Page 29
Story: The Briar Club
Dear Kitty, I may actually expire of curiosity: nearly two years I’ve lived at Briarwood House with Bea Verretti, and I still have no idea why she keeps a baseball bat by her door! On the run from the mob? Living in fear of a violent husband? Afraid of the dark? Will I ever know?
I wish you were here. —Grace
Bea slipped on a patch of ice the day after President Eisenhower was inaugurated, and as she hit the ground—as a spike of pain bolted through her bad knee, and every nerve from the crown of her head to the ends of her toes shrieked—she realized what she should have probably realized years ago: she was done. She was never, ever coming back.
“Is MissVerretti crying?”
whispered the girls in her eleven a.m. physical education class, but they soon wandered back inside the gymnasium. Bea had been trying to cajole them outside for a game of basketball, but It’s coooooold, MissVerretti and I’m having my time of the month, MissVerretti , and now here she was on her rump on the cracked asphalt, crying, as her class went inside to file their nails and chatter about the last episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy gave birth at the same time Lucille Ball gave birth, and hadn’t it all just been to die for. People said more viewers had tuned in for “Lucy Goes to the Hospital”
than for the presidential inauguration the next day, Bea remembered hearing on the radio. Certainly her batch of thirteen-year-olds had, these snotty little misses who refused to break a sweat in their gym slips and apparently had their periods three weeks out of every month.
I am never getting out of here , Bea thought, wiping her eyes, massaging her knee, which was still shrieking at her like a postseason umpire with a hangover. I am never going back where I belong. I will be the PE teacher at Gompers Junior High until I rot.
You could come home and get married , her mother’s voice chimed immediately. Artie Aliberti broke things off with Rosa Conti, and he’s always had an eye for you! Oh yes, go home to the North End in Boston and start churning out babies while reminiscing with all the other women about the time the altar had been set up in North Square for a procession in honor of Saint Rosalie, che bellissima . Bea would rather take a bat to her own temple.
She managed to limp inside as the bell rang and her class clattered off to the locker room. Lunch hour—Bea had a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper but she ignored it, heading for the principal’s office. His secretary had the desk outside, and the woman was off getting her hair done ( the only thing that would shift her ass out of that chair , Bea thought), so the telephone was unattended. Bea put the call through to a suburb in Kalamazoo, smiling despite herself as the forthright voice came down the line: “Bea Verretti, you lazy tramp, how are you?”
“Not bad, you slack-jawed cow.”
She could almost hear Elizabeth’s answering grin on the other end. Elizabeth Bandyk, who’d come up with Bea at Chicago tryouts in ’43, both of them eighteen years old and ready to chew up nails and spit out carpet tacks. Elizabeth Bandyk had been known as the South Bend Bandit, and Bea Verretti the Swinging Sicilian, by the end of their first season. “Getting ready for spring training?”
Bea asked, perching her hip on the desk to take the weight off her knee.
“Keeping the arm loose, working on my slider. Still drops like a deck chair over home plate, but I have to ice my elbow afterward for an hour.”
Elizabeth laughed that big raucous laugh, the one that sounded so incongruous coming from such a delicate little blonde. It was Elizabeth’s looks as much as her killer fastball that got her onto the South Bend Blue Sox with Bea that first year in ’43, where she’d stayed as Bea moved on through various other teams. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the AAGPBL, wanted its players to look a certain way, as well as play a certain way. Bea and Elizabeth hadn’t cared; they were just there for the game. “When did we get old?”
Elizabeth demanded now. “Every spring I see these rookie girls hardly dry behind the ears, all their joints brand-new off the factory floor...”
Bea looked down at her swollen knee. Just a twenty-eight-year-old knee; how could it have failed her like this? Twenty-eight wasn’t old! “Liz, I’m not going to be there at spring training.”
A pause on the other end. Not, Bea thought, a surprised pause.
She gripped the telephone receiver harder. “You don’t seem shocked.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Bea, that break was bad.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
A late-season game against the Rockford Peaches, a hard slide into second on a short hopper—Bea had run a play like that hundreds, thousands of times, from sandlot ball as a kid all the way to her years in the league with the South Bend Blue Sox, the Racine Belles, the Fort Wayne Daisies. Why had that one slide been different, her left knee giving way with an audible crack as loud as a curveball connecting with a bat’s barrel? “I should have been playing by the next season.”
“You thought that, Bea.”
