most for the neglect of his son. He never talked to the boy or offered his companionship. He had always relied on his presence in the child’s life as a model for emulation. How smug that was, how stupid, as the tactic of a man who had acted in his life to distinguish himself from his own father. He looked for the boy and found him on the floor of his room reading in the evening paper an account of the successful play of the New York baseball nine under the masterful coaching of John J. McGraw. Would you like to see that team? he said. The boy looked up, startled. I was just thinking of it, he said. Father went to Mother’s room. Tomorrow, he announced, I am taking the boy to see a game of baseball. He said this with such resolve in its rightness that she was checked in her response, which was to condemn him for an idiot, and when he left the room she could only wonder that she had had that thought in the first place, so separated from my feeling of love.

30

The next afternoon, when father and son left the house, two reporters followed them part of the way on their brisk walk to the railroad station on Quaker Ridge Road. We’re going to the Giants baseball game, Father advised them. That’s all I will say. Who’s pitching? one of the reporters asked. Rube Marquard, the boy said. He’s won his last three chances.

Just as they reached Quaker Ridge a train pulled in. This was the New York Westchester and Boston railway. It did not go anywhere near Boston, nor did it provide service all the way to New York. But it gave a smooth ride to the Bronx and left them with a trolley connection, the 155th Street crosstown, which went over the Harlem River to the Polo Grounds at Coogan’s Bluff.

It was a fine afternoon. Large white clouds moved briskly under a clear blue sky. As the trolley came across the bridge they could see on the bluff overlooking the wooden stands several huge trees which, lacking leaves even in this season, supported derbied figures of men who preferred not to pay to enter the park but to watch the game festooned in the branches like black flowers swaying in the wind. Father caught some of the boy’s excitement. He was immensely pleased to be out of New Rochelle. When they reached the park crowds were streaming down e stairs from the El, cabs were pulling up and discharging their passengers, newsboys were hawking programs of the game, and there was a raucous energy everywhere in the street. Horns blew. The overhead tracks of the El left the street mottled with sun. Father bought the expensive fifty-cent admission, then paid extra for a box, and they entered the park and took their seats behind first base in the lower of the two decks where the sun would for an inning or two cause them to shade their eyes.

The Giants were dressed in their baggy white uniforms with black pin stripes. The manager, McGraw, wore a heavy black cardigan over his barreled trunk with the letters NY emblazoned on the left sleeve. He was short and pugnacious. Like his team he wore socks with thick horizontal stripes and the small flat cap with a peak and a button on the crown. The opponents of the afternoon were the Boston Braves, whose dark blue flannels were buttoned to the neck with the collar turned up. A brisk wind blew the dirt of the field. The game began and almost immediately Father regretted the seats he had chosen. The players’ every ragging curse could be heard clearly by his son. The team at bat shouted obscene taunts at the opposing pitcher. McGraw himself, the paternal figure and commander of his team, stood at third base unleashing the most constant and creative string of vile epithets of anyone. His strident caw could be heard throughout the park. The crowd seemed to match him in its passions. The game was close, with first one team then the other assuming the lead. A runner sliding into second base upended the Giant second baseman, who rose howling, limping in circles and bleeding profusely through his stocking. Both teams came running from their dugouts and the game was stopped for some minutes while everyone fought and rolled in the dirt and the crowd yelled its encouragement. An inning or two after the fight the Giant pitcher Marquard seemed to lose his control and threw the ball so that it hit the Boston batsman. This fellow rose from the ground and ran out toward Marquard waving his bat. Again the dugouts emptied and players wrestled with each other and threw their roundhouse punches and beat clouds of dust into the air. The audience this time participated by throwing soda pop bottles onto the field. Father consulted his program. On the Giant side were Merkle, Doyle, Meyers, Snodgrass and Herzog, among others. The Boston team boasted a player named Rabbit Maranville, a shortstop who he noted roamed his position bent over with his hands at the end of his long arms grazing the grass in a manner that would more properly be called simian. There was a first baseman named Butch Schmidt, and others with the names Cocrehan, Moran, Hess, Rudolph, which led inevitably to the conclusion that professional baseball was played by immigrants. When play was resumed he studied each batsman: indeed, they seemed to be clearly from the mills and farms, rude-features, jug-eared men, sunburned and ham-handed, cheek bulging with tobacco chew, their intelligence completely absorbed in the effort of the game. The players in the field wore outsized flapping leather gloves which made them look like half-dressed clowns. The dry dust of the diamond was blotched with expectorant. Woe to the campaigns of the Anti-Spitting League in the example of these men. On the Boston side the boy who picked up the bats and replaced them in the dugout was, upon second look, a midget, in a team uniform like the rest but proportionately minute. His shouts and taunts were piped in soprano. Most of the players who came to bat first touched him on the head, a gesture he seemed to invite, so that Father realized it was a kind of good luck ritual. On the Giant side was no midget but a strange skinny man whose uniform was ill-fitting, who had weak eyes that did not align properly and who seemed to shadow the game in a lethargic pantomime of his own solitude, pitching imaginary balls more or less in tie to the real pitches. He looked like a dirt eater. He waved is arm in complete circles, like a windmill turns. Father began to watch the game less than he did this unfortunate creature, obviously a team pet, like the Boston midget. During dull moments of the game the crowd yelled to him and applauded his antics. Sure enough, he was listed in the program as mascot. His name was Charles Victor Faust. He was clearly a fool who, for imagining himself one of the players, was kept on the team roster for their amusement.

