WSCTE

K Mart

For Lesley Choyce

    "The past is so melodramatic," my wife said to me not long ago. "I remember standing at the sink with a plate raised over my head," she went on, "screaming at my first husband, bringing the plate down on the pile of broken dishes already in the sink, screaming louder. I don't even remember what I was mad about. I've never done anything like that since we've been married. But then you don't goad me. I keep remembering all those terrible life-and-death situations when I was a teenager; you must have suffered the same kind: she loves me, she loves me not. If he doesn't ask me out I'll die. None of them were ever as disastrous as I feared they would be."
    "Some are," I said.
    "Name one," she said.
    "Well . . ." I said and remained silent, smiling wryly, letting her think she had me. But I was thinking of Cory

    "If we lived in the South we'd be white trash," mother said as she stared around the living room of the dark, dilapidated house we were moving into. I was not quite fourteen and had spent all my life in a dreamy, small town called Onamata on the banks of the Iowa River, until suddenly, the hardware store my father had inherited from his father failed, and our big, old house with its wide verandahs and creaking porch swing was sold to pay off creditors.
    We were not in the South but on the outskirts of a dingy factory town in Illinois, where a never-before-seen relative had found my father a job as a nighttime security guard at a tool and die plant.
    There were dust demons on the scuffed floorboards. The previous tenants had left behind the skeleton of a chrome kitchen chair, scabby food particles dried on the legs. The chair glinted sickly under a single pale light bulb. We were, in my mothers no-nonsense way of speaking, "making the best of a bad situation." The year was 1949.

    The cast of characters: Bronislaw Kazimericz, Edward Kleinrath, Corrina Mazeppa, and a character named Jamie (Flash) Kirkendahl who, when I look back, is less real to me than many of my fictional creations. The nickname, incidentally, was an irony, tacked to me because of my lack of speed on the basepaths, perpetuated because of my propensity to fall down while trying to get out of the batter's box after hitting the ball. Jamie Kirkendahl would say this is not a story about baseball. Perhaps I should let you be the judge of that.

    "What are you lookin' at, Stretch?" were the first words Bronislaw Kazimericz ever said to me. It was noon hour on my first day at a cinder block school that looked more like a factory or a prison.
    I hadn't been looking at anything. In fact I had been standing alone alongside a chain link fence wishing I was almost anywhere else. I looked at the speaker, a squat, blond boy, heavily muscled. He had a wide, pink face, pale blue eyes, and a soft, flat nose like a baby's.
    "Kaz beats up every new kid, just to show who's boss of the playground," said a thin boy with the face of a weasel, Coke-bottle glasses, and a shoelace of mud-colored hair that fell down on his forehead as fast as he flicked it back into place.
    "So go ahead," I said, making no effort to defend myself.
    "Aren't you afraid?" said the weasel. "Kaz is the toughest guy in Northside." Northside was both the name of the school and the district within the city where we lived.
    "I guess I'm afraid," I said.
    "You don't know?"
    "If you bruise me or break something it will hurt and maybe I'll forget how miserable I am," I said. "Do your worst."
    "Kaz doesn't usually beat up guys unless they want to take him on, or unless they try to get away," said the weasel.
    "Shut up, Eddie," said Kaz. "You too good for us, or what?" Kaz said to me.
    "If you're gonna kill me, get it over with, " I said.
    "Go ahead, kill him," said Eddie the weasel.
    "I never met one like you," said Kaz. "You got a name?"
    "Jamie," I told him.
    "I'm Kaz; he's Eddie."
    "His real name's Bronislaw," said Eddie, dancing backward in front of Kaz, staying well out of his reach.
    "Let only fear and common sense stop you from calling me anything but Kaz," he said to me. "By the way, do you play baseball?"
    "Yeah, I do," I said.
    "Right after school," said Kaz. "Kitty-corner from the back door of the Railroad Hotel," he added, pointing across the gray schoolyard to where, a couple of blocks away, the hotel rose up rectangular and ugly. It was the only building over two stories for blocks.
    "Bring your own glove," said Eddie.

    I showed up at the baseball field. Baseball was my salvation, for it was the only real connection between my past and present. The game we played here in this dismal factory town with its constantly gray skies was exactly the same game I had played in the sweet, green warmth of an Iowa summer. Here, it was April and the snow was barely gone. If I looked closely I could just make out the fine green tendrils emerging from the earth beneath the brown fuzz of winterkilled grass.
    There were some two dozen neighborhood boys from twelve to seventeen who played baseball from the time school was let out until dark, and all day Saturday and Sunday. In that strange way boys have of forming instant alliances, I was accepted by Kaz and Eddie, and because of that was grudgingly accepted by everyone else. Kaz cleared the way for me like a snowplow, for he was indeed a fighter to be reckoned with. He had been Eddie's protector, and now he was mine as well. By the end of the summer it was as if I had lived all my life in Northside. But buried deep within me were memories of a better place and better times and a determination to succeed at something. I hated the overcrowded, inferior school, the gritty rows of bars along Railroad Avenue, the meanness, the poverty, the myopia of almost everyone trapped in a hopeless cycle, dependent on the availability of work at the ugly factories. The most important thing in every adult's life was who was hiring workers and who was laying them off.
    What did baseball mean to us? Why the daily ritual, the dawn to dusk devotion? We were not good at the game. Kaz could hit the ball a mile, but a good pitcher could make him look ridiculous. I was a sneaky hitter; I held out my bat and let the ball do the work. I hit dying quail Texas Leaguers to all fields. I was the only one who kept meticulous records of my batting average. My on-base percentage was over .560, but in a game where power hitting was everything, I was one of the least valuable players. Eddie had virtually no skills at all; his poor eyesight made him a liability both at bat and in the field, but he was never picked last because if Kaz wasn't a captain, he insisted that whoever picked him had to make Eddie their next pick.
    Baseball held us together like glue. Kaz, Eddie, and I became known as the Three K's, because each of us had a long, difficult name beginning with that letter. In science we had studied simple chemical compounds, and the diagrams of those compounds, dots joined by dark lines until they looked like constellations of stars, reminded me of our own attachments, and of the endless combinations we formed each day as the pickup game went on.
   