Quietly. “Everyone else knew you were done.”
Bea flinched. “Don’t be a bitch.”
People would be surprised, hearing how the league women swore. They knew how to present themselves—carefully curled hair under their baseball caps, red lipstick, crisply skirted uniforms, and demure handshakes right out of Helena Rubinstein charm school—but on the field and in the locker room they could cuss like sailors.
“I’m not being a bitch. I’m being a realist. I tried to tell you then, so did the doctor, so did your manager. You didn’t want to hear it.”
Bea ruffled a hand through her hair—the black hair she’d started growing out again in preparation for spring training; league players had to have long hair. “I thought for sure I’d be back this year,”
she said softly. The Swinging Sicilian, back in the game. She wasn’t even Sicilian, but the nickname still stuck. Because with a bat in her hand she was unstoppable; she could put the best fastball in the league on the goddamn moon .
And now her bat stood leaning up against her apartment door in Briarwood House.
“You had eight years, Bea. It was a good run.”
It wasn’t enough , she wanted to scream. “I was hoping for one more,”
she managed to say, trying to make a joke out of it.
“One more might be all any of us gets.”
Elizabeth hesitated on the other end of the line. “The crowds aren’t what they were. There’s talk of shutting the league down.”
“They’ve been saying that from the beginning,”
Bea scoffed.
“Well, this time it feels serious. It’s not just the old girls shouldn’t play griping, it’s cutting down on equipment, it’s cuts in the budget...”
She went on, and Bea forgot all about the throb in her knee. No AAGPBL? Even if it had been agony these past two seasons, knowing her friends were playing without her, at least she’d known they were playing . Were the higher-ups really just going to send all those women home?
No league. No cramped locker rooms, wandering around in brassieres and the uniform undershorts, icing bruises and gossiping about the opposing team. No infield chatter as you bounced from foot to foot waiting to shovel up a grounder. No team bus rattling them between away games, no darning knee socks and sponging stains off uniform skirts in makeshift hotel rooms, no sneaking around the chaperones to go out drinking after curfew. No easy identity: “I’m a Daisy”
“I’m a Peach”
“I’m a Belle.”
If she wasn’t any of those things, what was she?
The door to the principal’s office creaked, yanking Bea’s roiling thoughts back to the present. “Gotta go,”
she whispered to Elizabeth. “Keep working that slider, long as they’ll let you throw it—”
and she got the receiver down just in time.
“Beatrice,”
breathed Mr.Royce. “What can I do for you today?”
The Gompers principal put a hand on her shoulder the way he always did, so he could stand just a bit too close for comfort. His eyes were bright with dislike. Bea couldn’t figure out which he wanted more—to get his hand down her blouse, or fire her.
“Nothing at all, Mr.Royce.”
Sliding out from under his hand and stretching to her full height. Bea was nearly a head taller than her boss, and she knew he hated it. “Just stopped by to borrow something from your secretary.”
“A lipstick?”
Mr.Royce chuckled. “You ladies and your beauty products!”
“A Band-Aid. I was showing the girls how to throw windmill style for softball”—demonstrating, with just enough of a whip in her elbow to force him back a step—“and I caught my thumbnail and tore it halfway off. Blood everywhere, look—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Edging back some more.
“Nothing like what I used to get in my league days! I tell you about the time I broke my bat against a fastball from a Kenosha Comet pitcher, and one of the splinters went clear through my forearm? Ran all the way to third with a stand-up triple, spraying blood the whole way—”
“I hope you don’t tell these gruesome stories to your students. And really, softball doesn’t need to be part of the curriculum for the young girls of Gompers. Something more ladylike. Tennis, perhaps.”
Have you heard the way tennis players grunt? Bea thought. Ladylike as all get-out! “Yes, Mr.Royce,”
she managed to say.
“I’ve told you before, you may call me Eugene,”
he chided. “At least when there are no pupils around! And you need to change back out of shorts into a skirt after class, Beatrice, I’ve spoken to you about that. The dress code for our staff’s females—”
“I’m in physical education, Mr.Royce. I need to be able to demonstrate anything athletic.”
“Well, now. How athletic do we really want our young ladies to be?”
Chuckle, chuckle. Bea just looked at him, wishing she could cram his tie clip up his nose. If she did that she’d be fired for sure, but how much did she want this job anyway? And how far could she get it up his nose? Three inches at least, before she hit the wind tunnel he had for a brain?
