Bliss, Remembered

by Frank Deford

  “No, I didn’t mean to chastise you, Teddy. It wasn’t a test of your love. We remember the days when people were born, not when they die, and that’s the way it should be.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it’s been seven years,” I said.

  “I know. Once you’re gone, it’s amazing how fast everything moves on. You miss a lot very quickly when you die.”

  I had to chuckle. “I never quite thought about it that way.”

  “Well, I’m dying, so it occurred to me.” She rose from the table. “But, of course, I’d rather remember all the wonderful things your father and I shared. You remember, I dragged him to the Olympics in Los Angeles in ’84.”

  “He liked it, didn’t he?”

  “Oh yes, but I made him sit through all the swimming. He would’ve preferred a more varied fare.”

  “Well, Daddy was always very agreeable.”

  “Yes, indeed he was. He was the sweetest husband a woman could ever want.”

  “Sweetest father, too,” I added. And for just a moment, I thought Mom might cry, but she kissed me on the forehead and moved on with dispatch, snapping up the car keys. As she approached the door, though, she suddenly swung around and looked directly at me. “How much do you think you could do for love?”

  That came right out of the blue, and I was completely taken aback. “You mean me in particular?”

  “Well, anybody.”

  “What in the world made you ask that, Mom?”

  “It just occurred to me.”

  “It’s awfully hypothetical.”

  “So that’s your escape clause?”

  “Well, all right. People have made the supreme sacrifice for love. They’ve died to save someone they love. That’s the answer, isn’t it?” I was still rather puzzled by the whole exchange.

  “Yes, I suppose. Or if we do something completely out of character—” She paused. “Even something illegal . . . We do that to help someone we love, maybe that’s an even greater sacrifice.”

  “A greater sacrifice than dying?”

  “Under some circumstances, I think.”

  “You have anything particular in mind?”

  She shook her head. “Well, Teddy, let’s just say: not right now.”

  “Okay, Mom, I’m sorry, but I just never really gave the subject much thought. You have a habit, you know, of springing things on people.”

  “Well, keep it in mind, and we can talk about it some other time.”

  “All right,” I said, if only to be done with the matter.

  But it seemed to satisfy her enough and, promptly turning the conversation back a ways, she said, “Now, speaking of your father, I’m gonna get some flowers, Teddy. I feel guilty that I can’t put ’em on his grave—”

  “Come on, Mom, it’s back in Missoula, so you can’t very well—”

  “Exactly. So I’ll get some flowers in honor of Jimmy, and we can look at ’em here.”

  “What’re you gonna get?”

  “Oh just some cheap bunch at the supermarket. Your father never cared much for flora. I don’t think he could tell a gladiola from a gardenia, so there’s no sense going whole hog on a bouquet that wouldn’t impress him, anyway. Is it?”

  “No, we should be consistent. On the other hand, if we raise a toast to Daddy tonight, it better be a good bottle of wine, or he’ll be ticked off.”

  “A point well taken, Teddy. I will stop by the grog shop too.”

  And off she went. I must say, times like this, when all the medications were working, it was absolutely impossible to tell that she was dying. She was thinner, yes, but all her hair had fallen out during the chemo, so she had a very nice wig on, and what with her lovely new dress and her usual cheerful demeanor, it all seemed so out of joint. I called up Helen then and gave her an update on Mom’s condition, and reminded her to call in the evening. “Do you know what day this is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the day Daddy died, seven years ago.”

  “Oh my god, Teddy. Who ever remembers the day when people died?”

  “Yeah, I agree with you, but if you call up Mom tonight and mention it, it’ll make a big hit with her, and then she’ll go to her grave loving you much more than she does me.”

  “All right,” Helen said. “Under those circumstances, I’ll certainly do it.”

