Bliss, Remembered (15 page)

“Because of this Horst?”

“Exactly. I sorta got ahead of myself back there. Let me back up now and get a running start into Horst.”

“All right. Where do you start to run from?”

“Well, get out that tape recorder, Teddy, and lemme see.”

Dutifully I obeyed, and Mom pondered for only a second before she launched back into her tale.

Well, I’ll begin at the women’s village. Of course, it wasn’t a village. Not like the men’s. Now that was a village. It was way out of town, in Doeberitz, set in these lovely birch woods with ponds and all sorts of animals. They even had a kangaroo or two to make the Australian boys feel at home. And the sauna, of course. That’s where Leni got her film of the Scandinavian boys all runnin’ around naked as blue jays. That was avante garde for the time, Teddy. Very avante garde. I can assure you, you didn’t get to see that sort of thing at the New Lyceum Theatre in Chestertown.

But as for the Olympic girls—well, there simply weren’t enough of us competing then to have a village. We just had a dormitory—the Friesenhaus they called it—and it was mighty spare, lemme tell you. They turned it into military barracks after the Olympics were over, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it wasn’t for officers.

They’d just finished the place, too, and because it was so damp and cold when we first got there—

Exactly. All the Germans were saying it was the first time they’d ever had April in August. It was so raw that the plaster was still wet. And the beds. The mattresses were filled with straw, I think. Oh, they were awful. But I was lucky, Teddy. By the time I got there, the other girls had already been there a week, and they told me the food had been so bad at first, almost nobody could eat it. Green apples, brown bread, all that heavy Teutonic stuff. There’d been so many complaints, though, at least it was edible by the time I arrived. And you know how it is: when in Rome. Why, I even got to like pickled cabbage and cucumbers—

Well, I suppose. Anyway, the cuisine was definitely improving. I got there on the third. Monday, August the third, 1936. Things had started on the first. The track and field especially. Jesse Owens was already the talk of the town.

There was two of us to a room. I got put in with Mary Lou Petty, because Eleanor had originally been assigned as her room-mate. I think it was Olive who said, “It was convenient for Eleanor that she got thrown off the team on the boat, because she’d’ve left this place first night.”

And Iris said, “If I’d’ve known what this place was gonna be like, I’d’ve run around with Eleanor on the boat and gotten thrown out myself.”

But we were just gripin’, you know. It’s the nature of the beast, Teddy. And nobody much expected a great deal then, in the way of accomodations. I mean, it was the Depression. You were grateful for a roof over your head and three squares. You know what we use to do for amusement in the dorm? We’d bowl oranges down the floor at Coke bottles. Nowadays, none of the young people can amuse themselves unless they have something electronic.

Exactly. But you had to make your own fun in the Depression. And, anyway, we were all just a bunch of gals away from home. It was exciting just to be there. And the Germans—the interpreters they had livin’ with us—they were the nicest ladies. Later on back home people would say, “What about those awful Nazis over there, Trixie?” and the first person who would come to my mind would be Elsa, our interpreter. I never met a nicer person on the Eastern Shore than Elsa. It’s the personal things you remember much more than the general picture. Even the matron we had, she was an old biddy, with pearls hanging down with her jowls. She’d been royalty—Baroness Von Wangenheim was her name—but she wasn’t so bad. They had a high wrought-iron fence around our dorm, but I don’t think that was so much to keep us girls in as to keep any boys out. And the Baroness was formidable enough to handle that without any fence. So we were certainly not under any house arrest, I can assure you.

Teddy, I told you I needed a running start. For goodness’ sake, let me get warmed up.

Always gets in the way of my nose.

Nobody says “wet your whistle” anymore, do they?

Well, this sure wets my whistle, Teddy.

Unfortunately, not long after I settled into my room, Elsa came and said there was a man to see me in the mess hall.

Am I telling this story or are you?

I’ll get to Horst in due time. So I went over to the mess hall. It was next to the dorm. The right men could come in there, and the man who wanted to see me was the girls’ team coach, Mr. Daughters. Ray Daughters—like sons and daughters. Right away, he said, “You better sit down, Sydney,” and when I did, he said, “Look, I’m not gonna beat around the bush.” He took a breath, and I swear, I thought someone had died, before he blurted out, “I’m sorry, Sydney, but you can’t swim. You’re not eligible.”

Of course, that hit me like a ton of bricks. It didn’t make any sense. “I’m not?” was, I think, all I managed to say.

“No, I’m afraid Mr. Brundage put the cart before the horse. He thought he could just substitute you for Eleanor, but it doesn’t work that way in the Olympics. We’d already sent the names of the team in, and you weren’t on the official list, so you aren’t eligible. Mr. Brundage thought he could pull some strings, but even though he’s in like Flynn with the Germans, there wasn’t anything he could do.”

“Oh,” was all I said, Teddy.

“Then,” Coach Daughters told me, “that means you can go home anytime you want, Sydney.”

“You mean, go back to Chestertown? Take a boat right back across the ocean?” He nodded. Can you imagine, Teddy: go all the way to Germany and just turn around and go home like you’d just been over to Dover, Delaware? That was the nuttiest thing I’d ever heard. “Do I have to?”

