My job – or, rather, the job of the new public relations person – was to write copy for the Chicago Cubs yearbook. A young woman whom I remembered having a confrontation with a few years before kept checking the dates on her calendar and staring at me, trying, I’m sure, to place me. She assigned me back issues of the yearbook to read, promising to give me more substantial employment after lunch when the public relations director returned.
As I glanced at the yearbooks, I eyed the rows of foot-locker-green filing cabinets, my mouth watering for the opportunity to leap into history. Shortly before lunch I made my way to the supply room and secreted myself behind several thousand Chicago Cubs yearbooks. I lay on the floor and covered myself with the glossy little magazines, their slick surfaces smelling like new-car interiors. I slept for a while, dreaming I was in the hold of a fishing vessel, covered with slippery tropical fish.
When the fluorescent hands on my wrist watch showed 6:00 P.M., I ventured out. The offices were deserted, silent, smelling of paper and coffee grounds.
I spent the entire night skimming through the filing cabinets, reading everything I could find concerning the years 1902–1908, which were the years the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was in existence.
It was sad to find out that, to the Cubs, baseball was not the least magical; it was strictly business. The files contained little but contracts, tax forms, medical expense forms. There were no elaborate personnel files, no newspaper clippings, no fan testimonials.
Here was the Cubs’ greatest pitcher, Mordecai Peter Centennial ‘Three Finger’ or ‘Miner’ Brown, in a manila folder labeled M. BROWN and smudged with fingerprints. Not even a first name. No mention of his 239 victories or of his induction into the Hall of Fame. No mention of his injury, the cropped finger that allowed him to put a special spin on the ball. Just a file with the barest of records.
I did find some of my own correspondence in a file labeled CRANK LETTERS, filed away alongside a letter claiming the Chicago Cubs would win the last pennant before Armageddon and another containing what purported to be conclusive evidence that Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were extraterrestrials. Seeing them side by side, I had to admit that those letters made as much sense as mine.
There were penciled notes on one of my more inflammatory letters: Dangerous? F.B.I.? Relative of E. G. Clarke? My sister, Enola Gay, is a fugitive from justice.
I emerged at 6:00 A.M., disheveled, dry-mouthed, redeyed, and without one shred of evidence that the 1908 Chicago Cubs ever visited Big Inning, Iowa, or, for that matter, that there ever was a Big Inning, Iowa.
‘It is a fact that there are cracks in time,’ my father repeated endlessly. ‘Weaknesses – fissures, if you like – in the gauzy dreamland that separates the past from the present.’ Hearing those words like a musical refrain all through my childhood, I came to believe them, or, rather, accept them; it was never a matter as simple as belief. To me they weren’t remarkable; after all, some children were taught to accept the enormities, the absurdities, the implausibilities of scripture as fact.
‘Time is out of kilter here in Johnson County; that’s my conclusion,’ my father said to me often. ‘But if something is out of kilter, there’s no reason it can’t be fixed. And when it’s fixed I’ll be proven right.’
Briefly stated, here is what my father believed: through those cracks in time, little snippets of the past, like small, historical mice, gnaw holes in the lath and plaster and wallpaper of what used to be, then scamper madly across the present, causing eyes to shift and ears to perk to their tiny footfalls. To most people they are only a gray blur and a miniature tattoo of sound quickly gone and forgotten. There are, however, some of us who see and hear more than they were ever meant to. My father was one of those, as am I.
My father, Matthew Clarke, dreamed his wife. He lay in his bedroom in the square frame house with green shutters in the Iowa town called Onamata, which, long ago, before the flood, when everything but the church was washed away in the direction of Missouri, was called Big Inning. Wide awake, eyes pressed shut, Matthew Clarke dreamed his ideal woman, conjuring her up from the scarlet blackness beneath his lids, until she rose before him like a genie, wavery, pulsating.
‘There’s always been a strangeness hovering over all this land,’ he used to tell me. ‘Even before I dreamed Maudie, before I learned of the Confederacy, I knew there were layers and layers of history on this land, like a chair with ten coats of enamel. And I sensed some of those layers were peeling off, floating in the air, waiting to be breathed in, soaked up like sunshine. I tell you, Gideon’ – and he would scratch the tip of his long, sun-bronzed nose and run a hand through his black curls, which were as unruly as twitch grass – ‘there are all kinds of mysteries dancing around us like sunbeams, just beyond our finger tips.’ When I’d look at him as if I didn’t quite believe him, he’d go on, ‘They’re there, like birds in a thicket that you can hear but can’t see.’
And I would listen to him and marvel at his energy and dedication, and I’d believe him or at least accept what he told me, but with a total lack of awe. If my father insisted that he alone was in step, the rest of the world a ragtag of shabby marchers, who was I to disagree? Nothing, including the resurrection of the dead, would have surprised me.
My first experience of the floating magic he talked of was when the hollyhocks sang to me. I suppose I was eight the first time I heard those hollyhocks, tall, sturdy flowers the color of sun-faded raspberries. They grew high and physical outside my father’s bedroom window, their stocks like broom handles, saucer-sized heads bowed silently, gathered together like a freshly scrubbed barbershop quartet. ‘Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh,’ they sang at first, softly as a choir.
As I listened I knew they were performing for me alone, that if a playmate appeared he would hear nothing. I remember thinking, Why shouldn’t the hollyhocks sing? And I pictured a nebulous rock wall, desert-rust in color, cracking open like an egg, the tall flowers ducking their heads as they emerged, eerie as aliens. As I sat cross-legged on the lawn in front of them, their song grew louder, the tempo increased: ‘DA da DA da DA DA, DA da DA da da, DA da DA da da, DA da DA DA DA.’ It would be years before I discovered the source of their music.
One thing I don’t understand is that I did not tell my father of the experience. How he would have loved to have had me as an ally. In that credulous way children have of accepting what life offers them, it didn’t occur to me then how lonely my father’s quest must have been. By the time I realized, my mother had long since left us and taken my sister and my cat with her to Chicago. Father was devoting his whole life to proving the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and having precious little success.
I didn’t understand his obsession well enough to be the kind of son I should have been. Now, years after his death, after he has been dead for more years of my life than he was alive, after I have come to have an obsession of my own, I understand all too well what he went through, and I sympathize, too late though it may be.
But back to my father’s dream. I won’t tell what I know about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy just yet. It is more important to explain about my father and my mother, the woman he dreamed to life.
‘She was so real sometimes, I could smell her and taste her and do everything but touch her,’ he used to say to me. ‘When you get older you’ll understand what it was like, Gid.’ I wonder if all parents tell their children things the children don’t understand but will when they get older. I wanted to understand then.
Matthew Clarke knew he wasn’t likely to find his dream among the residents of Onamata, or even in nearby Iowa City. It was the summer of 1943, the war was raging, and Matthew Clarke was just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in American history.
‘I had a choice to make and make quickly,’ he used to say to me. Some of my earliest memories are of hearing this story. We – when we were still a family – used to sit on the wide verandah on humid summer evenings, Mother and Father on slatted wooden chairs, hers enameled white, his vermilion, while my sister and I sat