  We always got along well, Helen and me. We shared much the same outlook and had quite the same wry sense of humor. Curiously, I, the male, looked more like Mother, while she, lighter in coloring, favored Dad, but it was not pronounced in either case. As a family, right along into the next generation of our own children, we’re not much into spittin’ images. In terms of personality, though, Helen is more of a risk taker than I’ve been, and in that sense, she took more after Mom. She went back East to college, while I stayed close to home—Montana State, down in Bozeman. Then after college, she flew for Pan Am as a stewardess—that’s what you called them then: stews—so she saw the world for several years. She was libertine and married a pilot who had the look of eagles and a voice of authority when he assured passengers that the turbulance was nothing at all to fret about—only “some chop.”

  That helped our relationship, too. We both liked each other’s spouses. As a matter of fact, I liked all of Helen’s husbands, and never could understand why she kept changing them. After the pilot, there was a plastic surgeon, and then the one now, whom I’m pretty sure is the finale. He’s a retired stock brokerage president, which means that he is, at the least, “well heeled.” Certainly, from all outward appearances, Helen and Buck live a very well-heeled life in Rancho Santa Fe.

  Helen likes Jeanne, my wife, a lot. “She’s very good for you, Teddy,” is what she said from the beginning—although I’ve always been a bit dubious about that analysis. I like to think that you want someone who’s good with you, rather than for you. But then, maybe I’m splitting hairs. In the event, Jeanne and I do get along absolutely wonderfully, just as Mom and Dad always did.

  I’m a school teacher. I’ve been that all my life. I taught English in high school and was in charge of dramatics, as well. Theater’s been my passion. I always directed as many plays in school as I possibly could, and now that I’m retired from teaching, I still work with a little theater group in Great Falls. I started teaching in Butte right out of college, but I went to a high school in Great Falls three years later, strictly because I could run the dramatics. And I’ve been there ever since. Jeanne was a teacher, too, and we met there. History was her subject. And she coached the girls’ tennis. Sounds terribly dull, doesn’t it? But I’ve just never been the sort to move around or change when things seem to be going reasonably well, and Jeanne, being good for me (as well you know), went happily along. We had three children, all grown now, all healthy, all spread to the winds, the way Americans are supposed to.

  After Mom left for the flowers and wine, I could not help thinking about Daddy. The apartment, of course, was rife with his pictures, and I studied them all. Daddy as a young man at the bank, Daddy holding baby Helen in his arms, Mother and Daddy on vacation, posed here and there at various ages and holidays with the two children, then Daddy later on with various grandchildren. I especially paused to study the one on Mom’s little desk of the two of them in front of the swimming venue at the Olympics in Los Angeles. Daddy was approaching seventy then, but he had a little tan and that wonderful smile of his, and I’ll bet no one would’ve thought he could’ve been much past fifty.

  Understand this: Daddy was simply terribly handsome—so much so that men were as inclined as women to acknowledge that. Before his hair turned gray, it was a soft sandy shade, and he had wonderful blue eyes and dimples and the sort of features that only a few people have that simply all work together. That is, everything was exactly the right size and not the least bit out of place. People who met him were always comparing him to some heartthrob actor. When I was a kid, it was Richard Widmark in particular. One of my first girlfriends thought Troy Donahue. The nex
t generation thought Robert Redford, and even when he was an old man, I heard somebody say that if he were younger he’d be a dead ringer for Brad Pitt. As much as I loved acting, if I’d had Daddy’s looks, I would’ve tried Hollywood. More’s the pity, no?

  In fact, when I got out of college, I thought about going to New York and trying my luck at acting. It probably says more about my parents than me, that my mother’s response was, “What the hell, Teddy, give it a shot. I went to Berlin all by myself when I was much younger than you.” But Daddy said that while it was my decision, and he didn’t want to discourage me because for all he knew I might be one terrific actor, he didn’t think I was sufficiently built for that challenge.

  “I don’t mean to be critical of you, Ted, but New York’s tough, and it’s even tougher trying to make it as an actor. You’ll have to suffer a lot of rejections, and you haven’t got the thickest of skins.”

  “Yes sir, I know. That’s what worries me.”

