“Shh,” Hope told her sternly.
“What?” I said.
“Mommy says we must tell her if you start acting funny,” Susy said.
“It’s okay,” I said to Hope, who looked mortified. Disappointment burned in me, but I was surprised that the milkiness had been so close. So attainable. “That would certainly be a very good thing to tell Mommy.”
“Well, are you?” Susy persisted.
I gave her a squeeze. “Daddy’s fine.”
“Not funny?”
“No, not funny.”
I found a history of theater that included early burlesque performers. In a chapter dealing with the British Blondes I found a stagy photo of Elise Holt. She didn’t look nearly so sexy as in person. Maybe my taste had already modernized. What shocked and saddened me were the parenthesized dates beneath her picture: 1847-1873. Twenty-two when I had known her. She died only four years after. No cause was given.
The account mentioned Holt’s feud with the Advertiser. I smiled as I remembered her encounter with Marriott.
On an impulse I looked for material on the Avitor. A thick history of California aviation offered the information that it had made the first lighter-than-air flight in the western hemisphere on July 2, 1869. Despite setbacks with creditors, Marriott and his backers had raised enough money by 1875 to push ahead with plans for an “aeroplane.” Eventually a company was formed to produce a triplane to be called the Leland Stanford. But a crushing blow fell in ’83, when the Patent Office rejected it as an impossibility. Profoundly hurt and discouraged, Marriott died the next year.
I closed the book, depressed. For the first time I realized—emotionally—that they were all dead. They had been dead for a long time. Longer than my grandparents.
Dead.
I phoned the National Baseball Library at Cooperstown and learned that they had biographical files on thousands of ball players.
“What about the early ones?” I said.
“How early?”
“The ’sixty-nine Red Stockings.”
“Oh, well, that’s a famous bunch, you know. I imagine we have more on them than most others from that era. You weren’t kidding, were you? Those are real old-timers.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I pictured Andy, George, Mac, Allison—young, fresh-faced, exuberant, loving their music and laughter and horseplay. I felt infinitely older than all of them.
“You want copies of anything in particular sent out to you?”
“No,” I said. “I want to come and see it all myself.”
One starlit night I lay with the quilt pulled up around me, looking out my window at the Transamerica pyramid glowing even larger than usual. I remembered the Mongomery Block which had stood there. And I thought of Cait, imagining her arms around me, recalling details of our night at Gasthaus zur Rose. Mustn’t let the sense-memories slip away, I thought. They might have to last a long time.
For the first time I seriously considered writing to Hamilton County. Had a marriage certificate been issued to Caitlin Leonard? Perhaps a death certificate, if she’d remained in Cincinnati. If not, then maybe Newark. And there was Timmy, too. Not to mention the possibility of descendants still living.
I started to cry.
I knew I could never write to those places.
But a month later, taking some earned vacation time, I flew to Cooperstown. It is reputedly a charming village, but I didn’t pay much attention. I headed straight for the Baseball Hall of Fame. And my first disappointments.
The plaques of Harry and George aren’t bad—if you can believe that somebody in bronze bas-relief ever actually lived—and it was nice to discover that they were the first brothers in the Hall of Fame.
But so little remained. A single trophy ball, filthy, naturally, from 1869. Another ball—a sad relic, to me—from the Stockings’ loss to the Atlantics in 70. A few faded club ribbons that players wore on their uniform sleeves. A scattering of ornaments and badges; an Eckford banner that brought to mind the hot June afternoon we’d faced them in Williamsburg.
And that was about it. No bats, no uniforms, no trophies. What had happened to Harry’s cups and medals and plaques? To George’s already-impressive collection of silver inlaid bats and victory cups that must have grown enormous over his career?
All gone, I was told. Dispersed to relatives. Lost in fires. Gone.
I spent only one morning in the library. Apart from Harry’s and George’s files, not much existed in the individual Stockings’ folders. What I did find was more than enough.
I skipped over their baseball careers. Only George and Mac played on into the National League era to any extent, after they, with Andy and Spalding and Ross Barnes—the latter two recruited from the Rockfords—had powered Harry’s Boston Red Stockings to four consecutive Professional Association pennants.
Instead I hunted for clues as to how their lives had gone. The fragmentary information I found held few surprises. George founded a sporting-goods company, grew rich, married well, played tennis and golf and cricket, the perennial sportsman. Andy worked for him in his Boston factory.
Mac migrated west and settled in San Francisco—back home again I would phone every McVey in the book but find none related—where he played ball and married; in the ’06 quake his wife was badly injured; there is a touching 1914 letter in his file, written by Allison, then living in Washington, appealing to the National League for aid and medical care on Mac’s behalf, saying a mine accident had left the former star “down and out.”
Waterman and Brainard each married Cincinnati women and eventually deserted them. Sweasy got into trouble on several ball clubs, developed rheumatism that ended his career, and became a huckster in Newark. Gould and Waterman spent their later days in Cincinnati’s West End, scene of their greatest glory, holding menial jobs for the most part. Hurley—how glad I was to find a clipping about him!—played briefly with the Washington Olympics, then drifted home to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, after “getting in dutch” in pro ball, according to hometown sources, who admitted him to be “quite a boozer.” He taught school for a while, captained the Honesdale ball club, and held down second base for
