Chapter 5 Bea

Chapter5 Bea

Dear Kitty, I may actually expire of curiosity: nearly two years I’ve lived at Briarwood House with Bea Verretti, and I still have no idea why she keeps a baseball bat by her door! On the run from the mob? Living in fear of a violent husband? Afraid of the dark? Will I ever know?

I wish you were here. —Grace

Bea slipped on a patch of ice the day after President Eisenhower was inaugurated, and as she hit the ground—as a spike of pain bolted through her bad knee, and every nerve from the crown of her head to the ends of her toes shrieked—she realized what she should have probably realized years ago: she was done. She was never, ever coming back.

“Is MissVerretti crying?” whispered the girls in her eleven a.m. physical education class, but they soon wandered back inside the gymnasium. Bea had been trying to cajole them outside for a game of basketball, but It’s coooooold, MissVerretti and I’m having my time of the month, MissVerretti , and now here she was on her rump on the cracked asphalt, crying, as her class went inside to file their nails and chatter about the last episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy gave birth at the same time Lucille Ball gave birth, and hadn’t it all just been to die for. People said more viewers had tuned in for “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” than for the presidential inauguration the next day, Bea remembered hearing on the radio. Certainly her batch of thirteen-year-olds had, these snotty little misses who refused to break a sweat in their gym slips and apparently had their periods three weeks out of every month.

I am never getting out of here , Bea thought, wiping her eyes, massaging her knee, which was still shrieking at her like a postseason umpire with a hangover. I am never going back where I belong. I will be the PE teacher at Gompers Junior High until I rot.

You could come home and get married , her mother’s voice chimed immediately. Artie Aliberti broke things off with Rosa Conti, and he’s always had an eye for you! Oh yes, go home to the North End in Boston and start churning out babies while reminiscing with all the other women about the time the altar had been set up in North Square for a procession in honor of Saint Rosalie, che bellissima . Bea would rather take a bat to her own temple.

She managed to limp inside as the bell rang and her class clattered off to the locker room. Lunch hour—Bea had a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper but she ignored it, heading for the principal’s office. His secretary had the desk outside, and the woman was off getting her hair done ( the only thing that would shift her ass out of that chair , Bea thought), so the telephone was unattended. Bea put the call through to a suburb in Kalamazoo, smiling despite herself as the forthright voice came down the line: “Bea Verretti, you lazy tramp, how are you?”

“Not bad, you slack-jawed cow.” She could almost hear Elizabeth’s answering grin on the other end. Elizabeth Bandyk, who’d come up with Bea at Chicago tryouts in ’43, both of them eighteen years old and ready to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks. Elizabeth Bandyk had been known as the South Bend Bandit, and Bea Verretti the Swinging Sicilian, by the end of their first season. “Getting ready for spring training?” Bea asked, perching her hip on the desk to take the weight off her knee.

“Keeping the arm loose, working on my slider. Still drops like a deck chair over home plate, but I have to ice my elbow afterward for an hour.” Elizabeth laughed that big raucous laugh, the one that sounded so incongruous coming from such a delicate little blonde. It was Elizabeth’s looks as much as her killer fastball that got her onto the South Bend Blue Sox with Bea that first year in ’43, where she’d stayed as Bea moved on through various other teams. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the AAGPBL, wanted its players to look a certain way, as well as play a certain way. Bea and Elizabeth hadn’t cared; they were just there for the game. “When did we get old?” Elizabeth demanded now. “Every spring I see these rookie girls hardly dry behind the ears, all their joints brand-new off the factory floor...”

Bea looked down at her swollen knee. Just a twenty-eight-year-old knee; how could it have failed her like this? Twenty-eight wasn’t old! “Liz, I’m not going to be there at spring training.”

A pause on the other end. Not, Bea thought, a surprised pause.

She gripped the telephone receiver harder. “You don’t seem shocked.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Bea, that break was bad.”

“No, it wasn’t.” A late-season game against the Rockford Peaches, a hard slide into second on a short hopper—Bea had run a play like that hundreds, thousands of times, from sandlot ball as a kid all the way to her years in the league with the South Bend Blue Sox, the Racine Belles, the Fort Wayne Daisies. Why had that one slide been different, her left knee giving way with an audible crack as loud as a curveball connecting with a bat’s barrel? “I should have been playing by the next season.”

“You thought that, Bea.” Quietly. “Everyone else knew you were done.”

Bea flinched. “Don’t be a bitch.” People would be surprised, hearing how the league women swore. They knew how to present themselves—carefully curled hair under their baseball caps, red lipstick, crisply skirted uniforms, and demure handshakes right out of Helena Rubinstein charm school—but on the field and in the locker room they could cuss like sailors.

“I’m not being a bitch. I’m being a realist. I tried to tell you then, so did the doctor, so did your manager. You didn’t want to hear it.”

Bea ruffled a hand through her hair—the black hair she’d started growing out again in preparation for spring training; league players had to have long hair. “I thought for sure I’d be back this year,” she said softly. The Swinging Sicilian, back in the game. She wasn’t even Sicilian, but the nickname still stuck. Because with a bat in her hand she was unstoppable; she could put the best fastball in the league on the goddamn moon .

And now her bat stood leaning up against her apartment door in Briarwood House.

“You had eight years, Bea. It was a good run.”

It wasn’t enough , she wanted to scream. “I was hoping for one more,” she managed to say, trying to make a joke out of it.

“One more might be all any of us gets.” Elizabeth hesitated on the other end of the line. “The crowds aren’t what they were. There’s talk of shutting the league down.”

“They’ve been saying that from the beginning,” Bea scoffed.

“Well, this time it feels serious. It’s not just the old girls shouldn’t play griping, it’s cutting down on equipment, it’s cuts in the budget...”

She went on, and Bea forgot all about the throb in her knee. No AAGPBL? Even if it had been agony these past two seasons, knowing her friends were playing without her, at least she’d known they were playing . Were the higher-ups really just going to send all those women home?

No league. No cramped locker rooms, wandering around in brassieres and the uniform undershorts, icing bruises and gossiping about the opposing team. No infield chatter as you bounced from foot to foot waiting to shovel up a grounder. No team bus rattling them between away games, no darning knee socks and sponging stains off uniform skirts in makeshift hotel rooms, no sneaking around the chaperones to go out drinking after curfew. No easy identity: “I’m a Daisy” “I’m a Peach” “I’m a Belle.”

If she wasn’t any of those things, what was she?

The door to the principal’s office creaked, yanking Bea’s roiling thoughts back to the present. “Gotta go,” she whispered to Elizabeth. “Keep working that slider, long as they’ll let you throw it—” and she got the receiver down just in time.

“Beatrice,” breathed Mr.Royce. “What can I do for you today?” The Gompers principal put a hand on her shoulder the way he always did, so he could stand just a bit too close for comfort. His eyes were bright with dislike. Bea couldn’t figure out which he wanted more—to get his hand down her blouse, or fire her.

“Nothing at all, Mr.Royce.” Sliding out from under his hand and stretching to her full height. Bea was nearly a head taller than her boss, and she knew he hated it. “Just stopped by to borrow something from your secretary.”

“A lipstick?” Mr.Royce chuckled. “You ladies and your beauty products!”

“A Band-Aid. I was showing the girls how to throw windmill style for softball”—demonstrating, with just enough of a whip in her elbow to force him back a step—“and I caught my thumbnail and tore it halfway off. Blood everywhere, look—”

“That won’t be necessary.” Edging back some more.

“Nothing like what I used to get in my league days! I tell you about the time I broke my bat against a fastball from a Kenosha Comet pitcher, and one of the splinters went clear through my forearm? Ran all the way to third with a stand-up triple, spraying blood the whole way—”

“I hope you don’t tell these gruesome stories to your students. And really, softball doesn’t need to be part of the curriculum for the young girls of Gompers. Something more ladylike. Tennis, perhaps.”

Have you heard the way tennis players grunt? Bea thought. Ladylike as all get-out! “Yes, Mr.Royce,” she managed to say.

“I’ve told you before, you may call me Eugene,” he chided. “At least when there are no pupils around! And you need to change back out of shorts into a skirt after class, Beatrice, I’ve spoken to you about that. The dress code for our staff’s females—”

“I’m in physical education, Mr.Royce. I need to be able to demonstrate anything athletic.”

“Well, now. How athletic do we really want our young ladies to be?” Chuckle, chuckle. Bea just looked at him, wishing she could cram his tie clip up his nose. If she did that she’d be fired for sure, but how much did she want this job anyway? And how far could she get it up his nose? Three inches at least, before she hit the wind tunnel he had for a brain?

You aren’t qualified to work anywhere else , she reminded herself. She hadn’t even finished her senior year of high school when she’d quit to play shortstop for the AAGPBL. No, if she lost this job it was back home to Boston and her mother’s matchmaking.

“Oh, and Beatrice?” Mr.Royce’s hand descended on her shoulder again, damply. “We’ll be needing you to fill in for MissFerguson’s afternoon class, now she’s quitting to get married. You ladies, running for the hills as soon as you get that ring on your finger!” Chuckle, chuckle. “I can’t deny she’s left us shorthanded, but you’ll do fine for the spring semester.”

Bea blinked. “Me, teach a class?”

“Relax, my dear.” A squeeze of her shoulder, fingers now draping over her collarbone. “It’s not like I’m asking you to teach algebra!”

Bea’s heart sank. “...What’s the class?”

“Home economics?” Grace paused a moment, glass of sun tea in hand, then burst out laughing.

“It’s not funny,” Bea objected, but too late: the Briar Club’s collective funny bone had been set off. Nora giggled into the neck of Grace’s cat, Fliss buried her laughter in Angela’s ruffled romper, even Arlene tittered against her fingertips. Claire flopped all the way onto her back from where she’d been sitting on the floor.

“Kill me now,” she announced. “Bea Verretti, teaching home ec!”

“You’re all dead to me,” Bea said, and that just set everyone off again.

“I’m sure MissVerretti will do just fine,” Arlene’s sharp-faced FBI boyfriend, Harland, called over from the kitchenette area in his Virginia drawl. Arlene hadn’t gotten a ring out of him yet, but she still had her hooks in somehow—Bea couldn’t think of any other reason a man would come over and offer to cook for his girlfriend’s housemates. He stood at the hot plate now, jacket discarded and sleeves rolled up, frying chicken with surprising dexterity. “You took home ec in high school, didn’t you?” he asked Bea.

