The Celebrant, page 12
“I think I know how you feel,” I said.
“There’s no worse assumption.”
“Let me speak my piece. The first time I took this swing with Eli I was quite put off by his behavior. It seemed so unlike my idea of what it ought to be. Of course I had a very narrow conception of the selling trade. I couldn’t fathom what Eli was doing, and even more I feared I’d have to adopt his ways. But it turns out that that’s not the way of things. Whatever his methods, you can’t argue with the results.”
“Indeed I might, but, to repeat myself, I’ve too small a sampling at the moment. If you think it contemptible to participate in my research I’ll make other arrangements.”
“Not at all! I’m happy to help you. I just think we ought to leave Eli to better things.”
“Other things.”
“If you will. The point remains that Eli deserves respect, not disdain or contempt.”
Arthur put down the magazine. “Do you know, Jack, that your work stands out on the shelves?” he said. “It’s far superior to the competition, and a good thing, too. Those displays are numbing. Something must be done about that. I’m disturbed that Eli’s never so much as asked Wanamaker’s for a separate display for our line.”
“What chance is there of having one?”
“None at all, if it’s never asked. What’s this, now?”
The train was slowing, and over the hiss of the brakes we heard the thump of a bass drum and the glissando of a glockenspiel. I pulled the window down and stretched out for a look at the depot. Heads were poking out of other windows, obstructing my view, but the noise grew ever louder, the heroic rhythm of a marching band and the cry of voices shouting Mathewson’s name. I heard Seymour and Wiltse, just ahead, describing the panorama to Eli: “Looks like the high school band.”
“There’s women! Lots o’ women!”
“Guy in the top hat must be the village squire.”
“Big banner says ‘Welcome Christy Mathewson’ in great big letters, and then it’s got ‘and the New York Giants’ down below, real tiny-like.”
“Pretty good crowd for a town this size. ’Course, it’s Matty’s part of the country.”
“I seen bigger in a lot smaller burgs.”
“Hey, little girl! Yeah, you! You got a sister?”
We passed in review; every eye was turned to the window ahead. The band struck up another rouser, the train lurched forward, and I fell back into the compartment. Arthur, expressionless, watched through the window as the train picked up speed and left the station behind.
“I gather this is hardly unusual,” he said.
“It’s been the rule since aught-five,” I said.
“I daresay he deserves it. He’s an uncommon man for a ballplayer.”
“He’s an uncommon man altogether.”
Arthur shrugged. “That’s a common opinion. He does carry about him a rather haughty aspect, don’t you think? Something of the prince who condescends to walk among the people.” “Wherever did you get that idea?”
“Last night, at the Schuylkill Chess Club.”
“You were there? You saw him there?”
“Unavoidably. He strode through the rooms like an icon on self-display.”
“Did you speak with him?”
“Very little, beyond the attractions of the queen’s pawn opening.”
“You played with him?”
“No. He watched me play for a short time. The fuss people made! It rather”—he paused—“it reminded me a bit of you, to tell the truth.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Believe me, I meant no insult. On the contrary. The experience gave me a better appreciation of something I’ve heretofore considered rather queer. Finding that you’re not alone in your estimation of the man puts you in a different light.”
“More common, you mean.”
“Less odd, certainly. And seeing that the adoration of the man is so general, I wonder how we might put it to our advantage. Look at this.”
He thumbed through the magazine and displayed a page. It was an advertisement for a brand of shirt collars; a drawing of Mathewson’s face filled half the page, and below it, over his signature, ran a flowery endorsement of the product. “If shirt collars, why not jewelry?” said Arthur. “Why not our entire line?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? Why shouldn’t he be happy to do it?”
“I’d never ask him to do such a thing.”
“Why not?”
“I’d sooner ask Edith to model in a store window!”
“But don’t you see?” said Arthur. “The man’s already modeling in a store window. We need only add to the display.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I do know that I’d never ask him for such a favor.”