You aren’t qualified to work anywhere else , she reminded herself. She hadn’t even finished her senior year of high school when she’d quit to play shortstop for the AAGPBL. No, if she lost this job it was back home to Boston and her mother’s matchmaking.
“Oh, and Beatrice?”
Mr.Royce’s hand descended on her shoulder again, damply. “We’ll be needing you to fill in for MissFerguson’s afternoon class, now she’s quitting to get married. You ladies, running for the hills as soon as you get that ring on your finger!”
Chuckle, chuckle. “I can’t deny she’s left us shorthanded, but you’ll do fine for the spring semester.”
Bea blinked. “Me, teach a class?”
“Relax, my dear.”
A squeeze of her shoulder, fingers now draping over her collarbone. “It’s not like I’m asking you to teach algebra!”
Bea’s heart sank. “...What’s the class?”
“Home economics?”
Grace paused a moment, glass of sun tea in hand, then burst out laughing.
“It’s not funny,”
Bea objected, but too late: the Briar Club’s collective funny bone had been set off. Nora giggled into the neck of Grace’s cat, Fliss buried her laughter in Angela’s ruffled romper, even Arlene tittered against her fingertips. Claire flopped all the way onto her back from where she’d been sitting on the floor.
“Kill me now,”
she announced. “Bea Verretti, teaching home ec!”
“You’re all dead to me,”
Bea said, and that just set everyone off again.
“I’m sure MissVerretti will do just fine,”
Arlene’s sharp-faced FBI boyfriend, Harland, called over from the kitchenette area in his Virginia drawl. Arlene hadn’t gotten a ring out of him yet, but she still had her hooks in somehow—Bea couldn’t think of any other reason a man would come over and offer to cook for his girlfriend’s housemates. He stood at the hot plate now, jacket discarded and sleeves rolled up, frying chicken with surprising dexterity. “You took home ec in high school, didn’t you?”
he asked Bea.
“I didn’t pay attention. I barely went .”
Too busy ditching class for batting practice, or sneaking off school grounds to watch the Red Sox at Fenway. “What do people learn in home ec, anyway?”
Bea asked, somewhat desperately. She was supposed to start filling in for Miss Ferguson on Monday.
“Sewing, of course,”
said Nora. “How to run up a simple blouse or skirt on your Singer—”
“Housework,”
Claire said with a dramatic retch. “How to get stains out of things, polish silver—”
“Household accounting?”
Grace suggested. “How to shop on a budget?”
“What is there to learn about not having any money?”
Bea wanted to know. “You don’t have any, you buy what little you can afford, it’s not complicated. Why is there a class ?”
“Oh, sweetie, home ec is where you learn the refinements of being a wife,”
Arlene cooed. “How to dress nicely, host a party, set a proper table. How embarrassed would you be, not knowing where to set the bread plate and the cake fork if you had your husband’s boss coming for dinner?”
Sidelong glance at Harland: Look at me! Excellent wife material over here!
Bea groaned, pulling a bottle of Schlitz out of Grace’s tiny icebox. “Just put me on the DL now. I’m finished.”
“You can do the cooking part at least, can’t you, MissVerretti?”
Harland lowered the last floured chicken drumstick into the pan of hot oil with a pair of tongs. “What with this supper club you ladies have had going for what, nearly three years?”
“You know what the Briar Club eats when it’s my turn to cook?”
Bea bashed the cap off her bottle. “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I can’t cook a lick.”
The saintly Harland looked disapproving. He probably thought all females emerged from the womb knowing how to cook. Bea grinned and took a swig of beer right out of the bottle, knowing he didn’t really approve of that, either. Or her slacks, or her short hair—a man who wore such unbelievably starched shirts and spoke so respectfully of J. Edgar Hoover undoubtedly liked his women cute and curly. But what was the point of having a straitlaced young FBI agent around if you weren’t going to shock him? “Tastes good, G-man,”
Bea said, stealing a crispy fried morsel from the plate of chicken pieces already sitting golden and mouthwatering beside the hot plate. “Maybe you should teach home ec instead of me.”
