The index of self destru.., p.40
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 40
As he watched her leave, Frank had a moment of terrible clarity: they were sending him away. He’d gotten old and useless—he couldn’t even remember what year it was—and they wanted to be rid of him. Kit couldn’t face him while she did it, so she’d left the house and sent these men for him. When they were done with the library, they would move on to his office and his bedroom. Once all his things were packed, there would be nothing left but to pack up Frank himself and put him into storage, too.
He needed a drink. It was a bit early for that, but that could be excused on such a day. He got up from the couch and crossed the room, but he found his bottles gone from the bar. The glasses and the decanter and even the ice bucket were in their proper places, but these were all useless without any booze. The men had stolen his scotch while he slept. He was about to call out to Margo, but he stopped himself. He checked the time on the cable box. It was 10:30 in the morning, and his daughter had just finished scolding him. He wasn’t going to ask where his liquor bottles had gone.
They’d probably packed up the bar in the library, too. Anyway, Frank couldn’t bear the idea of facing the men, especially the one with the braids, who’d conspired with his daughter to make a fool of him. He thought of getting a bottle of wine from the kitchen, but he was afraid of being caught.
Was he really going to allow himself to be imprisoned in his office? Was he just going to wait until they were ready to take him away? He needed to escape.
Starting with the library had been their fatal mistake, since all the books he truly needed were here. He turned the sound up on the television so that Margo would think he was watching if she decided to listen in, and he started to go through his shelves. Surely his three-decade-old copy of Herodotus was among the essentials. He placed it on the floor near the couch, the beginning of a pile. Thucydides perhaps he could do without. He worked his way slowly around the room, making difficult choices. Every shelf had something he wanted badly to bring along but forced himself to leave. Aeschylus, not Sophocles. Daniel Bell but not David Riesman. Not Hawthorne but Twain. Already the pile was too big. He remembered that attempt to lift the box in the hall. He’d have to be even more selective. In a way, it was a great gift to be forced to choose. This had been the problem with the big book—he’d tried to make it about everything, and instead it had been about nothing at all.
Halfway around the room, he pulled Middlemarch from the shelf and noticed something behind it. He had to take out the books on either side—Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, both great but neither truly necessary—before he could be certain of what it was: a half-empty bottle of scotch. Something miraculous at work in this discovery. An earlier version of himself, one he couldn’t even remember, had hid it there along the way, as though he’d known he would need it now. He pulled the bottle free and retrieved a glass from the bar. Having poured himself a drink, he sat back down on the couch and took a long sip while considering what to do next.
The TV had started showing highlights again, followed by each team’s “path through the playoffs.” It seems the Phillies had beaten the Dodgers in the NLCS. Frank took in this fact with the usual odd mix of emotions his old team still engendered in him, something like what he imagined a happily married man would feel when stumbling upon the woman who’d broken his heart so many years before, when he was in the full flower of youth. His first eighteen years had been devoted to the Dodgers. That wasn’t easily forgotten. He didn’t exactly wish for their success, but he felt a reflexive disappointment when he learned of this loss.
If the Dodgers had survived to face the Yankees, he could at least have rooted for them wholeheartedly, as he had every time the two teams had played in the World Series, even as far back as ’63, when the wound was fresh, when Walter O’Malley—the great betrayer, an Irishman of all things—still owned the team, and some of the best players were Brooklyn holdovers. The Dodgers had swept that year, and a full generation had passed before the Yankees fielded another decent squad. Frank wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
He’d refused to play under the Yankee banner even in their old neighborhood stickball games. In Flatbush, only the Italians wanted to be Yankees, because of DiMaggio and Rizzuto and Berra. The Puerto Ricans wanted to be Giants, like the screwballer Rubén Gómez, and everyone else fought to be on the Dodgers. That meant Jews and Poles and Irish—most, like Frank, the first in their families born in this country—and a handful of blacks whose parents had come up from the South, making them immigrants, too, of a sort, though they were in some ways the only real Americans in the pack. For the rest of the week, they lived on their own blocks, shopped at their own stores, went to their own houses of worship, but there weren’t enough of any one tribe to form a team, so on Sunday afternoons out on Ditmas Avenue, they mixed.
