The Peerless Four

by Victoria Patterson

  “It is,” I agreed, and that shut him up.

  We went down my street and I said, “That one,” nodding at my house. Jack parked, saying, “You go. I’ll wait.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to see me?”

  “He will. He agreed.”

  I got out of the car, went to the gate, and started up the walk. The sky was dark, almost black, the new moon giving little light. Then I heard Jack coughing in the Cadillac, and I knew that he’d taken a slug from his flask. I went back and told him to keep the noise down, and he gave me a patient look, knowing that this had nothing to do with my return. He’d already lit a cigarette. The end fired and glowed as he sucked. He held it through the opened window for me, and I took a long drag. The smoke left my mouth in a puff of white. We stayed that way—passing the flask and cigarette back and forth through his opened window—until Jack looked at his watch and said, “You’re fifteen minutes late now.” So I left, walking back through the gate and up the walk to the front door.

  I knocked softly even though I had a key. I hadn’t been home in over a month and it was improper to barge inside. I knocked again—louder—then looked through the glass at the door. His study door opened off the hall, and then a light came on. A guilty, sad pang went through me when I saw his bulky form. He was coming toward the front door, stroking the chain of his pocket watch, and another pang went through me. I pulled my face from the glass before he saw it. He didn’t bother asking who it was, opening the door calmly.

  I said, “Good evening, Wallace.”

  He stood there blinking into the dark. I wondered if he’d been drinking. Then he put his hands out and I came to him for an embrace, smelling the Scotch. When he pulled away, he looked glad to see me but then he was sad again.

  He gave a long deep look into the night.

  I stepped inside, telling him, “Jack’s in the car.”

  His head went back, as if he’d spotted Jack’s outline, and he shut the front door behind us. The paintings in their elaborate wood frames, the lamps, and the wallpaper were as familiar to me as my own body. But I’d pushed them from my mind, along with everything, so that their reappearance was startling.

  “It’s just,” I began talking, not knowing what I’d say, “I’m leaving for Amsterdam. I want your blessing. But I’m leaving no matter what.” I went on like this, telling him my reasons, and he watched me steadily.

  When he was sure I was done, he said, “Get Jack.” I was confused until he added, “I can’t talk sense into you.” We hadn’t fought in the past and he wasn’t about to start now.

  So I went outside. Jack’s head was leaned back against his seat, eyes closed, mouth opened, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. I rapped my knuckles against the window, and he shot forward, almost burning his thigh. He rolled his window down farther.

  “He wants to reason with you,” I said, and he fumbled, mashing his cigarette in the car’s ashtray, gathering his hat. He followed me inside as if I were leading him to a funeral.

  We found Wallace in his study, waiting behind his desk. There was an open bottle of Scotch and an empty glass. As we entered, he didn’t stand, but stayed slumped in his red-leather chair, the room smelling musty with books and Scotch. I could tell right then that he’d given up on keeping me home. He knew that I would go whether he permitted me to or not, but he would make Jack beg for it.

  Jack took his hat off his head and stepped forward, saying, “She’s made her decision. It has nothing to do with me.”

  Wallace gave no response, as if he hadn’t heard.

  Jack was looking at me now. “She’s made her decision,” he repeated. “It has nothing to do with me.” His hat was going from hand to hand as if it were a ball.

  Wallace slanted his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, sir,” he said, and then he turned to me. “Do you wish to elaborate?”

  “No,” I said, brusquely. I let him know with my look that I wasn’t involved with Jack. Wallace eyed me. I saw that he believed me but that he still wanted to punish Jack.

  Jack went into his best sales pitch then, telling Wallace that the team needed me to chaperone. History would be made, and I’d get a chance to participate. It would reflect well on Wallace. He talked about the girls, explaining their strengths. He said we had a chance to beat the United States, even with their twelve girls stacked against our four, based on our talent. The British team had been favored, but they were boycotting in protest of the limited track and field schedule. We’d come back victors and change the Olympics. He half-raised his hands and shook them as if in halfhearted victory, the pits of his shirt wet.

  Wallace gave no reaction.

