by Frank Deford
“But you’d get the bronze for looks?”
Mom simply smiled, and let it go. In fact, I think she regretted that she’d so quickly given the silver to Dorothy Poynton. So she raised her champagne glass again. “And to your father, too, Teddy. Seven years. Seven years gone. My Jimmy.”
I raised mine too. “Why’d he never talk about Guadalcanal, Mom? Was it that bad?”
“It must’ve been.”
“He talked to you about it when he came back, didn’t he?”
“Not, uh, extensively. There were a lot of them that way, the boys in the war. You get shot, I don’t suppose you want to dwell on it. Who in their right mind wants to talk about getting shot . . . or shooting someone else, for that matter? Could you shoot someone, Teddy?”
“Well, maybe if I was a soldier. You know, in a war.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “But maybe not everybody could.”
“I guess I don’t know, Mom.”
“No. No one probably knows till they’re confronted with the situation.” She stopped abruptly then. “But that’s enough of that. The point is, your father got his honorable discharge, and then he made it plain to me that that chapter was concluded, and it was not something he wished to discuss, and I was happy to comply with his wishes. Why not? Your father and I always had plenty of happy things to talk about.”
“I know that. But after all those years . . .”
“Like someone said, Teddy: War is hell. War must be hell. Jimmy wanted to let it go.” She looked back at the television, even if it was a commercial. It was apparent, as always, that my mother didn’t want to talk about my father’s experience in the war any more than he had. But then, after she’d given it some thought, she turned back to me and said, “Well, there’s a bunch of that in the story. I told you: it’s the last story about the war.”
“The story in the purple acetate folder?”
“Yeah. That’ll tell you more than enough. So be patient.”
“Okay.” I shrugged, and raised my glass again. “Well, to you both. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother and father.” I went over and kissed her.
“Thank you for that, Teddy,” she said, but I could tell that she’d grown tired. Sometimes now she wore down more quickly, and sure enough, before long, she started to nod off, even before all the swimming races were over. There was a women’s relay she’d been really looking forward to, but she couldn’t last, so I helped her to bed, and when she was settled, I brought in the flowers that she’d bought in honor of Daddy and put the vase by her bed. I took one, though, a little yellow one—like Daddy, I’ve never been very learned about “flora” either—and stuck it in one of my shirt buttonholes. She liked that. She touched it. “Bachelor button,” she said.
“No, Daddy button,” I said, and kissed her good-night.
As I was leaving, she called me back. “Teddy.” I turned around. “Would you be upset if an old lady threw humility to the winds?” I shook my head. “Well, maybe I was the silver medal. Dorothy Poynton was very pretty indeed, but she had all those fancy get-ups. I was still just a kid swimming in a plain black suit. But it showed me to good advantage, I think. And I always made it a habit to rip my bathing cap off as soon as the race was over, so my hair could tumble down.”
I said, “You always had pretty hair, Mother.”
“You don’t have to gild the lily. I knew how pretty I was. But I’m thinking now of a time in Germany when I got all gussied up in a beautiful gown, and when I saw myself in that, I suppose that made me think I had the edge on Dorothy.”
“I’m sure you turned a lot of heads.”
Mom smiled deliciously. “One in particular,” she said. “And we’ll get to him soon enough.”
Unfortunately, Mom woke up the next morning feeling poorly. She had, as she simply called them, “her days.” I wanted to drive her over to the doctor’s, but she absolutely forbade me to even call him. “Teddy,” she said, “some mornings I just gotta roll with the punches. You wait, by the afternoon, I’ll be fine and dandy—relatively, of course.” Sure enough, she took some kind of pain pill, lay down awhile and by the afternoon she emerged with a smile on her face. “Get that machine goin’ mister,” she told me.
“You sure you want to, Mom?”
“Well, Teddy, either I sit here and tell you more of my story or I’m goin’ over to the Chippendales’ matinee.”
“You’re what?”
