The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [20]
That summer, inspirited by success, he worked even harder. Instead of five thirty, he got up at five. Instead of five meals a day, he ate six. His mind felt clear and pure. The ball rocketed off his bat. He was coming to understand certain parts of The Art of Fielding in a new way, from the inside out, as if the great Aparicio were less an oracle than an equal.
He acquired a protégé too—Izzy Avila, a player Schwartz had recruited from his old neighborhood in South Chicago. Schwartz loved Westish, and he both loved and hated where he came from, and he wanted to help guys get from one to the other. Izzy was a perfect candidate, a gifted athlete and decent student who nonetheless needed the help. His two older brothers had also been gifted athletes—now one lived with their mom and the other was in prison. “He’s a little raw,” Schwartz said. “He can ride the bench this year, learn some things. Then play second next year after Ajay graduates. Then when you’re gone, he’s the new shortstop.”
Izzy feared and respected Schwartz, but he worshipped Henry. When they took their daily ground balls, he tried to copy Henry’s every move. When Henry talked about the subtleties of infield positioning, Izzy, unlike the other Harpooners, understood. When he didn’t understand, he studied until he did. They worked relays, rundowns, bunts, feints, pickoffs, double plays. Henry bought him a copy of The Art of Fielding for his birthday.
But Izzy wasn’t ready, mentally or physically, for Henry’s toughest workouts. Henry trained speed with Starblind, the fastest guy on the team. He trained strength with Schwartz, the strongest. When those guys went home, he went to yoga class with Owen. Then he trained some more. He fielded grounders in his mind until he fell asleep. He got up at five and did it again.
By the start of his junior season, he’d become something Westish College had never seen: a prospect. He hit a home run in the second game of the Florida trip, another in the fourth game, a third in the sixth. By then the scouts were loitering in their Ray-Bans behind the backstop. Fans showed up too, local baseball lovers who’d heard about the must-see kid with the magic glove. By week’s end the team was 10 and 2, Henry was hitting .519, and he’d moved within a single game of tying Aparicio Rodriguez’s NCAA record for most consecutive errorless games. The flight back to Wisconsin was one long celebration.
6
In the spring of 1880, Herman Melville, then sixty years old, was working as a customs inspector at the Port of New York, having proved unable to support his family through literary work. He was not famous and earned almost nothing from royalties. His first-born son, Malcolm, had committed suicide thirteen years earlier. Melville’s in-laws, among others, feared for his health and regarded him as insane. On a national scale, the horrific, bloody rift he’d prophesied in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno (both long out of print in 1880) had come to pass, and, as he had been perhaps the first to foresee, the anguish had not ceased with the end of the war.
Not surprising, then, that the great writer might have found himself growing grim about the mouth, as his best-known protagonist put it; that he might have deemed it high time to get back to sea. Too old, impecunious, and hemmed in by family matters to make any more ocean crossings, Melville settled upon a more modest adventure. The spring thaw came early that year, and in March he boarded a ship headed up the Erie Canal, to tour the Great Lakes and thereby reprise alone a trip he had taken with his friend Eli Fly forty years before. Scholars have made much of Melville’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem (1856–57), but this later domestic voyage went unmentioned until 1969, when an undergraduate at Westish College—a small,