When I was young—seventeen—I had a paper route which I remember as a meandering through early summer, a ritual pilgrimage along old broad streets beneath maples just shooting out a soft haze of fresh buds. With my papers in their drapesack striking off my back and belly, and with a thick load of rubber bands coiled over my knuckles, I’d hike alone across the east side of town, rolling my papers tightly in thirds as I went and tossing them high in delicate arcs to land lightly in doorways and on porch steps. My route took me where the homes were large and venerable and still, where the lawns were broad and insistently manicured beneath the new-budding maples. Wherever I went, timeworn and meditative old men stood by and watched me behind the glitter of sprinklers, or pulled weeds mutely with a bland concentration, and plump-armed women in cotton dresses and tough black shoes hovered busily under clotheslines, dropping white sheets into deep wicker baskets. From eyes made large and watery by spectacles they watched me half-amused, half-sad and sentimentally, the women with wooden clothespins in their mouths, the men clutching garden spades and weeding forks or lawn rakes. As I walked I would catch the hot fruit sugar fragrance of the pies that baked in their kitchens, or the powdered soap smell of the drying sheets, or the mint-and-tinder scent of lawns mowed too often, and I would hear the lazy clinking of occasional wind chimes. Hummingbirds and blue jays gathered at feeders and a gold light fell out of a blue sky, intensifying, somehow, the stillness in everything.
When the drapesack was empty I flew home, knocked the dust from my cleats, rubbed neat’s-foot oil into the soft heart of my glove—checking to see that its webbing was cinched tightly—and then I pulled my cap down low and ran up to Adams Field, where the Cardinals worked out through the late afternoon, where I stretched and warmed up and threw batting practice while the infield dust drifted low across the bleachers and the clean white chalklines were erased by the base runners. The catcher in his shinguards and facemask and chestpad sent me signals from under his well-worn glove. I learned to throw a breaking ball hard that summer; I got my slider down, privately dreaming of a shot at the majors, and followed Whitey Ford, Warren Spahn and Don Drysdale in the boxes. The sun flooded richly over the backstop and diamond, and when I turned to watch the high flies crest in the outfield a halo of pink light engulfed the spinning ball. I saw little else but what could be seen from the pitcher’s mound at Adams Field. The view from there was of the game whirling magically around me, holding me delicately in its order and process and symmetry and motion, a fragile web of rule and action—myself at its center—that fended the world off perfectly, thwarted it completely, muted its terror with something as simple as a drag bunt laid neatly out across the infield.
In July new houses were added to my route, and Anna Lewis—who had black ringlets of hair at the nape of her neck, and a pair of dark moles at the base of one cheek, and blue eyes that could not be disturbed by commotion—lived in one of them: a three-story white clapboard colonial near one end of Tullis Street, a tall shuttered house set back behind hedges. Sitting cross-legged on a bench made of cool gray stone beside a sundial on a tapering pedestal, she read War and Peace and Persuasion and Dead Souls in its flower garden, which bloomed from May until the end of September with at least sixty species of perennials.
That first day on Tullis Street I trudged up the flagstones beyond the clasped gate in the perfect hedge, wedging a paper together as I went and smelling the honeysuckle, and then in a bend in the garden path I came on Anna, who frowned gravely up at me from out of the pages of the book she cradled in both palms, thumbs weighing the pages down, blue eyes casting me in the mold of intruder, her face tanned a clear sharp brown and the black tangled gloss of her hair framed in yellow sunlight. All around her, in a half-moon surrounding the stone bench and sundial, were flowers in sloped beds that rose to a high picket fence; beach stones lined the garden paths, and shade trees grew where the paths converged, in the midst of the garden at a raised gazebo beside a miniature fountain. With Anna behind me I tossed my paper, lofted it onto the high, broad porch, then turned again and passed her on the flagstones. As I did she glanced up at me, and a smile of amusement formed beneath the frown; her face seemed strong and brown, broad from ear to ear and gleaming as she held her book shut, marking her place with a forefinger. While I watched her black hair seemed to ripple in the sunlight and her wary eyes moved to the book once more. She shook her head once, briskly, not lifting her eyes, and the mane of her hair spilled over her forehead like a woven shield, iridescent and beautiful.
