M E M 0 R

A MICKEY MANTLEKOAN

The obstinate grip of an autographed baseballBy David] ames Duncan

On April 6, 1965, mybrother, Nicholas John Dun-can, died of what his surgeonscalled "complications" afterthree unsuccessful open-heartoperations. He was seventeenat the time-four years my el-der to the very day.He'd beenthe fastest sprinter in his highschool class until the valve inhis heart began to close, buthe was so bonkers about base-ball that he'd preferredplayinga mediocre JV shortstop tostarring at varsity track. As aballplayer he was a competentfielder, had a strong and fair-ly accurate arm, and stole bases withease-when he could reach them. Butno matter how much he practiced orwhat stances, grips, or self-hypnotictricks he tried, he lacked the hand/eyemagic that consistently lays bat-fatagainst ball, and remained one of theweakest hitters on his team.

John lived his entire life on the out-skirts of Portland, Oregon-637 milesfrom the nearest major league team. Infranchiseless cities in the Fifties andearly Sixties there were two types offans: those who thought the Yankeesstood for everything right with Amer-ica, and those who thought they stoodfor everything wrong with it. Mybrother was an extreme manifestationof the former type. He conducted a

David James Duncan's new novel, TheBrothers K, was published recently by Dou-bleday. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Photograph by Debra Goldman

one-man campaign to notify the worldthat Roger Maris'ssixty-one homers in'61 came in three fewer at bats thanBabe Ruth's sixty in '27. He main-tained-all statistical evidence to thecontrary-that Clete Boyerwas a bet-ter third baseman than his brother,Ken, simply because Clete was a Yan-kee. He may not have been the onlykid on the block who consideredCasey Stengel the greatest sage sinceSolomon, but I'm surehe was the on-ly one who considered YogiBerra thesecond greatest. And, of course, Mick-ey Mantle was his absolute hero, buthis tragic hero. The Mick, my broth-er maintained, was the greatest rawtalent of all time. He wasone to whomgreat gifts were given, from whomgreat gifts had been ripped away; andthe more scarred his knees became,the more frequently he fanned, themore flagrant his limp and apologet-

ic his smile, the more Johnrevered him. And toward thissingle Yankee I, too, was ableto feel a touch of reverence,if only because on the subjectof scars I considered my broth-er an unimpeachable author-ity: he'd worn one from thetime he was eight, compli-ments of the Mayo Clinic, thatwrapped clear around his chestin a wavy line, like stitchinground a clean white baseball.

Yankees aside, John and Ihad more in common than abirthday. We bickered regular-lywith our middle brother and

little sister,but almost never with eachother. We were both bored, occasion-ally to insurrection, by schoolgoing,churchgoing, and any game or sportthat didn't involve a ball. We bothpreferred, as a mere matter of style, In-dians to cowboys, hoboes to business-men, Buster Keaton to CharlieChaplin, Gary Cooper to John Wayne,deadbeats to brownnosers, and evenbrownnosersto ElvisPresley.We shareda single cake on our joint birthday, in-variably annihilating the candle flameswith a tandem blowing effort, only torealize that we'd once again forgottento make a wish. And when the partieswere over or the house was stuffy, theparents cranky or the TV shows insuf-ferably dumb, whenever we were rest-less, punchy, or just feeling as if therewas nothing to do, catch-with a hardball-is what John and I did.

We were not exclusive, at least not

MEMOIR 65

by intention: our father and middlebrother and an occasional cousin orfriend would join us now and then.But something in most everyone else'sbrain or bloodstream sent thembustling off to less contemplative en-deavors before the real rhythm of thething ever took hold. Genuine catch-playing occurs in a double limbo be-tween busyness and idleness, andbetween what is imaginary and whatis real. Also, as with any contempla-tive pursuit, it takes time, and theability to forget time, to slip into thisdual limbo and to discover (i.e., lose)oneself in the music of the game.