Father remembered the baseball at Harvard twenty years before, when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians who rarely numbered more than a hundred. He was disturbed by his nostalgia. He’d always thought of himself as progressive. He believed in the perfectability of the republic. He thought, for instance, there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement. He did not believe in aristocracy except of the individual effort and vision. He felt his father’s loss of fortune had the advantage of saving him from the uncritical adoption of the prejudices of his class. But the air in this ball park open under the sky smelled like the back room of a saloon. Cigar smoke filled the stadium and, lit by the oblique rays of the afternoon sun, indicated the voluminous cavern of air in which he sat pressed upon as if by a foul universe, with the breathless wind of a ten-thousand-throated chorus in his ears shouting its praise and abuse.

Our in the center field, behind the unroofed or bleacher seats, a great display board indicated the number of outs and the inning and the hits and runs made. A man went along a scaffold and hung the appropriate marked shingles that summarized the action. Father sank into his chair. As the afternoon wore on he entertained the illusion that what he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be see from a distance.

He turned to his son. What is it you like about this game, he said. The boy did not remove his gaze from the diamond. The same thing happens over and over, he said. The pitcher throws the ball so as to fool the batter into thinking he can hit it. But sometimes the batter does hit it, the father said. Then the pitcher is the one who is fooled, the boy said. At this moment the Boston Hurler, Hub Perdue, threw a pitch which the New York batter, Red Jack Murray, swung at. The ball soared into the air in a high narrow arc and seemed then to stop in its trajectory. With a start Father realized it was coming directly at them. The boy jumped up and held out his hands and there was a cheer behind them as he stood with the leather-covered spheroid resting in his palms. For one instant everyone in the park looked in their direction. Then the fool with the weak eyes who imagined he was a player on the team came up to the fence in front of them and stared at the boy, his arms and hands twitching in his baggy flannel shirt. His hat was absurdly small for his abnormally large head. The boy held out the ball to him and gently, with a smile almost sane, he accepted it.

An interesting note is that this poor fellow, Charles Victor Faust, was actually called upon to pitch one inning in a game toward the end of this same season when the Giants had already wan the pennant and were in a carefree mood. For a moment his delusion that he was a big-leaguer fused with reality. Soon thereafter the players became bored with him and he was no longer regarded as a good luck charm by Manager McGraw. His uniform was confiscated and he was unceremoniously sent on his way. He was remanded to an insane asylum and some months later died there.

31

At the end of the ball game a great anxiety came over Father. He felt it had been stupid to leave his wife alone. But as they left the park borne by the streaming crowd he realized his son had taken his hand. He felt an uplift of his spirit. On the open trolley he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Arriving in New Rochelle they walked briskly from the train station and when they came in the door they gave a loud hello! and for the first time in days Father felt like himself. Mother appeared from the back of the house. Her hair was bound, she was groomed and smiling and neat. She embraced him and said Look, I have something to show you. Her face was radiant. She stepped aside and walking down the hall, holding the hand of the housemaid, was Sarah’s child in his nightshirt. He tottered and swung against her skirt, righted himself and looked at Father in triumph. Everyone laughed. We can’t hold him, Mother said. He wants to walk everywhere.

