Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  o o o

  The talk that passed after what Francis said, and after the silence that followed it, was not important except as it moved the man and the woman closer together and physically apart, allowed her to make him a Swiss cheese sandwich and a pot of tea and begin dressing the turkey: salting, peppering, stuffing it with not quite stale enough bread but it’ll have to do, rubbing it with butter and sprinkling it with summer savory, mixing onions in with the dressing, and turkey seasoning too from a small tin box with a red and yellow turkey on it, fitting the bird into a dish for which it seemed to have been groomed and killed to order, so perfect was the fit.

  And too, the vagrant chitchat allowed Francis to stare out at the yard and watch the dog and become aware that the yard was beginning to function as the site of a visitation, although nothing in it except his expectation when he looked out at the grass lent credence to that possibility.

  He stared and he knew that he was in the throes of flight, not outward this time but upward. He felt feathers growing from his back, knew soon he would soar to regions unimaginable, knew too that what had brought him home was not explicable without a year of talking, but a scenario nevertheless took shape in his mind: a pair of kings on a pair of trolley cars moving toward a single track, and the trolleys, when they meet at the junction, do not wreck each other but fuse into a single car inside which the kings rise up against each other in imperial intrigue, neither in control, each driving the car, a careening thing, wild, anarchic, dangerous to all else, and then Billy leaps aboard and grabs the power handle and the kings instantly yield control to the wizard.

  He give me a Camel cigarette when I was coughin’ my lungs up, Francis thought.

  He knows what, a man needs, Billy does.

  o o o

  Annie was setting the dining-room table with a white linen tablecloth, with the silver Iron Joe gave them for their wedding, and with china Francis did not recognize, when Daniel Quinn arrived home. The boy tossed his schoolbag in a corner of the dining room, then stopped in midmotion when he saw Francis standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Hulooo,” Francis said to him.

  “Danny, this is your grandfather,” Annie said. “He just came to see us and he’s staying for dinner.” Daniel stared at Francis’s face and slowly extended his right hand. Francis shook it.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Daniel said.

  “The feeling’s mutual, boy. You’re a big lad for ten.”

  “I’ll be eleven in January.”

  “You comin’ from school, are ye?”

  “From instructions, religion.”

  “Oh, religion. I guess I just seen you crossin’ the street and didn’t even know it. Learn anything, did you?”

  “Learned about today. All Saints’ Day.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a holy day. You have to go to church. It’s the day we remember the martyrs who died for the faith and nobody knows their names.”

  “Oh yeah,” Francis said. “I remember them fellas.”

  “What happened to your teeth?”

  “Daniel.”

  “My teeth,” Francis said. “Me and them parted company, most of ‘em. I got a few left.”

  “Are you Grampa Phelan or Grampa Quinn?”

  “Phelan,” Annie said. “His name is Francis Aloysius Phelan.”

  “Francis Aloysius, right,” said Francis with a chuckle. “Long time since I heard that.”

  “You’re the ball player,” Danny said. “The big-leaguer. You played with the Washington Senators.”

  “Used to. Don’t play anymore.”

  “Billy says you taught him how to throw an inshoot.”

  “He remembers that, does he?”

  “Will you teach me?”

  “You a pitcher, are ye?”

  “Sometimes. I can throw a knuckle ball.”

  “Change of pace. Hard to hit. You get a baseball, I’ll show you how to hold it for an inshoot.” And Daniel ran into the kitchen, then the pantry, and emerged with a ball and glove, which he handed to Francis. The glove was much too small for Francis’s hand but he put a few fingers inside it and held the ball in his right hand, studied its seams. Then he gripped it with his thumb and one and a half fingers.

  “What happened to your finger?” Daniel asked.

  “Me and it parted company too. Sort of an accident.”

  “Does that make any difference throwing an inshoot?”

