IRA SADOFF
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sentence, to see if they approve. The meeting, I am sure, does not go
well, but I keep talking, hoping something I say will change their
minds, will live up to their expectations, whatever they are.
A month later my mother and I watch my father pack his suitcase,
the silence punctuated by his practical remarks-that we should
forward his mail to NBC, that he'd be in touch as soon as he got his
affairs straightened out. I remember my mother's face, her eyes narrow–
ing in anger, I remember that she does not cry, that she watches each
piece of clothing being folded into the suitcase. I remember her saying,
" I want to know what's going on, Allie. What 's going on?" She knows
less about Melissa than I do, and I feel it my duty
to
protect her from
lhat terrible knowledge for as long as I can.
I am determined Benny will enjoy seeing a ballgame more than I
did.
In
the subway on the way to Shea Stadium I go over the starting
line- ups with him. Tom Seaver, his favorite ballplayer, has been traded
to
the Reds, the team the Mets are playing against, so Benny's loyalties
are divided. I assure him it's all right to feel that way. And before the
game, as a special treat , I decide to take him to Frank's Bar and Grill,
the bar run by my former hero. Thomas has owned the bar ever since he
retired in the mid-sixties . Eventually the Pirates did trade him, but
unfortunately to the expansion team Mets, who lost as many games in
their first season as any team in history. Thomas hit nearly .300, and
finished out his career as the best ballplayer on the worst team in
baseball. I still admire his perseverance. I point him out to Benny, this
now 280-pound red-faced Irishman who stands behind the bar shaking
up whiskey sours. I get up the courage to speak to him before ordering.
"You were quite a ballplayer, " I say.
"Uh-huh," he says. "Now what'll you and your boy have?"
I order a beer for me and a Coke for Benny, telling him that had
Thomas been on the Yankees or Dodgers in those days, he'd probably
be in the Hall of Fame now. Benny is singularly unimpressed.
"He sure looks awfully fat to have been a ballplayer," Benny says.
"Are you sure it's the same Frank Thomas?"
''I'm sure," I say, not parucularly anxious to explain the meta–
physics of growing older to a twelve-year-old. ''I'm sure."
Benny's first date seems occasion enough for Evelyn to invite me to
dinner, provided, of course, that Benny doesn't know I'm to witness his
