by James Dodson
By the end of our first eighteen, I’d managed to climb back to within one hole of squaring the match. Dad suggested another circuit, so we started again.
I reminded him that my first golf lesson had been on a putting green with him when I was about six or seven. I couldn’t remember where the lesson had taken place, but I could recall some of what my father had told me because he told me the same thing for a year. “First get your balance, because golf is a game of balance. Then try and keep your head still. Lead with your left hand, and PLK.”
“What?”
“PLK. That stands for putt like a kid. That’s what you told me. ‘Remember,’ you’d say, ‘lead with the left hand, and putt like a kid.’ ”
He smiled. “I think I remember saying something like that. God knows where I picked it up.”
“Actually, I think you were on to something. I never knew what you meant, but I think I do now.”
“What do you think I meant?”
“Kids are fearless putters. Just watch ’em. They’re about as un-mechanical as you can get. They set up, aim, and pull the trigger without a lot of second-guessing and body tension.” I told him about Maggie’s emerging putting prowess. She seemed to think the object was to move the hole back a foot or two. “She’s not the least bit shy about it. Loves to bang it at the hole. Leads with the left, putts like a kid. Wish I could putt half as well as her,” I admitted.
“Interesting theory. I wasn’t aware you’re afraid of putting.”
“Utterly terrified,” I said, lining up a three-footer for my two-par. “In my little golf group, it’s the running gag. They’d rather see me three feet than thirty feet from the hole.”
“Hold it right there,” Dad said. “Step back.”
I stopped, looking up at him. “What?”
“Let’s see you set up again, and this time”—a smile crept across his face—“let’s see you lead with your left and putt like Maggie.”
I told him I didn’t think I could do it. For one thing, I’d have to have a mouth full of bubble gum. For another, I’d spent years trying to banish the “wrist” from my stroke and learn to putt like a machine.
“Are you a putting machine?”
“More of a putting fool.”
“Why not try to putt like a kid, then.”
I shrugged and took a deep breath. I walked away from the ball and came back, got my balance, set up, took one look at the hole. I putted with the wristy old style of my childhood. The ball clattered into the cup.
“How ’bout that,” Dad said with a grin.
“Even I get lucky.”
He shut me out at the thirty-second hole, five up with four to play, the usual rout. Tom Neek and his kids were long gone. The sun was going home from Hyde Park, too, and the guy with the nose ring and strange reading tastes was padlocking up his booth.
We walked to Alexandra Gate to hail a taxi.
“Well, you won,” I said. “I’m buying dinner. Where shall we go?”
“How about Rules?” Dad proposed as a black taxi separated from the sea of whizzing cars and pulled over. “I haven’t been there in at least half a century.”
—
I was glad he chose Rules. Rules of Covent Garden, London’s oldest restaurant, had significance to us both. On leave during the war, my father thought he saw novelist Graham Greene dining with friends at Rules and almost asked him for his autograph.
He told me this story again as we settled over beers at the bar. It was still early at Rules, and waiters were setting up for the dinner trade. The restaurant has a cozy Victorian feel, lots of brass fixtures, signed photos of famous patrons on the wall, and small linen-clothed tables pushed tightly together. We were early, the only dinner customers in the place as yet.
“Thank God I didn’t go over and disturb the man. I wasn’t even certain it was Graham Greene. Someone only said that it was him because he always ate at Rules. I think Greene had been in Sierra Leone prior to 1943, but I guess it could have been him.”
“Why didn’t you go find out?” I knew the answer to the question, but considering the setting, I wanted to hear the tale all over again. I sipped the yeasty head off my Old Peculiar.
“My group was, how shall I put it—a bit rambunctious.”
“Drunken?” I helped him.
“And a bit disorderly. That’s what happens, I’m afraid, when you give five American sergeants real English folding money and a week’s leave and point them generally in the direction of a large city.”
“How skunked were you?”
“Still sober enough not to want to make a horse’s ass of myself in case it wasn’t him—or maybe worse, really was him. American GIs weren’t all that popular in some places in Britain, for good reason. I knew guys who did nothing but gripe about English food or the weather or the toilets. I’m no prude, but the language could get really raw from these idiots. They didn’t disguise the fact that they thought Britons were damned lucky to have the American cavalry saving their skins.”
“How’d you pick Rules? Had you read Graham Greene?”
“Nope. I wasn’t that literary, I’m afraid. Some fella selling newspapers at Victoria Station told us the classy good-looking girls went to Rules. A big Dutchman named Culp came back from the bar and said a man seated at a table in the back was Graham Greene. Culp was a big ape from Pennsylvania. He was always trying to get me into trouble. He said as the only college boy in the crowd, I ought to go over and introduce myself to the famous novelist. I was tempted to do it, but luckily I thought better of it. Hell, I’d never even read one of Greene’s books.”
“Did you ever?” I asked.
“Just the one I gave you.”