I was struck there and then I know now—the point of something sharp seemed lodged against my breastbone—not so much by beauty or romance but by my need and a nudging dread of it: dread of everything I would have to say and do against my will and yet precisely as my will wished. I knew about war from the baseball diamond—the private, intimate war of pitcher and batter in which subtleties of action are either gratifying or horrible—but not of the inner battle in which, even at seventeen, we recognize within desire the necessity of suffering. That comprehension of possible loss—of compromise, perhaps—and Anna’s beauty filled me as I stood there, though Anna was not exactly beautiful—the bones in her face were too large somehow, and the chin a bit too narrow—her beauty had no being unless you were me and the time twenty-one years ago.
“Looks like a nice spot to read,” I pointed out, mostly because I was no master of words and yet words seemed necessary.
“It is nice,” she said. “It’s very nice.”
There was that odd frown again, that sobriety and calm. I fell charmed by two traits: good posture and courteousness. They did me in as they had done in boys before me who in time had become husbands.
“What are you looking at?”
She’d said it this way: Ma-dahm Boo-vah-ree. I only nodded, though. “I haven’t read it,” I admitted.
“It’s worth reading,” said Anna. “I love it.”
“That’s good,” I answered and, because I’d lost the vaguest connection to my natural brand of thought, because my disorientation in her presence felt so horribly complete, I changed the subject instantly. “These flowers are something. They’re everywhere.”
She looked at me with an astonishment so subtle I noted it only as a refraction of light in her eyes, a drawing inward of the corners of her lips. She looked at me and let her forefinger slide from where all along it had been marking her place in Madame Bovary. Anna rose and loosed upon me a grace such as I had never witnessed, becoming as she emerged from her seated posture an extension of my pathetic and absurd delusions. All of that hair. The exactitude, the coolness of her back’s repose. I noticed, too, the length of her fingers. She was a girl composed of striking odd details. Take them as a whole and nothing matched precisely.
“You like them?” she said.
“Sure. How can I help myself?”
“You do?”
“Of course.” But I didn’t, not especially. I was lost in a conversation that impelled itself beyond the boundaries of my true thoughts. I was merely talking, saying things that did not necessarily reflect what was in my heart, because I wanted to be speaking with her; I knew that much.
“They’ve been a job,” said Anna. “Constant work. But if everyone helps, and you do a bit each day, and don’t get behind or let them get ahead of you, you don’t notice it. Let things go and it becomes a miserable chore.”
“Like a lot of things,” I said.
“Everything,” Anna insisted. “So many things are like that.” She smiled, somewhat sage, and then both of us lowered our eyes.
I can tell you how I left there: light-footed and ecstatic and sick to my stomach all at once, rolling my papers too tightly and conjuring up futures in which Anna and flowers figured prominently. Within that madness I began to run, leaping up stairways and crashing over lawns, flipping my papers at porches breathlessly while the old stony men in their yards looked on in silence, mystified, betrayed by memories that no longer reached back into boyhood.
This is how it went: I would find Anna in the garden almost daily, reading or culling bouquets or pinching the tops of the annuals off between her fingers, and on the days she was not there I felt strongly the weight of time, which seemed to languish between our encounters, and eventually she taught me the names of all the flowers and how to identify them in bloom—gaillardia, sedum, loosestrife, feverfew: one by one I came to know them separately, according to the shapes and colors of their petals, leaves and stems. It was the sort of esoterica I had never had an interest in but which now composed a whole world. We would linger at the stone bench, I would pull my drapesack of papers off, and Anna would put her book down and quiz me on the flowers I had memorized. We worked our way around the paths, kneeling at the beds beside the blooms, and there was something perfect and athletic, rolling, natural, in the way Anna’s arms and hands moved through the plants and bushes, pushing stems back or cupping petals while the bees flew in and out among the stalks and leaves. The more carefully I noted her gentleness and the ease of her knowledge the more agitated I became, and I would eye her as I eyed the flowers, secretly. When I found her pulling weeds—balanced on the balls of her feet, crouching and leaning into the flower beds—she looked up at me with pinpricks of sweat along her hairline, where the skin was whiter, and the black tendrils at the base of her neck seemed slick and oily. She rose smoothly and brushed the dirt out of her summer dress—she wore one every day, and they were all many sizes too large—and then she clapped the dust from her hands and stood with her fingertips poised against her hips, looking out over the flower garden. She wore sandals bound behind the ankle and over the flank of the foot with flimsy straps, and her calves shone in the sun and her brown shoulders and neck shone, and she might scratch her throat or cheek thoughtfully, leaving a smudge of dirt behind, and then she moved down the path in that fluid yet controlled way of hers, smooth and long-boned and utterly at home among the flowers. And all of that made me sentimental, which I knew was a weakness but couldn’t help.
