What It Takes (6 page)

One summer, when son Louis and daughter Dorothy were a mixed-doubles team playing for the River Club’s junior cup, G.H. Walker appeared at Court One, but Lou was nowhere to be seen. He claimed later he didn’t know the match was on. It turned out he was at the bathing beach, fooling around and drinking with friends. So the old man had Lou summoned. And he showed up loaded,
snookered
, in front of the whole club! He tossed a ball for a serve and
whiffed.
He was
staggering
on the court. The old man departed, leaving word: he would see Louis, after the match ... in his room. When Lou got back to the Point, much sobered (by match end, he hadn’t played so badly), the old man didn’t wait for explanation. He announced to Lou: “You’re not going to college. You’re too
stupid
to go to college. You’re going to work.” That same evening, Lou was packed, and on his way to a year in the coal mines in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

In time, all the Walker kids got the religion. They certainly had the talent. Herbie—George Herbert, Jr.—got it all, right down to the attitude. He was as hard in business and sport as his father, he loved a
winner
, and he became the second patriarch of the Point. But Johnny Walker was certainly the best ball player: one year at Yale, he hit a glorious .600! And no one played a better golf game than Jimmy: it was he who was in line to fill the shoes once worn by the old man as president of the USGA. Even Lou might have had some sporting glory if he hadn’t screwed around so much. When he was a senior, a pitcher at Yale, he got a spring-training tryout with the New York Giants. But when the great Mel Ott came to the plate, Lou’s first pitch plunked the slugger in the neck. Ott said: “Get that college jerk outta here!” And that was the end of Lou’s tryout.

But pound for pound, perhaps the best was Dottie, the younger of two daughters, the pearl in this pan of gravel. Not only was she bright and beautiful (they were all
so
attractive), but she seemed to have in her small form the distillate of the Walker ethic: she played to win. When Betty Trotter, a girlfriend at Kennebunkport, challenged Dottie to a swim from the River Club pier, all the Walker boys knew that Dottie wouldn’t stop until Betty did. But when Betty quit, after twelve hundred yards in choppy open sea, Dottie just kept swimming, more than a mile, straight to Walker’s Point. No one had to make allowances for Dottie in competition. When she married Prescott Bush, and had her own kids to raise, she served as the one-woman ranking committee: it was she who made the matches, pitting Bushes against Bushes, Bushes against Walkers, and Bushes against friends, in the constant contest to be the best.

And it wasn’t just summers, not just in Maine: in their year-round home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Bush kids played games constantly. If there wasn’t a ball game at the Greenwich Country Day School, or a tennis match at the Field Club, they’d gather their friends for football at the Bush house, where there was room, and a ready welcome from Dottie. The house on Grove Lane was a magnet for kids: if it rained, all the friends might still show up, to play indoor football in the long upstairs hall, or Ping-Pong on the table in the front hall (Dottie finally tired of taking it down—that table was the first thing visitors saw), or some game that Poppy made up, on the spot. Poppy never liked to be alone. And he was so good about sharing, making sure everyone was included. For a while, Dottie and the housekeeper, Antonina, called him Have-half, because once, when he got a new wagon, he turned to a friend and offered: “Have half? ...” Of course, he had the most little friends. When Pres would come home on the train from New York and find a house taken over by children at play, he’d sigh and inquire of his wife: “Dottie, do they all have to be here?” But even when Pres was home, and didn’t want a bunch of wild Indians in the halls, Dottie would sneak the boys’ friends up the back stairs so they could play. After supper, when Pres was closeted with important telephone calls, Dottie, daughter Nan, and all the boys, were likely in the living room, locked in a vicious tiddlywinks match: so serious, involving, so
do-or-die
, that it wasn’t uncommon for a child to leave the room in tears, after being “shot out.”

Withal, Dottie brought something new to the religion: a certain refinement, a polish, the product of one more generation under the buffer of good society. In Dottie’s house there was all the Walker competition, but none of the loudness about it. She did not abide bragging. Her boys were not to come crashing into the dining room, to announce: “I mopped up the court with Gerry.” God forbid! They could not even announce: “I won.” In the Bush household, young people were expected not only to win, but to be good winners. The proper way was to wait, to be asked:

“Didn’t you have a match today?”

