by James Dodson
We strolled to the mighty seventh and played a one-hole match that I somehow won, and Murdo bought me a delicious mutton dinner in his restaurant, telling me about the golfing exploits of his son Andrew, who was presently working as an assistant to the legendary professional John Stark at Creiff Golf Club, in Perthshire. I asked Murdo if he nurtured hopes of Andrew returning to Islay to take over the Machrie. “To tell the truth, it’s not a hope I hold out too terribly much,” Murdo admitted, reaching down to pet one of the two Jack Russell terriers that were never far from my host’s feet. “Andrew’s a clever and ambitious lad. Kids like him leave Islay and never come back.” He smiled somewhat wistfully, and poured me another finger of a peaty local malt. “Cheers, here’s to your further travels,” he said, lifting his glass.
I took my soggy clothes on to France, rented a car, and drove to Compiegne, checked into a small dark hotel next to the medieval city’s main bridge and the train station where the Germans, I soon learned, in fact deported close to 80,000 French Jews to concentration camps during the war. On my second day in town, I visited Napoleon’s sprawling summer palace and went searching in the vast adjoining royal forest for the beech tree where Dad had once carved my mother’s initials.
“Did you find the tree?” Dad suddenly asked, as he lay on the emergency room bed waiting for the heart specialist to arrive. His eyelids fluttered. For a moment I thought he’d dozed off.
“I think so.”
I explained that I’d found a broad lane vanishing into the yellow forest, but I’d unfortunately discovered thousands of lovers’ initials carved into the skins of the ancient beeches there, decades of declared amour. It had seemed fairly hopeless. After an hour or so of searching, though, I’d come upon what appeared to be JKD and another set of illegible initials encased by a crude heart and the date 1945, halfway up a large leaning beech. I decided this must be it—even if it wasn’t. I opened my Swiss Army knife and carved my own and my wife’s initials and the date below them.
As I worked, an elderly man in a wool topcoat came shuffling down the gravel path. He stopped, leaned on his cane, and watched me finish the carving. He was shabbily elegant: brown felt bowler, cashmere wool scarf, a figure from a Delacroix. He studied my handiwork and made a comment in French that I didn’t understand. I explained to him that my French was very poor. He nodded and smiled with brown broken teeth. “C’est la forêt de l’amour,” he declared, waving his arm expansively. The Forest of Love.
After that, pleased by my discovery, I’d strolled farther into the beautiful forest via the bridle path and walked for well over an hour, enjoying the sights and smells of the blazing autumn woods. After a while, I realized I might be lost and turned up another well-trampled path and walked along till I came to a small creek, a pretty wooden bridge, and a row of bushy poplar trees. I saw a patch of green beyond the trees, and white rail fences. It looked like an old racecourse. I pushed through the limbs and stepped out onto the grass just as I heard a solid metallic thwack and someone shouting angrily in French. I turned and saw two men standing thirty yards away, gesturing furiously at me. They were holding golf clubs. One of them had just fired his tee shot a few yards over my head. I’d stumbled out of the Forest of Love onto the Golf Club of Compiègne.
I apologized as best I could and hurried across the golf course toward a white stucco beamed structure that I assumed was the clubhouse. I walked into the clubhouse and found an attractive middle-aged lady who hadn’t a clue what I was trying to ask her—namely, How long had the golf course been there? Had it been around in my father’s day in Compiegne? Did anyone around perhaps parlez-vous anglais? Could I play it?
“You see Dick,” she said.
“Dick?”
“Yes, Dick.” She bustled away, and a nice-looking chap in a brown sweater came back. His name was Stephane. We shook hands. Stephane was Golf de Compiègne’s Directeur and spoke anglais. I could have kissed him on both cheeks. “You must meet Dick Di Salle,” Stephane said cheerfully. “He is our president sportif. He is American.” He motioned me toward the clubhouse bar with a large smile. “I call. You wait.”
I went into the bar and ordered a Coke and watched the dining room fill up with attractive-looking people from Compiegne. They kept turning their heads to smile at me, so I smiled back. I felt like the stranger in town in a spaghetti western.
