Bliss, Remembered

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com

Copyright © 2010 by Frank Deford

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

eISBN : 978-1-590-20534-1

It’s always tricky to place real people into a fictional work, but in inserting some of them into Sydney’s story I tried to be as faithful to their true selves as possible. It did help me that the two main historical women who play significant roles as characters—Eleanor Holm and Leni Riefenstahl—are people whom I actually met. Both were old women when I spent time with them, but they were both still very much vibrant and distinctive personalities, and it was easy to imagine what they had been like in the 1930s.

I am particularly indebted to Mary Lou Petty Skok, who swam in the ’36 Olympics, and Marilyn Sahner, a member of the Women’s Swimming Association back then, for their first-hand remembrances. Adolf Kiefer was also a member of the ’36 U.S. swimming team—he won a gold medal in the hundred-meter backstroke—and he too recalled the Berlin Olympics for me.

Angela Leuker, a wonderful old friend, was invaluable in supplying me with the right German expressions, as Mackey Dutton and Al and Georgianna Evans were so helpful in providing me with background detail of Chestertown and the Eastern Shore (although it’s a place where I’ve spent a lot of time myself). Lest anyone from Washington College question where the school’s indoor swimming pool was, I’m sorry, that was simply a necessary invention. Sydney had to swim somewhere in the winter, and so I gave the pool to the college. Otherwise, I believe I held literary invention to a bare minimum. The Germans did indeed, for example, land a spy from a U-Boat off Bar Harbor. Goebbels threw that party. Adolph Kiefer’s meeting with Hitler at poolside happened exactly as I described it. I just inserted Sydney into the scene. The best women swimmers really did wear those sexy bathing suits. Who knew?

Karen Crouse of
The New York Times
and Bob Duenkel of The International Swimming Tennis Hall of Fame steered me to good contacts, and the Westport Public Library and the New-York History Society library provided, once again, valuable research resource assistance.

Aaron Schlecter did a fine job of improving my manuscript, as Samantha Weiner, his colleague at Overlook, first disected it so lovingly. Sterling Lord has been my agent for forty-five years. It seems to work pretty well.

—FRANK DEFORD
Westport, Connecticut
January 24th, 2010

The summer after my mother found out that she was dying of cancer, she asked me to come visit and watch the Olympic swimming on television with her. It was 2004, when the Games were in Athens. Mom had been on the United States swimming team in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, when she was eighteen. While she never talked about that experience—she was, in fact, mysteriously silent on the subject—she would say, “That’s the only thing of any real consequence I ever did in my life.” That wasn’t true, but it was very much like her to speak so modestly. To put this in perspective: my mother was one of these people who gave much unto the world, brightened the lives of those around her and left us all better for her having been here among us.

You can be sure I understand if you think I am prejudiced, and I am, but nonetheless, that all happens to be the God’s truth.

Of course, she also could be herself, which was a handful.

She was an awful lot of fun; she had a way about her. Unlike most old people who seem to withdraw unto themselves, she became more expressive and confident of herself (and her opinions) as she grew older. She had developed an uncommon facility about the past, wherein she discussed herself back then with a certain out-of-body quality, as if that girl was someone else altogether. And while she certainly maintained the courtesy and graciousness that had always marked her, she felt less compunction to suffer fools. In particular: woe to the poor person who called her a “senior.” Mom, I think you could say, went out—well, if not with a bang, then certainly with a lot of sizzle.

I was, then, not altogether taken aback when, after I told her that I’d be delighted to come see her, she said, “I’ll have something in the nature of a surprise for you, Teddy.” But, although I pressed her in a good-natured way, she wouldn’t tell me what it was, and I had all but forgotten about it until I arrived, a few weeks later, at her garden apartment in Eugene, Oregon. After Daddy died and she sold the house in Montana, she came to Eugene because she had heard it was a nice place to live, and it was a college town, and while she wanted a more benign climate, she didn’t want to go to the Sun Belt and “play bridge with a bunch of old hags like myself.”