    It was during that first summer in Northside that I met Cory Mazeppa, the fourth major character in this story, the pivotal character. If it wasn't for Cory, there would be no story. Her family operated a small grocery store across the street from the baseball field. We were in and out of the store two or three times a day all summer, and when she didn't have to work behind the counter, Cory would wander across Railroad Avenue and sit along one sideline or another watching the baseball game. She was a year younger but two grades behind me in school.
    Mazeppa, Kaz informed me, was a Mongol name; he claimed there was some famous Mongol leader named Mazeppa. I often intended to look for confirmation in history books, but never have. The family claimed to be Yugoslavs who had crossed the border from Italy a century before. The parents had immigrated to America just before the Second World War. Cory would tell me a year later that she was conceived in the old country, born in the U.S.A. They belonged to a European church of some kind. It was housed in a sturdy building with a white steeple, formerly occupied by Lutherans who sold it after they built a flat, single-story church covered in yellow California stucco. The signboard outside Mazeppas' church was covered in upside-down writing that Kaz said was Russian. At least four gaunt, bearded, and black-cassocked clergymen lived in the church basement, and could occasionally be seen walking single file, hands behind their back, down Railroad Avenue.
    I would see the family file out the rear door of the small residence attached to the Mazeppa Family Grocery and head off in the direction of their church: the parents, Cory, her sisters, Mary and Pauline, one older, one younger, and a brother of about five who was always dressed in a replica of an adult suit and a tweed cap. The girls often wore billowing skirts and peasant blouses with brilliant embroidery patterns in vermilion, aquamarine, and kelly green.
    Cory had soft brown eyes, chocolate hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose. She was shy and tended to look away if one of us tried to make eye contact with her at the baseball field. We were braver at the store and would tease her and try to confuse her change-making. None of us admitted any interest in girls that first summer, though I used to daydream of Cory when I came to bat, fantasizing myself in the big leagues, Cory my faithful sweetheart gallantly cheering me on against impossible odds. If I hit, I looked to where she sat, her skirt a tent floating about her on the grass. I was hoping for recognition, praise, a sign, knowing that if she did acknowledge me I would be the subject of unmerciful teasing, but I didn't care.
   
    Baseball inextricably ties the four main characters together. But, as I've said, Cory is the important one, the fourth character. If Cory hadn't died there wouldn't be a story. But Cory chose to act, to end her life. If she had chosen not to act, to instead live out her days in the stifling cookie-cutter apartment, one in a complex of 250 identical apartments on the outskirts of Northside, apartments with gray stucco exteriors and close, airless interiors; if she had chosen to live that way, abandoned with her brood of children, she would have become only a passing memory to the Three K's. To Kirkendahl she would have been a warm, grayish memory that would flit to the surface of consciousness every year or so on a honeysuckle-sweet summer evening, when fireflies glittered like sequins in the soft darkness. And she would have been even less to the other two.
    But she did act, in her thirtieth year. Just as by thirty each of the others had acted. Kirkendahl quit his job as a sportswriter and lived off his wife's income while he researched and wrote Murder's Blue Gown, the re-creation of a sensational crime that had rocked a nearby Illinois industrial suburb. The book had sex, mystery, and mutilation. It eventually sold eighty thousand copies and was made into a B movie starring Dean Stockwell that still turns up occasionally on the late, late show. The income from the book and movie allowed the author to pursue a full-time writing career. Kazimericz turned one used gravel truck into a small empire, then married into money. Kleinrath discovered his religious heritage. And Cory Mazeppa committed suicide.
   
