“Safe!” hollered the ump.
I hadn’t ignored a base coach since Little League. I brushed myself off, feeling elated and guilty.
“Sorry,” I said later to Harry. “I just didn’t want it to end so fast.”
“I noticed.” He smiled faintly. “Perhaps there’ll be chances for you on the nine again, once things settle.” The warm eyes regarded me shrewdly. “But don’t ever run through my directions!”
We stopped by Cait’s, finding her and Timmy in good spirits. Andy displayed the small Stocking uniform he’d had specially made. I thought Timmy’s eyes would pop.
“The fellas say you can be our mascot,” Andy told him.“Oh boy!
“We’ll see,” Cait said quickly.
“MOTHER!”
That night, before a special meeting of the club, most of the nine and a number of Buckeyes gathered to eat at Leininger’s. George read aloud from a New York Sun story on the Haymaker game, reprinted in the Enquirer: “The Umpire very properly gave the game to the Cincinnati Club. . . . The Haymakers have always had a bad reputation. No club ever visited Troy and returned satisfied with their treatment. . . .” Last season, the article continued, before a contest with the Atlantics, the Haymaker president had tipped Mute players to back Troy because “a job had been put up.” If such was true, the writer concluded, the Haymakers should be expelled from the association.
We toasted the Sun reporter, grateful for eastern support.
Allison got laughs saying he’d heard that Lansingburghers were now so broke that housewives bought fish with flatirons and got change in matches and soft soap. In saloons drinks averaged two shirt collars.
“You fellers headin’ East again?” said one of the Bucks.
“Tonight will likely decide that,” George answered.
Three hundred club members applauded us in Mozart Hall. From the podium a smiling Champion orchestrated with grand gestures. We were in for a surprise.
“Gentlemen,” he announced, “the repute of our invincible first nine [more applause] has spread across the bosom [sly chuckles] of this continent. An invitation has arrived from the Pacific Slope, from the assembled baseball clubs of San Francisco and Sacramento, challenging us to a series of matches [shouts, laughter]. What’s more [dramatic pause and triumphant crescendo] they want us so badly they’ll pay our entire fare on the Pacific Railroad, lodge us at their expense, and give us half the receipts from all matches!”
The resulting roar reverberated in the large room. Not all of it signified support. Gould and Mac were on their feet yelling, “Let’s go!” George and Waterman shouted, “No! The whip pennant!”
Debate lasted two hours. Go East or go West? Either choice would reward the club and add to its fame. There wasn’t time to do both; contracts expired November 15, and September was already upon us.
I sat numbly as voices droned, one arguing for storming baseball’s traditional strongholds again, another dwelling on the glory of being the first to play on both coasts. Harry said nothing. I suspected that he and Andy and the other eastern players preferred going for the pennant, playing again before their families and friends. But the lure of crossing the continent was strong. The gold rush had happened only twenty years before. The West was wild and exotic, still inhabited by untamed Indians.
“I’m for Frisco,” I heard Brainard remark to Waterman. It occurred to me he might have his own reasons for not wanting to visit New York just then. But Allison also liked the idea, as did Sweasy.
In the end the chance to ride the four-month-old transcontinental railroad—already it was the rage among the fashionable—won out, especially since it would be free. An experience roughly equivalent, I thought, to a passenger shuttle to the moon. Except that reaching the moon wouldn’t take two weeks.
By a narrow margin the club voted to send us to California.
Tangled emotions played in me. I had no defense against bittersweet memories. San Francisco. Where I had left my little girls, my identity, my life.
“Sam!”
Andy was grinning at me.
“Ain’t it dandy for you!”
“What’s that?”
“Why,” he said, looking at me expectantly, “you’re goin’ home!”
PART THREE
The Pacific
. . . and I will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.
MARK TWAIN, Roughing It
Go, go, go said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
Fowler . . . continued his discoveries, with the result that I came out safe and sound, at the end. . . .
MARK TWAIN, Autobiography
Chapter 22
Good grief, Cait, what’s wrong?”
She looked at me silently, took a deep breath. “I’m not sure.”
It struck me as an honest assessment. She had been distant and fretful for several days. When I’d told her about the nine going West, she said, “How nice for Andy,” and asked how long the trip would be. I said it would take the better part of a month. Would I be going? she asked. I said I didn’t know yet. What I didn’t say was that it depended partly on her. Her matter-of-factness upset me. I wanted more from her. I wanted to talk about the jangling inside me that the prospect of going to San Francisco set off. Of the hauntingly strange pull I felt, almost like what had drawn me to her. But I couldn’t. Why was she being so distant? Didn’t she care?
“Whatever is wrong with me, as you put it,” she said a moment later, “you are likely the cause.”
I felt stung, as if she’d slapped me.
“Your coming to help truly was a miracle,” she added quickly, “but you must know that it brings pressure.”
“From O’Donovan, you mean?”
She looked troubled but said nothing. The silence stretched between us.
“Is it something else?”
Her answer was barely audible. “Knowing that you desire me . . . as a woman . . . it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” I said. “Pressure?”
She nodded, looking down.
“You think I might want you”—a blush crept up her face at that—“and so you feel pressure? That’s all?”
“Samuel, I—”
“Don’t you have desires of your own?”
