The Rail (14 page)

Blanchard was “hospitalized” for several days, and when she returned to the apartment, her husband, all his belongings and some of hers were gone. They only talked by telephone after that, and nothing came of it. Blanchard, given time and sanity enough to think, faced the truth: No matter what her husband said, it was close to impossible that she had come home early, for the first time in months, on the single day he had chosen to seduce one of his students.

She didn't have to be taken home to Richmond until almost a year later.

She had been erratic, off her medication and drinking heavily, yet she somehow kept her job and was even allowed to work full-time again as an editor. Some of her friends tried to help her and some disappeared. She told the ones who tried to help that she was fine, that she would snap out of it any day.

But then, in 1985, she was arrested for walking down Amsterdam Avenue at three in the afternoon, naked and singing a Beatles tune. She explained to the policeman who tried to cover her that she was too hot. It was mid-November.

And so, just in time for Thanksgiving, Blanchard Penn, who had re-assumed her family name after the first divorce and had never given it up again, was brought back south, accepting at last her fate. She lived with James and Virginia, who were already 72 and 66 and less thrilled to have their only daughter come home than they might have been 20 years before.

She told Betsy Traywick, one of the few old classmates who had stayed in touch since St. Catherine's days, that she needed to come home and take care of her mother and father. Everyone knew, though, that the care was essentially a three-way affair: The one most capable on any given day looked after the other two.

ELEVEN

David leaves Blanchard and his father in the garden. He wants to call Carly and tell her that the car is not yet fixed, and see if anyone has called about a job interview. He would not be averse to a little sympathy.

He's irritated that she's not in her office at the moment. His concern is greatly aggravated because the secretary, a young woman not long out of a two-year community college with an associate degree in secretarial science, explains, “To tell you the truth, she's out showing a house right now.”

Carly has told David that she does not completely trust Crystal.

“The thing is,” she said to him one night at supper a few months ago, “I know in a heartbeat when she's lying. You know how some people say, ‘Honestly' or ‘Really' before they're going to tell one? With Crystal, it's ‘To tell you the truth.' If Crystal starts a sentence with ‘To tell you the truth,' watch your hat and coat.”

It was good for a laugh, when David and Carly were still laughing together about things like that.

“I'll call back later,” he tells Crystal, trying not to sound as peevish or desperate as he feels. “She can call here but, to tell you the truth, I'm going to be in and out.”

David wonders what will become of him. He wonders what will become of them, of course, Carly and Frannie and Abbie. But he also believes, when he wakes up at four a.m. and can't get back to sleep, that they will be OK. About him, he's not so sure.

David wonders if he has taken a wrong turn somewhere. Other men, when they lose their jobs, seem able to recover. They sell, or they simply charm, or they have some specialty that is invaluable to someone, somewhere.

What David has become an expert in, he knows when he mentally gathers his assets in the long, dark predawn, is a language. Not even a lot of languages. He can speak a little French, a little Italian. But mostly it's English. He is the guy who knows the difference between ground zero and square one. He can tell enormity from enormousness. He sneers at those who mistake masterful for masterly or write of meteoric rises.

He knows that kudos is singular. He held forth on that at a party one night when he'd had too much to drink and an acquaintance, a big, gregarious pharmaceutical salesman who made twice the salary David did when David had a job, misused it.

“Whoa,” the man had said, his face reddening. “Who the fuck are you? The King of Kudos?” And David was the fool for correcting his friend.

That's me, David thinks to himself. The King of Kudos, indulged but hardly invaluable, kept for as long as the company stock doesn't dip.

He envies his father, who was born with the special talent that all small boys pray for—physical excellence. He knows that the Rail has suffered from having talents that he outlived before he was much past 35, and David is sure—usually sure—that another newspaper will pay him (sometime soon, please God) to report on some aspect of the human condition.

But he has seen the adoration on the faces of the other boys and the admiration of their fathers, and he knows that, were you to make him nine years old again, he would choose the quick reflexes and low, smooth, unflappable heartbeat of the Virginia Rail every time, and let the future be damned.