    My father was a confused, unhappy man, supervised by my mother. He had served as a medic in World War I, and his superiors told him he had the skill and temperament to be a doctor. But instead of becoming a doctor he did what was expected of him and returned to Iowa and the family hardware store.
    "Don't ever let anyone talk you out of being what you want to be," he told me on more than one occasion. That was about the only advice he ever gave me, for we were awkward around each other, our time together full of clumsy silences. Father was pale and thin with a fringe of blandish hair. He spent his life doing a job he hated while Mother hovered behind him, bullying and cajoling. Grandfather, who retired to California, still sent long detailed letters in his large, vertical hand, offering advice, no, giving instruction, on pricing, inventory, and promotion. But Father had the last laugh, and I will always have a soft spot in my heart for him because of it. In spite of everyone's good intentions he managed to stay drunk on the contents of nefariously hidden bottles of vodka for over twenty years. He also flimflammed the books so my mother never suspected the insolvency of the business until the bankers arrived, padlocks in hand, to close the store. My Father continued to drink; he would set off for his job as a security guard armed with a fifth of vodka and a heavy copy of Gray's Anatomy.
    For all our bad times, we were better off than my friends. We had, if not a happy family, at least a relatively tranquil one. My mother would hiss at my father only long after I was in bed, supposedly asleep. I never heard exactly what she said, but I know my father never defended himself against whatever charges she made.
    The time she made the remark about us being white trash my mother was about as depressed as she ever got. She rallied quickly and fixed up the house. She sewed bright curtains, scrubbed every inch of the place with Lysol, planted an extravaganza of flowers in the ugly front yard: poppies, pansies, heavy-headed white mums, sweet peas, cosmos, and hollyhocks. My bedroom reminded me of a coffin; my single bed filled the room. Mother put up a shelf alongside the bed and tacked a curtain to it to separate me from the bluish mildew that covered the wall.
    She also made some quick alliances in the neighborhood: a Mrs. Piska, a Mrs. Hlushak, a Mrs. Hearne. "Misery loves company," she loved to say. The four of them would congregate for coffee each morning at the oilcloth-covered table in one of their kitchens. Mrs. Piska was roly-poly and always wore a black babushka festooned with blood-colored roses; she rolled her own fat cigarettes and in her heavy Polish accent stated that even though she had been married for over thirty years, her husband, Bronko, did not know she smoked. Mrs. Hlushak's only son was in jail for car theft; Mrs. Hearne, who had nine children, carried religious medals in her apron pocket and often gave the other ladies one when the coffee klatch broke up.
    We at least had running water. Kaz lived-in a cluster of shacks that didn't even have the dignity of being assigned a street address. His mother was dead; his father was a brutish drunk; he had one sister of about eleven who grew wild and untended. Kaz's father worked from four to midnight at the Firestone Tire plant. After work he would stop at one of the all-night bars along Railroad Avenue, drink himself into a rage, fistfight with whoever was handy, and often end up sprawled on the gravel behind the hotel. On more than one occasion I slipped out of the house deep in the night after Kaz tapped on the wall behind my head (my room had no window), and the two of us took turns pulling Kaz's metal wagon home from the hotel, his father face down, mumbling, cursing, his hands dragging on the street.
    Eddie was the third of four children. His family lived in a shack with a slanted roof, and they had to carry water from a community water spigot four blocks away. Eddie's father, Isaac Kleinrath, claimed they were Hungarian Gypsies. Eddie said they were Jewish and called his father "The Rabbi" behind his back.

*

    I don't think anyone ever realizes the best times of their lives while those times are happening. It's just as well, for if they did, they would realize that everything else is downhill, no matter how gentle and gradual the slope, and they would stop trying, stop striving. I suppose it was sometime in my twenties when I realized that my baseball days, those three summers I spent in Northside, had so far been the best days of my life. That time when baseball was like the sun lighting my days. I was through university, working my way up the ranks in the newspaper business, ambitious, acquisitive, when the first suspicions appeared. My suspicions, shadows, gray, disturbing, like animals skulking about the edge of a camp, came in the form of disturbing thoughts about Cory, mixed with pleasant reveries about baseball. I dreamed of the long, sunny afternoons on the field where our endless game went on from the time the dew left the grass until it was too dark to see the ball. We played a game called Eleven, where if either team was ahead by eleven or more runs after even innings the game was called; we either started over or broke up and chose new sides. I can still hear Eddie's shrill "Way to go, Flash," as I ran in on a fly ball that was going yards over my head, or as I crashed to the ground after connecting with the ball, taking precious seconds to get to my feet, turning a double into a single.
    I loved those times, the tense, uncaring heat of August, the air thick, sweat drizzling into my eyebrows. I remember grabbing the bottom of my damp T-shirt, pulling it up and wiping my forehead, drying my eyes before heading for the plate. I remember squinting through a haze of perspiration from my spot in right field, the earth aerated by cheeky prairie dogs who peeked and chittered all the long, lazy afternoons.

    I had been in the enclosed yard behind Mazeppas' store on more than one occasion. In that way boys have of exploring like animals, I had peeked through the caragana hedge, crossed the yard, peered through the window of the garage where Mr. Mazeppa stored a seldom used, pre-war Essex. The car was tan, all square angles, with a windshield that tilted forward. One day I helped Mr. Mazeppa, a grumpy man with a sharp tongue, unload boxes of groceries he had carried home from the wholesaler. I carried in crates of tin cans, boxes full of pungent coffee and exotic-smelling spices. The cottonwood trees were tall with broad leaves. The leaves deflected the sun even in midafternoon, so only a few white diamonds of light would dance on the spongy earth of the yard. A few bluebells grew in the mossy turf, a cool aster bloomed, its purple head bowed by the weight of its lush petals.
    One afternoon, a skyful of black clouds stampeded in from the west, bringing heavy wind and rain with them. The game broke up quickly, some players running for home, some seeking shelter nearby. Cory had been sitting on the sidelines alone, as she almost always was; we both ran across the street, dodging the penny-sized raindrops.
    "Come on in the yard," she said. I was planning to make a run for home, but I quickly took her up on her invitation. Cory was wearing a mauve dress, a hand-me-down of some kind, that clung to her body. We stood under the leaves for a moment or two. The wind whirled through the tops of the cottonwoods. The tempo of the rain increased but the yard remained dry.
    "Do you want to see my rabbit?" Cory asked.
    The storm made the yard darker than twilight. We peered through the wire mesh but all we could see were the rabbit's eyes, a phosphorescent amber in a far corner. I touched Cory's hand and my heart bumped as if I'd tripped and stumbled. But I didn't let go. The feeling I experienced was the most beautiful I'd ever known. Being an only child, I had never felt protective toward anyone. It never occurred to me that what I was feeling was sexual, though I considered kissing Cory as we walked slowly to the center of the yard and sat side by side on one of the gnarled roots of the largest cottonwood. Cory's fingers were slim and her hand so much smaller than mine. I couldn't speak, but I glanced at her. Her long hair was uncombed. There were water marks on her cheeks as if she might have cried earlier in the day. I let my arm circle her shoulder, my fingers barely touching the skin of her upper arm. Cory let her head lean against my shoulder. I was just about to turn to kiss her when I glanced down. Below our feet, in the bare dirt near the roots was a scuffle of twigs, feathers, and blood, where a small bird had probably fallen victim to a cat; there was a worm of entrails, an inch of pale yellow, scaly leg.
    "What is it?" whispered Cory. I tightened my grip on her shoulder so she wouldn't look down. We were suddenly interrupted by pounding footsteps and loud voices. By the time Kaz and Eddie pushed through the hedge into the tranquillity of the yard, shaking themselves like dogs, Cory and I were sitting a couple of feet apart.

