Let Me Finish (15 page)

I walked in and found him restless in his bed and amazingly frail. His eyes lit up and he said my name in the old way: "Rog!" He wanted to know how I'd come from New York and I said that Henry Allen had picked me up at the Bangor airport. "Did you fly over Seattle on the way?" he asked. He didn't seem troubled when I said no, and after a moment murmured, "Lost in the clouds."

He died the next October, still at home and able to recognize the people around him. Joe told me that in that long year he'd read aloud to his father often, and discovered that he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn't always clear about who the author was. Sometimes he'd raise a hand and impatiently wave a passage away: not good enough. Other evenings, he'd listen to the end, almost at rest, and then ask again who'd written these words.

"You did, Dad," Joe said.

There was a pause, and Andy said, "Well, not bad."

L
ATE
one night in the summer of 1937 or 1938, a young man at a party—a cheerful fellow named Charlie, the older brother of a girl I'd once been seeing—came into the room where I was, looking for the girl he had brought and was now ready to take home. This was in a house on Parker Point, in Blue Hill, Maine, and the smoky, pretty room was full of young people I knew or almost knew—most of them part of the Blue Hill crowd, but with enough of my sixteen- or seventeen-year-old summer friends from nearby Brooklin in among them to make me feel at ease there, along about midnight. Charlie was from East Blue Hill, not my bunch, but I knew who he was looking for. "Anne? Light of my life?" he said, looking amiably and perhaps a little drunkenly around at us. "Figuratively speaking, light of my life, where are you?" There was some laughter at this, and in time Charlie found Anne—Anne Nevin—and the two said good night and went off together, as they always
did. I've forgotten the rest of the evening, but I can still hear the tone of Charlie's question, which came back to me later that night, after I'd got home. Its ease and style—what I would think of in time as cool—dazzled me; I couldn't get over it. Charlie was older, perhaps twenty. I didn't envy him or want to be him, but the moment became one of those flashes which light up the long hallway stretching down the later teens to the door that opens out into adulthood. It promised that what lay ahead for me and others my age was a new life in which we would talk to each other, we young people, in these confident and amusing tones, within an intimacy shared by men and women who were ready for each other now, and eager to find the easy sensual laughter and affectionate idioms and grasped shoulders and wrists and playful glances that would come with our main preoccupation over the next few years. Romance and sex and love itself were almost at hand, and with them the discovery of what sort of men and women we would become, to ourselves and our friends, and, up beyond that, within our marriages and new families.

"Light of my life?"—would I ever be as easy and joyful as that? The delectable question turns to a wisp as we look at it across this stretch of years. It would not occur to young sophisticates today, who are given little time for yearnings before being knocked flat by the rush and crash of experience.

Another passing question that has stuck with me came five or six years later on a narrow staircase connecting some upper stories of the imposing red roofed stone headquarters building at Lowry Field, in Colorado. College has
come and gone, it is the fall of 1943, wartime, and I am an Air Force corporal, most recently an instructor in machine guns and power turrets at the Aircraft Armament School but now converted to an official historian, of all things. Somebody at the Pentagon has decided that decent records should be kept about these suddenly overcrowded tech schools that are mass-producing trained personnel to maintain the floods of new bombers and fighter planes headed for the European and Pacific theatres, and has tapped its service records for young noncoms who were college English majors and perhaps can write. On this afternoon, I am going upstairs in search of some files stored in a dusty space under the roof. Ahead of me is a civilian employee in our office, a woman named Bettye, in her middle or upper twenties, and, just behind her, my boss, Tech Sergeant Maury Caples, a cheerful, informal thirty-odd-year-old type, not long ago in the advertising business in Cincinnati. Tromp, tromp we go, we three, when Maury, a step or two below the girl, says, "Have you had your Christmas goose yet, Bettye?"

"No," says Bettye, "but I think it might be coming soon."

"Nothing like a little goose for Christmas," says Caples, as we arrive, laughing together and a little out of breath. I am a married man—I've been married for a whole year now—but the bright-eyed look, a loaded glance, these two have just exchanged is outside my experience. Are they sleeping together? Isn't Maury married, like me? Is something happening between them, or is this just the way grownup men and women can talk sometimes when they trust each
other? The last possibility is almost the best. I've grown up a little, myself, right on these stairs. Wow.

