Nobody's Fool

to understand he was part of something bigger than himself, that the team came first. That, Clive Sr. was confident, would also stand Sully in good stead in the larger context of life. “The larger context of life” was one of Clive Sr.’s favorite phrases. Everything that took place on a football field was applicable to The Larger Context of Life in Clive Sr.’s view, and this was what he wanted Sully to grasp.
    What Clive Sr. hadn’t anticipated was that Sully would find a natural subversive ally in Miss Beryl. True, his wife had always made gentle fun of Clive Sr.’s most serious themes, but he hadn’t imagined she’d thwart his design to educate Sully. If that’s what she was doing. Which Clive Sr. couldn’t be sure. It seemed to him that his wife must be up to something subversive, even though he couldn’t put his finger on any single thing she was doing that warranted specific reprimand. Mostly, it was little things, like calling Sully “Donald” instead of “Don” or “Sully,” the names—men’s names—that everyone else called him. Clive Sr. didn’t like his heaviest hitter thinking of himself as “Donald,” though he wasn’t sure he wanted to raise this issue with Miss Beryl because he could hear her snort in his mind and knew how he’d feel when he heard it for real in his ears. There were some things women just didn’t understand and you couldn’t teach them and were better off not trying.
    But it wasn’t just the business of calling Sully “Donald.” What he’d had in mind was a dinner table at which two sportsmen—himself and Sully—would talk strategy about their next opponent in such a way that his own son, who would never be an athlete, might become more educated and aware of, albeit vicariously, the sporting life and the lessons of sport. What he had not anticipated was that every night Sully would become involved in conversations not with himself, but rather with Miss Beryl, conversations about books and politics and the war America wasn’t going to be able to stay out of much longer, subjects that somehow diminished football and therefore its lessons about The Larger Context of life.
    It was as if his wife were bent on undermining every lesson in citizenship that Clive Sr. was trying to impart. Gertrude Wynoski had been a case in point. For many years the junior high school social studies teacher, Mrs. Wynoski was, to Miss Beryl’s mind, a crackpot. Her particular area of interest was local history, and until her forced retirement she’d drawn for every seventh-grade student at Bath Junior High a parallel between Schuyler Springs and Babylon, claiming that the latter’s prosperity was built on a precarious foundation of moral corruption. After her retirement, feeling the loss of her captive audience, she commenced to share her views with the citizens of Bath in a series of jeremiads published in the Letters to the Editor section of the
North Bath Weekly Journal
, reminding all and sundry that Schuyler Springs’ good fortune had its roots in immorality. That community had always condoned every form of gambling, legal and illegal, from horseraces to cockfights to savage prizefights and for decades had even tolerated the existence of a particularly infamous whorehouse. “House of ill repute” was actually the term she used, much to the confusionof her seventh-graders, for whom the phrase remained opaque, Mrs. Wynoski demurring exegesis. Her readers at the
North Bath Weekly Journal
followed her drift, and she concluded all of her epistles with strong hints that it was only a matter of time before Schuyler Springs was visited by some form of retribution, possibly biblical in nature.
    Clive Sr., who loved Bath and felt out of place in Schuyler Springs, especially during the tourist season, privately inclined toward Mrs. Wynoski’s view. As football coach, he felt an obligation to take the moral view, and he wanted badly to believe in a moral world. What he wished for more than anything was that the comeuppance Mrs. Wynoski predicted for Schuyler Springs would come, if God willed, at the hands of his football team. The Schuyler team was always rumored to have players who did not actually reside in the city, and Clive Sr. didn’t mind sharing these rumors with his student athletes in the hope of spurring them to moral outrage. They were