Sunset Park

scouts, and when he took the mound for Monroe that day in early June, he had an undefeated record and what appeared to be an unhittable arm. On the first pitch of the game, just as the fielders were settling into their positions behind him, he threw a low fastball to the Clintonshortstop, Tommy DeLucca, and the line drive that came flying back at him was struck so hard, with such ferocious power and speed, that he had no time to lift his glove and protect his face. It was the same injury that destroyed Herb Score’s career in 1957, the same bone-breaking shot that changes the course of a life. And if that ball hadn’t slammed his father in the eye, who is to say he wouldn’t have been killed in the war—before his marriage, before the birth of his children? Now Herb Score is dead, too, Morris thinks, dead as of six or seven weeks ago, Herb Score, with the prophetic middle name of Jude, and he remembers how badly shaken his father was when he read about Score’s injury in the morning paper, and how, for years after, right up to the end of his life, he would periodically refer to Score, saying that injury was one of the saddest things that ever happened in the history of the game. Never a word about himself, never the slightest hint of any personal connection. Only Score, poor Herb Score.
    Without his father’s help, the publishing house never would have been born. He knew he didn’t have the stuff to become a writer, not when he had the example of young Renzo to compare himself to, his dormitory roommate for four years at Amherst, the immense, grinding struggle of it, the long solitary hours, the everlasting uncertainty and compulsive need, and so he opted for the next best thing, teaching literature instead of making it, but after one year of graduate school at Columbia, he withdrew from the Ph.D. program, understanding that he wasn’t cut out foran academic life either. He wandered into publishing instead, spent four years rising through the ranks of two different companies, at last finding a place for himself, a mission, a calling, whatever word best applies to a sense of commitment and purpose, but there were too many frustrations and compromises at the top levels of commercial publishing, and when, in the space of two short months, his senior editor quashed his recommendation that they publish Renzo’s first novel (the one following the burned manuscript) and similarly rejected his proposal to publish Marty’s first novel, he went to his father and told him he wanted to quit the august company he was working for and start a little house of his own. His father knew nothing about books or publishing, but he must have seen something in his son’s eyes that persuaded him to throw a losable fraction of his money into a venture that was all but certain to fail. Or perhaps he felt this certain failure would teach the boy a lesson, help him work the bug out of his system, and before long he would return to the security of a normal job. But they didn’t fail, or at least the losses were not egregious enough to make them want to stop, and after that inaugural list of just four books, his father opened his pockets again, staking him to a new investment worth ten times the amount of his initial outlay, and suddenly Heller Books was off the ground, a small but viable entity, a real publishing house with an office on lower West Broadway (dirt-cheap rents back then in a Tribeca that was not yet Tribeca), a staff of four, a distributor, well-designedcatalogues, and a growing stable of authors. His father never interfered. He called himself the silent partner, and for the last four years of his life he used those words to announce himself whenever they talked on the phone. No more This is your father or This is your old man but, without fail, one hundred percent of the time, Hello there, Morris, this is your silent partner. How not to miss him? How not to feel that every book he has published in the past thirty-five years is a product of his father’s invisible hand?
    It is nine-thirty. He meant to call Willa to say happy new year, but it is two-thirty in England now, and no doubt she has been asleep for hours. He returns to the kitchen to  pour himself another scotch, his third since coming back to the apartment, and it is only now, for the first time all evening, that he remembers to check the answering machine, suddenly thinking that Willa might have called while he was at Marty and Nina’s or on his way home