My Father's Baseball

A Story

BY ROBERT FONTAINE

WHEN I was a kid, which is some time ago indeed, my father was very fond of baseball. I liked to play baseball. I was a fair pitcher and a very poor hitter. “Good pitch: no hit,”as they say. But I was not too fond of watching other people play.

My father, however, found that baseball gave him an outlet, as, I imagine, it does many other men of his character. In my youth my father was an accomplished musician and spent his life with vaudeville actors and temperamental burlesque comedians. He was quiet, gentle, self-effacing, and, as I judged him then, just plain scared of other people. Sitting in the grandstand at a baseball game, though, he gave vent to all bottledup irritations. His knowledge of baseball was fairly good, but not as good as one would judge, to hear his opinions on various matters on the field.

His voice was neither deep nor resonant. It was shrill, high, and piercing. When he called for the death of the umpire he could be heard. He could be heard above the roaring crowd because he was on a completely different wave length, so that his fierce squeak penetrated into every corner of the playing field.

Often, when I was a child, I was afraid of what might happen to my father. Now and then a player or an umpire would look in his direction as if prepared to do battle. My father would lower his voice then and talk casually of other matters. After a while I got used to the whole thing. We went to ball games every Saturday and frequently to double-headers on Sunday, against my mother’s wishes. She did not think Sunday a day for baseball.

Our procedure, my father’s and mine, was always the same. We would walk a way and then stop for ice cream and proceed from there, on foot again, to the ball park, a mile or two from home. My father liked to walk. He sat down all day before a music stand, so it was good to stretch his legs.

When we got to the ball park, always forty minutes before the game started, my father would take a good cigar from his pocket, remove the band carefully, clip off the end with a pair of scissors attached to his vest, light the cigar, and puff happily.

“I like to watch them warm up,” he would say in a half-apologizing tone.

On the way home, when it was almost dark, we would walk a way and then stop, and I would have thick chicken soup and orangeade while my father had an egg sandwich and coffee. We never changed the menu. I loved chicken soup and orangeade, and my father, whose teeth were quite bad, found that egg sandwiches were about the toughest thing he was able to chew comfortably.

This went on for years, and then I left home and there were no more baseball games. Decades later I would come home for a few days, and we would go through the same procedure.

One time, when my father was about sixty and had been forced to retire simply because of lack of jobs, we went to see a ball game. As usual, we walked. My father, who had an early dislike of public conveyances, was now bitterly opposed to them. He claimed, possibly justly, that buses always took him past his destination and that when he wanted to board one it was never around. Walking was something on which he could depend.

When we got to the park, my father took out a cigar, a much cheaper one this time because he and my mother were living, and have lived since, on a much smaller income than they had had in his heyday. Just the same, the cigar was there and the little scissors to clip the end. We were very early, of course, and he said, as if it had been yesterday that I was a kid accompanying him, “I like to watch them warm up.”

He had not altered his tactics. He cursed the umpire, or at least condemned him as much as possible without resorting to profanity. My father very rarely swore, nor does he today, his heartiest expletive being, “Gor ram it!” He also explained to me that the manager should never have signaled for a hit-and-run in the third inning and the thirdbase coach who sent that fellow in had no business being in baseball.

“They never learn,” he said. “Baseball is full of boneheads.”

I could not deny that. I have always been amused by the gravity with which sports writers credit managers and players with all sorts of sagacity when, in actual practice, a reasonably trained dog could do as well. And I have been a sports writer and covered baseball myself.

During the second game, after someone had hit a home run into the left-field bleachers, my father said, rather wistfully, “You know, in all my years in baseball — and I go back to Ty Cobb and all those fellows — I have never caught a ball in the stands.”

“Well, neither have I,” I said.

“Yes,” my father agreed. “But you’re still young. You’ve got years ahead of you.”

After the game we walked home, and my father stopped and had an egg sandwich. I said, “It’s time you had some good teeth. Why don’t you get some good teeth so you can cat something besides egg sandwiches?”

“I eat beans,” he said solemnly.

“Wonderful,” I replied dully.

“I eat hash on soft toast. Your mother makes wonderful hash.”

“You ought to get new teeth.”

“I’d rather have hair,” my father replied, after some thought. “But I can’t afford either of them.”

YEARS went by again, after that. I got married and went to New York and to Hollywood and back to my home town at last with a wife and two line daughters. My father and mother were still living in the same small apartment, listening to the same radio, playing a little cards. They did not look very different, although my father was close to eighty and my mother in her middle seventies.