The boy knelt and held out his arms and the child shook his hand free of the housemaid and lurched toward him, picking up speed as he went, outracing his instability and falling happily against the boy’s chest.

A kind of resolute serenity carried them through the evening. In the quiet of Mother’s room toward midnight she and father discussed everything on their minds. The chances were that Coalhouse would continue for some time to elude capture. In that case they foresaw a community from which they would be increasingly alienated. Already a few of Mother’s acquaintances from her service league had reacted to the publicity given the family. She dreaded actions of spite and bitterness in which Sarah’s baby would be taken away under protection of a vengeful authority. Father could not deny that might happen. But they were in this moment so calmly in possession of themselves that there was no need for false assurances or for either of them to dissemble an optimism not truly felt. Father said he would not put it past the authorities to decide to use the child in some way to persuade Coalhouse to surrender. What we have to do, Father said, is get away. But how can we, Mother said. My father is invalid, school is not yet out, we have just taken on the responsibilities of a household staff. Each of these problems she enumerated with her right index finger tolling the fingers of the left hand. So she had been thinking the same thing and Father now perceived that she awaited his solutions in good faith. He told her to leave everything to him. His assumption of responsibility produced in her warm feelings of gratitude. Their conversation reminding them that they were after all friends of long standing, they went to bed and spent the night together. She let him make love to her, responding with such cooperative huggings and movements of her hips, and with so many caresses of encouragement to represent her best wishes to have him succeed in his efforts, that he felt for the first time in many months she appreciated she had a good man in her arms.

The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. Father located a fine hotel there, the Breakers, which had available a suite of rooms facing the ocean for something less than would be expected, the season having barely begun. The South Jersey shore was easy to reach, a few hours by rail, not too near, but not too far to keep him from going back Sunday evening as his business dictated. The change of air would do everyone good. Grandfather’s doctor, who had submitted him to the latest orthopedic procedure fro broken hips, a metallic pin implanted like a internal splint, advised them that he should be on his crutches or in his chair as much as possible, bed rest comprising the greatest danger for one of his age. The boy would have to leave school a few weeks early but was so adept at his studies that this was not considered a serious disadvantage. The house would not be closed with the covering up of furniture and shutting off of rooms this required, but maintained with the staff for those periods in which Father would have to be in New Rochelle. The housekeeper would stay with mother at the shore. She was a stolid, conscientious Negro woman who would provide, in addition, the obvious and erroneous explanation for the presence of a brown child in their party.

Thus armed with a plan of action the family prepared for their departure. They maintained a good cheer that became almost hysterical as the situation grew in its ugliness. The new Police Chief, a retired inspector from the New York City Department of Homicide, proposed lines of investigation that were ominous. His first day in the job he told reporters that the explosive used on Municipal Station No. 2 was very sophisticated, a combination of gun cotton and fulminate of mercury that could only have been concocted by someone who knew his stuff, which Coalhouse Walker, a piano player, did not. He asked where the Negro got the money for the car he used or for the assistance of a gang of colored men all armed and all presumably motivated by hard cash. He has to pay his cohorts. He has expenses. Where does he get his money? Where does he stay between his mad raids on this gentle city? I know a half-dozen Reds I would love to have in detention here. I bet I would get some of my answers.

These remarks, which were widely disseminated, had in their suggestion of a conspiracy of radicals the worst possible effect on an already agitated townspeople. Militia patrolled the streets. There were several instances of abuse of Negroes who were seen out of their neighborhoods. There was rash of false alarms from fireboxes all over the city, each bringing out engines with police guards and a convoy of reporters in cars. Reporters were everywhere, and along with the troopers and the highly visible police in their wagons, produced in the community a painfully swollen sense of itself. The churches on Sunday morning had never known such crowds. The hospital emergency room reported a higher than usual number of household accident victims. People were burning themselves, cutting themselves, tripping on rugs and falling down flights of stairs. Several men were brought in with gun wounds inflicted in the cleaning and handling of old weapons.