It helps to have a special place toplay. Ours was a shaded, ninety-footcorridor between one neighbor's appleorchard and the other's stand of old-growth Douglas firs, on a stretch oflawn so lush and mossy it sucked theheat out of even the hottest grounders.I always stood in the north, John inthe south. We might call balls andstrikes for an imaginary inning or two,or maybe count the number of errorlesscatches and throws we could make(300s were common, and our recordwas high in the 800s). But the deepshade, the 200-foot firs, the mossyfoot-ing and fragrance of apples all made ita setting more conducive to mentalvacationing than to any kind of disci-plined effort. During spring-trainingmonths our catch occasionally startedas a drill-a grounder, then a peg; an-other grounder, a peg. But asour move-ments became fluid and the throwsbrisk and accurate, the pretense ofprac-tice would inevitably fade, and we'djust aim for the chest and fire, hisssssPOP! hisssss POP! until a meal, a duty, ortotal darkness forced us to recall thatthis was the real world in which eventimeless pursuits come to an end.

Our talk must have seemed strangeto eavesdroppers.We lived in our bod-ies during catch, and our minds andmouths, though still operative, werejust along for the ride. Most of thenoise I made was with the four or fivepieces of Bazooka I was invariablyworking over, though when the gumturned bland, I'd sometimes narrateour efforts in a stream-of-doggerelplay-by-play. My brother's speech was lessvoluminous and a bit more coherent,but of no greater didactic intent: hejust poured out idle litanies of Yan-

66 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1992

kee worship or even idler braggadocioa la DizzyDean, all of it artfully spiced

with spat sunflower-seed

B husks.

ut one day when we were-six-teen and twelve, respectively, my bigbrother surprised me out there in ourcorridor. Snagging a low' throw, heclosed his mitt round the ball, stuck itunder his arm, stared off into the trees,and got serious with me for a minute.All his life, he said, he'd struggled tobe a shortstop and a hitter, but he wasolder now, and had a clearer notion ofwhat he could and couldn't do. It wastime to get practical, he said. Time tostart developing obvious strengths andevading flagrant weaknesses. "So I'vedecided," he concluded, "to become ajunk pitcher."

I didn't believe a word of it. Mybrother had been a "sluggerworshiper"from birth. He went on embellishinghis idea, though, and .even made itsound rather poetic: to foil some mus-cle-bound fence-buster with an off-speed piece of crap that blupped offhisbat like cow custard-this, he main-tained, was the pluperfect pith of anattribute he called Solid Cool.

I didn't recognize until months lat-er just how carefully considered thisnew junk-pitching jag had been. ThatJohn's throwing arm was better thanhis batting eye had always been obvi-ous, and it made sense to exploit that.But there were other factors he didn'tmention: like the sharp pains in hischest every time he took a full swing,or the new ache that half-blinded andsickened him whenever he ran fullspeed. Finding the high arts of slug-ging and base stealing physically im-possible, he'd simply lowered his sightsenough to keep his baseball dreamsalive. No longer able to emulate hisheroes, he set out to bamboozle thosewho thought they could. To that endhe'd learned a feebleknuckler, a round-house curve, a submarine fastballformidable solely for its lack of accu-racy, and was trashing his arm and mypatience with his attempts at a screw-ball, when his doctors informed ourfamily that a valve in his heart wasrapidly closing. He might live as longas fiveyears ifwe let it go, they said,butimmediate surgery was best, since hisrecuperative powerswere greatest now.

John saidnothing about any of this. Hejust waited until the day he wasdue atthe hospital, snuck down to the stablewhere he kept his horse, saddled herup, and galloped away. He rode abouttwenty miles, to the farm of a friend,and stayed there in hiding for nearlytwo weeks. But when he snuck homeone morning for clean clothes andmoney, my father and a neighborcaught him, and first tried to force himbut finally convinced him to have theoperation and be done with it.

Once in the hospital he was coop-erative, cheerful, and unrelentinglycourageous. He survived second, third,and fourth operations, several stop-pings of the heart, and a nineteen-daycoma. He recovered enough at onepoint, even after the coma, to comehome for a week or so. But the over-riding "complication" to which hisprincipal surgeon kept making obliquereferences turned out to be a heart soravaged by scalpel wounds that an ar-tificial valve had nothing but shreds tobe sutured to. Bleeding internally, piss-ing blood, John was moved into anoxygen tent in an isolated room, wherehe remained fully conscious, and ful-ly determined to heal, for two monthsafter his surgeons had abandoned him.And, against all odds, his conditionstabilized, then began to improve. Thedoctors reappeared and began to dis-cuss, with obvious despair, the feasi-bility of a fifth operation.