Occasionally I saw Anna’s mother—who was thin and narrow in the face, wore a gardening apron everywhere and parted her hair severely down the middle—moving along the flagstone paths and dragging a hose behind her, or darting about with a can full of fish fertilizer, and whenever our eyes met she smiled faintly and cryptically, but hardly ever said a word to me directly. Anna’s father, Doctor Herbert Franklin Lewis, was thick and ruddy and wore coarse suits. On Saturday afternoons he worked in his garden, or sat in the gazebo with his heavy legs crossed and smoked a cigar meditatively, clutching a glass of iced tea between his hairy fingers and whistling unrecognizable tunes. He paid his bill for the newspaper promptly and tipped me twenty-five cents magnanimously, flicking his bow tie and caressing the great red wattles of skin that fell over his throat in separate flaps. He was a large, difficult and serious man who spoke to me often of the vagaries of baseball, wiping his face all around with a handkerchief and exuding a domestic, comfortable confidence. I often think of him now as one of a dying breed of men, who want, really, nothing for themselves, who have effaced their innermost desires without self-flagellation, and—in order to avoid the desperations of solitude—have given themselves over completely to their wives and to their children, and ultimately to their children’s children, and done it with a magnificent serenity.
Mostly, though, Anna and I were alone in the garden, and I began to linger there, late for practice. Eventually we lay in the grass that fronted the gazebo, where one day I pressed myself over her at last, locked my forearms against her cheeks and curled my hands through her hair. She was pensive, uncertain, her face paled slightly and silence overtook her; she seemed to be studying my face, searching its features for a truth that stubbornly remained hidden, and her hands only rested below my shoulder blades, waiting and plaintive and still. In time, though, I saw that her eyes were no longer wary, and when I pressed myself over her I felt her back arch and her hips swell to meet mine. It was a form of paradise and I knew it even then: the depth of the sunlight as it glowed through the garden, the bitter, private, fleshy taste of Anna’s lips and mouth, the warm abrasiveness of grass against my arms and legs, and the choking scent of flowers everywhere, all around us, shutting the world out forever.
Yet at times, at the core of bliss, I would feel a dread I’d never felt before; I would dream through my ears the clack of a bat, resonant and crystalline, but when I lifted my head up to listen for it, it ceased to exist altogether. My chest tightened, seized up in knots, and Anna peered into my eyes suspiciously: I got up suddenly and hurried away from there with my eyebrows knit and my jaw jutting, saying I was late for baseball practice. And, in hurrying away, alone and loping along the streets effortlessly, I felt a transformation taking place; the further I got from the flower garden and the closer to Adams Field, the more ecstatic I became, until before long Anna seemed like a dream, beautiful and tranquil and surrounded by flowers, but far from the stuff of which my real life was made. By the time I reached the pitcher’s mound I felt no dread anymore, could not remember dread at all, and I would throw batting practice with a soaring heart, at the hub of the wheel of the baseball field.
That summer season came and went, the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series, the flowers knit themselves up against winter, and everywhere I took my papers that fall maple leaves rattled drily in the windy streets, curled like fists and skating in hordes along the asphalt. With school again—my last year of it—I brought the papers around at three; Anna was no longer in the garden (the air had turned too sharp and cold) but in the evenings I walked up and we sat by the fire with the television on softly and our schoolbooks open. Doctor Lewis hunkered down beside us in his thick padded armchair and eventually slept peacefully with a cold cigar between his fingers, and Mrs. Lewis seemed always to be padding back and forth stealthily behind us in her slippers and awkward chenille bathrobe. The wall clock ticked like thunder and the fire popped and fizzled and Doctor Lewis wheezed through one nostril and exhaled his breath like a clogged bellows, and Anna and I leaned together in the calm purple wash of the television’s light, not asleep and not awake, in a trance of sorts until the clock belled eleven and the late-night news came on. With the news Doctor Lewis stirred and perked up, lit his cigar again and watched in a daze with his arms folded across his belly. “Sports report,” he said to me. “Let’s all be quiet now.”