This bothered some of the Irish boys but not Frank. How could he possibly object to playing beside a colored kid after Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson? Frank had been seven years old when Jackie broke into the league, just beginning to follow the game. It was the first year he was deemed old enough to go to the ballpark, but he almost wasn’t allowed—not because of integration, but because of the Lip. That off-season the Dodgers manager, the Catholic Leo Durocher, had married a Hollywood starlet, Laraine Day, trouble being that she was still married to her first husband. So long as a bigamous adulterer was running the team, the CYO wouldn’t send poor parish kids to the games. Frank would be lucky if his mother let him listen to Red Barber make the call on the radio. Spring training was already underway by the time the commissioner suspended Leo the Lip for conduct detrimental to the game. The bishop relented, and with him Nora Doyle.
A month into the season—May 23, 1947, to be exact—he went to Ebbets Field for the first time. The Dodgers beat the Phillies five to three. Jackie was three-for-four with two home runs. The man was the most beautiful thing Frank had seen in his young life, at once fierce and elegant. Beside him the other players appeared to be moving through a fog, tentative and uncertain. The Dodgers won the pennant that year. They’d gone from being a second-division team to the class of the league, and the difference was Jackie Robinson. The only appropriate ending for such a season was a World Series win, but the Yankees beat the Bums in seven games, guaranteeing Frank’s lifelong enmity. From then on, he would always fight to be a Dodger on those Sunday afternoons. Failing that, he could accept being a Giant, but never a Yankee. And it wasn’t Pee Wee he pictured each time he stepped to the plate. It wasn’t the Duke. He imagined himself as that beautiful black man.
He knew even then that he couldn’t move his body like Jackie did, but he’d tried over the years to make his mind work with that same ferocious grace. In this way, he thought he might live a kind of life of action, even if he spent it mostly sitting at a desk. The problem was that he’d dedicated so much of his life to the extraneous. He’d written a hundred columns on which party was looking better in the next midterm. What difference had it made? Now he didn’t even know who was president, and he couldn’t imagine how that would matter beside the things he still had in his head. He looked at the mountain of books he’d built beside the couch. Perhaps he didn’t need any of them. Auerbach had written Mimesis from memory, after fleeing the Nazis; surely Frank could write the big book in flight from his family. It was all still there, at least for now, but he had to act soon. He was starting to slip. Like the body, the mind went eventually, and he risked turning into Willie Mays—the most graceful man who ever stepped on the diamond—wandering center field at Shea as though lost. He poured himself another drink and took the bottle with him down the hall. He hurried a bit as he passed Margo’s room, but she was sitting on her bed with a notebook in her hands, so absorbed in whatever she was reading that she didn’t notice him.
Upstairs he went into the walk-in closet where he’d always dressed himself in front of the full-length mirror hanging from the door. He was surprised by the stubble on his face, his long and unkempt hair. He never went out of the house without a fresh shave, but he didn’t have time for that now. He looked over the row of Italian suits and the row of tailored shirts that together filled his half of the closet on two long rods, the line of shoes that filled the rack above them. These clothes he’d accrued over forty years would all be left behind. His days of cutting a figure in the world were done. He just needed to work. He put on a pair of wool slacks and a white shirt, argyle socks and brown Berluti loafers. He found an old weekend bag and packed a few more things—a clean shirt, some underwear, another pair of pants. He considered packing a sweater or a coat, but it was still summer and he would be done before it turned cold.
A small shelf by his bed contained first editions of all his books, and he couldn’t resist taking a few along. They would be a kind of talisman, a reminder that the work could get done. The collections of columns about NAFTA and impeachment and the Contract with America held no interest for him, but he took copies of the baseball books. He poured another drink, put the bottle in the bag, and zipped it shut. Still light enough to carry. He stepped quietly as he passed Margo’s room. She was listening to music, her back to the door, and she didn’t notice him at all.
The front door was open, as though it were waiting for him. The first thing that struck him when he stepped outside was the cold. He looked up at the trees lining their block and saw the lightly oranging leaves. Summer was gone. He wasn’t dressed for the weather, but it was too late to turn back. Across the street, two large black men leaned against a moving truck, smoking cigarettes and breathing heavily. They waved at Frank as though they all knew each other. It was comforting to be recognized. Probably Mets fans.
At the corner he dropped the bag and removed the bottle. He took a long slug while deciding where to go next. The answer when it came was obvious. He screwed the bottle shut but didn’t return it to his bag. He walked with the bag in one hand and the bottle in the other to Fifth, where he hailed a cab downtown.
