Chapter 5 - 4

“ 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.”