“I didn’t pay attention. I barely went .” Too busy ditching class for batting practice, or sneaking off school grounds to watch the Red Sox at Fenway. “What do people learn in home ec, anyway?” Bea asked, somewhat desperately. She was supposed to start filling in for Miss Ferguson on Monday.

“Sewing, of course,” said Nora. “How to run up a simple blouse or skirt on your Singer—”

“Housework,” Claire said with a dramatic retch. “How to get stains out of things, polish silver—”

“Household accounting?” Grace suggested. “How to shop on a budget?”

“What is there to learn about not having any money?” Bea wanted to know. “You don’t have any, you buy what little you can afford, it’s not complicated. Why is there a class ?”

“Oh, sweetie, home ec is where you learn the refinements of being a wife,” Arlene cooed. “How to dress nicely, host a party, set a proper table. How embarrassed would you be, not knowing where to set the bread plate and the cake fork if you had your husband’s boss coming for dinner?” Sidelong glance at Harland: Look at me! Excellent wife material over here!

Bea groaned, pulling a bottle of Schlitz out of Grace’s tiny icebox. “Just put me on the DL now. I’m finished.”

“You can do the cooking part at least, can’t you, MissVerretti?” Harland lowered the last floured chicken drumstick into the pan of hot oil with a pair of tongs. “What with this supper club you ladies have had going for what, nearly three years?”

“You know what the Briar Club eats when it’s my turn to cook?” Bea bashed the cap off her bottle. “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I can’t cook a lick.”

The saintly Harland looked disapproving. He probably thought all females emerged from the womb knowing how to cook. Bea grinned and took a swig of beer right out of the bottle, knowing he didn’t really approve of that, either. Or her slacks, or her short hair—a man who wore such unbelievably starched shirts and spoke so respectfully of J. Edgar Hoover undoubtedly liked his women cute and curly. But what was the point of having a straitlaced young FBI agent around if you weren’t going to shock him? “Tastes good, G-man,” Bea said, stealing a crispy fried morsel from the plate of chicken pieces already sitting golden and mouthwatering beside the hot plate. “Maybe you should teach home ec instead of me.”

“Bea,” Arlene said with that don’t you dare mess this up for me edge in her sweet Texas drawl. Bea poked out her tongue, feeling childish, and wandered over to the window. Grace had it cracked open despite the cold; the green-walled room was always warm on Thursday nights with so many of them crammed in. On the walk below, Mrs.Nilsson was bustling out for her Thursday bridge club, stopping to click her tongue disapprovingly at the mellow sound of the saxophone drifting down from Joe Reiss’s window next door. Joe sneaked over for most Briar Club dinners; he must have gotten lost in a new jam. Woodshedding it, he’d say: Gotta woodshed a new tune.

“What?” Bea had asked the first time she heard that.

“You know,” he answered with a shrug of his lean shoulder. “Take it to the woodshed and do some work on it.”

“I didn’t know music was work.”

“You got paid to play a kid’s game, and I’m betting that still counted as work.” Joe was the only one who knew she’d played with the AAGPBL. At first she hadn’t spread it around because Mrs.Nilsson was the type who thought women baseball players were tramps, girls no better than they should be who pranced around fields showing their bare legs to crowds of men—that was what Bea’s own mother had thought—and it seemed better to just introduce herself as the Gompers Junior High gym teacher rather than the former shortstop of the Fort Wayne Daisies with a career batting average of .282. And Bea hadn’t thought she’d be here very long anyway, just long enough for her knee to knit itself together and then back to spring training she’d go...

And now she’d been coming to dinner with these women for more than two years, and they didn’t even know her. Bea Verretti, the team spark plug who had known every last bruise and heartbreak and secret of every one of her teammates while she was playing.

“—waiting for Reka tonight?” Nora was asking, helping herself to more of Grace’s sun tea.

“Reka’s spending a week in New York.” Grace pinned up a loop of golden-brown hair that had escaped her blue-checked bandanna. “Some business with a museum—she went off in a nice new coat.”

“I’d like to know where she could afford a coat with a mink collar,” Arlene speculated.

“I’m just glad she’s got a little money again,” Bea said. Collectively the Briar Club had worried quite a bit about Reka’s finances—Fliss kept finding excuses to make her pots of soup, and Bea had rigged her window sash so her room wasn’t so cold over the winter. But Reka had a real spring-training bounce in her step these days, and she’d put a fiver into the pot for Lina’s new corrective glasses without looking at her wallet in that worried way you did when bank accounts were lean. “You should be glad things are looking up for her, too, Arlene,” Bea added. “Since you’re the one who got her fired from the library in the first place.”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. You told the librarian that Reka was a Commie—”

“I merely let it slip that she had Communist sympathies, which she does , so it wasn’t like I was lying . I had no idea they would fire her, and I told her so. I apologized,” Arlene insisted, looking peevish. “I apologized twice .”

“Maybe that’s good enough for Reka.” The old woman had shrugged at the time; said she didn’t care one way or another if Arlene started wedging herself back into the Thursday night dinners with a casserole dish and an ingratiating smile, but the rest of the Briar Club was still inclined to regard the Huppmobile coldly, Bea included. She believed in nurturing grudges; it was the Italian in her. “Two apologies doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a lousy thing to do, Arlene—”

“What’s the commotion?” Harland asked, coming over with a big heaped platter.

“Nothing,” Arlene said quickly, but Bea overrode her.

“Arlene didn’t tell you this particular story over the pillow? How she got old Mrs. Muller fired from the Smoot Library on suspicion of being a Communist? Shocker. Here, I’ll take some of that.” Bea sank her teeth into a golden-fried chicken breast while Arlene and Harland started whispering and hissing at each other and the rest of the Briar Club nibbled and eavesdropped as hard as they could. It was all very satisfying, but Bea felt a little flat as she licked the last delectable fried crumbs off her lips. She found herself slipping out in the commotion of the Nilsson kids slipping in—“Sorry, had to help Lina finish the corn muffins,” Pete said breathlessly, holding the door as his little sister staggered in with a pan fresh out of the oven, the lenses of her new glasses all fogged up, and Bea snagged a couple as she looped around and headed down the stairs.

“You’re missing out,” she said when Joe Reiss opened the door of his second-floor apartment next door. “Arlene’s G-man made fried chicken, and now if I’m not mistaken he’s breaking up with her.”

“I was auditioning a new drummer.” Joe leaned an elbow on the doorjamb, tenor saxophone hanging around his neck on a loop of cord. “Can’t blame Claude for heading to the Big Apple, but I haven’t found a guy yet who can keep a beat.”

Bea took a big bite of warm corn muffin. “Want some company?”

“Depends.” He tilted his head back to look up at her—like Mr.Royce, he was shorter than Bea; unlike Mr.Royce, Joe didn’t bristle about it. “You bring any more of those muffins? Or are they Lina’s?” he added belatedly.

Bea tossed him one underhand, like she was lobbing an easy grounder to first base. “Yes, but they’re pretty good. Lina finally stopped mixing up the baking powder and baking soda. I think it’s the new glasses—she wasn’t really able to read the labels before, poor kid.” Grace had been the one who took Lina to the eye doctor behind her mother’s back, then passed the hat around the Briar Club to cover the bill. Bea had been fairly broke that week after a trip home to Boston, but she’d still kicked in her last few dollars. The insurance covered the glasses , Grace assured Doilies later, wide-eyed. Isn’t that wonderful? The American experiment in action!

“Huh. Tasty,” Joe said around a mouthful of corn muffin, and he pulled Bea in with an arm around her waist. His room was strewn with sheet music and spare reeds and smelled like fresh bagels and black coffee from Rosenberg’s Deli downstairs. “Come on in, Fort Wayne.” He always called her that, ever since he’d helped her wrestle her mattress upstairs when she moved in next door, and he learned she’d played for the Daisies in the town where he’d grown up. “Only one thing to do when you grow up in a place like Fort Wayne, Indiana,” he’d said, “and that’s move east the minute you can figure out how to read a compass.” Bea hooted, and they’d been rolling around on that mattress pretty much as soon as they got it horizontal and onto the frame.

“You don’t have anyone else dropping by, do you?” she teased after coming up for air from a long kiss. She knew Joe fooled around plenty, but so did she. Why not? They weren’t going steady and never had been. The only difference was, Joe could fool around with all the women he liked, and Bea had to be sneaky about it. But if you’d learned to get around the razor-eyed chaperones hired to keep the league girls in their hotel room beds at night (hah!), getting around Mrs.Nilsson was easier than catching an infield pop-up. “I’d hate to mess up your busy schedule...”

“Only thing on my schedule is opening set at the Amber Club at ten.” Joe’s fingers fluttered the length of her spine like he was stroking saxophone keys. “We got time.”

It was a good couple of hours, and it got Bea out of her head for a while—nothing like working up a sweat if you needed to stop thinking. But as she sauntered back next door, humming “I Got Rhythm” and feeling as nicely played as Joe’s sax, the sensation of flatness came back. Her third-floor room, her favorite bat leaning up against the door, her old Rawlings mitt in the drawer... At the bottom of her bureau, wrapped in tissue paper like a wedding gown, her skirted uniform and cap. And on top of the bureau, the home economics textbook she’d half-heartedly been perusing for Monday. She opened it at random to a table-setting diagram like the one Arlene had lectured them about. “Dessert spoon above the cake fork,” Bea read aloud. “Bread plate to the left, above the salad fork and dinner fork, butter knife placed at ten o’clock across the plate.”

The clock ticked loudly as her voice trailed off. Downstairs, Mrs. Nilsson was coming home from her bridge game, scolding Pete for leaving a pan on the stove. His mumble: Sorry, Mom...

Bea’s voice startled her as she spoke aloud. “I have got to get the hell out of here.”

Harland’s Fried Chicken

5 pounds chicken parts, preferably dark meat or breasts cut into halves 1 to 1 1 / 2 quarts buttermilk

2 quarts vegetable oil 4 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons salt 4 tablespoons paprika 4 tablespoons garlic powder 4 tablespoons black pepper 4 tablespoons white pepper 1 tablespoon cayenne 1 tablespoon onion powder 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 tablespoon baking powder

Place the chicken parts in a large mixing bowl, cover with the buttermilk, and place in the refrigerator for at least 1hour. In a large, deep frying pan, add enough oil to cover the bottom 2inches of the pan and slowly heat. Do not allow the oil to smoke.

Combine the flour and all remaining ingredients in a large mixing bowl, and mix well. Prepare a landing zone for the floured chicken, usually a large baking sheet, and a rack for the chicken once it’s fried.