    In the spring of my third and final year in Northside, on the opening day of the baseball season, my father died. In his typical way, not wanting to disturb anyone, he died in his sleep. Since he worked nights, it was midafternoon when my mother discovered his body. By the time I got home from school the undertaker had already removed the corpse, funeral arrangements had been made, she had called his employer to say he wouldn't be in again, and had contacted a branch of the insurance company which insured his life. Mother was so efficient that we were hardly inconvenienced at all.
    Four months after my father's death, my mother married a man named Nick Walczak, a fifty-two-year-old dairy farmer, and we moved to Wisconsin in time for me to start school in September. Nick was a widower with a grown family. He wore a felt hat and a shiny blue serge suit. His face was windburned and he smelled of cattle. I hated Nick, the farm, Wisconsin, and the Bible Belt high school I attended in a holier-than-thou town called St. Edward. I have to admit that Nick was a good deal more tolerant of me than I would have been of him if our roles had been reversed.
    My mother must have met Nick through the personal ads in our daily newspaper, or through a lonely-hearts club of some kind. I imagined his ad: Gent. 52, widower, farmer of some means, seeks marriage-minded woman. Box———.
    "You're going to become Polish by marriage," Kaz teased me.
    Nick claimed to be Estonian but Kaz taught me the vilest Polish curses he knew and Nick seemed to understand them. Someday I am going to write a novel about the year I spent on Nick Walczak's farm in America's Dairyland.
   

    Cory is dead and her death stays with me, a stain on the canvas of my life. When I was a kid in Iowa, in our dark and unused parlor hung a watercolor painted from a photograph, a picture of my mother's older brother. It was a large head-and-shoulders view of what could have been either a boy or a girl: a pink-faced child with rouge cheeks and artificially blue eyes, staring sullenly from a mop of long, blond hair. Charlie had died at age seven from a bee sting to the eye. My mother, a year younger than Charlie, had been playing with him in the garden on a sunstruck afternoon when Charlie bent a tall hollyhock down to his face and the resident bee panicked and stung him on the eyelid. The poison went to his brain and he died a day later.
    My mother, in one of the rare moments when she talked about her past, said that she blamed herself for Charlie's death, and that throughout the rest of her childhood she planned how, as soon as she was old enough, she would get pregnant and present her parents with a baby to replace Charlie. "I thought about it endlessly, but I never acted," she said. She was in her mid-thirties when I was born, and by that time both her parents were dead.
    There is an Indian legend called "The Woman on the Rocks," and I can't help but recall it as I think of Cory and all the what-might-have-beens. The legend states that young warriors of pure spirit will, as they wander the forests, one day see a beautiful young woman sitting amid rocks at the top of a fearsome waterfall. The girl sees them, beckons to them seductively from behind the white spume of the falls. Each warrior who sees the young woman is immediately captivated, but each, for whatever reason, considers too long before going to her aid. Each one hesitates for a fraction of a second, taking his eyes from the beautiful face for an instant, and when he looks back the maiden on the rocks is gone, swept away to her death perhaps, or simply vanished because of the warrior's indecision. But the warrior is left forever with a memory pure and fresh, cut into his heart—a memory of what might have been if he had been quicker to act. No warrior ever reached the woman on the rocks. Elders interpreted the phenomenon as a moral statement, a truth. Carrying the leaden ball of what-might-have-been deep within us is not a punishment but a lesson. And the ache is not always unpleasant, but often warm and nostalgic, reeking of lost innocence. But what of the woman on the rocks herself ? What happens when she is not a spirit, a lesson, an abstraction, but real flesh and blood with a heart that breaks and a soul full of human longings?

    I have tried on several occasions to write about Cory and how she touched my life. About ten years ago I got several pages into a story called "Who Can Eat a Gingerbread Man?" which was about Cory's last hours of life. But I was still too close to the material. I wrote a story about the Three K's, called "Tough Guys." It is one of my few unpublished stories. What follows is the opening page of "Who Can Eat a Gingerbread Man?"

    On a dismal afternoon in February 1967, Corrina Ann Mazeppa (her married name had been Kliciak, but she had taken back her maiden name after the divorce) bundled her three youngest children into their snowsuits, put them into a cab, gave the driver her last ten dollars and her mother's address, telling him to be certain and send the change in with the oldest child.
    Corrina Ann Mazeppa, Cory to everyone, closed the door, shivered away the cold draft that had chilled her feet and ankles. She took a last look at the buried yard where snow sculptures like whitecaps sat stiffly in the sullen cold of midwinter. Cory made her way to the bathroom, where cheap plastic curtains covered the frosted glass of the single window. The room smelled of diapers, baby powder, and sour towels. She ran water into the scummy, avocado tub, took off her jeans and sweatshirt, slipped down into the very hot water. She picked up a safety razor, released the blade, rinsed dried soap and hairs from both edges, drew the blade harshly across the underside of her left wrist, changed hands, and cut her right wrist in the same manner. She slid deeper into the water until it touched the back of her neck. Suppressing an urge to vomit, she watched transfixed as her blood colored the water.
    I abandoned that fiction, or faction. For though we know Cory put her kids in a taxi and later cut her wrists in the bathtub, no one can ever know her thoughts in those last moments.

