“I’m done here.” he said. “Harry caught me out more times that I can count. He gave me every chance.”
“Why couldn’t you stay square, Dick?” said Andy.
“I don’t know.” His words were slurred. “Maybe I’m just not one to prosper. God knows, I scarcely think about anything else—but I have no answer. The drink’s taken hold.”
“You know,” I began, my heart going out to him, “I’ve had some problems with the stuff too, and—”
“Let it be, Sam,” he interrupted. “It’s all done.”
He left that night, a solitary figure on the late train. We accompanied him to the depot. He said he’d scout around his hometown in Pennsylvania, maybe get a teaching job, play local ball till he could hook up with a top club again. We wished him well and told him he’d be missed on the Stockings.
“Beware the hold of those bright leggings on you,” he said.
“Horses are tied by the head; dogs and bears, by th’ neck;
monkeys by th’ loins, and men by th’ legs . . .”
He waited for me to guess.
I cleared my throat and played his game one final time. “Macbeth?”
“The Fool,” he said, “in Lear.”
He waved once from the train. I waved back, hoping I would see him again. As things turned out, I would not.
Sunday was the Fourth of July, but in these God-fearing times no celebrating would occur until the following day. I slept late, dozing over a copy of Dickens’s Dombey and Son I had borrowed from the Mercantile Library.
I dreamed of Andy’s two sisters. I kept trying to see them close up, but each time I did their features were those of Stephanie, my ex-wife.
Enough, I told myself, and got up.
It was a large two-story frame house with wisteria climbing over a jigsaw-piece veranda. It sat in the middle of a block not far from the Sixth Street marketplace in the West End. Andy and I took a horsecar out Eighth and walked the remaining blocks. He led me through the front door and sat me down in a small parlor. There I waited with growing nervousness as he went upstairs to get Cait.
Around me were houseplants, a small reed organ, horsehair chairs. Framed on the wall opposite was a large scroll decorated with an Irish harp, sunburst, and wreath of shamrocks. Inscribed in the center was an inscription I took to be Gaelic.
A cutting voice behind me said, “‘They shall never retreat from the charge of lances!’”
I wheeled around to find a dark-suited, mustached man with penetrating blue eyes standing in the parlor doorway. The eyes seemed to pierce me. I was vaguely aware of a woman and a boy behind him.
“What?” I said.
“You were trying to read it,” he said, jabbing a finger impatiently at the scroll. The gesture matched his aggressive tone; his voice was knife-edged, a weapon. “‘They shall never retreat from the charge of lances!’” His fixed stare challenged me.
I felt myself bristling. “How quaint of them.”
As if I’d physically threatened him, he recoiled into an even more rigid stance, the ice-blue eyes flashing. I met his stare with my own.
Andy edged into the parlor and shot me a look that said he didn’t like the guy either. “I didn’t introduce you proper the other night,” he said, drawing the woman in. “Sam, this is my sister Cait.” He nodded toward me and said, “Sam Fowler.”
She wore a dark dress and a hat with a veil. Through it I saw gray-green eyes and a pale face. She stood very still, nearly as tall as Andy and the other man.
“Mr. Fowler,” she murmured.
“Nice to see you again,” I said. My brain was doing odd blippy little things. “Call me Sam.”
“She certainly will not!” snapped the man.
Andy looked pained. “Sam, this is Mr. O’Donovan.”
“Captain Fearghus O’Donovan, sir!”
So this was O’Donovan. My pulse danced faster, more irregularly. “Right,” I said, and turned to the boy. He was about seven or eight, a good-looking kid with alert gray eyes and his mother’s black curly hair. He wore short pants, a jacket and tie. His Sunday best, I thought. All three of them, in fact, looked spruced up. For what? I wondered, and said to the boy, “You call me Sam, okay? What’s your name?”
“Tim O’Neill,” he said forthrightly. “Are you a ballist, like Andy?”
“Not like Andy,” I told him. “Andy’s the best—an ace. Are you coming out to see us?”
I saw I’d dropped a conversational bomb. The boy looked beseechingly at his mother, who said nothing. Andy shifted his feet uncomfortably. O’Donovan, whose face had darkened when I snubbed him, looked grimmer yet.
“I want to,” the boy said. “At school they talk of nothing else but the Red Stock—”
“Timothy, mind yourself!” said O’Donovan, glaring at him. “You know your mother’s wishes. We’re not here to talk of a game.”
Why are we here? I wondered.
“Fearghus,” she said, “would you wait with Tim a bit?”
“Caitlin,” he said heatedly, his pronunciation echoing Mrs. Leonard’s “Cat-LEEN.” “It’s not proper that you be left alone with this . . . gentleman.” The word sounded wrenched from him.
“It’s not alone I’ll be,” she replied, and for the first time I heard a touch of brogue. “Andy will stay. It’s a family matter, Fearghus, please.”
He turned reluctantly, reaching for the boy’s hand. Timmy ignored him and walked ahead toward the door.
“Cait, why not let the lad come out to the grounds?” Andy said. “It’s all in fun.”
“I’ll not have it discussed,” she said. The words were severe, but her voice held a timbre that intrigued me, a low, throbbing, restrained urgency that I found inexplicably familiar, holding some tonal quality that resonated deep within me.
She reached up and removed her hat, revealing a dark curling mass of hair held by several green ribbons. I saw her features clearly for the first time. Where Andy’s eyes were emerald, hers were jade, long-lashed, far less open to the world than his. Her nose was straight and
