Casey's Home (21 page)

He nodded. “Did I mention I
refused to forgive him? Don’t forget, I was angry, too, Casey, and devastated.
Mostly, I wanted to tell. It was so childish and irrational, but I wanted to
scream it out, to be sure everyone heard me. I had lost something and I wanted
everyone, everywhere, to feel that loss with me. I was about to ask him to leave
when your mother came in. I remember, her hair was pulled back from her face.
She looked so young and pretty. And she looked at us and I could see that she
knew something was wrong. She kept brushing this stray bit of hair out of her
eyes and I realized I had never seen her without her hair down. She had such
luminous eyes. And I looked over at your father and I was sure from the
terrified expression on his face that she didn’t know.”

“So you didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t say anything. I let it
go. And eventually, years later, I forgave him.”

“I’ve already forgiven him,” I
told Ben. “It’s not about forgiveness. It’s about disappointment.”

He stroked his index finger over
my own. “Did you really think he was perfect, Case? You lived with the man. You
had to have known he wasn’t.”

“I idolized him.”

“Maybe we’re getting too old to
idolize people anymore,” he said quietly.

“I also idolized you,” I said. He
stared straight ahead, suddenly unable to look at me. Reaching out, I turned
his face to mine. His eyes were dark and unreadable, his mouth was compressed
to a thin line, the skin of his cheek felt like it had been coated with hot
sand. “You knew, all this time, and you never told anyone.”

“No,” he said at last. “He asked
me not to.”

“Jesus.” I was on my feet again,
my whole body tingling. “How could you let him get away with it?”

“I didn’t intend to, at first,”
he said, watching me but making no movement of his own. “I was going to tell
someone, I really was. But think about it, Casey. My arm was fried. I had a
compound fracture so bad it looked like someone had hit my humerus with a
hammer. My career was over. Your father was widely considered to be the
greatest pitcher of all time. All the guys on that team were legends. I kept
thinking about what it would do to the game, to the fans. And after all, they
won. Don’t you see? They won. So no one lost anything, in the end.”

“Do you honestly believe you
didn’t lose anything? How can you sit there and say that to me?”

Ben winced and looked away.
“That’s what I thought at the time, Casey. They won the Series. At the time,
that was all that mattered to me. I was like you; I thought the game was the
most important thing in the world. It was years before I realized it wasn’t,
but I’ve never regretted my decision.”

He looked up and met my stony
glare before looking past me to the street.

“He said he kept seeing when I
went down, over and over in his mind. It wasn’t until he heard the sound, until
he saw me fall and realized that I wasn’t going to get up again that it hit
him. What he knew then, what he finally understood... and this is what you have
to understand, Casey, because it explains everything...” Ben held both hands
out, palm up, and I knew this was what he believed. “You have to understand how
transitory our great loves are, what a short time we are given to do what we
enjoy. They won. I couldn’t let them lose, not after that.”

What I understood was that I was
standing in the middle of Ben’s yard, hugging myself as if it was suddenly as
cold as North Dakota. The world had become that unfamiliar.

“You should tell the truth,” I
said. “He’s dead now. Fuck him.”

“No,” Ben said. “This is what I
wanted. Your dad’s in the Hall of Fame. I helped, in my own way, to put him
there. That’s the only glory I’m ever going to get.”

“You could keep your fucking
job,” I said. “And then those idiots who idolize my father for all they think
he did would see him for who he really was.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean
they would see me for who I really am.”

He rose and took two long steps
to stand in front of me. It would have taken me four to reach the same point.
He slid both hands up my arms and cupped my face, forcing me to look at him. It
was arguably the most painful thing I’d done all day. I was both bitterly angry
and terribly, inconsolably sad.

“It’s over,” he said, meeting my
gaze. “It’s been over for twenty-two years. What you know of your father, what
you know of me; hell, Casey, what you know of yourself, none of that is the truth.
It’s just what you believe right now. It’s what gets you through. Who your
father was hasn’t changed. It’s only you who changes.”

His hands were hot against my
cheeks and he leaned down, very slowly, and kissed my lips. Not with passion,
but with compassion.

“I don’t want to change,” I said
against his mouth, sounding like a two year-old. The space between my shoulders
and my neck throbbed as if I’d thrown something over and over.

“You know they never proved that
Pete Rose bet against his own team,” he said, dropping his hands from my face
and stepping back. He looked weary. “Something doesn’t have to be the truth to
be reality.”

“Fuck this,” I said. “Fuck you
and my father. All of you conspired so beautifully to turn something rotten
into some noble act of self-sacrifice. It was, and it always has been, about
him.”

Ben sank back down onto the
steps, his face slumped and defeated. “I never thought you would know. He said
he would never tell anyone. I don’t understand why he had to tell you.”

“I guess because it’s the fucking
truth,” I said and he looked up.

“Maybe he thought you deserved
that,” he said quietly. “Maybe that was his gift to you.”

“I’d rather have had the damn
house,” I said and he snorted and looked away. “I believed in him. I’ve spent
my whole life trying to be the sort of person I thought he was.”

“Have you succeeded?” he asked
sharply. I moved back toward the stairs, to where he sat, waiting. “Are you
happy, Casey?”

“No,” I said, honest through
exhaustion. It was so damn hot. The world seemed to pulse, to buzz with heat
and motion. I wanted to close my eyes, but that wouldn’t block out the noise.
“But then hey, I just came from a fucking funeral.”

He nodded and seemed to be
examining his feet, dusty in a pair of slightly dull wingtips he’d probably had
for years. It reminded me of the story my father used to tell me when we’d see
a peacock at the zoo. “Do you know why they scream like that?” he would say,
“because they’re so beautiful, and then they look down and see their ugly
feet.”

