The Cavanaugh Quest Read Online Free Page A

which sent the curtains billowing, and lay down on the bed with The Baseball Encyclopedia, which meant that I was afraid of the night.
    Two of the most important treasures anyone can find in life are, one, something which can effectively take your mind off yourself and, two, something which can put you to sleep when the nighttime is your adversary. For $17.95 The Baseball Encyclopedia does both and consequently, dollar for dollar, it is the most valuable object ever devised by man. On page 687 I began rummaging through the career of one of my favorite players of the forties, Bill Nicholson, also known as Big Swish, who played the outfield for the Cubs from 1939 until 1948, when, almost sacrilegiously, he was traded to the Phillies, where he ended his career in 1953.
    When my father had been a professor at the University of Chicago I had frequently gone to Wrigley Field, where the green vines grew thick on the outfield walls. Nicholson had been a six-foot, 200-pounder with a reputation as a home-run hitter, though his totals don’t realize that World War II baseball was sort of a make-do-with-what-you-could-find proposition. When I was ten years old, in 1944, and when Nicholson was thirty he led the National League with 33 home runs, 116 runs scored, and 122 runs batted in. I’d never heard of anybody quite like Bill Nicholson before and one day while I stood watching some teenagers play baseball on a vacant lot I heard one of them refer to the one who was batting as Big Bill Nicholson. I felt my heart jerk and I swallowed hard, inconspicuously edging around the sun-bleached grass until I could see if this guy really was Bill Nicholson; after all, the Cubs had an off day before Brooklyn came in and maybe this was how he spent his spare time. But it wasn’t Bill Nicholson, of course. It was a big muscular kid with boils on the back of his neck and he could hit hell out of the ball. But he was a long way from being Bill Nicholson.
    It was thundering again and rain was spraying through the window onto my bare feet. The huge volume had slipped down on my lap and my eyelids felt as if somebody were rubbing sand into them but my brain hadn’t cut out yet. I was still thinking about Larry Blankenship and wondering why it all works out for some people and doesn’t work out at all for others. It was a train of thought which could drive you crazy and maybe nothing really worked out for anybody. Maybe that was why everybody got so tired.

2
    I HAD SHOWERED BUT WAS still in my underwear and gaping robe when I went to fetch the morning Tribune from the hallway. Her voice came like the muffled caw of a bird; everything about her was birdlike, the sharp darting nose, the gray feathery hair, the overquick jerks and snaps of her head. “Why, Paul”—quick breath, mouth snapping shut between words, eyes poking about in a random pattern, flighty—“how are you this morning?” It was her perfunctory way of getting to whatever was really on her mind. She was rubbing her nose with a Kleenex, ready to begin the next remark.
    “I’m fine, Mrs. Dierker,” I said, “just getting my paper.”
    She always looked as if she’d only just that moment come across a conspiracy of some significance. I’d known her all my life, through my parents. The Dierkers had recently sold their elaborate Lake of the Isles mansion and moved into the building, waiting for the end. Harriet Dierker looked as if she had a way to go.
    “Well, I’m so upset I don’t know what to do …” She twisted her hands, an elderly woman acting like a child, tailoring the performance to her audience. “Tim just sits there and eats his Rice Krispies, dribbling cream on his Pendleton robe, telling me to calm down—it’s so frustrating, so upsetting. And he’s not at all well, you know. There’s been something particularly bothering him lately.”
    I looked bland. She always sounded the same, whether discussing the weather or a natural disaster.
    “You’ve heard