Ironweed - William Kennedy [19]
The insight raised in Francis a compulsion to confess his every transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his own character, however minor. What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?
When Oscar segued perfectly into a second song, his talent seemed awesome to Francis, and the irrelevance of talent to Oscar’s broken life even more of a mystery. How does somebody get this good and why doesn’t it mean anything? Francis considered his own talent on the ball field of a hazy, sunlit yesterday: how he could follow the line of the ball from every crack of the bat, zap after it like a chicken hawk after a chick, how he would stroke and pocket its speed no matter whether it was lined at him or sizzled erratically toward him through the grass. He would stroke it with the predatory curve of his glove and begin with his right hand even then, whether he was running or falling, to reach into that leather pocket, spear the chick with his educated talons, and whip it across to first or second base, or wherever it needed to go and you’re out, man, you’re out. No ball player anywhere moved his body any better than Franny Phelan, a damn fieldin’ machine, fastest ever was.
Francis remembered the color and shape of his glove, its odor of oil and sweat and leather, and he wondered if Annie had kept it. Apart from his memory and a couple of clippings, it would be all that remained of a spent career that had blossomed and then peaked in the big leagues far too long after the best years were gone, but which brought with the peaking the promise that some belated and overdue glory was possible, that somewhere there was a hosannah to be cried in the name of Francis Phelan, one of the best sonsabitches ever to kick a toe into third base.
Oscar’s voice quavered with beastly loss on a climactic line of the song: Blinding tears falling as he thinks of his lost pearl, broken heart calling, oh yes, calling, dear old girl. Francis turned to Helen and saw her crying splendid, cathartic tears: Helen, with the image of inexpungeable sorrow in her cortex, with a lifelong devotion to forlorn love, was weeping richly for all the pearls lost since love’s old sweet song first was sung.
“Oh that was so beautiful, so beautiful,” Helen said to Oscar when he rejoined them at the beer spigot. “That’s absolutely one of my all-time favorites. I used to sing it myself.”
“A singer?” said Oscar. “Where was that?”
“Oh everywhere. Concerts, the radio. I used to sing on the air every night, but that was an age ago.”
“You should do us a tune.”
“Oh never,” said Helen.
“Customers sing here all the time,” Oscar said.
“No, no,” said Helen, “the way I look.”
“You look as good as anybody here,” Francis said.
“I could never,” said Helen. But she was readying herself to do what she could never, pushing her hair behind her ear, straightening her collar, smoothing her much more than ample front.
“What’ll it be?”