I remember, for example, Moe Berg’s seventh home run.
I call tails. The quarter glitters through its arc over my dad’s hand, looking like any number of slow-motion coin flips I’ve seen in fifty years of movies since then. Dad catches it in his right hand, slaps it onto the back of his left. “You sure?”
I nod. He takes away his hand. It’s tails.
“Here you go,” Dad says. The last hot dog is gone before Rowe has taken his eighth warm-up.
And then, would you believe it, Moe Berg steps to the plate. The Tigers public-address announcer sounds like he can’t believe it either; his voice hesitates, and is momentarily lost in the echoes of his last word. “Sox, sox, ox, ox, ox.” The crowd stirs, and people look up from their scorecards to see if it could actually be Moe Berg taking a last practice cut and scuffing dirt away from the back of the batter’s box. Baseball fans are always alert to the possibility of history being made.
For me, Berg’s appearance is better than a ticket to the World Series. I take off my Tiger cap and look at his autograph, scrawled across the underside of the bill last August. I’d had to fight my way through the crowd around Ted Williams to get near the dugout, and Berg was just sitting on the corner of the dugout steps, rolling a quarter across the backs of his fingers and watching the crowd for pretty girls. When I’d leaned over the railing to hand him my cap, he’d cracked a smile at the Old English D. “You know what an agent provocateur is, kid?”
“No sir,” I said, “but I’ll go home and look it up after the game.”
His smile broadened just a bit, and he scribbled his name on my cap and tossed it back to me.
Now he stands in, and Rowe fires a dipping fastball at the knees. Berg watches it go by, shakes his head, waits on the next pitch.
And smokes it out to left-center.
I’m on my feet cheering even before it occurs to me that the ball might have home-run distance. The ball reaches the peak of its arc, and the two Tiger outfielders slow to a jog, watching it head for the fence. Head for me. I remember thinking that: it’s heading right for me. I reach up, watching the ball curve a bit as it sails down out of the sky and worrying that it’ll go over my head. I don’t have my glove, but otherwise for the longest second of my life it’s just like the field behind Estabrook school, watching the ball and hearing my dad’s voice in my head. Keep your eye on it, look it in. Two hands.
The sound of the ball hitting my palms is almost exactly like the sound of my dad smacking the quarter onto the back of his hand. Someone bumps into me and I fall between the rows of seats. On the way down I bang my head, hard, on a seat or someone’s knee, and fold up like Max Schmeling. But I’m not completely out, I’m still cradling the ball like one of the eggs the high-school girls have to carry around for their home-ec projects. My dad hauls me to my feet, and the knot of fans around me disperses as quickly as it converged. A few people slap me on the back and say, “Nice catch.”
“Look at you, Avery my boy,” Dad says. “You eat all my hot dogs and catch a home run.”
“A Moe Berg home run,” I say, looking at the ball. An oblong smudge covers part of the Spalding logo. Moe Berg’s bat was there, I think. It’s almost as good as shaking hands with him. I look up and he’s rounding third, two of him, accepting a laughing double handshake from the twinned third-base coach.
It’s like a dream. Berg starts to get blurry, and there is a roaring in my ears, and my father says something else but I’m too busy falling down to hear him.
And then it is a dream, or anyway it’s different. Avery isn’t in the ballpark any more, and his father isn’t around; in fact, nobody is. He’s alone in a room that seems to have walls, a ceiling, and a floor, but when he looks at them he can’t quite tell whether or not they’re there.
No, he’s not alone. There’s a man in the room. Like the walls, his face is indistinct, but Avery can tell he’s wearing a tuxedo like the one in his parents’ wedding picture.
“What just happened didn’t really happen,” the man says.
Avery is twelve years old. “Sure it did,” he says. “I was there.”
“Where was there?”
“Briggs Stadium, at the ball game. I caught this ball,” Avery says, holding it up to him so the man will have to believe him. He has the ball, therefore there was a home run.
Only the ball is a quarter, like the one Avery’s dad flipped for the hot dog. A 1936 quarter, with three short parallel gouges across the eagle’s right wing.
“Where’s my ball?” Avery looks around the room.
“There is no ball. What you have is what you caught.”
“Come on,” Avery says scornfully. “Ted Williams couldn’t hit a quarter out of the park. Hank Greenberg couldn’t. Jimmie Foxx couldn’t. You expect me to believe Moe Berg did?”
“What do you have in your hand?”
“A quarter.”
“Then that must be what you caught.”
“No way. You stole it, didn’t you? You stole my ball.”
“Avery. Listen to me. There’s a reason it’s a quarter.”
“Sure there is. It’s a quarter because you stole my ball and you’re such a cheapskate you only gave me a quarter for it.” Avery throws the quarter at the man, but it stops halfway between them, spinning in the air just as it did on its way through the summer air in Briggs Stadium.
“Now you’ve done it,” the man says.
Where am I going, where have I been, how do I know both at once? I’m seventy-two years old, retired from the GM Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan, to a seaside cottage in Seal Harbor, Maine. The Tigers have won three World Series since the day I saw (or didn’t see) Moe Berg’s home run-in ’45, ’68, and ’84. The Red Sox haven’t won any. The four years they’ve gone, they’ve lost in seven games every damn time. The last time was 1986, when Red Sox Nation really thought the Curse had been lifted; but after Mookie Wilson’s seeing-eye grounder found its way through Bill Buckner’s legs, it would almost have been better if the Angels had beaten the Sox in the AL playoffs. At least then… but if, if, if. “If chickens had lips,” my dad used to say, “they would whistle.” No use speculating on ifs. It wasn’t easy growing up a Red Sox fan in Detroit, but I managed, mostly because, as with Moe Berg’s autograph under the bill of my Tiger cap, I kept my allegiance carefully hidden.
In summer, I take a radio out on my porch and listen to the Sox while watching the waves come in from the North Atlantic. Waves crash on every shore, and I wonder every single day if there’s some kind of middle point from which waves radiate in every direction. The still point of the turning world, as Eliot put it. The place where choices resolve into certainties.
If there is such a place, I would like very much to see it, to know it exists. I would like very much to know whether or not my choice killed my father.
“Done what?” Avery says.
“The quarter’s in the air. Now you’ll have to make a call before it comes down.”
“Why?” Avery looks at the man again, and he’s sitting in a chair that wasn’t there a minute ago. The quarter spins at his eye level.
“To decide what happens.”
“What am I deciding?”
“You have two choices to make, Avery. Only one depends on the coin, so we’ll deal with the other one first. Let me tell you a story.” The man shifts in the chair, getting comfortable. “In a year and a half, America will be at war with Germany and Japan.”
“No we won’t,” Avery says. “Roosevelt said we were staying out of it.”
“Yes, he did. But it will happen anyway.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what I do. I know. In fact, you might say that’s what I am. Someone who knows.”
Avery squints at the man, trying to make his face stay still long enough to get a look at it. “Someone who knows, huh? Well, do you know what you look like?”
“You’re misunderstanding. Avery, I only look like this because that’s the easiest way for you to see me.”
“It’d be easier if you had a face,” Avery says.