Then came the second "complica-tion": staph. Overnight, we were re-duced from genuine hope to awkwardpleas for divine intervention. We in-voked no miracles. Two weeks after

contracting the infection,

A my brother died.

t his funeral, a preacher whodidn't know John from Judge KenesawMountain Landis eulogized him solavishly and inaccurately that I wasmoved to a state of tearlessness thatlasted for four years. It's an unenvi-able task to try to make public senseof a private catastrophe you know lit-tle about. But had I been in thatpreacher's shoes, I would have men-tioned one or two of my brother's ac-tual attributes, if only to reassure late-arriving mourners that they hadn'twandered into the wrong funeral. Theperson we were endeavoring to miss

had, for instance, been a C studentall his life, had smothered everythinghe ate with ketchup, had diligentlyavoided all forms of work that didn'tinvolve horses, and had frequentlygone so far as to wear sunglasses in-doors in the relentless quest for SolidCool. He'd had the disconcertinghabit of sound-testing his pleasantbaritone voice by bellowing "Beeeeeee-ooooooo1"downסoס0 any alleyor hall-way that looked like it might containan echo. He'd had an interesting,slangy obliviousness to proportion:any altercation, from a fistfight to aworld war, was "a rack"; any authori-ty, from our mother to the head of theU.N., was "the Brass"; any pest, fromthe kid next door to Khrushchev, was"a buttwipe"; and any kind of ball,from a BB to the sun, was "the orb."He was brave: whenever anybody hisage harassed me, John warned themonce and beat them up the secondtime, or got beat up trying. He wasalso unabashedly, majestically vain.He referred to his person, with obvi-ous pride, as "the Bod." He was animmaculate dresser. And he loved tostare at himself publiclyor privately-in mirrors, windows, puddles, chromecar-fenders, upside-down in tea-spoons-and to solemnly comb hislong auburn hair over and over again,like his hero, Edd {"Kookie"}Byrnes,on 77 Sunset Strip.

His most astonishing attribute, tome at least, washis never-ending skeinof girlfriends. He had a simple but ap-parently efficient rating system for allfemale acquaintances: he called it"percentage of Cool versus percent-age of Crud." A steady girlfriend usu-ally weighed in at around 95 percentCool, 5 percent Crud, and if the Crudlevel reached 10percent it was time tostart quietly looking elsewhere. Onlytwo girls ever made his "100 percentCool List," and I was struck by thefact that neither was a girlfriend andone wasn't even pretty: whatever "100percent Cool" was, it was not skin-deep. No girl ever came close to a"100 percent Crud" rating, by the way:my brother was chivalrous.

John was not religious. He be-lieved in God, but passively, withnothing like the passion he had forthe Yankees. He seemed a little morefriendly with Jesus. "Christ is cool,"

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he'd say, if forced to show his hand.But I don't recall him speaking ofany sort of goings-on between themuntil he casually mentioned, a day ortwo before he died, a conversationthey'd just had, there in the oxygentent. And even then John was John:what impressed him even more thanthe fact of Christ's presence or theconsoling words He spoke was the

natty suit and tie He was

A wearing.

n the morning after his death,April 7, 1965, a small brown-paperpackage arrived at our house, specialdeliveryfromNew YorkCity, addressedto John. I brought it to my mother andleaned over her shoulder as she satdown to study it. Catching a whiff ofantiseptic, I thought at first that itcame from her hair: she'd spent thelast four months ofher life in a straight-back chair by my brother's bed, andhospital odors had permeated her. Butthe smell grewstronger as she began tounwrap the brown paper, until I real-ized it came from the object inside.

It was a small, white, cylindrical,cardboard bandage box. "Johnson &Johnson," it said in red letters. "12inches x 10 yards," it added in blue.Strange. Then I saw it had been splitin half by a knife or a scalpel andbound back together with adhesivetape: so there was another layer,some-thing hiding inside.