As the cab pulled into Herald Square fifteen minutes later, Frank reached to his back pant pocket and found it empty. The driver stopped outside the Herald Building, punched the meter, and looked expectantly into the rearview.
“I’ve forgotten my wallet,” Frank said.
The driver cursed in a language unknown to Frank before turning around in his seat, leaning toward the opening in the plexiglass, and saying, as though to clarify, “Son of the bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” Frank said.
“Leave with me,” the driver told him, pointing to the bag on Frank’s lap. “You get money and bring back.”
Everything Frank had left was in the bag. He couldn’t trust this man with it. But there had to be something inside that he could give him. He pulled out his copy of The Smell of the Grass.
“This is a first edition of a book I wrote,” he explained. “A famous book. If I sign it, you could probably get a few hundred dollars for it.”
A mild exaggeration, but a signed first edition was certainly worth more than a cab ride. The driver didn’t seem pleased with this solution, but eventually he nodded. Frank asked for a pen and opened to the title page. He considered inquiring whether the driver wanted it inscribed, but he knew the joke would be as little appreciated as the value of the book itself. He blew briefly on the signature before closing the cover and handing the book through the opening. The driver made no effort to reach for it, so after an awkward moment Frank dropped it on the front passenger seat, amid a pile of old newspapers and a roll of paper towels. He was barely on the sidewalk before the car sped away.
Inside the Herald Building, Frank walked straight to the security turnstile and waited for the guard behind the desk to press the button that would release him into the elevator bank.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked.
He must have been new, because Frank didn’t recognize him, and Frank had always had a good relationship with the building staff. The head of security, an Indian named Prasad, was a die-hard Mets fan, and they’d talked on many mornings about the previous night’s game. The sport was a great democratizer. Prasad followed the off-season rumor mill even more closely than Frank did, and he always knew the latest trade talk or who had the hot arm in Triple-A. Where was he now?
“Frank Doyle. I work at the newspaper.”
“Do you have your access card?”
For the second time in as many minutes, Frank reached for his empty back pocket.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Some other form of ID?”
Security had gotten ridiculous in the building after 9/11. There was a fine irony to that: no one who worked at the paper wanted to admit that Islamic terrorism was an existential threat, but they sure as hell wanted to protect their elevators.
“I left the house without my wallet this morning. I assure you that I write for the paper. I’m actually fairly well-known.”
The man looked Frank over, letting his eyes land pointedly on the bottle that Frank now remembered was in his hand.
“Is there someone upstairs I can call? Someone who can come down here and bring you in as a guest?”
“Roger Meaney,” Frank said immediately.
It would infuriate Rog to have to come downstairs in the middle of a workday to let Frank in, which is exactly why Frank had chosen him. The guard looked at his screen, typed a few letters, and turned back to Frank.
“Could you spell that for me?”
That the man had never heard of the paper’s managing editor almost made the whole thing worth it. Frank could already imagine Could you spell that for me? being the punch line of this story when he told it to the office.
“Mean with an e-y.”
The guard looked again at the screen.
“I’m afraid that name isn’t coming up on our system.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Frank said, but in that instant it came to him that Roger was no longer the managing editor. He’d retired a few years ago. Frank couldn’t remember the name of his replacement.
“Try Ken Calder,” he said a little more uncertainly. Before the guard had even punched in the name, Frank knew it wouldn’t come up. Ken was gone, too. He’d taken a buyout. There had to be plenty of people still working at the paper who could vouch for Frank, but he couldn’t remember a single one. The guard seemed about ready to escort him out.
“How about this?”
Frank put down the bottle and opened his bag, from which he retrieved The Crack of the Bat. Some people would have mocked his decision to bring his own books on this expedition, but so far they were proving quite useful. He flipped to the author’s photo. It was more than thirty years old but still easily recognizable as him.
“Look here. That’s obviously me. I’m a little older and grayer, but still. And it says right below it, ‘Frank Doyle is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Herald.’”
The guard read the words over, examined the photo, and looked back up. With his eyes still on Frank, he punched a few numbers into his desk phone.
“Can you come out and help me with something?” he said into the receiver.
A door on the other side of the lobby opened, and from it walked Prasad, who smiled at Frank as he approached. Frank smiled back with relief. He should have asked to speak with Prasad from the beginning.
