Chapter 5 - 3

“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.