If I Forget You(9)

The other baseball players are not, to his surprise, his crowd. Like Henry, they are public school kids, rare here, and they are surprisingly local, most of them from nearby cities like Syracuse and Rochester, recruited like he was for their ability to hit or pitch or field. They are also more working-class than the student body as a whole, just like Henry, though none of them is Jewish, and this becomes a brief issue during fall practice, when the left fielder, a junior and a meathead, makes some joke under his breath about Hanukkah Henry.

“Excuse me?” Henry says.

“Nothing,” the boy, whose name is Johnny, says. “Just messing with you.”

Henry senses something in his posture, that he might actually be afraid of Henry, and doesn’t expect the boy to challenge him. Henry tries something from the neighborhood then and says, “If there’s a problem, maybe we can take a walk, figure it out.”

“It’s cool,” Johnny says. “Relax, dude. Just busting your chops a little, you know?”

And Henry knows in that moment he has won something, though he also knows he hasn’t come all this way just to live in Providence again. And maybe this is the beginning of the end of his baseball career, but it is also more than that, for Henry is changing.

The other baseball players do not live for words and ideas and language, which Henry increasingly does. A class on Latin American literature, taught by a pretty, long-haired professor with a Spanish accent, introduces him to Neruda. Henry is enthralled by Neruda’s story—his fame, reading poems in front of an entire stadium full of people. Henry loves Neruda’s courage, the knowledge that his words and his poems will cost him his life and yet he marches on. Henry hadn’t realized there were places in the world where poetry could have this kind of importance.

Mostly, though, Henry is drawn to what Neruda feels and what Neruda says and how he speaks of love. The poet talks of women in a way that channels Henry’s own secret thoughts, but not the kinds of things he could ever say out loud in his old Providence neighborhood, or even here on this leafy campus, in front of the baseball team anyway.

Henry hadn’t known men could talk about love this way. In reading Neruda, Henry sees the deepest part of himself, and he realizes he is not alone in thinking as he does, and it is then he decides he will be a poet.

It is an absurd idea. Who becomes a poet? People become bankers or lawyers, or go to med school and save lives. It is not something he can tell anyone about. His mother would be horrified. She was overjoyed when he got into Bannister and was able to go practically for free. She was overjoyed because she saw him becoming a lawyer or a doctor or working in some respectable profession where you wore a suit and went to work in an office every day, made plenty of money, and built a new life along the way. It was the idea that each generation is stronger than the one before. He would fulfill the promise of America her own parents had when they fled Poland half a century before. He would fulfill the promise of the name they’d given him.

At the beginning of his sophomore year, Henry does two things. The first is to declare his major as English. He tells his mother this is the fastest track to law school, and she smiles when he says it. She gives him a hug and says, “Oh, Henry,” and he feels a little bad for deceiving her, but there will be plenty of time later to explain things.

The more difficult one is his baseball coach, whom Henry visits in his office in the basement of the athletic center. His coach is a hard man and Henry doesn’t expect it to go well, and it doesn’t. Coach is angry.

“My heart’s not in it,” Henry says.

“There’re twenty-four other guys counting on you,” his coach says, standing up and raising his voice. “Twenty-four guys, Henry, who all want to win a championship. What about them?”

Henry shrugs. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“That’s all you got?”

Henry thinks for a minute. “Yes,” he says.

And so that semester, Henry signs up for his first creative writing class. There are twelve students around a wooden table in a small room with big windows that look out onto the main quad. The professor is a youngish man, a short story writer who recently graduated from Iowa, he tells them, as if this is important. He wears a uniform of tight jeans, cowboy boots, a white button-down shirt, and a tweed coat. His outfit never changes. His face shows a consistent four days of stubble. He insists everyone call him Jon.

The class is entry level and he assigns them prompts to write stories and poems. They are to write about childhood smells, that kind of thing. And then they bring them in and read them aloud to one another, and everyone critiques one another, with Jon moderating while tapping a pencil thoughtfully against his jaw, ensuring that nothing gets personal, which is no small task, since everything, for young writers, is by definition personal.

Henry loves the assignments, even the silly ones. He loves wrestling with the words and he loves playing with structure. Each poem is a tiny puzzle to be solved.

What he doesn’t love is reading out loud in class. He is self-conscious about his voice, and especially his accent. He doesn’t know anyone else with his accent at Bannister. People say to him immediately, “Where are you from? Boston?”

“Providence,” he says.

Reading out loud, Henry thinks it is even worse. The effort to enunciate, to linger on each word, only makes it worse. The first time he reads, several of the girls giggle, and Jon shushes them. “Go on, Henry,” he says, though Henry once again is reminded that he has traded being an outsider in one place for being an outsider in another.