Free A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley Page B

bland, soggy food eaten silently in barnlike automats; a room that varied arbitrarily between extreme heat and cold; a hundred and one missed subway connections; the Fordham-Pittsburgh game ’ s having been sold out; the astonishment I underwent at no one ’ s knowing my father; and finally, the fact that our meeting with Owen, which I had been led to believe was prearranged, was nothing more than wishful thinking on my father ’ s part.
    I don ’ t know how many times we went to Owen ’ s hotel, but each time we were told that he was “ out. ” Each time we returned to the YMCA a little more tired, a little more defeated, and with each trip the Giant players whose names I knew, Strong and Cuff and Leemans and Hein, began to loom as large and forbidding as the skyscrapers. At one point I knew, though I daren ’ t say so to my father, that the idea of such a game was preposterous. Moreover, for the first time in my life I began to understand the awesome vanity and gnawing need required to take on New York City with a view to imposing one ’ s personality on the place. This was a knowledge that came to haunt me in later years.
    It was not until my father, his voice weary, suggested that we make one final trip to the hotel that I saw that he, too, was disheartened. All the way there I prayed that Owen would still be “ out. ” I had come to see that the meeting was undesired by him, and I feared the consequences of our imposition. The moment we walked into the lobby, however, the desk clerk (who had, I ’ m sure, come to feel sorry for us) began furiously stabbing the air in the direction of a gruff-looking, bespectacled, and stout man rolling, seaman-like, in the direction of the elevator—a fury that could only have signaled that it was he, Owen. My father moved quickly across the lobby, stopped him, and began the conversation that ended with Owen ’ s I ’ m sure he ’ s tough, Mr. Exley. As I say, I don ’ t remember a good deal of the conversation prior to my being introduced; I do remember that Owen, too, thought the idea of such a contest ridiculous. Worse than that, my father had already been told as much by mail, and I think that his having made the trip in the face of such a refusal struck Owen as rather nervy, accounting for the uneasiness of the meeting. On Owen ’ s leaving, I did not dare look at my father. It wasn ’ t so much that I had ever lived in fear of him as that I had never before seen any man put him down, and I was not prepared to test his reaction to a humiliation which I had unwittingly caused. Moreover, my father ’ s shadow was so imposing that I had scarcely ever, until that moment, had any identity of my own. At the same time I had yearned to emulate and become my father, I had also longed for his destruction. Steve Owen not only gave me identity; he proved to me my father was vulnerable.
     
    On the subway going up to the Polo Grounds, I was remembering that meeting and contemplating the heavy uneasiness of it all anew when suddenly, feeling myself inordinately cramped, I looked up out of my reverie to discover that the car was jammed and that I had somehow got smack among the members of a single family—an astonishing family, a family so incredible that for the first time in my life I considered the possibility of Norman Rockwell ’ s not being lunatic. They were a father, a mother, a girl about fifteen, and a boy one or two years younger than she. All were dressed in expensive-looking camel ’ s-hair coats; each carried an item that designated him a fan—the father two soft and brilliantly plaid wool blankets, the mother a picnic basket, the girl a half-gallon thermos, and the boy a pair of field glasses, strung casually about his neck—each apparently doing his bit to make the day a grand success. What astonished me, though, was the almost hilarious similarity of their physical appearance: each had brilliant auburn hair; each had even, startlingly white teeth, smilingly