 

Getting there, becoming my adult self, was not a steady goal in my scattered youth, and changes in me, when they came, took me by surprise. Who would expect such a thing to happen on a golf course? Let's reverse directions and go back a few summers again, back before the war to a morning in late August, 1940, when I'd joined my hacker friends Freddy Parson and Bus Willis for another round, there in Brooklin. Where we played was an unfenced but privately maintained little nine holes, right in the middle of town, with bumpy, pasturelike fairways and sunburned greens, where each hole supported an old-style iron flagstick, twisted with years of use and cool to the touch. The shallow, undemanding traps had long since gone to gravel, but lichen-crusted granite ledges, here and there intruding upon a fairway or rising more boldly, like silent onlookers, to one side of a green, offered a greater threat to your score. There was one par five, a fall-away meadow that terminated in a natural bowl, where the strip of rough beyond the green was bordered by knee-high clumps of ball-swallowing ferns. Pinewoods threw their morning shadows almost to the middle of the narrower fairways, and by five-thirty or six on August afternoons began to repeat the process from the other direction. The course started at roadside, just beside the narrow two-lane macadam of Route 175, and at its farther end skirted the inner shore of our harbor. Sometimes, bent almost double under the limb of a hackmatack while I tried to extemporize an irritable slash at my
Kro-Flite, nestled dangerously close to a root, I would peer out toward the green and catch a flash of rippled sunlight from the Reach beyond. Other days, again in the rough, I would straighten up to brush a twig or a bug out of my collar, and find myself monitored by a motionless gull twenty feet away, with a bit of mussel shell at its feet. It was a great seven-iron course, perfect for old gents and free-swinging teen-agers perpetually and hilariously in trouble.

Here, on a clear morning sixty-five years gone, a green Ford pulled up beside the grass shelf that constituted the first tee, and we friends were inspected by a young woman with short reddish hair and a grave stare. "Hi," she said. "Any way a person could pick up a game around here?" Without waiting for an answer, she backed up her car and slid it deftly between my ancient Plymouth roadster and the Parsons' station wagon. As she got out and pulled her clubs from the back seat, we eyed each other uneasily. We were young men in mid-college, just sprung from summer jobs in the city, and thought ourselves a suave bunch. While our casual, pickup rounds often included girls or girlfriends, or even sisters, this was our game, made exclusive by a shared age and ineptitude.

"Hi," she said again, dropping her bag next to ours. She told us her name, and the family she was staying with, out on Naskeag Point, who'd said it would be O.K. for her to just come over like this and horn in. She paused, watching us. "Now I'm not so sure," she said.

We collected ourselves and told her our names. Of course she could come along, Freddy said, but we were
only duffers. Bus shook her hand and said he'd just figured out who she must be—and mentioned the name of her fiancé. Didn't he play golf?

Not this week, she told us—he was away and she'd been invited up to get to know the family. She said it lightly.

"I'd be here if I was him," Bus said.

I didn't know the family or their place, but Bus did and even knew how to talk to a self-possessed young woman in her middle twenties—an age that made her as strange to me as any movie star. She wasn't quite beautiful, as I recall; there was something too firm about the line of her jaw, but the way she stood now, looking down the first fairway with her weight cocked easily on one hip and a red tee protruding from between her teeth, was both comforting and exotic.

Perhaps a bit abashed by her own boldness, she said she didn't want to spoil our game. It would be better if she chose one of us to be victim, and to have the two others go first, go on ahead. She didn't want three of us standing around while she fought her way out of the woods. Would that be O.K.?

We agreed, and stood together, suddenly shy before her gaze. "I'll take you," she said, amazingly pointing at me. She asked me to tell her my name again.

I told her, and we two vacated the tee, leaning back against my car together while Bus and Fred teed off—Freddy for once avoiding one of his monster mishits, which had been known to bonk off a farmhouse roof adjacent to our right—and headed down the innocuous par-four first. Glancing sidewise, I noted her stylishly flapped old golf
spikes and heavy leather bag, with its three woods and matching irons. The scored, expensive-looking clubfaces were flecked with blackened grass. I was way over my head.

