Larry agreed to meet at a Mexican place off Route 50. Neutral ground, I figured. Not his town, not mine either. When I arrived he was already seated at a booth in the window, his backpack beside him on the bench. He seemed older than he had the first time we’d met. Lines around his mouth and forehead looked drawn in pen.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I said. As I slid into the booth, he glanced nervously around the restaurant, as though ensuring no one he knew was there. Two men in bikers’ leather sat in the far corner, drinking beers, pale logs of burrito in front of them. They were paying no attention to us. A waiter came by and deposited a basket of chips and a ramekin of salsa on our table; I loaded a chip and crunched it down, not out of hunger but because I needed something to do with my hands.
“I had to turn off the osprey cam,” Larry said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I hoped he heard my empathy; I knew it must have pained him to do so. In his first post, he’d said that we had a responsibility to witness the natural world, even when it was sad or savage.
“I’ve never been in this situation,” Larry said. “I tried to live my life keeping my head down. Even at my wedding, we had five people. And apparently the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Trust is just furious. Those people—they’re all over the land. He’s upset, but I am too. The whole point of this place—” He broke off. “Well, I don’t even know the whole point of it, but it was a place where Luna liked to be. It was a sanctuary for the osprey, for nature undisturbed, and now the idea of it turning into an amusement park for misguided eco-warriors is just…well, Eleanor, is there a way you can help me stop it?”
I thought for a moment. “I have to write a piece, but it will be very fair,” I said. “In fact, I’ll make it really dry. It will attract no attention. It will be as dry as these chips.” He didn’t even smile, so I just went on. “These things pass in days,” I said, mostly meaning it. “Nobody stays interested. One of the byproducts of the internet is that everyone’s attention span is flea-like.”
A baby-faced server, pants belted high on his waist, appeared beside our table. “Hello, my name is Alex, are you ready?” he asked, pen poised.
“I’ll have a Coke and two chicken tacos,” I said, glancing quickly at the menu. Burrito Mondays: $1 shots with purchase of burrito!!!! it read. Taco Tuesday! 2 for 1! Poor Tuesday, always forced by alliteration to be paired with tacos.
“I’ll try the cactus salad. Thank you.” Larry handed him our menus. Alex nodded gravely and continued to stand by our table while he separated the perforated page from the order pad.
When he moved away, I went on. “I can write the most brilliant piece about this and it will be painted over in two days by a protest against…I don’t know, clarified butter. Or tube socks.”
But Larry looked unhappy and shaken. “I want the marsh quiet again for the birds,” he said.
“It will be.”
“I know we don’t know each other,” Larry said, sitting perfectly still with his fingers laced together, “but I’m asking you not to write about it anymore.”
His composure seemed to mask a deep well of vulnerability and tenderness. I could see it in his eyes, how he couldn’t quite bring himself to look at me. And so I found myself nodding, agreeing not to write the piece I had promised Steve I would. The front-page piece. I felt bound to Larry, and it was easy to let Steve fade in my mind. I wanted to learn everything I could about this man who had known my father and known him with a vehemence I didn’t yet understand. Steve would be angry, but I would figure out a way to explain. I knew Steve only cared about the piece because of himself, his ego, the brief flutter of clicks it would generate for Apogee. It wouldn’t teach readers anything; it would be giving a platform to people who were anti-science, anti-evidence, who protested by pillorying a well-meaning environmentalist and by throwing birdseed in the air, as if wild seabirds were interchangeable with the suburban sparrow. Everything that Jane argued Apogee shouldn’t be. Everything I knew my father would be against too.
Our plates were set down with extra napkins tucked beneath them. I stared at my dish, the tacos sagging in their shells. “Thanks for seeing me and giving me another chance,” I said.
“It wasn’t me. You should thank Drew, my husband. He thought I should meet with you. That it might bring me some closure, after everything.” Larry cupped both hands around his water glass. “It’s all been weighing on me, since I got your first email.”
I waited for Larry to say more. This was a journalist’s strategy, not to rush to fill a silence. If you let silence bloom, the other person might tell an unvarnished truth, not the version of it they’d prepared in their heads.
“Also”—Larry looked at me—“you’re not your father.”
It was true, I wasn’t my father. But it hurt to hear him say it. It sounded as if Larry didn’t think my father was a good person. “How did you know him?” I asked finally.
“We went to high school together. We were on the baseball team.”
“I found a picture of the two of you, in The Castle Hill Moat. You were a shortstop, right? And my dad was first base.” Baseball friends. My dad had left his baseball to an old pal. Old pal. The words felt wrong. I knew there was more to it.
“Right.”
He didn’t elaborate, so I said, “The school jocks?”