Remove a piece of chicken from the buttermilk bath, shake the excess buttermilk off, and dredge it in the spiced flour mixture, then use tongs to set it aside on the baking sheet. Repeat until all pieces are dredged in flour and coming to room temperature.

Once the oil reaches 350°F on a cooking thermometer, or when a piece of bread fries golden when dipped in the hot oil, re-dredge 1piece of chicken in flour to ensure an even coating and place it into the hot oil. If there is excessive splattering, remove the pan quickly from the heat and turn the heat down for a few minutes. The oil should sizzle, not splatter and spray.

Allow the chicken to cook approximately 4 minutes per side, a little longer for larger pieces. Once done (it should just slip off a fork), remove it to the prepared rack to rest and keep warm. Repeat with all remaining chicken pieces. Do not allow the chicken to cool too much (if it does get cold, refry it quickly in the oil), but chicken should rest at least 10 minutes before serving. Eat among friends, without caring whether the table has cake forks or bread plates, as long as there are plenty of napkins and Eddie Fisher singing “Wish You Were Here” on the radio.

“Lousy—goddamn— March ,” Bea muttered on her way home from work. February was bad enough: the time of year when her body really started yearning for activity, yearning to throw off the winter coat and run down ground balls—yearning, in short, for spring training. And now it was March, and in the Midwest the rest of the Fort Wayne Daisies were limbering up for the season: brushing off rusty double-play moves, taking practice swings in the batting cage, running laps with the springtime zest of a body that had rested all winter, shaken off last season’s nagging shoulder strain or bruised kneecap, and come back ready and eager to play.

Bea’s body hadn’t learned yet that she wasn’t going to spring training, that all her spring fever energy had nowhere to go.

“Say, MissBea!” Pete called excitedly as Bea came through the garden gate. He was clearing the weeds out of his mother’s vegetable patch, rearing back on his heels as she paused on the path up to the house. “Did you hear the news? Joseph Stalin is dead!”

Good for Joseph Stalin , Bea thought grumpily. Right now she envied him. She’d spent six weeks thinking I’ve got to get out of here , and that thought had led exactly nowhere; no ideas at all about how a failed baseball player could conceivably reshape her life once her playing days were over. Why didn’t she just go ahead and drop dead like Uncle Joe?

“They’re calling it a crippling blow to Reds everywhere as the Kremlin totters,” Pete said, clearly quoting the radio. “I can’t remember who they said is going to succeed him. All those Russian names sound alike—”

“Pete, it’s a beautiful spring afternoon. Go throw a baseball around the sandlot like every other boy in America, and let the Reds handle themselves.” Bea knew she was being a pill, but right now she hated anybody who had the ability to play ball who wasn’t doing it. Come to think of it, she hated the ones who were doing it, too.

“I have to get the tomato plants going in the greenhouse for Mom.” Not enough for Doilies that her old Victory Garden took up most of the yard; she’d had Pete laboring a full three weeks after Christmas this winter putting up a small greenhouse out back so she could get her seedlings going before anyone else in the neighborhood. Or rather, so Pete could get them going for her. Not that he’d get to eat any of those early tomatoes once they ripened, Bea thought, oh no. Mrs.Nilsson would sell everything to the corner store this spring at a stiff markup. “My dad used to play catch with me every spring when the nights got long,” Pete said, looking wistful. “He’d throw and throw for hours...”

Bea felt her snappishness subside. “Maybe he’ll come home this summer for a game or two,” she said, trying to sound encouraging.

Pete’s face shuttered. “Don’t want him to,” he said, bending back over the garden patch and yanking a weed out with unnecessary force. “He hasn’t been around for years. I don’t want him around now.”

Yes, you do , Bea thought, but didn’t say aloud. “Come knock on my door when you’re done with those seedlings, then. I’ll get my mitt and we’ll play some catch.”

“After the greenhouse chores I have to trim the backyard hedge and take the garbage out,” he rattled off. “Then find that candy dish that went missing from the parlor, or Mom’ll get mad.”

Pete, Bea had often thought, was really batting zero when it came to parents. “Tell you what, I’ll tell your mom I lost that candy dish and that’ll buy you some time. Knock on my door when you’re done in the garden.” Boys his age thought themselves too tough and manly for a pat on the shoulder, so she punched his arm encouragingly and headed inside.

Where she saw Grace March passed out dead drunk at the foot of the stairs.

“ Grace? ” Bea whispered, flabbergasted. She’d never even seen Grace tipsy before: the woman could drink a stevedore under the table without slurring a single word. But Grace was very definitely drunk now, curled up on the floor in her green print skirt and ballet flats, head pillowed on the very bottom riser of the staircase, stinking of brandy. Bea rushed to her side, saying, “Did you fall?”

“Mmmm.” Grace looked up, muzzily. “No... I came in the back door so Doilies wouldn’t catch me. Hic. Too many stairs, so I thought I’d take a l’il nap...”

Her head started sinking. “Oh, no you don’t.” Bea caught her arm and began hauling her up. “If Doilies catches you smelling like a brewery, there’ll be hell to pay. Come on—”

“She’s gone,” Grace whispered, letting her arm flop bonelessly over Bea’s shoulders. Her mascara was smeared down her cheeks as if she’d been crying. “Bea, she’s gone —”

“Mrs.Nilsson? Never mind, just get up the stairs—”

Bea managed to haul Grace’s dead weight up to the second-floor landing when Claire came down the stairs in her stocking feet, looking rumpled despite her secretarial blouse and skirt. “Whew,” she whistled, sniffing the alcohol fumes. “Did she take a bath in Old Hennessy?”

“Help me get her back to her room before Nilsson sees.”

Together they managed to wrestle Grace up the stairs. The staircase was light and airy now instead of drab and ill-lit—Grace and Pete had painted it up a bit at a time, that warm buttercream color she’d cajoled Mrs.Nilsson into approving, and the Briar Club was gradually extending the flowered wall vine down, daisies and violets and roses flowing over the line of the banister. Right now, the vine had grown just past the third-floor landing. “Of course she’d have to live on the top floor,” Claire panted as they heaved Grace up the last flight.

“This is nothing,” Bea panted back, thinking of the time she’d hauled a passed-out right fielder up to the sixth floor of a Chicago hotel in a fireman’s carry, without the chaperone suspecting a thing. The three of them fell through the door into Grace’s green-walled room, Bea and Claire managing to flop her gently onto the narrow bed.

“She’s gone,” Grace kept mumbling, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “She’s gone , and now he’s gone...”

“Who’s she talking about?” Bea wondered, grabbing a dish towel and heading for the bathroom.

“Who knows?” Claire looked speculative. “We don’t exactly know very much about Grace, do we?”

That was true, Bea reflected, wringing out the dish towel. The hostess of their weekly suppers always listened, but never seemed to require listening in turn. “‘She’s gone,’” Bea quoted, coming back in to lay the wet cloth over Grace’s forehead. “Nora said she saw Grace with a picture of a kid once, a little girl. I wonder if—” Bea broke off as Grace rolled onto her back, catching her by the shoulder and turning her back on her side. “Got to keep her on her side in case she chucks up all that brandy in her sleep.”

“You’ve looked after a few drunks in your day,” Claire said with some amusement. A tendril of red hair escaped its coil and she jabbed it back in place.

The first year my team won the championship, we all went out and got absolutely snockered after the game, Bea thought. Twenty-four women tearing up the town, blitzed out of their minds, even the ones who didn’t usually drink. By morning they’d all been holding back each other’s hair and passing out... God, that had been a good night! Elizabeth Bandyk climbing on a tabletop to sing the “Victory Song” at the top of her lungs; a shy brunette center fielder from Peoria dragging Bea into a kiss like a python, nearly swallowing her down. Bea didn’t usually go for girls, but she’d kissed back and kissed back hard, absolutely blotto on champagne and victory. What a night. Screw the hangover.

“One of us should stay and watch Grace,” she said, pushing aside the memories as Claire headed for the door. “In case she rolls over again.”

“Feel free. I’ve got things to do—”

“You know she could choke. I’ll sit for half an hour, then I promised I’d run to the park with Pete. Spell me then?”

Claire looked over her plump shoulder. “I already helped you get her up the stairs, and that was just so I didn’t have to hear old Nilsson shrieking and carrying on—”

“I’ll see you in half an hour,” Bea overrode her. Because the thing about Claire was that she bitched a lot whenever she was asked to help, but she still tended to show up and actually help . She’d pitched in for Lina’s glasses, too, just like the rest of them. “You’re more of a team player than you like to let on, Hallett,” Bea told her.

“I am not.” Claire’s voice drifted back as she vanished into the hall. “I am a lone wolf and I walk alone—”

“Just walk your lonesome rear back up here in thirty minutes,” Bea yelled after her, then looked back down at Grace. “What on earth got into you today?” she wondered aloud.

“She’s gone,” Grace was still mumbling, three-quarters asleep.

“Who is she?” Bea asked. Why did they all know so little about Grace? No family visits in these past few years; no references to sisters or brothers or parents; no photographs in this tiny apartment—not the picture of the little girl Nora claimed to have seen, not a single image of Grace’s dead husband. Did anyone even know his name? Bea, looking around this cheerful room with its crisp curtains and flooding sunshine, didn’t think she did. Grace made her environment so colorful and welcoming, it took you forever to realize she also kept it a complete and utter blank slate. “Who’s she , Grace?”

Grace opened her eyes slowly, blinked even more slowly. Didn’t answer.

Bea tried again. “Who’s he , then? ‘She’s gone and now he’s gone—’ You mean your husband?”

Grace’s whisper-thin smile cut like a razor. “Oh, him,” she mumbled. “Good riddance.” And she passed out.

“MissVerretti?”

Bea turned, digging into her paper bag of roasted peanuts. “G-man,” she greeted Harland Adams, who looked ready for work in his narrow tie and gray suit but wasn’t at work at all—he was here in Griffith Stadium, presumably to watch the Senators play the Yankees. “Playing hooky?” Bea asked. “Or are you ferreting out Communist plots in the bleachers?”

“Playing hooky,” he admitted, taking off his sharp-brimmed fedora and running a hand over his close-cropped hair.

“Not a very nice day for it.” Bea tilted her head back at the swirling clouds overhead, threatening rain. Cold wind tugged at her jacket (it was April now) but the stadium was still a beauty even without sunshine: compact and irregular, the grandstands smelling like peanut shells and chewing gum, the field smelling of grass and chalk. The best perfume in the world , Bea thought.

“It’s gusty, but it feels good to me.” Harland Adams sniffed the wind like a fox. “The bureau offices get mighty stuffy on an April day. You playing hooky too?”