In his ceremonious fashion, Arthur lit another cigarette. “You know, Jack, I’m only trying to help. Eli uses the firm’s connection with the team to such an extent that I wonder his cards don’t read, ‘by appointment to the Polo Grounds, jewelers to his royal highness John McGraw.’ It seems a small leap from that to a more general announcement through the medium of magazine advertisement. I find exciting the prospect of marketing copies of the triple diamond you did for him. Such an original design!”
“I don’t think you understand how offensive I find your suggestions.”
“Offensive? No, I don’t understand that. I certainly don’t mean to offend. But aren’t we in the business of selling jewelry?”
“Are you? Is that your intention? Or will you abandon it when you leave us next week and head west? What will catch your fancy then?”
Arthur nodded and drew on his cigarette. “You’ve a perfect right to say that, of course. To doubt my commitment. I’m rather surprised at myself, that the trade has caught my fancy. I never dreamed there were so many aspects to merchandising. It does engender thought. But they’re merely thoughts. Though I make them as statements, essentially they’re questions, and it’s the essence of a question to be unanswerable.”
“You sound like something out of a Cooper Union lecture.” “Vienna, actually. A compelling debate between two scholars of whom you’ve never heard.” He turned a page of the magazine. “I doubt that even Christy Mathewson has heard of them.”
“You don’t impress me with these airs, Arthur. Scholarly citations don’t wash with me. You’re riding not fifty feet from one of the phenomenons of our age——”
“Phenomena.”
“——and you haven’t the wit to realize it. You want only to use it and cheapen it.”
“A phenomenon of our age!” Arthur turned back the page and regarded the drawing in the advertisement. “To think of buying a shirt collar from a phenomenon of our age! Why, I might order half a dozen!”
From Pittsburgh the Giants doubled back to the east; we went on to Cincinnati and St. Louis, where Arthur departed our company for the hinterlands. It was well for Eli that he left us before our Chicago appointments; that city was Eli’s favorite stop on the circuit, and his most perilous. He played for high stakes there, and bet with a will. It had become a joke between us; as we pulled into the Union Station he’d hand me our tickets forward and tell me not to trust him with our samples in that rugged and appealing city.
We had the luck to catch the Cubs playing the Pittsburgh nine at the West Side Grounds. Champions twice over in the National League, Chicago had squelched Detroit in four games in the World’s Series of ’07 after breaking the Giants’ infant record for victories in a season. No finer defensive team existed. Frank Chance, their manager, had redefined play at first base, taking his position daringly distant from the bag and covering nearly as much territory as second baseman Johnny Evers. This Evers was regarded by no less an authority than Mathewson as the league’s most dangerous hitter in a pinch, and his fiery will to win matched McGraw’s own. You couldn’t bunt on Battleaxe Steinfeldt at third; still less could you put the ball by him. At shortstop was Joe Tinker, the little Kansan with the lined, leathery face and weather eye of a midwestern farmer. Behind these were the mellifluous outfield trio of Scheckard, Slagle, and Schulte; there were daily arguments in the bleachers as to which was the best ballhawk in the league, let alone on the club. Johnny Kling’s gutteral, often obscene, encouragements to his pitchers rang out from behind the plate to reach the ears of everyone in the park, and the staff he caught was deep and fine: Pfeister, Reulbach, Overall, Fraser, and above all Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown, Three-Fingered Brown, whose index finger was abbreviated at the knuckle and whose curve balls darted and jerked like trout on a hook. “I wonder if he gets anything special with that cut finger?” McGraw once mused. “If I’m ever convinced he does, I’ll have a surgeon go to work on my entire pitching staff.” No one quite believed he was joking.
These were the Cubs, hobbled by early season injury but now, under the kindly summer sun, pulling together to play their best ball. But Pittsburgh had Honus Wagner. He hit a home run that day, one of ten he hit that year, an astonishing total. I remember it exactly, for it was the first I’d ever seen belted out of the West Side Grounds. There was a man on third, and Wagner needed an authoritative fly ball to bring home the run. Reulbach, Chicago’s pitcher, tried to cross him up with a soft curve. You might beat Honus Wagner, but you could never fool him; he timed his swing with the precision of a headsman, and bang! The ball soared skyward, and the voice of the crowd, dead silent in the immediate moment, rose with the ball, not as a cheer but as a gasp of awe. I don’t know that they ever found the ball, but they scratched a mark in the pavement where it was seen to land, and after the game, and for days following, people gathered at the spot, looked back at the ballpark, and shook their heads in wonder.
