by Frank Deford
“Your telephone rang.”
Teddy, how in the world did you guess that?
“Let’s just say you telegraphed your punch, Mom. And a little birdie tells me it was Horst calling.”
Well, if you’re gonna take all the suspense out of this, I guess I don’t hafta tell you the rest.
“Oh, don’t be so sensitive. What’d he say?”
Well, Dorothy answered. That’s Dorothy Poynton, the diver—remember I told you: Dorothy was married. She was a little more savvy than the rest of us, so she answered the phone and listened for a second before she handed me the receiver and cooed, “Be still my heart.”
I didn’t get it right away, Teddy, but the other girls sure did. They started giggling. I just said, “Hello?”
And, of course, yes, it was Horst, and he said, “Hey, Sydney.” And then he told me to look over my shoulder, and there he was at a table with two other guys, up in this sorta mezzanine, and I almost died. The other girls had already spotted him, so even before he said anything, Dorothy said, “Well, I guess we’ll see you back at the dorm, Sydney.” So then, when Horst asked me to come up, I knew it was okay with the other girls if I left them. And I did. In a July minute.
He rose when I got to his table. You see, he was a gentleman, Teddy. As it was, most everybody had better manners then, but that’s neither here nor there, and if I got into that, it would only make me sound like an ancient scold. Which, of course, I am.
“Really, Mom, I think you’re very up to date.”
Well, that doesn’t stop me from gritting my teeth at the antediluvian behavior I encounter these days, but let’s get back to Horst.
“I’m all ears.”
Good. Well, there were two friends of his at the table, and they both shook my hand and then departed forthwith.
“Forthwith?”
Yes, pronto. Itsky-outsky. So there I was alone with Horst. He said, “Can I getcha a beer?” Remember now, he spoke just like the boy next door. And even though I’d already finished almost one whole beer, which was pretty much my limit, I threw caution to the winds and accepted. “Try a Rothaus,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s my favorite, but you have to be German to know about it. It’s been made for centuries somewhere down in the Black Forest. I think monks used to make it. They had a lotta time on their hands when they weren’t praying, so they learned how to brew a damn good beer.”
“Sounds fine with me.” So he picked up the phone and ordered two of those Rothauses. I’ll tell you, Teddy, I thought the Empire Room at the Palmer House was something, but this was beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Of course, you gotta remember, when I’d been to the Empire Room I was not in the company of Horst Gerhardt.
We looked at each other and smiled, and I believe both of us would’ve been delighted to continue that arrangement ad infinitum, but finally I sorta regained consciousness and reminded him that he was gonna tell me a long story. He said, “A long story?”
“You know, how you learned to talk English like an American.”
“Oh yeah, we both had long stories.”
I nodded. “You first. Didja spend time in America?”
“No, never, unfortunately. But I’d really like to come over there.” My heart leaped, Teddy. Just the thought that this dreamboat might actually cross the Atlantic and become a “to be continued . . .” in my life.
“So,” I said, “if you never—?”
“It’s really not that long a story. My father’s a diplomat, and when I was a little boy he was posted to the embassy in Tokyo, and when it was time for me to go to school, my parents decided to send me to the American school. There were a lotta Americans in Tokyo, and they ran the best foreign school there. My mother had spent some time in England before the war—actually, she’s something of an Anglophile, speaks veddy British—and she also thought it would be a good idea for me to learn English. Dad agreed, and so little Horst in his liederhosen went to study with all the Yanks. Almost right away, they started calling me ‘Ger.’”
“Ger?”
“From Gerhardt. They didn’t like Horst.”
So I blurted it out: “Everyone used to call me Trixie.” Immediately, I was sorry I’d volunteered a name Eleanor had advised me to ditch, but Horst thought it charming.
“Trixie? I like that. It’s just so . . . American. You prefer that or Sydney?”
“Oh, I’m all Sydney now.”
