The abandoned baby

We have reached the point in the month of October when I suddenly forgive my (generally) as-yet-childless neighbors for decking out their houses and lawns in spider webs and headstones on the first of the month. Yes, okay, Halloween is fun. Here’s an awful Halloween story:

My little brother Matthew and I are riding in our family station wagon with our father. It’s late October, and the trees are nearly bare, but the lawns of our town are filled with brilliant-colored leaves. Here and there, along the curbs, piles of leaves have been raked into the street for disposal. Our father is shaking his head.

“Do you see that?” He points out the piled leaves I’d already noticed. “That’s one thing you should never do, Joseph.”

I’m not sure what our father is talking about, but we live outside of town, in the “country”, and collect our raked leaves into a compost pile on the undeveloped acre next to our own. Our father works in town, so I’m excited for what he will say next; hoping I’ll learn something which will, possibly, make me seem like more of a “townie” to my classmates.

“What, Daddy?”

“Why, rake leaves into the street like that? Didn’t you hear that story on the news?”

My little brother, sitting in the back, leans forward.

“Somebody had a baby they couldn’t keep,” our father continues.

“Why?” my little brother asks.

We’re both adopted, but he asks this stupid question.

“Because it couldn’t cry,” our father says. “So they had to stand over the crib all day, to see if it needed anything, and they couldn’t get anything else done. So they decided they couldn’t keep the baby. But they didn’t know what to do with the baby. So they put it in a cardboard box, and hid it under a pile of leaves, just like that one. And someone parked their car in the leaves…and crushed the box flat.”

My little brother and I are stricken. The station wagon rolls along silently for a moment.

“I bet they felt bad,” I say.

“Who?” our father asks.

“The people who threw the baby out.”

“Never mind them. Think about the guy who parked his car on top of the box!”

And, with those words, our father cuts the wheel of the station wagon to the curb, pulls to a stop on top of a big pile of leaves, and shifts into Park.

The next thing I know, he’s out of the car, leaning back in though the open door with a helpless, dumb grin on his face: “C’mon, we’re late!”

We’re late for Mass. The Catholic church is a block away. The bells are tolling. The sidewalks are filling with little Italian widows, dressed head to toe in black, tottering on their heels like witches. There are piles and piles of leaves between our station wagon and the vestibule. Our father is going to have to be a lot nicer if he wants us to move.

The whale (part one)

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach; Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville; The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte; The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas; Leviathan, by Paul Auster; The Natural, by Bernard Malamud; The Natural, (directed) by Barry Levinson; The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth; The Magic Barrel, by Bernard Malamud; Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth; David’s Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan; The Dawn Treader Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman; “People Who Died,” from the album Catholic Boy, by the Jim Carroll Band; The Summer Game, by Roger Angell; Why Time Begins On Opening Day, by Thomas Boswell; End Zone, by Don DeLillo; White Noise, by Don DeLillo; the Harry Potter books, by J.K. Rowling; American Pastoral, by Philip Roth; Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides


I suppose it’s possible to finish reading Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and not want to pick up Moby-Dick immediately. The fictional liberal arts college in Wisconsin where the novel takes place, Westish, trades charmingly on a once-nearly-forgotten guest lecture by Melville, and Melville and his greatest novel function as touchstones among the characters. For me, this sort of thing never works – it’s the novelistic equivalent of having characters in your movie watch a classic movie, and it only takes a few frames of Hitchcock, say, to make me lose interest in Tony Scott completely. Why should I bother with The Club Dumas, when The Three Musketeers is readily available? That’s always been my thinking, though I’ve made exceptions when the great novel in question is also an invention (i.e., the prisoner’s novel in Paul Auster’s Leviathan [a title referring Hobbes, not Melville, by the way]). But no matter, because Harbach pulls it off, also charmingly, and I moved on to Moby-Dick as a matter of course.

