The Art of Fielding. Chad Harbach

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СКАЧАТЬ Sugar Maples, the Westish teams had worn a rather hideous combination of yellow and red, in homage to the autumn colors of the state tree. The change to the Harpooners was unveiled soon after Affenlight’s graduation, and as a direct result of his literary discovery. Near the end of H. Melville’s lecture, while thanking his hosts for their hospitality, he’d uttered the following comment, now long committed to Affen-light’s memory: “Humbled, I am, by the severe beauty of this Westish land, and these Great Lakes, America’s secret sinew of inward-collecting seas.” The schools’ trustees, not wanting to squander such an eloquent endorsement, erected a statue on campus in Melville’s honor in 1972 and had those words inscribed on the base. They also changed the athletic teams’ name to the Harpooners, and their colors to blue and ecru — to represent, Affenlight assumed, the lake Melville admired and the age-faded sheets on which his admiration had been transcribed.

      At the time this might have seemed like a stretch, not to say a risible act of desperation — to adopt Melville a thousand miles from where he spent his life, ninety years after a visit that lasted a day. But as rebrandings went it had turned out okay. Certainly the new colors looked more dignified on a seal or brochure, and the athletes enjoyed not having their teams named after a tree. And over the years a thriving cult of Melvilleania had developed at the college, such that you could walk across campus and see girls wearing T-shirts with a whale on the front and lettering on the back that said, WESTISH COLLEGE: OUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOURS, or you could enter the bookstore and buy a Melville’s-bust keychain and a framed poster of the full text of “The Lee Shore” to hang in your dorm room. Quotes from Melville’s work were threaded throughout the brochure, the application materials, and the website. A seminar called Melville and His Times was one of the few permanent features of the English Department rotation — Affenlight hoped someday to make time to teach it—and the library had acquired a small but significant collection of Melville’s papers and letters. Affenlight tended to be heartened by his hero’s academic legacy at Westish and to despair over the ways he’d been turned into commercial kitsch, but he wasn’t so naive as to think you could necessarily have the former without the latter. The bookstore did a brisk business in that kitsch; they shipped it all over the world.

      The aged scoreboard in left-center field read WESTISH 6 VI ITOR 2. The wind flared off the lake in petulant gusts. The few dozen fans on the home side, most of them parents and girlfriends of the players, huddled under afghans and sipped from Styrofoam cups of decaf that had long ago ceased to steam. A few fathers — the ones too tough for decaf, the ones who shot deer — stood in a row along the chain-link fence that abutted the dugout, feet spread wide. Hands thrust deep in their jacket pockets, they rocked from heel to toe, muttering to one another from the corners of their mouths as they cataloged their sons’ mental errors. With only a topcoat over his wool suit and no hat or gloves, Affenlight felt underdressed. That lone scotch he’d had with Gibbs was still generating a hint of inner warmth. The Westish batter — Ajay Guladni, whose father taught in the Economics Department — stroked a single up the middle. Mittens muffled the sparse clapping of the fans.

      The inning ended, and the Moose trotted off the diamond. Affenlight leaned forward as the Westish players emerged into the frigid daylight to take the field. He took pride in knowing the names of the school’s twenty-four hundred students, and even from a distance the faces of the upperclasspersons were familiar to him: Mike Schwartz, Adam Starblind, Henry Skrimshander. But where was the face he’d come to see?

      Perhaps he wasn’t playing today. Affenlight knew he was a member of the baseball team, but whether he was a starter or a benchwarmer or somewhere in between was a question he’d never considered. How stupid to have sat here, behind the home dugout, so that he couldn’t see inside. And yet what else could he do? Move over to the visitors’ bleachers and become a traitorous president? How suspicious would that look? For now he stayed put. He couldn’t see O, but he and O were facing the same way, watching the same white ball zip toward home plate, the same anxious batter swing and miss, and that in itself, that same-way-facing, felt like something.

      Whatever happened, he couldn’t be late to pick up Pella. To be late would be a bad start, and things were tricky enough without a bad start. He hadn’t seen her since she’d dropped out of Tellman Rose, midway through her senior year, to elope with David. That was four years ago, an unthinkably long time. If events had unfolded differently, she’d be graduating from college this spring.

      Two nights ago she left a message on his office phone — strategically avoiding his cell, which he might have answered — and asked him to buy her a ticket to Westish. “It’s not an emergency,” she said. “But the sooner the better.” Affenlight bought the ticket with an open return. How long she’d stay, whether things were going badly with David, he didn’t know.

      Baseball — what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around. Affenlight looked about, bethinking his options. He had less than an hour. What he needed was a reason, an excuse, to circle over to the Milford side and thereby catch a glimpse of the person he was eager to glimpse. He scanned the visitors’ bleachers, and his eyes settled on two large, well-dressed men whose attitudes and accessories marked them as distinct from the other spectators. Affenlight, combining what he saw with what he’d lately heard, guessed that they must be professional scouts, here to see Harpooner shortstop Henry Skrimshander, a junior. Which seemed to afford the perfect excuse: he would pay his guests a cordial visit.

      He rose from the bench, pulling his tie out of the pond-shaped space between his knees. As he followed the bleachers around the backstop, the corrugated aluminum resounded beneath his loafers. He shook a pair of powerful right hands — insisting that Dwight and L.P. call him Guert, just Guert—and lowered himself beside them. The new patch of aluminum felt far colder through his slacks than the old one.

      “So gentlemen,” Affenlight said. “What brings you to Westish?”

      The one named Dwight gestured toward the shortstop position with his sunglasses, indicating Henry Skrimshander. “That fellow right there, sir.”

      L.P. and Dwight, it turned out, were ex—minor leaguers not far removed from their playing days. Smooth-featured and polite, business-casual in dress, with slender laptops in their laps and BlackBerries laid beside them on the bleachers, they looked like oversize consultants or CIA agents playing a very reserved sort of hooky. L.P. had his hands clasped behind his head and his legs stretched before him, covering several rows; he would have dwarfed Affenlight if they both stood. Dwight was blond and pale, more densely built than L.P. but not quite as tall. Dwight did most of the speaking, in the chatty, choppy tones of the Upper Upper Midwest—Affenlight guessed Minnesota, or maybe he was Canadian:

      “Henry Skrimshander. I tell you what, Guert. A heck of a shortstop. I first saw him play last summer at this tournament down in, boy, I forget where . . .”

      If Affenlight wanted, he could swivel his head to the right, away from the smiling eyes of Dwight, and look down into that distant corner of the Westish dugout and see him.

      “. . . and this pitcher I was there to scout, boy, did he turn out to be a dog, but I was too lazy to get up and . . .”

      If he wanted? Of course he wanted. It was the wanting, the incredible strength of the wanting, that had prevented him so far. Affenlight felt afraid to look — afraid, perhaps, that looking might commit him irrevocably. But to what? Commit him to what?

      Now, finally, as Dwight paused for breath, Affenlight indulged the desire that had been simmering in his mind. He snuck a peek into the Westish dugout. Oh. His features were indiscernible at this distance, lost in the heavy shadows that shrouded that corner of the dugout. A thin stream of light connected his cap to the book in his lap.

      “. . . that’s what scouting is,” Dwight was saying, more or less. “Following up on tips and notes, ninety-nine point five percent СКАЧАТЬ