Henry is in love. He is in love with this leafy upstate New York campus. He is in love with its brick buildings, with everything that is opening in front of him, his world suddenly as expansive as these rolling hills with their great glacial lakes, wide and cool and blue as the sky. The narrow streets of Providence, the triple-deckers and the gray, cracked asphalt, the clotheslines and antennas, have been replaced with impossibly green, impossibly wide-open spaces.
Baseball gave him this gift. Oh, he was a decent-enough high school student, good grades and well liked, but his test scores were nothing to write home about. He might as well have Christmas-treed the math test.
But he could really play shortstop. His senior year in high school, he wore a glove several sizes too small for him, and he did it deliberately so it would feel closest to his bare hand, and while a left-handed shortstop was so unorthodox as to be unheard of, he gobbled up every ball that came his way. As a hitter, he didn’t have a ton of pop, but he could spray singles to all fields. By his senior year, Henry was all-city, and then all-state, and soon the bleachers were full of scouts.
The thing is, baseball loved Henry more than Henry loved baseball. His greatest strength as a young man might have been a preternatural sense of self-awareness. He was a marginal prospect and he knew it. The Boston Red Sox were not in his future. A bald old man chain-smoking unfiltered Camels told him this.
The man was a freelance scout, published some newsletter that was read widely. “I got you rated as average, slightly below on all tools,” he told Henry after a high school game. “Except fielding. I gave you a seven out of ten. But you’re a lefty playing shortstop, son. That’s a nonstarter. Think about moving to the outfield,” he said. “Put on some weight. You got good, fast hands. Maybe you’ll grow into some power.”
Other boys his age might have been angry about words so damning related to the thing one was most known for. But Henry was grateful for candor, and not surprised by it, for it supported his own assessment of where he was.
And so while there was still some talk about being drafted, it was the colleges he turned his attention to. At his request, his high school coach sent VHS tapes to coaches around New England and in New York and Pennsylvania. His mother was right, way back when she agreed to let him play organized ball. This game was going to open a door that would otherwise be closed to him.
And so Henry, in the fall of 1988, finds himself a student at Bannister College and the college’s starting shortstop. As a Division III school, Bannister technically doesn’t give scholarships, though one look at Henry’s aid package would suggest otherwise. It is a wink and a nod.
The baseball coach sees Henry as a four-year star for his program, and has no idea that Henry is far more calculating than any eighteen-year-old athlete he has ever known. His aid package is for four years and, naturally, contains no mention of baseball.
Nevertheless, Henry does commit to playing his freshman year, and that spring he leads the team in hitting from the lead-off position, and plays a steady and sometimes spectacular shortstop.
All the things he always liked about baseball—those quiet moments before the ball was pitched, the anticipation of its being put in play, instincts taking over as he moved swiftly to his backhand position and scooped the ball with his small glove—are still true for him. He likes the crack of the bat. He likes watching the rotation of the ball as it streams toward him when he is at the plate, gauging in seconds whether to take the lumber off his shoulder and swing through it. It might be a beautiful, poetic game, but it is not a game often played by poets.
The other baseball players are not, to his surprise, his crowd. Like Henry, they are public school kids, rare here, and they are surprisingly local, most of them from nearby cities like Syracuse and Rochester, recruited like he was for their ability to hit or pitch or field. They are also more working-class than the student body as a whole, just like Henry, though none of them is Jewish, and this becomes a brief issue during fall practice, when the left fielder, a junior and a meathead, makes some joke under his breath about Hanukkah Henry.
“Excuse me?” Henry says.
“Nothing,” the boy, whose name is Johnny, says. “Just messing with you.”
Henry senses something in his posture, that he might actually be afraid of Henry, and doesn’t expect the boy to challenge him. Henry tries something from the neighborhood then and says, “If there’s a problem, maybe we can take a walk, figure it out.”
“It’s cool,” Johnny says. “Relax, dude. Just busting your chops a little, you know?”
And Henry knows in that moment he has won something, though he also knows he hasn’t come all this way just to live in Providence again. And maybe this is the beginning of the end of his baseball career, but it is also more than that, for Henry is changing.
The other baseball players do not live for words and ideas and language, which Henry increasingly does. A class on Latin American literature, taught by a pretty, long-haired professor with a Spanish accent, introduces him to Neruda. Henry is enthralled by Neruda’s story—his fame, reading poems in front of an entire stadium full of people. Henry loves Neruda’s courage, the knowledge that his words and his poems will cost him his life and yet he marches on. Henry hadn’t realized there were places in the world where poetry could have this kind of importance.
Mostly, though, Henry is drawn to what Neruda feels and what Neruda says and how he speaks of love. The poet talks of women in a way that channels Henry’s own secret thoughts, but not the kinds of things he could ever say out loud in his old Providence neighborhood, or even here on this leafy campus, in front of the baseball team anyway.