“No.” Larry shook his head firmly. “We were artistic kids. We loved baseball, but we were artists first. Jim encouraged my photography when no one else did.”
“He always loved photography.”
“Jim was the only other person in class who cared about art. He could talk about the latest foreign films. He read everything. That really impressed me. After baseball practice one day, I was showing him some of my photographs. We were sophomores, so we weren’t allowed to use the school darkroom. The photography course was an elective for seniors only. The principal had basically said that anyone using the darkroom without permission would be suspended, but Jim convinced me that I should develop my film there, that it was my right as an artist. One day he stood outside while I went in through the curtain. The chemicals were all laid out in bins, and there was a string lined with wooden clothespins where you could hang photos. All those pins waiting—that was thrilling to me. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
“Then in a while a teacher passed by. I recognized his voice. Mr. Trillin, our English teacher. We both adored him, especially your father. He worshipped him. Trillin asked what he was doing there outside the darkroom. I froze, thinking, shit, Jim is going to give me up—but he didn’t. Jim distracted him with some story about the Orioles first baseman. First he was doing the sound the ball makes when it cracks against the bat. Then he switched to the Orioles stadium announcer. Trillin thought it was so funny; he was really cracking up. Jim made it seem perfectly natural that he was just standing outside the darkroom. When it got quiet again, I poked my head around the curtain and saw Jim sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, reading a book. He didn’t want to disturb me.”
Larry stopped to take a long sip of water. For the first time since my father’s death, I felt he was alive again. This was a real story, one that I didn’t know and couldn’t embellish and could only listen to. A story outside my own memory. Not like everything I had made up in my head to explain my father’s actions toward me. I tried to float inside the image of Dad sitting by the darkroom, guarding his friend. A cinder-block wall painted white. My father’s backpack next to him, unzipped. His face a study in concentration. Alert for footsteps. I was greedy for more.
“In the darkroom that day,” Larry said, “I remember thinking that was a very unusual thing to do. Jim believed in my work, and that meant a lot to me.” Larry went on twisting his palms around his glass of water as though his mind had forgotten what his hands were doing. “Later, he asked to see the photos I developed. He really studied them. It was a series I shot of my parents dancing at my cousin’s wedding. The ceremony was at the county fairgrounds. They were on an empty carousel in their wedding clothes, slow-dancing beside a painted horse. In the first frames, they’re laughing and looking at each other, but then my father says something that makes her sad. In the final shot, they’re kind of gazing into the distance. My mother isn’t smiling anymore. She looks just to the left of the camera. Her eyes are fierce. Jim said, ‘She’s thinking of what to say that will wound him.’ He suggested I call that final photo ‘The Retort.’ I loved that title. I loved that he thought it should reflect my mother’s experience, her viewpoint. My father was a difficult man.”
Larry picked up his fork. I watched slim green pieces of cactus disappear into his mouth. I sipped from my Coke, picked up a taco, and let the grease from the meat run in rivulets between my fingers. Finally, Larry set down his fork.
“Toward the end of our senior year, for whatever reason, the school closed the darkroom. Budget cuts or under-enrollment, I can’t remember. They stopped offering photography classes. Jim came up to me one afternoon in the locker room before baseball practice. He had the idea that we could build our own darkroom. Neither of us had the kind of money we’d need to do that. But Jim had just read Nietzsche. He said that we should steal the supplies on the basis of property rights—that those who will make greater use of things are entitled to them. This was an eighteen-year-old’s interpretation of Nietzsche. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? We could never get away with that.’ Jim said something like, ‘Extraordinary people are allowed to transgress. It’s expected of them. We should aspire to break moral codes to achieve great things.’
“I refused, of course. He didn’t understand what the consequences would be for me if I got caught doing something like that. My father was a—” Larry stopped, coughed. “He’d been in the military, and he was angry with everything and everyone. But he took it out on me most of all. I was quiet. Artistic. I was gay, but I wasn’t out. What could I have said to Jim? That gay people aren’t allowed to be reckless, because the consequences are worse for us? The truth is I was in love with your father, but I couldn’t admit it to myself, and God knows I would never admit it to him. And I’m not quite sure why I’m admitting it to you.”
Larry looked out the plate-glass window and blushed slightly, as though his shyness had caught up to him. I wanted to say something reassuring, but I didn’t know what that would be. I never moved my eyes from Larry’s face.
