Bliss, Remembered (8 page)

“I never thought of that.”

“Yeah, well, if I were you, even if most people think it’s a boy’s name, from now on, I’d be Sydney.”

And you know what, Teddy? I was, from that moment on.

Well, Michael Phelps did indeed win again that night, and so Mom asked me to pop the cork on the champagne, and we raised our glasses high to him. “You mark my words,” she told me, “that boy will do even better in 2008.”

“That’s a long way off,” I said.

“Yeah, but he’s young, and you can tell how much he wants to win. That’s the way I was. And he can make the big bucks, too. It was all amateur back then. The rules were insane. The next time I saw Eleanor Holm, she told me how she could’ve made a whole lot of money in Hollywood swimming in movies, but if she swam in movies, the American Olympic Committee would declare her ineligible. Of course, that’s what everybody wanted to see, though. Everybody wanted to see Eleanor swim—especially since she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. But she was pretty as a picture. They were always posing her in these sarong-type things and putting her next to giant clamshells to show that it was, you know, marine.”

“Prettier even than you, Mom?”

“Oh yeah. No contest.”

“Now, Mom. Is that modesty compelling you to say that?”

“Oh no, I could be as vain as the next one, sure, but Eleanor was a real doll. Ziegfield wanted her to be one of his girls on stage. Now, Teddy, all right, I could turn some heads when I had it all going for me, but nobody was giving me any movie contracts to sign. I’ll tell you, though, we weren’t a bad-looking group, us swimmers. It wasn’t very fashionable then to be a girl athlete. They said it gave you all the wrong muscles, and a lot of people assumed we had to be dykes.” Mom paused a moment. “I know that’s out of line to say now, but I’m just quoting what people said then, you understand. They said ‘dykes.’ So I’m just quoting.”

I told Mom I understood where she was coming from.

“They also called us ‘naiads?’”

“What?”

“No, I didn’t imagine you ever heard that. It’s spelled n-a-i-a-d-s.”

“Naiads?”

“Right. First time I saw it in the newspaper, I didn’t know what to think, and I didn’t want to ask anybody for fear of looking like a naïve little girl from the Eastern Shore—”

“Which you were.”

“Which I was. But I suspect there were a lot of sophisticates from Park Avenue who didn’t know what in the Sam Hill naiads were either.”

“Well, I give up.”

“I looked it up in the dictionary. It turns out to be some kinda water nymph in Greek mythology. I’ve sorta forgotten now, but I think we naiads were supposed to guard the brooks and rivers and such from ogres and trolls and what-have-you. There, I’d been a naiad all my life swimming in the Chester River, and I never even knew it. I think the newspapers thought it was some kind of compliment. They always called the men swimmers ‘mermen.’”

“But they didn’t call you ‘mermaids’?”

“No, I think they thought that would be an insult to mermaids naming a bunch of dykes after them. So we were naiads.”

“But the naiads weren’t insulted?”

“Evidently not. But I’ll tell you, Teddy, it was a bad rap they gave us. There was this prejudice that all girl athletes had to be ugly. And that was nonsense. Lemme tell you, Eleanor wasn’t the only looker in our crowd.”

“Would you get the silver medal?”

“For looks?” She rubbed her chin very thoughtfully. “No, but maybe the bronze. We had a diver named Dorothy Poynton. She’d won a gold at Los Angeles, and after Berlin—she got the gold there, too—Dorothy figured to make hay while the sun shone. She had all sorts of contracts signed to dive professionally. Dorothy didn’t even want to be photographed in our team suits. After she’d finish diving, she’d rush back and change fast into a real snappy number, with this kind of bandanna she wore, and then she’d come out and pose for the photography boys. And before she dived, she’d sashay all around the pool in gold lamé high heels. She was very sexy.”

“But you’d get the bronze for looks?”

Mom simply smiled, and let it go. In fact, I think she regretted that she’d so quickly given the silver to Dorothy Poynton. So she raised her champagne glass again. “And to your father, too, Teddy. Seven years. Seven years gone. My Jimmy.”

I raised mine too. “Why’d he never talk about Guadalcanal, Mom? Was it that bad?”

“It must’ve been.”

“He talked to you about it when he came back, didn’t he?”

“Not, uh, extensively. There were a lot of them that way, the boys in the war. You get shot, I don’t suppose you want to dwell on it. Who in their right mind wants to talk about getting shot . . . or shooting someone else, for that matter? Could you shoot someone, Teddy?”

“Well, maybe if I was a soldier. You know, in a war.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “But maybe not everybody could.”

“I guess I don’t know, Mom.”

“No. No one probably knows till they’re confronted with the situation.” She stopped abruptly then. “But that’s enough of that. The point is, your father got his honorable discharge, and then he made it plain to me that that chapter was concluded, and it was not something he wished to discuss, and I was happy to comply with his wishes. Why not? Your father and I always had plenty of happy things to talk about.”

“I know that. But after all those years . . .”

“Like someone said, Teddy: War is hell. War must be hell. Jimmy wanted to let it go.” She looked back at the television, even if it was a commercial. It was apparent, as always, that my mother didn’t want to talk about my father’s experience in the war any more than he had. But then, after she’d given it some thought, she turned back to me and said, “Well, there’s a bunch of that in the story. I told you: it’s the last story about the war.”

“The story in the purple acetate folder?”

“Yeah. That’ll tell you more than enough. So be patient.”

