Love and the Designated Hitter Rule

...I worried at first would be too artificial...

...When America has been genuinely threatened, people have signed up to defend it at great personal peril...

...I nursed him until he died eleven years later,” Isabel says in the book’s opening scene...

...But at the end of the book Isabel goes through an epiphany (conveniently taking place during Easter week), during which she realizes she is pursuing a destructive course...

...The needs of an underindulged eleven-year-old are remarkably simple: what makes him most happy is to be taken to look at hot rods and customized vans...

...Isabel Moore is probably the last person in America, real or imagined, who retains such total faith in the ability of the government to help those in need...

...James’ father ran away when he was an infant, and James lives in an apartment cztnplex with his mother, who works on an assembly line in a big lightindustrial plant...

...To me, it was not only inevitable, but natural...

...But over the course of history, love has done the better job...

...We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections,”she tells herself...

...He had a stroke when I was nineteen...

...After a few weeks, he shyly asked me if we could get together twice a week instead of once, and I agreed...

...This is plainly the magic answer of somebody who has been cooped up in a row house in Queens for eleven years...

...Altruism can fulfill more needs than government dollars...

...It’s not love yet, but certainly we like each other...

...So to have someone other than his mother to tall< to is a great pleasure for him, too...

...or help write nursing home legislation...

...Her great struggle is with N d d u . \ Leiiiann I S an ellitos of Texas Monthly Unci a cotitsit7rrting ellitor of The Washington Monthly...

...Love and the Designated Hitter Rule bv Nicholas Lemann Final Payments by Mary Gordon (Random House), a f i r s t novel published last year to considerable acclaim, is an admirable bookadmirable for its clean, careful, perceptive, and accurate writing, and ;:b~ its main themes, extremely unusual f d a~ n ovel about a young single person looking for love in New York in the seventies...

...certainly I am in no danger of falling prey to the extremes of altruistic behavior that bedeviled Isabel Moore...

...This is not a newly discovered secretit’s the way churches and junior leagues and Rotary Clubs and political parties have enticed people into service for years...

...For those who don’t follow baseball, this needs some explanation...

...What I provide f o r J a m e s is somebody to talk to and take him places...

...I’m a Big Brother, a weekend father figure for an elevenyearold boy named James...

...It said nothing about being tired or lonely or in despair...

...All the female characters in Final Payments are drawn stubbornly imperfect, but Isabel’s lover, alas, is the sort of dreamboat who descends on a cloud into the lives of the heroines of s t o r i e s in Co sm opo I it an -t a1 1, handsome, “older,” with one of those jobs (he’s a veterinarian) where you get to be sensitive and compassionate but also make lots of money...

...She does not, after all, want to join wholeheartedly in the serried ranks of the Me Generation...

...After her father’s death, Isabel gets a job with a county government, visiting the homes of people who have taken in elderly non-relatives in exchange f o r a government stipend, to see how well the arrangement is working...

...We read every day about some high government official who goes off to work at seven and comes home at nine, but there’s only one recent example of an official who was also engaged in labors whose tangible, immediate fruits he could see...

...With these institutions in relative disrepute, the government might take up the slack by glorifying altruism itself...

...Isabel comes from a conservative Catholic background, and she is continually torn between the new world to which she is suddenly exposed-the world of ( 1 L 01 ced friends, love affairs with I U ~rIie d men, working, living aloneand the world from which she has just emerged, one of total abnegation and self-sacrifice...

...If YOU really cared for the person, or even for the extremities of their situation, you ought to do something, or you ought to give up the luxury of caring...

...The problem is that because of the nature of large organizations, it’s a 5050 proposition at best whether those long days of budget analysis or billwriting or corruption-exposing will actually make America a better place...

...But I don’t think the government should be sending them cash instead of Big Brothers sending them me...

...The most narcissistic social climber will put in long hours on charity work if it will mean a better class of invitations...

...I should say also that in the opinion of James and his mother, Gordon’s formulation is right: all of the deficiencies in their lives would be solved by money...