“One weekend we were hanging out in his basement,” he went on. “It was the afternoon and we were drinking beer. We could drink beer at his house, because he had no father to tell us not to. Sad but useful. I couldn’t have Jim over—my father was too controlling and cruel. I didn’t want anyone around him. At Jim’s house, the TV was on, and we were just sitting on the couch and shooting the shit, and Jim started talking about how he was going to get the darkroom chemicals. A cousin of his worked part-time at the hardware store, and he’d explained that the inventory wasn’t matched against the money in the register until Fridays. So if we snuck in on Saturday night, no one would notice anything was missing until the following Friday. Again I refused. I tried to talk Jim out of it. I said he was just drunk. At some point we’d had so many beers, there were crumpled cans all over the floor, and he fell asleep. When he woke up, he saw that I was staring at him, and I’m sure he knew what I felt about him. We never discussed it, but he knew, and I knew that he knew.”
Larry paused. Then he said, “Again Jim started babbling about stealing the chemicals, but this time he wouldn’t look at me. It was just a few bottles of chemicals, a few trays, he said. Nothing they would go crazy over. This cousin of his often took little things, a box of nails here and there, and no one noticed. He was almost pleading with me, in that charming way he had, making it sound fun and exciting, the start of our lives as true artists. We were both sitting up, foot to foot, and he said, ‘We need to do this for our art.’ Then his mother called us to dinner, and he got up off the couch and left the room. He must have known on some level I would always do what he wanted. I was in his thrall.”
Thrall. That was the word for the air around my father that contained him and drew people in: men, women, children, probably random small animals. Me. I’d never thought of it before, but it was perfect. What a strange word, one of those words that didn’t even sound real if you overthought it: thrall.
Larry stopped speaking and emptied his water glass. I watched him drink until the ice rattled inside the deep cup. “Jim was someone I admired and looked up to. That night we had dinner with his mother, like we’d done dozens of times. She made some kind of tuna casserole with lima beans. She was the worst cook—”
I laughed softly. Dad had often referred to his mother’s horrible cooking and her paranoid hoarding of food. He’d said it lovingly, with compassion. He’d told me that after his mother’s funeral, long before I was born, when he was cleaning out her house, he found a hundred cans of lima beans in the basement.
“Jim was praising her casserole,” Larry said. “At any other dinner he would have winked at me, included me in the secret of her terrible cooking. But this time, all his attention was on his mother. I was just there, poking my fork around those lima beans and rubbery noodles slathered in mayonnaise. His poor mother was too grief-stricken to notice the weirdness between us. Jim’s father had died that winter. Jim didn’t look at me once that entire dinner. I felt he was testing me, showing me what life would be like if we weren’t friends. He had all the power, and at the time I felt I couldn’t lose him. But really it was that I couldn’t lose the way he made me feel. When you were the center of his attention, you felt like a million bucks, better than anyone else had ever made you feel. But when he was cold, well…”
Larry took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his forehead.
“So I agreed. I told him I would do it,” Larry said. “We must have made our plan. I don’t remember that part. We went there on Saturday after the store had closed for the night, and we slipped in through a back window. Jim’s cousin must have told him how to get in. The rest was easy. We found the jugs quickly, and we could have left, but Jim couldn’t do anything in an ordinary way, so he began poking around the shelves. He saw a stack of baseballs and took one out of its packaging.”
The baseball, I thought. The baseball, finally making its appearance in this unlikely scene.
“He tossed it to me and I caught it,” Larry said. “He threw his arm around my shoulders, like old times. He backed up into the aisle so we could throw it back and forth. In the dark, that baseball was so white it glowed. We were there a few minutes later when the lights of a police car lit up the back wall. Jim said, ‘Shit,’ as he caught the ball. We froze. I was closer to the front of the store, near the counter. Jim was hidden in the aisle when the cops came in. Their flashlights were in my eyes, and I remember the relief when the beams shifted down to the jugs at my feet. They asked for my name and spun me around so they could cuff me, and I tried to catch a glimpse of Jim, but I couldn’t see where he was. I wanted to call out for him, but it was only when the cops pinned me, and my cheek was resting on the counter, that I saw him. He was walking down the aisle to the back door. He never said a word. Never turned around to see if I was okay. Those two policemen didn’t see him. That pompous, slow walk Jim had. I’ll never forget the sight. His back was to me, and he walked with that limp on his left side. He was still holding the baseball.”
Hearing this, I burned coolly, like I was sitting in an ice bath with a fever. My father’s walk, with the hitch in his leg, the walk I’d known my entire life, the walk Van had imitated at the Lincoln Memorial. “What happened?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“They put me in a holding cell with a bunch of drunks. It was humiliating. My father came down to the station later that night, wearing a long trench coat and a hat, like he was trying to hide himself. I don’t know what he did or said, but the police let me go with a warning. And then my father didn’t talk to me again, basically ever. Not only was I gay, which he knew on some level, but I was a thief. He was disgusted. He couldn’t punish me for being gay, because I’d never admitted it. But he sure as hell could punish me for being a thief. And for embarrassing him.”
I put my hands on my knees and found that they were trembling.
