Chapter Two

I just didn’t see myself a farmer’s wife. No insult intended to all my friends who found satisfaction in it, but I just couldn’t. I was, at heart, a town girl, even if the town was little Mount Joy, Iowa, population insignificant, city limits something like six blocks firmly built on the banks of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t that I didn’t want marriage; of course I did. And kids. But I wanted something else for them besides the grinding work of feeding America. I wanted something more for myself than being sentenced to cooking three meals a day seven days a week for insatiable farmhands. Pickling and canning and putting up. Putting up green beans and tomatoes. Putting up with bad harvests and droughts and too much rain and corn borers. I was a town girl, but the domestic realities of my farm-bred girlfriends made an impression on me.

Thus I was flirting with old maidhood, a ripe nineteen years old, my only significant accomplishment the high school diploma my mother had framed and hanging in the den. My high school chums were getting married one after the other, but I was determined that my knight in shining armor wasn’t going to be one of the local boys, most of whom had already adopted the high seat of the combine as their throne and were deep in the family cornfields. Their chief currency was the half acre set aside for a new house, or the addition Daddy would put on the old one to accommodate the anticipated bounty of babies. More fodder, I thought, for the machine of agriculture. That’s not what I wanted for my kids. I wanted for them what I wanted for myself, an indefinable more.

When I try to unravel the skein of circumstance that led me to meet Rick Stanton, I have to look to my cousin Sid. Cousins through our mothers, we were playmates, and then he grew into a boy, and I wasn’t much interested in playing army or being forced into the damsel in distress role for Sid and his buddies to rescue on their imaginary chargers, wielding not so imaginary sticks as lances and swords. One unfortunate kid got his eye poked real good, as his imaginary knight’s visor was a little porous, and the neighborhood mothers put a stop to stick play for a time.

The one thing Sid and I continued to enjoy together was baseball. We’d sit in our parlor, or his family’s, the big cathedral radio on, our dads in their undershirts, sneaking Pabst Blue Ribbon beers past our mothers. We listened to the games of the St. Louis Cardinals, as close to a home team as those of us in Mount Joy, Iowa, had. We might have rooted for the Cubs, but my family had turned its back on the Chicago team a generation ago.

Sid sided with me even when I refused perfectly nice Buster Novack. Buster’s family were good people, good farmers, but sown into the earth like the corn they raised. Life with Buster would mean respectability and church suppers, raising a nice family to farm the same acres as his grandfather farmed. The biggest excitement the daily corn futures. One day the same as the next. The truth was, I burned for something else. Something beyond watching a slender and good-looking Buster Novak take on a farmer’s bulk. Maybe someday I’d regret a missed chance at an ordinary life, but right then it seemed more like a death sentence. So I told Buster no, thank you, and mystified my parents.

But Sid sided with me, and then told me I needed to get the heck out of Mount Joy, that the pickins were too poor for a girl of my standards. “You won’t find a prince in this pack of paupers, Francesca. You’ve got to go farther afield.” Sid, having reversed our pioneer heritage, was living in what we simply called the East, Boston to be exact, a graduate of Bryant College, in Rhode Island, and making a good living as an accountant for a shipping firm. He had become exotic. And when he invited me to visit him there—the East—I did. I packed enough so that, unbeknownst to my parents, should an opportunity arise, I could stay. I don’t know exactly what I thought might comprise an opportunity, but I knew that should one arise, I’d recognize it. And I did.

So there it is, a friendly cousin, a girl on her first big trip, and a mutual love of baseball. Sid took me to Nickerson Field, traveling the whole way from his digs in Dorchester by subway, which for this country girl was almost as exciting as the train ride east had been, the shopgirls and the businessmen straphanging, looking bored, not the least bit uncomfortable as bodies bumped up against those of perfect strangers, as if this was all so ordinary.