Soon a robust-looking gray-haired man rambled in with an attractive woman by his side. “I hear we’ve been invaded by the Americans again,” he said, offering a brisk handshake. Dick Di Salle introduced me to his wife Rolande. We found a table and ordered venison sausage for lunch. I learned Dick and Rolande had met just after the Liberation when Dick, a first lieutenant from Colorado who arrived in France three months after D-Day, helped set up a hospital in nearby Soissons.
I explained that he’d arrived about the same time as my father, and I told the Di Salles about the months my father ran the “prison” camp on the outskirts of town. “I remember the camp,” Dick said, “but I don’t remember your dad. That’s not so surprising, though. There were so many Americans coming and going around here at that time.” For the next hour or so, we talked about the war. Rolande talked about the horrors of the German occupation, and Dick, now a retired hospital administrator, explained how he’d met the love of his life on a tennis court in Soissons and decided to stay put and build a life in France. Rolande had been a champion tennis player, but now the couple also golfed. I asked them about the handsome golf course outside. “Oh, it was here during the war,” Dick said. “You just couldn’t see it. The Germans parked their trucks on it, and the Allies later bombed it.” He said a bunker on the eleventh hole (near the spot where I’d barged onto the course) was in fact the remains of an old American bomb crater.
It was an unexpectedly bountiful day. As I left, the Di Salles urged me to come back again someday with my father or my wife or my children, and Stephane reappeared, smiling and handing me a packet that contained the club history, a visor, and an attractive blazer patch with the official Club de Compiègne emblem. I thanked him and said I would wear it with pride.
The next morning, a dreary rainy Thursday, I played Compiègne’s golf course with the only people who were about, Jean and Michel, ironically the same two blokes whose match I’d interrupted the day before. They turned out to be Gallic versions of American golf nuts and seemed to have entirely forgotten or forgiven my transgression. Only Michel spoke English. He kept complimenting my shirt: “Nice shirt, Jeem.” This was odd because my shirt, per usual, was plain white. Finally, near the end of our round in the rain, I figured out he had been graciously complimenting my shots. I thanked Michel and invited him and Jean to come to my home club in Maine someday. Michel translated this to Jean, who seemed very pleased and said something to Michel, who asked me if Men was anywhere near Pee-ball Beech. I replied that both were at least on the coast. I just forgot to tell them which coasts.
That afternoon I drove to Chantilly, where there was a great château and a famous racetrack and an even better golf course, where the European Open had been played. I played one of the two courses there alone through a fog. Somewhere near the end of the round—I wasn’t playing well or having much fun—I looked at the Seiko and realized it had stopped. Fearing I’d killed yet another watch, I drove into the town proper and found a jeweler named Pagette, who held up the watch and gently shook it, producing a disturbing rattle. Chevy ball bearings seemed to be rolling around inside it.
Gently prying apart the watch at his little table, Monsieur Pagette stared at the innards like a worried surgeon. He finally shook his head and said something I was pretty sure wasn’t “Heck, it was only a dumb ole battery.” He closed up the watch and presented it back to me with a delicate shrug. He murmured something consoling, which his wife Hélène helpfully translated. “He says, um, he cannot, um, comprehend, how this, um, timepiece could, you see, have, um—how you say?—have worked for so many years.” We all stared solemnly at the watch f
or a moment. Then I thanked them and left.
I drove on to Paris and checked in to a small hotel behind the Opéra and walked around the City of Light for a day, thinking about my father and his great affection for the French and their famous river city. After that I met Bertrand Dubeigny, a golf pal of Murdo Macpherson’s, a doctor of tropical diseases who graciously took me to his golf club in the western suburbs of the city and later accompanied me to the Museum of the Grand Army and showed me Napoleon’s tomb and told me about the hardships his family, some of whom served in the Résistance, had endured during the war. We parted on Le Pont Neuf with a firm handshake and a promise to meet and play again sometime. Touchingly, Bertrand gave me some antique postcards from the war era and asked me to give them to my father as a little token of gratitude from the liberated French people. It was a moving gesture, and we actually embraced.
