by John Irving
Mary Bates had grown up with Winslow Berry, yet they had never given each other more than a nod or a grimace of recognition. 'We seemed to be looking beyond each other, I don't know why,' Father told us children -- until, perhaps, they first saw each other out of the familiar place where they'd both grown up; the motley town of Dairy and the barely less motley campus of the Dairy School.
When the Thompson Female Seminary graduated my mother in June of 1939, my mother was hurt to realize that the Dairy School had already had its graduation and was closed; the fancier, out-of-town boys had gone home, and her two or three 'beaus' (as she called them) -- who she might have hoped would ask her to her own graduation dance -- were gone. She knew no local high school boys, and when her mother suggested Win Berry to her, my mother ran out of the dining room. 'Or I suppose I could ask Coach Bob!' she shouted to her mother. Her father, Latin Emeritus, raised his head from the dinner table where he'd been napping.
'Coach Bob?' he said. 'Is that moron here to borrow the sled again?'
Coach Bob, who was also called Iowa Bob, was no moron, but to Latin Emeritus, whose stroke seemed to have fuddled his sense of time, the hired jock from the Midwest was not in the same league with the academic faculty. And years ago, when Mary Bates and Win Berry had been children, Coach Bob had come to borrow an old sleigh, once notorious for standing three years, unmoved, in the Bates front yard.
'Does the fool have a horse for it?' Latin Emeritus had asked his wife.
'No, he's going to pull it himself!' my mother's mother said. And the Bates family watched out the window while Coach Bob put little Win in the driver's seat, gripped the whiffletree in his hands behind his back, and heaved the sleigh into motion; the great sled skidded down the snowy yard and into the slippery street that was still lined with elms, in those days -- 'As fast as a horse could have pulled it!' my mother always said.
Iowa Bob had been the shortest ulterior lineman ever to play first-string football in the Big Ten. He once admitted to being so carried away he bit a running back after he tackled him. At Dairy, in addition to his duties with football, he coached the shot put and instructed those interested in weight lifting. But to the Bates family, Iowa Bob was too uncomplicated to be taken seriously: a funny, squat strongman with hair so short he looked bald, always jogging through the streets of town -- 'with a ghastly-coloured sweatband around his dome,' Latin Emeritus used to say.
Since Coach Bob would live a long time, he was the only grandparent any of us children would remember.
'What's that sound?' Frank would ask, in alarm, in the middle of the night when Bob had come to live with us.
What Frank heard, and what we often heard after Coach Bob moved in, was the creaking of push-ups and the grunting of sit-ups on the old man's floor (our ceiling) above us.
'It's Iowa Bob,' Lilly whispered once. 'He's trying to stay in shape forever.'
Anyway, it wasn't Win Berry who took Mary Bates to her graduation dance. The Bates family minister, who was considerably older than my mother, but unattached, was kind enough to ask her. 'That was a long night,' Mother told us. 'I felt depressed. I was an outsider in my own hometown. But in a very short while that same minister would marry your father and me!'
They could not even have imagined it when they were 'introduced,' together with the other summer help, on the unreal green of the pampered lawn at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Even the staff introductions were formal, there. A girl was called out, by name, from a line of other girls and women; she would meet a boy called out from a line of boys and men, as if they were going to be dance partners.
'This is Mary Bates, just graduated from the Thompson Female Seminary! She'll be helping in the hotel, and with hostessing. She likes sailing, don't you, Mary?'
Waiters and waitresses, the grounds crew and caddies, the boat help and the kitchen staff, odd-jobbers, hostesses, chambermaids, laundry people, a plumber, and the members of the band. Ballroom dancing was very popular; the resorts farther south -- like the Weirs at Laconia, and Hampton Beach -- drew some of the big-name bands in the summers. But the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had its own band, which imitated in a cold, Maine way the big-band sound.
'And this is Winslow Berry, who likes to be called Win! Don't you, Win? He's going to Harvard in the fall!'
