Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  All of this, of course, was for Savannah. I kept picturing her cabin, and especially those buckets. It all began to haunt me. With every trip I made out to the Fleetwood, carrying an armful of junk, I thought of something new she might need, and this something, whether it was pots and pans, or toilet paper, or insect repellent, or magazines (because she deserved some entertainment, didn’t she?), was usually something we had piling up in our house.

  The plan was relatively simple, and as I waited for the right time to make the drive from Bluepoint to the Emerson Oaks, everything, so suddenly, brought to mind her poverty, her bandaged knee, the way she had grasped for Lem’s envelope full of money with the simultaneous sense that she shouldn’t and yet she should. My father had taken to putting up an American flag every morning, and the sound of its grommets smacking the flagpole made me think of the creaky hinge on the door Savannah had held open with her toe. Wind lifting the canvas over a cord of firewood behind the house suddenly became the sound of the tarp flapping against the roof beams of their cabin. In Life magazine that month, there was a series of photographs of young ballerinas dancing in a window in downtown Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman’s hometown. They were simple pictures, charming, and all the girls seemed relatively happy to have their have their hands on the bar, to have been photographed in their tights and tulle. My only thought was whether this was something Savannah might like. A newspaper advertisement for a local bakery showed a three-tiered wedding cake. What about this? Would Savannah like this? A trio of speckled birds nested outside my bedroom window for a few noisy days. I hated them. They were loud and seemed to do nothing but chirp at each other and break apart worms in their beaks. But still I asked myself the same question: How about these? Would she like these? I was prepared to get her anything.

  The drive to Emerson Oaks took longer than I expected. At the rotary in Orleans, I went in the wrong direction, crossed the Sagamore, and was nearing the outskirts of what Bostonians call the South Shore before I turned and headed back. Even though I’d had my license for a year, I had driven only twice—once in Manhattan, when my father was too tipsy to park his Cadillac properly, and once on a somewhat sentimental trip my mother and I had taken to New Haven in order to see the old place. I had, I discovered, a heavy foot, something that unnerved me. Speed as a passenger is something far different from speed as a driver. Because of this I made the trip slowly. It was a Thursday evening. Robert Ashley had somehow met a woman—Emily Baines—and had invited her over for a dinner at his house. Never one to miss a potential coupling, my mother had managed to invite herself over. It fell to Lem to do what my father called “working the party,” which meant acting as waiter, bartender, and janitor. He’d appeared on the lawn wearing a cummerbund and a black jacket and feeling, he told me later, mortified.

  It was still light when I arrived at Emerson Oaks. Summer in Cape Cod seemed to have a monopoly on daylight. As I got out of the car, I saw Charles Ewing standing a few yards from the cabin’s front door. He had two pieces of a fishing rod in his hands and was trying, I guessed, to fit them back together.

  “What do you want?” he called out. He wore a white tank top and tan work pants. He was a remarkably skinny man, scrawny, even. His collarbone jutted out, two tiny columns. Now it seemed even more amazing that he’d been able to throw that curveball so well, so fast, with so much English on it.

  “I came to bring you some things,” I said eagerly.

  “Who said we need things?”

  “Uh… I just…”

  “You think we’re a charity case?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t think I can get things?”

  “I’m just trying to be nice,” I said.

  “Yeah? Nice?”

  I reached through the open passenger-side window and grabbed what I could. “It’s just bread and jam and stuff.”

  “You working for some sort of organization?” he asked. He put the fishing pole down. “Some church group send you?”

  “It’s whatever you want it to be,” I said. This was something I’d rehearsed. I’d figured he might say this to me, or something like it. I was proud I’d come up with something like that to say back to him.

  Savannah came out of the house then. She was in a tank top like her father’s. In fact, it might have been one of his. It hung past her waist, almost to her knees. I could see the outline of her brassiere beneath the fabric. She put her hands on her hips.

  “We don’t need any of this,” she said, jumping down from the front door, bridging the distance where a staircase ought to have been. She came up to the car window and peered inside. I was tempted to look with her. I’d lost track of everything that I’d stuffed into the backseat.

  “There’s more in the trunk,” I said.

  “Who told you to do this?” she asked. “Did Lem?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He know you’re here?” she asked.

  “Course not,” Charles shouted. “Giving things to you is his job. Ain’t it? You don’t think he’d let that lawyer’s boy start buttering you up, would you?”

  She looked at me. I felt the urge for some reason to touch her wrist, just her wrist, not any other place on her body, which was, I saw now, a beautiful body, different from the bodies of the girls at my school, more delicate somehow. Her wrist, though, was what had my attention. It had a mark on it where a doctor might put his fingers to search for a pulse, a raised welt like the club on a deck of cards.

  “All right,” she said. “Get on, now. Take it back.”

  “Look,” I said, “you don’t know how my father is.”

  “I read the papers,” she said. “I got an idea.”