“It’s a joke, Teddy. It’s a joke. Come on, let’s go.”
So I put a new tape in and she immediately took up her story again.
In those days, you didn’t have a lot of national meets. The best swimmers couldn’t just take off and fly around the country, willy-nilly, like pashas. You stuck pretty much to your territory, your region. Besides, we had to be amateurs, and it was still the heart of the Depression, so nobody much had the money to travel hither and yon just to swim. But after I did so well at the Interscholastics, Mr. Foster realized that I needed some good competition. I mean, I couldn’t improve if I just practiced all the time, even though basically that’s all I did do, because there wasn’t a whole lot to do on the Eastern Shore in 1935 except possibly neck with Buzzy Moore, which I didn’t much want to do except just enough for him to take me to the movies and what-not. And eventually, in fact, when Buzzy realized that the candy store really was closed, that was the end of that. So I just swam more and more, especially when the weather got warmer and I could go back to swimming off the dock at our house in the Chester River, like always.
Sometimes Carter would come over and keep me company, swimming. We’d race some. I’d give her a head start and she’d swim freestyle, and I’d try to catch up with her swimming backstroke. But it was just fun. The best part, then, was we’d lie there on the grass and talk about what we were gonna do with ourselves. Nobody—especially kids like us—envisioned a war. Who did in the United States? Mostly, we just imagined the Depression stretching out forever and ever, all our days. After all, it’d been everybody’s way of life for years, and it was hard to picture the world without it.
Our senior year was coming up, so even if I hadn’t gotten myself all worked up about swimming, everything was necessarily gonna change in just another year. It was time to start thinkin’ ahead. Carter knew she was going to Towson State Teachers and find a husband in Baltimore and make a life there. “Does Tommy know this?” I asked her.
“Tommy doesn’t think much beyond next week,” Carter replied. She was just gonna cross that bridge when she came to it.
So we would talk like that, and this one time—it must’ve been late in June after school let out, I suddenly said, “You know, Car, I’m gonna have to leave, too.”
“Leave here? Leave the Shore?” I nodded. “Gee, I didn’t know that, Trix. That’s great. I just figured you’d stay and help your mother at the office.”
“Well, I figured that, too, but if I’m gonna be a swimmer, I have to go somewhere where there’s a swimming club.”
You see, Teddy, if I’d been a boy, I could’ve gotten some kind of scholarship to swim on a college team somewhere, working at a job on the side. But there wasn’t anything like that for girls. There weren’t even any girls’ teams in college. Girls swam in clubs. By now, I had found this out, because I’d been to one seniors meet. Understand, “seniors” doesn’t mean what it does now—that god-awful “senior citizens.” It was just the difference between juniors and seniors. It was like the major leagues, seniors.
The seniors meet Mr. Foster had taken me to was down in Washington. It was sanctioned. It was run by the Shoreham Hotel Athletic Club, which some of the best girls belonged to. And understand this, too, Teddy. When I say girls, I mean women and girls. They just called us all girls then. Like they called us naiads. But then, we called ourselves girls. I don’t remember anybody much being a “woman” then, Teddy. Unless maybe if you were a cleaning woman. You were a girl unless you were a young lady, until you became a lady. And then you finally
became an old lady.
That lexicon being squared away, I asked Mother how she did in the meet down in Washington.
Well, as a matter of fact, I did very well. I was moving up in competition here, Teddy. I finished second in both the one-hundred-yard and the two-hundred-yard backstrokes, which amazed everybody because nobody’d ever heard of me. Here I was swimming in the seniors, and I wasn’t even in a club. I swam what was called “unattached.” Almost everybody else was associated with some club, but I was just “Sydney Stringfellow, unattached,” and there was only this one girl who beat me in both races—and barely that—but she was really grown-up, maybe twenty-five or something, so, as Mr. Foster told me, at that advanced age, she wasn’t gonna get any better. In fact, driving back home, when we were on the ferry goin’ across the Bay and we went to the lunch counter, he told me that someone from the Shoreham Hotel AC had asked him if maybe I wanted to come down and swim for them when I finished high school.
