The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [44]
Schwartz would be glad about Miranda Szabo. Thrilled. Ecstatic. Henry had been worried about what would happen next year, after Schwartz graduated and went off to law school on the East Coast or the West. But maybe he’d be gone too, off to the minor leagues a year ahead of schedule, with money in his pocket. It was bittersweet to think about leaving, he loved it here, but baseball was baseball, and it was fitting that he and Schwartz might leave together. Without Schwartz there was no Westish College. Without Schwartz, come to think of it, there was hardly even any Henry Skrimshander.
12
On Schwartz’s law school applications, as on most posted documents, he listed his home address like this:
MICHAEL P. SCHWARTZ
VARSITY ATHLETIC CENTER
WESTISH COLLEGE
WESTISH, WI 51851
He rented a campus-slum two-bedroom house on Grant Street with Demetrius Arsch, his cocaptain on the football team and backup catcher on the baseball team, but rarely set foot inside it. During the day there were classes and practices to attend, plus Henry’s regimen to oversee, and at night he worked on his thesis—“The Stoics in America”—here on the top floor of the VAC, in a dark-carpeted conference room that he long ago appropriated as his personal office. Schwartz held no official position within the Athletic Department, but he’d donated so much time and effort over the past four years that no one begrudged him his key to the building. Books with brittle, snapped bindings and missing pages, collected via his nationwide ILL dragnet, stood in drunken piles all along the long oval table, surrounded by a sea of color-coded note cards, wire-bound notebooks, and empty coffee mugs that had been converted to spit cups. He’d quit chewing tobacco two years ago, but it aided his concentration so much that, as he entered this final thesis crunch, he’d had to make some exceptions. With a good dip in, plus a couple Sudafed for luck, he could crank out nine or ten pages in a night. He wasn’t into Adderall.
Schwartz cherished these private, diligent hours. All day long, no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he accomplished, a voice in his head berated him for his laziness, his sloth, his inability to concentrate. His concerns were trivial. His knowledge of history was shallow. His Latin sucked, and his Greek was worse. How did he expect to grasp Aurelius and Epictetus, inquired the voice, when he could barely string two Latin words together? Vos es scelestus bardus. Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. Even the pain in his knees subsided.
Tonight, though, didn’t seem destined to contain much calm. First the Buddha’s injury, and now, as Schwartz stepped out of the VAC elevator and into the corridor lit only by a red EXIT sign at either end, he could see a bulge in the manila envelope he’d affixed to his office door as a makeshift mailbox. He pressed his fingertips to the sandy yellow paper: sure enough, there was something inside, something that—he drew it out, heart thundering—bore the blue insignia of Yale University.
Schwartz prided himself on his honesty. If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve. That was the lesson of the Greeks; that was the lesson of Coach Liczic, who’d banged on the Buick’s window.
That happened two years after his mom died of cancer. He was living by himself. He’d never met his dad—his parents had been engaged at one point, but his dad drank and bet on sports and left before Schwartz was born. When the woman from Children and Family Services came by a month after his mom’s funeral, he’d told