    I remember noticing, those first summers in Northside, how many of the boys at sixteen or seventeen suddenly began drifting away from the eternal pickup game. I couldn't imagine it ever happening to me. But during my final summer, after my father's death, life began interfering with baseball. I got a paper route; for six days a week, from three to six in the afternoon, I had to abandon the game. I also had to miss Friday evenings, which was collection time.
    Kaz, the first of us to turn sixteen, got his driver's license and suddenly became obsessed with rebuilding a rusty skeleton of a one-ton truck that had languished in his father's yard for years.
    Eddie, the most fearless and outgoing of our group, developed an interest in religion; he visited one of the two synagogues in the city to discuss his Jewishness.
    "You circumcised?" he asked me one day as we slouched along Railroad Avenue.
    "No," I replied.
    "At the synagogue they asked me and I told them the truth. I wish I'd lied. I wonder if they really check your dong to make sure you've been cut?"
    "I wouldn't know," I said.
    And of course we all discovered girls. Some of us more than others. I was one of the others. Most of the girls I knew were shrill, giggling brats. Kaz suddenly started talking about one or two of the older girls who were reputed to put out; he talked as if he was speaking from experience. Eddie emulated Kaz, though I had more doubts about his claims. "What about you?" Kaz said one evening. "You're not cherry, are you?"
    "I know my way around," I said defensively.
    But Eddie was the one who talked, about anybody and everybody. "Oh, God," he'd cry as we walked away from Mazeppas' store in the twilight. "Did you see the knockers under that sweater of Cory's? I'd sell my right nut just to touch them. One touch and I'd die happy." He would fumble through his jacket pockets looking for matches to light his cigarette, his eyes bleary slits behind his thick glasses.
    I was surprised one night when Kaz called Eddie on his wishful thinking. "You're all talk, Kleinrath," he said. "You're talking about Cory Mazeppa, for chrissakes. Anybody can do it with Cory."
    Kleinrath was all ears and I, too, was silent as Kaz told us how Cory had taken him into the back seat of the square-fendered Essex. I knew Cory didn't come to the ballfield very often anymore. I'd seen her walking with a boy named Buck Johnson; he was white trash, a pock-faced kid who worked on the killing floor of the packing plant. He had a long, equine head and a greasy pompadour. Another time I saw her duck into her yard with Nick Kliciak, a thug who lived at the Passtime Pool Hall. He was short, and, even though he was only a year or two older than us, wore a charcoal-gray suit and pink shirt with an inch-wide black tie.
    A week later, Eddie was echoing Kaz's story word for word.
    "Come on, Kirkendahl," he said, "get in on the act. You've always had a thing for Cory, haven't you?"
    I only smiled and changed the subject

    This is not one of those heartwarming stories of lasting friendships and lifelong loyalties. After I left Northside, we did not stay in touch. I finished high school in Wisconsin, moved to the warmth of California, and married a California girl. Now I seldom leave the state except to go on book promotion tours, which was what brought me to Illinois in the winter of 1967.
    A few years after we left Northside, after my mother had been widowed for a second time—this time being left well off financially—she did a very strange thing. She moved back to Northside. She rented a modest apartment on the edge of the old neighborhood, and took up where she had left off with her old friends. The four of them have all been widowed for years and years. Among them they have the complete oral history of Northside in their heads. My mother can recite from memory the history of all the families who populated the district when we first moved there thirty-five years ago.
    "You remember Heather Bratus,"she'll write to me. "She married the youngest Dzuba boy, from the packing-plant Dzubas, not the lumber-yard Dzubas—well, her daughter . . ." She will tell me a long, often pointless, story about someone I know only by name. I often remind her that I lived only about three years in Northside, but she can't seem to comprehend that, at least for more than a few minutes.
    But it was through my mother that I knew what became of Kaz, Eddie, and Cory.
    "Eddie, that nice boy with the bad eyesight, is an architect-now. He turned Jewish. But then his name always was, wasn't it? He married the daughter of the founder of the firm he works for." She even went so far as to clip the bold-type listing from an outdated Yellow Pages directory: MOSER, SALTZMAN, GREEN & KLEINRATH, followed by a prestigious address in the downtown area of the city.
    "Your friend Bronislaw is a millionaire," my mother reported. "Mrs. Piska says he owns a thousand trucks. But no one can figure how he got his money. Mrs. Hearne says he was doing something illegal to start with, drugs or stolen goods . . ." Kaz as Gatsby. Interesting. I've seen Kaz's trucks in southern California, golden transports and tankers, with Bronze Transport in swirling script on the doors and down each side, a small Polish flag beneath the curlicued B in Bronze. "Your friend Bronislaw married the ex-mayor's daughter. I guess two fortunes are better than one."
    Once she mentioned Cory. "Pauline, the youngest Mazeppa girl—you remember the family has that little store on Railroad Avenue—got married over the weekend to a mining engineer from Chicago. A big splash at the Russian Orthodox Church and a huge reception at Northside Community Hall. I hope she's done better than the middle girl; she married one of the awful Kliciak boys and has had nothing but grief."