But my father looked straight at my mother, who smiled and turned her face away -- as embarrassed for him as she was for herself. She'd never noticed what a handsome boy he was, really; he had a body as hard as Coach Bob's, but the Dairy School had exposed him to the manners, the dress, and the way with his hair that Bostonians (not Iowans) were favouring. He looked as if he already went to Harvard, whatever that must have meant to my mother then. 'Oh, I don't know what it meant,' she told us children. 'Kind of cultured, I guess. He looked like a boy who knew how to drink without getting sick. He had the darkest, brightest eyes, and whenever you looked at him you were sure he'd just been looking at you -- but you could never catch him.'
My father maintained that latter ability all his life; we felt around him, always, the sense that he'd been observing us closely and affectionately -- even if, when we looked at him, he seemed to be looking elsewhere, dreaming or making plans, thinking of something hard or faraway. Even when he was quite blind, to our schemes and lives, he seemed to be 'observing' us. It was a strange combination of aloofness and warmth -- and the first time my mother felt it was on that tongue of bright green lawn that was framed by the grey Maine sea.
STAFF INTRODUCTIONS: 4:00 P.M.
That was when she learned he was there.
When the introductions were over, and the staff was instructed to make ready for the first cocktail hour, the first dinner, and the first evening's entertainment, my mother caught my father's eye and he came up to her.
'It will be two years before I can afford Harvard,' he said, immediately, to her.
'So I thought,' my mother said. 'But I think it's wonderful you got in,' she added quickly.
'Why wouldn't I have gotten in?' he asked.
Mary Bates shrugged, a gesture learned from never understanding her father (since his stroke had slurred his speech). She wore white gloves and a white hat with a veil; she was dressed for 'serving' at the first lawn party, and my father admired how nicely her hair hugged her head -- it was longer in back, swept away from her face, and clamped somehow to the hat and veil in a manner both so simple and mysterious that my father fell to wondering about her.
'What are you doing in the fall?' he asked her.
Again she shrugged, but maybe my father saw in her eyes, through her white veil, that my mother was hoping to be rescued from the scenario she imagined was her future.
'We were nice to each other, that first time, I remember that,' Mother told us. 'We were both alone in a new place and we knew things about each other nobody else knew.' In those days, I imagine, that was intimate enough.
'There wasn't any intimacy, in those days,' Franny said once. 'Even lovers wouldn't fart in front of each other.'
And Franny was forceful -- I frequently believed her. Even Franny's language was ahead of her time -- as if she always knew where she was going; and I would never quite catch up to her.
That first evening at the Arbuthnot there was the staff band playing its imitation of the big-band sound, but there were very few guests, and even fewer dancers; the season was just beginning, and it begins slowly in Maine -- it's so cold there, even in the summer. The dance hall had a deck of hard-shined wood that seemed to extend beyond the open porches that overlooked the ocean. When it rained, they had to drop awnings over the porches because the ballroom was so open, on all sides, that the rain washed in and wet the polished dance floor.
That first evening, as a special treat to the staff -- and because there were so few guests, and most of them had gone to bed, to get warm -- the band played late. My father and mother, and the other help, were invited to dance for an hour or more. My mother always remembered that the ballroom chandelier was broken -- it blinked di
mly; uneven spots of colour dappled the dance floor, which looked so soft and glossy in the ailing light that the floor appeared to have the texture of a candle.
'I'm glad someone I know is here,' my mother whispered to my father, who had rather formally asked her to dance and danced with her very stiffly.
'But you don't know me,' Father said.
'I said that,' Father told us, 'so that your mother would shrug again.' And when she shrugged, thinking him impossibly difficult to talk to -- and perhaps superior -- my father was convinced that his attraction to her was not a fluke.
'But I want you to know me,' he told her, 'and I want to know you.'
('Yuck,' Franny always said, at this point in the story.)
