I apologize. I have a tendency to—a lot of smarts, my father used to say, but not a lick of social sense. May he rest in peace.” She picked up her wine and raised it slightly upwards. “How did you get hurt?”
He told her about the game weeks earlier, about the play that hurt him, but not about his performance at the plate, partly because he heard the account through her perception: to someone else, it would seem a baseball version of “the one that got away.” It didn’t count, but the game was thiiiiiiiiiis big.
“My father was a Cardinals fan.” She took another forkful of her salad but paused with the bite partway between her plate and her mouth, as if she was remembering someone. “I’m not from here,” she said, taking the bite finally. “We’re from Indiana. Hoosiers, rah!” She raised a fist in a way that made him think of cheerleaders, and for a moment he could see her at sixteen, red-cheeked, giving a jump on the sidelines of a football game in November, bouncy with youthful excitement. He tried to calculate when that would have been.
“By rights, we should have been Cincinnati fans, but for some reason …” She gave a shrug. “When I was a little girl, my father and I—but you don’t want to hear this. We said silence.” She held up the scout salute again.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You and your father …”
“You don’t have to,” she said, taking another forkful of lettuce and then inspecting it as if it were something distasteful, pulling a small brown and wilted leaf from the fork and laying it delicately on the edge of her plate before eating the rest of the forkful.
“You and your father,” he said again.
“We would sit up listening to Cardinals games on the Philco. The reception wasn’t always clear. We’d get overlap, you know, from other stations. My mother would say, ‘Howard, the girl has to get her sleep.’ ‘There’s plenty of time for sleep after October,’ he’d say. He was my hero for that.”
The waitress brought their dinners but got the orders mixed up: when Edward Everett cut into his steak, a thin trail of blood pooled around the edges of his sirloin.
“Not very ladylike,” Estelle said, switching their plates. “To order meat so near to still being alive.” She went on with her story. “Even after he died, I kept on with it. It was my way to stay connected to him. I remember when I was just out of college, my mother wanted to take me to Paris. It was what women of a certain sort did after college. She’d done it with her mother and so she and I were going to damn well do it. We were not close, but one did not say ‘no’ to one’s mother. Not then.”
She got lost again for a moment in some thought but came back after a second. “I didn’t want to go. The Cardinals were still in the thick of things and I didn’t want to miss it. They had a chance to go to the Series for the first time since 1946 and I was damn well not going to miss it. She didn’t understand. It wasn’t the baseball, it was—”
“Your father.”
“Exactly. You understand that. She couldn’t. So we went; they were in first place the day we left and they weren’t anymore when we got back six weeks later.” She laughed. “It will sound stupid, but I blamed myself. If I’d been there, listening to the games, they’d’ve won. Silly, and maybe you can’t understand that. One afternoon, we were going to the Louvre and on the way we passed a newsstand where they had the International Herald Tribune; I bought one and, while we were waiting in line to get into the room to see the Mona Lisa, I read the sports page. It wasn’t much—just a paragraph about a game they had with someone, I don’t know: Cincinnati or New York. My mother snatched the paper out of my hands in front of all those people—a rare lapse in decorum for her—and snapped at me. ‘For God’s sake, Esty. We’re in the Louvre.’ She stepped out of line and marched the newspaper to a trash can and came back. I could tell the newsprint all over her hands bothered her. It made me think of Lady Macbeth—‘Out, damn spot’—the way she kept wiping one hand against the other to try to get them