Underworld

Jersey side.

He was looking for 46 west. He'd written out directions that the man had recited over the phone. The man had recited the routes and streets in a manner so automatic that Brian realized many pilgrims had made the trip across the river.

He had the directions written on hotel stationery and he kept the page on the seat next to him, snatching a look every ten seconds. After a mile on 46 west he spotted the Exxon station and made the maneuver onto 63 south, racing along the three-mile stretch to the Point Diner. Then he made a left turn out of the howl of highly motivated traffic and into residential streets, beginning to relax at last, approaching the circle on Kennedy Drive, another dead president.

Down a side street to an old frame house. Marvin Lundy opened the door, a hunched fellow with a stylized shuffle, in his late sixties, holding a burnt-out cigar. Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation. He followed the man through two rooms steeped in aquarium dimness. Then they went to the basement, a large finished room that held Marvin Lundy's collection of baseball memorabilia.

'My late wife, she would serve us tea with popovers that she made fresh, all other things being equal.'

The room was filled with objects on tasteful display. Flannel jerseys draped along the walls, caps with souvenir buttons pinned to the visors, there were newspaper pages framed and hung. Brian did a reverent tour, examining autographed bats ranked on custom wall fittings, game bats beautifully grained, some with pine tar on the choke. There were stadium seats labeled like rare botanical specimens-Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, Griffith Stadium. He nearly touched an old catcher's mitt set on a pedestal, the object gashed yellow, spike-gashed and sun-smoked and patriarchal, but he managed to hold back. He looked at autographed baseballs in plexiglas globes. He leaned over display cases that held cigarette cards, ticket stubs, the signed contracts of famous players, nineteenth-century baseball board games, bubblegum wrappers that carried the pinkish likenesses of men from Brian's youth, their names a kind of poetry floating down the decades.

'You would put strawberry preserves on the popovers, which forget it, all life from the Renaissance onward it pales by compare.'

None of this amounted to an astonishment. It was interesting, even moving in a way, but not great or memorable. The wondrous touch, the outlandish and surpassing fancy was the large construction along the far wall, a replica of the old Polo Grounds Scoreboard and clubhouse facade. It covered an area about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet high, floor to ceiling, and included the Chesterfield sign and slogan, the Longines clock, a semblance of the clubhouse windows and parapet and finally a hand-slotted line score, the inning by inning tally of the famous play-off game of 1951.

'You would have to eat them hot. She made a strict rule of no dawdling, Eleanor, because lukewarm you lose the whole experience.'

Brian stood near the Scoreboard, looking at Marvin for permission to touch.

'I had a draftsman, a carpenter, an electrician and a sign painter, not a house painter, very temperamental. I showed them photographs and they did measurements and sketches so they could respect the proportions and get the colors. The hit sign and the E light up, for error. Where do you live?'

'Phoenix.'

'I was never there.'

In the stronger light down here he could see that Marvin Lundy's hair was a swatch of loomed synthetic, ash- brown, combed sleekly forward, and it made Brian think of Las Vegas and pinky rings and prostate cancer.

He said to Marvin, 'I grew up in the Midwest. Cleveland Indians, that was my team. And I was flying in on business last night and saw an article in the airline magazine, the piece about you and your collectibles, and I felt a strong compulsion to get in touch with you and see these things.'

He fingered the silky lapel of Babe Ruth's smoking jacket.

'My daughter talked me into doing the interview,' Marvin said. 'She thinks I'm turning into a what-do-you- call.'

'A recluse.'

'An old recluse with half a stomach. So now my picture's in twenty thousand seat pouches. This is her idea of get out and meet people. They put me in with the vomit bags.'

Brian said, 'I went to a car show and it did something to me.'

'What did it do?'

'Cars from the nineteen-fifties. I don't know.'

'You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you're a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination.'

'It's ridiculous, isn't it? But probably harmless too.'

'Nothing is harmless,' Marvin said. 'You're worried and scared. You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe.'

Brian pushed through a turnstile from an old ballpark. It creaked sort of lovingly.

He said, 'Cold war? I don't see the cold war winding down. And if I did, good. I'd be happy about it.'

'Let me explain something that maybe you never noticed.'

Marvin was sitting in an armchair alongside an old equipment trunk bearing the stenciled inscription Boston Red Stockings. He gestured toward the chair on the other side of the trunk and Brian went over and sat down.

'You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It's the one constant thing. It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main-what do I want to say?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging. The cold war is your friend. You need it to stay on top.'

'On top of what?'

'You don't know on top of what? You don't know the whole thing is geared to your dominance in the world? You see what they have in England. Forty thousand women circling an air base to protest the bombs and missiles. Some of them are men in dresses. They have Buddhists beating drums.'

Brian didn't know how to respond to these remarks. He wanted to talk about old ballplayers, stadium dimensions, about nicknames and minor league towns. That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stones of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century-the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.

Marvin sat staring at the Scoreboard, his cigar slightly shredded at the burnt end.

'I thought we were going to talk baseball.'

'We're talking baseball. This is baseball. You see the clock,' Marvin said. 'Stopped at three fifty-eight. Why? Is it because that's when Thomson hit the homer off Branca?'

He called him Branker.

'Or because that's the day we found out the Russians exploded an atom bomb. You know something about that game?'

'What?' Brian said.

'There were twenty thousand empty seats. You know why?'

'Why?'

'You'll laugh in my face.'

'No, I won't.'

'It's all right. You're my guest. I want you to feel at home.'

'Why so many empty seats for the most important game of the year?'