  “Sure does, but not to me. I don’t throw no more at all. Never was a pitcher, you know, but talked with plenty of ‘em. Walter Johnson was my buddy. You know him? The Big Train?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Don’t matter. But he taught me how it was done and I ain’t forgot. Put your first two fingers right on the seams, like this, and then you snap your wrist out, like this, and if you’re a righty—are you a righty?”—and the boy nodded— “then the ball’s gonna dance a little turnaround jig and head right inside at the batter’s belly button, assumin’, acourse, that he’s a righty too. You followin’ me?” And the boy nodded again. “Now the trick is, you got to throw the opposite of the outcurve, which is like this.” And he snapped his wrist clockwise. “You got to do it like this.” And he snapped his wrist counterclockwise again. Then he had the boy try it both ways and patted him on the back.

  “That’s how it’s done,” he said. “You get so’s you can do it, the batter’s gonna think you got a little animal inside that ball, flyin’ it like an airplane.”

  “Let’s go outside and try it,” Daniel said. “I’ll get another glove.”

  “Glove,” said Francis, and he turned to Annie. “By some fluke you still got my old glove stuck away somewheres in the house? That possible, Annie?”

  “There’s a whole trunk of your things in the attic,” she said. “It might be there.”

  “It is,” Daniel said. “I know it is. I saw it. I’ll get it.”

  “You will not,” Annie said. “That trunk is none of your affair.”

  “But I’ve already seen it. There’s a pair of spikes too, and clothes and newspapers and old pictures.”

  “All that,” Francis said to Annie. “You saved it.”

  “You had no business in that trunk,” Annie said.

  “Billy and I looked at the pictures and the clippings one day,” Daniel said. “Billy looked just as much as I did. He’s in lots of ‘em.” And he pointed at his grandfather.

  “Maybe you’d want to have a look at what’s there,” Annie said to Francis.

  “Could be. Might find me a new shoelace.”

  Annie led him up the stairs, Daniel already far ahead of them. They heard the boy saying: “Get up, Billy, Grandpa’s here”; and when they reached the second floor Billy was standing in the doorway of his room, in his robe and white socks, disheveled and only half awake.

  “Hey, Billy. How you gettin’ on?” Francis said.

  “Hey,” said Billy. “You made it.”

  “Yep.”

  “I woulda bet against it happenin’.”

  “You’da lost. Brought a turkey too, like I said.”

  “A turkey, yeah?”

  “We’re having it for dinner,” Annie said.

  “I’m supposed to be downtown tonight,” Billy said. “I just told Martin I’d meet him.”

  “Call him back,” Annie said. “He’ll understand.”

  “Red Tom Fitzsimmons and Martin both called to tell me things are all right again on Broadway. You know, I told you I had trouble with the McCalls,” Billy said to his father.

  “I ‘member.”

  “I wouldn’t do all they wanted and they marked me lousy. Couldn’t gamble, couldn’t even get a drink on Broadway.”

  “I read that story Martin wrote,” Francis said. “He called you a magician.”

  “Martin’s full of malarkey. I didn’t do diddley. I just mentioned Newark to them and it turns out that’s where they trapped some of the kidnap gang.”

&n
bsp; “You did somethin’, then,” Francis said. “Mentionin’ Newark was somethin’. Who’d you mention it to?”

  “Bindy. But I didn’t know those guys were in Newark or I wouldn’t of said anything. I could never rat on anybody.”

  “Then why’d you mention it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s how come you’re a magician.”

  “That’s Martin’s baloney. But he turned somebody’s head around with it, ‘cause I’m back in good odor with the pols, is how he put it on the phone. In other words, I don’t stink to them no more.”

  Francis smelled himself and knew he had to wash as soon as possible. The junk wagon’s stink and the bummy odor of his old suitcoat was unbearable now that he was among these people. Dirty butchers go out of business.

  “You can’t go out now, Billy,” Annie said. “Not with your father home and staying for dinner. We’re going up in the attic to look at his things.”

  “You like turkey?” Francis asked Billy.