My mother smiled as she began torip the tape away. At the same time,tears were landing in her lap. Thenthe tape was gone, the little cylinderfell away, and inside, nested in tissue,was a baseball. Immaculate whiteleather. Perfect red stitching. On onecheek, in faint green ink, the signatureof American League president JosephCronin and the trademark REACH. THESIGN OF QUALITY. And on the oppositecheek, with bright blue ballpoint ink,a tidy but flowing hand had written,To John-My Best Wishes. Your Pal,Mickey Mantle. April 6, 1965.

The ball dwelt upon our fireplacemantel-an unintentional pun on mymother's part. We used half the John-son & Johnson box as a pedestal, andfor years I saved the other half, figur-ing that the bandage it once containedhad held Mantle's storied knee to-gether for a game.

Even after my mother explainedthat the ball came not out of the bluebut in response to a letter, I consideredit a treasure. I told all my friends aboutit, and invited the closest to stop byand gawk. But gradually I began tosee that the public reaction to the ballwas disconcertingly predictable. Thefirst response was usually, "Wow!Mickey Mantle!" But then they'd getthe full story: "Mantle signed it theday he died? Your brother never evensaw it?" And that made them un-comfortable. This was not at all thewayan autographed baseball was sup-posed to behave. How could an im-mortal call himself your "Pal," howcould you be the recipient of TheMick's "Best Wishes," and still just lieback and die?

I began to share the discomfort.Over the last three of my thirteenyears I'd devoured scores of baseball

. books, all of which agreed that a bat,program, mitt, or ball signed by a big-league hero was a sacred relic, thatwe shouUl expect such relics to havemagical properties, and that theywouUl prove pivotal in a young pro-tagonist's life.Yethere I was,the youngprotagonist. Here was my relic. Andall the damned thing did, before long,was depress and confuse me.

I stopped showing the ball to peo-ple, tried ignoring it, found that thiswas impossible, tried instead to pre-tend that the blue ink was an illegiblescribble and that the ball was just aball. But the ink wasn't illegible: itnever stopped saying just what it said.So finally I picked the ball up andstudied it, hoping to discover exactlywhy I found it so troublesome. Feign-ing the cool rationality I wished I'dfelt, I told myself that a standard sportshero had received a letter from a stan-dard distraught mother, had signed,packaged, and mailed off the standardingratiatingly heroic response, hadfailed to think that the boy he in-scribed the ball to might be dead whenit arrived, and so had mailed his sur-vivors a blackly comic non sequitur. Ithen told myself,"That's all there is toit"-which left me no option but topretend that I hadn't expected orwanted any more from the ball than Igot, that I'd harbored no desire forany sort of sign, any imprimatur, anyflicker ofrecognition from an Above

or a Beyond. I then began falling topieces for lack of that sign.

Eventually, I got honest about Man-tle's baseball: I picked the damnedthing up, read it once more, peeredas far as I could inside myself, and ad-mitted for the first time that I waspissed. As is always the case with ar-riving baseballs, timing is the key-and this cheery little orb was inscribedon the day its recipient lay dying andarrived on the day he was being em-balmed! This was not a harmless co-incidence: it was the shabbiest, mostembittering joke that Providence hadever played on me. My best friend andbrother was dead, dead, dead, andMantle's damned ball and best wish-es made that loss even less tolerable,and that, I told myself, really was allthere was to it.

1hardened my heart, quit the base-ball team, went out for golf, practicedlike a zealot, cheated like hell, kickedmy innocuous, naive little opponentsall over the course. I sold the beauti-ful outfielder's mitt that I'd inherited

from my brother for a pit-

B ranee.

ut, as is usual in baseball sto-ries, that wasn't all there was to it.

I'd never heard of Zen koans at thetime, and Mickey Mantle is certainlyno roshi. But baseball and Zen aretwo pastimes that Americans andJapanese have come to revere almostequally: roshis are men famous for hit-ting things hard with a big woodenstick; a koan is a perfectly nonsensicalor nonsequacious statement given byan old pro (roshi) to a rookie (laymanor monk); and the stress of living withand meditating upon a piece of mind-numbing nonsense is said to eventu-ally prove illuminating. So I know ofno better way to describe what themessage on the ball became for methan to call it a koan.

