Dissident Gardens (13 page)

Screw Mim for not loving him, for never having him even once.

Screw
being crucially milder than
fuck
, containing as it did some element of tenderness.

Lenny Angrush and Lawyer Shea would show them all. Shea and his partner, Branch Rickey, heroic integrator of baseball, even if Robinson had turned out to be a Republican, one of those Negro dupes who liked Ike. With Rickey on their side, and Senator Kefauver’s spotlight on the owners’ monopoly tactics, they’d forge a league and a team and a stadium in the homeland, in the bogs of Flushing. All of this, riding on what Lenny Angrush could deliver: a little five-ten pitcher from Queens College with a curveball Mantle couldn’t possibly handle. The pitcher, and a team name incarnating the spirit of the working classes. Those—pitcher and moniker—and the song on the reel of tape.

And if Lenny Angrush didn’t particularly care for the song himself, who was he to judge?

The Irish folksinger’s tune would prove crucial. Miriam, falling in love with the singer, had betrayed Lenny. Yet what were Branch
Rickey’s words?
Luck is the residue of design
. The team’s theme song was the residue of Lenny’s desire. As Marx would have it,
the surplus value
.

When Dora or Dolly or Flossy (he could think of a thousand names for her, why settle on one?) reemerged, Lenny leapt to his feet and seized her bare arm in his hand, spilling briefcase, but not reel, to the floor. “Where’s Shea? Is he ready?”

“Let go, you’re hurting my arm.”

With satisfaction he detected Canarsie in her speech; duress had brought it out, a grain bleeding up through the veneer of elocution lessons. “This can’t wait.”

“It had better wait. Half an hour at least. He’s with a client.”

Watching his thumbprint blush to visibility on the flesh of Shea’s secretary’s arm, Lenny figured to mingle purposes. Fuck Yankees, screw Mim. Carpe diem, grab a little residue for himself for a change. Lenny modulated his tone of imperious harangue. When he chose, he could drop an octave, insinuate, ingratiate, beguile. He did now: “Forget Shea, then. I want you to be the one to listen.”

“Listen?”

Had she no eyes? “You must have a reel-to-reel around here, for taking depositions, listening to detectives’ wiretaps—”

She scowled. “What detectives? You’re thinking of some other kind of lawyer, Mr. Angrush. Bill Shea’s on the board of the Brooklyn Democratic Club. He was at lunch yesterday with Robert Moses—”

“One of our more distinguished racketeers, since the whole burg’s his racket. Listen, conjure up the tape player, trust me. I’ll bring you on the inside, before even Shea gets to hear it.”

“Mr. Angrush, what is your ordinary work, when you’re not coming up here and bothering us?”

“Bothering you is my ordinary work. I am what is conveniently dismissed as a
provocateur
. I say this with no shame.”

Donna’s or Floris’s eyes widened, perhaps involuntarily. Then narrowed. Seething with suspicions. Good. Let his rhetoric be like the pink imprint of his thumb on the susceptibility of her gray matter. Doreen or Floreen knew Shea took Lenny’s calls. He could afford to strike her as improbable—he
was
improbable! Of such bewilderments
as he saw in the secretary’s eyes now were Lenin Angrush’s sporadic seductions made. In fact, she moved as though hypnotized, to a supply closet incompletely disguised behind wood paneling. There, with a little grunt, she retrieved from a shelf at eye level a reel-to-reel player, affording an instant’s view of her stocking tops at mid-thigh, flesh bulging snowily above. Bless the new knee-high hemlines. Let only cynics say there was no progress in human affairs.

She set it on her desk, then stood with arms crossed while Lenny took command, unwinding the player’s power cord and locating a socket, threading his precious spool past the heads, testing it with a
whrrrr
, then pausing again. He raised his hand. “Preeee-senting the new television and radio theme for the Continental League’s linchpin New York franchise, the baseball organization of, by, and for the workingman, the Sunnyside Proletarians—”

“That’s got to be the worst name yet,” deadpanned the secretary.

“They’ll be known as the Pros, of course. What do you mean, worst
yet
?”