Irrelevant football scores perhaps, or meaningless trades in distant cities, or the retirement of a gladiator no longer filled with the requisite bravado, the requisite innocence and awe. “He was a superb ath-alete,” Doctor Lewis commented on the occasion of some obscure player’s slide from the fields of glory. “Absolutely superb. A whiz.”
On another occasion, as we sat through a round of advertisements, he waxed candidly prophetic. “Don’t be frightened by failure, son,” he warned me out of nowhere, from no source—just sudden words spoken boldly. “The world is filled with men who dream of their own importance. No, don’t be fooled by the prospect of failure. You’ve a fine, fine arm. A fine arm. Who knows? The true loss would be in not trying a ’tall, with one so young as you are.… ” But I don’t think he knew how to finish, or even quite what he meant to say. Doctor Lewis was a lost and sentimental man; he went off to bed when the news was done without any further advice. I had the sense that the confusion and mystery he’d left me with were purposeful.
“What was he talking about?” I asked his too-lovely and too-quiet daughter.
“Baseball.” Just one word. Then: “You.”
We talked for some time, with great seriousness, and about matters better left untouched by children. At last, because she’d implied for so long that the words were really necessary, I told Anna that I loved her. I said it with my head hung and my eyes averted. I remember there were icicles hanging from the eaves; it was just before Thanksgiving and the killing-frost had come and gone—she cupped my face in her hands as we sat side by side on her mother’s sofa and—with eyes that were stern, wet and scared, eyes that were serious even about themselves—Anna said she loved me too, plainly and boldly and with too much painstakingly concocted drama for me not to feel ill about everything. She waited for me to fill the empty space that followed, to ladle emotion into it—staring at me, and me sick about it, sweating. I felt her breath on my face and smelled her clean flesh and just-washed hair—something like a tremor went through me which I suppressed and concealed while I made a comic face, a parody of lovesickness, a mask as reply, an image of what I kept myself from being or becoming—she didn’t laugh and I flicked out the light behind us and kissed her with a force that I wished could obliterate the need for words but which failed to do so; I didn’t know what I felt, not really, not well enough to articulate it anyway, and within my excesses of ecstasy and dread there was only turmoil and uncertainty about Anna. I knew that, suddenly, too well.
Later, walking home in the cold through streets that were dark but for the blurred glow of streetlamps, I felt relief at having a bed of my own to return to. At home I stared hard at the ceiling of my room, knowing what I felt and knowing it was a betrayal of feelings I had felt to be true until then: I squeezed my eyes shut until a thousand helixes of light shot forth inside them, and told myself I loved Anna a hundred times until somehow, in the silent utterance, it seemed to have become true and I could finally sleep.
A wave, though, had been set in motion. That winter I waited, mostly, for baseball season; I threw some, indoors, and I gave up my paper route to concentrate on pitching. When spring came my arm was already strong, and I had added a sweeping knuckleball to my repertoire. The ground thawed in a sudden rush of heat, the grass turned green in the field again and the team turned out in the afternoon beneath skies that were turquoise and empty of clouds. In the evenings I often showed up at the Lewises’ and met Anna in the garden—reading, as always, at the stone bench—and it was then, in April, that we began to plant a slope of the yard with a few perennial flowers of our own.
I don’t remember where the idea came from anymore, but no doubt it was Anna’s: she was obsessed with gardening, with gardens and books about people who never lived by people who were no longer living. One evening, simply, I found myself busy with a hoe and rake, rooting up strips of lawn behind the gazebo. We plowed a long crescent of soil to a depth of twelve inches, and shoveled the earth through an angled rock screen, and then we tilled in four twenty-pound bags of steer manure and raked a clean contour into the bed. I spread a thin layer of vermiculite one Saturday and we sat down at the stone bench and made out our garden plan meticulously. We sketched in, along the edge of the lawn, Jacob’s-coat, heliotrope, zinnias, astilbe, bearded iris, alyssum, baptisia, forget-me-nots and evening primroses. Behind these we added white regal lilies and pink phlox—late summer flowers—backed by a line of delicate snakeroot. Lastly, we filled in with gas plant and butterfly weed and a few day lilies—long-suffering flowers that will bloom even where there is no nurturing and little sustenance.