She made a lot of good friends in Eugene and enjoyed her years there, stirring the pot. She told me she was accepting of death, although her one wish was that she would not die while George W. Bush was the president of her country. Unfortunately, much to her chagrin, she would be denied that hope.

Mom, whose name was Sydney Stringfellow Branch, threw off her mortal coil, going on eighty-seven, on January 11, 2005. “Well,” she said, a few days before the end, when the die was cast, “at least I won’t have to be around for that damn fool’s second inauguration.” And she added: “You know, Teddy, I’ve always wondered what comes next, but at least I can die positively knowing that as long as Bush is president here, I’m guaranteed to be going to a better place.”

Anyway, it was the previous August when I visited her. I came by myself, for although Mom adored Jeanne, my wife, I could tell that she wanted to see me alone. So I’d left home, left behind Jeanne, left our empty nest (well, save for our dog, Elsinore), and come to Eugene at the time when the Olympic swimming started. Mom and I would watch it every night. She adored Michael Phelps, all the more so that he came from Baltimore, because she had grown up nearby, across Chesapeake Bay, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. “I wish he’d swim in the backstroke,” she said. That had been her specialty.

“You can’t swim everything, Mother.”

“He can. He’s amazing.”

“I never asked you: why did you swim backstroke?”

“You really wanna know, Teddy?”

“Yeah.”

“Because when you’re on your back you don’t have your face stuck in the water. You can see the sky. I liked that.”

“Who woulda thunk it?” I said.

“Now, it’s not so good when you’re in a race in an outdoor pool, because if the sun’s out, it’s in your eyes, but me just swimming the backstroke in the river, why, if the sun got in my eyes, I just turned over for awhile. You’ve got to remember, in the beginning, I just swam for the hell of it because the river was out our backyard. I imagine if I’d lived in Nepal, I’d’ve climbed mountains and been a Sherpa.”

“Aren’t the Sherpas all men?”

“For God’s sake, Teddy, don’t be so literal. Is this any better: if I’d grown up in Las Vegas, I’d’ve been a whore.”

Mom made certain to find out when the women’s hundred-meter backstroke would be shown. That had been her event when she’d made the U.S. team. “I want to tell you all about that,” she told me.

“You do? I could never get a word out of you on that.”

“Well, there was a reason.”

“What was that?”

“That’s what you’re gonna find out, antsy-pants. But things were connected.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I didn’t ever want to talk about the Olympics because that was connected to other stuff, which I didn’t think was any of your damn business.”

“Till now.”

“A woman can change her mind. So can a man, but most of you are too stubborn ever to do that.”

That reminded me. “I thought you had something for me.”

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“Teddy, just hold your horses.” She shook her head in despair at me—which was not uncommon, although I usually couldn’t imagine what exactly it was that Mom held me in despair of. “Nobody can wait anymore,” she said in exasperation. “One of the great technological advances in this world, which is actually a terrible step backwards, is cameras.”

At times like this, I had no idea where she was going. “How so?” I asked. Mom liked a straight man.

“Much of the fun of taking pictures was not knowing how a picture came out. You took a picture and then had to wait till you got the roll back from the drugstore to find out how good the pictures were. And when you found out one of them—even only one of them—was a honey of a picture, it made your day. Now, with all this digital nonsense, you can see the picture right away. What fun is that?”

“Well, there’s something to be said for getting something right, isn’t there?”

“Oh sure,” she said, in that world-weary way, which I took to really indicate a weariness of me and my questions. “But the point is—the larger point, Teddy—is that there are no surprises left. You can tell on the phone who it is before you pick it up. All the children are on that Facebook thing, so there’re no blind dates left. Just peek-a-boo dates. Everybody has to know what sex their child is hardly before they’re out of bed and through conceiving. No, no, no, we think we’re so clever, but we’re a poorer world without surprises.”