A Ticket for a Seamstitch

This is the third novel narrated by Henry Wiggen, a six-foot three-inch, 195-pound, left-handed pitcher for the New York Mammoths. Henry, who began as a rookie in The Southpaw and developed into a pro in Bang the Drum Slowly, is a mature veteran in A Ticket for a Seamstitch. A seamstress from "somewhere out West" writes to Henry, her hero, that she will be in New York to watch the Mammoths play on the Fourth of July. When she arrives in New York, both the married Henry and his pal, the very unmarried Thurston "Piney" Woods, are at a loss as to what to do with their visitor. The two men finally do the decent thing: they take the seamstress to the automat for dinner. In so doing, they both learn some things worth knowing, although the distraction undoubtedly affects their performance in the big game. In the essay "Easy Does It Not" Mark Harris describes the origins of this wonderfully comic novel.