He knows that Neil Beauchamp didn't get to be who he was on natural talent alone. He knows that the soft suburban comfort his father afforded them when David was young helped ensure that he would not be a great athlete, the thing Neil would most have liked.

You should have been harder on me, David wants to tell his father. You shouldn't have just dropped in and out like some celebrity guest on a TV show.

He has seen The Contract, one of Neil Beauchamp's most treasured possessions, probably long since sold at some collectibles show, possessed by a father of three in Des Moines or a fat guy living in a trailer in Mobile.

He has heard his father, the only time Neil held forth at any length on the subject in his presence, talk about what The Contract meant, what it took him from, what it made him.

It was for $250, the amount to be given by the Detroit Tigers to James O'Neil Beauchamp, on January 8, 1953.

“This is what got me out of Penns Castle,” he told David, who was 14 that year. They were living in a suburb of Kansas City while The Rail played out the string. “This is why we're here. Baseball.” Even then, he said it as an evangelist might have said “Jesus.”

Neil Beauchamp was a natural-born athlete. Everyone in town knew that.

They all assumed he would have been a better student, if he hadn't spent all his time working and playing ball.

Some of the older men, watching and drinking in the shade trees, thought he might even be a big-leaguer some day.

The more sober-minded, though, remembered Mack Turpin, who had thrown the ball so hard that they sometimes had to give the other team four strikes. Mack Turpin was working at the lumber yard, had been for a decade, after only a year in the low minors. They recalled Poorboy Ransom, who hit home runs so deep right before the war that the Jacksons put up a screen in their back yard, 75 feet beyond the railroad tracks. He joined the Marines in '42 and then went to work for Philip Morris in Richmond; he never even got an offer.

Big fish, they said. Little pond.

Neil's junior year, the Penns Castle Pirates beat every team they played. Twice they took on the city boys from John Marshall High, both times traveling to Richmond in the Blue Goose, a bus so beyond usefulness that it was deemed unsafe for everyday use on the regular school routes.

Twice, they won.

Neil hit two home runs in the first game, an 8-2 rout. The second time they played, they drew almost five thousand fans on a Wednesday afternoon. Most had come to see the Mosby Marvel, as Chauncey Durden, the
Times-Dispatch
sports editor, referred to him in his column.

In that one, they intentionally walked Neil the first four times he batted, and Penns Castle had only one unearned run through seven regulation innings, same as the city boys. Neil, playing center field, saved the game with a running catch in the bottom of the seventh with two runners on base and two out. He pitched in relief in the eighth and ninth, shutting out the home team.

Then, with Neil leading off the top of the tenth, the third pitcher, too proud to intentionally walk him again, trying to nibble him to death instead, threw a pitch that was too close to the plate. Neil drilled the ball over the shortstop's head, all the way to the fence, for a double.

The next batter popped up. Then, with an oh-two count on the skinny Pirates second baseman, Neil went for third. The batter swung and missed for strike three, but the catcher's throw was too late.

With two outs and Penns Castle's seventh batter at the plate, crouched down and waggling his bat as if his highest ambition was a walk, Neil waited through a ball and a strike.

Then, with the left-handed pitcher set to throw, his shadow almost reaching the third-base line in the dying light, Neil took off, his cleats throwing chunks of clay and small clouds of chalk. He caught the pitcher and catcher as well as his own coach unawares (although the man refused to admit later that he didn't give the signal to steal home).

The element of surprise would not have been enough, in itself. The pitcher recovered almost instantly and threw accurately to home, and the catcher jumped out of his crouch, pushing the batter aside.

Half a second before it happened, Neil Beauchamp was dead in the water. Everyone who saw it agreed to that. He had taken off his cap for his dash home and was holding it in his left hand. Not four feet from the plate, he stopped, and even in that he was, they all said, a natural. From full tilt to dead still, just like that.