  “No. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know you guys are richer than the Rockefellers. You don’t need to come all this way to tell me that.”

  “He just buys this stuff. Half the time he doesn’t even remember why, he’s so drunk. The other half, he doesn’t realize he already has what he’s buying. Like this,” I said, opening the front door, reaching for a gallon of milk. “We have six gallons of milk in our house right now. Six. He doesn’t remember that he keeps calling the milkman. Our milk guy is basically the happiest milk guy in America.”

  She pursed her lips. “I can’t take that.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said, lifting it out. It was still chilled. We were talking so softly. “Here. Just take it. It’s yours. Otherwise it’ll spoil.”

  “It’ll spoil anyhow,” she said.

  “It won’t. It’s fresh. I took the freshest bottle.”

  “We don’t have a refrigerator,” she said. “Or an ice chest.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. The thought seemed ridiculous to me. Who didn’t have a refrigerator? I looked behind her toward the cabin. Its door was open. Again: those buckets.

  She shook her head. “Listen—” she tried.

  “OK, fine,” I said, unwilling to be refused. “Then here.” I reached for the bread, the rice, the macaroni, the jam, the cans of cooked littlenecks, the jars of peaches. I put it all on the ground at her feet. “Here. You don’t need a refrigerator for this. For any of it.”

  Her eyelashes were suddenly wet. “Please.”

  “Wait, wait, wait…” I reached in toward the far edge of the backseat, where I’d stuffed a few of the scarves my mother had bought in Boston and never even taken from the packaging. I held up what I considered the nicest scarf for Savannah. It was red, with a thin yellow band at either end. It was the kind of scarf you wore to the Princeton game. “I figured it must get cold here,” I said.

  “At night,” she said quietly.

  I put it in her hand. “It’s soft,” I said.

  Savannah bit down on her lip. What was only a hint of tears was now a full barrage. I wanted to ask her if she still had the money Lem had given her, but somehow, I knew she didn’t, and that her father had taken it, and that it was gone now. I got all of this from her tears.
/>   “I can’t,” she said finally, waving her hands over the car like a magician, shoving the scarf back into my hand. “Any of it.”

  “Take it,” I said. “It’s wool.”

  She felt it and laughed a little. “It’s cashmere,” she said.

  “That’s a kind of wool, isn’t it?”

  “What am I gonna do with this?” she said. “Wear it with my overcoat?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She laughed more and kicked at the dirt. “That was a joke. I don’t have an overcoat. Obviously.”

  “Well, fine. Joke about it. Cut it up, make it into a sweater. I don’t really care.”

  “Why’re you doing this?” she asked.

  “All this junk is just sitting around in our house,” I said. “Collecting dust. Ten days from now, there’s gonna be a whole new pile of junk. More scarves. More food. More milk.”

  “And what then?” she asked. “You gonna come by with all that, too?”

  “If you want,” I said.

  “Your father is gonna get so angry when he finds out. I’ve seen him get angry,” she said. “You remember?”

  I laughed. “He’s just like that.”

  “Every day?”

  “Only when he drinks.”

  She seemed to like that I’d said that. “Dad and Lem have names for him.”

  “Like what?” I said, smiling. “Like what? Tell me!”

  “Oh,” she said, placing her hand flat against my chest for a brief moment, as if she wanted to push me away. Her fingers were long, and her nails had chipped yellow polish on them. I had never seen a girl with fingernails painted yellow before. “I don’t know you well enough yet to let you in on that kind of secret.”

  I blushed, either because of her hand, or because of the way she’d intimated that I might indeed get to know her well enough at some point that I might learn some of her secrets. Suddenly, nothing mattered more to me—not my father, not what was in the car, not the fact that I’d just driven nearly sixty miles without any permission. I looked down at her hand, and then, inexplicably, I reached out and put my hand on top of hers. She pulled away so quickly that I thought I’d hurt her.

  “You flirting with me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “No way.”

  She grinned. “You are. You’re flirting with me, aren’t you? Is that why you came all this way? Is that why you brought all this?”

  “No,” I insisted. “You’ve got the wrong idea.”

  “Oh, I do, huh?”

  Charles started to come toward us. He had both pieces of the fishing rod still in his hands. He saw me looking at it and then held it out to me. Savannah straightened, and whatever anger or suspicion she held toward me was quickly replaced by something altogether different. Her father, like my father, held such sway over her that his emotion was the emotion that mattered most, his gravity the gravity that took precedent.

  “He found this fishing rod,” Savannah explained, the muscles in her jaw clenched. “He thinks he’s gonna start fishing out all our meals from the ocean. All the sudden he’s Captain Ahab.”

  “I don’t know who the hell Captain Ahab is, but I don’t get what’s wrong with a man who wants to fish. Fish are just out there. Free for anybody to get. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to get some. Maybe I’ll get so good, I’ll get a boat, go out farther, get some big fish. Bluefish. Then maybe you’ll change your tone.”