*

    As my final summer in Northside moved into the heat of July, I found myself doing what I vowed I'd never do. I drifted further and further away from the continuous baseball game. My paper route took up my time; I had money to spend. I helped Kaz work on his truck. He taught me to drive.
    One evening, as I headed home from Kaz's place, I found myself crossing the baseball field at twilight. There had been a heavy thunderstorm an hour or two before and the game hadn't resumed. The grass was sopping, the air fresh as an April morning. As I neared home plate, I saw someone leaning against the backstop.
    The last red tines of sunset clawed across the field. I recognized Cory by her silhouette. She beckoned to me. I walked slowly toward her across the damp infield. She smiled shyly. "It's so fresh out here," she said. "I like the air after a storm." I didn't say anything. "You haven't been around very much this summer," she went on. I mumbled about being busy, about working on Kaz's truck. I became conscious that though I'd washed my hands I still smelled like solvent and had more grease on my clothes than I was comfortable with.
    Cory didn't seem to notice. "Let's walk," she said. And she took my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do.
    "Pickup! Pickup!" screamed a couple of shrill voices from across Railroad Avenue as we started up the wooden sidewalk toward the edge of town. Though the words were directed at Cory, the girls yelling were schoolmates of mine, Ruthie Fontana and Cookie Brost. I realize now that Cory was doing what they didn't have the nerve to do. But what she was doing made her different, and there is no room anywhere for people who are different. "Pickup!" they screamed again, then went into a fit of shrill giggling.
    "Don't pay any attention," whispered Cory.
    Cory's father had made her quit school on her fifteenth birthday. For nearly a year, her life had revolved around the dark little store that smelled of coffee and oily floorboards. I didn't speak but I squeezed Cory's hand in a gesture of reassurance. I thought of Ruthie Fontana, pale, hatchet-faced, eyes quick as a bird's. Ruthie went steady with one of the Bjarnson boys, who lived down by the stockyards. They had a blanket stashed in the bushes behind a Coppertone sign way out at the end of Railroad Avenue; they went there every day after school and had probably spent half the summer there, too. But they were going steady.
    There I was, walking up the sidewalk, the first hints of ground mist rising from the grassy gutters. Me, the clutch hitter, heart thrumming, tongue clotted in my mouth because I was holding the hand of a girl I'd known for three years and seen every baseball summer day that whole time.
    We slowed and stepped into a gateway where tall, yellow caragana rose high above our heads. Cory turned to face me. I held her, my hands flat on the middle of her back, and we kissed. Cory was soft in my arms and she smelled sweet; her lipstick was slick against my lips. We clung that way for a long time. I remained totally silent. I kissed down the side of her face, across her cheek and back to her lips. They parted willingly. At the same time, I was as happy and as frightened as I had ever been in my life. Cory needed to be held. So did I. Fantasies of rescue flashed through my mind. Cory moved one hand to the back of my neck, twined her fingers in my hair, pulled my face closer to hers. She had none of the coyness of the girls I went to school with, girls who doled out half-returned kisses for favors real or imagined.
    We walked on slowly, our arms now twined around each other's waists. The only sound was our shoes on the hollow wooden sidewalk. The sidewalk ended a block farther on. A single avocado-green house sat fifty yards back from the street, a cow grazing near it. In the distance a dog yapped.
    We sat on the end of the sidewalk and kissed some more. Cory swung both her legs over my closest one. One of my arms braced her back. I kept thinking of what Eddie and Kaz said about her, of my seeing her with Nick Kliciak. What was expected of me? Wasn't instinct supposed to play some part in a situation like this? Wasn't I supposed to know what to do? I had no idea what to do. Cory was wearing a soft, pink sweater and a brown skirt. Her dark hair was restrained by pink barrettes shaped like kittens. I tentatively touched the sweater, let my fingers slide across to her breast. Cory didn't resist, so I cupped her breast gently, trying to convey affection through my touch. My throat felt cemented shut, like a useless plumbing pipe. I could say nothing. I tried once to speak her name, just her name, a whisper in a tone that would convey some feeling. What emerged was a helpless sound, like a shoe being extracted from mud.
    "Your arm is shaking," Cory said, burying her face in my neck. My left arm, which supported her back, was trembling.
    "I'm all right," I managed. Cory shifted her weight, wrapped her arms tightly my neck, kissed me fiercely. I caressed her breast.
    "Please, please, please," Cory murmured, holding on to me so hard her own arms trembled. We sat for several more minutes, kissing, touching gently.
    "I have to get back," Cory said finally. "Papa will miss me." We walked back toward the lights of Northside, our arms still twined around each other's waists.
    When we got to her door I cleared my throat and said, "Thanks, Cory." I felt like a fool the instant the words were out.
    "For what?" She smiled, I think sadly, stood on her tiptoes, and brushed her lips across mine. "Do you like me?" she said suddenly, slipping her arms around me, resting her head against my chest.
    "Yes, I really like you," I said.
    "Will you come by tomorrow evening?"
    "I will. I promise."
    Cory slipped away, closing the screen door softly behind her.

    My wife and I sometimes work as a team on journalistic assignments. She does the interviewing; I do the writing. I don't like interviewing people, because silence is still a problem in my life. Weeks after an interview I think of all the questions I should have asked. I relive the interview again and again even though it is water under the bridge. In the same manner I have spent a great deal of my life thinking about Cory. I feel like a wedding car with a tin can still traveling behind it, years and years after the event. I mean, I haven't been obsessed to the point where it has destroyed my life. I have a lovely wife and a grown daughter who has been a great joy to me. We live in a pleasant condo in La Mesa, California, with a cat the color of cinnamon, named Joy-Hulga. I have season tickets at nearby Jack Murphy Stadium where I watch the San Diego Padres perform. I have never mentioned Cory to my wife. In fact, I have never mentioned Cory to anyone, ever.