“Grace’s new fling works for the Senators somehow, so she said he could get me in anytime. And with my entire PE class apparently on their period and half the sewing machines in my home ec class on the DL with the Singer equivalent of pitcher’s elbow, you’re goddamned right I’m playing hooky.” Harland looked startled at the word period , and even more startled at her language, but Bea just grinned. “I’m also here to hex the Yankees,” she added. “I don’t want them winning a fifth consecutive title, and I figured I’d need to get the ill will going early this season. Last year I waited till summer, and three months of spite was just not enough to derail that win record.”

“Lordy, MissVerretti. What have you got against the Yankees?” To Bea’s surprise, he fell in beside her as she began making her way toward her seat.

“I grew up in Boston. North End.” Bea twisted sideways to get around a cluster of men fiercely arguing batting averages. “You’re born within a hundred square miles of Fenway Park, hatred for the Yankees comes in with your mother’s milk.”

“No Sox hat, though.” He nodded at her well-worn cap with FW in the center. “What team is that?”

“Fort Wayne Daisies,” Bea said brusquely and got absorbed finding her seat. She expected Arlene’s beau would tip his hat and scram, but he lounged along behind.

“Mind if I tag along?”

“Arlene probably would,” Bea threw over her shoulder, edging into her row. “She doesn’t like it when anyone plays with her toys.”

He cleared his throat. “I, um. Arlene and I aren’t keeping company anymore.”

Bea burst out laughing. “Congratulations on your escape!”

“She’s a very fine young lady.” Stiffly. “I’m not implying any fault on—”

“She’s a bitch on wheels, and she’d have made your life a living hell.” Bea flopped down in her seat, just a row or two behind the presidential box by the first base dugout. Ike had thrown out the first pitch from that box on opening day; Bea had listened on the radio.

Harland looked around at the prime view. “MissVerretti, is this your seat?”

“Who’s going to kick me back to the bleachers? The stadium’s half empty. And quit calling me MissVerretti,” Bea added. “I get enough of that at Gompers.”

“Then make it Harland ,” he said, passing Bea a pencil for her scorecard as he sat down. “Not G-man . Is that Masterson on the mound?”

“Stobbs. Manager thought the Yankees would have more trouble with a southpaw,” Bea said as Chuck Stobbs went into his windup and the game got underway. “Look, you don’t have to hang around with me just to be polite.”

“A lady at a ballpark alone may be exposed to rougher elements of society—” he began.

“Don’t you give me that, G-man. Ballparks are home to me.” Unexpectedly, Bea felt her eyes sting. I have to get out of here , the words still drummed in her veins, but the only place she wanted to go was a ballpark.

His eyes went back to her cap. “Fort Wayne Daisies,” he said slowly. “One of the women’s league teams? You played?”

She twirled an imaginary bat. “Bea Verretti, the Swinging Sicilian.”

“Are you Sicilian?”

“No, Neapolitan originally. But it sounded good, and I sure could swing.” Still can , she thought.

“You miss it,” Harland said. A statement, not a question.

“Of course I miss it . Who wouldn’t? We didn’t get big stadiums like this, and we didn’t get paid anything like what the Senators do, but it was still baseball. It was still getting paid, every day, to play a game I’ve loved since I was four. Of course I miss it .”

She didn’t know why she was biting his head off. He was being perfectly pleasant, if a little condescending. Rougher elements of society , really. Any rougher elements came at Bea here, she’d grab the nearest bat and flatten ’em with that vicious short-porch swing that could deposit a fastball over the fence. She joined the smatter of applause as Stobbs sat his third batter down, and the Senators loped in toward the dugout.

“Must have been nice having a job you loved,” Harland said. “Most people aren’t so lucky.”

“Don’t you love yours?” Bea raised an eyebrow. “Worshipping at the altar of J. Edgar Hoover?”

“He’s a great man,” Harland said automatically. But he rotated his fedora between his hands, keeping his gaze on the hatband.

“You always want to be an FBI agent?” Bea tried to picture little Harland Adams with a plastic toy badge, towheaded and gap-toothed. “Shooting it out with Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd? Junkballer ,” she hollered toward the field as Eddie Lopat took the mound for the Yankees.

Harland grinned, and the smile made something unexpected out of that lean, foxlike face. “What I really wanted to do was play second base for the Senators.”

“Second base, not bad. I was shortstop with the Daisies—I could shovel a grounder to second on a 6–4–3 double play faster than any other girl in the league.”

“See, I had no talent at all. Zero, zip. Tripped over my own shoelaces when I tried out for junior varsity in high school.”

“FBI or bust, then?”

His smile disappeared. “Something like that.”

“And there hasn’t been much in the way of shoot-outs with gangsters,” Bea guessed, handing him her bag of peanuts.

“More like collecting files and keeping tabs on suspected—” Harland paused. “Never mind.”

Junkballer or not, the Yankees pitcher breezed through the first and the Senators went jogging back out toward the field. “You don’t like your job, just quit,” Bea said, watching the great, hateful Mickey Mantle head for the batter’s box.

“Quit the FBI, right. And do what?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” The same question kept Bea up at night: What now? Mantle was limping slightly, she noticed—sprain, tendonitis, charley horse? “I wonder if it haunts him,” she wondered. “What he’ll do when that body gives out and he can’t play anymore.”

“It ever haunt you when you were playing?” Harland tipped the bag of peanuts back in her direction.

“No,” Bea said honestly. “Never occurred to me. Baseball players are made to run and jump and hit and move , and that’s what we do until it comes out of nowhere: the moment when we can’t.”

“Now, I’m a worrier,” Harland confessed. “I spent my whole first six months at the bureau worried I’d never catch Director Hoover’s eye. Well, I did. Want to know how?”

“How?” asked Bea, letting out a hiss as Mickey Mantle worked a walk.

“He came by my desk and said, ‘Strip out of that suit, kid.’” A lopsided smile. “Some group or other had protested that the bureau didn’t have any Negro agents, so on the morning they were coming to the office the director brought his chauffeur up, told the man to put my suit on since we were the same size, and parked him at one of the front desks as one of the FBI’s premier colored agents. He told me to go wait in the nearest closet in my undershorts until everyone had cleared out, then I could get dressed again.”

“That’s a great man?” Bea couldn’t help asking. Even baseball had Negro players now; she’d been lucky enough to see Jackie Robinson play in Ebbets Field and had felt like holding her breath with the privilege of watching him move—all liquid grace and iron composure—in his Dodger colors. Was the FBI really lagging so far behind the times?

Harland shucked a peanut out of its shell. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” he muttered eventually.

“I think you should quit,” said Bea, then had to leap up and yell when the still-limping Mickey Mantle managed to steal second.

“Arlene was always saying I should stick it out till I have more seniority,” Harland said, then gnawed his lip as if he hadn’t meant to say her name. “...How is she doing, anyway?”

“Making life hell for everyone at Briarwood House,” Bea said cheerfully. “Bit Claire’s head off yesterday for using up the hot water, told Pete this morning that his acne made him look like he had chicken pox, told Fliss her husband was probably flirting with floozies over in Tokyo. We’re all just about ready to kill her. You dodged a bullet not marrying that one.”

“I still feel like a bastard,” he burst out, and that was when it clicked for Bea: just why this fellow she barely knew was tagging along, listening to her insult his boss and offend his sensibilities by wearing trousers and cussing at the Yankees. Harland Adams was lonely .

She heaved a sigh. “Tell me all about it. You and Arlene.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” he said, which was what men said when they were about to talk your ear off. Really, men handled heartbreak much worse than women did. Women (as Bea knew, having consoled plenty of teammates through faithless lovers and broken engagements) just cried it out as hard as they could, ate all the cake their listening friends pressed on them, then moved on . Men jutted their chins and insisted they were absolutely fine, nothing wrong at all, absolutely nothing, and after two months of being absolutely fine they were ready to shatter over the nearest consoling shoulder, poor things. So Bea put on her listening face through the next three innings as the Senators and the Yankees traded a run each, and Harland launched into his heartbreak. How he and Arlene had met (“One of those DC parties, all senatorial aides and typing pool girls and junior agents drinking warm white wine and trying to pretend they’re more important than they are”), how he kept meaning to propose after the first year but somehow never had (“Why didn’t I? Arlene was perfect for me, the kind of wife you know will always have the house clean and the kids scrubbed and make the right kind of impression on your boss; they tell us to keep our eyes peeled for girls like that, it’s important for a man’s career”); and then the bust-up (“What you said about her getting old Mrs. Muller fired—she kept saying she hadn’t known it would happen, but she works for HUAC—she had to have guessed. I couldn’t marry someone who would risk a thing like that out of spite, could I? What does that say about her? But breaking things off with a girl when you’ve been going together more than two years, only a cad does that, what does that say about me?”).

“Did you sleep with her?” Bea asked with interest and watched his lean face turn nine shades of pink.

“I am not discussing any such thing,” he said stiffly. “Arlene may not be my girl anymore, but she’s still a lady.”

“You didn’t,” Bea guessed, as Yogi Berra came to the plate in the fifth. “Because you’re the type who’d automatically marry a girl if you slept with her—”

“ Keep your voice down ,” he hissed, clapping a hand over his fedora to keep it from blowing away in the cold breeze. “Jesus Christ—”

“Nobody’s listening, Him included. So you wouldn’t sleep with Arlene, because you’re a gentleman, and on some level you knew that was the steel trap you couldn’t gnaw your way out of. I’ll bet Arlene tried to sleep with you to seal the deal, though.” Bea grinned as he went through all those shades of pink again, clear through to crimson. “She did!”

“I am not —”

“Discussing this, right. Look,” Bea said as Yogi Berra worked a walk. “You’re hurting, G-man. You dated a girl for two years, and you were thinking about the house and the white picket fence and the two kids named Harland Junior and Arlette, and how nice it would be to have someone to cuddle when you come home after a day doing important FBI things like standing in broom closets in your undershorts so the director can pretend he has a Negro agent on the payroll. But you’re going to look back on this and be glad you didn’t leg-shackle yourself to the kind of person who thinks nothing of getting a seventy-one-year-old woman blacklisted out of pure spite.”

Harland blinked a few times. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“I was team captain on the Daisies. You know how many heartbreaks I’ve nursed my girls through? When your star pitcher is melting down like an ice cream cone because her love stopped returning her calls, and it’s the first championship game tomorrow and you need her pitching her best game, you learn to give love advice real fast.” Half the time, of course, Bea’s teammates were sobbing about girlfriends rather than boyfriends because more than half the women in the league, even with their red lipstick and curled hair and short-skirted uniforms carefully designed to pack the stands with men, were what Director Hoover and Joe McCarthy would call deviants . But Bea didn’t think she was going to bring that up.