“We take vitamins,” my father explained once, soon after I had settled in my home town again. “We read where they increase muscle tone in the aged about 32 per cent. They also practically eliminate headaches.”

“Good,” I said.

He smiled at me, “See?” he said.

I was very pleased. He had gone to the dentist and gotten a new smile. “Wonderful.”

“I eat everything,” he said. “I’ve only had them two weeks, and I eat everything.”

My mother said, “The dentist said his ridges wouldn’t hold teeth.”

My father snorted. “My ridges are fine. I eat everything. Even corn on the cob.”

“That money you sent him for Christmas,” my mother explained.

“I really wanted hair,” my father admitted, “but the teeth are fine. I’m glad I got them. I eat peanuts all the time.”

I guess my wife and I and the children had been settled down a year or two when, one day, I began to think about how much my father liked baseball. I said to my wife, “I think I’ll take Papa to Boston to a ball game. I bet he hasn’t been in years.”

“Fine,” my wife said. “It’s only about ninety miles. You can leave in the morning on the train and get back after the game.”

“That’s right,” I said.

My father thought the baseball game idea was wonderful. The following Sunday there was a double-header between the Boston Braves and the St. Louis Cardinals. We took the train to Boston and we arrived at the station and went out into the street. “Shall we take a cab?” I asked.

My father was reasonably familiar with the city, but I was not. He had played there in the old days for shows like The Dollar Princess. He said, “Why don’t we walk?”

I shrugged. If an eighty-year-old man could walk to Braves Field from around Back Bay, so could I. We walked. We did. We walked all the way. I was exhausted, and I don’t imagine my father was any too peppy. He didn’t show it, though. He smiled with his new teeth and said, “Nothing has changed in Boston.”

“Nothing ever does,” I said.

We had good seats. My father took out a cheap cigar and went through his ritual. The game got under way after about a half hour, before which my father announced as casually as ever, “I like to watch them warm up.”

“I know you do,” I said, a little tartly. Then I shut my eyes and dozed off. I awakened in the fourth inning as ray father’s voice, now still higher, pierced through the crowd calling down the heavens on the Boston manager for failing to take out a pitcher.

I stayed awake during the rest of that game and into the second inning of the next. The score then was 7-0, and my father yawned and said, “I’m getting too old to take on a whole double-header. You mind if we go?”

I was delighted. I had been exhausted just from walking to the field. I got up. The batter struck at a ball, deflected it, and it came sailing right at my father. He lowered his head and stuck up one hand.

The ball hit his hand and fell on the floor of the stands. There was a wild scramble, with four little boys, a determined woman, and my father. In time my father came up smiling, the ball clutched in his hand. “First time,” he said joyfully, “in seventy-five years!”

We went back toward the railroad station. My father insisted on walking, but finally we stopped and entered a café. It was quite an elegant restaurant, and I determined to have a good meal. My father, however, ordered an egg sandwich.

“Did you forget you had teeth?” I asked. “They have Cape scallops. They have filet mignon. They have everything.”

“I like egg sandwiches,” my father insisted, examining the baseball he had captured. “Too bad it wasn’t a home run. I mean it was just a foul ball.”

“You got it, didn’t you?”

“Yep. First time in seventy-five years.”

His energy replenished, my father insisted on walking the rest of the way. I said, “I thought you were so tired you couldn’t last a doubleheader.”

“I’m tired of baseball. That’s all. After seventyfive years, I’ve had it.”

We walked to the depot. My father seemed quite alert. At the end I had to lean against lampposts and stop and sit on stone steps on Commonwealth Avenue. My father said sympathetically, “You’re soft, boy.”

I was in the habit of visiting my parents for an hour or so every day. When I called the following day, my father greeted me warmly and told me what a good time he had had. He took the baseball out of his chest of drawers and looked at it, smiling. “You can see where the bat nicked the cover.”

“You ought to give it to some little boy,” my mother said. “Some poor boy would be happy to get a regular big-league baseball.”

My father was stunned. “Give it to somebody?”

My mother said, “Yes, what good is it? Are you going to stuff it?”

“You see?” my father said to me. “Fifty years of this I’ve been through !”

I laughed, and we went on to other things. After I left, I occasionally thought of the baseball and I decided that my mother would eventually persuade him to give it to some boy in the neighborhood. I was wrong, though. When I came to see my parents the next day, the ball was waxed and sitting on a little pedestal on the dining-room table where the paper roses used to be. On the pedestal a little card had been tacked. On the card was printed in my father’s precise hand: FOUL BALL.