fire up my road-weary Datsun for the twenty-minute drive to Iowa City. We have a new car since the ballpark has made the farm profitable, but I prefer the Datsun. It’s like traveling with an old friend, as full of memories as it is food wrappers.
Missy likes to keep the windows open in summer. She convinced me to take a hammer and small crowbar and pry open the windows at the rear of the house, several of them for the first time in their existence. In summer, in Iowa, the humidity itself is a presence, and the fragrance of honeysuckle is like a character in a drama. As the windows were opened, a breeze moved through my home like a cool hand, and as I pried open the side windows, cross breezes soothed and purified, carrying away odors and memories, letting in what I wished might be hope.
Eventually, all the windows on both floors were freed and oiled, and Missy could raise or lower them with the tips of her fingers. And my huge old house with the iron-spiked widow’s walk was airy and cool, even in breathless high July.
Missy was eating the breakfast I had made, toast and marmalade, three fried sausages, two eggs and a glass of milk, when the phone rang. I raised my hand to indicate she needn’t get up, then didn’t make any move to answer it myself. It is a silly game we play: who can ignore the phone longest, but still get to it before the caller hangs up.
Before Missy came to live with me after her mother, Marylyle Baron, passed away, I seldom answered the telephone. The only person I hoped might call was my long-lost wife, Sunny. But Sunny did not like telephones, had never in the years we were married, in the dozen times she disappeared for days, or weeks, or months, or now, for years, ever called me.
Missy likes an ordered world. An unanswered telephone makes her agitated, for Missy, despite her Downs’ syndrome, has, in many ways, more curiosity about life than I have.
The average caller, we have discovered, hangs up after the sixth ring. This time, after the fourth ring, Missy pushed her chair back, but I made as if to stand, a quality feint, deking Missy into sitting back down. The phone, the pure white of camelias, jangled a fifth time from the apple-green wall of the kitchen.
This phone is another concession to Missy’s joy of living; we were walking past the phone store in Iowa City one afternoon when Missy was drawn in like metal filings to a magnet by the dazzle of multi-colored and miraculously shaped telephones. The camellia-white phone replaced the black-box table phone with a circular metal dial that had been in the house since I was a child.
I don’t know who said, ‘Be careful, for you may get what you think you want,’ but it was certainly true in my case.
I labored most of my adult life to prove that information my father and I knew about a baseball league called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was true and accurate. And, surprisingly, after a miraculous sojourn in the past, I accomplished what I had set out to do. My late father, Matthew Clarke, is now held to be one of the pioneers of American baseball research. His thesis, A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, is considered one of the finest pieces of baseball research ever documented. But in the process of accomplishing what I thought I wanted most, I believe I lost whatever capacity I ever had for love, or at least true love, however that might be defined.
I thought when I first returned from the past (1908 to be specific) that I’d eventually be able to go back there, to take up where I left off, to somehow alter history.
I fantasized about returning to 1908 armed with nothing but a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia, which I would use as a guide to betting on pennant races and World Series’ winners. But as time passes, it appears that my excursion into the past was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’ve spent the dark of many a night walking the baseball spur on the outskirts of Iowa City, searching for the magical spot where my friend Stan Rogalski and I crossed the dimensions of time.
I’ve stood in the clover-smelling darkness at the end of that spur line, arms raised to the moon like some pagan warrior. I’ve pleaded with the night, with the voices and spirits that listened to me once. But there is only silence, only the touch of the velvet night on my arms, only the rub of the perfumed grasses on my ankles.
Sometimes I’ve broken the night open with the caterwauling of my horn, blasting out raucous Dixieland jazz or the ultimate sorrow of the blues. But nothing I could do would move the phantom listeners I knew were nearby in the long, black moonshadows of the abandoned rail line.
In the days when I thought of myself as a knight in shining armor, when I had a quest, it was I who reassured my life-long friend, Stan Rogalski, a career minor-league player, that he had a few more baseball games in him, that he still had a chance, albeit a slight one, of making it to the major leagues. But though I’m the one who got what he thought he wanted—the recognition that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy existed—it is Stan who has adjusted to life as I have never been able to.
When we returned from our adventure to our home town of Onamata, Stan had been cut by his team, forced into retirement, a situation that to my great surprise, he accepted. Stan didn’t let his wife and brother-in-law talk him into a dead-end job with the railroad; instead he went to Onamata High School and applied for a job he was technically unqualified for, and he got it.
The baseball coach had just retired, but in order to coach baseball one had to have a teaching certificate and be able to teach health as well as physical education. But the powers that be wanted Stan to coach baseball. They forced the drivers’ ed. teacher to teach health, and hired Stan as a custodian at a salary equivalent to that of a beginning teacher. It was agreed that as long as Stan coached all the boys’ sports teams he didn’t have to do any custodial work.
Stan has been at it for several years and is as happy as it’s possible for him to be. His wife, Gloria, has supplied him with a square-built replica of himself, Stan Jr., now a toddler, and Gloria is pregnant again.
Just as children become guardians to aging parents, Stan and I, in the past year or so, have reversed roles. It is now Stan who assures me that I have something to live for, that my long-lost wife, Sunny, will return again someday. Or that I will be able to return to 1908, to Big Inning, Iowa, where Sarah will be waiting for me, and where I will be able to alter history by saving Sarah from the accidental death I know awaits her.
As the phone begins its sixth ring both Missy and I leap for it. I beat Missy by a stride and put the white receiver to my ear. Not many people phone us. We’ve calculated that for every call for me, there are two telephone solicitors. Missy and I have learned how to torture telephone solicitors with silence.
No matter what they are selling—magazines, travel opportunities, insurance, cookies, or cuckoo clocks—the seller’s spiel can only be successful if the sellee co-operates by making acknowledging sounds at the proper moments. Missy and I listen to whatever pitch the salesperson is making, then, when they pause in their presentation for us to comment or grunt or answer a direct question, we simply stay silent.
After a long pause in which we can sometimes hear the heartbeat of the caller, the salesperson invariably says, ‘Are you there?’
We answer with the single word, ‘Yes.’
The sales pitch then continues until the next pregnant pause. Followed by the next query. Followed by the next, ‘Yes.’
Four or five pauses into the presentation the sweating, frustrated, suffering telephone solicitor succumbs to our silence, and forlornly hangs up the phone. Missy holds the record—she’s kept a strangling solicitor going through seven pauses. Five is the best I’ve ever managed.
When the defeated sales representative hangs up, Missy and I give each other a high five, as if one of us has hit a home run. It is so much more fun than getting angry and hanging up.
I place