by Frank Deford
Horst was no better. He just stared ahead, pretending to concentrate on driving. Luckily, though, I suddenly heard: “Achtung! Achtung!” You see, Teddy, they’d also set up loudspeakers along the main streets, and whenever an event concluded in the stadium, the results would be announced. “Achtung! Achtung!” Then the results. And if the Germans won a medal, everybody would stop and cheer to beat the band.
It sort of bugged me at the time that they could get so worked up over the javelin throw or some such thing, but, then, when it comes to sports, we’re all brothers under the skin, aren’t we? We beat up on Bolivia or Mongolia or some little pissant country in basketball, and we all go nuts screaming, “U!S!A! U!S!A!” and “We’re Number One.”
Anyway, Horst eventually figured out a way to get us back into a natural conversation. “At night,” he said, “they play marches and Viennese waltzes. You wanna come here some evening?”
“Yeah, sure, great.”
“There’re clubs and cabarets. We could dance, Sydney.”
“I’d love that,” I said. “I’d love to dance with you, Horst.” The way he’d said “we could dance,” I knew he must be a good dancer. Boys don’t bring up dancing unless they’re good at it. Men don’t. So, I knew: one more thing he was good at. One more thing to love him for.
Well, that’s fine, I thought, but I just couldn’t resist taking the magnificent Herr Gerhardt down a peg. So I interrupted her. “You always said Dad was such a wonderful dancer.”
That caught Mom off guard, and she pondered it for a moment. “Well, you’re absolutely right about that, Teddy. Your father certainly was.” But then, very quickly, she was back in the car with lover boy.
So Horst said, “Then it’s a date. But now: it’s time for a picnic.”
I said, “A what?”
“A picnic, of course. It’s a perfect day for a picnic. Look in back.” Sure enough, when I picked up the beach towel there, it revealed a lovely picnic basket beneath it.
Horst turned the car toward Charlottenburg, west of the city, and then he drove down toward Grunewald, which was the next fancy suburb. We passed the Rot-Weiss Club, and then, a bit further along, we came upon this large forest. I mean, we are still in what I’d call greater Berlin, but all of a sudden here we are in a regular forest—dark green, rich in these tall fir trees. It was like any minute we were gonna come upon Hansel and Gretel following their bread crumbs. But then, only a bit further, everything opened up and there before us was this perfectly lovely lake. You could see large mansions ringing it, speedboats, and people swimming off this pretty beach. All the beaches on the Chesapeake, I’d never seen anything like it. Even Easton, as fancy as it was, couldn’t hold a candle to it. “This is Lake Wannsee,” he said.
We found a table, and I opened up the basket. Horst had provided quite a spread: sandwiches, cheese, sausage, and even apple streudel for dessert. He bought us a couple beers at the concession stand, and we laughed and exchanged stories. I told him all about Eleanor, and when he told me about living in Japan, I decided I’d let him in on my dream. “I want to go there,” I said.
“Tokyo?”
“Yeah. The ’40 Olympics. I think I can be the best by then, Horst. I think I can win a gold medal. That’s what I’m gonna work for.”
He smiled and cocked his head, but made me drop mine because he kept looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re so beautiful, Sydney, and I can’t believe someone so beautiful is so wonderful too.” He reached over and took my chin with his hand and raised it up so that I’d look into his eyes. “Will you let me come to Tokyo and be your guide? I can still remember a few words in Japanese. Let’s see: Arigato. Sayonara. Gaijin . . . uh . . . kimono. Of course, that wouldn’t be much help.”
“But you’d come?”
“Sydney, I’d go anywhere with you.” That made me blush all the more. “Besides,” he went on. “Nineteen-forty. I’ll have graduated from college and finished my military tour by then. We all hafta serve in the army for a couple years. It’s a nuisance, but Hitler’s very conscious of what happened to us after the war. So we all hafta learn to be little soldiers to make sure we’re not conquered again.”
He shook his head at the nonsense of it all. Remember now, Teddy, the First World War was The War To End All Wars, so anybody with his wits about ’em was sure there wouldn’t be any more wars. Because wars had ended. Finis. “Well,” he said, “would you let me come?”