The sound of an engine was drowning out the band, and many of the dancers left the floor to see what the commotion was. My mother was grateful for the interruption: she couldn't think of what to say to Father. They walked, not holding hands, to the porch that faced the docks; they saw, under the dock lights swaying on the overhead wires, a lobster boat putting out to sea. The boat had just deposited on the dock a dark motorcycle, which was now roaring -- revving itself, perhaps to free its tubes and pipes of the damp salt air. Its rider seemed intent on getting the noise right before he put the machine in gear. The motorcycle had a sidecar attached, and in it sat a dark figure, hulking and still, like a man made awkward by too many clothes.
'It's Freud,' someone on the staff said. And other, older members of the staff cried out, 'Yes! It's Freud! It's Freud and State o' Maine!'
My mother and father both thought that 'State o' Maine' was the name of the motorcycle. But then the band stopped playing, seeing its audience was gone, and some of the band members, too, joined the dancers on the porch.
'Freud!' people yelled.
My father always told us he was amused to imagine that the Freud would any moment motor over beneath the porch and, in the high-strung lights lining the perfect gravel driveway, introduce himself to the staff. So here comes Sigmund Freud, Father thought: he was falling in love, so anything was possible.
But this was not that Freud, of course; it was the year when that Freud died. This Freud was a Viennese Jew with a limp and an unpronounceable name, who in the summers since he had been working at the Arbuthnot {since 1933, when he'd left his native Austria) had earned the name Freud for his abilities to soothe the distress of the staff and guests alike; he was an entertainer, and since he came from Vienna and was a Jew, 'Freud' seemed only natural to some of the odd, foreign wits at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. The name seemed especially appropriate when, in 1937, Freud arrived for the summer on a new Indian motorcycle with a sidecar he'd made all by himself.
'Who gets to ride behind and who gets to ride in the sidecar, Freud?' the working girls at the hotel teased him -- because he was so frightfully scarred and ugly with pockmarks ('holes from the boils!' he called them) that no woman would ever love him.
'Nobody rides with me but State o' Maine,' Freud said, and he unsnapped the canvas canopy from the sidecar. In the sidecar sat a bear, black as exhaust, thicker with muscles than Iowa Bob, warier than any stray dog. Freud had retrieved this bear from a logging camp in the north of the state and had convinced the management of the Arbuthnot that he could train the beast to entertain the guests. Freud, when he emigrated from Austria, had arrived in Boothbay Harbor, by boat, from New York, with two job descriptions in capital letters on his work papers: EXPERIENCE AS ANIMAL TRAINER AND KEEPER; GOOD MECHANICAL APTITUDE. There being no animals available, he fixed the vehicles at the Arbuthnot and properly put them to rest for the non-tourist months, when he travelled to the logging camps and the paper mills as a mechanic.
All that time, he later told my father, he'd been looking for a bear. Bears, Freud said, were where the money was.
When my father saw the man dismount from the motorcycle under the ballroom porch, he wondered at the cheers from the veteran members of the staff; when Freud helped the figure from the sidecar, my mother's first thought was that the passenger was an old, old woman -- the motorcyclist's mother, perhaps (a stout woman wrapped in a dark blanket).
'State o' Maine!' yelled someone in the band, and blew his horn.
My mother and father saw the bear begin to dance. He danced away from Freud on his hind legs; he dropped to all fours and did a short lap or two around the motorcycle. Freud stood on the motorcycle and clapped. The bear called State o' Maine began to clap, too. When my mother felt my father take her hand into his -- they were not clapping -- she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.
'You felt that, really?' Franny always asked.
'Everything is relative,' Mother would say. 'But that's what I felt, yes. I felt my life start.'
'Holy cow,' said Frank.
'Was it me or the bear you liked?' Father asked.
'Don't be silly,' Mother said. 'It was the whole thing. It was the start of my life.'
And that line had the same fix-me-to-the-spot quality of Father's line about the bear ('He was too old to be a bear anymore'). I felt rooted to the story when my mother said that this was the start of her life; it was as if I could see Mother's life, like the motorcycle, after long revving, finally chunk into gear and lurch forward.
And what must my father have imagined, reaching for her hand just because a bear was brought by a lobster boat into his life?
