My mother married twice, both times to neolithic men, whom I will call Visigoth I and Visigoth II. V-I was a gambler. That marriage produced me in 1942, as well as a divorce in 1944, when V-I came home broke on a payday one too many times.

From 1944 to 1952, my mother’s happier single years, we lived with her parents on Fyler in south St. Louis, near the Frisco yards. My mother would take me to games at Sportsman’s Park to see the Cardinals.

Somehow, she would get good tickets. I never wondered where she got them. She was able to date often, since my grandparents could care for me, and she did. Her two loves were baseball and jazz, and St. Louis was exemplary in both categories. I don’t know if she dated ballplayers. Those tickets came from somewhere. Ballplayers were handsome in their uniforms, always scouting the stands for pretty women to wink at. My mother was likely spotted by many players.

When she married V-II in 1952, her single days ended again. At least so I thought. But the tickets kept showing up “from her office,” she said. She was by then a private secretary at Barnes Hospital, so it was possible the staff had extras.

My stepfather, V-II, was anxious to impress me, so he would take me to the ballpark, flash his police officer’s badge, and we would enter free. I was impressed. He would lead me to the third base side of the lower deck, deep under the dark overhang, where he would wave to the usher he knew.

“Take those two seats, there, Bill,” the usher would say to my stepfather. They were always the same seats, directly behind a pillar. What was this? I couldn’t see the pitcher. I could only pick up the flight of the ball just before it reached the plate. I couldn’t even see the windup. What kind of a man had she married this time?

My mother’s seats were never behind a pillar. She and I would sit low near third or first base, or behind the home plate screen. I started telling V-II that I had a stomachache whenever he asked if I wanted to see a ball game. No pillars for me. I would wait for my mother’s tickets to show up, as they always did.

My mother divorced the pillar man in 1962, the year I left home. V-II had been physically abusive to her during 10 years of marriage, and when I got out of the house, so did my mother.

She was single again and only 43 years old. She started dating, and her gorgeous smile returned. I was happy for her. This was when she was happiest. My mother was not cut out for marriage.

I spent a few years in Europe in the 1960s, and my mother would send me Cardinal items, including press passes to the games. Now, why would she have those?

When I came back from Europe in 1967, she said she had tickets for the next night’s game. When we arrived at the new Busch Stadium, I was encouraged to see there were no pillars. What architectural progress had been made in my absence! She led me all the way down to the Cardinal dugout, where I learned, to my surprise but not to my amazement, that we had Gussie Busch’s box seats. My mother smiled at me, her rhinestone cigarette holder with her Viceroy smoking in the end held high in her left hand, and said, “Welcome back to the USA, son. Gibson’s pitching.”

The players always glance to see who’s sitting in the owner’s field box and, from the winks my mother got, I knew she’d been in that seat before. I started to ask her how she got Busch’s seats. “Don’t ask,” she said. “Just get me a foul ball.”

A few years later, when I was sleeping on her couch on a visit to St. Louis from my new home in California, she didn’t come back from a game until 1 a.m. I was worried and asked her where she’d been.

“I took Diz to the airport.”

“Diz who?” I asked.

“Dizzy Dean.”

“I didn’t know you knew him.”

“I don’t tell you everything,” she said.

After she died in 1983, I found a few hints in her belongings as to who the ticket benefactor may have been, including a few ballplayers, musicians, and others, but no solid evidence. To this day I wonder where the tickets came from all those years. I also wonder who else my mother took to the airport.

RICHARD WESTON grew up on the north side of St. Louis, went to Beaumont High, Washington University and the University of Missouri. Beaumont has produced many superlative athletes, but Richard is not one of them. He is a writer-editor-actor and does analysis for Retrosheet.