Chapter Five

My last night in Boston, our last night together, Rick took me to Norumbega Park on the Charles River in Aburndale to dance at the Totem Pole Ballroom. One of the area’s premier night spots, “the most beautiful ballroom in America,” the Totem Pole featured the best big bands and popular singers in the world. That night, we danced to the music of Benny Goodman. For a small-town Iowa girl, this was a magical evening. Made more magical by the feel of Rick’s arms around me, the grace with which this long, tall ballplayer danced. Even in Mount Joy, we knew the new dances, and before long Rick and I were the center of attention as he flung me up into the air, my full skirt belling around my legs. We laughed and gasped for breath, and when the photographer came to us to take our picture, I was certain that he wasn’t going to need a flashbulb, we were so lit from within. He captured us so perfectly, that anonymous on-staff photog. A lovely couple, starry-eyed with fresh love. Our future written in our smiles.

Exhausted, we finally flopped down on one of the settees arranged around the dance floor. When I rested my cheek against him, I came up against something hard in his jacket pocket. “What’s that?”

“Oh, this?” Rick reached in, and I expected him to pull out a pack of cigarettes, because that’s what it felt like. “A little something I’m hoping that you’ll like.” Then he dropped the kidding tone and slipped his arm out from under my head. Rick got down on one knee, and I thought that my heart would explode. “I know this is really rushing things, but I have never been so certain of anything—or anyone—in my life. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

One week to the day since we had met. And I had no reservations about saying yes.

*   *   *

And then I was on the train, heading home to Iowa. Sid, God bless him, hadn’t said a word as I slipped into his second-floor flat at five in the morning, only yawned and started the coffee.

“Is he downstairs?”

“Yes. Asleep in the car.”

“Go get him.”

I ran downstairs as quietly as I could, so as to not disturb the neighbors, but Rick was gone. Of course, he had to get home to Pax. He’d be back in a couple of hours to take me to South Station, when we would have what we hoped was the only separation we would endure in our lives together. A few days on the road for the team wasn’t going to have the same weight.

Pax and Rick picked me up, the dog relegated to the backseat but leaning his big head over the front seat, so that I could feel his whiskers against my cheek. Impulsively, I kissed that muzzle. Pax sniffed my cheek in return. “I’ll miss Pax, too, you know. It isn’t just you.” I think saying that made Rick almost as happy as my wearing his ring.

I was such a baby, quietly weeping most of the way to New York, where I changed trains for the Chicago leg of my journey, dabbing my eyes with a sodden handkerchief, as if I had the least concept of what true absence was. I wallowed in the sweet agony of separation from my beloved. As I wearily climbed aboard the final connection home, I tortured myself with wondering if absence would make his heart fonder, or would he wake up in a week and wonder what the heck he’d gotten himself into? Rick promised a letter a day, a telegram a week, a phone call every other. Would his letters begin to thin out; would the telegrams seem more ominous than loving? Would he forget to call?

A telegram was waiting for me when I finally arrived back in Mount Joy. “MISS YOU MORE THAN WORDS CAN SAY STOP CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR YOUR VOICE STOP WILL CALL THIS EVENING AT 8 STOP ALL MY LOVE RS”

The dark tunnel of doubt opened to a bright new day.

*   *   *

Rick and I tied the knot in mid-October, not four months after that day in the ballpark. As soon as the season was over, Braves foundering in seventh place, Rick took the train for Mount Joy and I introduced my fiancé to my astounded parents. He knew Casey Stengel. That was enough to win over my father. He was well-bred, and that was enough for Mother. It might have looked a bit like a shotgun wedding, but it wasn’t. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” might be a well-founded adage, but we laughed at the thought that if we hadn’t married, we might have ended up with my father’s shotgun pointed at Rick’s back. After all, Saint Paul did suggest that it was better to marry than to burn, and we burned for each other. That’s the best way I can describe it. But I was an Iowa girl and he was a gentleman, and marriage was the only acceptable route.

My two best girlfriends, Gertie Fenster and Patty Olafson, stood up for me, and my older brother Arnie acted as best man, with Sid as his groomsman. At Rick’s insistence, Pax performed ring bearer duties, wearing a black bow tie around his neck, the rings tied to it with blue ribbon. I was just glad he hadn’t wanted the dog as best man. The guests threw rice for luck and I wept for joy.

We stayed in the Elyria Hotel in downtown Mount Joy. Our window overlooked the mighty Mississippi, but I’m not sure either one of us ever looked out at the view.

*   *   *

As much as I liked the big dog, to Rick, Pax was his baby. Pax was Rick’s blind spot. He didn’t see anything wrong with the dog following him around from room to room, so that anywhere Rick was, there was Pax. Even in our bedroom. Basking in afterglow, I’d look over and there would be Pax, the patient voyeur. At least Pax didn’t get up on the bed, but I couldn’t ignore the weight of his muzzle as he studied Rick’s face for any damage I might have caused. Eventually, he’d humpf and flop down into his basket, clearly dissatisfied with my remaining in Rick’s (in Pax’s view) bed.

I began to feel like I hadn’t passed some test, that I wasn’t worthy of Rick. Those amber eyes would fix on me as I rubbed Rick’s shoulders, sore from his day of hard practice, or sat in his lap as we canoodled while listening to the radio. Pax would lay with his head between his paws and sigh, exactly like my mother might do when one of us disappointed her. A hand-to-God sort of sigh. Rick thought I was nuts.

“He loves you.”

“Does not.”

“What makes you say that? Look, he’s sitting right beside you.”

