The Given Day (49 page)

He came home to his apartment a few hours later and found Harry Frazee waiting for him in the lobby. The doorman went back outside and Ruth pushed the button and stood by the brass doors of the elevator.

"I saw you at the president's speech," Frazee said. "I couldn't reach you through the crowd."

"Sure was thick," Ruth said.

"If only our dear president knew how to play the press like you do, Mr. Ruth."

Babe swallowed the smile that threatened to creep up his face. He had to hand it to Johnny Igoe on that one --Johnny had sent Babe out to orphanages and hospitals and old-lady homes, and the papers ate it up. Men had flown in from Los Angeles to give Babe screen tests, and Johnny talked up the offers he'd told Babe were coming in from the flickers business. Actually, just about the only thing that could have pushed Babe off the front pages this week was Wilson. Even the shooting of the Bavarian prime minister went under the fold when Babe's deal to star in a short flicker called The Dough Kiss was announced. When reporters asked if he'd be going to spring training or not, Ruth kept saying the same thing, "If Mr. Frazee thinks I'm worthy of a fair wage, I'll be there."

Spring training was three weeks off.

Frazee cleared his throat. "I'll meet your price."

Babe turned and met Frazee's eyes. Frazee gave him a curt nod.

"The papers have been drawn up. You can sign them at my offi ce tomorrow morning." Frazee gave him a thin smile. "You won this round, Mr. Ruth. Enjoy it."

"Okay, Harry."

Frazee stepped in close. He smelled good in a way that Ruth associated with the very rich, the ones who knew things he'd never know in a 408DENNIS LEHANE way that went beyond secret handshakes. They ran the world, men like Frazee, because they understood something that would always escape Babe and men like him: money. They planned its movements. They could predict its moment of passage from one hand to another. They also knew other things Babe didn't, about books and art and the history of the earth. But money most importantly--they had that down cold.

Every now and then, though, you got the better of them.

"Have fun at spring training," Harry Frazee said to Babe as the elevator doors opened. "Enjoy Tampa."

"I will now," Babe said, picturing it. The waves of heat, the languid women.

The elevator man waited.

Harry Frazee produced a money roll held fast by a gold clip. He peeled off several twenties as the doorman opened the door and a woman who lived on six, a pretty dame with no shortage of suitors, came down the marble floor, her heels clicking.

"I understand you need money."

"Mr. Frazee," Babe said, "I can wait until the new contract's signed." "Wouldn't hear of it, son. If one of my men is in arrears, I aim to help him out."

Babe held up a hand. "I've got plenty of cash right now, Mr. Frazee."

Babe tried to step back, but he was too slow. Harry Frazee stuffed the money into the inside pocket of Babe's coat as the elevator man watched and the doorman and the pretty woman on six saw it, too.

"You're worth every penny," Harry Frazee said, "and I'd hate to see you miss a meal."

Babe's face burned and he reached into his coat to give the money back.

Frazee walked away. The doorman trotted to catch up. He held the door for him, and Frazee tipped his hat and walked out into the night.

Ruth caught the woman's eye. She lowered her head and got in the elevator.

"A joke," Ruth said as he joined her and the elevator man shut the cage door and worked the crank. "Just a joke."

THE GIVEN DAYShe smiled and nodded, but he could see she pitied him.

When he got up to his apartment, Ruth put in a call to Kat Lawson. He convinced her to meet him for a drink at the Hotel Buckminster, and after they'd had their fourth round he took her to a room upstairs and fucked her silly. Half an hour later, he fucked her again, doggie-style, and whispered the foulest language he could imagine into her ear. After, she lay on her stomach, asleep, her lips speaking softly to someone in her dreams. He got up and dressed. Out the window lay the Charles River and the lights of Cambridge beyond, winking and watching. Kat snored softly as he put on his coat. He reached into it and placed Harry Frazee's money down on the dresser and left the room.

West Camden Street. Baltimore. Ruth stood on the sidewalk outside what had been his father's saloon. Closed now, distressed, a tin Pabst sign hanging askew behind a dusty window. Above the saloon was the apartment he'd shared with his parents and his sister Mamie, who'd been barely toddling when Ruth was shipped off to Saint Mary's.

Home, you could say.

Babe's memories of it as such, however, were dim. He remembered the exterior wall as the place he'd learned to throw dice. He recalled how the smell of beer never left the saloon or the apartment above it; it rose through the toilet and the bathtub drain, lived in the floor cracks and in the wall.