In the first place, the damnedthing's batteries just wouldn't rundown. For weeks, months, years, everytime 1 saw those nine blithely blue-inked words they knocked me off hal-ance like a sudden shove from behind.They were an emblem of all the falseassurances of surgeons, all the futileprayersof preachers, all the hollownessof Good-Guys-Can't-Lose baseballstories I'd ever heard or read. They

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IIII

were a throw I'd never catch. And yet... REACH, the ball said. THE SIGN OFQUALITY.

So year after year I kept trying, kepthoping to somehow answer the koan.

I became an adolescent, enrollingmy body in the obligatory school ofpain-without-dignity called "puber-ty," nearly flunking, then graduatingalmost without noticing. I discoveredin the process that some girls werenothing like 95 percent Crud. I alsodiscovered that there was life afterbaseball, that America was not theGood Guys, that God wasnot a Chris-tian, that I preferred myth to theolo-gy, and that, when it came to heroes,the likes of Odysseus, Rama, and FinnMacCool meant incomparably moreto me than the George Washingtons,Davy Crocketts, and Babe Ruths I'dbeen force-fed. I discovered (some-times prematurely or overabundantly,but never to my regret) metaphysics,wilderness, Europe, black tea, highlakes, rock, Bach, tobacco, poetry,trout streams, the Orient, the novel,my life's work, and a hundred othergrown-up tools and toys. But amidthese maturations and transformationsthere was one unwanted constant: inthe presence of that confounded ball,I remained thirteen years old. Onepeek at the "YourPal" koan and what-ever maturity or wisdom or equanim-ity I possessedwas repossessed, leaving

me as irked as any stumped

I monk or slumping slugger.

t took four years to solve the rid-dle on the ball. It was autumn whenit happened-the same autumn dur-ing which I'd grown older than mybrother would ever be. As often hap-pens with koan solutions, I wasn'teven thinking about the ball at thetime. As is also the case with koans, Ican't possibly describe in words theimpact of the response, the instanta-neous healing that took place, or theensuing sense of lightness and release.But I'll say what I can.

The solution came during a fit ofrestlessness brought on by a warm In-dian summer evening. I'd just finishedwatching the Miracle Mets blitz theOrioles in the World Series, and wasstanding alone in the living room, juststaring out at the yard and the fadingsunlight, feeling a little stale and fid-

~II

gety, when I realized that this was justthe sort of fidgets I'd never had to suf-fer when John was alive-becausewe'd always work our way throughthem with a long game of catch. Withthat thought, and at that moment, Isimply saw my brother catch, thenthrow a baseball. It occurred neitherin an indoors nor an outdoors. It last-ed a couple of seconds, no more. ButI saw him so clearly, and he then van-ished so completely, that my eyesblurred, my throat and chest ached,and I didn't need to see Mantle's base-ball to realize exactly what I'd want-ed from it all along:

From the moment I'd first laid eyeson it, all I'd wanted was to take thatimmaculate ball out to our corridoron an evening just like this one, totake my place near the apples in thenorth, and to find my brother waitingbeneath the immense firs to the south.All I'd wanted was to pluck that too-perfect ball off its pedestal and pro-ceed, without speaking, to play catchso long and hard that the grass stainsand nicks and the sweat of our palmswould finally obliterate every last traceof Mantle's blue ink, until all he wouldhave given us was a grass-green,earth-brown, beat-up old baseball. Beat-upold balls were all we'd ever had any-how. They were all we'd ever needed.The dirtier they were, and the morefrayed the skin and stitching, the loud-er they'd hissed and the better they'dcurved. And remembering this-re-covering in an instant the knowledgeof how little we'd needed in order tobe happy-my grief for my brotherbecame palpable, took on shape andweight, color and texture, even anodor. The measure of my losswas pre-cisely the difference between one ofthe beat-up, earth-colored, grass-scent-ed balls that had given us such hap-piness and this antiseptic-smelling,sad-making, icon-ball on its bandage-box pedestal. And as I felt this-as Istood there palpating my grief, shift-ing it around like a throwing stone inmy hand-I fell through some kindof floor inside myself, landing in adeeper, brighter chamber just in timeto feel something or someone tell me:But who's to say we need even an oldbaIl to be happy? Who's to say we couldn'tdo with less?Who's to say we couldn't stillbe happy-with no ball at all?

