the geography of his life. There was his self on the far side of the line, the major league ballplayer, and his life on the other side, where he was an exile from the country where he wanted to be.
“You brood about it too much,” his second wife said to him on one of the days when he was more taciturn than usual, a day not long before he came home from a trip and found she’d moved out. “I’m not thinking about what you think I’m thinking about,” he protested, although he was.
He didn’t want to be one of those men whose lives were all about missed opportunities and regret, men like his father, for example, who stayed in the same high school coaching job for more than twenty years but who was haunted by what he saw as his moment of failure, when Woody Hayes invited him to be one of his assistants when he left high school football to coach a bad Denison University team; his father had turned him down because it was too risky: what if he went to Denison and they failed there? He remembered too well the Depression, his own father sullen and unemployed for three and a half years, his family renting out their house to a family who did have a husband and father with a job, and moving into the basement; his own father sitting in a basement corner staring angrily at the ceiling, grimacing every time the other family made a noise upstairs in what should have been his home, their feet clomping on his floors, their scraping a chair across his dining room. Worse yet were the days on which the family upstairs had a party: the door opening and closing and opening and closing as they admitted their friends; the explosion of laughter or the high chatter of children. Edward Everett’s father remembered that all too well and didn’t want to become his father, an exile in his own home, and so he said no to Woody Hayes. The first year, when Hayes’ team went two and six, it seemed a shrewd decision, but then Hayes became a coaching god at Ohio State. And so Edward Everett’s father did become his own father, unhappy in his life, waking up on a Saturday morning after yet another loss by his own poor high school football team, sitting in the living room, not wanting to tune in the Ohio State game on the radio but doing so, and then turning it off and then on again, thinking about the country that could have been his life, instead of the one that was: the coach of a mediocre high school team. Until he hung himself from a ceiling joist in his office just off the locker room in the high school.
“It’s not the same,” Edward Everett’s wife told him that day shortly before she left. “It wasn’t as if you walked away from the major leagues.”
“No, I was carried off the field away from them,” he said, and she shook her head in what he thought was a gesture of mock frustration but which, in the end, was real.
In the hospital, he had his own room that looked out across the street to a church he later learned was called Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal. From his bed, all he could see was part of its green bronze dome rising above a thick stand of trees and the cross at its apex, but all through Sunday morning he listened to its resonant bell clanging the call to Mass. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer anymore; the idea of getting up early on a Sunday to go to Mass when he was with the team embarrassed him. On his first Sunday when he was in rookie ball, eighteen and full of self-consciousness, he was awakened at dawn by the sound of one of the three teammates who shared his room moving around—the click of his suitcase latch, the huff when he opened it, the clang of his belt hitting the bureau. Edward Everett was lying on the carpet where he’d slept the night before. The room had two double beds, but no one shared them: first two men in the room took the beds, the other two earned the floor. He realized it was Sunday, and thought, I ought to go to Mass. But before he could get up, another of his teammates snapped, “Jesus Christ, Turner, keep it down.” Turner apologized