  Jack sat in a chair in defeat. He glanced at all the leather-bound books in the bookshelf, which reached the ceiling. I’d spent hours in there, reading by myself, a small fire going in the fireplace, logs crackling.

  No one spoke, and the grandfather clock in the corner ticked. Some of Wallace’s old trophies were on the mantle, and a gun rack was on the opposite wall. I’d posed with each of those guns, watching my reflection in the big gilt-framed mirror by the fireplace, when no one was looking.

  I wanted to tell Wallace that if I went to Amsterdam, I might return how he wanted me: All-Wife. I was sorry for not giving him children, and that sorrow coursed through everything. I loved him but I couldn’t understand the love because I loved him most when I was away from him.

  Wallace was thinking things he couldn’t say as well. His red hair had thinned and he’d gained more weight. He always favored ice cream in grief.

  Jack stood and made his way to the door. He laid his hand on the doorknob and opened it. Without looking back he said, “This dispute has nothing to do with me”—he placed his hat on his head—“and it has nothing to do with Amsterdam.” He paused, as if debating whether to throw a look back at us. He didn’t. “We should be going, Mrs. Ross,” he said to the hall. “The girls need you.” Before I could respond, he closed the door behind him.

  We were quiet and then Wallace said, “Ex-wife, three kids. Two affairs that I know of.”

  He didn’t need to tell me about Jack’s unsavory background, and I took this as a cue to leave. I had made it to the door when he said, “Why do you think he helps girls? You think he’s doing it because he’s a good man?” He laughed, shifting in his chair. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “I’ll tell you why.”

  A few tears started but I was able to stop them, getting angry instead, thinking, Why do men always make it about them? I went out the door, down the hall—passing my fingertips across our furniture, remembering and leaving everything at once—and when I got to the front door, I wanted to slam it behind me.

  I had my grip, ready to let the door fly, but then I thought about Wallace alone in our house, mixing his Scotch and water (he rarely imbibed), and I settled for shutting the door gently.

  Back in the Cadillac, we headed to the house near the Athletic Club where the girls were waiting, and the sky seemed even darker than before, if possible, and packed with stars. A mist had collected at the road, and our headlights glowed through it, dipping and swerving.

  Jack opened his flask and we passed it between us, steadying our nerves. But there wasn’t much whiskey left, and our adrenaline from the encounter had sobered us. I had a feeling of freedom mixed with tremendous sadness, and I couldn’t ever remember feeling that way before.

  After some time passed Jack said, “He doesn’t like me.”

  “He thinks,” I said, “that you help the girls so that you can see them in their revealing uniforms. Running, jumping, throwing. Their thighs and arms right there for you to gape at.”

  He sighed and said, “Well, who wouldn’t want to see them, Mel. They’re beautiful.”

  Chapter Three

  Beauty Contest

  In November 1927, I met Bonnie Brody while on assignment for the Toronto Daily News, sent to her small hometown of Elnora, Manitoba, for a personality piece. My editor calle
d it a “weeper.” “Tragedy Strikes Family of Champion Athlete” ran the headline. Bonnie and her family had buried her mother three months earlier.

  Bonnie, like the other girls on our Olympic team, was an all-rounder, great at a variety of sports, and Bonnie’s mother liked to walk her to her afternoon high school basketball practices.

  It was one of those ideal afternoons—warm and pleasant with a cool breeze, shadows of clouds skimming the grass—that seem retrospectively fated by its perfection.

  Mother and Daughter said a casual good-bye, turning to go their separate ways.

  Bonnie didn’t see the Model T’s wild swerve at the corner of Jeffers and Pillsbury. But she heard the screeches and screams, and she ran to find her mother lying bloody and broken on the street.

  Coach Frank, the boys’ baseball coach, ran from the field, and he stayed with Bonnie through the ambulance ride and at the hospital, until her own father arrived hours later, due to his being out of town on business.

  At the hospital, Bonnie yelled for her mother long after the nurse pulled a sheet over Mrs. Brody’s head and declared her dead. Three nurses and Coach Frank held Bonnie while a doctor sedated her with an injection.

  When her drug-fog lifted, her screams switched to an existential grievance that I’ve often pondered: “Who’s in charge? Tell me who’s in charge!” and the nurses and Coach Frank held her for the doctor’s repeat injection.