“The better to keep me separate from you. He’s between us, Rick.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking metaphorically or literally at that moment, although Pax did always keep himself in the middle. We sat on the couch and the dog sat on the floor, his big head resting in between us.

“That’s just so we can both pet him.”

“What happens when we have a baby? How will he be?” As much as we knew that we wanted children, we were giving ourselves at least a year of marriage. The only advice my mother gave me on the eve of my wedding night was that if I relaxed, it wouldn’t be so bad. The best advice I got was from the shortstop’s wife, who knew a female doctor with a modern outlook on birth control and an admiration for Margaret Sanger.

“He’ll devote himself to our babies. He has a massive capacity to love.”

The very first thing I learned about being married to a professional ballplayer, was that I had to keep his state of mind in perfect equilibrium. Numbers were everything. In those days, there was no designated hitter, so Rick batted and pitched. He was a better pitcher, and no one expected him to be a great batter, but he still believed in his earned run average like it was tea leaves forecasting our future. Which, I suppose, it was. Those numbers dictated our lives. Good ones, and we got to stay put. Sinking ones, and who knew where we might end up. Bad ones, and his career might be over. Rick loved being a ballplayer; it was his first love, and I understood its importance in his concept of himself. Being a ballplayer defined Rick. So I swallowed my annoyance with having a big, shedding, slightly sloppy, all-boy dog in our one-bedroom apartment and molded myself into the best ballplayer’s wife in the league. Supportive, pennant-waving, consoling, and laudatory.

Right after spring training, Rick started traveling two or three days a week; our honeymoon winter was over. Pax and I were left alone together.

It was rocky at first. The big dog didn’t want to take orders from me, so I found myself cajoling rather than ordering: “Come on, Pax, let’s go outside.” “Come on, Pax, there’s a good boy, don’t get on my couch.” Even though Rick expected me to, I certainly didn’t walk Pax as much as he did. Just like the dog, I loved those evening walks with Rick, when we’d go hand in hand, talking about our days, or our future. But when Rick was on the road, I’d take Pax once around the block, me towing him along or being towed by the dog, depending on where his nose took him, and then head home to listen to the game on the radio, or wait for Rick’s late-night phone call from a pay phone somewhere far away.

*   *   *

Rick was in Baltimore, and the heat in Brighton certainly rivaled that of Maryland. Hot, sticky, the only relief coming in those early hours before dawn, when the wind might shift a little and drag some of the cooler ocean air off Boston Harbor and inland enough to reach our stifling first-floor bedroom with its single window and no cross ventilation. Now, as a midwesterner, I knew heat. Our corn-raising community was unbowed by routinely high temperatures in summer; every woman carried a fan and a capsule of smelling salts in her purse to church. But this sticky, wet, humid heat was intolerable to me. The only cool place at night was on the front porch, so in the middle of the night, desperate and wide awake, I placed a thick collection of wedding-present blankets down on the deck of our first-floor porch and hoped that no one passing by in the predawn—the milkman, for instance—would notice a grown woman stretched out on the porch in a mysteriously glowing white nightie. Because of the arrangement of our front door and that of our neighbors’, who, in their second- and third-floor flats, were more likely to be catching the thin breeze, I worried a little that Pax might dash down the steps. I gave him the first command I’d ever tried: “Stay.” He looked at me with a dog’s version of “Make me” but stayed, lying flat on his side against the short end of the porch railing. His soft panting put me to sleep.

I shivered, smiled at the sensation, then woke fully, to see the dog standing over me, head lowered, teeth bared. I fought the urge to push him away, freezing in place like a rabbit hoping the fox doesn’t see it. Then I realized that Pax wasn’t baring his teeth at me, but at the man who was urinating loudly into the hydrangea bushes planted against the porch. Pax’s dewlaps twitched over his bared teeth. A growl percolated deep in his throat. I touched him, trying to tell him that it was all right, not particularly pleasant, but harmless. The growl went from barely audible to ferocious, and the man literally ran off half-cocked. Pax leaped over the railing, and the frightened drunk ran for his life.

“Pax! Come!” I had no real hope that he would, and I pictured this poor unfortunate guy with the seat of his pants torn out. Perhaps worse. Pax was fast; Pax was in high dudgeon. But he surprised me and returned to my side in three strides. If a dog’s face can express “Wasn’t that fun?” Pax’s did. His long muzzle split wide and his long tongue lolling, he rolled his eyes up to me, and in them I saw that a sea change in our relationship had occurred. He’d protected me; ergo, I was now part of his responsibility. I hugged him then, and he took it as if it meant something to him, tail sweeping the porch floor. After all, it was possible that the drunk, seeing a woman in such a vulnerable position, had had more ominous plans post-urination and Pax had known that. Who knows? All I knew was that Pax had protected me whether or not it was really necessary. He’d done his duty by me.

We sat there a long time after that, Pax leaning his big body against mine as we sat on the porch steps. I kept an arm around him. The first bird sent out notice that the sun would make its appearance soon. Slowly, the night paled, and I heard the clop of the milkman’s horse from down the narrow side street. I needed to get into the house before anyone saw me like that, dressed in my honeymoon negligee. “Come on, Pax. Let’s put the coffee on.” Before I could push myself up off the step, Pax did something that stopped me. He gently pressed his muzzle under my chin, just like Rick sometimes did to raise my face to his. Then he licked my cheek. Even though I didn’t assign any human qualities to animals like, well, like Rick, I understood completely that I had been accepted. We’d always be rivals for Rick’s attention, but at least now we could be friends.