...The federal government now spends $63.9 billion on caring for the dependent, and just about everybody else seems to think most of it is going to waste...

...What Woodworth saw was that doing good need not be subject to the designated-hitter principle-that it did not always have to be the job of some specialist who was paid to do it...

...It was also, as the book makes clear, more complicated than that...

...So the way to encourage altruism, besides convincing people that it actually does some good, is to pluck the strings that make the music play...

...All of their essential needs-food, rent, car, clothes, television-and not much masre are covered by James’ mother5 paycJheck...

...But I would stick to the form...

...One woman reads her palm, another asks her what’s black and white and red all over...

...Still, there remains that problem of how to find that middle course, how Isabel can leave her life of caring for someone she doesn’t love, but still can bring some good to the world-as she says, “Perhaps I could give reasonably without giving my life...

...I should say that 1 do this more because 1 like kids and thought it would be fun than as part of my campaign for canonization...

...These are valid objections, and they make it hard to accept Gordon’s idea that working for the government is the way to do good...

...She breaks off with Hugh, lets herself deteriorate physically, and goes off to spend her life ministering to a shrewish, hateful woman named Margaret, who used to be her father’s housemaid...

...The reason is her conviction, drawn from t h e a l l - c o n s u m i n g experience of ministering to her [sther, that caring for someone else through personal involvement inevitably destroys the possibility of leading a normal life...

...Yes, we are at base selfish creatures, but selfish in complicated ways...

...This was always reported as a charming eccentricity of Woodworth’s...

...Yet even if we got past that mentality, what would compel US to volunteer...

...This it could do by convincing people that they have a personal stake in the well-being of the society at large...

...This she does, but it proves more difficult than she had expected...

...Those most in need today are those without relatives who can do that job...

...or expose corruption in high places...

...On the right (old, new, and neo) the objection is that all those programs cost too much and are inefficiently and even fraudulently run...

...Why, then, isn’t it happening...

...All of them are desperate for more from life than just having their physical needs met...

...So she leaves Margaret and prepares to go back to Hugh...

...Obviously this is the right course for Isabel...

...But usually designated-hitter thinking is so prevalent that it’s built into policy...

...finding a middle course between the two...

...Isabel and Hugh fall in love and all looks rosy, until Hugh’s wife confronts Isabel and asks her to back off...

...The main reason is not that we have become a nation of craven self-servers so much as that most of t~s ,t oday, operate under what might be called the Designated-Hitter Principle...

...We must not try to second-guess death by refusing to love the ones we loved in favor of the anonymous poor...

...it costs less, and it need not be artificial or require on the part of the altruist a gettheeto-a-nunnery devotion...

...The rule was designed to liven up the game by relieving pitchers, always weak at the plate, of their batting duties, but it also reflected a longstanding trend in American life: increasing specialization’ and the concomitant dilution of individual responsibility...

...I think it would be better for him to have a father or a real big brother than me, but I know I’m better than nobody at all...

...On the other hand, working as a volunteer in a nursing home won’t change the nationwide statistics much, but it will indisputably help a few people...

...He and his mother are new in town, and so lack for family and friends and a deep prejudice both of them hold against MexicanAmericans makes James draw away from most of his neighbors and classmates...

...He even has a dreamboat name: Hugh Slade...

...Final Payments is about freedom and sex, as befits the times, but it’s more importantly about love and morality, and caring for others...

...many of their problems are financial, but others-chiefly loneliness, the sense of having no one who cares about you-would not be much alleviated by federal grants...

...Radicals have always been hostile to welfare-state social programs on the grounds that they are mild palliatives designed to obscure deep structural problems...

...That was the late Lawrence Woodworth, the tax-policy czar of the Senate Finance Committee, who spent his nights and weekends working on the civic affairs of his tiny hometown, Cheverly, Maryland...

...I had come to be his friend, after all, not because I loved or even liked him, or he me, but because an agency had paired us...

...Indeed, even if the government suddenly were to over come all its flaws, the notion that money can solve people’s problems better than love still wouldn’t make sense...