“Bea,”
Arlene said with that don’t you dare mess this up for me edge in her sweet Texas drawl. Bea poked out her tongue, feeling childish, and wandered over to the window. Grace had it cracked open despite the cold; the green-walled room was always warm on Thursday nights with so many of them crammed in. On the walk below, Mrs.Nilsson was bustling out for her Thursday bridge club, stopping to click her tongue disapprovingly at the mellow sound of the saxophone drifting down from Joe Reiss’s window next door. Joe sneaked over for most Briar Club dinners; he must have gotten lost in a new jam. Woodshedding it, he’d say: Gotta woodshed a new tune.
“What?”
Bea had asked the first time she heard that.
“You know,”
he answered with a shrug of his lean shoulder. “Take it to the woodshed and do some work on it.”
“I didn’t know music was work.”
“You got paid to play a kid’s game, and I’m betting that still counted as work.”
Joe was the only one who knew she’d played with the AAGPBL. At first she hadn’t spread it around because Mrs.Nilsson was the type who thought women baseball players were tramps, girls no better than they should be who pranced around fields showing their bare legs to crowds of men—that was what Bea’s own mother had thought—and it seemed better to just introduce herself as the Gompers Junior High gym teacher rather than the former shortstop of the Fort Wayne Daisies with a career batting average of .282. And Bea hadn’t thought she’d be here very long anyway, just long enough for her knee to knit itself together and then back to spring training she’d go...
And now she’d been coming to dinner with these women for more than two years, and they didn’t even know her. Bea Verretti, the team spark plug who had known every last bruise and heartbreak and secret of every one of her teammates while she was playing.
“—waiting for Reka tonight?”
Nora was asking, helping herself to more of Grace’s sun tea.
“Reka’s spending a week in New York.”
Grace pinned up a loop of golden-brown hair that had escaped her blue-checked bandanna. “Some business with a museum—she went off in a nice new coat.”
“I’d like to know where she could afford a coat with a mink collar,”
Arlene speculated.
“I’m just glad she’s got a little money again,”
Bea said. Collectively the Briar Club had worried quite a bit about Reka’s finances—Fliss kept finding excuses to make her pots of soup, and Bea had rigged her window sash so her room wasn’t so cold over the winter. But Reka had a real spring-training bounce in her step these days, and she’d put a fiver into the pot for Lina’s new corrective glasses without looking at her wallet in that worried way you did when bank accounts were lean. “You should be glad things are looking up for her, too, Arlene,”
Bea added. “Since you’re the one who got her fired from the library in the first place.”
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did. You told the librarian that Reka was a Commie—”
“I merely let it slip that she had Communist sympathies, which she does , so it wasn’t like I was lying . I had no idea they would fire her, and I told her so. I apologized,”
Arlene insisted, looking peevish. “I apologized twice .”
“Maybe that’s good enough for Reka.”
The old woman had shrugged at the time; said she didn’t care one way or another if Arlene started wedging herself back into the Thursday night dinners with a casserole dish and an ingratiating smile, but the rest of the Briar Club was still inclined to regard the Huppmobile coldly, Bea included. She believed in nurturing grudges; it was the Italian in her. “Two apologies doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a lousy thing to do, Arlene—”
“What’s the commotion?”
Harland asked, coming over with a big heaped platter.
“Nothing,”
Arlene said quickly, but Bea overrode her.
“Arlene didn’t tell you this particular story over the pillow? How she got old Mrs. Muller fired from the Smoot Library on suspicion of being a Communist? Shocker. Here, I’ll take some of that.”
Bea sank her teeth into a golden-fried chicken breast while Arlene and Harland started whispering and hissing at each other and the rest of the Briar Club nibbled and eavesdropped as hard as they could. It was all very satisfying, but Bea felt a little flat as she licked the last delectable fried crumbs off her lips. She found herself slipping out in the commotion of the Nilsson kids slipping in—“Sorry, had to help Lina finish the corn muffins,”
Pete said breathlessly, holding the door as his little sister staggered in with a pan fresh out of the oven, the lenses of her new glasses all fogged up, and Bea snagged a couple as she looped around and headed down the stairs.
“You’re missing out,”
she said when Joe Reiss opened the door of his second-floor apartment next door. “Arlene’s G-man made fried chicken, and now if I’m not mistaken he’s breaking up with her.”
“I was auditioning a new drummer.”
Joe leaned an elbow on the doorjamb, tenor saxophone hanging around his neck on a loop of cord. “Can’t blame Claude for heading to the Big Apple, but I haven’t found a guy yet who can keep a beat.”
Bea took a big bite of warm corn muffin. “Want some company?”
Table of Contents
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- Page 29 (Reading here)
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