“It’s good to see you, Frank,” Prasad told him.
“You, too,” Frank responded.
“It’s a shame about the team this year. We had the talent, you know, but we got bit by the injury bug. Santana, Wright. It’s like we were playing under a bad omen.”
“The baseball gods are fickle,” Frank agreed.
“What can I help you with?”
“I left my wallet at home, and your man here is being very diligent, which we all appreciate.”
Frank nodded at the guard, who looked on curiously.
“Who are you here to visit?” Prasad asked, a bit nervously.
Frank didn’t know what to make of this question.
“Not visiting anyone. Just headed upstairs to do a little work.”
Prasad shook his head as though disappointed by this answer.
“You know, Frank,” he said, almost in a whisper. He looked around as though about to divulge a rare secret. “You don’t work here anymore.”
Frank wanted to laugh. Someone was playing a joke on him. It was a good one, too, but now was not the time for it.
“Sure,” Frank said. “But I need to get upstairs.”
“You retired about a year ago,” Prasad persisted.
The expression of embarrassed pathos on his face wasn’t something easily faked. But he couldn’t be right. Frank would never retire. He wouldn’t accept a buyout like Meaney or Calder. For starters, he didn’t need the money.
“Of course, I know that,” he assured Prasad anyway, unwilling to have this fight in his current state. “I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I thought I would stick my head in to see the old place.”
“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” Prasad said, his tone a crushing mix of pity and relief. “Lots of changes here, you know.”
“Listen,” Frank said, “I should have done this years ago.”
He took the book from where it sat on the security desk and turned to the title page. He picked up the pen from beside the sign-in sheet. This time he would inscribe it, though he was not entirely sure how Prasad spelled his name—or for that matter, whether the name was his first or last. He drew a large, dramatic P that trailed quickly into a scribble. Beneath it he added a note about their years of great baseball talk. He signed it and passed the book over. Prasad smiled again, and this time Frank thought he saw tears coming into his eyes. He offered Frank a hand, and they shook—so far as Frank could remember, their first physical contact in the twenty years they’d known each other. Frank turned to go, but before he got to the door Prasad called after him. Frank stopped and looked back.
“We’ll get ’em next year.”
Outside, a large billboard dominated the north end of Herald Square. Half of it was filled with the face of a man with a long gray beard against a dark background, the other half with large type: What would you change if you knew it was all going to end? November 1, 2009, 10 o’clock.
He needed a drink. It was a bit early for that, but that could be excused on such a day. He got up from the couch and crossed the room, but he found his bottles gone from the bar. The glasses and the decanter and even the ice bucket were in their proper places, but these were all useless without any booze. The men had stolen his scotch while he slept. He was about to call out to Margo, but he stopped himself. He checked the time on the cable box. It was 10:30 in the morning, and his daughter had just finished scolding him. He wasn’t going to ask where his liquor bottles had gone.
They’d probably packed up the bar in the library, too. Anyway, Frank couldn’t bear the idea of facing the men, especially the one with the braids, who’d conspired with his daughter to make a fool of him. He thought of getting a bottle of wine from the kitchen, but he was afraid of being caught.
Was he really going to allow himself to be imprisoned in his office? Was he just going to wait until they were ready to take him away? He needed to escape.
Starting with the library had been their fatal mistake, since all the books he truly needed were here. He turned the sound up on the television so that Margo would think he was watching if she decided to listen in, and he started to go through his shelves. Surely his three-decade-old copy of Herodotus was among the essentials. He placed it on the floor near the couch, the beginning of a pile. Thucydides perhaps he could do without. He worked his way slowly around the room, making difficult choices. Every shelf had something he wanted badly to bring along but forced himself to leave. Aeschylus, not Sophocles. Daniel Bell but not David Riesman. Not Hawthorne but Twain. Already the pile was too big. He remembered that attempt to lift the box in the hall. He’d have to be even more selective. In a way, it was a great gift to be forced to choose. This had been the problem with the big book—he’d tried to make it about everything, and instead it had been about nothing at all.
Halfway around the room, he pulled Middlemarch from the shelf and noticed something behind it. He had to take out the books on either side—Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, both great but neither truly necessary—before he could be certain of what it was: a half-empty bottle of scotch. Something miraculous at work in this discovery. An earlier version of himself, one he couldn’t even remember, had hid it there along the way, as though he’d known he would need it now. He pulled the bottle free and retrieved a glass from the bar. Having poured himself a drink, he sat back down on the couch and took a long sip while considering what to do next.