“I still think I should have...” Harland trailed off.

“Think about it.” Bea took the bag of peanuts back. “You just got out of marrying Arlene Hupp, who might have given you a Harland Junior and a little Arlette but who was never, ever going to cuddle you and make you feel better about having to work for J. Edgar Hoover. And you might feel a little guilty and heartbroken right now but, really, you are going to be fine . Strike him out, you bum!” she hollered toward the Senators pitcher, as Mickey Mantle took ball one.

“Jesus Christ,” Harland said, looking at her in half horror and half appreciation. “The mouth on you—”

“SON OF A BITCH!” Bea erupted, but no one stared or clucked at her because they were all shouting, too, as Mickey Mantle connected with a chest-high fastball. That crack —if you’d ever been a slugger, you knew the sound of a home run by that crack before the ball even left the barrel of the bat. This one was going deep, going yard, the entire stadium knew it. Everyone was on their feet, shouting, heads tipped back, watching the ball rise and rise and rise. Over the left-center-field wall, over the left-field bleachers, caroming off the National Bohemia beer sign and out of the park: the biggest home run Bea Verretti had ever seen in her life.

She flung her arms around Harland Adams as the entire stadium erupted. “ Did you see it —”

“ I saw it —”

“ Five hundred feet at least! ” This one was one for the record books, she could feel it in her bones. Maybe Mantle was a Yankee but Bea couldn’t begrudge him: that soaring home run was a burnished thing of beauty, the greatest goddamned feat of baseball she’d ever seen in her entire life, and at that level teams didn’t matter. Only the beauty did. Maybe some folks didn’t think a home run could be beautiful, the way a snowy mountain or a fiery sunset could be beautiful, but they were wrong. What could you call it but beautiful, a moment when the perfect combination of human skill and drive and determination made a humble piece of cork and yarn and horsehide streak skyward like a homesick angel?

Harland was still holding her off her feet as Mickey Mantle took his home run lap and an entire stadium went insane. “Sorry,” he said, setting her down at last, and Bea took his face in her hands and planted a long smack of a kiss on him.

“That is the biggest home run I’ve ever seen,” she said, laughing. The next batter was already queuing up, but the rest of this game, Bea could tell, was going to be something of an afterthought. “I thought only Babe Ruth could hit like that—”

“He’s got the record,” Harland said, arms still around her waist, and planted a kiss right back on her.

“I know,” Bea said once he let her up for air. “Five hundred and seventy-five feet, Navin Field, 1921. Want to get out of here?”

“Don’t you dare ask me to marry you,” Bea told him at some point between the second time and the third time.

“I should,” he muttered against the hollow of her neck, hand tangled in her sweat-damp hair, tugging her bad knee around his hip. “Jesus Christ, I did not see the afternoon going this way...”

She pulled him closer by his government haircut. “Shut up, G-man.”

By the time Decoration Day rolled around at the end of May, Bea was out of ideas when it came to home ec. “You got me out of a real ninth-inning jam,” she told Fliss, the two of them starting the walk back from Gompers to Briarwood House. “I owe you at least three babysittings for Angela.”

“I will never turn that down.” Fliss laughed, pretty and perfect as ever with her blond hair flipping up under its blue Alice band, her fluffy paisley skirt as crisp as if she’d just whipped it off the ironing board. Bea’s home ec students had hung on her every British-accented word, passing little Angela around like a doll as Fliss showed them how to run up a skirt on the clunky school Singers and get stains out of white blouses so they shone like a Duz Detergent ad. “How are you going to get through the end of the year?” Fliss asked.

“I have no idea.” Bea sighed. Who was there left to ask? Nora had taught a class on how to freshen up your wardrobe on a budget; the girls had swooned over her trim suits. Claire had taught a surprisingly thorough class on household budgeting and how to balance a bankbook. Reka would have come in to teach the girls how to make schnitzel and goulash, but Principal Royce got wind of that (“Our Gompers girls can’t be taught by immigrants , MissVerretti!”). Bea had been falling on Royce’s scolding side a lot lately: today it had been another lecture about neglecting to change from shorts back into her skirt. Bea unbuttoned her sweaty blouse another button now and flapped her collar irritably.

“Are you coming to Grace’s cookout tomorrow?” Fliss asked, swinging Angela along between them as they turned the corner onto Briar. “She thought we should make it a picnic, since it’s Decoration Day. Or Memorial Day, I hear some people are calling it now.”

“Is Mrs.Nilsson going to hover and glare?”

“She’ll be gone all day to a bridge tournament, Pete says.”

“Then I’m in. You know she’s taking that boy out of school? She told me she doesn’t see why he should go back after this summer!” Bea shook her head. She’d hated every minute of school, couldn’t wait to drop out early, but anyone with eyes could see that Pete—bright, eager, curious Pete quoting everybody from Alexandre Dumas to Wernher von Braun—should be soaking up all the classes he could. “He’s going to start full-time at Moonlight Magnolias the minute school’s out, and you can just tell she’s already mentally cashing his paycheck!”

“That bloody ghoul ,” Fliss agreed, as hot under the collar as Bea ever saw her. “Poor Pete. That darling boy deserves better.” The two slanged their landlady all the way home, where they saw Grace halfway up the path to the house, eyeing Mrs.Nilsson’s vegetable patch.

“Those tomatoes,” Grace said with a sigh after greeting Bea and Fliss. “Aren’t they just like rubies on a stem?” Thanks to the backyard greenhouse and Pete’s early planting, Doilies had full-blown tomato plants to put down when everyone else was planting seeds, and a warm spring meant the tomatoes were already hanging ripe and heavy on the vine, red as the knee socks Bea had worn during a brief stint as a Rockford Peach.

“I don’t even like to cook,” said Bea, “and tomatoes like that make me want to start simmering a ragù.” It was the Italian in her: suddenly she could almost smell her mother’s Sunday gravy, pot wafting the scent of tomatoes and rosemary and grilled sausages all day long, the smells of everyone else’s Sunday gravies wafting right back through the whole neighborhood. Those North End housewives could get vicious about ragù, arguing whether the Bolognese version with minced beef was better than the Neapolitan version with sausage, or if the Venetian version without any tomatoes at all took the prize. (The Neapolitan version was the best. Obviously.)

“Pity none of us will get a taste of those tomatoes.” Grace sighed as they all trailed past the vegetable patch into the house. Bea eyed her curiously: relaxed as ever after a day shelving books at the Smoot Library, a smudge of yellow paint on one knuckle from the odd painting jobs she picked up on weekends. Whatever it was that had made her go on that bender back in March, there had been no sign of it since. Grace hadn’t said a word, so neither had Bea. Sometimes your teammates got confessional, sometimes they didn’t.

Decoration Day dawned warm and cloudless, Mrs.Nilsson haranguing Lina in the kitchen before the sun was even fully up. “Lina, stop messing about with that piecrust and clear the table. Pete, get those tomatoes picked so you can sell them off to Mr.Rosenberg tomorrow—”

“I was going to head down to the sandlot for some ball this afternoon, Mom—”

“Tomatoes first. I want those vines picked clean ; you know what we’ll be able to charge for tomatoes out of season?”

Bea knew even as she listened to that fretful, hectoring voice that the idea that had just popped into her head was a bad idea, but she took that bad idea and ran with it like she was stealing home plate. Ran with it the moment Mrs.Nilsson bustled off for her all-day bridge tournament.

“What on earth...” Grace blinked when she answered Bea’s knock.

“Have you got a big pot?” Bea hefted the hem of her sweatshirt, now sagging under the weight of every single ripe tomato that had been plucked from under Mrs.Nilsson’s produce NOT for briarwood house boarders! sign. “We’re making a proper Italian ragù.”

The Decoration Day picnic turned into a party, spilling out of Grace’s room and taking over the kitchen downstairs—which felt much friendlier than it used to. Lina’s constant baking had loosened up the space so it smelled more like sugar than Lysol, and Grace had cajoled permission to plant some flower boxes just outside the kitchen window so now the breezes came through the curtains scented like marigolds and pansies. “It’s pretty in here,” Pete said in some wonder, turning on the radio, “it’s actually pretty—” and Bea slung an arm around his shoulder.

Fliss had brought a friend from church, some endlessly tall, devastatingly elegant woman named Mrs. Sutherland who barely said a word (“My husband took our son out to see fireworks and I pleaded a headache on some ghastly patriotic tea for lawyers’ wives”) but shyly tied an apron over her expensive-looking pink linen dress and washed endless dishes. Joe was doing Gershwin riffs on the saxophone for Lina as she whipped up a pair of surprisingly delicious-looking apple pies. And Bea finally got to clap eyes on Grace’s latest fling, the one who worked for the Senators and was such a convenient font of tickets. He turned out to be a tall, dark-haired, loose-limbed drink of water named JD, one of the assistant pitching coaches, and Grace laughed as she introduced them. “Don’t steal him, Bea!”

“What do you think of the Senators bullpen this year?” Bea demanded immediately, dragging him off into the kitchen so she could keep on stirring her ragù. “Did you used to play? What position...”

“Claire keeps saying her boyfriend is coming and she is lying ,” Arlene was seething, rattling a glass of sun tea. “That girl is too fat to have a boyfriend; who does she think she’s fooling?”

“I met Grace at a poker game,” JD was telling Bea. He was maybe thirty, definitely younger than Grace. Good for Grace , Bea thought. “She took twenty bucks off me, but I got her number, so I can’t regret it too much. She’s got the best poker face in D.C.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” said Bea, stirring. “Any chance you can set up a grill? We don’t have any Italian sausage, but Doilies has some lamb shanks in the icebox...”

“I can lend a hand,” said a Virginia drawl from the kitchen door.

“ Harland ,” Arlene cooed before Bea could react, smile instantly switched on to its highest wattage. “What a surprise!”

Harland Adams, standing in the door with his hat in his hand, went his usual nine shades of red but his voice was apologetic and steady. “It’s good to see you, Arlene, but actually I’m here to see Bea.”

Arlene went white instead of red. The white of a clenched fist , Bea thought, watching from the stove with a grin. Dropping her wooden spoon, Bea jerked her chin at Harland in a get on over here gesture. “Good to see you too, G-man. Come on in and lend a hand.”

“We can’t leave the pot,” she said after the kitchen cleared out and she’d yanked Harland in for a kiss. “Or Arlene will put strychnine in it. Take over stirring; my arm’s limp as a noodle.”