The book he gave me in 1969 was Travels with My Aunt, one of Greene’s later novels and perhaps his most charming tale. In it, a stodgy unmarried bank manager named Henry Pulling is yanked by fate from his humdrum dahlia-growing existence by his bawdy Aunt Augusta and dragged on the adventure of a lifetime. A typical Greenesque transformation of the character occurs: While racing from one exotic setting to another (from Paris to Istanbul to Paraguay), Pulling, confronted by a cast of rogues and dangers both imaginary and real, is forced to confront the ghosts of his own past. In the process, he discovers for the first time what it means to really be alive. A long life is not a question of years, Aunt Augusta lectures her reluctant traveling companion at one point. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.
My father had had a long life, no doubt, because he had the kind of rich memories Aunt Augusta would have found appealing and necessary for a rewarding passage. I had memories, too. By the time I arrived in London on my strange nongolfing golf pilgrimage after Kristin’s death, I’d read every book Graham Greene had written. His romantically sad protagonists—drunken priests, lonely foreign diplomats, businessmen reluctantly made spies in service to Queen and country—and his theme of redemptive loss greatly interested me. I didn’t want to know Graham Greene so much as be him. Absurdly, I’d even written him a fan letter—my first and last—addressed via the Times where Greene had worked thirty years before as a subeditor. I suppose I hoped some kindly soul would pass the letter along and the great man would agree to see me.
On one of my first nights in London, I set out to try and find him. I knew, thanks to my father, that the writer was a habitué of Rules. The most seductive love scene in all literature, in my view, takes place at Rules in Greene’s book The End of the Affair, his famous précis on the eternal war between agape and eros, when Bendrix, the world-weary writer, falls for Sarah, his friend’s wife, over a plate of steak and onions—a scene that apparently gave British censors a few sleepless nights when it first appeared in the mid-1950s.
Fortunately for Graham Greene, he wasn’t at Rules the night I went there looking for him. He probably hadn’t been in the place for years. But I certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to ask him for his autograph—finishing what my father h
ad started thirty years before.
I told my father this sad little story as we had our beers, and he made me feel better by smiling. “I don’t think you were really looking for Graham Greene,” he said. “I think you were really looking for yourself.” He paused, then added: “That was a pretty difficult time you were going through. I can see why you found Graham Greene so appealing.”
I turned my pint slowly on the cardboard coaster, noting how the condensation made a perfect circle on it. After he accompanied me to Kristin’s funeral, we never talked about her death again.
“Did you know it’s been twenty years since Kristin died?” I said. “It occurred to me on the flight over.”
“Good heavens. Has it been that long? I had no idea.” He fell silent.
“The strange thing is, it doesn’t feel that long ago. It feels like it happened…I don’t know…”
“She was a marvelous girl,” he said.
“Funny how we never talked about it afterward,” I reminded him.
“I thought if you wanted to talk, we would talk.”
“I wouldn’t have known what I wanted to say.”
“Do you now?”
I looked at my father and smiled slightly. “I don’t know. I guess life doesn’t seem to make any more sense than a Graham Greene novel. Life is probably much tougher than art.”
“It certainly separates us—life, I mean.”
“The way I separated you from a thousand dollars.”
“How’s that?”
“That was the emergency money you gave me at the airport,” I reminded him. “I used it to come over here and mope my way through the glorious capitals of Europe like a poster child for post-Woodstock depression. I hung out with Bulgarian exchange students who reeked of garlic, and lost my favorite golf bag—that was the trip’s only major highlight. Somewhere in France right this minute is the kid of a reformed train thief using a very nice old Byron Nelson MacGregor driver to dispatch woodchucks in his papa’s vineyard. I loved that club. Talk about a waste.”
“With all due respect, Sport, I disagree.”
I searched his eyes, waiting for him to explain.
“I don’t think it was a waste at all. On the contrary, I think you learned something very valuable.”
“Right. I learned I wasn’t Graham Greene. He seemed to go out of his way in a country of just forty million people to avoid me. I guess I can’t really blame him. I made his characters look downright jolly.”
Dad ignored me. “Grief is powerful stuff. Especially when you don’t let it go. I forget who said the dead are the lucky ones because they don’t have to grieve. It may even have been your friend Mr. Greene.”
Before I could say more about this, a waiter appeared. He led us in to dinner, seating us at a table by the window. We ordered fresh beers and game hens, and my father excused himself to go phone my mother, to remind her, he said, that tomorrow was garbage collection day.
My parents had been married fifty-three years and were obviously devoted to each other. My father took care of most of the external duties of domestic life. He earned the money, paid the bills, kept the house in good working order, saw to the yard maintenance, even did the lion’s share of the grocery shopping and some of the weekday cooking. My mother handled the social duties and the decorating, kept up on neighborhood gossip and both their complicated medical routines, talked on the phone, volunteered at the church soup kitchen, and occasionally produced very good meals.
I knew he worried about her a great deal. She suffered from a painful lung condition that caused her to be hooked up to a lung medicating device for an hour or so each day. Though otherwise fit and even pretty agile for an aging beauty queen knocking toward the end of her eighth decade, the mental image of her seated at the den counter doing her “treatments” while The Young and The Restless blared mindlessly from the television set was the governing, and most troubling, image in my mind. I sometimes wondered how she would possibly cope with the exigencies of life when my father was gone. I knew he had recently been teaching her how to properly keep up with the checkbook, pay bills, and replace blown fuses. Other seminars on car maintenance, Social Security, insurance, and income taxes were apparently scheduled soon to follow.