“Oh no, you can stay. You’re on the team. Here.” He handed me a credential, with my name on it. “You’re in the Olympics. You just can’t compete.”

“Well, Coach, I think I’ll stay.”

“Good. You can come to practice, maybe help out—whatever the other girls want.”

“Sure.”

“One thing, though. Did you bring a suit?”

“A bathing suit?”

“Yeah. See, we’ve already handed out all the suits we had on the ship and Eleanor kept hers, so if you don’t have a suit, we have to scare one up for you.”

Well, that was the Depression for you, Teddy. The United States of America didn’t have the money for any extra bathing suits for their Olympic team. If President Roosevelt had known, there would’ve been hell to pay, but, obviously, he was in the dark. Luckily, though, I had brought my own—my sexy see-through silk number.

So Coach Daughters said, “Well, then, you’re all set. Come on over to practice with the other girls tomorrow.” He got up then. “I’m really sorry about this, Sydney. But I guess sometimes Mr. Brundage can act like a bull in a china shop.”

“It’s okay, Coach,” I said. “I’m just glad to be here at all.”

See, Teddy, that’s one reason why I was never very keen to talk much about being in the Olympics. Because I wasn’t really. I was something of a fraud. As an Olympian, I was ersatz.

Oh, I know that. But still, it’s a little embarrassing.

And I’m fortified some, too.

The next morning, when it was our turn to practice, we all walked over to the pool. After all, it wasn’t even a half-mile away. The pool was part of the main complex—so near to the stadium itself, you could sense the excitement over there, it was so loud. As for us swimmers, though, we all just hoped that it got warmer by the time our races started in another four days. It was so unbelievably chilly for August. You can imagine what the water was like. Then, once you did get in, you didn’t want to get out because the air was so cold.

But it was a magnificent pool for racing, and there must’ve been twenty thousand seats around it. Teddy, I’d never seen any stadium so big in all my life. I don’t mean swimming stadium, you understand. I mean any kind of stadium.

Well, at practice I was just gonna swim with the other backstrokers, Edith and Alice, maybe race ’em a lap or two. But all of a sudden here comes these three men with a rubber raft and some cameras. They slipped the raft into the pool, and then one of ’em went over to speak to Coach Daughters.

I was way on the other side of the pool, but we could tell Coach wasn’t very happy. He was gesticulating furiously. But it was clear he wasn’t gettin’ anywhere, because he finally just threw up his hands in disgust. “All right,” he said, “just make sure you leave us some of the pool. We gotta practice.” Then, he blew his whistle and, of all things, called me over. “Look, Sydney,” he told me, “just do whatever they say so the other girls get a good practice in.”

Well, Teddy, the three men were fixing the camera on the raft, and when the cameraman got on it, the one who’d been talkin’ to Coach Daughters came back over. “All right, her,” Coach told him. “She’s the odd one out.” That meant me. Then he walked away. And there I was left alone with this guy, and Teddy, I was, well, I was just a silly goose. He was so handsome. I mean, he sparkled, and when he smiled, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t even bear to look at him.

Yes, Teddy, you can relax because we have indeed gotten to Horst. We are down to where the rubber hits the road. Sure, I’d heard about love at first sight, but this was Exhibit A, and it was happenin’ to me. All the boys I’d met in the United States, nothing, and then the first boy I meet in Germany, I’m a wreck. An absolute wreck. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Horst Gerhardt.”

I looked up. I had to make myself do that, but as soon as I saw him looking back at me, it was the funniest thing, Teddy. Even though I was this foolish little ninny, I suddenly had the feeling that he liked me. I had my sweatshirt on, because it was so cold, you know, so it wasn’t like he could give me the old once-over, so he was just lookin’ into my face, and of course I didn’t have any lipstick on or anything, but dammit, Teddy, I looked back at him, and I smiled the best I could, and I just said, “Hi, I’m Sydney Stringfellow.”

“Good to meetcha,” he said. I remember that exactly. Good to meetcha.

“Yeah,” I replied. It was amazing. My heart was going pitter-patter-pitter, but all the while I knew I was behaving like one cool customer. It was like I was an actor playing Sydney Stringfellow.

“Whereya from, Sydney?”

“The Eastern Shore of Maryland.”

“Hmm. Don’t think I know that.”

“It’s between the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean.” I could see him kind of sortin’ that out on the map in his mind. So I asked him, “Where you from?”

“Oh, right here. I’m a Berliner.”

Now that threw me for a complete loop. He didn’t speak any different from anybody in Chestertown. I couldn’t help myself. “You’re German?”

He put his hands on his hips, screwed up his mouth and said, “Ya got somethin’ against that, sister?” You know, like he was a gangster in a movie—and perfectly.

And you know what I did, Teddy? I mean reflexively? I’d learned about five words of German in my guide book, but I pretended to cower like the mean gangster was holding a gun on me, and then I used three of those words: “Nein, herr. Dankeschoen.” Which means—