Edgar Doctorow - Ragtime

Father remembered the baseball at Harvard twenty years before, when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians who rarely numbered more than a hundred. He was disturbed by his nostalgia. He’d always thought of himself as progressive. He believed in the perfectability of the republic. He thought, for instance, there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement. He did not believe in aristocracy except of the individual effort and vision. He felt his father’s loss of fortune had the advantage of saving him from the uncritical adoption of the prejudices of his class. But the air in this ball park open under the sky smelled like the back room of a saloon. Cigar smoke filled the stadium and, lit by the oblique rays of the afternoon sun, indicated the voluminous cavern of air in which he sat pressed upon as if by a foul universe, with the breathless wind of a ten-thousand-throated chorus in his ears shouting its praise and abuse.

Our in the center field, behind the unroofed or bleacher seats, a great display board indicated the number of outs and the inning and the hits and runs made. A man went along a scaffold and hung the appropriate marked shingles that summarized the action. Father sank into his chair. As the afternoon wore on he entertained the illusion that what he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be see from a distance.

He turned to his son. What is it you like about this game, he said. The boy did not remove his gaze from the diamond. The same thing happens over and over, he said. The pitcher throws the ball so as to fool the batter into thinking he can hit it. But sometimes the batter does hit it, the father said. Then the pitcher is the one who is fooled, the boy said. At this moment the Boston Hurler, Hub Perdue, threw a pitch which the New York batter, Red Jack Murray, swung at. The ball soared into the air in a high narrow arc and seemed then to stop in its trajectory. With a start Father realized it was coming directly at them. The boy jumped up and held out his hands and there was a cheer behind them as he stood with the leather-covered spheroid resting in his palms. For one instant everyone in the park looked in their direction. Then the fool with the weak eyes who imagined he was a player on the team came up to the fence in front of them and stared at the boy, his arms and hands twitching in his baggy flannel shirt. His hat was absurdly small for his abnormally large head. The boy held out the ball to him and gently, with a smile almost sane, he accepted it.

An interesting note is that this poor fellow, Charles Victor Faust, was actually called upon to pitch one inning in a game toward the end of this same season when the Giants had already wan the pennant and were in a carefree mood. For a moment his delusion that he was a big-leaguer fused with reality. Soon thereafter the players became bored with him and he was no longer regarded as a good luck charm by Manager McGraw. His uniform was confiscated and he was unceremoniously sent on his way. He was remanded to an insane asylum and some months later died there.

At the end of the ball game a great anxiety came over Father. He felt it had been stupid to leave his wife alone. But as they left the park borne by the streaming crowd he realized his son had taken his hand. He felt an uplift of his spirit. On the open trolley he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Arriving in New Rochelle they walked briskly from the train station and when they came in the door they gave a loud hello! and for the first time in days Father felt like himself. Mother appeared from the back of the house. Her hair was bound, she was groomed and smiling and neat. She embraced him and said Look, I have something to show you. Her face was radiant. She stepped aside and walking down the hall, holding the hand of the housemaid, was Sarah’s child in his nightshirt. He tottered and swung against her skirt, righted himself and looked at Father in triumph. Everyone laughed. We can’t hold him, Mother said. He wants to walk everywhere.

The boy knelt and held out his arms and the child shook his hand free of the housemaid and lurched toward him, picking up speed as he went, outracing his instability and falling happily against the boy’s chest.

A kind of resolute serenity carried them through the evening. In the quiet of Mother’s room toward midnight she and father discussed everything on their minds. The chances were that Coalhouse would continue for some time to elude capture. In that case they foresaw a community from which they would be increasingly alienated. Already a few of Mother’s acquaintances from her service league had reacted to the publicity given the family. She dreaded actions of spite and bitterness in which Sarah’s baby would be taken away under protection of a vengeful authority. Father could not deny that might happen. But they were in this moment so calmly in possession of themselves that there was no need for false assurances or for either of them to dissemble an optimism not truly felt. Father said he would not put it past the authorities to decide to use the child in some way to persuade Coalhouse to surrender. What we have to do, Father said, is get away. But how can we, Mother said. My father is invalid, school is not yet out, we have just taken on the responsibilities of a household staff. Each of these problems she enumerated with her right index finger tolling the fingers of the left hand. So she had been thinking the same thing and Father now perceived that she awaited his solutions in good faith. He told her to leave everything to him. His assumption of responsibility produced in her warm feelings of gratitude. Their conversation reminding them that they were after all friends of long standing, they went to bed and spent the night together. She let him make love to her, responding with such cooperative huggings and movements of her hips, and with so many caresses of encouragement to represent her best wishes to have him succeed in his efforts, that he felt for the first time in many months she appreciated she had a good man in her arms.

The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. Father located a fine hotel there, the Breakers, which had available a suite of rooms facing the ocean for something less than would be expected, the season having barely begun. The South Jersey shore was easy to reach, a few hours by rail, not too near, but not too far to keep him from going back Sunday evening as his business dictated. The change of air would do everyone good. Grandfather’s doctor, who had submitted him to the latest orthopedic procedure fro broken hips, a metallic pin implanted like a internal splint, advised them that he should be on his crutches or in his chair as much as possible, bed rest comprising the greatest danger for one of his age. The boy would have to leave school a few weeks early but was so adept at his studies that this was not considered a serious disadvantage. The house would not be closed with the covering up of furniture and shutting off of rooms this required, but maintained with the staff for those periods in which Father would have to be in New Rochelle. The housekeeper would stay with mother at the shore. She was a stolid, conscientious Negro woman who would provide, in addition, the obvious and erroneous explanation for the presence of a brown child in their party.

Thus armed with a plan of action the family prepared for their departure. They maintained a good cheer that became almost hysterical as the situation grew in its ugliness. The new Police Chief, a retired inspector from the New York City Department of Homicide, proposed lines of investigation that were ominous. His first day in the job he told reporters that the explosive used on Municipal Station No. 2 was very sophisticated, a combination of gun cotton and fulminate of mercury that could only have been concocted by someone who knew his stuff, which Coalhouse Walker, a piano player, did not. He asked where the Negro got the money for the car he used or for the assistance of a gang of colored men all armed and all presumably motivated by hard cash. He has to pay his cohorts. He has expenses. Where does he get his money? Where does he stay between his mad raids on this gentle city? I know a half-dozen Reds I would love to have in detention here. I bet I would get some of my answers.