I pulled away, lifted the trunk, and began my climb, leaving my mother in the stairwell of a dormitory, as close as she would ever get to a college education.
The Middle of the Day
“SO HOW IS CATHERINE?”
We were back in her kitchen, having lunch, as she had suggested. Since I’d been on my own, I had eaten most of my meals from barstools or in fast-food outlets. But my mother had always shunned eating away from home. “Why should we pay for bad food?” she would say. After my father left, it became a moot point. We ate at home because we couldn’t afford to eat out anymore.
“Charley? Honey?” she repeated. “How’s Catherine?”
“She’s OK,” I lied, not having any idea how Catherine was.
“And this business about Maria being ashamed of you? What does Catherine say about that?”
She carried over a plate with a sandwich—pumpernickel bread, roast beef, tomato, and mustard. She sliced it diagonally. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sandwich sliced diagonally.
“Mom,” I said, “to be honest...Catherine and I split up.”
She finished slicing. She seemed to be thinking about something.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Mmm,” she answered, quietly, without looking up. “Yes, Charley. I did.”
“It wasn’t her. It was me. I haven’t been real good for a while, you know? That’s why...”
What was I going to say? That’s why I tried to kill myself? She pushed the plate in front of me.
“Mom...” My voice cracked. “We buried you. You’ve been gone for a long time.”
I stared at the sandwich, two triangles of bread. “Everything’s different now,” I whispered.
She reached over and put my cheek in her hand. She grimaced as if a pain were passing through her.
“Things can be fixed,” she said.
September 8, 1967
Charley—
How do you like my typing! I’ve been practicing at work on Henrietta’s typewriter. Pretty snazzy!
I know you won’t read this until after I have left. But in case I forgot because I was too excited by the whole idea of you being at college, I want to tell you something. I am so proud of you, Charley. You are the first person in our family to go to a university!
Charley, be nice to the people there. Be nice to your teachers. Always call them Mr. and Mrs., even though I hear now that college students call their teachers by their first names. I don’t think that’s right. And be nice to the girls you go out with. I know you don’t want love life advice from me, but even if girls find you handsome, that is not a license to be mean. Be nice.
And also get your sleep. Josie, who comes into the beauty parlor, says her son at college keeps falling asleep during his classes. Don’t insult your teachers that way, Charley. Don’t fall asleep. It’s such a lucky thing you have, to be taught and to be learning and not have to be working in a shop somewhere.
I love you every day.
And now I will miss you every day.
Love,
Mom
When Ghosts Return
I USED TO DREAM about finding my father. I dreamed he moved to the next town over, and one day I would ride my bike to his house and knock on his door and he would tell me it was all just a big mistake. And the two of us would ride home together, me on the front, my dad pedaling hard behind, and my mother would run out the door and burst into happy tears.
It’s amazing the fantasies your mind can put together. The truth was, I didn’t know where my father lived and I never did find out. I would go by his liquor store after school, but he was never there. His friend Marty was managing it now, and he told me my dad was full-time in the new place in Collingswood. It was only an hour’s drive away, but to a kid my age, it might as well have been on the moon. After a while, I stopped going past his store. I stopped fantasizing about us biking home together. I finished grade school, junior high, and high school with no contact from my old man.
He was a ghost.
But I still saw him.
I saw him whenever I swung a bat or threw a ball, which is why I never gave up baseball, why I played through every spring and every summer on every team and in every league possible. I could picture my father at the plate, tipping my elbow, correcting my batting stance. I could hear him yelling, “Dig, dig, dig!” as I ran out a ground ball.
A boy can always see his father on a baseball field. In my mind, it was just a matter of time before he showed up for real.
So, year after year, I pulled on new team uniforms—red socks, gray pants, blue tops, yellow caps—and each one felt like I was dressing for a visit. I split my adolescence between the pulpy smell of books, which was my mother’s passion, and the leathery smell of baseball gloves, which was my father’s. My body sprouted into his frame, broad and strong-shouldered, but two inches taller.
And as I grew, I held on to the game like a raft in the bumpy sea, faithfully, through the chop.
Until at last, it restored me to my father.
As I always knew it would.
HE REAPPEARED, AFTER an eight-year absence, at my first college game in the spring of 1968, sitting in the front row of seats just left of home plate, from which he could best study my form.
I will never forget that day. It was a windy afternoon and the sky was a gunmetal color, threatening rain. I walked to the plate. I don’t usually look at the seats, but for whatever reason, I did. And there he was. His hair was graying at the temples and his shoulders seemed smaller, his waist a bit wider, as if he had sunk down on himself, but otherwise, he looked the same. If he was uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. I’m not sure I’d recognize my father’s “uncomfortable” look, anyhow.
He nodded at me. Everything seemed to freeze. Eight years. Eight whole years. I felt my lip tremble. I remember a voice in my head saying, Don’t you dare, Chick. Don’t you cry, you bastard, don’t cry.
I looked at my feet. I forced them to move. I kept my eyes on them all the way into the batter’s box.
