Lady in the Lake(58)
“I meant—” She didn’t go on. Ferdie knew what she meant. He was being deliberately obtuse.
He placed his hand on Maddie’s midsection, a sign that he was done talking. She was embarrassed by her midriff. The current fashion magazines showed girls in bikinis that drooped on knobs of hip bones, their arms and legs skeletal. Maddie had always taken great pride in her slenderness, but she looked bovine when compared to these young girls. Dated, a woman from another era. She wanted to be modern and sleek, a rocket built for missions to the stars.
“I wish—” Ferdie did not finish his sentence right away and in that shining, open moment Maddie felt at once fearful and excited. What did Ferdie want, really?
“I wish,” Ferdie repeated, “that I had caught that baseball. I would have given it to a kid, too. But I wish I could have been the one to catch it. Wouldn’t that have been something?”
Number Six
Number Six
Bottom of the third, I’m facing Lopez and the go-ahead run is on second. Lopez can be wild. He’s already hit six batters this season and he wasn’t trying to brush them back. He’s got no control.
Ball one.
Ball two. It comes close to me. I can feel my teammates tensing in the dugout.
Strike one, looking.
Strike two—it tips off my bat, into the stands.
It’s my third season with the Orioles, although I didn’t get any real playing time in ’64. One at-bat, one strikeout, in the lineup eight times total. Last year, I played a hundred sixteen games, hit .231. Not great, but better than Etchebarren, and my defensive skills can’t be faulted. I also got hit by a pitch four times. I don’t mind getting hit, but it’s not the way I want to get on base.
The next pitch, it’s going to curve, it’s going to be just in. I swing, I connect, the run comes in, I’m on first. We’re up, 2–1.
The Orioles fans are almost too polite, prone to murmuring, not shouting, but then they don’t boo that much, either, so I guess it’s a push. Still, even in the relative quiet of Memorial Stadium, you can tell the fans know this summer is special. We’re magic. Here we are, almost to the All-Star break, and we’re 54-25 and I’m hitting close to .300. I won’t make the All-Star team. Obviously, that will be Frank, probably Brooks. But one day I’ll make it, I bet. The All-Star squad, maybe a Gold Glove or two. I am twenty-two years old and I am making eight thousand dollars a year and I wake up smiling every day.
This is what I’ve wanted, all my life, since I was eight. Willie Mays was my hero, but when I saw my chance to make the majors, I thought, I gotta find my own style, can’t do that basket catch. I didn’t want anyone to say I was copying Willie. But I can play shallow, like Willie, chase balls in the gap. If I don’t catch something, you can bet it’s a home run.
After the game, I sit in my car, a ’65 Dodge Dart bought for a good price when the ’66 models came in, and the kids swarm, asking for autographs. As long as there’s a single kid waiting for a signature, I don’t leave. The fans are our real bosses, in the end. If they don’t show up, we don’t have a job. I’ll sign cards, balls, scraps of paper, anything. And if a boy asks me if he should try to be a ball player, I’ll say yes, dreams come true. I’m proof.
Today, a guy comes up, a little older than me. He doesn’t ask me to sign anything. “I’m Ferdie Platt, just want to shake your hand, Mr. Blair. You are living the life.” Mister, although he’s got at least six or seven years on me.
But he’s right. This is the life and I am living it.
July 1966
July 1966
The Flamingo was a bit of a disappointment to Maddie, not because of its lack of grandeur—she had very low expectations for the second-best club on Pennsylvania Avenue—but because of its humdrum ordinariness, its very lack of danger. Of course, it was only six p.m., early for decadence on anyone’s clock, but the club struck her as not that different from the Woodholme Country Club on a theme night.
She took a seat at the bar, ordered a vermouth. The bartender was white, a stocky man with dark hair and hooded eyes. Could this be the bartender, the one who had described Cleo Sherwood’s date to police? She hadn’t expected a white man in a club owned by a Negro, which served mainly Negroes. She assumed a white man would be less hostile to her, but he leaned back, arms folded, making no move to prepare her drink.
“We prefer,” he said, “that our lady customers be accompanied by men. And even then, we don’t seat them at the bar. The owner finds that—” He paused, searching for a word. “Disreputable.”
“I’m not a customer,” Maddie said.
“Good, you catch on fast. Why don’t you go hang with the ladies at Hutzler’s tearoom? That seems more your style. Or if you really want a drink, the Emerson Hotel.”
“I’m a reporter.”
Was that amusement in his sleepy eyes? At any rate, he served her, then went to the end of the bar to continue his prep for the evening. She sipped the drink, surprised to find it comparable to the vermouths she’d had in other bars, then realized how silly she was to be surprised. There was not a lot of variety among vermouths. Wines, yes, whiskeys, yes, but vermouth in Maddie’s experience ran to sweet or dry. This was a sweet one.