“All right. But I’ll surprise you sometime and call you Trixie—just ’cause I like it.”
“All right, Ger.”
He laughed and reached over and put his hand on mine. I remember what struck me was how natural it was, Teddy. How naturally he did it, how naturally I felt. Usually, you know, especially when you’re young, every move a boy makes seems so . . . well, studied. Horst just did it and right away, I felt . . . well, that my hand was where his belonged. And he kept it there, tellin’ me his story:
“So I was with all these American guys, and the teachers were all American, too. I told Mom the liederhosen had to go. My God, I even learned to play baseball. Hey, there’s a game next week. Wanna go?”
“A baseball game? In Berlin?”
“Yeah, an exhibition in the Olympic stadium. Show the Germans what the Americans are so crazy about.”
“Sure, I’d love to go.”
“Good, it’s a date. Anyway, I hung out with American boys mostly, and you know how it is: what you learn when you’re young makes the greatest impression on you. I even had to be Germanized some by the time I came back here to live.”
A waitress in some sorta faux Alpine outfit brought the beers, and Horst took his hand off mine long enough so we could raise our glasses. Then he said, “There were a couple kids who came from down South in my class, and I even learned to talk with a Southern accent.” I cocked my head, like okay, show me, and he put down his glass and took my hand again and said, “Honey chile, Ah’m jes so dang glad Ah met y’all.”
He had it exactly right, too, but best of all, I could tell he meant what he was saying. I didn’t try any accent back to him. I just said, straight up, “Me too, Horst. Thank you.”
We drank up, but I didn’t do a very good job of pretending I liked the beer. It was awfully bitter. “Aw, you don’t like Rothaus?”
“Well, it’s, uh . . . sharper than I imagined.”
“Want me to getcha somethin’ else?”
I shook my head. “No, this is fine.” And then I said—oh Lord, I remember this word for word, “Anything’s wonderful with the present company.” Now, was that a line? I mean for a kid to just toss it off? I thought to myself: look to your laurels, Noël Coward. And lemme tell ya, Teddy, it sure passed muster.
Because . . . Horst cocked his head and stared at me and said, “You know, I’d really like to kiss you, Sydney.”
And I just said “Yeah,” and we kinda stuck our heads forward over the table and kissed. Just like that. On the lips. Right there before God and everybody in the Femina bar.
“Thank you,” he said. “That was lovely.”
Of course, right then, the phone rang. I’d forgotten the girls could see us, but right away we both figured who it was, and Horst gestured for me to go ahead and pick it up. It was Dorothy. “Well,” she said, “those Germans sure work fast.” Let us just say, Teddy, that I did not deign to honor that with an answer. I just said, “Oh, hi.”
“Okay, Sydney, we’re gonna be leavin’ soon. The consensus is that very possibly you would rather not come with us.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.”
“All right. And we all say: your German’s one awful cute fellow.”
“I know that.”
“Well, have a good time, and don’t be too late.”
“Okay.” I hung up the phone. I could tell Dorothy’d been ready to add something about me taking care of myself. Well, I didn’t need that, thank you very much. “They’re gonna take off and get a cab,” I told H
orst.
“Don’t worry. I’ll drive you back.” He took another gulp of his beer, so I took a sip, too, and it was better than the first time. “I think it’s an acquired taste,” I said.
“You’re not,” he said.
“I’m not what?”
“You’re not an acquired taste. There was somethin’ about you right away.”
“Yeah.”
I’m afraid, Teddy, that the Noël Coward repartee deserted me when he looked at me with those big baby blues. So, since I was no longer brilliantly holding up my end of the dialogue, Horst went on: “After Tokyo, my father got posted to run a consulate in Manila for a year, and most all the foreigners in the Philippines were Americans, and so we not only spoke almost exclusively English—even at home—but my language was completely Americanized. To my mother’s despair.”
“You got any brothers or sisters?”
