THE BREWERS WERE
playing the Toronto Blue Jays that Sunday, and the game started at one-fifteen. The original plan was for Arthur and their son Drew to go with Charlie and Ella, but Arthur called that morning to say he’d been thinking it could look bad if, this soon after the meat scandal, he and Charlie showed up on TV, enjoying themselves at the ballpark (the Blackwells’ seats were eight rows above the Brewers’ dugout, between third base and home plate). “We were exonerated!” Charlie protested, but apparently, Arthur couldn’t be dissuaded. When Charlie hung up, he said, “I smell John all over this.”
I’d planned to spend the afternoon preparing for the upcoming week—the next day, I’d return to Riley to help my mother bring my grandmother home from the hospital, and on Tuesday, for a Garden Club luncheon at Sally Gilman’s house, I was responsible for making potato salad for thirty—but I quickly agreed to go in Arthur’s stead. We called Harold to see if he’d like to join us, but their flight back to Washington was at four.
I didn’t really mind the change of plan; even before Charlie and I had Ella, attending baseball games was probably our best shared activity. I liked how you were part of a crowd, but an orderly crowd—there were seats and rows and sections so that even with tens of thousands of people, it wasn’t chaotic, and if a fan became drunk and unruly, he was usually escorted away. I liked how the park was a setting where you could but didn’t have to carry on a conversation, I liked the people-watching (the fans like us, families with children, and the adolescent or middle-aged couples on dates, the groups of friends in their late twenties or early thirties, the men who came alone, about whom there was something very moving to me, or at least there had been before Charlie became one of those men, at what I felt was my own and Ella’s expense). But I liked the wholesome cheers and the corny traditions and the familiar songs and the basic tastiness of eating a hot dog and drinking a beer on a sunny afternoon or evening. The one part of a baseball game I didn’t like was when a foul ball or a home run flew into the stands and people scrambled over it—when only one person got what so many wanted. But in general, baseball games kept Charlie sufficiently occupied, not bored, while also being calm enough for me. As for Ella, she liked games for her own reasons—her Japanese pen pal was a tremendous fan of the sport, which had increased Ella’s interest in it, and she also loved that the frozen custard came in a small plastic Brewers cap that you could take home—but the important part was that she liked them, that we all did.
By the fourth inning, the score was 4–1 in the Brewers’ favor, and Charlie seemed to have forgotten that he was freshly peeved with his brothers. This was when Zeke Langenbacher sidled up to us. Zeke was a man about twenty years older than Charlie and me, rumored to be the richest person in Milwaukee and possibly in Wisconsin —he was a high school dropout who’d started as a milk delivery boy and owned his own dairy by the age of twenty- five before diversifying into auto insurance, radio stations, and motels. I had met him a number of times, but I always imagined he wouldn’t remember my name, and I was always pleasantly surprised when he did. He and Charlie occasionally played tennis together—on the court, Zeke was known to be both excellent and quite aggressive—and I think these matches, even losing them, gave Charlie a frisson of pride. “Zeke’s a big fucking deal,” he told me after one. “He’s a captain of industry.”
After greeting me and being introduced to Ella, Zeke gestured to the empty chair next to Charlie. “Anyone sitting here?”
Charlie patted the seat. “We were holding it open for you.” Zeke had his own season tickets a few rows in front of ours—County Stadium never had luxury boxes, which to me was part of its charm—and earlier in the game, I’d noticed him down there with two other men.
Ella was sitting between Charlie and me, and Zeke was on Charlie’s other side, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was surprised that he stayed into the seventh inning, by which point the Brewers had scored three more runs. I took Ella to the bathroom, then waited in line with her for french fries, and we were making our way back to our section when Ella and a little boy about her age collided. Almost half of Ella’s french fries spilled from the paper cup onto the floor, and in a scolding tone, she said to the boy, “Look what you just did!”
The boy appeared frightened, and I said, “Ella, sweetie, it was an accident. It wasn’t his fault any more than it was yours.” The boy was accompanied by a man, and when I glanced up, anticipating an exchange of apologetic smiles, I saw that the man was Simon Tornkvist. I believe that we mutually considered pretending not to recognize each other—his glasses were different, with larger lenses, and he no longer had a beard, but his floppy blond hair was the same, his drooping left eye—and then I said, “My goodness, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” I set a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “This is my daughter, Ella.”
“My son, Kyle.”
“It’s sure a nice day for a ball game,” I said.
“We live up in Oshkosh now, but we’re here visiting some friends.” Simon’s tone was warmer than I would have anticipated.
“Isn’t Oshkosh where you’re from?” I said, and he said, “Good memory.”
I thought.
“You might be surprised to know I ended up in the education field, too,” he said. “I’m a high school history teacher.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. It seemed that he was waiting for me to provide a comparable update
and I found that I did not want to share with Simon that I no longer held a job. I realized I’d been wondering if he’d know whom I’d married, or at least know that it was one of the sons of the former governor, and I was glad he appeared to have no idea. How disapproving Simon Tornkvist would probably be, how pathetically bourgeois my life would seem to him. “We’ll let you two get back to the game,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Maybe our families can get together when we’re next down here,” he said, and I smiled, banking on the fact that he’d never be able to track me down.
“Absolutely.”
Back at our seats, Zeke Langenbacher was gone, and I said to Charlie, “You’ll never believe who Ella and I just ran into—Simon Tornkvist.”
“You mean Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme?” This was the nickname that Charlie had made up for Simon years earlier, based on my brief descriptions. The two of them had never met, but Charlie had somehow gotten the impression that Simon was a long-haired guitar-strumming antiwar protestor; really, this said less about Charlie’s idea of Simon than his idea of me. “He was with his son,” I said, and Ella said, “He made me spill my fries!”