The catcher seemed puzzled for a half-second. That was all it took. Suddenly, Neil was flat on his back, the heel of his left foot just scraping the plate, inches below the catcher's frantic swipe.

The John Marshall catcher swore he'd tagged him, and his coach was thrown out of the game taking up the cause, but the home-plate umpire had seen it all.

The bottom of the tenth was an anticlimax. The Richmond fans were so busy buzzing about the country boy who stole the game that they never really rallied behind their batters, who seemed equally distracted and went down in order, the last one rolling an easy grounder to the pitcher's mound that Neil pounced on and threw to first.

The Richmond fans didn't boo, although few could swear that Neil Beauchamp was either safe or out at the plate. They didn't cheer either, at the sight of their team losing for the second time to a country school that had fewer students than were in the John Marshall senior class. What they did, the sports editor noted the next day, was stand there watching silently, as if they realized this was something they would want to remember.

One of those who stood and watched was Jimmy Black. Jimmy was a short, quick man from Norfolk who scouted much of the eastern half of Virginia for the Detroit Tigers. He was as impressed as the rest, maybe more so, because he had seen Mickey Mantle run when he was in the minors, and he had seen Ted Williams swing a bat before he turned 19. He had seen Babe Ruth in his prime. His gift as a baseball talent scout was his ability to remember. And what Jimmy Black saw that day held up well against what he knew of potential greatness.

Jimmy Black was no fool, though. He didn't run out on the field and tell the kid he was the greatest prospect he'd ever discovered. That could be expensive, and one of Jimmy's most endearing qualities, from the Tigers' point of view, was the way he protected their money as if it were his. He'd been a scout for 30 years at least partly because of his thrift.

Besides, there was no reason to rush. Jimmy knew, because he knew all the other scouts who roamed his territory, that he alone had witnessed this.

There were plenty of high school studs who hit legendary home runs and ran like deer and struck out 18 batters in a game. The numbers didn't matter to Jimmy Black. Numbers were what the other guys let you do.

What mattered was how well they fit the mold, the interior vision that let some scouts, if they were lucky and experienced and perceptive enough, recognize greatness where it was not expected, be the first to truly identify it.

“I don't give a shit what their batting average is,” he would say. “I don't care how many home runs they hit, how many men they struck out. All I care about's hit, hit with power, throw, run, field.”

And in that one game, Jimmy Black, who was then 63 years old, thought he saw it all concentrated in one tall, thin country boy. He watched as Neil joined his teammates afterward in pushing an old, blue school bus until it reached sufficient speed for the coach to pop the clutch and start it.

He didn't talk to the boy, didn't let the sports editor or anyone else know he was there. It was the next-to-last game of the season, and the last one would be played in Penns Castle. If no other scout had seen Neil Beauchamp in Richmond, he could rest easy that none would come to Penns Castle.

Jimmy Black watched the last Penns Castle game, too, just to confirm what he already knew. And then he waited.

Neil didn't play summer ball, except on Saturdays with the town team when Wade Ramsey and his mother or some clerk were able to mind the store. Jimmy Black dropped by once, staying for half a game, just checking.

His senior year, Neil Beauchamp was a star on the football team, an end and a safety. Basketball was only six games old, and Christmas was just past, when Jimmy Black made his one visit to the Beauchamps' house.

He introduced himself to Jenny as a baseball scout. Jenny, who wondered what sort of grown man would have such a job title, directed Millie to run get her brother from the store.

“If I'd of known what he was coming for,” she said later, her eyes red, “I would've run him off.”

He wanted to make the offer before Neil's senior season began. Some of Jimmy Black's peers were rumored to be able to read, and he feared that they might be inspired enough to see this kid themselves if the newspaper persisted in writing about him.

They sat at the kitchen table, the older man drinking black coffee and Neil sipping a soda. What Jimmy Black was prepared to do, he said, was make it possible for Neil Beauchamp to be a professional ballplayer. He didn't oversell it, because he knew he could get most of these country boys for bus money. Hell, what else was there? The Army? The cigarette factory?