Larry’s face was drawn, and sweat was collecting at his temples. “He never forgave me. Barely spoke three sentences to me before he died.”
He reached into his backpack and brought out my father’s baseball. “Jim was my friend, and he sold me out. The consequences for him would have been minor. A distracted, grieving mother who doted on him—what would she have cared about his teenage mistake? I’ve gone over it and over it in my mind. He knew what I felt for him and knew it wouldn’t end up anywhere good, because he didn’t return the feelings. So I guess he took this as an opportunity to get rid of me. In the end, he was careless with my heart. And then a million years go by and he leaves me a baseball in his will?”
Tears were coming to my eyes. My stomach clenched and heaved.
“Never heard from him. Nothing,” Larry went on. “Right before graduation I was driving to pick up something for my mother, and I took a detour down his street. He was out in the yard, raking leaves. When he saw me, he let the rake fall. I thought he was going to come over, but he just bent and picked it back up. He had a chance. He didn’t take it.”
I took in what my father had done. I wished I could not only refuse to write the osprey story; I wanted to go to the protests and club the protesters to death. This man, whom my father had treated so badly, just wanted to live his life. He couldn’t have his best friend treat him decently. He couldn’t even have a quiet place for the osprey. And I had been close to adding to the chatter about that in order to please Steve Glanz with clickbait.
I drew a deep breath. “But you’re married? You have a good life?”
“Drew and I—we have a terrific marriage. Ups and downs, like anyone. But that’s not the point. Your father was my best friend.”
“He never apologized?”
Larry shook his head.
“He never wrote you? Never called?”
“The last time I talked to him was 1978, in that old hardware store.”
That old hardware store. I reached into my purse and brought out my notebook of first lines, where I’d transcribed “The Catch” to read at my father’s funeral. Tossing the ball from end to end / in dusty store aisles.
My hands shaking, I pushed the notebook across the table. “I always assumed the store in his poem was this general store in our town. And I thought the poem was about me. But it wasn’t.” Some mixture of dread and relief was blooming hot in my stomach. “My father’s best poem, ‘The Catch,’ is about you.”
Larry removed his glasses from his breast pocket, looping them around his ears one side at a time.
THE CATCH
but,
if time could kneel, as a catcher
shifts to his knees when the pitch is wild
For the summer we played in ruffled green grass,
or indoors if the sky shivered with rain,
Tossing the ball from end to end
in dusty store aisles.
Would the solid walls still echo with the hollow
slaps of our hands to leather mitts,
Or would I leave you there
your arms outstretched
as if to receive me.
“This has been published?” Larry’s voice was low and tight.
“Yeah, in 1991. And it’s been anthologized a lot since then. It’s sort of my dad’s most famous poem.” Larry didn’t respond, so I continued: “Obviously the speaker has left the person he was playing with. I always thought it was me, because my parents got divorced and Dad moved away, and I knew he felt guilty. But what you described…” I reached across the table and pointed to the first stanza, the way my father might have demonstrated for a student.
“He starts the poem with but and then describes a betrayal. So the betrayal comes before the poem even starts. Like whatever it was was too bad to put into words. Which now I know…” I trailed off. “Maybe the poem is about”—I paused, realizing it only as I said it—“maybe the poem is his atonement.”
Larry picked up my father’s baseball. “You say this poem was anthologized?”
“Yes—”
“So he made money off it.”
“Poets don’t really make a lot of money, but I guess—”
“It benefited his career,” Larry said matter-of-factly.
“I guess,” I said miserably.
“And you say he kept this baseball next to him all his life. That he used it.”
“Yeah.”
“For luck.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Well.”
I thought for a minute. Keep your eye on the ball, Dad used to say when we’d play catch. Eye on the ball, Ellie. You can’t catch it if you don’t see it coming. You can’t catch it if you don’t follow its arc. What a poor token the baseball had been. If it was a symbol of his steadfastness, it was a broken symbol; if it was a reminder to avoid betraying those he loved, it had failed.
“Maybe it wasn’t for luck, actually,” I said. “Maybe it was to remind him not to do anything like that again. Not to hurt the people he loved. To remind him what he was capable of. It didn’t work, though. He went right on hurting people until he died. But maybe he left you this baseball as a way to apologize after all this time.”
“Eleanor,” Larry said, “I already know what he was capable of. He could have apologized to me when he was alive. Any number of times. Any number of ways. Instead, he waits until he’s dead?”
“He must have been ashamed,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but it’s too little too late. You can imagine, I don’t want anything to do with this. You can keep the baseball. It’s yours.” Larry put the ball on the table and let go. It wobbled and rolled unsteadily toward me. For a moment it seemed like the ball would fall off the other side, into my lap, but then it came to rest in the center of the table.