Don DeLillo - Underworld

"What shame?"

"Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing."

"Bad luck," Classic said, spearing a potato on my plate.

"It's about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don't know. I keep saying I don't know and I don't. But it's the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own."

" A shameful secret?" Parish said.

"Yes. First to spend serious money on a souvenir baseball. Then to buy it for the reason I bought it. To commemorate failure. To have that moment in my hand when Branca turned and watched the ball go into the stands-from him to me."

Everyone laughed but Sims.

Classic said, "Even his name. Somber Ralph Branca. Like a figure out of an old epic. Somber plodding Ralph slain in something something dusk."

"Dark-arrowed," said the woman.

"Very good. Except it's not a joke of course. What's it like to have to live with one awful moment?"

" A moment in a game," she said.

"Forever plodding across the outfield grass on your way to the clubhouse."

Sims was getting mad at us.

"I don't think you fellows see the point," The way he said fellows. "What loss? What failure are we talking about? Didn't they all go home happy in the end? I mean Branca-Branca's got the number thirteen on his license plate. He wants us to know he was the guy. Branca and Thomson appear at sports dinners all the time. They sing songs and tell jokes. They're the longest-running act in show business. You fellows miss the point." Making us sound like scrubbed boys in preppy jackets. "Branca's a hero. I mean Branca was given every chance to survive this game and we all know why."

A little pall fell across the table.

"Because he's white," Sims said. "Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you."

Classic shifted in his chair.

Sims told the story of a pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife. Donnie Moore was black and the player who hit the home run was black. And then he shot and killed himself. He shot his wife several times, nonfatally, and then shot himself. He took a dirt nap in his own laundry room, Sims said. Sims told this story to the Englishwoman but it was completely new to me and I could tell that Classic barely remembered. I'd never heard of Donnie Moore and missed the home run and didn't know about the shootings. Sims said the shootings came a few years after the home run but were directly traceable. Donnie Moore was not allowed to outlive his failure. The fans gave him every grief and there weren't any skits at the baseball dinners,

Sims knew a lot about the shootings. He described the shooting of the wife in some detail.

Parish shut her eyes to see it better.

"We hear what you're saying," Classic said. "But you can't compare the two events on the basis of color."

"What else is there?"

"The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day. The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way. Because it's not in competition for our attention with a thousand other pieces of action. Because it's something that's preserved and unique. Donnie Moore-well I'm sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?"

"The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened," Sims said, "to the parties involved. We're talking about who lived and who died."

"But not why," Classic said. "Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?"

"Unhistorical," I said.

"Then we realize there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we'll never know or understand."

Sims called us fellows again. I switched sides several times and we ordered another round of drinks and went at it some more. We were not talking to Jane Parish now. We didn't notice her reactions or encourage her interest. Sims called us fellows many times and then he called us chaps. It began to get a little funny. We ordered coffee and watched the game and Parish sat in a thoughtful knot, arms and legs crossed, body twisted toward the window, yielding to the power of our differences.

"Buying and selling baseballs. What heartache. And you never told me," Sims said.

"It was some time ago."

"I would have talked you out of it."

"So you could buy it yourself," Classic said.

"I deal in other kinds of waste. The real stuff of the world. Give me disposable diapers by the ton. Not this melancholy junk from yesteryear."

"I don't know," I said again.

"What do you do, take the ball out of the closet and look at it? Then what?"

"He thinks about what it means," Classic said. "It's an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and the sweetest of good fortune to another. It's a lovely thing in itself besides. An old baseball? It's a lovely thing, Sims. And this one's got a pedigree like no other."

"He got taken big-time," Sims said. "He's holding a worthless object."

We paid the bill and started filing out. Sims pointed to a photograph over the bar, one of dozens of sporting shots. It was a recent photo of a couple of gray-haired ex-players, Thomson and Branca, dark-suited and looking fit, standing on the White House lawn with President Bush between them, holding an aluminum bat.

We went out and sat in the company box for ten minutes so Classic could hear the crowd noise. Then we walked down the ramp and headed for the parking area. Parish had some questions about the infield fly rule. Sims and Classic were able to get together on this by the time we got out to the car. It was an unexpected boon for the BBC.

I sat in back and looked at the city flowing past and I thought of Sims the kid running down a street in St. Louis. He's wearing dungarees with the lower legs rolled into bunchy cuffs that are paler than the dark denim twill of the outer cloth. He's waving his arms and shouting that he's Bobby Thomson.

I sat with my mother in her room and we talked and paused and watched TV We paused to remember. One of us said something that roused a memory and we sat together thinking back.

My mother had a method of documentary recall. She brought forth names and events and let them hang in the air without attaching pleasure or regret. Sometimes just a word. She spoke a word or phrase that referred to something I hadn't thought about in decades. She was confident in her recall, moving through the past with a sureness she could not manage to apply to the current moment or hour or day of the week. She made fun of herself. What day is it? Do I go to mass today or tomorrow? I drove her to mass and picked her up. This was the steadiest satisfaction of my week. I learned the mass schedule and the types of mass and the length of service and I made sure she had money for the basket. We sat in the room and talked. She seemed untouched by sentiment. She'd summon a moment that struck me with enormous force, any moment, something ordinary but bearing power with it- ordinary only if you haven't lived it, if you weren't there-and I saw how still she sat, how prudent she was in her recollecting.

I used to tell my kids when they were small. A hawser is a rope that's used to moor a ship. Or, The hump in the floor between rooms, I used to say This is called the saddle.

We set her up with the dresser and the air conditioner and a hard mattress that was good for her back. She brought forth names from the family passional, the book of special suffering, and we paused and thought. Her hair was still partly brown in places, gone wiry and iridescent, goldshot in bright light, bobby-pinned, and we sat there with the TV going. I knew she would not say too much or remember carelessly. She was in control here, guiding us safely through the pauses.