    I have not done very many things in my life of which I am genuinely ashamed. But in the week following my evening with Cory I did three reprehensible things that will trail after me like pale ghosts all my life.
    The first was that I did not go back to see Cory as I had promised. I wanted to. I planned to. But each evening as I made ready to walk over to Railroad Avenue, my throat tightened until I could barely swallow. Even away from her I could not think of a single word I could say. The anticipation of the long, crushing silences I knew lay ahead was too much for me. One day became two, three, six.
    The second thing was worse and occurred a week to the day after our meeting. At midmorning I had to run an errand for my mother. I caught the bus downtown. The bus was small, painted red and cream, and held only about twenty people. It looked like a loaf of bread with windows and wheels. When I got on there were only three other passengers and one of them was Cory. She was sitting in a window seat just in front of the rear door. I lowered my eyes, took a seat at the front of the bus with my back to her. I rode the bus twenty blocks past the downtown, nearly to the end of the line, staring straight ahead, unseeing, my neck stiff as a railroad tie. When I stood up to leave I noted with great relief that Cory was gone.
    What held me back? When I saw Cory why couldn't I have marched down the aisle and sat beside her? Why couldn't I have asked where she was going and then said something like "I guess we're both pretty shy, but maybe if we spend a little time together we'll get over the worst of it. Let's just walk around downtown for a while and window-shop. Maybe we'll get to be friends." And I would have taken Cory's hand, and she would have nestled her head against my shoulder. But then I've had nearly thirty-five years to compose that speech.
    My third act occurred later that same day and made the other two forgettable. Eddie came by Kaz's place and the three of us tinkered with the truck. A couple of other sometime-ballplayers were hanging around.
    "I hear you're travelin' with Cory Mazeppa," Eddie said to me.
    "Where would you hear that?" I said.
    "Cookie Brost saw you the other night. Nothin' happens in Northside that somebody doesn't see."
    "So what?"
    "Cory's hot stuff. Did you score?"
    "What business is that of yours?"
    "She took Kaz in the garage, more than once," said Eddie, leering, his mouth twisted. "And me. " He danced backward a few steps. "So, what about you?"
    Everyone was waiting. They were all watching me.
    "She was easy," I said.

    Northside and the city of which it is a suburb are not places where people buy books. They are rough, ethnically mixed, hard-working communities, distinctly lacking in imagination. I insisted the city be on my itinerary when I ventured out to promote Murder's Blue Gown. My mother had visited California once or twice a year, spending the money from Nick Walczak's dairy herd on airfare and hotels. I had not been back to Northside since the time about a month after my evening with Cory, when my mother sprang the surprise that she was marrying Nick and we were moving to Wisconsin.
    I arrived the night before Cory's funeral. Coincidence? I suppose. A bitter wind drifted snow over the city. I bought a newspaper, found the ad touting my appearance at a bookstore the following evening, and scanned the obituaries, where I saw: "MAZEPPA, Corrina Ann (Kliciak). Suddenly, on Feb. 22; she is survived by…"
    The names of her four children, her parents, and her sisters followed. The oldest child was named James. Another coincidence, I suppose.
    Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby states, "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues." His, he says later, was honesty. I wonder about my own. It certainly isn't honesty. Is hindsight a virtue? Where do vice and virtue blur together? How responsible are we for the lives of those we touch briefly? Is omission as much of a sin as commission? I tried not to think about it. But I couldn't help it. I decided to attend the funeral of someone I hadn't seen for sixteen years, half my lifetime, half hers. Yet I felt strongly that I had contributed to her death. At that point I didn't know for certain how she died, but I would have bet my own life that she was a suicide.
    I arranged for my mother to take a taxi down to the hotel and have dinner with me. For once I was vitally interested in her oral history of Northside. I had only to ask "What's new?" to elicit more information than I wanted to know about Cory and her family.
    "Lots of excitement," my mother said, leaning conspiratorially across the dark blue linen tablecloth. "You remember Mazeppas, the family had the little store on Railroad Avenue, their second daughter, Cory, the one who married badly, committed suicide Monday. The old folks still live behind the store, though it's not a store anymore; they closed up after Safeway opened across Railroad Avenue in the big shopping center. Well, the suicide isn't official or anything. Mr. Mazeppa went to the bishop of their church; they have to have the funeral at a funeral home and not at the church, but she can be buried in their cemetery." And she went on and on and on.

    "Hey, Flash." It was Eddie at my shoulder, just as he used to be near me at my locker in high school and at the continuous baseball game. I was crossing the parking lot toward the door of the funeral home. Eddie punched my shoulder, just as he did a half lifetime ago, with a backhanded flick of his knuckles.
    "Eddie." I turned and smiled down at him, his thick glasses revealing the same blue blur as in the past. His hair was styled now, the ever present shoelace defeated. He wore an expensive black overcoat, a maroon velvet yarmulke perched on his skull like a beanie.
    "Did you come all the way back here for the funeral?"
    "Coincidence," I said, "though I might have, if I'd known in time."
    We talked quietly about our present lives. We didn't mention Cory.
    "How long since you've been home?" asked Eddie.
    "Years," I said. Home. What a strange word. Where the heart is kept flashing through my head. Where the heart is. Not so untrue. This miserable, cold, inescapable city may well be where my heart is, I thought. A heart never grown to full size, suspended in the humid summer evenings of long ago: the baseball field, Cory, home.
    "You'll see a lot of changes," Eddie said.
    "I don't recognize much. The downtown has been leveled and rebuilt."
    "So has the old neighborhood. The Railroad Hotel's still there, but there's an auto dealership between the hotel and Mazeppas' store. There's a K Mart where we used to play baseball. Store's a block square, dropped right down on the old playing field like a circus tent. You wouldn't know the place."
    At this moment Kaz appeared, getting out of a bronze limousine longer than the funeral cars parked at the side of the building.
    "This guy's a wheel," said Eddie, grinning, displaying Kaz to me like a personal accomplishment.
    "I guess none of us have done so badly, us three old ballplayers," I said, shaking Kaz's hand. Kaz looked every inch a millionaire: his hands were as soft and pink as his face, which was turning fleshy. In a few years he would look like a friendly bulldog.
    We sat shoulder to shoulder on one of the varnished pews of the funeral home. The service was brief, the chapel less than half full. The coffin was closed. A relief. I could never have brought myself to walk by it.