“Well, I’m happy,” Ben said
finally, stretching his legs. “I’m selfishly delighted to have told you all of
this. I’ve wanted to tell someone, anyone, for years.”

“I’m so glad I could be of
service,” I said. He looked at me with a sort of amused affection, and then he
smiled.

“I might have a bottle of wine
somewhere in the house. The faculty gave it to me last year. They haven’t
figured out I don’t drink yet. Want to go inside and get drunk?”

The idea of it made my stomach
roll.

“When was the last time you were
drunk?” I asked.

“Seventeen years ago,” he
answered immediately.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go
inside and get drunk.”

“Want to just come inside?”

“Do you have any more root beer?
I need something stronger than this,” I told him, gesturing to my water.

He nodded and helped me to stand
up. As we walked inside, I noticed he finished the contents of my glass.

The kitchen was not hotter than
it was outside, merely darker and smaller. The old house and the surrounding
swamp kept the air circulating. This place was built in a time before the
climate could be regulated; when Southerners were a hardy, scrappy breed,
rather than willowy groups of elderly women driving from one artificially
cooled building to another in crocheted cotton cardigans.

Ben handed me a glass and a
bottle of root beer, dripping with condensation the moment it left the fridge.
A fan rustled in the hallway, blowing interior air in slow circles around the
ground floor. I rolled the bottle over my forehead, over my paper-thin eyelids
until my eyes were washed in white light. Ben stood at the sink, unbuttoning
his shirt and running the faucet until the water was finally coming from
somewhere deep in the bottom of the cistern, somewhere cool as earth. Another
layer of sweltering cloth dispensed with, and he was left in a plain white
t-shirt, a jarring contrast with the rich, dark wool of the suit pants.

I watched as he filled his cupped
hands and brought the water to his face. He scrubbed his skin with his fingers,
then patted his face dry with a handful of paper towels. It was a peculiarly
masculine ritual. He left the water running and slowly washed his hands,
cooling the pulse points of his wrists. “Come here, and take off your jacket”
he said, without turning around. Slipping the dark wool off, I laid it
carefully over the back of one of the chairs. The heat rushed in to slip around
me, disguising itself as air. When I was standing beside him, he took the
bottle from me and set it on the counter, then grasped both my hands and pulled
them under the water with his own. I could see the fine, white line of the end
of his career running up the dark skin of his arm, disappearing into his
t-shirt.

“This will cool you off,” he
said, though that was not quite the effect it was having. “Don’t dry them.” He
dragged one soapy finger over the creases behind my elbows, then pushed me
forward until I was wet up to my forearms. “Let it run until you feel cold,” he
said, standing just behind me. I shivered and he turned the water off. One damp
hand rested momentarily on the back of my neck before he moved away to sit at
the table. Picking up my drink, I joined him there.

“You should tell them at the
hearing,” I said.

He shook his head, picking at the
label on his root beer. Everyone else in Florida drank root beer from a can. I
couldn’t decide if that made Ben old fashioned, or fashionable. Probably
neither.

“What good would that do? It’s an
event that no longer holds any real relevance. You know what I want, Casey? I
want that job because I’ve been a damn fine coach for seventeen years. I want
it because I helped that team win championships. I want it because I worked for
it.”

“Maybe they’ll see that,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why they’re having the hearing in the first place.”

“Maybe,” he said, but he had
already discounted this option. “The truth is I never had that job because I
was good. I had the job because Billy wanted me there.”

“But you were good,” I pointed
out. “I even heard him say so, on occasion.”

Ben smiled and shrugged, a bit
embarrassed by the praise. “He was a good baseball coach, and I was one of his
students.”

The thing about Ben, however, and
I think my father knew this too, was that he came to us with some part of
himself already completed. There were areas of Ben that remained unteachable. I
tried to remember something about his mother, but couldn’t come up with
anything beyond this fragile, quiet woman who looked at Ben the way a small
child stares at an older sibling’s forbidden toy. She was, I think, afraid to
hope. Perhaps that was a good thing.

“I’m not sure he was such a great
teacher,” I said, “when it came to everything else.”

Leaning back on two legs of his
chair, Ben gestured with the near-empty bottle. “You turned out ok.” The bottle
made a wide, sweeping motion that encompassed me and the chair and the hall. We
were all ok.

“You think?” I said, grinning
miserably.

“Sure,” he said. “I like you.”

And he did. Most of us say this
to people we don’t know, people we’re afraid to examine too closely. Ben was
never afraid of me. I couldn’t explain why this was, except that we recognized
each other, long ago. It was like passing someone on the freeway you’d been
following for miles. You might not know their name, but you were familiar with
their journey.

“Nearly a year after my mother
died,” I told him, “I was sitting in the kitchen one afternoon, writing a paper
for school. I don’t even remember what the paper was about. The radio was
playing softly in the other room, and suddenly, I had this thought. Completely
out of the blue: my mother used to dance. That was it, and then I could see
her, moving with my sister around the kitchen to
The Who
. They had been
making something, maybe a cake, and my mother was wearing a dark red sweater
and jeans and she was dancing, wildly, her hair flashing around her face like a
gypsy. ‘Baba O’Reily’, the song was, and you know that Irish bit at the end?
That was what she danced to, with Lee clapping and laughing, and God, she was
so vital and alive. I think I’d forgotten she could be that way. The memory
actually shocked me, like touching electricity. It was so beautiful, it hurt.”

“You don’t want to forget who you
believed your father to be,” he said quietly. “Before you knew.”

When I looked up, his face was
bruised and darkened by the shadows of the old porch outside the window. The
day had nearly ended, and my father was gone. I shook my head.