My father came back with a little smile on his face.
“Everything okay back at Camp Jan?”
“Fine.” He took a seat, tucking the napkin over his knees again. “It’s just your mother never ceases to amaze me. She can get worked up over the smallest things.”
I asked what she was worked up over this time. Last time I spoke with her, she was worked up over me taking my father to Britain.
“Well, she was over at the shopping center a couple weeks ago, and a woman came up to her and told her something about her husband being in jail and her needing to borrow some money in order to get to Florida. Your mother drove her to the bank and took out some money, then drove her to the bus station. She never heard from the woman again, and the Greensboro police just told her she was the fourth person that week to be hit by the scam. She feels pretty bad.”
“How much money was it?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
I pretended to strangle on my beer, wiped my mouth, and said, “I’d feel bad, too.”
“Why?”
“Why? Give me a moment, and I’ll give you ten thousand reasons why. She was basically robbed.”
“I suppose that’s true. Another way of looking at it, though, is that the woman, whoever she is, may actually be on the level and planning to return the money, and even if she isn’t, well, at least your mother wasn’t injured. That’s the important thing. Besides, maybe the woman will do something good with the money. Who knows? I told your mother to forget it, just to let it go. But you know your mother. She can’t.”
“I frankly don’t think I could, either.”
“That doesn’t come as a particular shock to me.”
“Really?”
“You’re like her in many ways. She’s feisty and so are you. She’s also the most generous person I ever knew. It didn’t bother her to give that woman ten grand—only that she might have stolen it.”
“It didn’t bother her to try and make me date the daughters of her friends, either,” I pointed out. “I remember one who bore an uncanny resemblance to Charles de Gaulle. She was a congressman’s daughter. Even had the funny little moustache.”
Dad laughed. “You were her baby. She only wanted somebody nice for you.”
“I had Kristin. And I eventually found Alison—all by myself.”
He nodded. “That’s right. You did. We all loved Kristin. I’m glad you found Alison.”
I asked him to finish what he’d started to say at the bar—the bit about my learning something important from that bootless trip to Britain twenty years ago.
He chewed the last piece of his game hen slowly. I could see him thinking this over. Perhaps he was thinking that his answer was important because our first time discussing the subject would also probably be our last.
“You learned your mother and I loved you enough to let you go, and enough to welcome you back. That’s something even more powerful than grief. Everyone needs second chances, new starts, whatever you want to call them. I sometimes think that’s why we like golf so much—every round is like a second chance to finally get it right.”
“I must have been driving you and Mom nuts,” I said.
He laid aside his silverware. A waiter moved toward us with a water pitcher. “As you’re discovering, the hardest job on earth is being a parent. Every child has to grow up. You’ll have to let Maggie and Jack go and trust them to do what is right. That’s the hard part. I think Francis Bacon said a parent’s joys and sorrows are secret—they won’t speak of one, they can’t speak of the other.”
I remained silent, thinking about this. There was a sudden burst of raucous laughter from a table in the back of Rules. London’s oldest restaurant was congested and buzzing now. The check came,
and before I could pay it, Dad had signed the credit card slip and we were walking outside with our coats, angling up the darkened narrow street toward a Covent Garden taxi stand. You could smell the river mud of the Thames drifting on the chill evening air, a sad end-of-summer fragrance. My father stumbled a little bit on the street’s cobblestones. I took his arm.
I started to admit to him that I’d come dangerously close to canceling our golf trip that afternoon, what with all the obstacles facing us and to say nothing of my mother’s immutable fears and my own pesky Greek chorus. But then I remembered once again why we were here, and why we would go on for as long as possible—the golf. My father was already one up on the putting greens, with the real fairways yet to come. Where I and others saw trouble, Opti the Mystic saw only another challenge, a chance to play and solve the problem.
Our dinner conversation reminded me of one last little-known Graham Greene story. It involved the great man’s brief encounter with golf. The end of that affair came quickly.
“Greene, you know, tried to play golf at Balliol College,” I explained to my Dad. “He beaned his caddy on the first swing, and that was all it took. His companion shot his ball through the open window of a passing bus and nearly killed the driver. They threw their clubs down and ran like hell.”
“I’ve had days just like that,” Dad said with a robust laugh. “Unfortunately, not all of them were on the golf course.”
FIVE
The Road to Lytham
Our little Omega was flying through the rain along the M6 motor-way early the next morning, angling toward the Lancashire coast, dodging lorries and motor coaches. The plummy-voiced weather girl on the BBC Radio advised us there would be “periods of heavy downpours in the south and west portions of England this morning, followed by showery breaks this afternoon and more heavy rains this evening.” It wasn’t the golfer’s forecast I’d been hoping for. A suicidal Hungarian composer’s orchestral tribute to mental illness came on. I yawned and switched the station to someone who couldn’t sing who was shouting rock lyrics I couldn’t understand to an audience that probably couldn’t care less. I shut off the radio.
