the lockers and scattering his books. “Brom Bones!” his father said, recognizing life from literature, when Teddy described what was going on. The remedy, as his old man saw it, was obvious: quit the team and thereby reject the stereotype of the American male as a brainless jock. Teddy didn’t see it like that. He loved basketball and wanted to play it as the noncontact sport he felt it truly was. He wanted to receive the ball at the top of the key, give any defender a shoulder fake, spin and take his fadeaway jumper. The sound the ball made when it went through the net without touching the rim was as perfect as anything he’d experienced in his young life.
His varsity career ended predictably, though had Teddy predicted it, he probably would’ve taken his father’s advice and just quit. One afternoon in practice, when he went up for a rebound, Nelson undercut him, sending Teddy crashing to the floor on his tailbone. The result was a hairline fracture of a vertebra that according to doctors could’ve been much more serious. Even so, it sidelined him for the rest of the season. Among the dozens of books he plowed through during his convalescence that spring and summer was Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which for some reason gave him the same feeling as swishing his jumper. When he finished the book, he asked his parents, neither of whom was religious, if he could attend church. Their characteristic response was that they had no objection unless he expected them to go with him. Sunday morning was when they read the New York Times.
Because Merton was a Trappist monk, Teddy tried the Catholic church first, but the priest there was what his father would’ve instantly identified as an anti-intellectual, a moron, really, as far removed from the monastic ideal as you could imagine, so next Teddy tried the Unitarian church a block farther away. There the minister was a Princeton-educated woman. In many respects she reminded Teddy of his parents, except that she seemed genuinely interested in him. She was pretty and not at all bony, so of course he fell in love with her. Still under Merton’s spell, he tried to keep that love pure, but most nights he fell asleep imagining what she might look like under her robe and stole, something he doubted Merton would’ve done. He was both heartbroken and relieved when she was transferred to another parish.
Senior year he was cleared to return to basketball, but he didn’t turn out, which compelled the coach to mutter sissy under his breath every time they passed in the hall. Either that or pussy, Teddy couldn’t be sure which. To his surprise, he discovered that he didn’t much care what Coach thought of him, though he must’ve cared a little, because that summer, just before Teddy headed off to Minerva, the coach, attempting to free a stick that had become wedged between the blade and the frame of his lawnmower without first turning the motor off, managed to slice off the top joint of what he always referred to as his pussy finger. Teddy, when he heard about it, couldn’t help smiling, though he felt guilty, too. He’d written his college entrance essay on Merton and doubted the monk would’ve taken pleasure in the suffering of another human being any more than he would’ve spent long nights, as Teddy recently had, imagining what a pretty Unitarian minister looked like under her vestments. On the other hand, Merton never met the minister in question and had apparently been a bit of a rake before his conversion. Also, Teddy thought, there was no reason to suppose that God lacked a sense of humor. He didn’t meddle in the affairs of men, Teddy had been told, or cause them to behave in a certain way, but so far as Teddy was concerned, Coach losing the tip of his pussy finger like that had to have tickled Him.
* * *
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MICKEY GIRARDI WAS FROM a rough, working-class neighborhood in West Haven, Connecticut, famous for bodybuilders, Harleys and ethnic block parties. His parents were Irish and Italian, his old man a construction worker, his mother a secretary at an insurance agency, both deeply committed to assimilation. They flew the flag and not just on the Fourth. A veteran of the Second World War, his father could’ve taken advantage of the G.I. Bill but knew a guy who could get him into the pipefitters union,