Green Cathedrals, Green Temples
Sammy folds the letter neatly, bending the bottom third upward, aligning the edges and pressing a sharp crease with his thumb. Then the top third, downward, aligned, creased. The edges perfectly squared up, the letter is carefully placed into the envelope, which he has already addressed. Mr. William Robinette, Grounds Keeper, 1060 West Addison Street, Chicago, Ill.
He imagines Mr. Robinette opening the letter, reading it quickly the first time, eyes flitting over the page, then settling down at the kitchen table for a slower second reading. Maybe, Sammy hopes, there would even be a third reading as the older man absorbed what Sammy had written, the words lingering after the man had finished, removed his glasses and remained sitting, lost in reflection. Sammy knew his words weren’t good enough to move anyone, least of all an important man like him, but he hoped they at least made Mr. Robinette pause, and wonder what had ever prompted Sammy to write in the first place.
Sammy looks again at the envelope, at Mr. Robinette’s name and address, and the blank corner at the upper left. Slowly, with the careful penmanship Miss Shapiro had taught him a few years earlier, he fills in the corner. Samuel Weir, 402 Market Street, Third Floor, Rockford, Ill. He rises from the family desk, in a tight corner of the small kitchen, and glances again at his name. He tenses, grinds his teeth and leans over the desk. He lowers the pen and jots, with barely a flourish, a comma, followed by Junior.
When Sammy returns from the post office, he sees, just inside the door, his father’s battered suitcase, bulging from inside and bound with an old belt. He calls hello but hears only empty echoes in reply. He wonders where his father is going this time, and tries to remember if he had been told, or if his father had said nothing. During the past few years it had been that way, his father only rattling off his itinerary on his way out the door. Years ago, far enough back that Sammy could only barely remember, the tours were shorter. Just a few nearby cities—Chicago, Madison, Moline, Peoria—and then his father would be back home again, exhilarant, almost giddy as he told of sold-out shows and delighted audiences, and bringing Sammy souvenirs of his travels.
But as Sammy grew older the tours became longer, to farther-off cities—Omaha, Memphis, Cincinnati—as, his mother told him, the work got harder to find and his father would latch onto any vaudeville troupe he could, any company with a magician slot open. These later tours would run three or four weeks, and his father would return home, tired and silent and looking almost beaten, and with empty hands. This time, Sammy thinks, his father might not even say anything at the last minute, leaving without a word. Don’t bother him, his mother had said the last time, he has a lot on his mind.
While his father was on the road and his mother busied herself with the washing she took in, Sammy would read the newspapers, both the morning and evening editions from the day before which he picked from the garbage cans behind Cohen’s Drug Store. He sped past the headlines and only slowed for the comics, which he breezed over in a minute or two before hurrying ahead to the sports pages. There he would linger for hours, reading the recaps and studying the box scores as if they were ancient, holy texts. He read the names, committing the new ones to memory beside the older, legendary ones, noted the hits and runs, the winning pitcher and whatever else could absorb from the bare text, basking in the glow of heroes he had only seen in box scores and pictured on tobacco cards. Once, in the Sunday Star, he happened to read a reference to a grounds keeper, Robinette, the columnist briefly lauding the man for the lush green paradise he had crafted, before the writer moved on to his views on that day’s game.
Even as Sammy finished the column and read the box scores for the third time, his mind lingered on Robinette. A man who not only spent his days surrounded by Sammy’s heroes, but worked on the vast, almost endless expanse of turf that Sammy had only seen in his imagination. Something, he thought, like the long open stretches of green he had seen and savored on a long Independence Day at Sinnissippi Park, during a rare afternoon when his father was home from the road and his mother took a break from the washing. He had removed his shoes and socks and ran through the grass barefoot, the soft blades caressing between his toes. Something, he thinks now, that is nothing like the gray, dusty emptiness of the apartment he sees before him, which seems always in shadow, even at noon.
William Robinette, forever in sunshine with lush grass underfoot, slowly ascended in Sammy’s mind until he reached the heights of the boy’s first heroes—Hack Wilson, Lefty Grove, Dazzy Vance, so many others. Even though he had seen the field only once—in a special Opening Day panorama in the Star—Sammy thought of it in almost mythical terms. And so the letter, addressed to Robinette in Chicago, in which Sammy meandered and blundered, trying to express his admiration, an appeal that he felt deeply but couldn’t quite put into words.
Sammy is sitting on the front step, just outside the stairway up to the apartment, when the postman arrives and hands him a small stack of mail. Sammy flips past the top letters that are all addressed to his parents, their names in formal type, before stopping at the last. He is stunned to see the insignia he knows so well, and the familiar street address, above which “W. Robinette” is written in elegant cursive, and then to his own name. With shaking hands he is barely able to steady his finger to dig beneath the flap and tear the envelope open.