Looking slightly grim, Harland took over the spoon. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he said, sounding accusing. “You are not my type.”

“I’m not,” Bea agreed. “But I’m a great lay.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!”

“Why, Mr. Adams. Taking the name of the Lord in vain, a good Christian boy like you!” She grinned again, enjoying the sight of him. She’d wondered if she was going to hear anything from Harland after that Senators game six weeks ago and had just about written him off. Too straitlaced, she reckoned, with a certain amount of regret, because that had been a very enjoyable night: there was something to be said for straitlaced men with a lot pent up, once you wrestled them out of their starched shirts. He had paid attention to every inch of her, from the arches of her feet to the soft spaces behind her ears, in a way that had rattled her spine up off the bed like a bat off the rack... “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a tie before,” she said now, looking at his blue shirt with the collar unbuttoned. “I’ve never seen you in anything but a suit. Or nothing at all,” she added, just to see that pretty vermilion go rolling over his cheeks again.

“I can’t stop thinking about you.” He glared. “It’s extremely distracting.”

“Are you going to get all guilty about it?” Bea wondered.

“I do not feel guilty in the slightest,” he stated. “And I am feeling guilty about that instead.”

“You aren’t going to start calling me a tramp, are you?”

“No!”

“Good. Because I’m not.” Bea liked men, they tended to like her, and that was a long way from being a tramp, regardless of what people like Mrs.Nilsson thought. Besides, there hadn’t been any flings since Harland, and before him there had only been the occasional roll with Joe next door, and two lovers in one year wasn’t exactly loading the bases, Bea reckoned. “We had fun,” she told Harland now, socking him companionably on the arm. “Don’t overanalyze it, Freud. Help JD out there, throw those lamb shanks on the grill, and sit down to the best ragù you’ve ever tasted. And later we’ll sneak upstairs and have ourselves some more fun.”

Harland glowered at JD, standing loose and easy out on the lawn with a beer, talking to Claire and Reka. “Who’s he?”

Bea laughed. “Hit the grill.”

Bea’s Ragù

3 large lamb shanks, 3to 4pounds each Salt and freshly ground black pepper Extra virgin olive oil for frying/grilling 4 ounces thickly sliced pancetta or bacon, cut into 1 / 4 -inch dice

2 large carrots, finely chopped 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 medium red bell pepper, finely chopped 1 medium yellow bell pepper, finely chopped 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 to 2 cups dry red wine Four 28-ounce cans peeled Roma tomatoes, coarsely chopped, juices reserved. Use fresh tomatoes if you can raid a Victory Garden. 1 cup chicken stock 3 bay leaves 1 / 2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

2 tablespoons sugar 1 / 2 teaspoon baking powder

Rigatoni or spaghetti, cooked according to package directions Grated pecorino or Romano

Heat a grill or an oven to 350°F. Pat the lamb shanks dry, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and let them sit for 30minutes. In a large saucepan, add enough olive oil to cover the bottom to 1 / 4 inch, and warm over low heat.

If using a grill, brush the lamb shanks in enough olive oil to thinly coat them, shake off the excess, and place them over direct heat on the grill. Rotate to achieve even browning all over, then reduce the heat to low and move the shanks to indirect heat and cook for 20to 25minutes. If using an oven, place the shanks into the olive oil warming on the stove and brown them on all sides, then transfer the shanks to an oven-safe dish and cover with foil. Cook in the oven for 25to 30minutes.

Gently press the lamb shanks with a thumb—they should give slightly and your thumb should leave an impression. Remove them from the grill or oven, cover, and let them rest for 10to 15minutes.

Add the pancetta to the saucepan, stirring over low heat as the fat renders out. Add the carrots, onion, bell peppers, and garlic, and increase the heat to medium. Stir continuously until the vegetables are softened and beginning to brown. Add the red wine and stir for 2 minutes, scraping the bottom to remove any brown bits. Add the tomatoes, stock, bay leaves, red pepper flakes, sugar, and baking powder. Increase the heat to high, stirring constantly as the sauce comes to a low boil, about 5minutes.

Once the sauce has combined, reduce the heat to low and add the lamb shanks directly to the sauce, bone and all. The sauce should barely cover the meat—if it doesn’t, increase its volume with the reserved tomato juice, additional red wine, or water. Let it simmer partially covered for approximately two hours, stirring every 20to 30minutes, until the meat is flaking off the bones but not disintegrating into the sauce.

Place the rigatoni or spaghetti in a large bowl and spoon the sauce over it, giving a gentle toss to incorporate the sauce with the pasta. Use tongs to gently remove the lamb bones and flake any remaining meat over the sauce.

Top with plenty of grated pecorino and eat on a summer day, in between bouts of singing the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League “Victory Song.”

What could be more patriotic for Decoration Day? Bea thought, looking over the empty bowls littering the backyard picnic blankets. Beer, apple pie, and a fight about Communism!

“I’m not saying all Russians are intrinsically evil.” Harland was halfway through a slab of Lina’s pie, which had turned out surprisingly tasty. She was getting confident enough to go off-recipe; that extra dash of nutmeg in the crust was an inspired touch, the Briarwood women had all reassured her. “I’m not painting an entire country full of people with the same brush; that would be simplistic. But as a whole they’re complicit in the evils of Communism—”

“And I’m saying they’re not all believers in the system,” Grace’s beau JD was arguing. Bea couldn’t remember what JD stood for, or what his last name was. Navarro, Cavarro? “I met a lot of Russkies in the war, fought next to ’em. Some hated Stalin even more than we did—”

“I’m stuffed,” said Claire, flopping on her back on the blanket. “I’ve got spaghetti coming out of my ears.”

“I haven’t eaten pasta in months ,” the elegant Mrs.Sutherland said, mowing through her second bowl of ragù. “My husband won’t have it on the table at home. He says only wops and charity cases eat macaroni.”

“Spaghetti,” Bea corrected, “not macaroni—”

“Goodness, don’t tell him what he’s missing out on.” Grace sucked up a last loop of spaghetti. “Someone like that doesn’t deserve good pasta.”

Angela was running rings around the picnic blankets, cheeks smeared with tomato sauce. Reka sat sketching something on a paper napkin, gnarled hands moving quick and deft. A good Decoration Day , Bea thought, looking up at the blue sky overhead, ignoring Arlene, who was watching her and Harland with eyes like vicious little chips of ice. I am not letting you drive me away , she’d hissed at Bea when the bowls were carried outside to the picnic blankets. Don’t even think about it!

I’m not thinking about you at all , Bea had told her, truthfully. And neither was Harland, who was still arguing with JD.

“How can you have fought alongside Russkies?” Harland demanded, taking a root beer out of the ice bucket. “Was that in Berlin, or—”

“A lot farther east. I sprang loose of a POW camp in ’45, walked straight into a Red Army tank regiment. They let me fight with ’em—”

Harland raised an eyebrow. “That’s a tall story if I ever heard one.”

JD shrugged. “Just the facts, ma’am. I fought with their regiment for near on a month, and they were some of the bravest women I’ve ever—”

Harland nearly dropped his bottle. “Women? Now I know you’re pulling my leg.”

“Reds put women in tanks. Put ’em in sniper nests and fighter planes, too.”

A blink. “And you approve of that?”

“Hey,” said Bea. “I can drive a Buick; don’t tell me I couldn’t have driven a tank if Uncle Sam had let me try.” There’s another career path closed...

“Women shouldn’t be subjected to battlefields,” Harland protested.

“I don’t think we’re quite so fragile as that.” Grace laughed. “Do you have any idea how bloodthirsty women can be? Ask the housewives on this block if there’s anyone they’d be willing to run over with a tank. You’d see nothing but squashed mothers-in-law for miles.”

“More than a month I fought under Captain Samusenko and I never saw her or any of her ladies flinch from combat,” JD began.

“I’m not saying Communists can’t be brave,” Harland amended. “But they’re still dangerous, because Communism itself is dangerous. It goes against human nature, because we want to enjoy the results of our own work. We want to build something for ourselves and our children, not see it get scooped away and given to someone else. Any ideology that ignores a human urge that basic isn’t just dangerous, it’s idiotic.”

“Look, the Russkies I knew weren’t going around quoting Marx and harping about the proletariat. They were just doing a job, pushing back an enemy who invaded them first. They were our allies at the time—”

“And now they’re the enemy,” Harland finished. “Maybe they weren’t then, but they are now.”

JD’s black eyes narrowed. Grace’s tall drink of water, Bea thought, was well on his way to furious. “The women I fought with will not ever be my enemy.”

“Do not tell me you fell for a Russki—”

“So what if I did? She drove a tank for Captain Samusenko, her name was Vika, she used to stub her cigarettes out in an old ballet shoe. What are you going to do, report me?”

“I probably should—”

“And what combat have you seen? Driving a desk doesn’t count.”

“Listen, you—”

“Okay.” Bea stood up, brushing off her shorts. “We can argue about the growing peril of the Red Menace, or we can work off some of that spaghetti. Everybody up.”

People started rising lazily, Harland and JD still throwing dark looks at each other. “Where are we going?”

“Prospect Park sandlot.”

Blank looks.

“She used to play for the women’s leagues,” Harland said. “Professional. Didn’t you know that?”

Pete’s jaw dropped. Grace’s eyebrows rose. “ That explains the bat,” she murmured, sounding vindicated. Bea grinned, hands on hips. “One game, men against women. Who’s in?”

“OUT!” screamed Arlene, jabbing a finger at the sky.

“Safe by a mile,” Pete protested, picking himself up out of the dust after rebounding off Claire’s chest protector.

“ OUT! ” Arlene bellowed again. Bea had figured a game would get rid of Arlene, but she was sticking around out of pure spite at this point, just to drink in Harland’s uncomfortable looks. So Bea had shrugged and made her the umpire. After all, the umpire was the only person on the field who stayed clean, and everybody hated them. The Huppmobile was a natural.

Pete shook his head but loped back to the dugout good-naturedly. The men’s team (Pete and JD and Harland rounded out with some sandlot players Bea had cajoled into the fun) cheered as Harland came to bat and Nora fired off a vicious windmill pitch on the mound. Turned out that when you’d grown up in an Irish police family, Sunday games among a hundred boy cousins meant even the girls learned how to sling sidearm. Bea approved. Harland took a swing, and the women catcalled when he missed. He wasn’t quite as bad as he’d avowed in Griffith Stadium, though; he connected on the second pitch and chopped a decent grounder in Bea’s direction.