“Uh huh, with Gerry.”

“Oh, lovely! How’d you do?”

And then, the proper answer was to offer some excuse for Gerry, avoiding the first-person pronoun altogether, or at most, to say, quietly: “I was lucky.”

It was all right if a brother or sister did a bit of bragging for you: “Oh, Poppy was great! He had three hits ...”

But if one of the Bush boys was asked about his game, and he blurted: “I had a home run!” Dottie’s voice would take on a hint of edge: “That’s lovely, dear. How’d the
team
do?” Sometimes, that edge could cut to the bone. When Poppy, age twelve, was asked about his tennis match and alibied, “I was off my game,” his mother snapped: “You don’t have a game! Get out and work harder and maybe, someday, you will.”

Of course, he worked harder. He was always sensitive to the ethic around him. And he so much wanted her cooing praise. There was something special between the two of them, the way he’d make her giggle, even in church. Pres would turn and stare down the pew severely, but Dottie couldn’t stop. Poppy was too much fun! And he adored her, admired her. He wrote, in 1985, in a Mother’s Day tribute in
The Greenwich Times:

“Physically she is a small woman, but she is made of mighty stuff. Nine months into her first pregnancy, she played baseball. Her last time up, she hit a home run, and without missing a base, continued right off the field to the hospital, to deliver Pres.”

Yes, Pressie was the first—Prescott, Jr.—but he was different, a big boy, jovial and generous, not quite in the Walker mold. Pressie was a bruiser, a good football player, a lineman who loved to hit. But from birth, he had a problem with one eye that lent him, unjustly, the appearance of slowness. Then, playing football, he blew out a knee, and he was not so good at games anymore. It was her second boy, the one she named with her own father’s names, George Herbert Walker, who had her gifts—the slender, supple form, the quickness, the charm. And she showed him in a thousand ways: he was The One. He was meant to win.

If she saved for him the bulk of that old Walker religion, he took it all, he grabbed for it. On Court One, again age twelve, with the family in attendance upon him, he played for the children’s championship of the River Club. Early in the match, he turned to glower at the grandstand, and ordered his Aunt Mary, Uncle Herbie’s wife, out of the stands. She was talking while he tried to play! That’s how he got the nickname, in confirmation of the hope that had given him his name:
George Herbert Walker
Bush—Poppy—just like Pops.

By the time he played first base for Andover, no one else was in the running for captain. Poppy Bush was The One. Not that he was squawking for it: he was never loud, not the rah-rah sort. When you thought about it, he never seemed to mention himself. Maybe there were better ball players: better hitters probably, and Ed Machaj was a heck of a pitcher. But Ed came out of nowhere; everybody knew Poppy, he was a friend, always looking out for the other guy. One year, there was a Jewish kid named Ovie who left school when he didn’t get tapped for the Greek societies. When they talked him into coming back, Poppy took him under his wing: brought him out for the ball team. One day a fly ball bounced off Ovie’s head, into the left fielder’s glove, and Poppy ran all the way out from first, to congratulate Ovie on the assist.

But it was more than kindness, more than friends. Elly Vose, another starting pitcher, had almost as many friends, he was good-looking like Poppy, won as many class elections. But there was something about Bush: no one could really explain it. Part of it had to be the way he dealt with the coach, Follansbee, a strange little guy, and severe, sort of a stick: never spoke like a coach at all, but like a biology teacher, which he was. They said he’d been a pretty good catcher for Princeton, in his day, but something happened to his legs: they were horribly twisted and bowed, with some kind of paralytic disease that never got talked about in those days. They called him Flop Follansbee behind his back, and some of the players never could get on with him. But Poppy was perfect, like he was with all the teachers. He wouldn’t brownnose, or as they called it then, “suck,” like some guys who had “drag” with the faculty. Poppy just fit in with them, like he belonged.

Still, there was something more, and this was about the way he played: it wasn’t thought, or forethought—nothing studied. Just the reverse: it was release, almost the absence of self, in the focus on the game. He wanted
so hard
to be the best. They could see it before every game.

