Free Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth Page A

prayed and wept for: that she should come out at the other end of her operation, and be alive. And then come home, to be once again our one and only mother. “Run, my baby-boy,” my mother croons to me, and sweetly—oh, she can be so sweet and good to me, so motherly! she will spend hour after hour playing canasta with me, when I am sick and in bed as she is now: imagine, the ginger ale the nurse has brought for her because she has had a serious operation, she offers to
me
, because I’m overheated! Yes, she
will
give me the food out of her mouth, that’s a proven fact! And still I will not stay five full minutes at her bedside. “Run,” says my mother, while Mrs. Re-ver-ed, who in no time at all has managed to make herself my enemy, and for the rest of my life, Mrs. Re-ver-ed says, “Soon Mother will be home, soon everything will be just like ordinary … Sure, run, run, they all run these days,” says the kind and understanding lady—oh, they are all so kind and understanding, I want to strangle them!—“walking they never heard of, God bless them.”
    So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her—two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress (so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of “the knife,” our knife) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is
nothing
. A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me—my very life!—how can I be so cruel? “Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy?” Never, I would answer, never, never, never … And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets
that I might never have seen again
. There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when she was a small child,
and that I would never have seen again
. And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake,
and still open, still loving me!
There was her ginger ale—and thirsty as I was, I could not have
forced
myself to drink it!
    So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space … Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, “It’s mine,” you call, “it’s mine,” and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it
is
yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is
mine!
    Unfortunately, I was too anxious a hitter to make the high school team—I swung and missed at bad pitches so often during the tryouts for the freshman squad that eventually the ironical coach took me aside and said, “Sonny, are you sure you don’t wear glasses?” and then sent me on my way. But did I have form! did I have style! And in my playground softball league, where the