by James Dodson
“Why’d locals come to the camp? To mock their German captives?”
“Goodness, no. They were starving and freezing to death. It was almost winter. A lot of them were farmers who’d lost everything. I remember one man who showed up with his little girl one morning in late November. He was barefoot, if you can imagine. I gave him some German army boots and some sweaters and jackets. I may have even given him a rifle and ammunition to hunt rabbits with in the forest. He was so grateful. A few days later, he showed up with another child, a boy slightly older. I gave him more boots and clothes. I wish I could remember his name….”
Dad thought for a moment. “He came back several times. He had six children. One day he brought me a giant mushroom he’d grown beneath his house. I remember how proud he was of it—how much he wanted me to have it. He said it would make an excellent omelet. We didn’t have any eggs, so I had a cook named Walter slice it up and fry it. It was delicious. Our cooks had been German army cooks. Walter was just eighteen. He used to look after my apartment. Nice kid. Said he wanted to be a chef at the Paris Ritz someday. Had a wallet full of family pictures. His favorite thing was to read palms. He used to read my palm and tell me the same thing. He told me I would someday be very wealthy.”
Dad smiled at the memory. “Fortunately he cooked better than he read palms.”
“Wasn’t that against military regulations, giving boots and stuff away to civilians?” I asked.
“Sure it was. They could court-martial you for that offense. Nobody really cared, though. The captain was with his girlfriend. Paris was liberated. I used to drive there in a jeep on weekends, parking behind the Opéra, and walk around the city. What a place it was. Everybody wanted the war to be over—everybody except maybe Krauss.”
“What happened to him?”
Dad sighed. “I gave him to the Belgians.”
“Really? Why?”
“As I said, Krauss and I had this thing going. He tried to get my goat by saying that Americans were weak people—too sentimental for our own good. That would be America’s downfall. He never put a cork in it and always gave the Nazi salute. I finally told him if he gave me another Nazi salute, he would have to do it with his feet because his arms would be in plaster casts. His real gripe, though, was with Walter—the kid who kept my apartment. One day Krauss used a forklift to crush Walter to death against a wall. He thought nobody saw him do it. But his own soldiers turned him in. I personally marched the bastard to the town jail with a machine gun at his back. If he’d said anything, I might well have shot him right there. The captain, as usual, wanted nothing to do with the matter. He was having a good time elsewhere. It just so happened that we had some Belgian underground fighters passing through on the way back to their country. I gave Krauss to them.”
“A death sentence?”
“Probably.”
“Did you regret it?”
“I’ve spent years wondering.”
A large, cheerful waitress brought our steaks. She had a mountain of red hair piled on her head and gaps between her teeth, a Scottish Wife of Bath. “You two must be Americans,” she insisted. “Americans always order the steak. Who’s pink and who’s black?”
When she was gone, I said: “Something’s just occurred to me. I’ll bet you got your palm-reading thing from Walter.”
One of Opti’s oldest party tricks was to read palms.
Dad set his fork aside and sipped his cognac. He nodded. “You may be right. I never really thought about it until now.”
“I’ll tell you something else you never thought about. You never read my fortune,” I said. “Wrong gender, I guess.”
“I guess.” He ate some more of his steak and then said, “Give me your hand.”
I stuck out my hand, palm up.
He was always adept at reading the palms of attractive women. He told them outrageously positive things—You are deeply admired for your great beauty and loving intuition; I see an extraordinary career in public service blossoming in the very near future, perhaps an ambassadorship or a successful run for the United States Senate; I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more intriguing lifeline—have you ever been to Khartoum during the rainy season?
He studied my palm, continuing to nip at his cognac.
“Am I going to be rich?” I asked. “Please don’t tell me I should run for the Senate.”
He shook his head. “This is very interesting.”
“Interesting good or interesting bad?”
“Good and bad. You’re already rich but may not realize it. I see other things.”
“A hole-in-one? A new Chevy Blazer?”
He shook his head. “Those aren’t important. I see some interesting changes coming in your life, some important connections of the heart you will finally make…things you will pass along to your children…your children are your real job, you know.”
“Right, right,” I said impatiently. “How ’bout at least a little ambassadorship to Ireland or a riding lawn mower?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Wife of Bath closing fast from three o’clock.
“He’s telling my fortune,” I explained to her.
“Get on,” she said smartly. “I thought he was proposing. Is he any good at it, the fortune-telling bit?”
“He predicted the end of the eighties and the demise of the leisure suit,” I assured her. “Even before they happened.”
“Brilliant. Would you care to do mine, love?”
“Delighted,” Opti said, releasing my hand like a stone.
Her name was Beth. He told Beth of Bath she was going to have a long life, several gorgeous children, and a nice house by the sea and possibly would win some kind of big contest involving Border collies. “Good heavens, I have two Border collies!” Beth shrieked deliriously and went away to fetch our dessert puddings as if she’d just won the Scottish National Dog Trials.
“You sure know how to warm a big bonny lassie’s heart,” I said to him.
“That’s my job,” Opti said, with a wink.