  “Who the hell don’t like turkey, not to give you a short answer,” Billy said. He looked at his father. “Listen, use my razor in the bathroom if you want to shave.”

  “Don’t be telling people what to do,” Annie said. “Get dressed and come downstairs.”

  And then Francis and Annie ascended the stairway to the attic.

  o o o

  When Francis opened the trunk lid the odor of lost time filled the attic air, a cloying reek of imprisoned flowers that unsettled the dust and fluttered the window shades. Francis felt drugged by the scent of the reconstituted past, and then stunned by his first look inside the trunk, for there, staring out from a photo, was his own face at age nineteen. The picture lay among rolled socks and a small American flag, a Washington Senators cap, a pile of newspaper clippings and other photos, all in a scatter on the trunk’s tray. Francis stared up at himself from the bleachers in Chadwick Park on a day in 1899, his face unlined, his teeth all there, his collar open, his hair unruly in the afternoon’s breeze. He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one hand and also in flight, arcing in a blur toward the glove. What the camera had caught was two instants in one: time separated and unified, the ball in two places at once, an eventuation as inexplicable as the Trinity itself. Francis now took the picture to be a Trinitarian talisman (a hand, a glove, a ball) for achieving the impossible: for he had always believed it impossible for him, ravaged man, failed human, to reenter history under this roof. Yet here he was in this acne of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught.

  But the ball is really not yet caught, except by the camera, which has frozen only its situation in space.

  And Francis is not yet ruined, except as an apparency in process.

  The ball still flies.

  Francis still lives to play another day.

  Doesn’t he?

  The boy noticed the teeth. A man can get new teeth, store teeth. Annie got ‘em.

  o o o

  Francis lifted the tray out of the trunk, revealing the spikes and the glove, which Daniel immediately grabbed, plus two suits of clothes, a pair of black oxfords and brown high-button shoes, maybe a dozen shirts and two dozen white collars, a stack of undershirts and shorts, a set of keys to long-forgotten locks, a razor strop and a hone, a shaving mug with an inch of soap in it, a shaving brush with bristles intact, seven straight razors in a case, each marked for a day of the week, socks, bow ties, suspenders, and a baseball, which Francis picked up and held out to Daniel.

  “See that? See that name?”

  The boy looked, shook his head. “I can’t read it.”

  “Get it in the light, you’ll read it. That’s Ty Cobb. He signed that ball in 1911, the year he hit .420. A fella give it to me once and I always kept it. Mean guy, Cobb was, come in at me spikes up many a time. But you had to hand it to a man who played ball as good as he did. He was the best.”

  “Better than Babe Ruth?”

  “Better and tougher and meaner and faster. Couldn’t hit home runs like the Babe, but he did everything else better. You like to have that ball with his name on it?”

  “Sure I would, sure! Yeah! Who wouldn’t?”

  “Then it’s yours. But you better look him up, and Walter Johnson too. Find out for yourself how good they were. Still kickin’, too, what I hear about Cobb. He ain’t dead yet either.”

  “I remember that suit,” Annie said, lifting the sleeve of a gray herringbone coat. “You wore it for dress-up.”

  “Wonder if it’d still fit me,” Francis said, and stood up and held the pants to his waist and found out his legs had not grown any longer in the past twenty-two years.

  “Take the suit downstairs,” Annie said. “I’ll sponge and press it.”

  “Press it?” Francis said, and he chuckled. “S’pose I could use a new outfit. Get rid of these rags.”

  He then singled out a full wardrobe, down to the handkerchief, and piled it all on the floor in front of the trunk.

  “I’d like to look at these again,” Annie said, lifting out the clippings and photos.

  “Bring ‘em down,” Francis said, closing the lid.

  “I’ll carry the glove,” Daniel said.

  “And I’d like to borry the use of your bathroom,” Francis said. “Take Billy up on that shave offer and try on some of these duds. I got me a shave last night but Billy thinks I oughta do it again.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to Billy,” Annie said. “You look fine.”

