I had no memory of the drive home. Suddenly I was parking in front of 1938 House. My idea of who my father was shimmered and changed before me. It ducked down in a baseball cap, pulled away in a car, left a best friend, a wife, children. Gone. I wasn’t any different from all the others. My legs were pulsing with energy; I had to move.
I was too jittery to sit at home, so I unlocked my bike and set off up the hill. I would bike up 1st Street, where the houses were painted jaunty colors, baby blue and magenta, and wore pointy hats. I’d loop around the city reservoir and back down through the Howard University campus. Hard and fast, I overtook the hill, cleaving to the reservoir’s chain-link fence, trying to outpace the feeling that something was rotting away on my insides.
“The Catch” wasn’t about me. My father had been cruel to Larry when they were young, had behaved like a coward. He’d never had any close male friends, I realized, or any friends that stuck. Was this early betrayal of Larry the reason for the pattern? Why had he never apologized to him? And then he’d betrayed Romley Cass, a poet he’d envied, chasing his wife. He’d cheated on my stepmother Colette with Linda, wounded his family. Now that I had the answers to my questions about Larry Taylor and the baseball and my father, I wanted them surgically removed. I tried to work up a different version—the baseball was a relic of a happy time, when children played catch on a wide green field in summer’s perfume. They adored one another. My father had been a good boy. He was a good man. Good boy, good man, I chanted softly, as if it might help.
I pedaled in the direction of Lucas’s house. The R Street bike lane took me all the way to 18th Street NW, where I swung onto Dupont Circle. The office buildings were dark, but people were coming out of bars and restaurants, loose from alcohol, stumbling in the humid air. I scanned the crowds for Lucas and his wife. When I reached their street, I got off my bike and stood on the sidewalk. The lights were on in their house, but the curtains were drawn. As I stood watching, a shadow passed behind the living room shade. I drew a breath, imagining Mina on the other side. The shadow paused. I wheeled my bike toward the dark side of the street, out of the streetlamp’s warm orbit.
I wanted her to know the truth. I thumbed a text to Lucas. No matter what happens with us, Mina deserves to know. I looked back at the window. The shadow was gone.
When I arrived at Apogee, just after 9 p.m., the office was truly empty, computers locked away in staff lockers, the Conveyor Belt long and bare, shining under the brass lamps. No bikes but mine at the communal rack. My father had cheated, he’d lied. He had betrayed his friend, his wives, all of us. He made feeble amends only in death. I poked at each fact with a stick, but each fact still lay there, dead. In the office kitchen I poured myself a beer, drank it fast while pacing.
I opened a fresh email, addressed it to Jane and Steve. In order to explain why I couldn’t write about the osprey protests, I had to fess up about my connection to Larry. And that required telling them that I’d obscured who Larry was and why I’d wanted to write about him in the first place. Also that I’d lied to Larry about my identity. And, of course, that I’d failed to complete the “front page” assignment Steve had given me. It was all mixed up inside me, knotted together. My cursor blinked, urging me on.
Dear Jane and Steve, I regret to inform you that I have not reported the osprey piece…I wrote.
But that didn’t sound right. I erased it and started again. Dear Steve and Jane, I need to apologize for my behavior…
My father had said that poetry was a way to ask endless questions without answers. He’d kept the baseball near him all his life, used its presence to compel him to write. Why? I’d always thought it was inspiration, but maybe the truth was it was guilt. Maybe all his poems were expressions of self, of remorse. Now that Larry didn’t want it, the baseball was mine again. What new meaning could I give it? I considered the poems my father had loved while I swigged down another IPA, feeling it buzz in my scalp and the backs of my knees.
Whose baseball this is I think I know.
Quoth the baseball, “Nevermore.”
I, too, sing of the baseball.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious baseball?
I’d have to start at the beginning, tell my bosses the truth. Dear Jane and Steve, This is a story about osprey, but it starts with my father. In a great gush of words, I told them about Larry, how I’d lied to get their approval in order to meet him and learn about his connection to my father. I apologized and pushed send.
Then I went on, writing for myself. Maybe for my sisters and Van, one day. I wrote about my father’s will and Linda and Romley’s marriage. The wives. I typed out the story Larry had told me about my father, the hardware store, and the baseball, trying to remember Larry’s words and his intonation. How he’d passed the baseball back to me. I excoriated my father. I excoriated myself. I would try to scrub us clean by telling the truth.
A tender shoot of understanding was growing through me, and soon I couldn’t recognize it as new—it was as if it had always been there, mixing with my own guts and hot blood. The great, indiscriminate lovableness of my father that had wounded Larry had also wounded Linda and Romley, my mother, my stepmothers, my sisters, Van. Me. He had walked out of the hardware store; he had walked away from his families. He hadn’t left Colette before he died, but maybe he would have. Could there have someday been a new lover who would have become the fourth wife? My father had never been held accountable for what he did to Larry, for the privilege that allowed him to act out that betrayal. Wasn’t it that very same privilege that enabled him to behave the way he had with all the women and then to haphazardly parent the children that resulted from those different unions? Summer Thanksgiving wasn’t a wacky, offbeat celebration of his love—it was a way to manage a careless life. And yet I loved him. We loved him. The love was the catch. It made no sense on one level. It just was—intractable, unwavering, an actual thing, almost an object.
I wrote feverishly while the sun rose, a palm print of light in the sky. Morning. I had been awake all night, like during finals week in college, when I would emerge from the computer center in the early-morning hours, my throat buckled, my head jackhammering, and follow the line of undergraduate all-nighters toward the diner that opened at 5 a.m. to serve construction workers about to start their days and college students who had waited until the last minute to write their papers. In uneasy fellowship, we sat together, chewing. Crunch of bacon, sweetness of the flapjack.
Jane and Steve had my email in their inboxes. They would see it as soon as they woke up. My head began to throb like it did when I stood up too quickly. What if the email was a mistake? But there was no going back now. I put the beer cans in the recycling bin, shut off the lights. Outside, the sidewalk stretched and contracted like putty. I forced myself to walk toward my bike, my face hot and tight, just as a long shadow rounded the corner into view. Fear folded over in my stomach like a classroom note—the approach of an unknown man on a deserted street. I wondered if there was time to get back into the building, or if I should make a dash to unlock my bike. I froze in indecision.
The man came closer, peered at my tears. “Why are you crying? Who is he? I’ll kill him,” he said.
“He’s already dead,” I said.