The sun fell behind the house while we planned and measured, and it became too dark to see our sketch easily. I went home, but all the next week, evenings, we planted with nursery sets and fragile garden cuttings, and raked over a layer of leaf mulch, shredded, in order to keep the weeds from taking root in the dark loose soil. By the middle of April—baseball season—Anna and I had a flower garden of our own to care for, and sometimes, as I waited to throw from the home dugout at Adams Field, I would wonder suddenly when the first blooms would begin to appear, and I wanted to be there when the buds began to open in the sun below the white gazebo.
That was a surprising, golden season—my last good season, really, in baseball (there is something, though, to be said to the good for my seasons as a spectator since then, too). My arm had hardened over the winter and I’d found my throwing strength at last; I learned to concentrate on the mound, to expurgate the unnecessary clutter of the world at game time, and when I got behind on a batter or had men on base I still kept my focus on the strike zone. I’d come to insist that the enclosed world of baseball protect me altogether finally, and as love became more difficult I probed the intricacies of pitching more deeply and perhaps more desperately, too. As long as the game lasted I was safe, hidden, but when it ended—when the season ended, I feared—I would come to myself in a shudder of self-knowledge and absorb the turmoil of love once more. It was a strategy of disciplined withdrawal, yes—how many athletes are driven by the confusions of their lives to do well at games?—but within it my numbers led the High School League: nine and one, sixty-five strikeouts, a two-point-three-one e.r.a. I pitched eight complete games—two of them three-hitters, three of them shutouts—and The Clarion—the newspaper I’d delivered on the east side once—wrote me up in June as a bona fide major league prospect.
Two days after graduation the Kansas City Athletics called. They wanted me in their farm system, at Chambers, upstate, for two-seventy-five a month plus per diem and bus fare and a chance to step right into the rotation or, if that didn’t work out, a guaranteed spot in the bullpen. I told them yes immediately, that I would report in three days, and then I went over to see Anna Lewis, figuring in my head as I walked the time it would take before I was pitching in the big leagues.
It was a drowsy hot June afternoon, moist and sweltering and windless. At the stone bench in the flower garden you could smell the thick spice of clove pinks; behind the sundial you could see the red heads of bee balm thrusting up toward the heat of the sun. Anna’s book—Mansfield Park this time—lay on its spine with the pages open; it seemed absurd and tiresome and petty in light of the Kansas City Athletics. I wound along the flagstones to the gazebo. From there I could see Anna kneeling at the border of our garden, dressed in her mother’s dirt-stained gardening apron and with her hair crimped into a loose bun full of black tendrils. Black sprigs of hair fell away from her ears and her neck as she worked with a weeding spade along the sliver of astilbe we had planted, tossing the uprooted weeds behind her with a minute turn of the wrist. They lay limply behind her in a long broken row at the edge of the lawn slope, each with its own root-crust of earth crumbling into the green grass and drying to a listless gray hue in the heavy swelter.
Perennials—even nursery starts—come into their own only gradually, and seldom make much of a show before their second season. Our garden was too new and tender and therefore scarcely in flower; the best we could hope for was a few forget-me-nots and, perhaps late in summer, some pink phlox and a smatter of snakeroot. The astilbe, though, had miraculously bloomed—it was the middle of June already and nearing the solstice; the days had been long and hot and at dawn all month the sudden rains had come—and now they showed their feathery spires in a halo around Anna. I went down the lawn slope and began to gather up the pulled weeds. Sliding along with one knee in the grass and a clutter of weeds dangling from one fist I told Anna about Kansas City and Chambers and the two-seventy-five a month the Athletics would pay me to play baseball. My memory of this moment is clear—my life, in retrospect, seems to have turned on it—Anna rose and dusted off her apron, smacked the dirt from her hands and reached into the pocket of her summer dress. She held the envelope out to me; I let fall the tangle of weeds in my hand and sat back on the lawn to read what it contained.
