Now You See It...

THE LATE CHRISTY MATHEWSON of the New York Giants standards on the mound, pitching for a baseball team composed of stars who shone when that appellation still meant something. They are the aptly named Dead Knights, facing Ann Arbor's South Avenue Rovers. It is 1942, and the Rovers are home on furlough from all corners of the war. If they win, they will live to tell about it. If the Knights win, their coach, Death, will take the Rovers.

By the time Things Invisible to See reaches this climatic contest, this scenario is absolutely believable. Nancy Willard has taken her numerous talents--as a poet, an award-winning children's and short-story author, and a baseball fan--and woven a tale so compelling that nothing could be more natural than a game played because one Ben Harkissian has made a bet with Death.

ALL WILLARD REQUIRES is that her readers suspend all disbelief and accept the element of magic in even the most mundane things. There is really nothing else to be done with a book that begins, "In Paradise, on the banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe." It seems God is quite a pitcher, plucking balls from the bed of the River of Time and hurling curves that change color as they break, determining the future. Either you believe it or you don't.

God throws one curve and back on base Willie Harkissian, a wheeler-dealer before he even leaves the womb, is born with his twin, Ben. The agreement: Willie will have "what the world calls brains"; Ben will "get out of this cave first." He will play Abel to Willie's Cain, and also be a deadly left-handed hitter, deadly that when, years later, he slams a teammate's pitch into a dark summer night on a date, he hits Clare Bishop in the forehead and she goes into a coma.

Clare wakes up unable to move her legs but with a new ability to see an ancestor's ghost, who visits her in the hospital and takes her on trips outside her body. Meanwhile, her level-headed parents, Hal and Helen, her nephew Davy and an as ortment of eccentric relatives and neighbors try to cook up cures for her paralysis. A temporary remedy comes in the force of--yes, Ben, overwhelmed by guilt, and then by Clare.

NOT HOWEVER, as much as Clare is overwhelmed by Bet., Willard lingers over every detail as she sets up the denouement of Things Invisible to See, narrating from both Ben's and Clare's perspectives, and establishing deliberately the eternal relevance of concepts like death, good, evil, love and baseball. In Ben's first visit to Clare, Willard captures all the agony of the first crush and even love at first sight:

A young man in a purple and gold varsity jacket was dangling a silver coin strung on a thread of elastic He was tall, with an open face and blue eyes and reddish blond hair that was all cowlick and no style, and Clare recognized him at once. Everyone at school recognized him. Once when Clare dropped her wallet while she was trying to open her locker, he'd leaned down and picked it up... "You dropped your wallet," he said. She was too flustered to say thank you. She managed a quick nod of her head and he disappeared down the hall. For weeks afterward, the sight of him made her tremble. She learned his schedule and looked forward to the few minutes between classes when their paths crossed. She watched when their paths crossed. She watched him in the cafeteria and remembered what he ate and what he left untouched. She memorized his clothes and fell in love with the way he rolled up his shirt sleeves. Saturday we watched him play, graduate he did not notice her in the stands....But always his gaze passed through her. Until this moment.

A bit melodramatic perhaps, but this is really the only clear picture we get of Ben. Some lucky coin--to which Death owns the rights--draws much closer scrutiny.

THIS SORT of inconsistency is the only major drawback of Things Invisible to See, but it is a big one. It is, essentially, a love story, but a novel that starts off with the Lord of the Universe and His archangels playing hall, and winds up with Mathewson on the mound and Lou Gehrig playing first, seems to call for a lot more baseball than Willard has seen fit to include. She certainly touches on an awful lot of other things, and perhaps it is because she does tackle so much that the leisurely. Saturday-afternoon-pickup air of the first three-quarters of the book evaporates in a rush as it tumbles to its conclusion.

Very suddenly, Ben is home from possibly the strangest theater or operations of the war--a two-man weather station in the South Pacific--and has made his bet with Death. The South Avenue Rovers, shorthanded because of a bus accident, are playing the Dead Knights. Willie has moved in on his brother's old girlfriend, the sleazy, vindictive Marsha. Hal, called away for a classified defense assignment that has almost broken Helen's heart, is on his way home in a plane with no gas. Joe "Iron Man" McGinnity of the New York Giants is up, and a girl is pitching for the Rovers.

The resolution of all these crises comes on entirely too quickly in a book about the ultimate timeless sport. The game begins, and only leaves you wanting more:

Suddenly the murmurs of the crowd ceased....The air grew faintly chill, as if rain were not far off--yet not rain, either, but the dank moisture on the undersides of stones....

They did not run onto the field. They simply appeared, as if they had broken through a wall of air, or an invisible ray into visibility....big, slow-moving men in the uniforms of the teams they had served. They lumbered onto the field and their feet touched the earth, yet the earth did not take note of them; they raised no dust, disturbed no blade of grass.

They disturb no reader, either, for Willard fails to convey a sense of why they were so great. Why does Iron Man McGinnity remember his first home run? Is there anything Lou Gehrig won't do for his mother? What is it about baseball that calls men back from the dead? The average reader, caught up in a tale of love, war, and the supernatural, won't ask those questions, but it's a shame Willard, definitely an above-average writer, does not answer them.