And I smacked the first pitch over the left-field wall.
Miss Thelma
MY MOTHER’S NEXT APPOINTMENT, she said, was with someone who lived in a part of town we called the Flats. It was mostly poor people in attached row houses. I was sure we’d need to drive there, but before I could ask, the doorbell rang.
“Answer that, Charley, OK?” my mother said, putting a dish in the sink.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to answer any bells or pick up any phones. When my mother called out again, “Charley? Can you get that?” I rose and walked slowly to the door.
I told myself everything was fine. But the instant I touched the knob, I felt a sudden blast that blinded me, a wash of light, and a man’s voice, the voice from Rose’s telephone. It was screaming now.
“CHARLES BENETTO! LISTEN! I’M A POLICE OFFICER!”
It felt like a windstorm. The voice was so close, I could physically touch it.
“CAN YOU HEAR ME, CHARLES? I’M A POLICE OFFICER!”
I staggered back and threw my hands over my face. The light disappeared. The wind died. I heard only my own labored breathing. I quickly looked for my mother, but she was still at the sink; whatever I was going through, it was happening in my head.
I waited a few seconds, inhaled three long breaths, then carefully turned the doorknob, eyes lowered, expecting the police officer who’d been screaming at me. I pictured him young for some reason.
But when I lifted my gaze, I saw instead an elderly black woman with spectacles on a chain around her neck, disheveled hair, and a burning cigarette.
“Is that you, Chickadoo?” she said. “Well, look who done grown up.”
WE CALLED HER Miss Thelma. She used to clean our house. She was lean and narrow-shouldered, with a broad smile and a quick temper. Her hair was dyed a reddish orange and she smoked constantly, Lucky Strikes, which she kept in her shirt pocket, like a man. Born and raised in Alabama, she somehow wound
up in Pepperville Beach, where, in the late 1950s, pretty much every house on our side of town employed someone like her. A “domestic” they were called, or, when people were being honest, a “maid.” My father would pick her up Saturday mornings at the bus station near the Horn & Hardart cafeteria, and he would pay her before he left the house, slipping her the folded bills low, by her hip, as if neither were supposed to look at the money. She would clean all day while we were out at baseball. By the time we got home, my room was spotless, whether I liked it or not.
My mother insisted we call her “Miss Thelma.” I remember that, and I remember we weren’t allowed to step into any room she had just vacuumed. I remember she played catch with me sometimes in the backyard, and she could throw as hard as I could.
She also, inadvertently, invented my nickname. My father had tried calling me “Chuck” (my mother hated that, she said, “Chuck? It sounds like a cowhand!”), but because I was always hollering from the yard back into the house, “Mommmm!” or “Roberrrrta!,” one day Miss Thelma looked up, annoyed, and said, “Boy, the way you holler, you’re like a rooster. Chuckadoodle-doo!” And my sister, who was then a preschooler, said, “Chickadoodle-doo! Chickadoodle-doo!” and, I don’t know, somehow, the “Chick” part stuck. I don’t think that made my dad too fond of Miss Thelma.
“Posey,” she said to my mother now, her grin spreading. “I been thinking about you.”
“Well, thank you,” my mother said.
“I surely have.”
She turned to me.
“Cain’t throw you no balls these days, Chickadoo.” She laughed. “Too old.”
We were in her car, which, I guessed, was how we were getting to the Flats. It seemed odd to me that my mother would do beauty work for Miss Thelma. But then, I knew so little about my mother over the last decade of her life. I had been too wrapped up in my own drama.
As we drove, for the first time, I saw other people out the window. There was a pinched old man with a gray beard carrying a rake to his garage. My mother waved to him and he waved back. There was a woman with hair the color of French vanilla ice cream, wearing a housedress and sitting on her porch. Another wave from my mother. Another wave back.
We drove for a while, until the streets became smaller and rougher. We turned on a gravel road and came to a two-family house with a roofed porch flanked by cellar doors, badly in need of paint. There were several cars parked in the driveway. A bicycle lay on its side in the front yard. Miss Thelma put the car in park and turned the key.
And just like that, we were inside the house. The bedroom was paneled, with olive carpeting. The bed itself was an old four-poster. And Miss Thelma was suddenly lying in it, propped up against two pillows.
“What just happened?” I asked my mother.
She shook her head as if to say, “Not now,” and began unpacking her bag. I heard children squealing from another room, and the muffled sounds of a television set and plates being moved around a table.
“They all think I’m sleeping,” Miss Thelma whispered.
She looked my mother in the eye.
“Posey, I sure would appreciate it now. Could you?”
“Of course,” my mother replied.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
I don’t tell her about seeing my father. He shows up for my next game, too, and he nods again when I come to the plate. This time I nod back, barely, but I do. And I go three-for-three in that game, with another home run and two doubles.