He told me, “Trixie—I mean, Sydney.” (See, when he had met me, I was Trixie, but then I asked him to change that after Eleanor Holm advised me against being Trixie, so he would forget sometimes.) “Sydney, you might make it to the Olympics in Berlin. You’ve got a chance, I would imagine, if you keep improving, but it’s gonna be tough. Nobody’s gonna beat Eleanor, and there’s two or three other gals who’re pretty good. You couldn’t beat ’em now, but maybe by next year. I will say you should be at the height of your powers for the next Olympics, in ’40. But if you’re gonna do that, you have to go somewhere and swim with a club. I just can’t help you that much anymore.”
So that’s why I told Carter I had to leave Chestertown and go out into the big, wide world. Her first reaction was, “That’s great, Trix, you can join a club in Baltimore, and we can get a place together.”
I said, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” At that point Carter started to take her straps down, and she said, “Come on, let’s get the sun on our backs like the boys do.” And just like that, she yanked the top of her suit all the way down to her waist. It was absolutely scandalous, even if it was just the two of us girls alone in my yard. But, as I told you, Carter was always out in front of the rest of us. Today, I suppose, you’d say that she’d be ahead of the curve. Anyway, she just pulled her suit down and lay on the towel.
“Did you do it too, Mom?”
Well, for a moment I worried that Gentry Trappe might be around, but he certainly wasn’t the sort to be a peeping Tom, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day, so yes indeed, I pulled my top down, too, and laid on my stomach with the sun on my back. Teddy, I felt absolutely debauched, but the funny thing was, I think it made it easier for me to think about goin’ out in the world. I mean, if a girl could take her top down outdoors, even if no one was around, it made you feel grown-up.
So I explained to Carter, “Well, there isn’t any swimming club I know of in Baltimore.”
“So where else?”
“Well, there’s a lotta choices. There’s that Shoreham Hotel AC in Washington and the Carnegie Library Club in Pittsburgh and the Broadwood AC in Philadelphia and . . .” I know I paused here, Teddy, because even as absolutely wicked and grown-up as I was with my top down, it was still hard to imagine it: “. . . the Women’s Swimming Association of New York.”
It struck Carter the same way. “New York!” she said.
“That’s what I want: the Women’s Swimming Association.” I got so excited I raised up on my elbow without even thinking, exposing my one side there for all the world to see—even if Carter was all the world that was looking at me at that particular moment —and I told her how Eleanor Holm herself belonged to the Women’s Swimming Association, and that next month when Mother and Mr. Foster were takin’ me up to Jones Beach for the national championships, I was gonna ratchet up my nerve and ask Eleanor if I could get into the Women’s Swimming Association.
“You think you can?” Carter asked me.
I got hold of my enthusiasm sufficient to restore decorum and laid back down on my stomach. “I’ll be honest with you, Car. I don’t see why not. I’m startin’ to understand how good I really am. I’ve only been serious about my swimming for a little while, but that time I made in the hundred down in Washington a couple months ago—Mr. Foster told me it was the ninth best in the country. In the country, Car!”
“The whole country?”
“That’s what I’m saying: the whole country, the United States, and I’m already ninth best. And if I just get a little better in the next year, if I’m third best, I can go to Berlin, to the Olympics, next summer, and even if I don’t make it, if I get to join the Women’s Swimming Association, I know I could be the very best by the ’40 Olympics. They give out gold medals if you win the Olympics, Car. I could get a gold medal in Tokyo.”
“What’s in Tokyo?”
“That’s what I’m tellin’ you. The 1940 Olympics are in Tokyo, Japan.”
“Wow,” Carter said. She processed all that. “So, let me get this straight. If you join this Women’s Swimming Association, you’d live in New York?”
“Yeah. I would. I’d get a job.”