Infield practice was the last bit of business before a game, and old Flop Follansbee, he could run infield. Some coaches, who couldn’t handle a bat, would just squib off grounders anywhere, weak rollers, or high-bouncing, too-easy chops off the hard dirt in front of the plate. But Flop, with his professorial scowl and his poor twisted legs, was a fine hand with a bat and ball. He could hit with different hops and different speeds, make an infielder go to his left or right, just to the edge of his range: Flop could bring out the best in an infield. And he loved to get the best from Poppy Bush. Poppy had fine, soft hands, quick moves, and Flop loved trying to hit one by him. So the last bit of infield went like this: Flop would rap a grounder down to third, and the third baseman would throw home to the catcher. The catcher would fire back to third, where the third sacker went back to cover. Then the third baseman fired the ball home again, and ran for the bench. Then, onto the shortstop, who threw home ... and the second baseman ... if they had a sub, they’d always give him a chance, too. But finally, there was Poppy alone, crouched on the balls of his feet at first base. And all the fellows, whatever they were doing: fiddling with a mitt, tying spikes ... everybody stopped, to watch this
thing
between Poppy and Flop. It was so ...
intimate
; just between them, really. But it was also a touchstone for the game to come—a check of the hands that day. Flop would hit a grounder down to first, and Poppy would throw home. The catcher would throw back to first, and Poppy would fire back to the plate. But he wouldn’t run to the bench. He’d charge the plate, right down the baseline,
streaking
in. And Flop would try to rap one by him. Never too hard, he made it fair. But you could see in the jawline of that crippled old coach: he was trying to beat the kid’s beautiful hands. And what they remembered most was the way Poppy came at him—flying down the line with the air and the strain pulling his face taut—
laughing
with the pure joy of contest.

That’s why he was The One for captain. It was the glint of Walker steel they saw. They wanted their team to be like that.

That was the privilege of being Poppy—just playing the game, being a friend,
being like he was
, and having it come out right, without thinking too much. Having other people do the talking about him, friends who’d take up for him, praise him, so he never had to be out for himself. They always wrote about his “life of privilege ...” like it was some snotty thing, where the family was better—thought they were better—than someone else. Wasn’t like that. Never ... wouldn’t do that. That was a matter of the personal code. It was just ... well, he just did, and people saw something in him.

That’s what he couldn’t understand now, why they couldn’t see it anymore. Why, forty-five years later, all the guys he hired wanted him to go out and beat his own chest, to thump the tub for himself like he’d never
done
anything. Trying to tell him how to
act.
Like he had to act. ... Goddammit, he’d played the game! And won. He wasn’t gonna change the way he was now.

Sometimes it almost made him laugh, sometimes he and Bar would laugh, the way they worried about him, like he wouldn’t be able to do anything—all these guys ... straphangers, he called them, guys hangin’ on for the ride. That wasn’t really fair. They were all friends. But all these kids, down in the hole with him now, what were they doing? Keeping quiet because he wasn’t talking. Worrying. He could feel their tension, like he’d never thrown a ball.

They were all just trying to do a job for him. He knew that. Hell, they were right about the vest. That’s why he had them call from the plane this afternoon, patched it through the White House switchboard, called ahead to meet him at the hotel, with a ball and a mitt, so he could throw a few. Wasn’t easy, with this damn thing on. But he had to go along. The Service ... they were trying to do a job, too ...

“
We’ve known him for years here in Houston
...”

The Lead Advance brushed by the VP to climb out to the field, give the high sign to the dugout, to Alan Ashby, the Astros’ catcher.

In the Catfish Hole, George Bush snapped to focus on the field, the photographers ... that’s Fred! He’s a friend! He raised a hand ... his blazer caught on the vest where it bulged ... he straightened himself.

“
And he’s flown in tonight to be with us
...”

The Lead Advance was looking back toward the Hole, where the Vice President was straightening his blazer. The blazer! Why the hell was Bush wearing the jacket? On top of the vest! Christ! Why’d he have to wear the stupid vest? He couldn’t move like that. At the hotel, he put on the vest—half his throws never got there!

Why didn’t he just tell the Service to
stick it!