Bliss, Remembered (12 page)

Actually, it wasn’t just the war that my father didn’t care to talk about. He was reluctant to bring up his childhood, too. I gathered enough to appreciate that it had been a terribly sad one for him. His family had been hard on one another, lacking much love, and they were poor, too, and as things had grown so terribly hard in the Depression, Dad simply saw no reason to bother any longer with the blood he’d been dealt. The best I could glean from him, one lovely summer’s day after high school, he just said good-bye, took off from home, which was upstate New York, and started looking for work. It seems that his folks hardly missed him; he certainly didn’t miss them.

As near as I can tell, he was a hobo for a while (although he was ashamed, I think, ever to say that in quite so many words), then he got into the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and that seemed to give him both hope and purpose. Dad was bright and self-confident. It was a bit odd, but whereas Mother would sometimes drift back into the rural argot of the Eastern Shore, Daddy—who’d come from far worse circumstances—always spoke with the finest diction. It was as if he was determined to leave that dispiriting youth of his completely behind. You could say Daddy remade himself.

Certainly, he began to improve his lot after he left the CCC, if only little by little. By that time, two or three years later, when he somehow happened to run into my mother, he’d already transformed himself into a young man of some evident potential, who had his eyes fixed on the main chance.

Now, mother was certainly more forthcoming about her upbringing. There were funny little stories, silly adventures she’d had with Carter Kincaid, tales of struggling in the Depression and, always, fond memories of her father. The only perplexing omission was that she’d never bring up her swimming in any detail.

Mother’s mother would also visit us periodically, bringing the latest breaking news from the Shore. Mom would listen to Grandmother’s reports, but she never seemed that engaged about the old homeland. I guess both Mom and Dad were like so many Americans. Once they’d left Back East and moved Out West, they simply didn’t look behind them, and without other family to connect them to the past, soon the tides of time washed over their earlier lives.

When Grandmother died in 1978, Mom returned for the funeral. Daddy had always been close to his mother-in-law, so it surprised me that he didn’t go, too. But Mom went alone, and I suppose because she hadn’t been back to the Shore for so many years, it made her, when she was there by herself, that much more sentimental. She told me, in fact, that she’d cried as much standing by her father’s grave as she’d wept for her Mother’s death. “All this time, Teddy, all this time he’s been gone,” she said. Part of her was really crying about her own past, about how it had all drifted away.

I asked her, then, if she’d stayed in touch with Carter. “No,” she said. “Not after we moved to Missoula.”

“But you were so close.”

“Oh, Lord, yes. When I was a girl, I never had a better friend than Carter Kincaid.”

“But you lost complete touch with her after she went to Baltimore?”

“No, I saw her there,” she said. “Well, the once.”

“But . . . ?”

Mom paused awhile, not so much to consider a response, I thought, as she did to use this occasion to remember Carter. She smiled broadly, fondly. Finally, though, she just said, “It’s complicated, Teddy. It was just too complicated.”

I had to assume there must’ve been some sort of falling out. In my experience, when there are sad ruptures among old friends, it usually has to do with new husbands or wives. Perhaps Carter’s husband didn’t get along with Mom. Whatever it was, I could tell that she didn’t want to discuss it, and so, reluctantly, I had to let the matter drop and consign Carter Kincaid forever to Mom’s childhood.

Like that, once Grandmother died, the Shore was, for my mother, gone for good. There was nothing Back East but cemetery plots, so thoughts of that past only surfaced again when Mom knew her own death was approaching—which also happened to be at the same time that Michael Phelps came out of Maryland, storming the Olympics and triggering the memories of swimming and all that went with it, way back then.

Mom slept late the next morning. She always ate a good breakfast, although one of the few tedious things about my mother was that all too often she’d go on (and on) about how she missed having scrapple for breakfast. They’d had that growing up on the Shore. “Most people don’t even have a clue what scrapple is,” she’d whine. They certainly didn’t in Missoula, Montana, or Eugene, Oregon—and, I assume, in most other places. “Just as well, I suppose,” she would then add. “I never was sure what was in it, but I think it was all the stuff that wasn’t good enough for sausage.”

“Not good enough for sausage? I thought you shouldn’t even ask what went into sausage.”

“Yeah, Teddy, scrapple is probably just nasty scraps, but it sure was good. We’d pour maple syrup on it.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone putting syrup on meat.”

“Well, we did on scrapple on the Shore, and it was delicious. For all I know, maybe they don’t even have scrapple anyplace but the Shore. All I know is, I sure do miss having a choice of scrapple for breakfast.”

But this morning, after her scrapple-less Oregon breakfast, when she found me out in her garden, she was raring to resume reminiscing. Mom was still in a good mood from the night before, because late in the evening, when she’d despaired that NBC would never desert the teeny little heinie-less gymnasts, they’d switched to the swimming. Then, not only did Natalie Coughlin win the hundred backstroke—hooray!—but Michael Phelps also won another gold medal in something or other.

It was a gorgeous morning in Eugene, and I’d sort of drifted off in the sun, reading the newspaper. Mom took it off my lap and turned right to the sports pages, looking for the certification in print of what she’d seen with her own eyes on TV the night before. She searched the agate. “I just can’t get over it, Teddy. The time.”

“What time?”