D-Day summer was finally over—but I’d finally finished a pilgrimage the way I’d hoped to. The autumn rains had come. Reunions were breaking up. On my last night in Paris, clear and cold and starry, I sat on a set of wooden bleachers by the Arc de Triomphe and watched a parade of World War II veterans from Britain, France, and America pass in review beneath the arch, elderly men with too-tight uniforms and forgotten medals pinned to their chests, shuffling down the Champs Elysées.
The next morning I flew home.
—
My father was sleeping now, taking very shallow breaths, still holding my hand.
I wasn’t sure how much of this he’d even heard. A nurse appeared, followed by a young doctor with a clipboard, nervously rocking on the balls of his spotless Nikes; a tennis player, I thought. He offered me a listless hand and simultaneously consulted his chart. He scarcely glanced at me and invited me to wait outside while he examined my father.
I was reluctant to go but finally went and sat in the emergency room lobby, where a young woman in running gear was sobbing quietly in the arms of an older woman and a three-hundred-pound man in a NASCAR tank top sat reading Scuba Diver magazine. A television set was playing, sound down, Packers versus Cowboys. I picked up a women’s magazine and opened it to a sneaker ad that assured me: Your childhood isn’t lost, you just misplaced it somewhere.
—
My father did not die, though I had honestly expected him to.
Instead, he pulled off another small resurrection feat. Two weeks later, after a brief restless rest, he went back to work with only a faint slur in his speech, cracking jokes about tippling on the job.
For Christmas, he took my mother to the Grove Park Inn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old Smoky Mountain haunt. He asked us not to come to Greensboro for the holidays because he wanted a “quieter” holiday with his wife. Our evening phone call once caught them breathless. They’d been hoofing to Benny Goodman in the den while Molly the dog chaperoned from Dad’s favorite armchair. They spoke of taking drives up to the Blue Ridge, of rising early to visit the farmer’s market. They behaved like two people caught up in the first blush of courtship.
My father went to Florida for his annual winter sales meeting. The meeting was a success. His territory, as usual, was one of the top earners in the country. We spoke on the phone—I was in California doing interviews at a tournament site—and he was ebullient, predicting the new year would be his best ever. He was already a sales legend in his company, but like Macbeth he had plans to expire in harness.
Two days later, my brother reached me on the West Coast to say Dad had come home from the Florida meeting and gone straight into the hospital. I flew east to pick up my daughter at her ballet lesson, then packed a larger bag and flew south to be with him.
Steve Blieveneick, my father’s longtime friend and surgeon, asked me to step out of the hospital room. Steve was a big burly Catholic, a brilliant cancer specialist, a poor golfer but an avid outdoorsman. He placed the X-ray on the illuminated panel and asked me to take a look. As I stared at it, he said, “I’ve almost never seen anyone with cancer so pervasive. It’s everywhere. His pelvis. Intestines. Liver. His back. I don’t have a clue how he’s gone on this long. The man should have been dead months ago. Your father astounds me.”
He turned off the panel light and looked at me straight in the eyes.
“These things are mysterious. We’re in God’s realm now. The medical establishment is basically helpless at this point. Your dad’s a racehorse. When he decides it’s time to go, I have a hunch he’ll go the way he lived—no complaints, no questions. I’d like you to be there.”
I assured him a stable of racehorses couldn’t drag me away.
“Good.”
An ambulance brought Dad home from the hospital. We set him up in a special bed in my old room. A large black woman from the local hospice came to help us learn to take care of him. With the assistance of another hospice technician named Colin, I became my father’s live-in nurse, chief medicator, changer of bed linens, bather, feeder, and head porter—maneuvering his wheelchair slowly through the narrow hallway and kitchen and den, the traffic cop of his vastly diminished universe. My mother stood back, a hand to her throat, a face holding back tears, helpless to do anything more than watch and wait for his requests for meals—requests that were rapidly diminishing.
Together, my brother and I became Dad’s late-night companions. Little by little his days and nights turned inside out, and ours went with them, a phenomenon the people at the hospice call sun-downing.
