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barking operatically.
    “Why doesn’t he like you?” Miss Sloviak said.
    I shrugged, and I felt myself blushing. There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
    “I owe him some money,” I said.
    “Grady, dear,” said Sara, passing the overcoats along to me. There was a patent note of stratagem in her voice. “Will you go and toss these on the bed in the guest room?”
    “I don’t think I know how to find the guest room,” I said, although I had on several occasions tossed Sara herself down onto that very bed.
    “Well, then,” said Sara, her voice alight now with panic. “I’d better show you.”
    “I guess you’d better,” I said.
    “We’ll just make ourselves at home,” said Crabtree. “How about that? Okay, now, old Doctor. Okay, old puppy dog.” He knelt to pet Doctor Dee, pressing his forehead against the dog’s tormented brow, murmuring secret editorial endearments. Doctor Dee stopped barking at once, and began to sniff at Crabtree’s long hair.
    “Could you find my husband, Terry, and ask him to lock Doctor Dee up in the laundry room for the rest of the party? Thanks, you can’t miss him. He has eyes just like Doctor Dee’s, and he’s the handsomest man in the room.” This was true. Walter Gaskell was a tall, silver-haired Manhattanite with a narrow waist and broad shoulders, and his blue eyes had the luminous, emptied-out look of a reformed alcoholic’s. “That’s a lovely dress, Miss Sloviak,” she said as we started up the stairs.
    “She’s a man,” I told Sara as I followed up after her, carrying an armful of topcoats.

I N THE SUMMER OF 1958 it was reported in the Pittsburgh newspapers that Joseph Tedesco, a native of Naples and an assistant groundskeeper at Forbes Field, had been suspended from his job for keeping an illegal vegetable garden on a scrap of vacant land that lay just beyond the wall in center right. It was his third summer at the ballpark; in the years before this he had failed at several modest enterprises, among them a domestic gardening business, an apple orchard, and a nursery. He was careful in his work but terrible with money, and he lost two of his businesses through disorderly bookkeeping. The rest of them he lost through drink. His well-tended but rather overexuberant patch of tomatoes, zucchini, and romano beans on tall poles, some four hundred and twenty feet from home plate, had caught the unfavorable notice of a real estate broker who was attempting to close the deal for the sale of the ballpark site to the University of Pittsburgh, and soon afterward Mr. Tedesco found himself sitting, in his vast undershorts, in his living room in Greenfield, while his former crewmates went on chalking foul lines and hosing down the infield dirt. Then his tale of injustice made the papers; there was a public outcry and a protest from the union; and a week after the scandal broke Mr. Tedesco was back on the job, having fulfilled his promise to dig up the offending plants and transplant them to his own postage-stamp backyard on Neeb Avenue. A few weeks later, just after the all-star break, at his youngest child’s and only daughter’s eighth birthday party, Mr. Tedesco had too much to drink, choked on a piece of meat while laughing at a joke, and died, surrounded by his wife and children, his two grandchildren, and his rows of Early Girls and lima beans. With an almost mysterious affection his daughter would afterward remember him as a big, fat, shiftless, and overexuberant minor craftsman, with bad habits, who committed a kind of suicide-by-appetite.
    I’m not sure how much of that I’ve got right, but it shows the lengths to which I’ve had to go in order to account for why a woman as sensible and afraid of disorder as Sara Gaskell would ever waste an hour on a man like me. Her mother, whom I’d met on two occasions, was a sad, strong, undemonstrative Polish lady with a black wardrobe and a white mustache who worked