“Natalie Coughlin’s time. Just thirty-seven hundredths of a second over a minute. Remember what I told you Eleanor swam it in—a minute, sixteen and something. Imagine that. And now they’re down to almost a minute.”

“That doesn’t make Eleanor or any of your crowd look very good, does it?”

She glared out me with eyes that suddenly seemed much younger than the rest of her. Angry eyes. The veritable headlights people always have that poor, clichéd deer caught in. “That’s both rotten and ignorant of you, Teddy Branch. Jesse Owens was running in those Berlin Olympics, and his times look pretty slow now, but would anybody think the less of him?”

“No, I’m sorry, you’re right, Mom.” I realized I’d waded into rushing waters and had better try to negotiate my way safely back to shore. But too late. She snapped at me now:

“The artists—the painters and the writers don’t get any better, do they?”

“What?”

“What? There’s nobody around today who’s supposed to give Shakespeare or Rembrandt a run for their money, is there?”

“No, that’s for sure.”

“Are any of the current would-be geniuses any smarter than Leonardo da Vinci was?” I shook my head. I saw where this was going. “So just because athletes have better times now doesn’t mean they’re intrinsically better, does it?”

“I see your point, Mom.”

“Well then, you’re not as ignorant as you let on. They’re swimming today in those skin-tight suits that look like something out of science fiction. Put me in one of those new-fangled suits!” She paused to consider that for a moment. “I don’t mean me now, of course. Me then. And the pools weren’t so streamlined either, so there were waves that would wash back on us. And in the backstroke, my stroke, the rules made it much more difficult to make a legitimate turn. You had to touch with your hand, like you were playing tag. You saw Natalie last night. They can just sort of flip around.” She threw her hands all around in some representation of a backstroke flip turn. Mom had gotten herself quite worked up. “Hell, Teddy, that in itself is whole seconds right there.” She shook her head in despair at me again. “Besides, there wasn’t any money in it then. The blazers wouldn’t allow it. These kids today can work at it all the time. I don’t imagine Natalie Coughlin is working nights singing at any Empire Room—”

“Or training on champagne and cigarettes.”

“Exactly. There I was, going to the Olympic trials, and I’d never even had a real coach. Just Mr. Wallace Foster in Chestertown, Maryland—and he was learning how to coach me out of a damn book.”

I held up my hands. “All right, all right. So, Mom, tell me: how in the world did you improve enough after the Indoors to finish in the top three and make it to Berlin?”

She looked over at me strangely. “Well, it wasn’t quite that way.”

“It wasn’t?”

She shook her head. “Get me another cup of coffee, Teddy, and grab that tape recorder, and I’ll explain.”

So I got her a cup, and she sipped at it and, like Scheherazade, began again.

The Trials in ’36 were held in New York, but this time they weren’t out at Jones Beach, but at a pool in Queens, right off the East River in a neighborhood called Astoria. You know New York, Teddy?

So you don’t know the Triborough Bridge?

Well, the Triborough Bridge was a big Depression project to put men to work, and the very day of the Trials—the exact day—it opened up, right near where we were swimming. The pool was new, too. It was another Depression project, so they wanted to show it off. That’s why we were there instead of Jones Beach. So every Tom, Dick and Harry with a car drove out that way to see the new bridge. Now at this same time, there was an ungodly heat wave that hit the whole country. People were dropping like flies. Remember, this is pre-air conditioning. Or AC, as everybody says now. Why in the world can’t we just say the words for things, Teddy? Does it really take that much longer to say “air conditioning” than “AC”? Well, does it?

You mean an RQ?

An RQ—a rhetorical question. We might as well give up the good fight and just use initials for everything.

Notwithstanding, Teddy, it was hot as Hades, and we didn’t have any air conditioning. Now, listen, it gets pretty darn hot on the Shore, so as Br’er Rabbit used to say, I was born and bred in that briar patch, but let me tell you, it was plenty uncomfortable for all us gals, regardless of our provenance.

The girls who made the team were going to ship out to Germany only three days after the Trials ended. They had space reserved on the SS Manhattan, New York to Hamburg, but the American Olympic people had the shorts. Right up until the last minute, they didn’t know how to pay for all the athletes they wanted to take to Berlin. They had to appeal to the public for funds. But that was the Depression, Teddy. I don’t think anybody nowadays can imagine it, unless they’re old and decrepit like me and actually lived through it.

Why, there was so little money for the swimming team that when the men had swum against the Japanese in some dual meet a few weeks before, they had bathing suits made with both flags on ’em—you know, the stars-and-stripes and the rising sun—and there were some left over, and that’s what some of our swimmers wore at the Olympics. I’m not kidding, Teddy, swimmers representing the United States of America actually wore bathing suits with rising suns on them in the Olympics. And what was it, five or six years later, that the little buggers bombed Pearl Harbor . . . and then shot your father at Guadalcanal right after that. But here we were wearing bathing suits with their flag on ’em because we didn’t have enough money to buy our own.

But it was the Depression.

I don’t think anyone was as PO’ed as Eleanor. See, here was the deal. The AOA had bought space for our athletes on the SS Manhattan, but it was all down in the bowels of the ship. Third class—the cheapest cabins possible. They used to call that steerage. Eleanor said, “The blazers’d put us all in hammocks if they could.”