time.
“You thought I wouldn’t know what they were,” Edward Everett said. “My mother, she’s pretty into the whole Catholic thing.”
That was the end of the conversation. Ten minutes later, they were outside the restaurant, buffeted by other parties coming in and going out. Edward Everett wondered if he should just leave them there, but the manners his mother had bred in him wouldn’t allow that, and so he offered to walk them to their car.
“We didn’t drive,” Julie said. “We only live a few blocks away.”
“Home, then,” he said. They set off to the apartment building where Julie and Audrey lived. It was past midnight. Off the main drag, the city was quiet, most of the homes dark. In a few yards, gas lamps burned dimly. Edward Everett tried to conjure something to say, but all he managed was “Carmelites,” giving an embarrassed laugh.
When they reached the apartment building, he stood at the curb until the women went inside, waving to him just before the door closed behind them. Two nights later, restless after a game, he went impulsively to their building again, and stood in the lobby studying the mailboxes. None said “Julie,” but one had two names embossed by a label maker, “J. Aylesworth, A. Humphrey,” and he went up the stairs looking for the number that corresponded with the names. As he knocked, he realized it was past ten-thirty; he had no idea whether Julie would be home, or whether it would be Audrey he’d find there, but Julie answered, opening the door as far as the chain lock would allow, and peered into the hall.
“Audrey’s not—” she said.
“Actually, I came to see you,” he said.
“Oh,” she replied, blushing.
“It’s late,” he said, but, after hesitating for a moment, she slipped off the chain.
“I can’t keep you in the hall,” she said. “But I have work tomorrow, so you can come in for just a minute.”
He asked for her phone number so he could invite her on a proper date and they began seeing each other whenever he was in town; in the off-season, when he went to Grand Rapids to work installing flooring for a company a teammate’s father owned, they talked long-distance twice a week and picked back up when the new season began. After games, she waited outside the ballpark with the other players’ wives and girlfriends and he would take her to a late dinner; on off-days, he waited outside her classroom building, sitting on a concrete bench the college had put there in memory of someone named Bartholomew Wesley, holding a book open in his lap so that people might mistake him for a student. Neither owned a car, and so they walked everywhere: to Abraham Lincoln’s house, to a small botanical garden, to a café called Oscar’s where the waitress came to recognize them and sometimes brought them plates of broken muffins the shop couldn’t sell. They could not go to Edward Everett’s place: he lived in a rooming house owned by an elderly woman whose husband had pitched a season with Springfield in the 1930s, when it was a Brooklyn farm club, and who made money after baseball as a paper wholesaler. The house had at one time been a splendid three-story Victorian in which the widow and her late husband had intended to raise, in her words, “a passel of kids,” but they’d never had any and after he died she started renting to ballplayers. She was strict, forbidding women in the players’ rooms, and the one time Edward Everett brought Julie over on a rainy Sunday, to visit in the living room, she hovered: straightening books on the shelves, plumping cushions and watering plants until finally Edward Everett took Julie home.
Because of Audrey, neither could they have privacy at Julie’s apartment: if Audrey came home and found Edward Everett there, she would give an embarrassed apology and go to her room and shut the door, but Edward Everett could hear her shuffling papers, sometimes typing, listening to some sad girl singer on her stereo, going into a sneezing fit because of her allergies.
They talked about spending the night together often before they finally did, on a Friday in April when Audrey went home for her mother’s fiftieth birthday party. Until then, Julie had been shy about sex. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “it’s just that the nuns get in your head, you know?” Before then, they had advanced to the point at which she would