“In Jones Beach?”
“No, that’s just where the nationals are. The Women’s Swimming Association is right in the city. They have their own pool and everything. You could come up from Baltimore on the Royal Blue”—that was the fancy B & O train then—“and stay with me in my apartment. I’d have my own apartment.”
“Wow,” Carter said again. “But you gotta look out for the men in New York, Trix. Men in New York can’t be trusted.”
“Come on, Car. Not all of them. There’s some good men everywhere, I’m sure.”
Carter agreed I had a point. Possibly. She was silent for a long time, then. This was a lot for her to take in from her best friend, especially when she thought she was the one who was so daring, going off to big, cosmopolitan Baltimore. But after a bit, all of a sudden, do you know what she did? She sat up and said, “Come on, Trix, we’re halfway. Let’s go skinny dippin’.”
If Carter Kincaid had suggested we rob the Queen Anne’s County Savings and Trust, I couldn’t’ve been any more shocked. “But, Car, it’s the middle of the day.”
“There’s nobody around.”
“Maybe Gentry Trappe.”
“Well, then it’d just be his lucky day,” Carter said. Teddy, she’d made up her mind. She was already pullin’ her suit down over her thighs. I could see, there was no stoppin’ her. And you know what?
“No, I don’t, Mother.”
I went right along. In another minute, I was naked as a jay bird, too, and here we were, in broad daylight, runnin’ down to the river and out on the dock and divin’ in. And the water never felt better, Teddy. You’ve been skinny dippin’, haven’t you?
“A time or two, yeah.”
Doesn’t it feel just wonderful?
I agreed that it did.
Yeah, we splashed around and swam underwater some, just like little girls, and I remember, I came up and I was treadin’ water, and I said, “You know what the Women’s Swimming Association bathing suits look like?” It was sort of strange to think about a bathing suit when I didn’t have one on, but it came to me. Carter, of course, didn’t know. “There’s like a shield here,” I said, drawing it with one hand, right in the middle of my chest. “And right in here”—I pointed to my cleavage—“there’s this big S.”
“S?” Carter asked.
“Yeah, S for swimming. And there’s a smaller capital W on this side and an A on the other. I could just see myself in that.” There I was without a stitch on, and I could visualize myself in the best swimming club in America, with the likes of Eleanor Holm herself, wearin’ that suit. It’s funny, Teddy, this was before Superman—
“With the big S on his chest.”
Exactly. But years later, whenever I’d see him taking his shirt off in the phone booth, I’d think back to the dreams of me wearing my own big S on my chest. I don’t
know, maybe whoever it was that dreamed up Superman had seen Eleanor Holm with her S, and that was his inspiration. Any man who saw Eleanor in a bathing suit, even just a picture, was gonna stop and dwell on her. I can assure you of that. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Superman got that S on his chest that way. Because of a girl.
And so we swam around a little longer, the sky so perfectly blue, the sun beating down on us, and it was as if I could see the future, all laid out for me. It was like Daddy had never been killed and there was no Depression, and I was gonna make the U.S. team and go to Berlin, and then I was gonna come back and leave the Shore and move to New York and join the Women’s Swimming Association, with the big S right there on my chest, and Eleanor Holm would be gone by then, off making movies or singin’ and whistlin’ along with Ted Weems, and I’d be the star of the backstroke, gettin’ ready to win a gold medal in 1940.
It was absolutely amazing how clearly I could see all the tomorrows stretched out before me, Teddy. In fact, I don’t think I ever had another day like that—one when I’d ever been so sure of things ahead of me—until maybe right now when I know I’m going to die pretty soon, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.
We watched the swimming from Athens again that night. It was an especially important evening for Mom because the finals of her old event, the hundred-meter backstroke, were on. With grand expectation, we settled in before the TV set. “You know what they called us then?” she asked me.
“Naiads.”
“Well, that’s right. I told you that. But that was all the girls who swam. I meant what they called the backstrokers?”