  She led him down the stairs and along a hallway where two rooms faced each other. She gestured at a bedroom where a single bed, a dresser, and a child’s rolltop desk stood in quiet harmony.

  “That’s Danny’s room,” she said. “It’s a nice big room and it gets the morning light.” She took a towel down from a linen closet shelf and handed it to Francis. “Have a bath if you like.”

  Francis locked the bathroom door and tried on the trousers, which fit if he didn’t button the top button. Wear the suspenders with ‘em. The coat was twenty years out of style and offended Francis’s residual sense of aptness. But he decided to wear it anyway, for its odor of time was infinitely superior to the stink of bumdom that infested the coat on his back. He stripped and let the bathwater run. He inspected the shirt he took from the trunk, but rejected it in favor of the white-on-white from the junk wagon. He tried the laceless black oxfords, all broken in, and found that even with calluses his feet had not grown in twenty-two years either.

  He stepped into the bath and slid slowly beneath its vapors. He trembled with the heat, with astonishment that he was indeed here, as snug in this steaming tub as was the turkey in its roasting pan. He felt blessed. He stared at the bathroom sink, which now had an aura of sanctity about it, its faucets sacred, its drainpipe holy, and he wondered whether everything was blessed at some point in its existence, and he concluded yes. Sweat rolled down his forehead and dripped off his nose into the bath, a confluence of ancient and modern waters. And as it did, a great sunburst entered the darkening skies, a radiance so sudden that it seemed like a bolt of lightning; yet its brilliance remained, as if some angel of beatific lucidity were hovering outside the bathroom window. So enduring was the light, so intense beyond even sundown’s final gloryburst, that Francis raised himself up out of the tub and went to the window.

  Below, in the yard, Aldo Campione, Fiddler Quain, Harold Allen, and Rowdy Dick Doolan were erecting a wooden structure that Francis was already able to recognize as bleachers.

  He stepped back into the tub, soaped the long-handled brush, raised his left foot out of the water, scrubbed it clean, raised the right foot, scrubbed that.

  o o o

/>   Francis, that 1916 dude, came down the stairs in bow tie, white-on-white shirt, black laceless oxfords with a spit shine on them, the gray herringbone with lapels twenty-two years too narrow, with black silk socks and white silk boxer shorts, with his skin free of dirt everywhere, his hair washed twice, his fingernails cleaned, his leftover teeth brushed and the toothbrush washed with soap and dried and rehung, with no whiskers anymore, none, and his hair combed and rubbed with a dab of Vaseline so it’d stay in place, with a spring in his gait and a smile on his face; this Francis dude came down those stairs, yes, and stunned his family with his resurrectible good looks and stylish potential, and took their stares as applause.

  And dance music rose in his brain.

  “Holy Christ,” said Billy.

  “My oh my,” said Annie.

  “You look different,” Daniel said.

  “I kinda needed a sprucin’,” Francis said. “Funny duds but I guess they’ll do.”

  They all pulled back then, even Daniel, aware they should not dwell on the transformation, for it made Francis’s previous condition so lowly, so awful.

  “Gotta dump these rags,” he said, and he lifted his bundle, tied with the arms of his old coat.

  “Danny’ll take them,” Annie said. “Put them in the cellar,” she told the boy.

  Francis sat down on a bench in the breakfast nook, across the table from Billy. Annie had spread the clips and photos on the table and he and Billy looked them over. Among the clips Francis found a yellowed envelope postmarked June 2, 1910, and addressed to Mr. Francis Phelan, do Toronto Baseball Club, The Palmer House, Toronto, Ont. He opened it and read the letter inside, then pocketed it. Dinner advanced as Daniel and Annie peeled the potatoes at the sink. Billy, his hair combed slick, half a dude himself with open-collared starched white shirt, creased trousers, and pointy black shoes, was drinking from a quart bottle of Dobler beer and reading a clipping.