—
The next morning, we drove over to the nearby village of Elie and played the short but cunning links there, a gently elevated seaside course, laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1895, that featured sixteen par-fours and measured just 6,233 yards against a par of 70. In my view, the course is distinguished for two other reasons, though. First, the links at Elie has never been closed in its entire history.
Second, because the first hole is a blind tee shot over a steep hill, play cannot proceed from the first tee until a little man pops out of a shed that features a submarine periscope on top and announces, “Please play away, gentlemen.” The periscope is used to make sure the forward grouping is safely out of cannon range. Except for the first and finishing holes, the sea is always in view at beautiful Elie.
The village was also the birthplace of James Braid, he of Muirfield hooking fame, the local-boy-done-good who won five Open championships and later built some of the finest golf courses in Britain. Almost as important to the social development of Scotland, Elie was where my mother-in-law used to spend summer fortnights as a child while her papa played golf.
The day was kind to us at Elie. The sea air heated up nicely, and Dad limped around to a highly respectable 91 while I, attempting to stay put in NATO, managed 78 and seemed to be finding a respectable game. We played with a local baker named Malcolm who claimed he was visiting only to warm up “in private” for his evening men’s league match, up the road at his regular club in Anstruther. Malcolm had the most violent hook swing I’d ever seen, but he got results. He routinely aimed a hundred yards right of every target off the tee, took a windup as big as West Texas, and found the heart of the fairway. It was quite impressive. He also drove two of the shorter par-fours and finished with a smart 75 on his scorecard, then bid us adieu with a muscular handshake, urged us to wander up the road to Anstruther sometime, then hurried off to his elderly Cortina as if he feared his fierce adrenaline rush would leak out like motor oil before h
e reached Anstruther’s first tee.
We drove back to the Scores, and I phoned up the Links Trust and learned that our names had once again failed to make the Old Course teetime list for the next day. There was a message from Bruce the caddy, though, and a phone number.
“This is ridiculous,” I murmured, looking at Bruce’s number, wondering if I shouldn’t just call him and ask him to do something for us and hope my father didn’t find out. I wadded up the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Dad came out of the bathroom, where he was running a tub of water for a bath. He was holding a Bible and the little leather notebook where he jotted down thoughts for his weekly men’s Bible class. He’d been moderator of the class for fifteen years. I broke the news to him that we hadn’t made the ballot once again.
“Well,” he said, not particularly dismayed, “let’s give it another day and see what happens.”
He picked up his fountain pen and headed back to the bath.
“And then what?” I said after him, perhaps a bit sharper than necessary.
He paused and looked at me. “Well, I think after that, if we don’t have any luck, Bo, it may be time for us to move along.”
I said evenly: “You mean go home.”
“Correct. I really think it’s time. I’ve got some things to do.”
“So Islay and Williamwood and France were never part of your plans?” I regret to say that this came out more like an accusation than a question.
“They would have been nice. We’ve had a great time. Let’s give it one more day and keep our fingers crossed.”
He disappeared into the bath, and I went out for a walk, and after a hike up to the remains of the town’s old cathedral, where both Tom Morrises are buried, I found myself standing above the stone steps leading down to the first tee at the Old Course, enviously watching the final players of the day tee off I wondered if the players were legal because the starter’s shed was empty and locked tight. Other players were visible out on the course, but darkness was perhaps only an hour or so away. The wind had been blowing all afternoon, pushing ragged gray clouds across the streaky autumn sky. The sleeves of my windbreaker flapped sharply in the wind. The two players were wearing knitted ski caps. I watched them tee up and hit their drives and hoist their bags and march off to battle as long as the light permitted. I stood there feeling more than a little sorry for myself. Sulking the way I used to do when I was thirteen. We’d come all this way, I told myself, for nought.
Just then a voice behind me remarked: “I’m told golf has been played out there for almost five hundred years and that by law anyone is basically entitled to walk these public grounds.”
My father was standing behind me dressed in fresh clothes. His windbreaker was zipped to the chin, and his St. Andrews cap tilted jauntily.
“That’s the story they feed the public,” I said. “The truth is, they keep a goon squad handy to remove any violators who haven’t paid a proper green fee. They make the goon squads of Brazil look like rank beginners.”
He gazed out at the old linksland. “Want to risk it? I thought I would at least take a stroll around the Old Course, just to see if the place has held up without me.”
“I guess so. Sure.”
By the time we reached the first hole, where the two players had just finished, the winds had slackened off a bit and the clouds had peeled back toward the neighboring village of Leuchar to permit a few rays of the sun to spill across bay and linksland. Ahead of us, I saw holes where nobody was even playing—the wind or the cold had driven them off.
It’s said you can really only see the glories of the Old Course at sunset, when shadows reveal the character of a piece of ground that has influenced the thinking of more golf course architects than any other place on earth. The first time Pete Dye played it during the 1965 British Amateur, he labeled the Old Course a “cow pasture”—only to play it twice more and come away convinced it was the greatest golf course in creation.
