I had a bad moment: a sense of being wrenchingly dislocated, cut off, abandoned. This was the first place I’d come back to that I’d known at all well. While writing a feature on Vietnam vets I’d become familiar with the capital and could picture the way it had looked. That picture was jarringly out of sync with what I saw that night: I scarcely recognized the White House without its wings. The Old Executive Office Building wasn’t yet built. Nor the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials. No reflecting pools, no shimmering lights. The broad streets were dirty, the buildings shabby. If ever I felt culture shock, it was then.
“What’re you fretting so hard over?” said Andy.
“Even if I told you, it wouldn’t make sense.”
“You rile me saying things like that,” he said hotly. “Go ahead, try me!”
“All right,” I snapped. “I’m thinking that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial isn’t here. And that it’s crazy for me to know about that.”
There was silence.
“You’re right,” he said at length. “I don’t make sense of it. It is crazy.”
He sounded hurt. I felt bad about that. But I was too low just then to do anything about it.
We spent four days in the so-called City of Magnificent Distances. My spirits did not rise very far. It seemed that I was adjusting all over again. Road weariness didn’t help. We’d all had enough touring. It would end soon—this was the last major city—but for me, unlike the others, reaching Cincinnati would only pose a new set of problems.
We were celebrities here, as in Baltimore. The Washington Republican called our eastern swing the greatest baseball tour ever. At all hours the staff of Willard’s shooed rubberneckers from the lobby. People massed outside for autographs.
The players sat for another picture, at Mathew Brady’s studio a few blocks up Pennsylvania. The walls there were covered with photos of corpse-strewn battlefields and steely-eyed Civil War officers. A Brady assistant made the portrait. The only notable changes in the Stockings since Newark were tonsorial: Andy had a two-week-old mustache; Sweasy and Mac showed the beginnings of brushes; Gould had shaved his goatee off so that he too wore only a mustache. With so many models around, I’d decided to raise my own crop of whiskers and had not shaved for several days. Once again I declined being in the portrait.
Waterman and Sweasy hid Brainard’s baseball shoes so well that in desperation he borrowed mine for the picture. In it he sits on the floor, one oversized shoe pointing upward with spikes attached—I had misplaced the key to unscrew them—while Waterman and Sweasy barely repress smirks.
We were scheduled for two games. On a ninety-degree Friday we faced the Nationals at their new grounds on upper Fourteenth. A crush of traffic made surrounding streets impassable. Trees and rooftops, including that of the State Department across the street—it was situated temporarily in the Orphan Asylum—were crawling with spectators. We waited. And waited. Tempers grew short. People collapsed on the baking turf. Politicians droned floridly. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish was mercifully brief—he must have been a wretched orator—in his enthusiasm for the national game. The entire British legation was introduced. By then nearly ten thousand had assembled—another record smasher—and Champion was all smiles; no more complaints about gate receipts.
While we waited I asked Millar if baseball went back as far here as in New York and Philadelphia. He said that teams of clerks had faced off on the “White Lot” behind the White House before the war. Lincoln himself had reputedly played, once stalling reporters with, “Wait until I make another hit.” But with the proliferation of teams after the war, Andy Johnson had chased everybody off—hence these new grounds. In ’67, having recruited George and Brainard among other stars, the Nationals were easily the nation’s best team. Touring westward they crushed the Stockings 53-10, a “Waterloo defeat,” Millar said, that had inspired Champion’s dream of assembling a western powerhouse.
By four we were ready to play. The contest boiled down to our hitting against the Nats’ fielding. They contained us fairly well but mounted no offensive threat. Not a single Nat reached second base until the fifth inning, and by then we were up 13-0.
It was about then that we began showboating.
Told that a slugger had plunked an omnibus in the street outside the ballpark the previous year, George said that wasn’t so much. He promptly smashed a drive over the fence in left center. That set the tone for the rest of the afternoon, everybody but Andy and Harry muscling up. As a consequence the Nats’ left fielder, one Sy “War-horse” Studley, hauled in fly after fly. But George powered another homer, and we won easily, 24-8.
Saturday dawned cloudy and threatening. The Nats showed up with a coach drawn by six horses draped in robelike ornamental skirts called caparisons, which made them look as if they’d clopped out of a medieval pageant. Our escorts looked a bit smug and secretive as we pulled up at the White House. I assumed we were in for a long-winded tour as a clerk ushered us into a large office. There, to my surprise, behind an oversized desk, smoking a cigar nearly as dark as his wrinkled black suit, sat President. Ulysses S. Grant.
He was smaller and grayer than I expected. The hero of Vicksburg and bludgeoner of Lee’s armies, sworn in as President only three months ago, he was destined to become one of the worst in history—epic achievements all. His washed-out gray-blue eyes regarded us blandly, betraying nothing but a fleeting hint of humor when he said, “I believe you warmed the Washington boys