The TV had started showing highlights again, followed by each team’s “path through the playoffs.” It seems the Phillies had beaten the Dodgers in the NLCS. Frank took in this fact with the usual odd mix of emotions his old team still engendered in him, something like what he imagined a happily married man would feel when stumbling upon the woman who’d broken his heart so many years before, when he was in the full flower of youth. His first eighteen years had been devoted to the Dodgers. That wasn’t easily forgotten. He didn’t exactly wish for their success, but he felt a reflexive disappointment when he learned of this loss.
If the Dodgers had survived to face the Yankees, he could at least have rooted for them wholeheartedly, as he had every time the two teams had played in the World Series, even as far back as ’63, when the wound was fresh, when Walter O’Malley—the great betrayer, an Irishman of all things—still owned the team, and some of the best players were Brooklyn holdovers. The Dodgers had swept that year, and a full generation had passed before the Yankees fielded another decent squad. Frank wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
He’d refused to play under the Yankee banner even in their old neighborhood stickball games. In Flatbush, only the Italians wanted to be Yankees, because of DiMaggio and Rizzuto and Berra. The Puerto Ricans wanted to be Giants, like the screwballer Rubén Gómez, and everyone else fought to be on the Dodgers. That meant Jews and Poles and Irish—most, like Frank, the first in their families born in this country—and a handful of blacks whose parents had come up from the South, making them immigrants, too, of a sort, though they were in some ways the only real Americans in the pack. For the rest of the week, they lived on their own blocks, shopped at their own stores, went to their own houses of worship, but there weren’t enough of any one tribe to form a team, so on Sunday afternoons out on Ditmas Avenue, they mixed.
This bothered some of the Irish boys but not Frank. How could he possibly object to playing beside a colored kid after Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson? Frank had been seven years old when Jackie broke into the league, just beginning to follow the game. It was the first year he was deemed old enough to go to the ballpark, but he almost wasn’t allowed—not because of integration, but because of the Lip. That off-season the Dodgers manager, the Catholic Leo Durocher, had married a Hollywood starlet, Laraine Day, trouble being that she was still married to her first husband. So long as a bigamous adulterer was running the team, the CYO wouldn’t send poor parish kids to the games. Frank would be lucky if his mother let him listen to Red Barber make the call on the radio. Spring training was already underway by the time the commissioner suspended Leo the Lip for conduct detrimental to the game. The bishop relented, and with him Nora Doyle.
A month into the season—May 23, 1947, to be exact—he went to Ebbets Field for the first time. The Dodgers beat the Phillies five to three. Jackie was three-for-four with two home runs. The man was the most beautiful thing Frank had seen in his young life, at once fierce and elegant. Beside him the other players appeared to be moving through a fog, tentative and uncertain. The Dodgers won the pennant that year. They’d gone from being a second-division team to the class of the league, and the difference was Jackie Robinson. The only appropriate ending for such a season was a World Series win, but the Yankees beat the Bums in seven games, guaranteeing Frank’s lifelong enmity. From then on, he would always fight to be a Dodger on those Sunday afternoons. Failing that, he could accept being a Giant, but never a Yankee. And it wasn’t Pee Wee he pictured each time he stepped to the plate. It wasn’t the Duke. He imagined himself as that beautiful black man.
He knew even then that he couldn’t move his body like Jackie did, but he’d tried over the years to make his mind work with that same ferocious grace. In this way, he thought he might live a kind of life of action, even if he spent it mostly sitting at a desk. The problem was that he’d dedicated so much of his life to the extraneous. He’d written a hundred columns on which party was looking better in the next midterm. What difference had it made? Now he didn’t even know who was president, and he couldn’t imagine how that would matter beside the things he still had in his head. He looked at the mountain of books he’d built beside the couch. Perhaps he didn’t need any of them. Auerbach had written Mimesis from memory, after fleeing the Nazis; surely Frank could write the big book in flight from his family. It was all still there, at least for now, but he had to act soon. He was starting to slip. Like the body, the mind went eventually, and he risked turning into Willie Mays—the most graceful man who ever stepped on the diamond—wandering center field at Shea as though lost. He poured himself another drink and took the bottle with him down the hall. He hurried a bit as he passed Margo’s room, but she was sitting on her bed with a notebook in her hands, so absorbed in whatever she was reading that she didn’t notice him.