Pittsburgh was the second choice in the race, after the Cubs; few gave the Giants a chance. But the club McGraw had built like a backyard hobbyist—a new gadget here, a reconstructed doodad there—held together. Among the rookies Doyle was excellent and McCormick effective, and Herzog was a wonder at the bat, though there was no place to hide him in the field. The old men, Seymour and Tenney, were productive, and Bridwell, at shortstop, was toughest when it meant the most. No one was lost to injury, and even the weather favored them; their thin pitching took extra rest when rain postponed a number of games at fortunate intervals. McGinnity was finished. Half the time he was listed to start he failed to toe the mark, and often he was relegated to the bullpen. Wiltse had a strong year, but Hooks was no Iron Man. The real difference was Mathewson. He never missed a turn, and between times McGraw would call on him in late innings to protect a precious lead. Every aspect of his game was at its sharpest edge: he’d strike out one man in five, walk one in thirty, allow half a dozen hits on an ordinary day, one or two on a great one. A third of his victories were shut-outs, as they had to be: many times one Giant run was the winning margin.
These three clubs gave us such a summer as the league had never seen, rising and falling and scraping against one another from June to September, never separated by more than a whisper. Whenever two of them met the third would skip over the ensuing carnage into first place. Giant fans packed the grandstand as quickly as the club could build new extensions; those who found no place at the park bought hourly editions of the newspapers to keep abreast. A speculator who in June offered Eli five dollars a ticket for our box seats upped the ante to ten dollars in July, twenty in August. That month, from Lake George, Edith asked a favor on her father’s behalf: would I kindly report the scores in my daily letter? Inning by inning tallies were posted on the Exchange, bellowed by newsboys, scrawled in soap on storefront windows. I felt that all New York had become Coogan’s Bluff, overlooking the Polo Grounds and reverberating with its echoes. Shows would succeed or flop, stocks would rise or fall, juries would acquit or convict in the temper of victory or defeat.
They turned into September with New York and Chicago tied, Pittsburgh half a game behind them. By Labor Day the Giants led by a game and a half. The next day Mathewson shut out Brooklyn in eleven innings; on Saturday he won his thirtieth victory, and tripled home two runs to boot. Two days later he won again, in relief; he came in with the score tied, one out, and two St. Louis runners aboard; he walked a man intentionally, struck out the next, and retired all the rest. On Friday, the eighteenth, while seven thousand New Yorkers rallied for William Jennings Bryan at City Hall Park, five times that number stormed the Polo Grounds for a climactic double-header against Pittsburgh. The Giants swept the pair; Mathewson threw another shut-out, his eleventh of the season. On that same afternoon Chicago lost in Philadelphia. Saturday morning’s papers showed the Giants four and a half games ahead of the Cubs, five up on Pittsburgh, and the specs were selling tickets at face value outside the Polo Grounds. A ten-inning defeat, the club’s first loss in two weeks, seemed hardly to matter. There was no ball on Sunday, the last day of summer, and I took Edith on the boat trip around Manhattan. Her pregnancy, hardly visible when she’d departed for Lake George, was now obvious, and it seemed that every nanny aboard had a guess at whether she was carrying a male or female heir. When we passed the Polo Grounds she asked how old the child might be before I took it to a ballgame, but my thoughts were on the present; in my imagination I saw the championship banner fluttering over the empty grandstand.
To the distracted city Arthur returned like a man from Mars. I’d thought or heard nothing about him in nearly three months, and when he pushed open the door to my office on Monday morning my first impression was that he’d grown noticeably taller. How odd, I thought, to spring up at his age, and then I saw his boots, chocolate brown and tooled in the Spanish manner and fitted with three-inch heels.
“You’ve joined the rodeo!” I said.