A school in Pennsylvania—Saint Alphonse College—had offered Anna a full scholarship to study literature: now I knew what all her books fed into. I read the letter twice; halfway through the third reading I knew that she would go, that when the season ended in Chambers and I came home she would be gone, that when she returned the next summer I would be pitching somewhere else again and wanted to, and that this would go on endlessly and we would see each other almost never, until at last we were entirely strangers. I didn’t know whether or not this was what I wanted, whether dread or ecstasy ought finally to be the state of things; I loved her as long as it was simple—as it was in the flower garden—but now the sticky web of the larger world was swiftly settling over us. And so I slowly forced the letter back inside its envelope and laid it on the lawn, and found I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I knew that it had never been right; she was solemn and cerebral and bound for college and I was a baseball player. Suddenly in Anna I saw the prospect of a future that might not include baseball, if I so chose; baseball, really, meant leaving her, even without the hindrances of logistics and Pennsylvania and time. What had come to pass was not a problem but a looking glass, a mirror in which the truth emerged as solid as a diamond. Love was too hard; it argued I could not be my own center alone, that there were others on the planet with me—love was impossible and too much to ask of a boy. We sat on the lawn in the white light of the sun and Anna insisted that distance was no object; I agreed with that, but already I had moved farther off than she could ever realize.
“It’ll work out,” I told her. “It won’t change anything.”
But of course she knew that I lied. It was as obvious as my shame. “I’m not going to change,” she said. The words trembled, the voice came softly. “I swear to it. I swear to it by these flowers, right now.”
She’d read too many books, but I didn’t say that. “Swearing isn’t any good,” I said. “We’ll just have to try to work it out.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about keeping the flowers going?”
“Swear to it.”
“I can’t swear.”
“I didn’t think you could,” she revealed at last. “I kind of suspected—I felt it right here.” She placed her hand over her heart and held it there for a moment. “Right here. Right here!”
I couldn’t look at her though. “Leave me alone,” I said. “Okay?”
“Did I hear you correctly?” asked Anna.
“Don’t talk to me,” I heard myself say. “I don’t love you. It doesn’t have anything to do with your college or anything else. I just don’t love you.”
I was marveling at the blades of grass in the lawn as I spoke these words. Each molecule of each blade had taken on an unsettling, perfect clarity of being; each appeared shot through with a quiet green inner light. It seemed to me I couldn’t fix myself on anything else at that moment, nothing but the texture of the lawn seemed real, and when I brought my head up at last I realized the silence had lasted too long, that Anna was no longer beside me. Something like panic overtook me in a flood and I jumped to my feet, disoriented, crazed, with just time to see her recede toward the house, recede through the flowers and then run up the porch steps, black hair streaming toward me as she turned through the door—and then Anna completely disappeared.
Chambers turned out to be a grim and dusty town, a long, narrow street of slatternly storefronts surrounded by blocks of austere and weather-beaten homes. A kind of stasis, disquieting and ever-present, seemed to oppress the very buildings along Main Street, and nothing moved but the occasional, slow-eyed dogs who stalked their tails in the lonely shadows, stirring the dust up and eyeing everything sadly. The searing summer wind carried the aroma of sulfur from the nearby mill, and the air smelled of insecticide in the early evenings. The townspeople, like figures in a dream, moved slowly and aimlessly when they moved at all, but came to the baseball games suddenly transformed (the games were like prayer meetings or old-time revivals) and sat fanning themselves and wiping their faces on their shirtsleeves in the bleachers, yapping in ecstasy at every base hit, swooning at every home run.
Chambers played in the Northern League, a Double A circuit that took in Saradon and Vicksburg, Oxacala and Merton, Larabee and Burris and Minapee City. The team bus rambled over roads as straight as ramrods, over pavement that sweated from a distant vantage but was only full of pockmarks and holes when you passed over it to wherever you were going. We were a team, mostly, of journeymen minor leaguers, men who had played baseball everywhere and were no longer surprised when they were traded or sold—men who played baseball for a living mechanically, with only a faint trace left of the hope they had once held inside. Some of them had had their day in the majors, of which they never spoke, and had followed a downward trajectory ever since, as though it were somehow their duty to see things through to their proper, inevitable ends. We played in dust and heat, slept on buses and in sweltering hotels, endured, with a consensual stoicism, our undeniable anonymity. I won my first start on bluster and optimism, but then I lost four badly and fell out of the rotation. Chambers used me in long relief rarely; the rest of the time I chewed gum in the bullpen, watching and wondering where I’d gone wrong.