She'd been pulling on a white golf glove, then stopped. "Oh, no," she said. "I keep forgetting." She held up her left hand, which displayed a striking ring on the third finger: a thick little blue-green chunk gleaming within a gold setting. She was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and a short skirt, with a couple of tees stuck into loops in the top, which she patted momentarily now, looking for a pocket.

"Roger, do you have a handkerchief, maybe?" she said, tugging off the ring. I reached into the hip pocket of my khaki pants and took out a faded, almost decent blue bandanna.

She took it from me, folded it into a long triangle, folded it again, and ran it through the ring. She brought the ends back over each other, making a snug packet, and handed it back. "I'm trusting you—O.K.?" she said. She retrieved the glove she'd tucked under her arm and put it on again, pulling it tight.

I was startled at the assurance and intimacy of the gesture. I took a match folder or whatever it was from inside my left-hand side pocket and stuffed the bandanna in its place, thrilling at the little lump at its center as I tucked it away next to my thigh.

When our turn came, she plucked up an iron and teed off swiftly, finishing her swing with an eloquent slide of the hips at the last moment, so that her lean body seemed to watch the safe flight of the ball. There'd been a click at contact: barely a sound at all. My own three-iron—I'd passed up my driver, which was prone to a low, diving slice—was banged off to the right, as usual, but this time missed the granite shelf out there, which could produce spectacular ricochets. "Shot," she said, picking up her bag. We diverged, and I could hear the rich, clockety sound her clubs made as she walked briskly away, her left hand swinging free.

I sank a lucky putt on the first—eight or ten feet, with the ball bumping and wobbling as it rolled, which happened on these greens—for a five on the hole: five to her four. Possibly we each managed fives on the comeback second, which brought us to the road again, next to where we'd started. Maybe I'd be O.K. We lit cigarettes while we waited for Fred to find his ball, up ahead of us in the marshy right rough of the dogleg third, and I filled her in a little, in response to questions. We were more tennis players, really. We'd grown up here in the summers and had taken up golf early in our teens, because of this handy little course. The proprietor, a shy man named Donald Parson—Freddy's uncle—had leased these acres and converted them to his own use. He allowed his friends and his friends' kids to play here without charge, while he himself turned up only now and then, mostly alone. Sometimes the course stood empty for days on end. None of us had had lessons. We were terrible golfers but not as bad as Fred's older brother Kornie. Kornie was a sketch out here, but a demon sailor who won most of our races. Suddenly sensing the need to account for my pathetic array, I explained that two of my clubs had belonged to my grandfather and the rest—well,
I couldn't remember where I'd picked them up. Weirdly, I had only odd-numbered irons—a three, a five, and a seven—along with a thick, garden-tool sort of sand club, plus my putter and stiffish driver. "I should really get organized someday," I said lamely.

She was too good for me, of course, much as she tried to hide it. I lost a ball in the same boggy stretch where Freddy had gone on that third, and took a seven. I half-shanked my drive on the downhill fourth, and when I'd at last rejoined her on the green it seemed to me that she intentionally misdirected her putt, sliding it well clear of the hole. When I wrote down our scores, I trailed her by four or five strokes. "Let's just play, shall we?" I said, stalking ahead.

She didn't apologize, but went on with her effortless round, gazing with evident pleasure as we topped the hill again, and the green with its circling birches and low bay-berry thickets came into view. I stopped sulking. Never mind the painful difference in our scores, I'd take on a different role here: I'd be her host. A couple of holes later, emerging onto the shelf of a west-facing tee, I named three or four of the cruising sloops and yawls at anchor amid the more numerous lobster boats before us in Center Harbor, and pointed out our modest yacht-club fleet, off beyond the spindle. A handful of broad catboats were beginning to stir at their moorings, to the first breaths of the afternoon's reliable southerly. "Ours is the blue one with the tan deck," I said, pointing. "See?" I sounded like a six-year-old.