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And with that, the koan wassolved.I can't explain why this felt like

such a complete solution. Reading thebare words, two decades later, theydon't lodk like much of a solution.But a koan answer is not a verbal, ora literary, or even a personal experi-ence: It's a spiritual experience. Anda boy, a man, a "me," does not havespiritual experiences; only the spirithas spiritual experiences. That's whychurches so soon become bandageboxes propping up antiseptic iconsthat lose all value the instant they areremoved from the greens and brownsof grass and dirt and life. It's also whya good Zen monk always states a koansolution in the barest possible terms."No ball at aU!" is,perhaps, all I shouldhave written-because then no onewould have an inkling of what wasmeant and so could form no miscon-ceptions, and the immediacy and in-tegrity and authority of the experience

would be safely lockedrJ" away.'

.this is getting a bit iffyfor a sportsstory. But jocks die, and then what?The brother I played a thousand gamesof catch with is dead, and so will I be,and unless you're one hell of an ath-lete so will you be. In the face of thisfact, I find it more than a little con-soling to recall how clearly and deeplyit was brought home to me, that Oc-tober day, that there is something inus which needs absolutely nothing-not even a dog-eared ball-in order tobe happy. From that day forward therelic on the mantel lost its irksomeovertones and became a mere auto-graphed ball-nothing more, noth-ing less.It liveson my desk now, besidean old beater ball my brother and Iwore out, and it givesme a satisfactionI can't explain to sit back, now andthen, and compare the two-thoughI'd still gladly trash the white one fora good game of catch.

As for the ticklish timing of its ar-rival, I only recently learned a coupleof facts that shed some light. First, Idiscovered-in a copy of the old let-ter my mother wrote to Mantle-that she'd made it quite clear thatmy brother was dying. So when TheMick wrote what he wrote, he knewperfectly well what the situationmight be when the ball arrived. And

second, I found out that my motheractually went ahead and showed theball to my brother. True, what was -left of him was embalmed. But whatwas embalmed wasn't all of him. AndI've no reason to assume that the un-embalmed part had changed much. Itshould be remembered, then, thatwhile he lived my brother was morethan a little vain, that he'd beencompelled by his death to leave ahandsome head of auburn hair be-hind, and that when my mother andthe baseball arrived at the funeralparlor, that lovely hair was being pre-pared for an open-casket funeral by acouple of cadaverous-looking ya-hoos whose oily manners, hair, andclothes made it plain that they didn'tknow Kookie from Roger Maris orSolid Cool from Kool-Aid. What ifthis pair took it into their heads tospruce John up for the hereafter witha Bible camp cut? Worse yet, what ifthey tried to show what sensitive, ac-commodating artists they were anddecked him out like a damned Elvisthe Pelvis greaser? I'm not trying to bemorbid here. I'm just trying to statethe facts. "The Bod" my brother hadvery much enjoyed inhabiting wasabout to be seen for the last time byall his buddies, his family, and a girl-friend who was only 1.5 percentCrud, and the part of the whole en-semble he'd been most fastidiousabout-the coiffure-was complete-ly out of his control! He needed bestwishes. He needed a pal. Preferablyone with a comb.

Enter my stalwart mother, who tookone look at what the two rouge-and-casket wallahs were doing to the hair,said, "No, no, no!", produced a snap-shot, told them, "He wants it exactlylike this," sat down to critique their ef-forts, and kept on critiquing until inthe end you'd have thought John haddropped in to groom himself.

Only then did she ask them to leave.Only then did she pull the autographedball from her purse, share it with herson, read him the inscription.

As is always the case with arrivingbaseballs, timing is the key. Thanks tothe timing that has made The Mick alegend, my brother, the last time we allsaw him, looked completely himself.

I return those best wishes to mybrother's pal. _