  Savannah tsked quietly.

  “I like to fish,” I offered.

  “Yeah? What for?’

  I was lying, of course. I hated being out on the water, hated that when I closed my eyes after a day at sea I could still feel myself rocking, swaying, tilting. Being out on a boat seemed like something rich people were supposed to be good at; I was horrible at it.

  “Any fish is good fish, right?” I said.

  He laughed and clapped me on the back. “Any fish is good fish,” he said. Then, to Savannah, he grinned. “See? Our little rich fella here understands.”

  “Don’t say stupid things like that,” she said.

  “That,” Charles told me, “is my life right there. Raise a girl up, give her everything, feed her, take care of her best I can, sacrifice, then she calls me stupid. Life in a nutshell.”

  I reached for the fishing rod. “Did it snap?”

  “I found it like this,” he said.

  “If you want, I could get you a new one,” I said.

  “Why you want to do that? You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you can throw a curveball.”

  “At least someone does,” he said bitterly.

  “You should try to play professionally,” I said. “There’s all sorts of ballplayers like you. Larry Doby. Hank Thompson. Dan Bankhead, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe—”

  “Players like me?”

  “You know. Jackie Robinson.”

  “You wanna know something about Jackie Robinson?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, although I was pretty sure I knew what there was to know. If there was a subject I was better suited to talk about, prompted or not, I don’t know if one existed.

  “Before all y’all knew him, before they put him in a fancy movie, I knew him,” Charles said.

  “Oh, please,” Savannah said, rolling her eyes.

  “Quiet, girl.”

  “It’s the same story over and over and over and over,” she complained.

  “You play with him or something?” I asked.

  “Really,” Savannah said, looking coldly at me, “you don’t want to know. ’Cause the next time you see him, he’s gonna forget he told you, and then he’s gonna tell you again. And that’s just gonna keep happening. Forever.”

  “But I do,” I said. “I do want to know.”

  “Three times,” Charles said, stomping the ground with his heel and then holding up his last three fingers, the way a ballplayer would. “Three times I faced him. Three times I turned him around with that curveball I showed you. Buckled the guy’s knees. Buckled.”

  “Buckled,” Savannah said, imitating him, wiggling her head the way her father had.

  “See, I started out in Kansas City. Played on the Monarchs. Played with Satchel.”

  “Satchel?”

  Charles shook his head. “You think you’re an expert? Satchel Paige. Played with him there. Pitched the lights out. I mean, just crushed fellas. Threw shit nobody could hit. I could go eight or nine any night you needed. Then, after that, went down to Birmingham. Played on the Black Barons. Piper Davis. Ulysses Hollimon. All sorts of fellas down there. Checkers Lauren.”

  “Who?”

  “Checkers. Younger than me by five years. Just a sweet kid. Crazy swing. Kid could hit a marble, he was so good. Even Willie Mays.”

  “Really?”

  “Young Willie Mays.”

  He smiled to himself, remembering this. So suddenly I was in awe of him.

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “He was like Willie Mays, but really young,” he said, laughing.

  “This is incredible,” I said.

  “One night while I was living down there, took a drive up to meet a nurse I met in Savannah. That’s where this one comes into the picture,” he told me, rubbing her hair with his hand. “Named after the city she was born in.”

  I smiled at both of them. I loved hearing this. All summer, I’d been poring over an old baseball almanac I’d found on one of the bookshelves in the house, left there by the last owner, almost like a present for me. I was this book’s perfect reader—it was full of just numbers, averages, statistics, the sort of arcane effluvia that I’d somehow always keep in my brain. But none of the stuff Charles had just told me was anywhere in that almanac, in any column, or box score, or chart that spanned the history of the game. Its absence suddenly felt criminal.

  “Finally,” he said, “I went back out, tried a year with Chicago American Giants. This was only a few years ago. But they buried me in the bull pen. Never really got o
ut much.”

  “You’re young,” I said, because he did look young. “You could still play. I saw you throw.”

  “You saw me throw one ball.”

  “Still!”

  “I’m thirty-six,” he said. “Thirty-seven in November.”

  “That’s young,” I told him.

  “Not for a ballplayer.”

  While we talked, Savannah started to look at what I’d brought over. After a moment, she gasped, put her hand to her mouth, and ran into the house. The doors of the car were open. And so was the trunk, where I’d stashed the frozen ham. I could hear Savannah crying from inside the house.

  “What did I do?” I asked.

  He walked around to the back of the car and saw the ham. “Oh,” he said. He said it again. “Oh.”

  “What? What did I do?”

  “It’s nothing, son,” he said kindly. “Just should have asked me before you did all this.”

  “No,” I said. “Clearly I’ve done something. Usually, when you make a girl cry, you’ve done something.”