Henry hadn’t known men could talk about love this way. In reading Neruda, Henry sees the deepest part of himself, and he realizes he is not alone in thinking as he does, and it is then he decides he will be a poet.
It is an absurd idea. Who becomes a poet? People become bankers or lawyers, or go to med school and save lives. It is not something he can tell anyone about. His mother would be horrified. She was overjoyed when he got into Bannister and was able to go practically for free. She was overjoyed because she saw him becoming a lawyer or a doctor or working in some respectable profession where you wore a suit and went to work in an office every day, made plenty of money, and built a new life along the way. It was the idea that each generation is stronger than the one before. He would fulfill the promise of America her own parents had when they fled Poland half a century before. He would fulfill the promise of the name they’d given him.
At the beginning of his sophomore year, Henry does two things. The first is to declare his major as English. He tells his mother this is the fastest track to law school, and she smiles when he says it. She gives him a hug and says, “Oh, Henry,” and he feels a little bad for deceiving her, but there will be plenty of time later to explain things.
The more difficult one is his baseball coach, whom Henry visits in his office in the basement of the athletic center. His coach is a hard man and Henry doesn’t expect it to go well, and it doesn’t. Coach is angry.
“My heart’s not in it,” Henry says.
“There’re twenty-four other guys counting on you,” his coach says, standing up and raising his voice. “Twenty-four guys, Henry, who all want to win a championship. What about them?”
Henry shrugs. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“That’s all you got?”
Henry thinks for a minute. “Yes,” he says.
And so that semester, Henry signs up for his first creative writing class. There are twelve students around a wooden table in a small room with big windows that look out onto the main quad. The professor is a youngish man, a short story writer who recently graduated from Iowa, he tells them, as if this is important. He wears a uniform of tight jeans, cowboy boots, a white button-down shirt, and a tweed coat. His outfit never changes. His face shows a consistent four days of stubble. He insists everyone call him Jon.
The class is entry level and he assigns them prompts to write stories and poems. They are to write about childhood smells, that kind of thing. And then they bring them in and read them aloud to one another, and everyone critiques one another, with Jon moderating while tapping a pencil thoughtfully against his jaw, ensuring that nothing gets personal, which is no small task, since everything, for young writers, is by definition personal.
Henry loves the assignments, even the silly ones. He loves wrestling with the words and he loves playing with structure. Each poem is a tiny puzzle to be solved.
What he doesn’t love is reading out loud in class. He is self-conscious about his voice, and especially his accent. He doesn’t know anyone else with his accent at Bannister. People say to him immediately, “Where are you from? Boston?”
“Providence,” he says.
Reading out loud, Henry thinks it is even worse. The effort to enunciate, to linger on each word, only makes it worse. The first time he reads, several of the girls giggle, and Jon shushes them. “Go on, Henry,” he says, though Henry once again is reminded that he has traded being an outsider in one place for being an outsider in another.
Bannister is a particular college. For years, it had the reputation of being the most expensive undergraduate college in the country. Yet it is a step below elite. It is not Williams or Wesleyan. Once in class Jon tells them that Vonnegut used to teach here—before his time, of course—and famously described Bannister as catering to the moronic and dyslexic sons and daughters of the ruling class.
Henry laughs the hardest at this, and Jon says, “What do you think of that, Henry?”
Henry shrugs. “I’m not a moron and I’m not dyslexic and I am certainly not from the ruling class, so it can’t be true, right?”
Everyone laughs, and for the second time, Henry feels like maybe he has won something.
One fall afternoon, Jon stops Henry after his class and asks him to sit for a minute. Jon waits until the rest of the class filters out. Henry looks past him to a big maple outside that has already turned red, the color of fire.
“Do you like this class?” Jon asks.
Henry nods. “Very much. Why?”
“You’re different from the others,” Jon says, and Henry thinks he is talking about his background, his working-class voice devoid of r’s.
“Most of these students,” Jon continues, “will take one of these classes, like some take a drawing class and never intend to become artists. You have that thing, though.”
“‘That thing’?”
“Talent, Henry. You can write. You hear language. Let me tell you a small secret.”
Henry leans slightly forward. “Yes,” he says.
“There are two reasons to teach writing, and neither of them is about teaching writing.” Jon laughs. “You teach writing for a paycheck. That’s first. Second, you teach writing to curate. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“I think so,” says Henry.
“You curate by identifying students with talent. You then encourage them to keep going. In some ways, that’s all you can do.”
“I get it,” Henry says.
“Keep going,” Jon says. “If you want this, you can do it. Okay?”
Henry nods. “Thank you.”
Walking out into the sunny afternoon, out onto the quad full of students sitting in small packs, dogs running wild, people throwing Frisbees, Henry feels better than he has in a long time. He realizes Jon has given him a gift, and though it will be a while before he realizes how important a gift it is, for Henry it is as if everything is suddenly different, smells different, looks different, and tastes different. He wants to take a bite out of all of it.