A SILENT, GNAWING, BRUTAL FEUD

1959

     Dad and I were not talking, nor offering apologies, because neither of us was capable of apologizing. Our feud seethed with such acrid resentment we refused to look at each other. When passing his store mornings with my crew I skittered on. Tension was taut at the dinner table. A welt from my flogging him with his jacket was scabbed over on Dad’s pate, and occasionally he glanced up at the ceiling, where a smudge of grease was left from the pork chop that flew from my grip after I was punched out, reminding me. Mother tried to break the ice by asking me how I was doing in baseball, but these overtures received only stony silence or grunts.

     In league play I was holding my own at the plate as lead-off hitter, but my fielding had begun to fall apart—specifically the accuracy of my arm, never a problem before. Coach Edgmon was easy and fatherly on his players, and especially with me, clapping his hands and urging me to shake it off when I booted one in the field or ground my teeth, barely holding my temper when I made out.

     “You can’t get a hit every time,” he told me. “Relax. Get ‘em next time. You’re hittin’ over three hundred.” But I wanted to hit .400.

     At shortstop, I was trying to compensate for my average arm by hurrying or loading up my throws instead of going with my natural rhythm, and tossing balls in the dirt. I was “thinking” too much. I knew I should talk with Dad, who always solved my problems instantly with small, subtle tips that were often just as psychological as mechanical. Several times I could not control my temper, and Bart and Bowlin were grumbling about my performance and alluding to Edgmon “coddling me.” Worst of all, I grew tight, tentative. Overnight I’d gone from cocky and confidant to fearful of muffing one.

     Edgmon finally took me off shortstop, switching me to second, replacing me with Loman.

     “You’re a little nervous out there at short,” he told me in his trophy-laden office, where I gritted my teeth and pleaded with him to let me stay at short and work things out. He shook his head. “I figure the shorter throw’ll take the pressure off you, son. Loman, he doesn’t have your range, but he’s got that strong, steady arm. I think you’re gonna be the best damned secondbaseman in the league. I’m doing this for the good of the team, and your good, too. It’s the right move.”

     Loman did not gloat, but instead encouraged me with pep-talks.

     When I got home, I didn’t tell mother about Edgmon’s decision. She was studying down in the den, about to get her teaching degree from Long Beach State to go along with her nursing degree so she could be a high school nurse. She made straight A’s. One minute Dad called her an “intellectual egghead with no common sense or understanding of the business world,” and the next he bragged to his shoemakers that she had an IQ of over 150, which she did.

     She saw I was down in the dumps and gazed at me, full of adoration, understanding and compassion, “the motha look,” as Dad described it, so sappy, and I began squirming, though Mother was my true confidante, which Dad interpreted as her protecting me. After he’d tried to teach me to drive in his stick-shift Rambler, and yelled at me and called me stupid when I ground the gears and eventually slammed into a gas station, jumped out and fled a mile home, Mom taught me on an automatic transmission and I did fine. He was jealous of her when I passed the DMV driving test.

     She sat me down. “Dell,” she said firmly, looking me straight in the eye, like she did everybody, unnerving many. “It’s up to you to be the mature one in your relationship with your father. You must make an effort to understand him and be a bigger, more tolerant person than he is. He can’t change, but you can. We both know your father is domineering, and controlling. He thinks he has to be. He can be a bully. He’s very jealous and petty, and he’s vengeful. You have no idea how he tried to dominate me early in our marriage. This was such a shock, because during our three years of engagement he was a perfect angel. Then I learned this whole other side of him. He forced me to quit the air lines as a stewardess because he didn’t want other men looking at me. He cheated me in cards for twenty years before I caught him. He tried to teach me to drive and humiliated me so I almost left him. The same with golf. You most understand that NOTHING you do in life will satisfy him. Your father, bless his heart, but he is so insecure, he is, well, a belittler, and the reason he is this way, believe it or not, is because he is frustrated and disappointed he never got as far as he should have in baseball, and if you let him drive you crazy, honey, you will be unhappy, and I can’t bear to see you this way, so miserable, hating your father who loves you more than you ca imagine. Dell, listen to me—if you take your father, and baseball too seriously, I fear it could have a very, very dangerous influence on your life.”

     She sighed, still gazing at me. “You are NOT just your father, you are also of me, and you should not be ashamed of that. You are much, much more sensitive than your father. You see and feel things he doesn’t, and you see gray, where he only sees black and white.”  Still gazing at me with the ‘motha look,’ she leaned forward and kissed my forehead, an act I’d been discouraging since becoming a teenager, and I squirmed, but she smiled, understanding my squeamishness at all things mawkish. “Please start talking to your father again. He’s always sorry when he knows he’s wrong, but he’s not going to admit it, and honey, his heart is breaking. Since the day you were born he has loved you like no other, and always put you first. You are his pride and joy, and you must put yourself in HIS shoes. That is the secret to living—putting yourself in everybody’s shoes. Be big. Remember, Dell, as my mother says—‘nobody is that wonderful, and nobody is that terrible.’ The only way I have been able to survive your father is to understand him, and forgive him. There’s no harder man to live with, but I could spend a lifetime trying to find a better man, a more decent man, a man as unique and interesting as your father, a man with his kind of character. You must be the adult in the relationship.”

     I knew she was absolutely right. I nodded. “I’ll talk to him, if he wants to talk to me, but you’ve got to tell him I don’t want him at my games, because Mom, he makes me too nervous, and I feel so much pressure that sometimes I can hardly think or breathe out there.”

     She looked deep into me, and nodded. “Okay. It’ll hurt him, but it might be the best thing to do right now—for both of you.”

     (Next Sunday installment: “Charley Gehringer—Secondbaseman”)