Two Stars at Yale--One Quickly Set, the Other Rose to Suffer in the End : Keyword: A three-line deck follows, summarizing the point. Sometimes it will be four or five. End it with graf symbol.

The roster for the 1948 Yale-Harvard baseball game lists my father’s name, Arthur Fitzgerald, first. Next comes George Bush, then the remaining 18 players.

My dad died of esophageal cancer just three weeks before the President was voted out of office. In the days leading up to the funeral, I went through the Yale sports archives and put together a packet of documents highlighting his collegiate sports career. On Nov. 3, 1945, in his first appearance with the football team, he scored the only touchdown to beat Dartmouth, 6-0. Later that season, he scored three touchdowns against Harvard. On the basketball team, he was a star guard. During his last two seasons on the Bulldogs baseball squad, he had a .325 average. My father captained the Bulldogs in 1949, as George Bush had the previous year. But it was Fitzie, not Poppy, who got a full-page tribute in the New Haven Register when he graduated.

One of the greatest athletes in Yale history, my father could not have had a more promising, future. But he died in relative obscurity at a hospice only a few miles from his fields of glory.

At his wake, I put 50 copies of those packets next to the book where guests sign in. The last item I included is a copy of the roster from that 1948 game. In this dying time, George Bush (whom I’ve always disliked) has been useful to me and my family. Several of us got a lift seeing our loved one’s name over that of the Chief Executive, for the ascent of G.H.W. Bush had been a stark contrast to my father’s fate. Bush, like all the men my Mom, my brother and I saw at those dreadful class reunions every five years, did tremendously better than the Willy Loman figure I called Dad. Art Fitzgerald was a good, gentle man, but by his generation’s standards of success, he did not fare well after Yale.

If only he hadn’t gotten kicked in the head blocking a punt during a high school football game. If only the disease caused by that injury hadn’t surfaced a decade later when he was a history teacher and head football coach at a high school in New Jersey. If only he hadn’t blacked out during a conference with a student and gotten fired on the spot.

Of course it would have made things easier if he had been born into wealth and privilege, but that firing left him a broken man; that boot to the brain had knocked something out of my dad for good. So it was that his siblings, his wife and his sons could savor a moment frozen in the past, preserved in the records of the Yale Athletic Assn: Art Fitzgerald, No. 1, top of the pyramid. George Bush, second.

When I flew back East for the funeral, one of the first things I did was call the White House. I wanted the President to know of his teammate’s death and to write a letter to my mom. I had tried to contact Bush once before, back in 1977 when he had just finished his tenure as CIA director and was in New Haven to give a talk at the university. He sent me an autographed photo and a friendly short note saying he was “sorry we missed connections,” but that he remembered well my “hard-hitting (the long ball from time to time) father.”

So I knew, 15 years later when the grieving hit us, that George Bush would be of service. Say what you will about his shameful flip-flops, his transparently macho contests with Noriega and Saddam, his aloofness to domestic crises, his gnarled syntax--this is a guy who leaves no note unwritten; indeed, his conscientiousness in that regard is Lincolnesque.

In his message to my mom, he crossed out the typed “Mrs. Fitzgerald” and wrote over it “Rosemary.” Dated Oct. 15, the letter reads, “Barbara and I were saddened to learn of your loss. Arthur was a fine man and a good athlete at Yale, where he was respected for his leadership on the baseball team . . .” At the bottom of the note, he added, again with his black felt-tip, “I loved the guy!” Signed “George.”

I had always heard that he was a really decent person, and that his campaign-made persona was not the burning Bush, but the Bush behind a bush. Still, I haven’t been able to forgive him for Willie Horton, the shameless campaigning in the flag factory, Clarence Thomas or that sanctimonious “trust” and “character” flimflam. Not to mention my aesthetic distaste for the man. Like my father, he was just unhip.

A New Republic piece last August titled “The Speech Thing” discussed the President’s aphasia, and suggested that he might well lose the election because of his inability to use language gracefully. Americans wanted a leader like Jack Kennedy whose eyes, words and voice could inspire us. Not only did Bush lack a communitarian vision; he was grating. But, late in the campaign, as his loss to the eloquent Arkansan became an inevitability, I began to feel uneasy about taking such pleasure in his ineptitude, for in his embarrassing vagueness and his frazzled manner when under pressure to be persuasive and precise, I saw my dad. Thirty years of anti-convulsives, a brilliant sports career demolished--and I resented the fact that my father was not mellifluous.

I am trying to account for how these two men, one the emblem of professional advancement, the other an unspeakably sad victim of blasted opportunities, could have been so similar in their mannerisms. Their feebleness. Something in the way men of their generation were raised made them, in the eyes of my generation, unknowable.

I did not connect with the men charged with teaching me what is to be a man. My father and the teammate who wore No. 2 on his Yale baseball jersey were uptight males and they never spoke to my soul. Their time has passed. It seems to me that it is very good for America, and perhaps especially for American men, that we have, in Bill Clinton and Al Gore, leaders who are at ease revealing the sorrows and terrors that have shaped them. Speaking that way is a damn good thing to do; it heals.

But there is this, too, to consider, something that I did not realize until my dad was two months dead, cold in the ground at All Saints Cemetery in North Haven: The best expression of his love for me was to keep silent about his agony. I never knew how he felt about living or dying. If I say I resent this, what will it avail? To earn a living, I teach writing and I write. There is very little that I want to hide, and I am always enjoining my students to stop protecting themselves by being vague. George Bush has been invaluable as an example of the pitfalls of hazy rhetoric.

As he leaves the stage, a Somalian swan song offering him the chance to salvage his reputation in history, I am ready, finally, to extend my regards. I owe him a thank you. We both lost a lot in the fall of 1992, and now I am able to see him in a place outside the pale of political antipathy. He, too, is a man who suffers, though his words may never say so.