“Okay.” I shrugged, and raised my glass again. “Well, to you both. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother and father.” I went over and kissed her.

“Thank you for that, Teddy,” she said, but I could tell that she’d grown tired. Sometimes now she wore down more quickly, and sure enough, before long, she started to nod off, even before all the swimming races were over. There was a women’s relay she’d been really looking forward to, but she couldn’t last, so I helped her to bed, and when she was settled, I brought in the flowers that she’d bought in honor of Daddy and put the vase by her bed. I took one, though, a little yellow one—like Daddy, I’ve never been very learned about “flora” either—and stuck it in one of my shirt buttonholes. She liked that. She touched it. “Bachelor button,” she said.

“No, Daddy button,” I said, and kissed her good-night.

As I was leaving, she called me back. “Teddy.” I turned around. “Would you be upset if an old lady threw humility to the winds?” I shook my head. “Well, maybe I was the silver medal. Dorothy Poynton was very pretty indeed, but she had all those fancy get-ups. I was still just a kid swimming in a plain black suit. But it showed me to good advantage, I think. And I always made it a habit to rip my bathing cap off as soon as the race was over, so my hair could tumble down.”

I said, “You always had pretty hair, Mother.”

“You don’t have to gild the lily. I knew how pretty I was. But I’m thinking now of a time in Germany when I got all gussied up in a beautiful gown, and when I saw myself in that, I suppose that made me think I had the edge on Dorothy.”

“I’m sure you turned a lot of heads.”

Mom smiled deliciously. “One in particular,” she said. “And we’ll get to him soon enough.”

Unfortunately, Mom woke up the next morning feeling poorly. She had, as she simply called them, “her days.” I wanted to drive her over to the doctor’s, but she absolutely forbade me to even call him. “Teddy,” she said, “some mornings I just gotta roll with the punches. You wait, by the afternoon, I’ll be fine and dandy—relatively, of course.” Sure enough, she took some kind of pain pill, lay down awhile and by the afternoon she emerged with a smile on her face. “Get that machine goin’ mister,” she told me.

“You sure you want to, Mom?”

“Well, Teddy, either I sit here and tell you more of my story or I’m goin’ over to the Chippendales’ matinee.”

“You’re what?”

“It’s a joke, Teddy. It’s a joke. Come on, let’s go.”

So I put a new tape in and she immediately took up her story again.

 

In those days, you didn’t have a lot of national meets. The best swimmers couldn’t just take off and fly around the country, willy-nilly, like pashas. You stuck pretty much to your territory, your region. Besides, we had to be amateurs, and it was still the heart of the Depression, so nobody much had the money to travel hither and yon just to swim. But after I did so well at the Interscholastics, Mr. Foster realized that I needed some good competition. I mean, I couldn’t improve if I just practiced all the time, even though basically that’s all I did do, because there wasn’t a whole lot to do on the Eastern Shore in 1935 except possibly neck with Buzzy Moore, which I didn’t much want to do except just enough for him to take me to the movies and what-not. And eventually, in fact, when Buzzy realized that the candy store really was closed, that was the end of that. So I just swam more and more, especially when the weather got warmer and I could go back to swimming off the dock at our house in the Chester River, like always.

Sometimes Carter would come over and keep me company, swimming. We’d race some. I’d give her a head start and she’d swim freestyle, and I’d try to catch up with her swimming backstroke. But it was just fun. The best part, then, was we’d lie there on the grass and talk about what we were gonna do with ourselves. Nobody—especially kids like us—envisioned a war. Who did in the United States? Mostly, we just imagined the Depression stretching out forever and ever, all our days. After all, it’d been everybody’s way of life for years, and it was hard to picture the world without it.

Our senior year was coming up, so even if I hadn’t gotten myself all worked up about swimming, everything was necessarily gonna change in just another year. It was time to start thinkin’ ahead. Carter knew she was going to Towson State Teachers and find a husband in Baltimore and make a life there. “Does Tommy know this?” I asked her.

“Tommy doesn’t think much beyond next week,” Carter replied. She was just gonna cross that bridge when she came to it.

So we would talk like that, and this one time—it must’ve been late in June after school let out, I suddenly said, “You know, Car, I’m gonna have to leave, too.”

“Leave here? Leave the Shore?” I nodded. “Gee, I didn’t know that, Trix. That’s great. I just figured you’d stay and help your mother at the office.”

“Well, I figured that, too, but if I’m gonna be a swimmer, I have to go somewhere where there’s a swimming club.”

You see, Teddy, if I’d been a boy, I could’ve gotten some kind of scholarship to swim on a college team somewhere, working at a job on the side. But there wasn’t anything like that for girls. There weren’t even any girls’ teams in college. Girls swam in clubs. By now, I had found this out, because I’d been to one seniors meet. Understand, “seniors” doesn’t mean what it does now—that god-awful “senior citizens.” It was just the difference between juniors and seniors. It was like the major leagues, seniors.

The seniors meet Mr. Foster had taken me to was down in Washington. It was sanctioned. It was run by the Shoreham Hotel Athletic Club, which some of the best girls belonged to. And understand this, too, Teddy. When I say girls, I mean women and girls. They just called us all girls then. Like they called us naiads. But then, we called ourselves girls. I don’t remember anybody much being a “woman” then, Teddy. Unless maybe if you were a cleaning woman. You were a girl unless you were a young lady, until you became a lady. And then you finally became an old lady.