LOOKING BACK ON that now, there is so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she really took that news. I didn’t know if it angered her or scared her. I certainly didn’t know that while I was having beers with my father, the bills back home were being paid, in part, by my mother cleaning houses with a woman who once cleaned ours.
I watched the two of them now in the bedroom, Miss Thelma upright against the pillows, my mother working her makeup sponges and her eyeliner pencils.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Tell you what?” my mother said.
“That you had to, you know, for money—?”
“Mop floors? Do laundry?” My mother chuckled. “I don’t know. Maybe because of the way you’re looking at me now.”
She sighed. “You were always proud, Charley.”
“I was not!” I snapped.
She lifted her eyebrows then returned to Miss Thelma’s face. Under her breath she mumbled, “If you say so.”
“Don’t do that!” I said.
“Do what?”
“If you say so. That.”
“I didn’t say anything, Charley.”
“Yes, you did!”
“Don’t yell.”
“I wasn’t proud! Just because I—”
My voice cracked. What was I doing? A half a day with my dead mother, and we were back to arguing?
“Ain’t no shame in needing work, Chickadoo,” Miss Thelma said. “But the only work I knew was what I’d been doing. And your mom said, ‘Well, what about that?’ I said, ‘Posey, you want to be somebody’s cleaning woman?’ And she said, ‘Thelma, if you ain’t above cleaning a house, why should I be?’ Remember that, Posey?”
My mother inhaled.
“I didn’t say ‘ain’t.’”
Miss Thelma howled with laughter. “Naw, naw, that’s right, you didn’t. I’m sure of that. You didn’t say ‘ain’t.’”
They were both laughing now. My mother was trying to work under Miss Thelma’s eyes.
“Hold still,” she said, but they kept on laughing.
“I THINK MOM should get married again,” Roberta said.
This was one time when I called home from college.
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s still pretty. But nobody stays pretty forever. She’s not as thin as she used to be.”
“She doesn’t want to get married.”
“How do you know?”
“She doesn’t need to get married, Roberta, OK?”
“If she doesn’t get somebody soon, nobody is gonna want her.”
“Stop it.”
“She wears a girdle now, Charley. I saw it.”
“I don’t care, Roberta! God!”
“You think you’re so cool because you go to college.”
“Cut it out.”
“Did you ever hear that song ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’? I think it’s so stupid. How come they play it all the time?”
“Is she talking to you about getting married?”
“Maybe.”
“Roberta, I’m not kidding. What did she say?”
“Nothing, OK? But who knows where the hell Dad is. And Mom shouldn’t have to be by herself all the time.”
“Stop cursing,” I said.
“I can say whatever I want, Charley. You’re not my boss.”
She was fifteen. I was twenty. She had no idea about my father. I had seen him and talked to him. She wanted my mother happy. I wanted her to stay the same. It had been nine years since that Saturday morning when my mother crushed the corn puffs in the palm of her hand. Nine years since we’d all been a family.
In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word “divorce” came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant “divide.” In truth, it comes from “divertere,” which means “to divert.”
I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother’s girdle and whether she should marry someone else.
Chick Makes His Choice
THERE ARE TWO DAYS AT COLLEGE that I’ll share with you here because they were the high and the low points of that experience. The high came in my second year, sometime during the fall semester. Baseball hadn’t started up, so I actually had time to hang out on campus. On a Thursday night after midterm exams, one of the fraternities had a big party. It was crowded and dark. Music blasted. Black lights made the posters on the walls—and everyone at the party—seem phosphorescent. We laughed loudly and toasted each other with plastic cups of beer.
At some point, a guy with long stringy hair jumped on a chair and began lip-synching to the music and playing air guitar—it was a song by the Jefferson Airplane—and it quickly became a contest. We went flipping through the milk crates of albums to find a “performance” song.
Well, I don’t know who owned these albums, but I spotted an unlikely one and I yelled to my buddies, “Hey! Wait! Look at this!” It was the Bobby Darin album my mother used to play when we were kids. He wore a white tuxedo on the cover, his hair embarrassingly short and neat.
“I know this one!” I said. “I know all the words!”
“Get out,” one buddy said.
“Put it on!” another said. “Look at that dufus!”
We commandeered the turntable, lined up the needle to the groove of “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” and when the music began, everybody froze, because this clearly wasn’t rock and roll. Suddenly I was out there with my two pals. They looked at each other, embarrassed, and pointed at me as they shook their hips. But I was feeling loose and I figured, who cares? So as the trumpets and clarinets boomed over the speakers, I mouthed the words that I knew by heart.
“You’re walkin’ along the street, or you’re at a party
Or else you’re alone and then you suddenly dig,
You’re lookin’ in someone’s eyes, you suddenly realize
That this could be the start of something big.”
I was snapping my fingers like the crooners from The Steve Allen Show, and suddenly everyone was laughing and hollering, “Yeah! Go, cat!” I got more and more ridiculous. I guess no one could believe I knew all the words to such a hokey record.
