The following story was suggested to me by a reader, whose invaluable assistance in my rendering it to the printed page has been much appreciated. The story is dedicated to that reader. This is Part Two of a three-party story.
*
The next day around 4:30 p.m. Ruth arrived at my office on Beacon Street with two pre-teen boys in tow. One was smaller, younger and sported dark hair; the other -- very nearly the visuographic negative of the first -- was bigger, older and lighter-haired. That morning I had gotten her signed acceptance of the offer to buy the shoes stores couried over to the prospective buyer's corporate offices in the Back Bay.
Later, that afternoon, I also spent a few minutes on the phone with the Vice-President of Business Acquisitions for the firm. He made it clear that he himself had already signed off on a full-speed ahead expediting of the purchase of the five stores and had approved the authorization of two wire transfers, one to Ruth and another much smaller one to the agent who'd helped with the sale, and that
all
that was still required was the signature of the CEO of the company to effect those transfers. He really wanted to move on the thing, he said, and so, he had scheduled a tentative closing meeting for the following Tuesday morning. By that time, he believed, Ruth would be a little more than $400,000 richer, money that she had, in effect, inherited from her dead husband's life's work.
But now in that late Thursday afternoon, it seemed to me that her dead husband occupied little, if any place at all, in anyone's thoughts. Instead, it was not death, but robust and energetic life that seemed to be front and center when Ruth and her 10-year-old son Tommy and his 12-year-old cousin Danny Sacco entered my somber and sedate law offices.
Maybe they weren't always so high-strung, though I'm fairly certain that I would have been naïve to expect 10 and 12 year-olds to be anything other than excitable -- at least
that
would have been the most honest description of my own 10 or 12-year old self. But these boys had just come from Fenway Park, where our hometown
Red Sox
had just beaten up on their archrivals from down Interstate 95, a quaint, little baseball team known as the
New York Yankees
.
For serious
Red Sox
fans like me, that day had begun with the trade of one Bernie Carbo to the
Milwaukee Brewers
. Carbo, whose place in
Red Sox
history had been cemented last year in Game Six of the 1975 World Series, when his three-run, pinch-hit homerun tied the score 6-6 in the bottom of the 8
th
inning in a game that the
Red Sox
eventually won in the bottom of the 12
th
when Carlton Fisk hit his own homer, a walk-off, game-winner down the left field line at Fenway, that he bent around the left field foul pole and which stayed fair only because of Carlton's sheer will and a series of persuasive hand gestures that none of us Boston fans are likely to forget any time soon.
It was a fitting end to a game that baseball historians still consider perhaps the greatest World Series contest in baseball history. Fisk's homerun is also one of the most famous and talked about plays in a sport that at that time was already over a century old. To this day, it still represents one of a handful of the most famous moments in Boston sports history. Still, the
Red Sox
lost Game Seven the next night, and the Curse of the Bambino lived on to torment us Bostonians and pretty much all of New England for almost 30 more years.
But, if the end of the 1975 season was disheartening, things only got worse during that '76 season. So, that afternoon's 8-2 shellacking of the much-hated
Yankees
was actually one of the high points of a really disappointing season, and the two boys who had just seen it were eager to tell anyone who would listen all about it.
Ruth arrived dressed much more conservatively that afternoon than she had been the previous night. She looked like she had just come from a business meeting or, perhaps, that she was about to go to a business meeting, and I guess, considering the fact that the news I had to tell her was about to make her almost a half-millionaire, ours
was
a business meeting of sorts. But other than relaying to Ruth a few minutes later pretty much everything I've already described above, that day was about the boys. After my secretary Milinda ushered the three back to my office, Ruth made the introductions.
"Tommy", she said bending down on one knee to look her son in the face while she put her arm around his narrow shoulders, "I would like you to meet Mr. Murray, my attorney. He is helping me to sell daddy's stores. Why don't you shake hands with him?"
Tommy calmed down for a moment. He seemed a little intimidated, though that wore off quickly. I got the impression that he hadn't met a lot of black people before, at least not black men, and if he had, they probably weren't as big or as scary looking as I was. "It's nice to meet you, sir," he said timidly, but with carefully trained etiquette that was really quite impressive. I had to bend over to shake Tommy's small hand. "It's nice to meet you, too, Tommy!" I said, smiling. "So, you got to see the
Sox
beat up on those
Yankees
, huh?"
I knew I had struck the right cord with my question. "Yes, sir!" Tommy said excitedly. "You should have seen it. We made them look silly today. Fred Lynn and Cecil Cooper each had three hits, and... and... and Yaz made a great catch, and...."
"The game was over by the 2