Home, in truth, was St. Mary's. West Camden Street was an idea. An on-deck circle.

I came here, Babe thought, to tell you I've made it. I'm Big Noise. I'll earn ten thousand dollars this year, and Johnny says he can get me another ten in endorsements. My face will be on the kind of tin plate you'd have hung in the window. But you wouldn't have hung it, would you? You would have been too proud. Too proud to admit you had a son who makes more money in a year than you could make in ten. The son you sent away and tried to forget. George Junior. Remember him?

410DENNIS LEHANE

No, I don't. I'm dead. So's your mother. Leave us alone.

Babe nodded.

I'm going to Tampa, George Senior. Spring training. Just thought I'd stop by and let you see I'd made something of myself.

Made something of yourself? You can barely read. You fuck whores. You get paid whore's wages to play a whore's game. A game. Not man's work. Play.

I'm Babe Ruth.

You're George Herman Ruth Junior, and I still wouldn't trust you to work behind the bar. You'd drink the profits, forget to lock up. No one wants to hear your bragging here, boy, your stories. Go play your games. This is not your home anymore.

When was it?

Babe looked up at the building. He thought of spitting on the sidewalk, the same sidewalk where his father had died from a busted melon. But he didn't. He rolled it all up--his father, his mother, his sister Mamie, who he hadn't talked to in six months, his dead brothers, his life here--rolled it all up like a carpet and tossed it over his shoulder.

Good-bye.

Don't let the door hit your fat ass on the way out.

I'm going.

So go then.

I am.

Start walking.

He did. He put his hands in his pocket and walked up the street toward the taxi he'd left idling at the corner. He felt as if he wasn't just leaving West Camden Street or even Baltimore. He was steaming away from a whole country, the motherland that had given him his name and his nature, now wholly unfamiliar, now foreign ash.

Plant Field in Tampa was surrounded by a racetrack that had been out of use for years but still smelled of horseshit when the Giants THE GIVEN DAYcame to town to play an exhibition game against the Red Sox and the white-ball rule went into effect for the fi rst time.

The implementation of the white-ball rule was a big surprise. Even Coach Barrow hadn't known it was coming this early. Rumors floating through the leagues had held that the new rule wouldn't be employed until opening day, but the home plate umpire, Xavier Long, came into the dugout just before the game to tell them today was the day.

"By order of Mr. Ban Johnson, no less. Even provided the fi rst bag, he did."

When the umps emptied that bag in the on- deck circle, half the boys, Babe included, came out of the dugout to marvel at the creamy brightness of the leather, the sharp red stitching. Christ's sake, it was like looking at a pile of new eyes. They were so alive, so clean, so white.

Major league baseball had previously dictated that the home team provide the balls for every game, but it was never stated what condition those balls had to be in. As long as they possessed no divots of marked depth, those balls could, and were, played until they passed over a wall or someone tore the cover off.

White balls, then, were something Ruth had seen on opening day in the first few innings, but by the end of the first game, that ball was usually brown. By the end of a three-game series, that ball could disappear in the fur of a squirrel.

But those gray balls had almost killed two guys last year. Honus Sukalowski had taken one to the temple and never talked right again. Bobby Kestler had also taken one to the bean and hadn't swung a bat since. Whit Owens, the pitcher who'd hit Sukalowski, had left the game altogether out of guilt. That was three guys gone in one year, and during the war year to boot.

Standing in left, Ruth watched the third out of the game arc toward him like a Roman candle, a victim of its own brilliance. He was whistling when he caught it. As he jogged back in toward the dugout, God's fingertips found his chest.

It's a new game.

412DENNIS LEHANE

You can say that twice.

It's your game now, Babe. All yours.

I know. Did you see how white it is? It's so . . . white.

A blind man could hit it, Babe.

I know. A blind kid. A blind girl kid.

It's not Cobb's game anymore, Babe. It's a slugger's game. Slugger. That's a swell word, boss. Always been fond of it, myself. Change the game, Babe. Change the game and free yourself. From what?

You know.

Babe didn't, but he kind of did, so he said, "Okay."

"Who you talking to?" Stuffy McInnis asked as he reached the dugout.

"God."

Stuffy spit some tobacco into the dirt. "Tell Him I want Mary Pick-ford at the Belleview Hotel."

Babe picked up his bat. "See what I can do."