Sid bought me a hot dog and a Coca-Cola, even though I’d asked for a beer. The Braves were playing the Cardinals and Sid and I were in hog heaven. Our seats were perfect, just a few rows back from the bull pen, where the relief pitchers played catch with catchers, legs extended in a balletic arc, the hardballs whizzing into the mitts with satisfying smacks. It would be so romantic to say that our eyes met, or that one look and I knew he was the one, but the truth is, I didn’t notice Rick Stanton in the bull pen because he wasn’t one of the pitchers warming up. He was acting as one of the catchers. So it wasn’t until the game began and the relief pitchers all settled down to watch the action, rumps in white trousers lined up side by side on the wooden bench like pigeons on a wire, that this catcher unfolded himself into a tall, thin man, unburdened himself of the chest protector and mask, and, for reasons neither he nor I ever understood, looked up at me. And I waved.

It still goes back to Sid. Consulting his program, he identified this dark blond, tousle-haired ballplayer with the strong jaw and Roman nose as Rick Stanton, recently brought up from the Eastern League’s Hartford Bees. A curveball pitcher with a decent win-loss history in the minors. He wasn’t scheduled to play today, unless the game went south and the three other pitchers on staff that day were tossed out. I was rooting for the Cardinals, so I hoped that maybe I’d get to see Stanton play for that reason alone.

He didn’t and the Braves won, but I admit that I hadn’t paid much attention to the game itself. Every few minutes, I glanced back down to where Rick was fence hanging, a study of concentration on the game. Every now and then, he’d lift his cap, run a hand through his hair, and glance back at me. I couldn’t tell then, from that distance, that his eyes were the richest hue of blue I’d ever seen. The kind of blue that seems to have a light behind it, like an Iowa sky on certain fall days. By the ninth inning, we were smiling at each other, and when the game was over, he jumped the fence and made his way up the steps to where I was trapped beside Sid in our row. Rick stood in the emptied-out seats just below me, which put us almost eye-to-eye.

“My name is Rick Stanton and thank you for coming to the ball game.” Wisely, he put his hand out to Sid first. Later on, I asked him how he knew that Sid wasn’t my beau; after all, he might have looked like a piker horning in on someone’s girl like that, maybe even gotten himself decked. It was simple, he said; Sid was a good-looking guy, but you were smiling at me, not him.

Sid stepped aside and let me out of the row. “Sid Crawford, and this is my cousin, Francesca Bell. Good game, but I have to tell you she’s a Cardinals fan.” With that, my cousin excused himself to go to the men’s room and left me with the man who would become my husband.

The moment is crystallized in my mind, but I remember it as if I’m looking down on these two young people. I see the girl, dressed in a summer skirt that lifts slightly in the breeze. I see this ballplayer, all long legs and arms outfitted in his baggy white uniform, the number 65 on his back. He has his hat in his left hand, gripping the curved bill. He reaches out with his right and takes the girl’s hand in his. There is a frisson, a jolt, as if they are both charged with positive and negative ions, two forces meant to join up. It was the first time in my life I’d felt physical attraction, and the longer he kept my hand in his, the stronger the sensation. I leaned forward slightly, breathing in the scent of his skin, my eyes closed. I don’t know what possessed me. Or, maybe it’s more reasonable to say, I didn’t know then. I just knew that Rick Stanton was what I’d been waiting for.

*   *   *

Our courtship seemed so fraught with complication: I lived in Iowa; he traveled all summer. The only thing to do seemed to be to get married right away, set up a home in the Boston area, based on his optimistic hope that he wouldn’t be traded for a few years. But the thing I had the most trepidation about wasn’t Rick, or leaving home, or setting up what might prove to be temporary housekeeping in a strange city. It was Pax.

“I want you to meet someone.” What girl ever hears those words with enthusiasm? Usually, it’s a doting mother who will assume you’re not good enough for her boy, or a bad-boy pal who will resent you taking his drinking buddy away. In this case, it was Rick’s eighty-five-pound spoiled-rotten German shepherd cross. And I knew right away that although I could certainly work my way into a mother’s good graces, or charm a drinking buddy into brotherly devotion, with Pax, I had to earn his permission to be important to his man. We were rivals for Rick’s heart.