“To Tokyo?”
“Yeah.”
“Horst, I’d go anywhere with you.” I was repeating, of course, exactly what he’d said to me earlier.
He reached across the table and took my hands in his. “What will happen to us, Sydney?”
“After I leave?”
“Yes. This can’t end. I’ve fallen in love with you. Did you know?”
I just shrugged and said, “Yes.”
Such an abrupt answer took him up short. “You know?” he asked.
“Uh huh.”
“How?”
“Well, I’ve fallen in love with you, and you act the same way with me that I do with you, so I figured it out from there.”
“You are amazing. I can hardly understand it . . . you . . . us.”
“Me neither. I always wanted to believe in love at first sight, but it scared me because I thought, well, maybe it’ll be first sight for me, but not for him.”
“Well, it was.” He squeezed my hand. “Could you live here?”
“In Germany?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god, Horst.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No, no, it’s just—I never thought I’d ever live much beyond the Eastern Shore. Wilmington, maybe. Baltimore. But Germany. Wow. That’s a stretch.”
Now, you gotta understand something, Teddy. This wasn’t just a lot of idle lovey-dovey. I was only eighteen years old, and he was only twenty, but back then, if you could scrape up the money, people got married at those ages. You couldn’t just live together WBOC.
“WB—what? What’s that, Mother?”
WBOC. Without benefit of clergy. That was sinful. There weren’t any halfway houses you could move into together. So you got married. I mean, we mighta been skirting the heart of the subject, but we really were talkin’ about marriage. Marriage! It was all going so fast, I got scared. “Come on,” I said, “let’s go swimming.”
There were changing rooms. He came out in a navy blue bathing suit with yellow piping. Remember, he’d seen me in a bathing suit before, but this was the first time I’d seen him in one. Oh boy, Teddy! What a doll! Now, remember, this is a long, long time before bikinis. The bathing suits now would make what I had on look like Old Mother Hubbard, but, for that time, between the two of us there was plenty of skin to go around. A lot of men still wore tops, like basketball shirts, but Horst was bare-chested. And here was the thing: by my exacting standards, he had just the right amount of hair on his chest. Not too much, but just enough. I mean, he was picture perfect, lemme tell you. “Come on,” I said, and I ran into the water.
When Horst followed me in, he kidded me. “Now don’t swim too fast, so I can’t catch up with you.”
Fat chance—right, Teddy? I ducked down and swam underwater, and he came after me and took me in his arms. Hey, I’d been doing a lot of swimming these last couple years. I’d been in the water a whole lot, all over, but now, this—this was like all of a sudden I was swimming in champagne. I mean, the water just didn’t feel like water anymore. We came up for air, and when we did, he kissed me.
“Standing up, Mom?”
Oh yes, it wasn’t that deep. We were standing on the lake bottom, and he said, “Ich liebe dich,” and I said, “What?” And he said “That’s ‘I love you’ in German,” so I asked him to repeat it, and I said it to him, “Ich liebe dich,” and then we kissed again, and I said, “I feel like I’m swimming in champagne,” and I broke away from him and swam on my back a ways, looking up to the blue sky, just like I did back
home, but thinking, how can this be the same blue sky that I looked up into when I was alone in the Chester River? How could that be possible?
Oh, Teddy, what a honey of a day that was. What a honey of a day.
The next day was Friday—Friday, the seventh of August, 1936—and Leni had given Horst a job that morning in the stadium. She’d had some railroad-type tracks built down a straightaway just to the inside of the running track, with a camera placed on a little tram on the track. The idea was, a cameraman could keep up with the runners, filming them abreast as they raced. It would be a new angle altogether. She’d chosen the five-thousand meters, since the runners ran slower in a long-distance race, so it’d be easier for the camera to stay up with ’em. Unfortunately, the motor that drove the tram made too much noise, so it’d been disallowed as a nuisance. So, Leni needed someone to push the apparatus, and she asked Horst to take on the task.