    "Those were the best of times," said Eddie, smiling sadly. We were back in the parking lot waiting for Kaz's limousine. He had offered to drop Eddie at work, me at my hotel. "God, I remember springing out of bed in the morning, wolfing down whatever I could find for breakfast, grabbing my glove, and heading for the field. I was almost grown up before I realized how poor we were."
    "I always knew how poor we were," said Kaz.
    "But what was it about baseball?" I said. "Why did we spend three or four years of our lives on that playing field?"
    "It was something to do with the ritual," said Eddie. "There was a wonderful sameness, a stability. At that age you don't understand anything that's happening to your body or your life. Kids at that age think they're immortal; they don't want their parents' religion, if the parents have any . . ."
    "There was something primitive about the game," said Kaz. "A closeness to the earth. The hardest part was waiting for the field to dry out after the snow melted. We'd try but we'd never make it, would we?"
    "We'd be playing with the water over our shoes. Remember how clots of mud used to cling to the ball."
    "I can still see the spray flying when I hit it square on."
    "Let's drive by the field," said Kaz. And he gave the driver instructions, not giving Eddie or me a chance to object.
    "Baseball is healing," I said. "I wish I could put it better, but the feeling I had, though I didn't know it then, is like I feel after being with a woman who loves me a lot, that dreamy lethargy, that feeling of well-being."

    People stared at us as we got out of the limousine in the K Mart parking lot. Kaz and Eddie looked like Mafia hitmen; I looked like a poor cousin in my light jacket and slippery shoes. The sky was low, the air bitter; snow drifted around our ankles. Across the street Mazeppas' store sat forlorn and in need of paint. There were curtains drawn across the front windows, and what used to be the door to the grocery was drifted full of snow and street refuse.
    Inside K Mart it was bright as summer noon. The ceiling was paved with white lights. There were few shoppers in the store. A bedraggled mother pushed a silver cart with two children in it. Another was tugging at her coat, whining.
    "The backstop and home plate would be over there," said Kaz, pointing to the women's wear section, where circular dollies full of bright, cheap clothes were crowded together like a field of giant flowers.
    "Left field would be out there in the furniture department," said Eddie.
    We walked to the sporting goods section. There was little baseball equipment on display. But Kaz and Eddie found gloves while I took the only bat in sight. Kaz spotted baseballs, safely behind glass in a display case. He looked around. As usual in K Mart, there were no salespeople anywhere in sight. Kaz went behind the counter, slid open the case, and extracted a half-dozen baseballs. Kaz and Eddie took off their overcoats and laid them across the counter. We made our way to women's wear. I took a child's red dress from a dolly and dropped it to mark the spot where home plate would be. Kaz paced off the distance to the pitcher's mound, elbowing dress racks out of the way, clearing a path. Eddie sprinted for the outfield. "Hit me a good one, Flash," he sang.
    I held the bat high, gripped tight at the end. I held it straight up and down, peeking over the crook of my left elbow. I have always prided myself that I was using a stance and grip remarkably similar to Carl Yastrzemski's, ten years before he first appeared in the majors. Kaz pawed the cheap white tiles where the mound used to be. Far back in left Eddie drifted among the sofas and loveseats.
    "Burn it in there, Kaz," he hollered, shielding his eyes with his glove, blocking out the glare of an imaginary sun. A few people were staring at us, warily, as they passed in nearby aisles.
    I wiggled the end of the bat and waited. As I did, the white light of K Mart became summer sunshine. The store lifted away from us like a bell jar. The other players took their places on the field: tall, silent Ted Troy at first base, Peppy Goselin as shortstop, Pudge Green in center field. As the players took shape, the racks of pink and blue dresses, the women's and children's clothes, fresh as sunshine, smelling of ironing and starch, rose like mist. The grass was emerald-green, measled with dandelions.
    "Burn it in there, Kaz," shouted Eddie.
    Kaz fired the ball. I swung and fouled it off. Strange that it made a sound like breaking glass. Someone strange was walking in from right field, a young man, his face the color of maple, wearing a white shirt buttoned to the collar and a black-on-white name tag reading AHMED. He looked both puzzled and frightened. "Please not to do what it is you are doing, please," he said in a heavy accent. He raised his hands in a gesture similar to calling time in baseball, though I'm sure he had no idea what he was doing.
    Kaz snarled several words at the intruder. He scuttled away.
    "Come on, Flash, straighten one out," yelled Eddie.
    "I lied about Cory," I yelled.
    "Everybody lies about things like that," said Kaz.
    "You?"
    "Everybody." He made a gesture that encompassed us all.
    All the players were in place now, my team along the sidelines, Kaz's team in the field. All the baseball boys. All the accountants and thugs and TV producers and packing-plant workers and railroad section men. And Cory was sitting on the grass a few yards behind the bench, alone as always, her black hair snarled about her face, her mauve dress spread in a wide arc about her.
    There were two pinging sounds like a doorbell. "Security to Section 12. Security to Section 12," said a female voice.
    "Burn it in there, Kaz."
    Cory is dead and her death stays with me, trapped here with me, inside my own skin.
    The maple-faced boy was back and there was someone with him. Someone larger.
    "Please not to do what it is you are doing, please."
    "Fire the ball."
    "Security to Section 12."
    What were these strange people doing on the field? The earth felt hard, my feet refused to dig in properly.
    "Pitch the ball."
    Kaz wound up; his thick arm and ham-like hand with the grease-stained knuckles snapped the ball toward me.
    Cory smiled shyly. After the game I'd walk her to the end of the sidewalk, kiss her so gently in the lilac shadows.
    The ball was one long laser of white connecting Kaz's hand with my bat. In the hairsbreadth of a second between the crack of the bat and the ball exploding into the sun above the outfield, I relished the terrible joy of hitting it square on.