Anyhow, by the time it was done, I got a big ovation and my friends tackled me around the waist, and we pushed into one another, laughing and calling each other names.
I met Catherine that night. This is what makes it the high point. She had watched my “performance” with a few of her girlfriends. I caught sight of her and I shivered—even as I was flapping my arms and lip-synching. She wore a sleeveless pink cotton blouse, hip-hugger jeans and strawberry-colored lip gloss, and she playfully snapped her fingers as I sang Bobby Darin. To this day, I don’t know if she would have given me a second look had I not been making such an utter fool of myself.
“Where did you learn that song?” she said, stepping up as I drew a beer from the keg.
“Uh...my mom,” I answered.
I felt like an idiot. Who begins a conversation with “my mom?” But she seemed to like the idea and, well, we went from there.
The next day I got my grades and they were good, two A’s, two B’s. I called my mother at the beauty parlor and she came to the phone. I told her the results and I told her about Catherine and the Bobby Darin song and she seemed so happy that I had called her in the middle of the day. Over the rumble of hair dryers she yelled, “Charley, I’m so proud of you!”
That was the high point.
I dropped out of college one year later.
That was the low point.
I DROPPED OUT to play minor league baseball, at my father’s suggestion and to my mother’s everlasting disappointment. I had been offered a spot in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ organization, to play winter ball and hopefully make their minor league roster. My father felt this was the right time. “You can’t
get any better playing against college kids,” he said.
When I first mentioned the idea to my mother, she screamed, “Absolutely not!” It didn’t matter that baseball would pay me. It didn’t matter that the scouts thought I had potential—maybe enough to make it to the major leagues. “Absolutely not!” were her words.
And I absolutely ignored her.
I went to the registrar’s office, told them I was leaving, packed up a duffel bag, and split. Many guys my age were being sent to Vietnam. But by whatever twist of luck or fate, I had drawn a low number in the draft lottery. My father, a veteran, seemed relieved at that fact. “You don’t need the trouble you get into during a war,” he said.
Instead, I marched to his cadence, and I followed his command: I joined a minor league club in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and my student days were over. What can I say about that? Was I seduced by baseball or my father’s approval? Both, I suppose. It felt natural, like I was back on the trail of breadcrumbs I had followed as a schoolboy—before things flopped over, before my life as a mama’s boy had begun.
I remember calling her from the motel phone in San Juan. I had flown there straight from college, the first time I’d ever been on an airplane. I didn’t want to stop at home because I knew she would make a scene.
“A collect call from your son,” the operator said with a Spanish accent.
When my mother realized where I was, that the deal was done, she seemed stunned. Her voice was flat. She asked what kind of clothes I had. What was I doing for food? She seemed to be reading from a list of required questions.
“Is it safe, the place you’re staying?” she said.
“Safe? I guess.”
“Who else do you know there?”
“Nobody. But there’s guys on the team. I have a roommate. He’s from Indiana, or Iowa, someplace.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Then silence.
“Mom, I can always go back to school.”
This time the silence was longer. She said only one more thing before we hung up:
“Going back to something is harder than you think.”
I don’t suppose I could have broken my mother’s heart any more if I tried.
The Work You Have to Do
MISS THELMA CLOSED HER EYES and leaned her head back. My mother resumed her makeup process. She dabbed the sponge around her former partner’s face, and I watched with mixed emotions. I always thought it was so important what came after your name. Chick Benetto, professional baseball player, not Chick Benetto, salesman. Now I’d learned that after Posey Benetto, nurse, and Posey Benetto, beautician, it was Posey Benetto, cleaning woman. It angered me that she had dropped so low.
“Mom...,” I said, haltingly. “Why didn’t you just get money from Dad?”
My mother set her jaw.
“I didn’t need any more from your father.”
“Mm-hmm,” Miss Thelma added.
“We got by all right, Charley.”
“Mm-hmm, you did.”
“Why didn’t you go back to the hospital?” I said.
“They didn’t want me.”
“Why didn’t you fight it?”
“Would that have made you happy?” She sighed. “It wasn’t like today, where people sue over the slightest thing. It was the only hospital around. We couldn’t just leave town. This was our home. You and your sister had endured enough change. It’s all right. I found work.”
“Cleaning houses,” I mumbled.
She put her hands down.
“I’m not as ashamed of that as you are,” she said.
“But...” I stumbled for words. “You couldn’t do the work that mattered to you.”
My mother looked at me with a glint of defiance.
“I did what mattered to me,” she said. “I was a mother.”
WE WERE SILENT after that. Finally, Miss Thelma opened her eyes.
“So what about you, Chickadoo?” she said. “You ain’t still up on that big stage playing baseball?”
I shook my head.
“Naw, I s’pose not,” she said. “Young man’s business, baseball is. But you’ll always be that little boy to me, with that glove on your hand, so serious and all.”
“Charley has a family now,” my mother said.
“Is that right?”
“And a good job.”