...But it has worked out...

...This strikes everyone in our decade as unusual, barbarous, cruel...

...In the final pages of the book, the solution comes to her in a flash: “I would work for a government, a dealer in charity without the weights of love...

...Curiously, this point comes through clearly in Final Payments...

...In my own case, my stock with people usually goes up when 1 tell them I’m a Big Brother, and that’s certainly part of why I do it...

...Gordon takes pains to make it obvious by creating a Margaret who is i r r e d e e m a b l y h o r r i b l e , and a Hugh who is wonderful, and by filling Isabel’s period of total altruism with images of ugliness and physical decay...

...Of course, some money is absolutely necessary...

...Suddenly Isabel is overcome with guilt, and grief for her father...

...Ten years from now, in a country where people just don’t seem much to like or care about each other, it Will seem pretty silly that we each went about our responsible, important jobs, did our public gaod, and never took the trouble to enter the life of Someone who needed a more basic, personal, and compassionate form of help...

...On her first day on the job, she looks at the form she’s supposed to fill out at every house she visits: “There were questions about square feet of space and medical equipment, about the patient’s age, the state of his health, and frequency and kind of medication...

...Nothing was said about how people felt and what they wanted...

...Every laid-off New York sanitation worker must wish that ten years ago he had thought a little less about getting those extra sick days and a little more about the welfare of the city...

...In o t h e r w o r d s , t h e r e are selfish motives-prestige, recognition, the preservation of a valued social unitthat make people behave in other than the most obviously selfish ways...

...A parent will usually, if given the choice, sacrifice himself to save his child...

...I don’t think that’s true, and the best for me to explain why is to ribe my own experience with this sort of thing...

...Its heroine, Isabel Moore, is a young woman of 30 from a working-class neighborhood in Queens, who has spent eleven years caring for her invalid father and is suddenly released f10.n that duty by his death...

...The only major flaw in Gordon’s depiction of life is that her men aren’t nearly as good as her womenespecially her most important man...

...Money was beautiful...

...It has come, over time, from the family, with love the activating force, Many more dependent people have been well cared for by their families than by the government...

...It always seemed that there was a great problem with sympathy,” she says to herself during one of her visits to homes...

...Liberals are uncomfortable with them because they degrade and oppress their beneficiaries...

...Everywhere she goes, the dependent person wants her to involve herself more deeply than her job requires...

...Most intelligent people today think that if they want to make a contribution to the life of the nation, they ought to acquire an area of expertise and apply it toward the public good, thus playing a small part in a sweeping effort to help peoplebeFome, for instance, a budget analyst at HEW...

...in every case, Isabel is strongly drawn toward that deeper involvement, and has to force herself back from it...

...an elderly roue persuades her to show him her breasts...

...Governments gave money and did not ask for love...

...if you could give money and not want love in return, you could change lives without giving up your own life...

...Even if your nursing home bill passes and has the intended effect, the actual helping of old people will be done by someone whose job it is, and that raises problems of expense and of leaving unmet the needs that unpaid personal contact fills...

...Humans are the only animals that go through lengthy periods of near-total dependency, just after birth and just before death, so the need for some caring mechanism has always been present...

...nobody in this country should lack the funds to feed and house and take care of himself and his dependents...

...So it seems to me that the proper reaction to the failures of the government to help people is notjust to throw up our hands and revert to Social Darwinism, but to bring about an increase in voluntary altruistic activity...

...The answer, as strange as the notion may seem these days, is that the volunteer spirit is not contrary to fundamental human nature...

...A few years ago, the American League (and not the National, which has always had more class) decided to allow teams to place in the lineup a “designated hitter,” whose responsibility was only to hit, not to field...

...What they think they rea1I.v need to be happy-mansions, Cadillacs, servants, vacation paradises, Betamaxes-I certainly don’t want my tax dollars, or anyone else’s, paying for...

...Without either of us being consumed by it, both our lives are made a little better by the arrangement, in a way that money rather than personal contact could not have brought about...

...and her final case begs for her help in carrying out a suicide plot...