“You can’t be thinking we don’t have nominations coming over the transom hourly, can you? By telegram and telephone, by smoke signals. There’s the contingent that wants to call them the Gi-Odgers or Dodgants. I suppose yours isn’t actually worse than that. I’ve heard Empire Staters, I’ve heard Long Islanders—”

Lenny brushed her off. “Amateur hour. You’re speaking of crazies, out howling in the bushes—I’ve been in to see Shea a dozen times, your daybook will testify. We’ve had lunches. Shea told me himself, they’ll have to field a team from scratch when the moment comes. I’ve got the players. What do they know of Queens, after all? I’m the bloodhound, I’m their nose on the ground. Flushing Proletarians could be fine, if Shea insists on tying it to the site. Sunnyside is sounding better to me for rhythmical purposes.
Listen
.”

Whrrrr. Whrrrr
.

“I’m listening, smart guy.”

What a tiger was Darlene, now that Lenny’d freed her from her cage! He raised his hand. “Please. It’s about to begin.” Miriam’s folksinger coughed, tuned a string. Then his flat piercing tenor droned through the waiting area, strummed chords giving faint color:

“You can’t do that,” said Shea’s secretary.

Whrrrr
. Lenny turned the dial, stopping the tape. “Don’t talk, you’ll miss the chorus. Can’t do what?”

“Mention Yankees in the lyric. It makes no sense. This is supposed to be a theme song. Don’t include the rival brand.”

“The team’s configured as a thorn in the paw of the plutocrats,” said Lenny. “There’s not only disappointed Dodgers and Giants fans out there, believe me—there’s an ocean of Yankee haters. It’s the villain that quickens the blood.”

“I’d advise something more upbeat.”

“This is what is known as a demo reel. In the final treatment there’d be musical context, trumpets, glockenspiel, fifty-seven varieties of syrup to make the message palatable.”

“You sound unpersuaded yourself.”

“Shhhh. The chorus.”
Whrrrrrr
—

“Why the yodeling?” said Flora. “He sounds like a dust-bowl hick.”

“This is the fashion,” said Lenny apologetically. He snapped it off there, before what he knew was coming, the singer’s additional extraneous flourishes. Lenny’s and the secretary’s heads leaned together, nearly touching. Lenny might win her by the song’s failure, a mixed
fate. His doubts about Gogan’s tune were enough as it was. To not advance it past Shea’s flunky could prove fatal. “This constitutes good singing, nowadays, the voice of the people. Trust me.”

Lenny wondered what stink of doubt emanated from his sweat-saturated jacket, undetectable to himself, since he went everywhere in a cloud of the stuff. Instead Doria’s sweet tang filled his nostrils, mixing with a certain tweed mustiness that might be her skirt or the office furniture. How long had it been since he’d smelled the body of a woman? Not yet thirty, he mourned his life.

Shea had come through his office’s inner doors and now stood watching Lenny and the secretary huddle at the tape player. The tall man in the suit coughed into his fist and they jumped. The strapping, glad-handing Irishman, the mayor’s man, Lenny’s conduit to Moses and Rickey. Delia or Felicia likely knelt on the carpet and sucked him off twice daily, once before lunch, once after. The carpet being perhaps where Lenny himself ought to kneel, rather than romancing the secretary. Not for the first time, Lenny Angrush bumped into the remainder of his own innocence, a part that had still underestimated corruption. This was nothing to congratulate himself over in a world of pragmatists and price tags, a world as yet unrenovated by revolution.

The song: Had Shea overheard it?

“Mr. Angrush, welcome. Why don’t you step inside?” Lenny offered his hand and Shea’s palms closed on it like a giant clamshell. No wonder the man had been entrusted with reclaiming baseball for the Dodger-bereft; he wore mitts of flesh. William Shea should have been Lou Gehrig, doffing his cap and silencing millions with a gesture of inner calm, just as he now re-instilled order to his secretary’s zone with the minutest nod of his chin. Lenny waddled inside, clutching briefcase. Here was where the air-conditioning was hidden. Canadian gusts reached the great lakes of Lenny’s armpits, chest, and belly. He turned to see the girl removing his reel and tucking it back into its box, then reclasping the reel-to-reel’s hood, her posture absurdly dainty and obedient. Then Shea closed the door, severing Lenny’s view of the scene to which he’d imported a brief measure of music and longing—all snuffed effortlessly. The light glared through shades from behind Shea, silhouetting him like an interrogation cop.