Upstairs he went into the walk-in closet where he’d always dressed himself in front of the full-length mirror hanging from the door. He was surprised by the stubble on his face, his long and unkempt hair. He never went out of the house without a fresh shave, but he didn’t have time for that now. He looked over the row of Italian suits and the row of tailored shirts that together filled his half of the closet on two long rods, the line of shoes that filled the rack above them. These clothes he’d accrued over forty years would all be left behind. His days of cutting a figure in the world were done. He just needed to work. He put on a pair of wool slacks and a white shirt, argyle socks and brown Berluti loafers. He found an old weekend bag and packed a few more things—a clean shirt, some underwear, another pair of pants. He considered packing a sweater or a coat, but it was still summer and he would be done before it turned cold.
A small shelf by his bed contained first editions of all his books, and he couldn’t resist taking a few along. They would be a kind of talisman, a reminder that the work could get done. The collections of columns about NAFTA and impeachment and the Contract with America held no interest for him, but he took copies of the baseball books. He poured another drink, put the bottle in the bag, and zipped it shut. Still light enough to carry. He stepped quietly as he passed Margo’s room. She was listening to music, her back to the door, and she didn’t notice him at all.
The front door was open, as though it were waiting for him. The first thing that struck him when he stepped outside was the cold. He looked up at the trees lining their block and saw the lightly oranging leaves. Summer was gone. He wasn’t dressed for the weather, but it was too late to turn back. Across the street, two large black men leaned against a moving truck, smoking cigarettes and breathing heavily. They waved at Frank as though they all knew each other. It was comforting to be recognized. Probably Mets fans.
At the corner he dropped the bag and removed the bottle. He took a long slug while deciding where to go next. The answer when it came was obvious. He screwed the bottle shut but didn’t return it to his bag. He walked with the bag in one hand and the bottle in the other to Fifth, where he hailed a cab downtown.
As the cab pulled into Herald Square fifteen minutes later, Frank reached to his back pant pocket and found it empty. The driver stopped outside the Herald Building, punched the meter, and looked expectantly into the rearview.
“I’ve forgotten my wallet,” Frank said.
The driver cursed in a language unknown to Frank before turning around in his seat, leaning toward the opening in the plexiglass, and saying, as though to clarify, “Son of the bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” Frank said.
“Leave with me,” the driver told him, pointing to the bag on Frank’s lap. “You get money and bring back.”
Everything Frank had left was in the bag. He couldn’t trust this man with it. But there had to be something inside that he could give him. He pulled out his copy of The Smell of the Grass.
“This is a first edition of a book I wrote,” he explained. “A famous book. If I sign it, you could probably get a few hundred dollars for it.”
A mild exaggeration, but a signed first edition was certainly worth more than a cab ride. The driver didn’t seem pleased with this solution, but eventually he nodded. Frank asked for a pen and opened to the title page. He considered inquiring whether the driver wanted it inscribed, but he knew the joke would be as little appreciated as the value of the book itself. He blew briefly on the signature before closing the cover and handing the book through the opening. The driver made no effort to reach for it, so after an awkward moment Frank dropped it on the front passenger seat, amid a pile of old newspapers and a roll of paper towels. He was barely on the sidewalk before the car sped away.
Inside the Herald Building, Frank walked straight to the security turnstile and waited for the guard behind the desk to press the button that would release him into the elevator bank.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked.
He must have been new, because Frank didn’t recognize him, and Frank had always had a good relationship with the building staff. The head of security, an Indian named Prasad, was a die-hard Mets fan, and they’d talked on many mornings about the previous night’s game. The sport was a great democratizer. Prasad followed the off-season rumor mill even more closely than Frank did, and he always knew the latest trade talk or who had the hot arm in Triple-A. Where was he now?
“Frank Doyle. I work at the newspaper.”
“Do you have your access card?”
For the second time in as many minutes, Frank reached for his empty back pocket.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Some other form of ID?”
Security had gotten ridiculous in the building after 9/11. There was a fine irony to that: no one who worked at the paper wanted to admit that Islamic terrorism was an existential threat, but they sure as hell wanted to protect their elevators.
“I left the house without my wallet this morning. I assure you that I write for the paper. I’m actually fairly well-known.”
