Diamonds are forever

Waiting for Teddy Williams
By Howard Frank Mosher
Houghton Mifflin, 280 pp., $24

Mark Twain famously observed that he came in with Halley's comet -- which appeared the year he was born, 1835 -- and that he planned to go out with it. He did. He died a day after it reappeared, in 1910.

There must be a number of folks in New England who make a similar pronouncement involving the Boston Red Sox. These would be people born when the Sox last won the World Series, in 1918, who plan to stick around until the Sox win again. They may be around for a while. The current season seems unlikely to lift what is tersely but unambiguously known as the "curse." Assuming the worst, at the end of this season the curse will for the first time extend longer than the 75 years separating reappearances of the comet. Boston championships will officially be measured in intervals somewhere between Halley's comet and the Second Coming.

Some relief for the chronically disappointed Sox fan is to be found in Howard Frank Mosher's new novel, "Waiting for Teddy Williams," in which we watch a Vermont boy known as E. A., who is 8 years old at the story's outset, mount toward a glittering rendezvous with the World Series.

Twain's ghost, wreathed in cigar smoke, hangs over E. A.'s story -- as it does over most fictional accounts of an American boyhood. Tom Sawyer and especially Huck Finn would have felt right at home with E. A., who lives close to the natural world and chafes under organizational authority. E. A. never attends school for a day in his life, being educated at home by his mother, a young, pretty aspiring folksinger who plans to make it big in Nashville but who in the meantime is running an "escort service" for which she is the only escort. Her clients are fond of her outlandish costumes and disguises.

Potentially, this sounds like the makings of something tight-lipped and grim -- a tale of athletic striving for redemption from seediness and squalor -- but "Waiting for Teddy Williams" steadily sheds any cloudy patches of darkness as it goes along. Like "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," which ends in the surreally bright golden glow of pirates' booty, Mosher's novel becomes something of a fairy tale.

We don't go to fairy tales for depth of character -- they're mostly populated by archetypes -- and a reader who comes to "Waiting for Teddy Williams" expecting the thickened textures of a fully lived life is apt to be disappointed. It's a comic novel, an affectionate rendering of small-town northern Vermont life, a place where everyone knows everyone's business -- and no one's business is very imposing. Certainly nothing looms larger, as the townsfolk stumble through their day-to-day lives, than the distant, often heartbreakingly inventive stumbling of the Red Sox, a team that continually seems to locate another way to lose a championship that seems its for the taking. The novel's first couple of sentences charmingly capture this sense of lives lived in superimposition:

"Time was, on a summer afternoon in the northern Vermont hamlet of Kingdom Common, when Ethan Allen could walk completely around the rectangular village green and never be out of earshot of the Red Sox game on somebody's radio. That's what E. A. was doing on the early afternoon of his eighth birthday."

Taking the book on its own terms, then, I only wish the comedy were a little sharper. Mosher is fond of quips and quipsters. There's a scabrous-tongued grandmother, a judge eager to wind up courtroom proceedings so he can get home to his baseball game, and even a canny macaw that likes to chant "New York Yankees, number one." Much of this comes across as that sort of nudging humor, with a laugh track serving as an auditory elbow in the ribs, which one associates with TV sitcoms.

Even so, the essential spell of Mosher's fairy tale holds. I suppose it must have been something like 40 years ago, when I was about 10, that I spent a couple of passionate months reading nothing but sports books -- "The Kid From Tomkinsville," "The Kid Comes Back," "Basketball Comes to Lonesome Point," and so forth. The stories inevitably culminated in some extraordinary act of athletic prowess, as "Waiting for Teddy Williams" does. To my surprise and delight, while reading "Waiting for Teddy Williams" I was caught up in a particular kind of literary pleasure I hadn't known in some 40 years. I was rooting for E. A.

It's the genius and essence of professional sports, of course, to offer farce posing as tragedy; caught up in the drama of the game, you lose sight utterly of any sense that the "losers" of a World Series or a Super Bowl or a Stanley Cup are a group of young, fit, idolized, often good-looking millionaires who must somehow swallow down the notion that, although they are surpassingly skillful at what they do, there may exist on the planet a few people who are even more skillful.

Still, what sports fan wants to see the truth straight on? It may be that the grass is always greener on the ballfields of yesteryear -- those of 1918, for example, when the Sox brought home a championship and people plausibly wondered whether they might repeat in '19. But come next spring, at the outset of that uncharted season of 2005, the outfields in Fenway Park should be verdant enough to inspire a dreamy sense that this might be the year. That's the spirit "Waiting for Teddy Williams" was written in. Mosher has attended to that internal voice within that cries, a little impatiently, "Play ball."

Brad Leithauser is the author of five novels. His new book of light verse, "Lettered Creatures," will be published this fall.