“There you go.” Miss Thelma eased her head back. “You’re doing awfully fine, then, Chickadoo. Awfully fine.”
They were all wrong. I wasn’t doing fine.
“I hate my job,” I said.
“Well...” Miss Thelma shrugged. “Sometimes that happens. Cain’t be much worse than scrubbin’ your bathtub, can it?” She grinned. “You do what you gotta do to hold your family together. Ain’t that right, Posey?”
I watched them finish their routine. I thought about how many years Miss Thelma must have run vacuums or scrubbed tubs to feed her kids; how many shampoos or dye jobs my mother must have done to feed us. And me? I got to play a game for ten years—and I wanted twenty. I felt suddenly ashamed.
“What’s wrong with that job you got, anyhow?” Miss Thelma said.
I pictured the sales office, the steel desks, the dim, fluorescent lights.
“I didn’t want to be ordinary,” I mumbled.
My mother looked up. “What’s ordinary, Charley?”
“You know. Someone you forget.”
From the other room came the squeals of children. Miss Thelma turned her chin to the sound. She smiled. “That’s what keeps me from being forgot.”
She closed her eyes, allowing my mother to work on them. She drew a breath and eased lower into the bed.
“But I didn’t hold my family together,” I blurted out.
My mother raised a finger to her lips for silence.
To my Charley on his wedding day—
I know you think these notes are silly. I have watched you scrunch your face over the years when I give them to you. But understand that sometimes I want to tell you something and I want to get it just right. Putting it down on paper helps me do that. I wish I had been a better writer. I wish I had gone to college. If I had, I think I would have studied English and maybe my vocabulary would have improved. So many times I feel I am using the same words over and over, like a woman wearing the same dress every day. So boring!
What I want to say to you, Charley, is you are marrying a wonderful girl. I think of Catherine in many ways like I think of Roberta. Like a daughter. She is sweet and patient. You should be the same with her, Charley.
Here is what you are going to find out about marriage: you have to work at it together. And you have to love three things. You have to love
1) Each other.
2) Your children (When you have some! Hint! Hint!).
3) Your marriage.
What I mean by that last one is, there may be times that you fight, and sometimes you and Catherine won’t even like each other. But those are the times you have to love your marriage. It’s like a third party. Look at your wedding photos. Look at any memories you’ve made. And if you believe in those memories, they will pull you back together.
I’m very proud of you today, Charley. I am putting this in your tuxedo pocket because I know how you lose things.
I love you every day!
Mom
(from Chick Benetto’s papers, circa 1974)
Reaching the Top
I HAVEN’T TOLD YOU YET about the best and worst thing that ever happened to me professionally. I made it to the end of the baseball rainbow: the World Series. I was only twenty-three. The Pirates’ backup catcher broke his ankle in early September and they needed a replacement, so I was called up. I still remember the day I walked into that carpeted locker room. I couldn’t believe the size of it. I called Catherine from a pay phone—we’d been married for six months—and I kept repeating, “It’s unbelievable.”
A few weeks later, the Pirates won the pennant. It would be a lie to say I was in any way responsible; they we
re in first place when I arrived. I did catch four innings in one playoff game, and in my second at-bat I smacked a ball to deep right field. It was caught, and I was out, but I remember thinking, “That’s a start. I can hit this stuff.”
It wasn’t a start. Not for me. We reached the World Series, but were beaten in five games by the Baltimore Orioles. I never even got to bat. The last game was a 5–0 defeat, and after the final out, I stood on the dugout steps and watched the Baltimore players run onto the field and celebrate, throwing themselves into a giant pile by the pitcher’s mound. To others they looked ecstatic, but to me they looked relieved, like the pressure was finally off.
I never saw that look again, but I still dream about it sometimes. I see myself in that pile.
HAD THE PIRATES won the championship, there would have been a parade in Pittsburgh. Instead, because we lost on the road, we went to a Baltimore bar and closed it down. Defeat had to be washed away by booze in those days, and we washed ours away thoroughly. As the newest guy on the team, I mostly listened to the older players grumble. I drank what I was supposed to drink. I cursed when they all cursed. It was dawn when we staggered out of the place.
We flew home a few hours later—in those days, everybody flew commercial—and most of us took hangover naps. They had taxis lined up for us at the airport. We shook hands. We said, “See ya next year.” The doors shut in one cab after another, thump, thump, thump.
The following March, in spring training, I blew out my knee. I was sliding into third base, and my foot jammed and the fielder tripped over me and I felt a snap like I’d never felt before. The doctor said I tore the anterior, posterior, and medial collateral ligaments—the trifecta of knee injuries.
In time, I healed. I resumed playing baseball. But for the next six years, I never came close to the major leagues again, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how well I thought I was doing. It was as if the magic had washed off of me. The only evidence I had of my time in the big leagues was the newspaper box scores from 1973 and my baseball card, with a photo of me holding a bat, looking serious, my name in block letters, the smell of bubble gum permanently attached. The company shipped me two boxes of those cards. I sent one box to my father. I kept the other.