“One older sister. Liesl. She’s married.” He paused, and I thought he was gonna tell me more about her, but instead he decided to go back to his own story. “Then, after Father got posted back to Berlin for a couple years, he made ambassador, and we went to Lisbon. And trust me, in Portugal, nobody but the Portuguese speak Portuguese. It was all English. By the time I got back here, it was almost like German was my second language.” He paused then and held out his hands. “There—that’s my linguistic history. And you?”
“Me what?”
“What’s your long story?”
“Oh yeah.” So I explained to Horst about Eleanor and why I happened to show up after the rest of the team, and how I found out I wasn’t allowed to swim.
He took a long pull on his beer and shook his head. “Aw, that’s a raw deal, Sydney.”
“Oh, I dunno. Right now, I think I got a pretty good deal.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We were, of course, talking about being with one another.
“I gathered that, Mom.”
Yeah, I just didn’t want to leave, Teddy. I mean, I’d completely forgotten about swimming. But I knew it was getting late, and so I asked him to take me home. He had a silver Opel roadster, and I remember driving back, how I noticed everything all around—things I hadn’t paid any attention to on the way over. All that stuff about I only have eyes for you—I never felt that, Teddy. I think that when you’re falling in love you see everything brighter and clearer. Everything is more vivid. That’s what love does to the whole world around you.
“Mom, you’re already in love with this guy?”
Teddy, I thought I had been crystal clear on that subject. What part of “head over heels” don’t you understand? Do you think I’d be wasting all this who-shot-John if he was just a passing fancy?
“Well, it’s just that—”
It’s just that I had never felt like this in my life. Never. All I wanted was to get back to the Friesenhaus so he could kiss me goodnight. I was all scrunched up as close to him as I could get, and when he stopped the car out front he turned to me and put an arm around me. It was hard for a guy to drive a car with his arm around a girl in those days, Teddy, because you had to shift gears. So he turns to me, and he says: “Look, if you can’t swim in the Olympics, wouldja like to come out to Grunewald, where there’s this beautiful lake, and you could go swimming there . . . with me?”
“Sure.”
But then he shook his head. It was a set-up. “No,” Horst said. “I don’t know. One time at the Rot-Weiss Club—”
“The what?”
“The Rot-Weiss Club. That’s red and white, rot-weiss.”
“Oh, okay. Now I know two more words.”
“Right. It’s our best tennis club, and I got back from Lisbon, and I thought I was a pretty good player, so the pro suggested I play this girl, and I said, ‘C’mon, I don’t want to play any girl,’ but he said she was pretty good, so I played her and guess what? She beat me straight sets. She was somethin’ like the national junior champion.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it was humiliating. Getting beat by a girl. So I don’t know if I wanna go swimming with you and get shown up.”
“That’s okay. I’ll pretend I can only dog paddle, and you can rescue me.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t know. Because now that I think about it, Sydney, I already know one other thing you do better than me.”
He had me there. “What’s that?”
“Kussen.”
“What?
“Kussen. You kiss better than me.”
“No, I don’t. You kussen much better.”
He drew closer. “Well, let’s see if we can settle the argument.” I mean, can you believe it, Teddy? Every other boy I’d kissed had just sorta moved in and planted it on me. This was like being in a movie. Dialogue, Teddy—dialogue! And, boy, we really did some kussen this time. And after a while I could sort of feel his hand around me kinda hovering, and so I reached up and took it and steered it right down, smack onto my bazoom.
“Oh, come on, Mother, I really don’t think—”
Oh, for God’s sake, Teddy, don’t be such an old woman. Have no fear, I’m not gonna get graphic. My tongue is just loosened up a little by the vodka. And besides, is there no poetry in your heart? You can’t listen to an old lady recounting the sweet memories of young love? Besides, I stopped kissing him long enough to say, “Just for a moment.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear there was some display of ladylike restraint.”