Not good enough to get past the best shortstop in the league , Bea thought, running to grab it on the hop. She flowed into a scoop-spin-leap, still midair when she fired the ball across the diamond toward Reka on first. God, I’ve missed that , Bea thought, landing with barely a twinge of pain. Maybe her knee couldn’t take a whole season, but it could take a sandlot game.

“OUT THREE!” Arlene shouted. She needed an excuse to take off the sugar-sweet smile and scream more often, Bea thought. Maybe all women did.

“Reka, that was a good 6–4–3,” she called as they all loped in from the field. Technically you needed a second basewoman to sling a 6–4–3, but Bea had sort of played both shortstop and second base. “Grace, Fliss, Mrs. Sutherland, just remember next inning—a ball comes your way, shovel it at me.” Put the Iowa housewife who didn’t play and the two Englishwomen who didn’t know baseball from cricket in the outfield where no one was going to hit anything. “Lina, you did great out there on third base, really great.” No one had hit anything to third, thank goodness; Lina adjusted her glasses and beamed. “Claire, nice job blocking that plate.”

“Sure, put the fat girl in the catcher’s mask and make her squat,” Claire groused.

“You don’t make the fat girl the catcher, you make the meanest bitch the catcher,” Bea shot back, and that made Claire grin. They were all grinning now, even the elegant Mrs.Sutherland, who had borrowed a pair of shorts from Grace to play in and handled her fielder’s glove like it was a Buckingham Palace teacup. “I do not understand this game,” she was saying in her soft British accent to Grace. “I just do not understand it at all, even as long as I’ve lived here.”

“Oh, honey, I don’t understand this game, either, and I was born here...”

“Come on, ladies,” Bea yelled as the men took the field. “Let’s take it to ’em!” Maybe it wasn’t much of a game—they had two bats and exactly six gloves to parse between two teams; no one was watching but some idle picnickers who’d brought their wicker baskets and checked blankets out to the grass for a Decoration Day lunch—but Bea could almost hear the roar of a crowd, the snap of the manager’s chewing gum, the announcer’s voice: Aaaaaaand introducing our home team, the Briarwood Belles!

“You’re going down, MissVerretti,” Harland drawled as Bea sauntered past him toward the batter’s box.

“Bring it,” she said with a tip of her Fort Wayne Daisies cap. Pete kept up a steady Hey batterbatterbatter from third base as JD wound up. He had a gorgeous fastball (“Should have seen it before I blew my shoulder out parachuting into France,” he said. “I could hit ninety-two on a slow day”), but Bea had his timing by now, and her swing started from her heels and traveled all the way up through her shoulders and into the bat like a bolt of lightning. She connected with a crack she felt clear down to her toes, and maybe it wasn’t going five hundred and sixty-plus feet like Mickey Mantle’s Griffith Stadium moon shot, but it was going plenty far. She flipped the bat with a flourish and dusted off her home run trot, and goddamn, but it felt good.

“I’ve never seen you look so lit up,” Grace observed as Bea fought clear of her high-fiving teammates at home plate. “Like Edison kitted you out with special light bulbs.”

“That’s how I always felt playing,” Bea said, scooping her bat out of the dust for Reka, who was up next. “Lit up.” She never understood why people wanted to get drunk. No gin buzz ever felt as good as this, the buzz of doing what you adored.

“Maybe you can go back to it.” Grace applauded along with the rest of the Belles (Bea could tell she was going to think of her housemates as the Belles from now on) as Reka stepped into the batter’s box, muttering Hungarian insults out at JD on the makeshift mound. “Not playing, but something else. Could you manage a team?”

Bea shook her head. “The managers were always men, even on the women’s teams.”

“Chaperone for the teams, then?”

“I was the one breaking the rules, not enforcing them. Aim for the plate, why don’t you? ” she yelled as JD’s next pitch whiffed wide.

“Surely there’s got to be somewhere you can slot in,” Grace persisted, slinging an arm around Lina and rumpling her hair. “Seems a shame to let all that experience go to waste.”

“At least I got to have the experience. The league is dead. It managed to struggle past the war, but now it’s almost done.” Bea had phoned Elizabeth Bandyk again, catching her between home games, and Liz had never sounded so gloomy. Emptier and emptier stands, no advertising, everyone staying home now to watch the men’s games on television; half-hearted talk among the women about switching to softball teams if that was the only way they could keep going... Bea shook her head. “Eight years I got to play. It wasn’t enough, but at least it was eight years. What about all the girls who watched me play and thought I want to do that , and by the time they’re old enough there isn’t any league? Only college teams and factory teams and softball teams?” She rubbed her hands slowly down her shorts. “I was the lucky one.”

And for the first time, despite her bad knee, she felt it.

Reka managed to bump her bat into the next pitch (JD definitely soft-tossing for her) and took off hobbling for first base. Pete scooped up the ball and tossed it over to first but his throw went wide, and Reka landed safe on the bag, puffing like a Disney witch, gray hair standing out like a haystack. “Hey, Pete!” Bea hollered. “Don’t go to one knee for the grounder, try to catch it on the hop. Like this—” And she demonstrated.

“I think you ladies cheated,” Harland said at the end of a riotous nine innings and a 3–1 victory for the women.

“A Briarwood Belle does not cheat,” Bea intoned, slinging her bat over one shoulder. “Or if she does, she is never caught.” They were all trooping back toward the house, dusty and tired, waving off the sandlot players who had filled the gaps on the men’s team.

“You definitely had the umpire on your side,” Harland accused.

Bea grinned. “Hey, now, I got called out on that play on second when I was standing still. She didn’t rule anything in your favor or mine!”

He reached for her hand, tangling his fingers with hers. “I’ll take that as long as you rule in my favor.”

“I might. If you don’t start droning on about the Red Menace again.”

“It’s my job right now to be concerned about the Red Menace, Bea. I can’t help that. If you choose to serve—in the army, the navy, the FBI, what have you—you don’t get to pick and choose where you’re sent or what your directives are.”

“And you’re all right with that?” Genuinely curious. “What if they’re the wrong directives?”

“Then there are channels to address that, and there need to be people on staff who will address it, not just shrug or throw up their hands.” Harland rubbed a palm across his short hair, looking frustrated. “The FBI isn’t perfect, I know that. Hell, the nation isn’t perfect. That doesn’t mean it still isn’t worthwhile to devote a life in service of both. Make both better. Believe in both, in what they have to offer.” He sighed. “You’re going to tell me I sound pompous, aren’t you?”

“No. Romantic, maybe. Not pompous,” said Bea, and she started to hum the league’s “Victory Song.” She had no urge to puncture Harland—in fact, she was rather touched by him. An idealist after all, under the starched shirt and tie... Though he wasn’t in a tie now. She’d had a whole afternoon to appreciate the sight of him moving loose and easy across a baseball diamond, sweat gleaming in the hollow of his throat. “Your place or mine?” she started to ask, when Pete bobbed up like an eager puppy on her other side.

“MissBea? Thank you for showing me how to make that scoop... Say, I play here with a summer team in the evenings, just for fun. D’you think you could come show the guys a few things?”

“Sure thing,” said Bea, and his eyes lit up like Christmas. Worth it, this whole day—worth it, worth it, worth it, even when they trooped back into Briarwood House to the sound of Mrs.Nilsson shrieking “ My tomatoes! ”

“It was Bea, Mrs.Nilsson,” Arlene said at once, throwing Bea under the bus with great pleasure. “ She took your tomatoes—”

“You ate just as many, you tattling cow,” Bea shot back. Arlene slapped her, Bea slapped right back with her whole arm so Arlene sat down on her rump in the picked-over patch, Mrs.Nilsson kept shrieking, and even then it had still all been worth it.

We are the members of the All-American League,

We come from cities near and far...

“Last home ec class!” Bea shoved that hateful textbook with its hateful diagrams of ladylike place settings and ladylike flower arrangements across the desk like it was radioactive. “Thanks for the assist, Grace.” Bea didn’t just owe her for the class—if it hadn’t been for Grace fast-pouring sweet talk on Decoration Day, Mrs.Nilsson would have kicked Bea out of Briarwood House for sure rather than being satisfied with a payment of triple market value for every tomato. (And, ouch, hadn’t that stung like getting drilled with a fastball. Still, better to fork over a little cash than find a new place to live... Bea had been surprised how glad she was about that, considering she’d started the season telling herself she had to get out of there.)

“I’d rather help you out than head home and hear Doilies harp about that crystal candy dish that disappeared on her,” Grace said, flipping the pages of the textbook. “Besides, better your girls learn how to make chicken salad and deviled eggs than...” Wrinkling her nose, she paused on a section titled Company Dinners. “‘Mock Jambalaya’? Instant rice, canned shrimp, Vienna sausage... Oh, honey, no.”

The two women laughed. Sunlight poured through the windows, and the room smelled like chalk and teenage sweat. Last day of school tomorrow; the students racketed through the halls outside like they deserved a championship title just for getting through the year. Maybe they did, Bea thought. It had been a hell of a year. Her last PE class had at least ended on something of a high note: she finally coaxed some aggression out of the girls, and they played an absolutely vicious game of field hockey, finishing up all sweat-tangled hair and bloody knees. “You like that feeling?” she told them. “Hold on to that. A woman needs to know how to get vicious, get tough, get down and dirty. Remember that.” And there had been grins, and she thought maybe teenage girls weren’t all such prissy little snots after all.

Still.

I won’t be back , Bea thought. Not here. She already knew she wasn’t going to be playing baseball again, but she wasn’t going to spend any more months spinning in limbo as a PE teacher and home ec substitute, either. There had to be something else other than Gompers Junior High.

She was even starting to get a few ideas what that might be.

Grace had been saying something about the Rosenberg executions—everyone had been glued to the trial a few years ago and now everyone was glued to the execution coverage; would they really send a woman to the electric chair, even a Red spy?!—but she broke off, seeming to sense Bea’s mind had traveled a million miles away from Red spies riding the lightning at Sing Sing. “Where’d you go, Slugger?” Grace had started calling Bea that ever since the sandlot game home run.

“Thinking about what comes next.” Bea ran her hand along the edge of the teacher’s desk. She’d never felt like anything but a fraud, sitting there.

Grace perched on the edge of the nearest student desk, green circle skirt flaring out under her bolero. “What does come next?”

“Something in the game,” Bea said slowly. “Something other than playing.” For so long, she’d been so fixated on playing, but there was more to baseball than what took place on the field. Look at Grace’s friend JD: he’d been on track for a pitching career, but the war had taken that away from him and now he was a pitching coach. She wondered if he’d been bitter about it. If someone had had to tell him, the way Grace had told Bea on the sandlot, There’s got to be somewhere you can slot in . Meaning somewhere else .