You and I may differ, though. You might decide you want to read another baseball novel, instead, or books about the game. Reviewers have taken the publication of the book as an opportunity to reiterate their admiration for such baseball novels as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel. (Malamud and Roth…I’m reminded of the joke, a favorite among booksellers: What’s the thinnest book ever published? The Great Jews of Sports.) I haven’t read either book, but I’ve now ordered them. I have very fond memories of reading both Malamud’s National Book Award-winning story collection The Magic Barrel and Roth’s controversy lightning-rod (dirty book) Portnoy’s Complaint as a high school student, in the seventy-five cent Dell mass market with the drawing of the uppermost floors of a New York tenement on the cover (Malamud) and the shocking-yellow Bantam (Roth), picked up in nearby Ann Arbor – purchased at David’s Books for fifty cents, or stolen from The Dawn Treader Book Shop. (We did not steal books from David’s Books, which was on the second-story above Discount Records at the time and kept books stacked on the stairway, inviting theft. We did occasionally steal books from The Dawn Treader, which was in a basement on State Street then and kept a first edition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book on prominent display, under glass, at its front counter – which could have been mere prudence, but rubbed us the wrong way. David’s: cats roaming about, exposed brick, windows that looked out on the neon signs of the Michigan and State theaters; lone employee playing chess with a bald teenager – leukemia? Dawn Treader: a basement, staffed with scolds. Take your pick.)

[We assumed the bald teenager had leukemia because this was around the time of Jim Carroll’s great “People Who Died.” Of course, we were also immortal teenagers, and joked about the possible lethal toxicity of used bookstore odor.]

I’ve started reading Roth novels down through the years, but I don’t think I’ve finished one since Portnoy. Yet I never even tried anything else by Malamud. I think I hated the film of The Natural so much that, even though it obviously had little to do with Malamud, I put him out of mind, and the books drifted out of print for a time, taking care of the rest of it.

So: books on order, and, after the World Series is over, we’ll see what’s what. At that time last year, I went for non-fiction about the game, and read collections by Roger Angell of the New Yorker (The Summer Game) and Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post (Why Time Begins On Opening Day) – which are still in print or, if not, easily picked up used, and pretty much essential if you care to read about baseball.

You might decide you want to read another college sports novel. End Zone, Don DeLillo’s great college football novel, which Chad Harbach cites in interviews as an influence, is my favorite DeLillo book: compact, furious, as funny as White Noise but even loonier, somehow. (Like The Art of Fielding, it’s also a great school novel.) Here’s the opening paragraph, which you can imagine coming from the mouth of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor:

Taft Robinson was the first black student to be enrolled at Logos College in West Texas. They got him for his speed.

Then again, you might just decide to re-read The Art of Fielding, the way some Harry Potter readers, all-too-aware that the next book would not appear for a year or more, turned back to page one of the newest Potter book as soon as they’d finished it. (Harbach worked on his manuscript for a decade.)

I thought about Rowling’s books almost as often as I did Melville’s while reading The Art of Fielding. I’ve read none of the Harry Potter books, but I worked in bookstores during the series’ run, and envied the young readers their untroubled enthusiasm (especially before the industry turned it into a circus). I also (secretly, problematically) envied the adults – a number of my co-workers among them – who said Screw it, chucked aside their vexing copies of American Pastoral or Middlesex, and committed not just to Potter but to the cleaner lines and storytelling virtues of Young Adult fiction en total. I too wanted to fall asleep with a footnote-free slab of story hugged to my chest. A teenaged wizard riding a broomstick wasn’t my ticket, though. I’d have to wait for a teenaged wizard at shortstop.

A barrel of monkeys

My father had seven brothers. What was it like, growing up with seven brothers? More fun than a barrel of monkeys: that was always his answer. And yet he stuck me with only one brother (a younger one, at that; a crybaby, too – in a word, useless). Why did he do that?

When I was young, I found the idea of having seven brothers very appealing. I liked to picture my late grandfather, Shorty, who I never knew in life, on the pitcher’s mound of a baseball diamond, with his eight sons filling the other positions on the field. Even as a child, I realized how improbable this picture was: I knew the story of my youngest uncle hiding behind my grandmother’s legs when his eldest brother returned home from the Second World War. But it was the most contained, most perfect of the fantasies I had devised to will the entire family into the same place at the same time, which never happened in my lifetime – if, indeed, it ever had.

Though we didn’t see them all together, we nevertheless saw my father’s brothers nearly every Sunday of my childhood. They shouldered their way through the door into their mother’s house or a brother’s house, carrying crock pots and baker’s boxes and cases of beer in cans, trailed by our aunts and cousins, filling up the small houses and neat backyards in Livonia and Garden City and Dearborn.

I watched them closely, looking to learn what being a brother meant, with my eye mainly on what latitude being a brother afforded you. As far as I could tell, it meant that you never passed up an opportunity to abuse your brother’s children’s trust for the sake of a laugh.

Want some chocolate? my uncle asked – offering me an opened tin of Copenhagen.

Want mustard on your sandwich? – knife poised over the horseradish.

We children spent part of every Sunday in tears, mothers or aunts scouring our tongues with wet washcloths, our backs turned to a room filled with laughing men.