Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“That’s very big of you,” I said.

He gave a snort of amusement. “Listen, what can I tell you? After a certain point, their agenda changes. It’s all about kids and housekeeping and what have you. With Anne, it’s that damn church. We’re the romantic sex, you know,” he said, fighting a burp. “Men. We’re interested in passion, glory. Women,” Chuck declared with a finger in the air, “are responsible for the survival of the world; men are responsible for its glories.” He turned the Cadillac south, onto Fifth Avenue.

We drove through Park Slope. A plotter’s grin formed on his face. We took a sharp turn, passed under a huge pair of arches, and halted at a prospect of grass and tombstones.

He had brought me to Green-Wood Cemetery.

“Look up there,” Chuck said, opening his door.

He was pointing back at the entrance gate, a mass of flying buttresses and spires and quatrefoils and pointed arches that looked as if it might have been removed in the dead of night from one of Cologne Cathedral’s more obscure nooks. In and around the tallest of the trio of spires were birds’ nests. They were messy, elaborately twiggy affairs. One nest was situated above the clock, another higher up, above the discolored green bell that tolled, presumably, at funerals. The branches littered a stone façade crowded with sculptures of angels and incidents from the gospels: a resurrected Jesus Christ prompted Roman soldiers to cover their faces with their hands. Come forth, a second Jesus exhorted Lazarus.

“Parakeet nests,” Chuck said.

I looked more carefully.

“They come out in the evening,” Chuck assured me. “You see them walking around here, pecking for food.” As we waited for a parrot to show, he told me about the other birds — American woodcocks and Chinese geese and turkey vultures and gray catbirds and boat-tailed grackles — that he and his buddies had sighted among the sepulchres of Green-Wood during his birding days.

I was half listening, at best. It had turned into a freakishly transparent morning free of clouds or natural inconsonance of any sort. Huge trees grew nearby, and their leaves intercepted the sunlight very precisely, so that the shadows of the leaves seemed vital and creaturely as they stirred on the ground — an inkling of some supernature, to a sensibility open to such things.

There still was no sign of parrots. Chuck said, “This is by the by. There’s something else I want to show you.”

We followed a roaming lane through a spread of hills and lawns: evidently directness is undesirable in a graveyard. “This is like a Hall of Fame for retailers,” Chuck said. “There are Tiffanys here. You have the Brooks brothers. You have Steinway. Mr. Pfizer. Mr. F. A. O. Schwarz. Wesson, the rifle guy, is out here.” The Cadillac was now traveling in what seemed like circles. A gravedigger wandered by with a shovel.

“OK,” Chuck said, stopping. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a camera. “Right here. I think this is it.”

I followed him off the path. Walking over burned grass, we went past an obelisk, past an angel guarding a plot with outspread wings, past the graves of ex-individuals named Felimi, Ritzheimer, Peterson, Pyatt, Beckmann, Kloodt, Hazzell. We stopped at an angular column several feet high and topped by a globe — an oversize baseball, judging from its meandering seam. The column bore an inscription:

IN MEMORIAM HENRY CHADWICK FATHER OF BASEBALL

“Do you know about Chadwick?” Chuck said. “He wrote the first rules of baseball.” Chadwick, Chuck said with that explanatory fluency of his, was the English immigrant and Brooklyn man who as a cricket reporter for the Times inaugurated baseball coverage in that newspaper and went on to popularize and modernize the sport of baseball. “What’s interesting about this guy,” Chuck said, wiping a handkerchief across his mouth, “is he was a cricket nut, too. He didn’t think it was America’s fate, or America’s national character, or what have you, to play baseball. He played cricket and baseball. They were totally compatible as far as he was concerned. He didn’t see them as a fork in the road. He was like Yogi Berra,” Chuck said not at all humorously. “When he came to a fork in the road, he took it.”

I’d heard the Yogi Berra line a million times before. My attention was given over to the small square stone in the grass — a maverick slab of crazy paving, one might have thought — on which Chuck had carelessly placed a foot. It was a gravestone. A word was engraved on it:

DAISY

Chuck handed me his camera and stood next to Chadwick’s tomb with hands clasped behind his back. I took the picture — took several, at his insistence — and returned the camera to him. “Very good,” Chuck said, studying the picture viewer. He would post the images on his forthcoming Web site, newyorkcc.com, and, he said, deploy them in the slide show he was preparing for his great presentation to the National Park Service.

He started to say something on this subject when his second phone rang. He took the call beyond my earshot, dangling a flip-flop from one foot. When he snapped shut his phone, he said, “So here’s my thinking, Hans.” His hands were in the pockets of his shorts and he was looking at Chadwick’s grave. “I’m thinking a cricket club might not be big enough. To get the attention of the NPS, I mean. It might seem exclusive; small-time. People might feel it has nothing to do with them.” He quickly said, as if I might interrupt him, “But they’d be wrong. And that’s what I’ve got to make them see. This isn’t just a sports club. It’s bigger than that. My own feeling — and listen to me on this before you say anything, Hans, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot — my own feeling is that the U.S. is not complete, the U.S. has not fulfilled its destiny, it’s not fully civilized, until it has embraced the game of cricket.” He turned to face me. “Do you know the story of the Trobriand Islanders?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s all people talk about.”

“Trobriand Island is part of Papua New Guinea,” Chuck said professorially. “When the British missionaries arrived there, the native tribes were constantly fighting and killing each other — had been for thousands of years. So what did the missionaries do? They taught them cricket. They took these Stone Age guys and gave them cricket bats and cricket balls and taught them a game with rules and umpires. You ask people to agree to complicated rules and regulations? That’s like a crash course in democracy. Plus — and this is key — the game forced them to share a field for days with their enemies, forced them to provide hospitality and places to sleep. Hans, that kind of closeness changes the way you think about somebody. No other sport makes this happen.”

“What are you saying?” I said. “Americans are savages?”

“No,” Chuck said. “I’m saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket. What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Everybody who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?” He was almost grim with conviction. In a confidential tone, he said, “Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t. I don’t need to tell you that. Look at the problems we’re having. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not? Why not say so if it’s true? Why hold back? I’m going to open our eyes. And that’s what I have to tell the Park Service. I have to. If I tell them I’m going to build a playground for minorities, they’re going to blow me away. But if I tell them we’re starting something big, tell them we’re bringing back an ancient national sport, with new leagues, new franchises, new horizons…” He faltered. “Anyhow, that’s what I’m doing here, Hans. That’s why I’m ready to do what it takes to make this happen.”