But...

“Baseball always meant women’s baseball to me,” Bea burst out. “Always. But if I want—”

She stopped.

“If you want to stay in the game,” Grace finished, seeing Bea wasn’t going to say the words, “it very probably means men’s baseball.”

Bea swallowed that down. Didn’t much like the taste of it. She supposed she could get involved with women’s softball or the various semipro teams—that didn’t taste much better. But being sidelined from the game altogether the last few years, well, she really hadn’t liked the taste of that.

So: Sit around being bitter, or try to carve herself a place in the world she wanted a part of again?

Grace tilted her head. “So what are you thinking of? Not playing, obviously. Not managing, not coaching...”

“There’s a kid I’ve been watching at Prospect Park the last few weeks,” Bea said slowly. “Pete plays with some friends in the evening—mostly they’re just clowning around, pretending to be Mickey Mantle. But there’s one outfielder, tall freckled kid goes to Anacostia High... he’s got something.” Even in a sandlot game Bea could see it: the crispness, the drive, that little extra pop that elevated a talented kid to an athlete . “Last night after the game, I asked him to show me what he had.” A howitzer of an arm that could fire a one-hopper from deep right to home plate like he was threading a needle, and one of the prettiest swings Bea had ever seen. “He’s eighteen, and he wants to play. Wants it so bad he can taste it. I could spot that a mile off.”

“Talent spotter.” Grace drew the term out. “Is that something you could do, Slugger?”

“In the majors, they call that a scout.” And, yes, Bea wondered if it was something she could do. Since her first spring training as an eighteen-year-old, looking around at all the girls there to try out for the league, she’d been able to pick the best ones out. The pitchers with a little extra gas in their fastball, the base stealers with the really fast feet who would beat every tag, the hitters with that sixth sense for where the pitch was coming next. Even playing that joke game with the Briarwood Belles, she’d known how to size her ladies up and where to put them. She’d always had the eye. It was why she’d been a leader on every team she’d ever joined.

She’d never heard of a major league team employing a woman scout. Who was going to listen if an ex-AAGPBL shortstop said she had the name of a young outfielder from Anacostia they should take a look at?

Bea looked at Grace, sitting there with her billowing green skirt, smiling faintly as she drew on her white gloves—Grace, who could wheedle anything out of anybody. Bea had always been inclined to blaze through life like a fastball, heading straight from where she was to where she wanted to go at ninety miles an hour—Grace, she thought, was a knuckleball, dancing on the wind, taking a less orthodox path to the plate but getting there all the same. There was, Bea mused, something to admire in that. Definitely something to be learned. “I already owe you,” she began. “For helping with class, and even more for persuading Nilsson not to kick me out over the tomatoes. But if I asked for help with something else—”

“Ask away,” Grace said. “You’re family.”

Family. Were they, the Briar Club? Bea couldn’t quite stop herself from grinning, as she explained what she wanted.

Grace’s eyes sparkled. “All I need is a telephone.”

“Miss Verretti,” Principal Royce chided as she rounded the corner of the empty corridor and nearly collided with him. His voice echoed off the double bank of lockers, the hallways entirely empty now. Grace had had to dash, due at the library for book-shelving; Bea had stayed to clear out the last of her things. “What have I told you about changing back into a skirt after PE?” Royce went on, placing his moist hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t set the right tone for the young ladies of Gompers. Our female instructresses must set an example—”

“Can I tell you something, Royce?” Bea beamed down at him, his resentful eyes and his hovering smirk. “As a boss, you’ve really been something.”

He smiled, thumb working a little closer to her collarbone. “Why, thank you—”

“I mean, you’ve really been something. Tinkling, fussing, petty, spiteful, and damp. You’re a real five-tool boss, emphasis on the tool .” Bea plucked his hand off her shoulder and flicked it away. “I was going to do this in a few months before the fall semester started, but what the hell. I quit.”

She waited long enough to see his jaw go slack. “Beatrice,” he began, but she just swung around him and sauntered down the hall, out of Gompers Junior High forever, a folded scrap of paper clutched in her hand. On it was the information Grace had wheedled after forty minutes on the phone in the Gompers Junior High main office, information she’d had no business getting her hands on but had gotten anyway after charming her way through a telephone operator, a junior secretary, a senior secretary, and one very self-important personal assistant.

The private business office address and personal weekly schedule of one Mr.Clark Calvin Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators.

“I’m in!” Bea whooped, pelting through the doors of Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown. Harland barely rose from the booth in time to catch her around the waist as she threw her arms about his neck. “I’m in! I’ve got it!”

“In where?” he asked, setting her back on her feet. “Got what?”

“A job interview.” Bea shrugged out of the green bolero she’d borrowed from Grace, paired with a lace blouse loaned from Nora, a circle skirt from Fliss, and a black straw hat from Claire. Feminine and chic; Bea knew from experience that if a woman wanted an in to a man’s world, she couldn’t afford to look mannish. Bea hurled the hat into the wood-paneled booth now and slid in after it. “I staked out Mr. Griffith’s office for three hours straight, right after lunch when he had a lull in his schedule.” Always brace a businessman after lunch , Grace had advised, both of them looking over the schedule for the best place for Bea to strike. If you’re lucky he’ll be three martinis in and feeling mellow. And his secretary said it’s when he keeps an hour free to go over his mail and review stats. That’s your window, Slugger.

“I told Mr.Griffith I wanted to talk about baseball prospects for the team, and he told me he couldn’t see me, but after two and a half hours when it was clear I wasn’t going away, he said he’d give me five minutes on Wednesday. He just wants to get rid of me”—Bea grinned—“but he won’t. I will dazzle him on Wednesday. I know all his stats from his playing and managing days, I can diagram his entire farm system—” She ran out of breath, slumping back in her seat. “So the real interview’s Wednesday. That’s my shot.”

All she needed was a sliver of a chance; she’d grab it with both hands and run the bases. How much of a shot had she had to make the South Bend Blue Sox at eighteen? She’d borrowed train fare from her eldest brother, packed her bats, and ridden halfway across the country for that chance, and it had paid off.

“Something to celebrate?” the waiter said, arriving to take their order.

“The lady may be about to land the job of her dreams,” Harland said, ordering two martinis. Bea looked around the tavern, glowing with old wood paneling and private booths, squatting on Wisconsin Street like a well-worn catcher guarding the plate.

“Your favorite place?” she asked.

“Most of D.C.’s favorite place,” he said. “Half of Congress comes in and out of here, and half the local mob. That’s a judge over there, sitting on a milk crate pulled up to that corner booth with Senator Sutherland... That’s Xavier Byrne taking his daily lunch; he used to run half the numbers racket in town for the Warring gang... Booth number three, that’s the junior senator from Massachusetts...” Harland saw the blank look on Bea’s face and grinned. “Okay. Billy Martin founded this place, and he played shortstop for the Boston Braves back in the day.”

“Now we’re talking.” Bea slugged half her martini when the waiter set it down. “You know there’s been a woman scout before? I had no idea! Edith Houghton, for the Phillies. She only left the post last year, scouted young players all over the Philadelphia area—”

Harland sat back, toying with the stem of his glass, other arm along the back of his booth. “Is that what life looks like for you, then?”

“If I get my foot in the door.” Taking trains wherever there was a whiff of talent, evaluating factory-team pitchers in Baltimore and high school shortstops in Gaithersburg. Sitting through games, talking to eager kids and their wary families. Show me what you’ve got, kid. Making the case at staff meetings for the ones she believed in. Getting to see the next generation of talent head off toward a career in the majors, all bright eyes and big dreams of hitting five-hundred-foot homers like Mickey Mantle. Making Briarwood House her base... Because Bea had realized she had no desire, after all, to leave it. Not the house, which had become a home, or Grace’s Thursday night suppers, or the Briarwood Belles, who had somehow become family. She smiled, lifting her glass. “I hope.”

“Then I hope, too.” They clinked glasses, just as the waiter swooped back to take their order. “What’s the commotion?” Harland asked, nodding at the wave of craning heads rubbernecking toward Booth #3.

“We appear to be witnessing a marriage proposal.” The waiter lowered his voice. “The junior senator from Massachusetts is, I believe, proposing matrimony to MissJacqueline Bouvier.”

“No kidding.” Bea craned her neck, too, unashamedly, for a look at the petite brunette in the pale yellow sheath dress and pearls, and the man in the carelessly rumpled suit holding her hands across the table. “Cute,” Bea appreciated, getting a gander at the big white grin and tanned face. “What’s his name again?”

A cheer went up, rippling across the tavern as the young senator straightened, looking exultant. “I take it MissBouvier said yes.” The waiter smiled and whipped off across the room to be the first to offer the engaged couple champagne on the house.

It seemed like a day for toasts. “To the happy couple,” Bea suggested. She swallowed the rest of her martini, lowering the glass to see Harland gazing at her, his lean foxlike face looking oddly, nakedly bemused.

“Let’s make it two proposals for Martin’s Tavern on June twenty-fourth, 1953,” he said. “Marry me.”

Bea laughed. “What?”

“I’m serious.”

“No, you aren’t. What are you thinking?”

“I have no idea. Marry me.”

“Are you drunk?” Taking his glass out of his hand and setting it down. “I am completely wrong for you.”

“I’m not arguing. You are completely wrong for me. You are in fact probably the worst candidate for an FBI agent’s wife I can think of. Marry me.”

“But I don’t want to be an FBI agent’s wife.” Bea gave him another grin, but a gentler one. “I want to be the first woman scout for the Washington Senators. I’d rather it was the Red Sox, but—”

“You can do both. Who says you can’t do both?”

“I don’t want to do both. Even if I’m very flattered by the offer, G-man, considering you think everything I do and wear and say is goddamn appalling.” Bea leaned across the table and gave him a lingering kiss.

“You do appall me,” he murmured against her lips. “But I’m not withdrawing my offer.”

“I’m not taking your offer.”

His eyes narrowed. “You have no idea how patient I can be, Beatrice Maria Verretti.”

“You’ll have to be, Harland Custis Adams. Because I’ve got miles to go and lots to do, and I’m aching to get started.” Bea rose from the booth, slinging Claire’s borrowed black straw hat across one arm and fishing in her pocketbook for the good luck token she’d brought to stake out Mr.Griffith’s office this morning: her faded Fort Wayne Daisies baseball cap. “You got an hour? Let’s head to Prospect Park and play some catch.”