If I Forget You(8)

It’s funny, Margot thinks, that wealth can give you lots of things, but one thing it often takes from you is family. The wealthy scatter like pollen in the wind, while the poor tend to stay together. Or is that even true? She doesn’t know. What she does know is that her family now is no different from the one she grew up in. There is always this urge to keep moving. The world as playground, each person jumping from one spot to the next. Her father gone for months at a time for work in places like Singapore. She and her sister sent away to boarding schools as soon as they hit puberty. Her mother, at eighty, still not sitting still. As if by living so urgently, they can somehow separate themselves from the sadness of the masses.

In her bedroom, Margot props pillows up on her bed and climbs on it fully clothed. She puts her glass of wine on the end table next to her bed and picks up her iPad. And for the first time in about a year, Margot types the name Henry Gold into the search engine.

There he is on his NYU faculty page. The photo is black-and-white and clearly taken for a book jacket. The photo makes his black eyes pop even more than usual, and in them she can see that soft, gentle intelligence. He wears a dark jacket and a light shirt. His biography is to the right of the photo, and for probably the fifteenth time, she reads the third line of it. “His debut collection of poetry, Margaret, won the Yale Younger Poets prize.”

Margaret, she thinks. Margot. Somewhere in her closet, buried, is a copy of the book, which she found used on Amazon years ago. She hid it in a shoe box in a place Chad would never look. On the cover is a picture of a woman, taken from behind, as she looks out a window. Margot devoured it the day it arrived, locking herself in the bathroom, her eyes filling with tears. Each poem is a moment, a day, she recognizes. Each poem is a whispered elegy to the two of them.

And the dedication in the beginning she knows by heart: For you, wherever you are.

Just from that alone, Margot thinks, I should have known he would never stop trying to find me.





Henry, 1991

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.