“Well, let’s do this. Let’s run through the press kit and maybe elaborate a little.” Linda Rabb nodded.
Rabb said, “It’s all in there.”
“You were born in Lafayette, Indiana, in nineteen forty-four.” Rabb nodded. “Went to Marquette, graduated nineteen sixty-five. Signed with the Sox that year, pitched a year in Charleston and a year at Pawtucket. Came up in nineteen sixty-eight. Been here ever since.”
Rabb said, “That’s about it.”
I said, “Where’d you meet Linda?”
“Chicago,” Rabb said. “At a White Sox game. She asked for my autograph, and I said, yeah, but she had to go out with me. She did. And bingo.”
I look at my biog sheet. “That would have been in nineteen seventy?”
“Right.” My glass was empty, and Rabb got up to refill it. I noticed his was less than half gone.
“We were married about six months later in Chicago.”
Linda Rabb smiled. “In the off-season.”
“Best thing I ever did,” Rabb said, and gave me a new bottle of ale. I poured it into the glass, ate some peanuts, and drank some ale.
“You from Chicago, Linda?”
“No, Arlington Heights, a little bit away from Chicago.”
“What was your maiden name?”
Rabb said, “Oh for crissake, Spenser, why do you want to know that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You ever see one of those machines that grades apples, or oranges, or eggs, that sort of thing, by size? They dump all sizes in the hopper and the machine lets the various sizes drop into the right holes as it works down. That’s how I am. I just ask questions and let it all go into the hopper and then sort it out later.”
“Well, you’re not sorting eggs now, for crissake.”
“Oh, Marty, let him do his job. My maiden name was Hawkins, Mr. Spenser.”
“Okay, Marty, let’s go back to why you love baseball,” I said. “I mean, think about it a little. Isn’t it a game for kids? I mean, who finally cares whether a team beats another team?”
It sounded like the kind of thing a writer would ask, and I wanted to get them talking. Much of what I do depends on knowing who I’m doing it with.
“Oh, Christ, I don’t know, Spenser. I mean, what isn’t a game for kids, you know? How about writing stories, is that something for grown-ups? It’s something to do. I’m good at it, I like it, and I know the rules. You’re one of twenty-five guys all working for something bigger than they are, and at the end of the year you know whether or not you got it. If you didn’t get it, then you can start over next year. If you did, then you got a chance to do it again. Some old-timey ballplayer said something about you have to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game, but you gotta be a man too.”
“Roy Campanella,” I said.
“Yeah, right, Campanella. Anyway, it’s a nice clean kind of work. You’re important to a lot of kids. You got a chance to influence kids’ lives maybe, by being an example to them. It’s a lot better than selling cigarettes or making napalm. It’s what I do, you know?”
“What about when you get too old?”
“Maybe I can coach. I’d be a good pitching coach.
Maybe manage. Maybe do color. I’ll stay around the game one way or another.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I’ll still have Linda and the boy.”
“And when the boy grows up?”
“I’ll still have Linda.”
I was getting caught up in the part. I’d started to lose track. I was interested. Maybe some of the questions were about me.
“Maybe I better finish up my Labatt Fifty and go home,” I said. “I’ve taken enough of your time.”
Linda Rabb said, “Oh no, don’t go yet. Marty, get him another beer. We were just getting started.”
I shook my head, drained my glass, and stood up. “No, thank you very much, Linda. We’ll talk again.”
“Marty, make him stay.”
“Linda, for crissake, if he wants to go, let him go. She does this every time we have company, Spenser.”
They both walked with me to the door. I left them standing together. He towered over her in the doorway. His right arm was around her shoulder, and she rested her left hand on it. I took a cab home and went to bed. I was working my way through Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, and I spent two hours on it before I went to sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