  “Now, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve always thought that the American Dream can be a terrible onus on people.”

  “The American Dream is terrible?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. I said it can be a problem, because it suggests that everybody can succeed if they just try hard enough or want it hard enough. And, of course, that’s nonsense. The good side of the American Dream is implicit in that, okay, there is no ceiling on hope in this country. But the dark side is that dreams are not reality—not even American dreams—so if Americans do not succeed in their quest they tend to be weighted down with a greater sense of failure. Then they come to my bank and ask to borrow money. Or, rather, they expect to.

  “Expectations can be cruel, Ted. Someday, you know, the United States is not going to be top dog anymore. I don’t mean the Communists are going to beat us. The Communists are frauds. But they’re mean bastards, like the Nazis were, so they get away with it. For now. But someday the rest of the world will simply catch up with us. That’s not a prediction; that’s just the way history works. And it’ll be especially hard for us, because we’ve been conditioned to think that we must be the best and so we deserve the best. We won’t handle that disappointment particularly well.”

  “Does anybody, under the circumstances?”

  “That’s a good point. Every country can get a pretty good ride out of that national pride stuff. But America is different from all the other empires, ever. You see, Ted, nobody else was ever brought up to believe that they’re living a dream.”

  After thinking about it, I didn’t go to New York, and while I don’t know if my father’s advice was pivotal to my decision, I do know that it comforted me. And I do know that once I made up my mind I was never dogged by that sense of might-have-been, probably because I enjoyed what I did do with the life I chose, and I was so very happy at home with Jeanne and my family.

  In fact, on the occasion of my fortieth birthday, Daddy told me how pleased he was for me that I had found such joy in my work. It made me wonder. “Haven’t you liked your job?” I asked him. He was about to retire as a vice-president at the First Montana Savings and Trust.

  “Well,” he replied, “I can’t say I get up every morning anxious to get down to the office, but it’s been satisfying enough. And I’ve improved over time; I think that’s significant. Perhaps that means more than merely liking your work. When you only like something, I’m not so sure you work hard. You can drift along then, enjoying the ride.”

  “I never thought about that,” I said, “but it makes sense. Of course, I was never in a war, Dad. I never had to go through anything like you did, being wounded and all. I guess it’s affected the way you’ve thought about things.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that would be true, Teddy,” he said, but he refused to take the bait. Even after all those years, that remained off-limits.

  Mom came back with some posies, to remember Daddy by. She put them in a vase and placed it on top of the television set. But instead of wine, she’d brought a bottle of champagne. “How’d you happen to do that?” I asked.

  “Well, I was in the liquor store, and it occurred to me that I might never have another reason to celebrate something and drink champagne again before I die, so I might as well do it tonight.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Well, if Phelps wins the butterfly tonight, I think that’s a very valid cause for celebration. You know, when I was swimming they hadn’t come up with the butterfly yet, so—”

  “It didn’t exist?”

  “Well, yeah, somebody had dreamed it up, but it wasn’t an official race until sometime after the war. I always liked to swim lots of ways myself, but when Mr. Foster started coaching me, he told me, ‘Trixie, concentrate on the backstroke. That’s your best, and you know, as good as you can be, you’re getting into this kinda late. You’re already sixteen, so let’s just master the one thing.’ Look, Eleanor Holm was on the Olympic team when she was fourteen.”

  “Fourteen?”

  “That’s right. In ’28, in Amsterdam. I had some catchin’ up to do.”

  It had warmed up nicely by now, so Mom and I went back down to the garden, and I turned on the tape recorder and she resumed her story:

  The first thing Mr. Foster had me do was get a new bathing suit. I didn’t even know you were supposed to call them “swimsuits.” On the Shore, we just said bathing suits. But the only one I had besides that faded cream number was light blue with some kind of overlapping red and green circles. Mr. Foster said he couldn’t take me seriously in those get-ups, so Mother and I found a proper black one. It was wool, the way they made them in those days, very modest of course—high in the front and, well, high in the back, too, with kind of a little skirt. It was constructed more for modesty than for speed.

