Chapter 5 - 5

“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.