Here, inside Shea’s sarcophagus of propriety, the walls lined with handshake photos and gold-seal certificates, Lenny reversed his guess again: Shea would never have fucked his secretary. Bill Shea was the other variety of power animal, a paragon of rectitude, who fucked his wife if he fucked at all. This office was a place of muffled and euphemistic rearrangements of the lives of other men, of amoral solutions writ in legalese—fixes to the crises of horse-betting city councilmen and real estate developers tripped up in their own chicanery. The element of chaos here, the imperative to think of fucking in the first place, was all in Lenny. Shea blanketed the area with uprightness, with Christian notions of normality and virtue, making everyone in range of his signal ashamed of their worst thoughts and grateful to be rebuked.

This was why he got the big assignments and the fat checks. Because Shea got it from his wife or perhaps discreetly in an apartment kept for that purpose on the West Side—here Lenny split the difference between corruption and sanctimony, for
of course
Shea fucked, he fucked hard and like a hammer, a man of his type would have appetites—but never, never in a million years would he accept even a passing blow from a gum-cracking type of secretary from the city’s flung-most periphery. It was Lenny, who wasn’t getting any, who felt the need to be on the brink of sex and disaster at this instant, in this office.

So it was, that in the seconds before Shea opened his mouth to betray him, Lenny was instilled with a certainty that he gazed on the face of the revolution’s worst enemy. Shea had the unflappability of self-certitude, of self-suasion. Lenny Angrush prized special capacities in himself, capacities for the recognition of capitalism’s fatal flaw, its undertow of squalor, its keening and clawing, the morbidity behind the sales pitch. These called to him by manner of his own squalorous keening, present always in himself like a high signal, a brainpan whine. Bill Shea didn’t register on this index, was something wholly other. Shea was righteous. He believed that bad things could in him be made good.

It was this belief, afloat everywhere in this great land, but occasionally coming home to dwell in a human outline, usually a big beefy masculine template exactly like that before Lenny now, that had prohibited Communism from arriving in the United States of America.

Beefy template dropped a hand mitt on Lenny’s shoulder and took measure of his utter smallness.

“Did you hear the song?” Lenny groaned.

“The National League’s coming in,” said Shea. “It’s expansion, just two cities, New York and Houston. Flushing gets its baseball club.”

“You’re joking.”

“What would I be joking about? Rickey and Frick are lined up. Wagner, too.”

“You ditched it.”

“I ditched nothing. National League baseball returns to New York City. They’ll announce it in a week. Under your hat for the time being, please.”

“The league, the Continental League.” The People’s League, though Lenny didn’t say the words.

“This is better.”

Mayor Wagner and, behind him, always, Robert Moses. Ford Frick, baseball’s commissioner. Branch Rickey, author of the Continental League. Lawyer Shea, the fixer. All the dominoes Lenny meant to fingertip-topple, now toppling backward onto him instead.

“What about the other cities?” Lenny asked, not so much caring for the answer as groping for instruments of comprehension: Who’d screwed whom? Was Rickey the Machiavelli, bending Shea to his contrivances? Was it higher up? Or right before his eyes? No matter. Crushing betrayal straight down the line: A life’s study informed Lenny Angrush it had nothing to do with him. Nor any other individual agent of history’s disregard. That he felt personally screwed, mere faint residue of luck’s design. He wondered how he’d break the news to his bespectacled pitcher, scholar of Gorky in the original.

“Let the league appease the other cities. You wanted baseball in Queens. Get happy, son. This is a thousand-percent victory.”

“The Pros,” Lenny almost whispered. The name, at least. Salvage the name. A kind of dissolving grace was upon him. Waning residue, backwash of unluck. Get him out of Shea’s office. He felt light-blinded, invisible. Who knew how many had entered never to leave. The glossy framed handshakes. He might if he wasn’t careful be reduced, like Vincent Price’s fly, to a head atop a suit. Nauseated smile as Shea knuckle-gripped the life from him. “The Proletarians!” Lenny
uttered in protest as he shrank to the door. Outracing the effects of the spell—he needed to be tall enough to reach the elevator buttons.

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

Shea’s token phrase buffeted Lenny’s shoulders as he fled. Under consideration, with Gi-Odgers and Dodgants. The difference between Shea’s inner office and the outer like stepping into a furnace. Lenny was surprised frost didn’t form on Shea’s door, now closed behind him. Blinkering himself in shame past the secretary’s gaze, Lenny forgot his reel, so she raced to catch him where he poked a button for the elevator. She pushed the white box in his direction. He pinned it with his elbow to the briefcase, adeptly now, locating in despair the poise his enthusiasm routinely destroyed. Let her fall in love with his departing outline. If only the elevator would come.