Meanwhile the press seemed to be ahead of the authorities in dealing with the specifics of Coalhouse’s letters. Probably for the pictures it would make they agitated for several editions to raise the Model T from Firehouse Pond. This was finally done. A crane was move to the site and the automobile was brought up like a monstrous artifact, mud dripping from its tires, water and slime pouring out of its hood. It was swung over to the bank and deposited on the ground for everyone to see.

But now the authorities were embarrassed. The Ford stood as tangible proof of the black man’s grievance. Waterlogged and wrecked, it offended the sensibilities of anyone who respected machines and valued what they could do. After its picture was published people began to come and see it in such numbers that the police had to cordon off the area. Feeling that they had compromised themselves the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen issued a new series of condemnations of the colored madman and said that to negotiate with him in any way at all, to face him with less than an implacable demand that he surrender himself, would be to invite every renegade and radical and black man in the country to flout the law and spit upon the American flag.

Even if there was at this point a public demand for a strategy of negotiation, which there was not—not even the press suggested it—no one could had any idea of how to get in touch with the killer. Coalhouse had not announced how much time he granted them till the next attack. Indeed, there was an opinion delivered by an alienist hired by the New York
World
that the second of the letters, signed
Coalhouse Walker
,
President
,
Provisional American Government
, was much advanced beyond the first in its signals of mental deterioration, and that to deal with someone in the throes of a progressive delusionary madness as if he were open to reason would be a tragic mistake.

However, it was left to the plain citizenry of New Rochelle to come up with the most practical idea for dealing with the problem. From every neighborhood and every class the cry arose for Willie Conklin to leave town. Some irate citizens even communicated with Conklin himself. He brought into police headquarters several unsigned letters delivered to his mailbox, all suggesting that if he did not pack up and leave New Rochelle they, the writers, would do Coalhouse Walker’s job for him. Like all of Conklin’s moves, sharing his correspondence with the authorities was a mistake. I did not generate their sympathy, as he had hoped, but simply made up their minds to sponsor the idea. From the beginning Conklin had been unable to understand how anyone who was white could feel for him less that the most profound admiration. The more unpopular he became the more piteous his bewilderment. The miserable fellow understood nothing and saw the public outcry for his exile not in its larger strategy, as a means of defusing the situation, nor even in the small, as a means perhaps of saving his own life. He felt martyred by what he called the nigger lovers, even though these now seemed to constitute virtually the entire population of the city. He drank himself into a state of torpor and became dumbly complaisant as his wife and associated made arrangements for their departure.

Thus, with no one completely in command of the situation, with municipal authorities, police, state militia and citizenry all nervous and unsure in their continuing vulnerability to the black guerrilla, two things were caused to happen more or less by public consensus that were roughly analogous to a recognition of his demands: the Model T Ford had been raised, possibly foretelling some kind of negotiation, and he could read, if he was in range of the New Rochelle papers, both of which gave the largest headlines in their history to the intelligence, that the Conklin family had gone into hiding in New York City. No concessions had been made and the streets bristled with military and paramilitary deployments. But the situation was altered. Let him now burn down the entire metropolis of New York, one editorial said. Or accept the principle that any man who takes the law into his own hands places himself against a civilized and resolute people and defames the very justice he seeks to enforce.

In contrast to all of this the family’s departure was private and unreported. Father contracted with the Railway Express to transport their baggage—a matching pair of wicker trunks he had bought for the occasion, each with several drawers and compartments and a commodious closet for hanging clothes, a brass-studded footlocker and several suitcases and hatboxes—and they rode out of New Rochelle on a train that came through at the crack of dawn. Later that morning in New York they made connections with an Atlantic City train in Pennsylvania Station. This was the station designed by the firm of Stanford White and Charles McKim. Its stone colonnade façades, modeled on the Roman baths at Caracalla, spanned 31st to 33rd Streets, and 7th to 8th Avenue. Porters helped with Grandfather’s wheelchair. Mother was wearing a white ensemble. The laundress held Sarah’s child. The station on the inside was so vast that although it was filled with people their voices were no more than a murmur. The boy gazed at the roof, an exposition of corrugated green glass vaults and arches supported by steel ribs and needlelike steel columns. The light fell through this roof like a soft crystal dust. Descending to the concourse of trains he looked right and left and saw as far as he could see in either direction the encouched locomotives waiting in an impatience of steam and shouts and tolling bells to be released on their journeys.