  But, of course, everything is relative. “Now,” Mr. Foster said the first day I showed up in it, “you look like you mean business.”

  And so I began to work out with him. Like I told you, Teddy, he wasn’t a real coach. He’d been a good swimmer in college and a camp counselor and what-have-you, but, still, he sure knew more about swimming than anybody else around, so I counted myself lucky. He also had an instructional primer, which he consulted. And he gave it to me, so I could take it home and read it myself. I won’t go into any of the who-shot-John about what he taught me. Suffice it to say that I followed his advice and what the book said, and I could tell right away that I was getting faster. I could tell that I was pleasing Mr. Foster, too. He was some kind of administrative officer at the college, and working with me gave him an interesting hobby. But he didn’t let me get carried away. I think you could say he was circumspect.

  Most importantly, though, I kept improving, and one day right before Thanksgiving, he said, “Trixie, does this really matter to you?”

  I said, “Yes, sir. I want to be good.”

  “Well, if you keep working as hard as you have, and you stay dedicated, and you don’t get too involved with some boy, I honestly believe you can make the Olympics.”

  I was flabbergasted. I barely knew what the Olympics were, and I certainly had no idea where they were taking place. I thought maybe they were permanently situated in Los Angeles, like Hollywood was, because I knew that’s where they’d been last time, in ’32. I knew that much, and that Babe Didrikson had been the big star, which I thought was neat, because she was a woman. I’d never heard of another woman in athletics. So, Mr. Foster was satisfied with my enthusiasm, and he told me there was something called the Eastern Interscholastics in March up in Philadelphia, and we were going to point for that.

  I worked so hard at my swimming that I kinda irritated my friends. Every day, after school, I’d have the bus drop me off at my mother’s office downtown, and either she or one of the agents would run me over to the pool at the college, or I’d take her car and drive over myself.

  Either way, I became something of a lone wolf.

  My best friend was Carter Kincaid. She was the most grown-up girl around—hot stuf
f. Carter had her wits about her, too. Her father had a large farm, and so he was weathering the Depression better than most, and Carter was determined to go to college. She wanted to become a teacher. In those days, there wasn’t all that much a girl could do, apart from being a secretary. Well, then there was teaching or nursing. That was about it.

  Carter was gonna go to Towson State Teachers College. There was a college on the Shore, Salisbury State, but Carter was like my mother. She wanted to be hell and gone from the farm. In fact, Carter wanted to be hell and gone from the whole Eastern Shore. Towson State was right outside of Baltimore, and so she had her sights set on the bright lights of the big city. Baltimore might as well have been Paris as far as we were concerned.

  Our junior year in high school—that’s when I started swimming—Carter began going out with Tommy Witherspoon, who was very cute and the captain of the baseball team. Tommy’s best friend was Buzzy Moore, and he was cute enough too, and he had a mad crush on me, and Carter and Tommy wanted us to double-date all the time. If it was going to a party or a movie at the New Lyceum Theatre with Buzzy, that was fine, and I’d let him kiss me goodnight, but that was pretty much the extent of it.

  “Buzzy’d really like to neck with you, Trixie,” Carter told me. This came as no surprise to me whatsoever, but I told Carter it just wasn’t on my agenda. We didn’t say “agenda” then, but that was the idea. I think then we said: it isn’t in the cards.

  “Well, look, I’m not planning to settle down with Tommy Witherspoon either, but it is kinda fun, Trixie.”

  “I know, Car. But I guess I’m just too wrapped up in my swimming.”

  We were over at her farmhouse, in the parlor, having this conversation one Sunday after church. I remember it very distinctly. I can see the Kincaid’s parlor as plain as if it was right here in this garden, Teddy. But I’ll spare you the details. It’s just that I remember so clearly that Carter leaned forward in her chair, and with this really queer expression on her face, she said, “Trixie Stringfellow, what are you up to?”