Yeah, wise guy, but I also added: “For now.” And then I tore myself away from him and outta the car and ran through the gate of the wrought-iron fence and inside the Friesenhaus, and I just delighted—just delighted—in all those other girls in their night gowns giving me those looks of censure . . . or envy. My, did I give it back to them.
Mom beamed, took a healthy swallow of her Bloody Mary and then actually smacked her lips.
Talk about a Cheshire cat, Teddy. Talk about a Cheshire cat.
Mom finished her bacon cheddar cheeseburger and—more to the point—her second Bloody Mary, and, true to her assumption, she was ready for a good nap. As soon as we got home and she went into her bedroom, I went to the garden to call my sister.
Now, I must admit, there was a part of me that was upset, even angry, for here was Mom absolutely radiating in this luminous story about her love for this sweet-talkin’, sharp-kissin’ German hunk. I felt hurt for my poor father, that he’d spent fifty years as an adoring husband, but it had all been a chimera, he some sort of afterthought.
But then, there was also a part of me that was absolutely beguiled by the whole fascinating story that Mother had suddenly chosen to reveal to me. I’d certainly never myself had any adventure of the heart like this—nothing so romantic nor so thrilling. I had to admit, as hard as I had fallen for Jeanne, that first great blush of my true love had certainly not reached the poetic peaks of sheer ecstacy that Mother’s own romance had attained.
In this frame of mind, I called my sister. Naturally, right away, when I told Helen that I was alone, outside, she assumed something must be wrong with Mother. “Oh no, in fact she’s on a roll. We just got back from lunch, and she had two Bloody Marys.”
“Jesus, Teddy. What’s the occasion?”
“Memories.”
“What?”
“She’s just having a ball telling me about her whole Olympic experience.”
I could almost visualize Helen shaking her head on the other end of the line. “That’s amazing,” she said. “She’d always skip over that. I’d press her, and she’d pretty much skim over the Olympics, just suffer me in that way of hers, maybe talk about Jesse Owens and Hitler, stuff you could read in a book. Very impersonal.”
“Well, trust me, she’s not leaving anything out now.”
“I’m jealous, Teddy. I always thought mothers were supposed to share the skinny with daughters. And fathers with sons.”
“Well, it’s cross-germination time, I guess. But, Helen, here’s a question. All the time she’s talked to you
. . . I mean, I know she never got into the Olympics, but did Mom ever mention a guy named Horst?”
“Horse?”
“No, no. German. Horst—with a t.”
Right away, Helen said, “No. That’s a new one.”
“Horst Gerhardt.”
“Sorry, Teddy. What’s the deal?”
“Well, the fact is, she’s really not telling me about the Olympics per se. They’re only the background for this Horst. She could be in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for all she talks about the Olympics. It’s just mein Horst.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Well, in the word of my new confidant, he was a quote dreamboat unquote.”
“God, dreamboat. I haven’t heard that in years. Not since we were girls, and we’d say to some stuck-up guy, ‘Hey, dreamboat.’ And when he’d smile, we’d say, ‘Not you, shipwreck.’”
“Oh, you girls were mean.”
“It’s a cruel world out there, Teddy. But, go on, tell me about Mom’s dreamboat.”
“Well, trust me: Horst sure fit the bill. Suave. A gentleman and a scholar. Delightful and charming. Silver-tongued, too.”
“Jeez, why couldn’t I ever have met a guy like that?”
“You did. But you just kept throwing ’em back and then casting the net again.”
“All right, smarty-pants.”
“Of course, it’s also possible that the dreamboat might’ve been a dirty rotten Nazi. I haven’t had the nerve to interrupt her reverie and ask that rather rude question. But—”
“Is Mom okay, Teddy? I mean this isn’t her mind playing tricks?”
“Oh no, she’s absolutely as sharp as ever. She’s incredibly vivid. It’s even a little embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?”
“Let’s just say it’s a little more than I wanna know. Granted, this was into the second Bloody Mary, but she made a point of describing how Horst copped a feel off her the first time.”
