“What makes you mad, Herb?” I have not taken a note yet, of course, nor have I touched my recorder, something I will need to do since I have a terrible memory. I am always too involved with things to pay strict attention. Though I feel like the interview has yet to get started. Herb and I are still getting to know each other on a personal level, and I’ve found you can rush an interview and come away with such a distorted sense of a person that he couldn’t recognize himself in print—the first sign of a badly written story.

“Do you have theories about art, Frank?” Herb says, setting his jaw firmly in one fist. “I mean do you, uh, have any fully developed concepts of, say, how what the artist sees relates to what is finally put on the canvas?”

“I guess not,” I say. “I like Winslow Homer a lot.”

“All right. He’s a good one. He’s plenty good,” Herb says, and smiles a helpless smile up at me.

“He’d paint Walled Lake here, and it’d feel and look pretty much like this, I think.”

“Maybe he would.” Herb looks away at the lake.

“How long did you play pro ball, Herb?”

“Eleven years,” Herb says moodily. “One in Canada. One in Chicago. Then they traded me over here. And I stayed. You know I’ve been reading Ulysses Grant, Frank.” He nods profoundly. “When Grant was dying, you know, he said, ‘I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.’” Herb takes off his glasses and holds them in his big linesman’s fingers, examining their frames. His eyes are red. “That has some truth to it, Frank. But what the hell do you think he meant by that? A verb?” Herb looks up at me with a face full of worry. “I’ve been worried about that for weeks.”

“I couldn’t begin to say, Herb. Maybe he was taking stock. Sometimes we think things are more important than they are.”

“That doesn’t sound good, though, does it?” Herb looks back at his glasses.

“It’s hard to say.”

“Your halo’s gone now, Frank. You know it? You’ve become like the rest of the people.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it? I don’t mind.” It’s pretty clear to me that Herb suffers from some damned serious mood swings and in all probability has missed out on a stabilizing pill. Possibly this is his gesture of straight-talk and soul-baring, but I don’t think it will make for a very good interview. Interviews always go better when athletes feel fairly certain about the world and are ready to comment on it.

“I’ll just tell you what I think it means,” Herb says, narrowing his weakened eyes. “I think he thought he’d just become an act. You understand that, Frank? And that act was dying.”

“I see.”

“And that’s terrible to see things that way. Not to be but just to do.”

“Well, that was just how Grant saw things, Herb. He had some other wrong ideas, too.