I couldn’t see him working, though, because that particular morning Coach Daughters had scheduled a trial race in the backstroke. The swimming competition would officially start Monday, with the first heats in the backstroke the next day, so Coach wanted Alice and Edith to have an intramural race in preparation. Then they’d tail off their workouts and be primed for the real thing. Since I was standing there, Mr. Daughters said, “Well, Sydney, you might as well race, too.” And you know what, Teddy?
“No.”
I coulda won.
“Whatdya mean you ‘coulda’?”
I mean, Teddy, I lost on purpose.
Edith usually started out fast, and I found out early on that I was keeping up with her. I was breezing, Teddy. I’d never swum so easy in my life.
“Ah, I guess that being in love can be a magic carpet ride, Mom.”
There may be some truth in that, Teddy. But it was also the case that even though I wasn’t gonna swim in the Olympics, Coach Daughters had given me a couple tips—you know, when he happened to see me working out with the other girls. Just little stuff—but it did make a difference. Maybe more than anything, though, I swam so much better because there was no stress, no pressure on me.
I knew then what I could do, Teddy. I realized that now that I knew how easily I could swim—how fast I could swim—that I could win the gold medal in Tokyo. I knew it!
Only suddenly, after I made the turn against Edith and Alice, going into the last fifty meters, it occurred to me what the implications were if I did win. Which I knew I was gonna do. Easy. I wasn’t even in the Olympics, and here I was gonna beat the two American girls who were. Just think what this would do to their confidence, Teddy.
I was even with Edith, but she was starting to fade. And Alice, who tended to finish well, was coming up, but Teddy, I had plenty of gas left in the tank. So I did what I had to do for the old red-white-and-blue. I began to slow up. Imperceptibly, you understand, but just enough.
“You threw the race.”
Exactly. I took a dive. The last thirty or forty meters I put on a pretty good act and let ’em both pass me. And now I knew Eleanor was right. I was absolutely gonna be the next Queen of the Backstroke. I almost ran all the way back to the dorm and stayed in my room, because I really didn’t wanna face the other girls.
After awhile, Elsa, the interpreter, came in and said that Herr Gerhardt had called and would pick me up a little earlier than we’d planned. Of course, by now, I was all the talk—the gossip—of the Friesenhaus. I’d even found out that, behind my back, the other gals called Horst “The Red Baron”—he, of course, being the dashing German pilot who’d shot down several of our planes in The Great War. (I’d kept that little nugget away from Horst.)
Elsa, too, was as curious about Horst as my teammates were, so when I merely said “Danke,” after she delivered the message from Horst, she took that as the little opening she needed to pry. “Ah,” she said, “your young man is teaching you German.”
“Ein bisschen,” I replied. That means “a little,” Teddy. Well, you could see Elsa figured she had carte blanche now, if you will excuse me for also meandering into French.
“Your linguistic skills are overwhelming me, Mom.”
All right, you wisenheimer, silencio, por favor. So then Elsa said: “Ah, and is Herr Gerhardt from Berlin?”
“Well, he is, but he’s studying architecture at Heidelberg.”
“Ah, isn’t that nice?”
“Yes, Elsa, he’s very nice.”
“He speaks such perfect English.”
So I explained how his father was a diplomat and how Horst had learned English abroad. And we chatted on, but, of course, every innocent little tidbit I told her soon spread throughout the premises. It also, by the by, got on a resume they were keeping of all the girls. Horst and I weren’t just an item, Teddy. We were on file. But, who knew?
In any event, after I finally got nosy Elsa out of the room, I put on my best cocktail dress. Well, it was also my only one—a red and green borderprint number that my mother had bought for me when I went to the Trials. The dresses in the thirties were extremely attractive, Teddy. They pinched in at the waist and had a slim bodyline that showed a girl’s curves to the world. There weren’t as many fat gals, then, either. There were more real curves by the bushel.
“Hourglass figures?”
You bet, Teddy. And my sand was in all the right places, then.