Montaigne had wanted death to find him planting cabbages. With Dad, we became couch potatoes and watched the NCAA basketball season drawing to a close, players executing brilliant baseline pivots and jump-shots as we moved from prime time into the long, eerie late-nights of cable TV. The UNC Tarheels were playing tough. Dad, turning grayer by the day, was pleased.
My mother, who moved quietly around the periphery of this vigil, suggested that I get out of the house—go play golf with my childhood buddy Pat or attend a movie. I went out and drove aimlessly around Greensboro in Old Blue. There were so many new streets that I didn’t know now, gourmet coffee bars, a rush hour that was staggering. Where, I wondered, had all these people come from?
I drove out to Bryan Park, the city’s fine public golf facility, but I didn’t want to play golf. I walked over and found a large man sitting in the starter’s cart. He was wrapped in a blue windbreaker, sucking on a smoldering stogie. Once again, I introduced myself to Aubrey Apple and asked if he remembered me.
“Oh shit, yeah,” he said, squinting at me. “You write about golf. How the hell’s your daddy?” Yo deddy.
I told him my father was dying. Aubrey shook his head and said he was sorry to hear that. He told me they didn’t make gentlemen like my father anymore. I thanked him. I also asked him how he liked being the club’s starter, prompting him to snap, “Well, it ain’t like being the pro.” We reminisced for a little while longer about Green Valley and people we knew from those days, and then I explained I had to go. We shook hands, and Aubrey plugged his stogie back into its socket and slouched back into his cart.
It was already getting dark. I went to a movie, though I don’t remember its name or what the film was about. The night was unusually warm, with a hint of early spring in the air. Afterward, I drove to Green Valley Parkway and parked Old Blue on the shoulder. I got out and looked around. In the moonlight, you could still see the remains of the old golf course. I was standing in the middle of the third fairway, my favorite hole. I walked up the knoll where I always aimed my tee shot and stood awhile. A car pulled up behind Old Blue, a white security cruiser. A rent-a-cop, hitching up his pants, walked slowly up the hill. He said good evening and asked what I was doing.
I said I was looking for something I’d lost.
“What’s that?” He wiggled a toothpick in his teeth.
“You’ll laugh,” I said. “A golf course.”
He laughed as if he didn’t believe me and said I would have to move along because I was loitering on private property.
“A couple times I got h
ome from here in two,” I said, indicating the land falling away toward the far trees, where the green used to be tucked.
“You what?”
“I reached the green in two. You have no idea what a thrill that was.”
His voice grew sterner. “Look. I’m going to have to insist you move along, or I’ll have to call the Greensboro police.”
“No problem,” I said, and left.
The next day I drove out of town to do a bit of work. It had been three weeks since I last worked on anything, and I was relieved to steer Old Blue four hours to the east to Wilmington, where I sat down with Ike Grainger, the famous USGA rules official. Grainger had just turned one hundred years old and my piece on him—a man who had made some of the most critical rulings in many of the biggest matches in the history of the game—was for the centennial edition program of the U.S. Open, which was to be held at Shinnecock Hills in June.
Later that night, as Dad and I sat watching the conference semifinals of a basketball tournament from some arena out West, I told him some of what Grainger and I had discussed—how the rule of equity is the heart and soul of golf, how whenever there’s no formal rule to cover a situation or dispute, you must try and do what’s most fair—and said how much Grainger’s love of the game had reminded me of his. I also told my father I wished he could accompany me to Shinnecock.
“Maybe I’ll get out of this contraption and we’ll go,” he said quietly, thumping the arm of the wheelchair. I said I’d be pleased to arrange the passes.
“I’m sorry for so much trouble,” he added, coughing dryly, shifting uneasily in his chair.
“It’s no trouble, Dad.”
“You’ll just never know how much I loved you all.”
“We love you, too.” My mother had quietly appeared in the kitchen doorway, dressed in her quilted bathrobe, the overhead light shining behind her, fingers to her throat. She was helpless to do anything but wait. My father didn’t see her. She was crying. She turned and went back to bed.