The Old Course was built by no man, shaped only a bit by Old Tom Morris and others, and it therefore abounds in eccentricity: massive double greens, crisscrossing fairways, target lines that seem to shift with the ever-shifting sea winds or don’t exist at all. You aim for distant church steeples, nubs of fairway, eruptions of gorse. The dangers are mostly hidden from view. Caddies will tell you that the smart play on the outward leg is to the right—that approach gives you the best angle to the greens—but conversely all the decent bailout room is to the left, wryly favoring the man who hooks the ball. The Old Course has 112 bunkers, many of which are so well disguised and lethal that they have ominous monikers—Principal’s Nose, Coffin, Grave, Hell. As a result of these factors and the ever-present blowing wind, you proceed cautiously and learn to play the Old Course perhaps more than any course on earth, your respect deepening with each circuit. “You have to study it,” Bobby Jones advised. “And the more you study, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you study.”
We walked slowly all the way out to the Eden estuary, careful to keep well shy of greens and fairways where players were engaged, and eventually came to the eleventh green, the 172-yard par-three called High Hole, one of the most dangerous holes in all of golf, where Jones began to learn this lesson the hard way as a young man during his first Open championship in 1921. He took 43 on the outward nine and bunkered his tee ball in fearsome Strath bunker by the eleventh green. He finished with a triple bogey, ripped up his card, and stalked off the course. The incident, though, had a transformative effect on Jones. He was so thoroughly ashamed of himself for quitting, he vowed to set the highest standard of sportsmanship for the rest of his career.
Since nobody was near the hole, my father and I stepped up to the tee. I explained to my father that the hole always caused me all sorts of grief. Strath bunker had caught my ball several times, and the green looked indecently puny with the Eden estuary spreading out behind it. Moreover, the wind usually came straight off the water, knocking anywhere from two to three lengths off your club. I’d tried everything from a six-iron to a two-iron at High Hole and almost always came away feeling low.
“Try it now,” Dad said. “The wind is down.”
I smiled at him. “I don’t have a club.”
“By all means,” he replied, “use one of mine.” He handed me an imaginary golf club.
It was another of Opti’s little exercises.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What do you think you’ll need?”
I looked at the hole. “Four-iron flush.”
“It’s a four then. Hit it flush.”
I took my stance and made a swing, finishing with my hands held high, as Jones used to do in his prime.
“That’s the way,” Dad said soothingly. “Think that little darling has a chance to go in the hole?”
“Not a chance,” I said, and explained about my Hole-in-None Society plans.
“Oh, well,” he replied mildly, “that makes two of us. Maybe I can join.”
He motioned me to vacate the tee. A trio of fast-moving players who looked like local teenagers were closing from the tenth green. We walked off the tee and started to cut across the empty twelfth.
“I never knew you never scored an ace,” I said. “Considering how well you play your irons, I guess I naturally assumed you had an ace—probably several.”
He said, “Oh, I came close a few times. It just never seemed to be my moment. After a while I just quit worrying about it and accepted what the game gave me. That’s the key to a good round of golf, you know—let it happen. Besides, if you don’t have an ace, you always have something to look forward to.”
On the way down the side of the twelfth fairway, I told him about Laird Small and Spyglass Hill and the importance of learning to stay in NATO.
“That’s a wonderful story,” he said. “Someday you can pass it along to your kids.”
“Was that what you meant last night when you cut short my palm reading to shamelessly cur
ry favor with the Wife of Bath? You said I would pass something important along.”
“I wasn’t talking about passing along your old Blazer, Sport.”
Dad paused again and touched my arm and nodded at a group on the thirteenth green. Thirty yards to the left, a tall guy was anguishing over a five-foot putt on one of the Old Course’s famous double greens. He stroked the putt, and it went in the hole, causing a portly man behind him to let out a modest little war whoop. They slapped hands like NBA warriors, retiring from the green. We followed them at a discreet distance to the par-five fourteenth and watched them tee off toward the church steeple in the town, hoping to avoid the out-of-bounds on the right and the infamous cluster of pot bunkers called the Beardies on the left. All four players found the safe landing area called Elysian Fields and hurried off at a brisk pace toward their balls, racing the darkness home.
As we stood there watching them, a plane flew low overhead. It was an old-fashioned biplane, the kind often used for aerial photography. I wondered if someone was taking pictures for the upcoming Open. Pictures you see of the Old Course are almost always taken at sunrise or sunset. It reminded me of the day all those years ago when a plane had flown over us at Green Valley, prompting Dad to mention Saint-Exupéry and opening a brand-new world to me.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Why did you give up flying?”
This was something else I’d never thought to ask my father. Why was that? Flying had been his first love, but something had made him give it up, and I was embarrassed to say I didn’t know what it was.
He smiled and shoved his hands into his windbreaker.
“Cold?”
“A bit,” he admitted. We started to walk down the fourteenth fairway. The foursome were now well ahead of us.
“It’s a funny story. Or maybe it’s not so funny. I almost killed myself and your brother.”
“You’re joking.” It seemed to be an evening for revelations.