Now the men dressed elegantly, too. We liked to dress up then, in the Depression. Maybe because we didn’t have much, we wanted to be stylish whenever we had the chance. It seems like the reverse nowadays, that the more people have, the worst they want to appear. Casual. But when did “casual” become a synonym for “sloppy,” Teddy? I might have come from the Eastern Shore, but damnit, I didn’t forfeit grace when I was casual.
Oh my, excuse me, now I sound like an old scold, don’t I?
“No, you don’t, Mom. I like it when you express your mind.”
Why, thank you, Teddy. Now that you’re also getting to be a, excuse me, senior citizen. God, isn’t that an awful phrase, senior citizen? The only thing worse is “up in years.” Everytime I hear somebody refer to me as “up in years,” it’s all I can do not to say, “oh, speaking of up—up yours.” But, you’ll be pleased to know that your dear old mother has so far resisted that urge.
“I am duly relieved, madam.”
Oh, what the hell, Teddy. What’s the use of being old if you can’t be crotchety? What’s the use of living all these years if you can’t remind the present-day idiots that just because they’re knee-deep in technology, it doesn’t make the here and now any better than the past? The young people today think they’re so smart, but our forefathers were so much smarter than we are.
“They were?”
Of course they were. They understood the world they lived in. We’re really strangers, Teddy—strangers to the everyday. We don’t know how a damn thing works. We just push buttons. That’s an indication of intelligence? Please. In the olden days, people were in control of their lives. They had to know the world to survive in it. They knew how to plant food and harvest it and how to cook it and how, like, if they were going somewhere in a wagon, they knew how the wagon worked. But us—the more things we just turn on, the dumber we get . . . en toto.
“That sonuvabitch Edison ruined it all for us.”
Absolutely. Now, go to the automatic ice maker and put some cubes in a plastic glass and pour me a nice tall gin and tonic.
“But, Mom, it’s only quarter past four.”
I know what time it is, Teddy. I can read a watch as well as the next dummy who doesn’t know how a watch works. I know I’m jumpin’ the gun, but the next part of the story requires a little lubrication, I think. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna get hammered. We’ll just move the time frame up this evening, then be stupider and have something from the microwave for dinner. It’s the last night for the Olympic swimming, so I’ll try to finish up my bloviating in time for us to watch it. And if you think you can hold your liquor like a gentleman, then please make yourse
lf a drink, too. A woman of a certain age shouldn’t drink alone, Teddy. It casts her in a bad light.
So, I fixed two gin and tonics and picked up the tape recorder and we moved down to the garden. There, Mom began once more, taking me back to the Friesenhaus. Horst arrived right on time again, looking like a million dollars, of course, and as soon as they got into the roadster, away from the prying eyes of Elsa and the girls of the Friesenhaus, he drew her, in her red and green borderprint, to him and they kissed a passionate hello.
I kept thinking to myself: couldn’t they at least have a lovers’ quarrel, maybe just a little spat? Couldn’t a little rain fall on their parade? But, of course, I kept these captious thoughts to myself and only listened as Mother went happily back in time again with her dreamboat.
After we’d torn ourselves apart, Horst asked me to close my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw him looking at me with this silly expression on his face. That’s because there, perched on his brow, was a laurel wreath. “Nice,” I said, taking it. “Who’d you steal it from?”
“Leni keeps a few in case she needs one for a close-up or some kind of a retake, and she grandly presented me this one for my efforts today.” As we pulled away, he took his hand off the gearshift and made a muscle. “I worked harder pushing that damn camera on the tracks for the five-thousand than the guys did running in the five-thousand.”
I reached over and pinched his cheek. “Leni’s really got a thing for you, honey . . .” I believe that was the first time I’d ever used a term of endearment like that with Horst. You know, Teddy: honey, baby, darling, that sort of thing. But it just came out, naturally. He looked over at me when I said that with a sweet smile of satisfaction. Little things mean a lot. There was a song by that title, and it’s very true. I said, “I’ll bet she’s jealous of me.”
“If she is,” Horst said, “you better watch yourself. Leni thinks she was an Amazon in a past life.”