We go on like this for several weeks. He sits. He watches. And I hit the ball like it is two feet wide. Finally, after a road game in which I hit two more home runs, he is waiting by the team bus. He wears a blue windbreaker over a white turtleneck. I notice the gray in his sideburns. He lifts his chin when he sees me, as if fighting the fact that I am now taller than him. These are the first words he says:
“Ask your coach if I can drive you back to campus.”
I could do anything at this moment. I could spit. I could tell him to go to hell. I could ignore him, the way he ignored us.
I could say something about my mother.
Instead, I do what he asks me to do. I seek permission to skip the bus ride home. He is respecting the authority of my coach, I am respecting the authority of my father, and this is how the world makes sense, all of us behaving like men.
“I DON’T KNOW, Posey,” Miss Thelma said, “it’s gonna take a miracle.”
She was looking into a handheld mirror. My mother unloaded small jars and jeweled cases.
“Well, this is my miracle bag,” she said.
“Yeah? Y’all got a cure for cancer in there?”
My mother held up a bottle. “I’ve got moisturizer.”
Miss Thelma laughed.
“You think it’s silly, Posey?”
“What’s that, honey?”
“Wanting to look good—at this point?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, you see, my boys and girls are out there, that’s all. And their little ones. And I wish I could look healthy for them, you know? I don’t like to make ’em fret, seeing me look like some old dishrag.”
My mother rubbed moisturizer on Miss Thelma’s face, making wide circular motions with her palms.
“You could never look like a dishrag,” she said.
“Oh, talk to me, Posey.”
They laughed again.
“I miss them Saturdays, sometimes,” Miss Thelma said. “We had some fun, didn’t we?”
“We did at that,” my mother said.
“We did at that,” Miss Thelma agreed.
She closed her eyes as my mother’s hands did their work.
“Chickadoo, your mama is the best partner I ever had.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“You worked at the beauty parlor?” I said.
My mother grinned.
“Naw,” Miss Thelma said. “I couldn’t make nobody look better if I tried.”
My mother capped the moisturizer bottle and picked up a new jar. She undid the top, and dabbed a small sponge into its contents.
“What?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
She held up the sponge like an artist about to put brush to canvas.
“We cleaned houses together, Charley,” she said.
Upon seeing the look on my face, she waved her fingers dismissively.
“How do you think I put you kids through college?”
BY MY SOPHOMORE YEAR, I’d packed on ten pounds of muscle, and my hitting reflected it. My batting average among college players was in the top fifty in the nation. At my father’s urging, I played in several tournaments which were showcases for professional scouts, older men who sat in the stands with notebooks and cigars. One day, one of them approached us after a game.
“This your boy?” he asked my father.
My father nodded suspiciously. The man had thinning hair and a bulbous nose, and his undershirt was visible through his lightweight sweater.
“I’m with the St. Louis Cardinals organization.”
“That right?” my father said.
I wanted to leap through my skin.
“We may have a spot at catcher, ‘A’ ball.”
“That right?” my father said.
“We’ll keep an eye on your boy, if he’s interested.”
The man sniffed deeply, a wet, noisy sound. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.
“The thing is,” my father said, “Pittsburgh has the inside track. They’ve been scouting him for a while.”
The man studied my father’s jaw, which worked over the gum he was chewing.
“That right?” the man said.
OF COURSE, ALL this was news to me, and when the man departed, I hounded my father with questions. When did this happen? Was that guy for real? Was Pittsburgh really scouting me?
“What if they are?” he said. “It don’t change what you gotta do, Chick. You stay in those cag
es, work with your coaches, and be ready when the time comes. Let me take care of the rest.”
I nodded obediently. My mind was racing.
“What about school?”
He scratched his chin. “What about it?”
I flashed on my mother’s face, walking me through the library. I tried not to think about it.
“The St. Louis Caaardinals,” my father drawled, long and slow. He ground his shoe into the grass. Then he actually grinned. I felt so proud I got goose bumps. He asked if I wanted a beer and I said yeah, and we went and had one together, as men do.
“DAD CAME TO a game.”
I was on the pay phone in the dorm. This was well after my father’s first visit, but it had taken me that long to find the courage to tell her.
“Oh,” my mother finally said.
“By himself,” I quickly added. For some reason, that seemed important.
“Did you tell your sister?”
“No.”
Another long silence.
“Don’t let anything affect your studying, Charley.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s the most important thing.”
“I know.”
“An education is everything, Charley. An education is how you’ll make something of yourself.”
I kept waiting for more. I kept waiting for some horrible story about some horrible thing. I kept waiting the way all children of divorce wait, for evidence to tip my scales, a tilt in the floor that made me choose one side over the other. But my mother never spoke about the reason my father left. She never once took the bait Roberta and I dangled before her, looking for hate or bitterness. All she did was swallow. She swallowed the words, she swallowed the conversation. Whatever had happened between them, she swallowed that, too.
“Is it OK that me and Dad see each other?”
“Dad and I,” she corrected.
“Dad and I,” I said, exasperated. “Is it?”
She exhaled.
“You’re not a little boy anymore, Charley.”
Why did I feel like one?