I suppose you could say that the dream fell away then; the shell broke around me and I felt no protection in the game any longer, but only the little-known reality of it. In my room over the auto parts store on the main street of Chambers I began to have nightmares, hideous dreams in which the void of my future expressed itself as a chasm, dark and impossible to avoid. From my vantage in the bullpen the actual game seemed far away and I would daydream through whole innings, sitting forward with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, staring at the dusty ground. More and more I thought of the flower garden, wondered what bloomed there and what sort of birds had come to the feeders. By the time the season ended it seemed quite important—the possibility that our pink phlox had blossomed, that the candelabralike flowers of snakeroot had opened up, that perhaps the alyssum or Jacob’s-coat would surprise us—the image of that lost world of color and light seemed always before me now, a salve of sorts for the wound the game had turned into.
Kansas City did not renew my contract, and I came home with baseball behind me, as if seeing the world for the first time. In my hometown the hard light of summer had softened and annealed; winds slightly cooler than summer winds blew, and in the mornings the sky appeared a heavy shade of mottled gray. I wandered a lot; at Adams Field a crowd of younger boys had come to dominate the baseball diamond, and sometimes I would sit against the chain-link fence behind the elementary school, watching their games from the hilltop. More often I would ponder the lost Eden of the flower garden, and once or twice, when night came, I passed by the hedge at the Lewis home. Beyond the clasped gate there was only darkness and the shadowy flickerings of the television in the front window, where Doctor Lewis, I knew without a doubt, looked at the late news and chewed on his cigar in the easy chair. It seemed to me that all across town the streets themselves had changed; they were narrower, the quiet in them had become a sad thing—they seemed desolate, and I saw now, improbably, that there were intricate lives in every home. A job, I began to say to myself, seeing how most men came out of their houses in the morning—but I couldn’t bring myself, yet, to look for one. I spoke only when spoken to, and I am sure that people spoke of me as one who had failed at his dream. Yet everywhere I went I thought of our flower garden and not of baseball; perhaps, I said to myself, the day lilies have come out, or the evening primroses, or the clump of zinnias has bloomed. By the time September ended I had led myself to believe in the elusive perfection of that place, and stubbornly felt the urge to go there, to stand among the flowers one more time.
A night came in October when I awoke at two A.M. and knew the killing-frost had come. The sharp air of winter flooded at the window, and outside, illuminated by the glitter of the full moon, the leaves on the cottonwood in the yard had bound themselves up and dropped to the lawn. It dawned on me then that the flowers in our garden would close against winter now, and I got up and dressed quickly, shivering all up and down my neck and back and arms. I went out hurriedly into the street and ran toward Anna’s in the cold moonlight, barreling up the old broad avenues of my paper route. When I turned into Tullis I stopped and waited while the steam of my breath died down. Moonlight bronzed everything—the leaves in the rigid maples, the clean, silent porches, the frost on the lawns and the gables and trellises—and the windowpanes all up and down the street shimmered like deep pools of water. The frost had hardened to a crust that fractured readily underfoot, and the night dew, silver in color, lay in drops the size of small pearls on the blade tips. The flowers, I thought: they will have folded up already where the frost is this thick, and I noticed uneasily a disturbance in the air then, and a steady drumming in the pit of my stomach, and my spine tightened as I walked and the tips of my ears felt furious with cold. I unclasped the gate I’d unclasped hundreds of times; inside the trimmed hedge each flagstone appeared as a ragged square of impeccable light; the three-story house rose hugely against the blue-black of the night sky, luminous, familiar, melancholy and silent—an impenetrable fortress of silver-white clapboard, with long eaves glistening beneath the moon.
Perhaps, I told myself one more time, everything will be in blossom—and then I stepped carefully along the lit flagstones. I went through the bend in the garden path; I came on the stone bench; on the low knoll to my left and before me I saw the outline of the white gazebo. I wound through the paths and down the shadowed lawn slope, but the garden Anna and I had planted was only a dark mass of stems now, everything cut back to a foot in height and mulched with several inches of raked leaves from the rest of the yard.
Everything else was as it should be, as it had been, but I had no place in it anymore. I’d trespassed in order to be there at all, and suddenly I felt more alone than I ever had, more desolate, more burdened by my own soul and by who I was, however ineluctably, and it began to seem as if my presence in that place at night beneath the moon marked the last moment ever in which I could really be young. Years have passed, but still today—on buses going downtown, in restaurants booming with noise, on airplanes as they lift off, at weddings and at movies and at baseball games when those moments arrive and the field disappears and I find myself burrowing backward in time, lost in myself as the game goes on—I have felt in my heart that same widening aloneness that buried me then: the loneliness that boys feel who are forever afraid of death and of becoming men.