'I knew it would be my bear,' Father told us. 'I don't know how.' And perhaps it was this knowledge -- that he saw something that would be his -- that made him reach for my mother, too.
You can see why we children asked so many questions. It is a vague story, the kind parents prefer to tell.
That first night they saw Freud and his bear, my father and mother did not even kiss. When the band broke up, and the help retired to the male and female dormitories -- the slightly less elegant buildings separate from the main hotel -- my father and mother went down to the docks and watched the water. If they talked, they never told us children what they said. There must have been a few classy sailboats there, and even the private piers in Maine were sure to have a lobster boat or two moored off them. There was probably a dinghy, and my father suggested borrowing it for a short row; my mother probably refused. Fort Popham was a ruin, then, and not the tourist attraction it is today; but if there were any lights on the Fort Popham shore, they would have been visible from the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Also, the broad mouth of the Kennebec River, at Bay Point, had a bell buoy and a light, and there might have been a lighthouse on Stage Island as long ago as 1939 -- my father never remembered.
But generally, in those days, it would have been a dark coast, so that when the white sloop sailed toward them -- out of Boston, or New York: out of the southwest and civilization, anyway -- my mother and father must have seen it very clearly and watched it undistracted for the time it took to come alongside the dock. My father caught the mooring line; he always told us he was at the point of panic about what to do with the rope -- tie it up to something or tug it -- when the man in the white dinner jacket, black slacks, and black dress shoes stepped easily off the deck and climbed the ladder up to the dock and took the rope from my father's hands. Effortlessly, the man guided the sloop past the end of the dock before he threw the rope back on board. 'You're free!' he called to the boat, then. My mother and father claimed they saw no sailors on board, but the sloop slipped away, back to the sea -- its yellow lights leaving like sinking glass -- and the man in the dinner jacket turned to my father and said, 'Thanks for the hand. Are you new here?'
'Yes, we both are,' Father said.
The man's perfect clothes were unaffected by his voyage. For so early in the summer he was very tanned, and he offered my mother and father cigarettes from a handsome flat black box. They didn't smoke. 'I'd hoped to catch the last dance,' the man said, 'but the band has retired?'
'Yes,' m
y mother said. At nineteen, my mother and father had never seen anyone quite like this man. 'He had obscene confidence,' my mother told us.
'He had money,' Father said.
'Have Freud and the bear arrived?' the man asked.
'Yes,' Father said. 'And the motorcycle.'
The man in the white dinner jacket smoked hungrily, but neatly, while he looked at the dark hotel; very few rooms were lit, but the outdoor lights strung to illuminate the paths, the hedgerows, and the docks shone on the man's tanned face and made his eyes narrow and were reflected on the black, moving sea. 'Freud's a Jew, you know,' the man said. 'It's a good thing he got out of Europe when he did, you know. Europe's going to be no place for Jews. My broker told me.'
This solemn news must have impressed my father, eager to enter Harvard -- and the world -- and not yet aware that a war would interrupt his plans for a while, the man in the white dinner jacket caused my father to take my mother's hand into his, for the second time that evening, and again she gave equal pressure as they politely waited for the man to finish his cigarette, or say good night, or go on.
But all he said was, 'And the world's going to be no place for bears!' His teeth were as white as his dinner jacket when he laughed, and with the wind my father and mother didn't hear the hiss of his cigarette entering the ocean -- or the sloop coming alongside again. Suddenly the man stepped to the ladder, and only when he slipped quickly down the rungs did Mary Bates and Win Berry realize that the white sloop was gliding under the, ladder and the man was perfectly in time to drop to its deck. No rope passed bands. The sloop, not under sail but chugging slowly under other power, turned southwest (toward Boston, or New York, again) -- unafraid of night travel -- and what the man in the white dinner jacket last called to them was lost in the sputter of the engine, the slap of the hull on the sea, and the wind that blew the gulls by (like party hats, with feathers, bobbing in the water after drunks had thrown them there). All his life my father wished he'd heard what the man had to say.