"Tuesday night."

Babe wiped down his bat. "Well, it is an off day."

Stuffy nodded. "Say around six."

Babe walked toward the batter's box.

"Gidge."

Babe looked back at him. "Call me 'Babe,' okay?"

"Sure, sure. Tell God to tell Mary to bring a friend."

Babe walked into the batter's box.

"And beer!" Stuffy called.

Columbia George Smith was on the mound for the Giants, and his first pitch was low and inside and Babe suppressed a giggle as it passed over the toe of his left foot. Jesus, you could count the stitches! Lew McCarty threw the ball back to his pitcher and Columbia George threw a curveball next that hissed past Babe's thighs for a strike. Babe had been watching for that pitch because it meant Columbia George was stair climbing. The next pitch would be belt high and a hair inside, and Babe would have to swing but miss if he wanted Columbia THE GIVEN DAYGeorge to throw the high heat. So he swung, and even trying to miss, he foul-tipped the ball over McCarty's head. Babe stepped out of the box for a moment, and Xavier Long took the ball from McCarty and examined it. He wiped at it with his hand and then his sleeve and he found something there he didn't like because he placed it in the pouch over his groin and came back out with a brand-spanking new ball. He handed it to McCarty, and McCarty rifled it back to Columbia George.

What a country!

Babe stepped back into the box. He tried to keep the glee from his eyes. Columbia George went into his windup, and, yup, his face corked into that telltale grimace it got whenever he brought the fire, and Babe gave it all a sleepy smile.

It was not cheers he heard when he scorched that fresh white ball toward the Tampa sun. Not cheers or oohs or aahs.

Silence. Silence so total that the only sound that could fill it was the echo of his bat against cowhide. Every head in Plant Field turned to watch that miraculous ball soar so fast and so far that it never had time to cast its shadow.

When it landed on the other side of the right field wall, five hundred feet from home plate, it bounced high off the racetrack and continued to roll.

After the game, one of the sports scribes would tell Babe and Coach Barrow that they'd taken measurements, and the final tally was 579 feet before it came to a full stop in the grass. Five hundred and seventy-nine. Damn near two football fields.

But in that moment, as it soared without shadow into a blue sky and a white sun and he dropped his bat and trotted slowly down the first base line, tracking it, willing it to go farther and faster than anything ever could or ever had or maybe ever would in so short a time, Babe saw the damnedest thing he'd ever seen in his life--his father sitting atop the ball. Riding it really, hands clenched to the seams, knees pressed to the leather, his father tumbling over and over in space with that ball. He howled, his father did. He clenched his face from the fear.

414DENNIS LEHANE

Tears fell from his eyes, fat ones, and hot, Babe assumed. Until, like the ball, he disappeared from view.

Five hundred and seventy nine feet, they told Ruth.

Ruth smiled, picturing his father, not the ball. All gone now. Buried in the saw grass. Buried in Plant Field, Tampa.

Never coming back. chapter twenty-five If Danny could say nothing else positive about the new commissioner, he could at least say the man was true to his word. When the molasses flood tore through the heart of his neighborhood, Danny was spending the week keeping the peace forty miles away at a box factory strike in Haverhill. Once the workers there were brought to heel, he moved on to ten days at a fishery strike in Charlestown. That whimpered to an end when the AFL refused to grant a charter because they didn't deem the workers skilled labor. Danny was loaned out next to the Lawrence PD for a textile workers' strike that had been going on for three months and could already claim two dead, including a labor organiz er who'd been shot through the mouth as he left a barbershop.

Through these strikes and those that followed throughout the late winter and into early spring--at a clock factory in Waltham, among machinists in Roslindale, a mill in Framingham--Danny was spat at, screamed at, called a goon and a whore and a lackey and pus. He was scratched, punched, hit with eggs, hit with sticks, and once, in Framingham, caught a hurled brick with his shoulder. In Roslindale, the machinists got their raise but not their health benefits. In Everett, the shoe 416DENNIS LEHANE workers got half their raise, but no pension. The Framingham strike was crushed by the arrival of truckloads of new workers and the onslaught of police. After they'd made the final push and the scabs had gone through the gates, Danny looked around at the men they'd left in their wake, some still curled on the ground, others sitting up, a few raising ineffectual fists and pointless shouts. They faced a sudden new day with far less than they'd asked for and much less than they'd had. Time to go home to their families and figure out what to do next.