Gas Money

The sportswriters of the 1940s called her “The Female Ted Williams.” When I look at the old black-and-white picture of my mother at the plate in 1945, I know why. She had the kind of swing you associate with Williams or Barry Bonds--smooth and sweeping, arms extended, weight shifting from back foot to front at just the right moment, supple wrists that snap the head of the bat through the ball.

Mom was a ballplayer. At least that’s what the newspapers said when she died. The obituary headline in the New York Times read, “Athlete Inspired Movies.” “A League of Their Own” was based, in part, on my mom’s years in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Courtesy of Hollywood, the complex life of Helen Candaele (born Callaghan) took on narrative coherence.

I don’t remember her talking much about her playing days while I was growing up in Lompoc. She didn’t save news clippings from her batting championship year in 1945. She couldn’t rattle off statistics like some of the ex-players. She kept no memorabilia or old, dark, lace-less gloves to prove to her kids how tough it was “in those days.” She didn’t believe the past was something you kept polishing until its sheen was rubbed away. But articles about her kids she kept forever. There were piles of yellowing, brittle newspapers stacked high in closets and cardboard boxes throughout our house. She dutifully followed her five sons’ endless seasons of baseball, basketball and football--years and years of soiled uniforms, bruised muscles, sprained ankles and, in her mind, less-than-competent coaches.

Our house was on a corner lot, bordered on three sides by grass. Little imperialists, we appropriated neighbors’ yards in every direction. To the south an end zone, across the street a home-run fence, to the west apple and orange trees that provided between-inning sustenance. Our blacktop driveway was our Boston Garden. If the Kennedys had Hyannis Port, we had 1001 E. Maple.

My mother loved to watch. Whether we played baseball in the yard with a broomstick for a bat and a taped-up plastic ball, or card games that went into the early-morning hours, she loved just being around. She relished the camaraderie, the celebration of our crude maleness. Every Christmas vacation we prayed for rain, and she prayed with us. When the rain came, the five of us “boys,” as she called us, headed for the Little League park with half a dozen intrepid friends. With pillows and towels stuffed under our shirts for padding, we played “walking” football. For hours we slopped in the soft grass and mud, outlining elaborately absurd plays to fool the opponents--three handoffs, a reverse, a shovel pass back to the quarterback. “Everyone go deep!”

My mother understood the importance of play. She liked the roughness and competition. She saw how confidence can come from gaining a command over the body, teaching the arms and legs to work in unison. Athletics was a constant struggle to overcome one’s limitations. She would have agreed with poet Richard Hugo’s observation that “without play, many people sense too often and too immediately their impending doom.” More important, play kept her five sons close to home and, in the best of times, close to one another.

There is a photo from her youth that looks like a recruiting poster for the Army. She’s with two other women, all dressed in overalls, Rosie the Riveter smiling and confidently striding into the future. It’s decades before the feminist movement shifted our mental landscape and tried to alter the economic and social terrain of women’s lives. She didn’t know then how difficult her life would be at times. She couldn’t have known what reserves of strength she would have to call upon when she and my father divorced, leaving her with five sons, four still at home and one in college.

Today I marvel at her strength of character. Her outlook seems from another time and place--before modern industrial and urban life helped create a culture that was out of touch with its ethical center. Above all, she wanted to keep our family together. I admire the strength that got her up every day with the sun, got us off to school, pushed her to endure the lowly jobs to which she brought a fierce pride. What kept her trotting down to another athletic field, another night game, where she would sit in her car to avoid the loudmouthed fans in the bleachers, nervously smoking and agonizing over every pitch to one of her kids?

In the early ‘80s, my mom developed breast cancer, then beat it into remission. It returned at a Dodger game in 1991--at least that’s when it returned for me. For her it had come back months earlier. We were in Dodger owner Peter O’Malley’s private box that night to see a late-summer game against Houston and to watch my younger brother Casey, who had followed in our mother’s footsteps and was playing with the Astros. I prepared her for the game. There was only one rule. “You see, Mom, the Dodgers are in a pennant race and the Astros are dead last, so if Casey does good, don’t cheer too loud.” She nodded in agreement, and we entered O’Malley’s box. O’Malley immediately made it easy on us by suggesting a deal. “Casey goes four for four but we win.” We accepted without hesitation. In Casey’s second at-bat, he fought Dodger pitcher Ramon Martinez to a three-and-two count, then sent a slider rocketing up the middle for a single. I’m certain that as she watched Casey, my mother saw part of herself on that field. Casey went two for four and the Astros won.

We walked around the stadium during the later innings to take her mind off the pain in her back, my usual serenity at being in a major league ballpark shattered by the thought of cancer eating at her bones. It was the last time my mom saw Casey play in person. Over the next year, I traveled as often as I could to Lompoc. It was easy to be strong around Mom because she never complained. When her beautiful, thick hair was gone, when she threw up after her treatments, when she lost her appetite and the comfort of unaided sleep, I never heard her gripe. She just kept saying, “That’s the way it is” or “I just have to fight this and get better.” It struck me as a very female, or at least very motherly, response to her situation--never wanting to bring more fear or uncertainty into our lives. You just go on.

And every time I came home there was the gas money ritual. Just before I’d leave, she would furtively motion me into her bedroom--always late on Sunday afternoon in the waning light. She would pull crumpled-up bills, occasionally coins, out of her purse or pocket. “Take this,” she would say firmly, shoving the money into my hand, “Buy yourself some gas. I know it costs you to come here.” Sometimes it was $20, other times $7 and change. I think we went through the same ritual every time I was home over the past 20 years. At first I tried to refuse the money, feeling childish for taking it. Then I realized how much that gesture meant to her. She worked simply to be able to do that. And she gave to all her sons, even to Casey when he was making close to $1 million a year with the Astros. Maybe she thought it would keep us coming back.

I was with her when she died. I believe that at that moment, a minute from death, she could still hear me telling her that it was OK. Her hand moved slightly toward mine--the final act of her tremendous will, trying to reach out one last time to her son, to hold on once more to that part of life that she could not bear to give up.

At the funeral, my brother Rick gave the main eulogy. He didn’t talk about her career as a baseball player. He just spoke plainly and honestly about who she was--her shyness, her great love for her grandchildren, how she wanted to live and watch them grow into adulthood as she had watched her own children. He described how every time her grandson Coley ran in a track meet, Mom could be found at the last turn, cheering him on in her birdlike but insistent voice. He also talked about how throughout her life she empathized with new roles and opportunities for young women, how it didn’t scare or intimidate her. After all, she was a pioneer herself. Before her sons and grandson carried her to her grave site, my older brother Rocky slipped a $20 bill into her hand, a mimetic gesture we all understood--gas money.

It has been suggested that baseball is the only sport in which an individual game can, in theory, go on forever, not limited by the constraints of time. It’s not true, of course. The longest game in the modern era lasted 26 innings and was called due to darkness. Baseball is mortal, too. My mother seemed to know this, leaving the game after four years to raise a family. For her, professional baseball ended 54 games into the 1948 season. She believed it was family that lasted forever.

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Kelly Candaele is a Los Angeles writer and president of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.