The man looked Frank over, letting his eyes land pointedly on the bottle that Frank now remembered was in his hand.
“Is there someone upstairs I can call? Someone who can come down here and bring you in as a guest?”
“Roger Meaney,” Frank said immediately.
It would infuriate Rog to have to come downstairs in the middle of a workday to let Frank in, which is exactly why Frank had chosen him. The guard looked at his screen, typed a few letters, and turned back to Frank.
“Could you spell that for me?”
That the man had never heard of the paper’s managing editor almost made the whole thing worth it. Frank could already imagine Could you spell that for me? being the punch line of this story when he told it to the office.
“Mean with an e-y.”
The guard looked again at the screen.
“I’m afraid that name isn’t coming up on our system.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Frank said, but in that instant it came to him that Roger was no longer the managing editor. He’d retired a few years ago. Frank couldn’t remember the name of his replacement.
“Try Ken Calder,” he said a little more uncertainly. Before the guard had even punched in the name, Frank knew it wouldn’t come up. Ken was gone, too. He’d taken a buyout. There had to be plenty of people still working at the paper who could vouch for Frank, but he couldn’t remember a single one. The guard seemed about ready to escort him out.
“How about this?”
Frank put down the bottle and opened his bag, from which he retrieved The Crack of the Bat. Some people would have mocked his decision to bring his own books on this expedition, but so far they were proving quite useful. He flipped to the author’s photo. It was more than thirty years old but still easily recognizable as him.
“Look here. That’s obviously me. I’m a little older and grayer, but still. And it says right below it, ‘Frank Doyle is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Herald.’”
The guard read the words over, examined the photo, and looked back up. With his eyes still on Frank, he punched a few numbers into his desk phone.
“Can you come out and help me with something?” he said into the receiver.
A door on the other side of the lobby opened, and from it walked Prasad, who smiled at Frank as he approached. Frank smiled back with relief. He should have asked to speak with Prasad from the beginning.
“It’s good to see you, Frank,” Prasad told him.
“You, too,” Frank responded.
“It’s a shame about the team this year. We had the talent, you know, but we got bit by the injury bug. Santana, Wright. It’s like we were playing under a bad omen.”
“The baseball gods are fickle,” Frank agreed.
“What can I help you with?”
“I left my wallet at home, and your man here is being very diligent, which we all appreciate.”
Frank nodded at the guard, who looked on curiously.
“Who are you here to visit?” Prasad asked, a bit nervously.
Frank didn’t know what to make of this question.
“Not visiting anyone. Just headed upstairs to do a little work.”
Prasad shook his head as though disappointed by this answer.
“You know, Frank,” he said, almost in a whisper. He looked around as though about to divulge a rare secret. “You don’t work here anymore.”
Frank wanted to laugh. Someone was playing a joke on him. It was a good one, too, but now was not the time for it.
“Sure,” Frank said. “But I need to get upstairs.”
“You retired about a year ago,” Prasad persisted.
The expression of embarrassed pathos on his face wasn’t something easily faked. But he couldn’t be right. Frank would never retire. He wouldn’t accept a buyout like Meaney or Calder. For starters, he didn’t need the money.
“Of course, I know that,” he assured Prasad anyway, unwilling to have this fight in his current state. “I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I thought I would stick my head in to see the old place.”
“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” Prasad said, his tone a crushing mix of pity and relief. “Lots of changes here, you know.”
“Listen,” Frank said, “I should have done this years ago.”
He took the book from where it sat on the security desk and turned to the title page. He picked up the pen from beside the sign-in sheet. This time he would inscribe it, though he was not entirely sure how Prasad spelled his name—or for that matter, whether the name was his first or last. He drew a large, dramatic P that trailed quickly into a scribble. Beneath it he added a note about their years of great baseball talk. He signed it and passed the book over. Prasad smiled again, and this time Frank thought he saw tears coming into his eyes. He offered Frank a hand, and they shook—so far as Frank could remember, their first physical contact in the twenty years they’d known each other. Frank turned to go, but before he got to the door Prasad called after him. Frank stopped and looked back.
“We’ll get ’em next year.”
Outside, a large billboard dominated the north end of Herald Square. Half of it was filled with the face of a man with a long gray beard against a dark background, the other half with large type: What would you change if you knew it was all going to end? November 1, 2009, 10 o’clock.