He laughed. “I bought them in Wyoming. Do you know, there’s a town out there called Jackson’s Hole? I saw it, the very thing. Not the town, the hole. I was told that Jackson is in there somewhere. Dead, of course. He drowned in it a couple of weeks after the Custer massacre. ‘Massacree,’ they pronounce it.”
“Sit down, cowboy. Welcome home.”
He sat, reached for his cigarette case, hesitated, and drew back his hand. “I hope I am welcome,” he said.
“Of course you are.”
“I’ve just seen Uncle Sid, and I wanted to see you and settle things between us.”
“Done.”
“Just like that? You’re in a generous mood.”
“Why not? We’re three and a half games up with just two weeks to go.”
“Ah, of course. I find the entire municipality at its wit’s end over the fortunes of its ball team. Truly a phenomenon of our age.” My smile evaporated. “Arthur, if you want things settled between us it might be best to retire that phrase.”
“But I agree, it is phenomenal! If you’re to be angry at me when I agree with you, what might you do in the event we disagree?”
I turned to my work. “You’ve seen Uncle Sid, you said.”
“Yes, I’ve asked him for a place in the firm.”
“Really! What sort of place?”
“In sales. That is, to begin in sales. I’d want to become familiar with every aspect of the business, in time.”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve done some serious thinking about this.”
“I have, you know. May I tell you what I’ve thought?”
“Arthur, you hardly need my blessing to join the firm. I’ve no objection. Uncle Sid must be delighted, though perhaps a bit dubious as to your worth. You’ll convince him, no doubt. Have you talked with Eli?”
“I intend to see him immediately.”
“Will you grant that he has somewhat more expertise than you?”
Now the cigarette case came out. “I believe that one can learn from the mistakes of others as well as from their example,” he finally said.
“That’s my very point, Arthur. You don’t yet know enough to judge a mistake. Please, you must understand this. You know nothing about this business. What you have in abundance is the capacity to learn. I beg you to take your time. Don’t try to turn things upside down at a stroke.” I put out my hand. “I wish you success, I really do.”
“Thank you,” he said, and took my handshake.
“Now go and see Eli, and good luck.”
“You won’t regret this.”
“Arthur, I’m not hiring you. The fact is that I’ll have very little to do with you. I can’t teach you anything about design. It’s just something I do, I’m no instructor.”
“May I tell you one more thing?” he said, standing at the door. “I’ll be very proud to represent your work. I hope I can do it justice.”
I smiled. “That won’t be very hard at all.”
Arthur stepped out into the hallway. “Where’s Eli’s room?” he asked.
“Next to Uncle Sid’s corner office.”
“Is that the way of things? The boss has the corner office?” “Congratulations. You’ve learned your first truly important lesson in business.”
I listened to the clipped tempo of his boots as he strode down the hall, then turned to my desk and began to scribble in my sketchpad. Everything took a diamond shape, nothing had worth. Designing the company line had become as routine as the ride to work on the “el.” I threw the pad aside and took up the morning paper. There were four pages exclusively devoted to the pennant race, and other sections made reference to it: the editorial page featured a cartoon of a mandarin in robes, the caption reading, “The Chinaman Says: ‘April showers bring September double-headers.’” The Giants faced five of them in the next ten days; the key series with Chicago would begin with one on the morrow. I turned again to the sports pages. A writer speculated on the Giants’ pitching the rest of the way. Today it would be Mathewson; for tomorrow, and after, it was McGraw’s decision and anyone’s guess. Kapinski, I thought, imagining it in newsprint with a parenthetical L to indicate a lefthander. I leaned back in my chair and began to work to the Cubs’ order. I jammed Sheckard with fastballs and threw an outside curve for a third strike. I loosened up Johnny Evers with a high one under his chin, and had him bailing out on the next pitch. I fooled Wildfire Schulte with a fadeaway. I had good stuff, putting down the first batter in every inning; I gave up a two-out single in the second and walked Frank Chance with two down in the fourth. I was ahead and cruising in the seventh, and Mathewson was warming in the bullpen in case I needed late-inning help, when an apprentice appeared at my door with a summons to Uncle Sid’s office.