  Much like reading necessitates the reader’s participation, hearing the accident charged Bonnie’s imagination.

  She relived the crash in detail, over and over, as if inside of it. An insatiable drive and anger overtook her, ostracizing her father and six siblings. Wanting to help, Coach Frank began training her for the Olympic 100-metres. Want, need, and grief blazed through her feet, and she ran and ran and hurt and ran.

  Her father remarried, and while the town was forgiving—he needed help raising those kids—his firstborn daughter was not.

  She latched onto Coach Frank. Almost twice her sixteen-year age, he was married with two kids and one on the way. Their relationship was unconventional, as was Coach Frank’s regimen: he drove his car alongside his sprinting protégée, yelling directions out the window, and every afternoon, she ran the bases with the boys’ baseball team.

  Townsfolk witnessed on more than one occasion their private, intimate embraces. But despite the whisperings, Elnora believed in Bonnie and sponsored her with numerous food drives and fund-raisers.

  The winters in Elnora can be rough and frozen, and Elnora was especially durable in response: frugal, religious, rigid, conservative. Populated mainly with Scottish immigrants, Elnora prayed for prosperity, health, peace, and for Bonnie Brody to win gold. God had summoned Bonnie. Even her mother’s death, they told her, was a thread in a divine tapestry. Guarded and suspicious, Bonnie nonetheless fell sway to Elnora’s worship of her.

  At night—every night—she looked in her mirror, said to her reflection 125 times: “Hello, Bonnie Brody, gold-medal winner.”

  Having set a world record at the Canadian Women’s Track and Field Championship and surpassing it to set another at the qualifications, she (100-metres) and Ginger (high jump) were the expectant gold-winners.

  The papers thrived on her tragedy for a while and then focused once more on the Dream Girl this, the Dream Girl that. Everywhere Bonnie looked: Dream Girl photographs and articles.

  The week before our train was to leave, Bonnie came to stay at the house in Toronto, rooming with Flo. Bonnie had turned seventeen the month before, and Flo was three months her elder.

  Her second afternoon, I was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, and Bonnie walked in and looked down at me, her eyes an inky pained blue.

  I needed to talk to her, had promised Jack that I would, and was sorting out how to do so. She wore a denim skirt with pockets, gym socks pulled to her knees, and flat oxfords. Her hair was cut in the Eton style, slicked and bangs plastered. But her hair constantly fought back, wild and angry.

  Pulling a chair from the table, she said, “Can I tell you something?” and then she sat. She hesitated, and then asked, “Why does she get all the attention?”

  “Who?” I asked, even though I knew.

  “I don’t care if she’s so pretty,” she said.

  “They do.”

  “Stupid,” she said, and rolled her eyes.

  “The press doesn’t care what we think.”

  “It’s not a beauty pageant,” she said.

  “We’ve been hearing,” I said, “how women athletes have beards and hair on their chests, and now they have someone they can’t take their eyes off.”

  “It’s awful,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t there some way to change it?” she asked. “She’s letting it go to her head.”

  I didn’t agree and said, “It confuses her.”

  For a moment, she acted as if she hadn’t heard me, and then she said, “She’s a stupid sap.” That was the last thing I wanted to hear. “She’s a sap,” she said again, and as I looked at her face, I saw something ugly and mean under the grief, as though hiding behind a mask. “Acting like a little girl,” she continued, “with that ukulele and doll.” She was talking about the ukulele and rag doll that Ginger kept on her bed. The rag doll was hand-stitched with an embroidered face and the ukulele was made of dark wood. Ginger acted like they were treasure.

  I was going to tell Bonnie that I had the power to pull her from the team, even if I wasn’t sure that I did. But I settled for, “We’re a team.”

  She mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Then she said, “I want to win so bad, Mel, I lay awake at night wanting.” Her voice was mournful, her hands on her knees. “I lie there all night wanting. I have to win. I go sick from it. It’s inside me and”—she leaned back—“What if I don’t win, Mel?” she said. “What then?”

  I was going to quote de Coubertin’s motto: The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part; the important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. But it struck me as disingenuous and I said nothing.

  She stood from her chair and said, “I’m favored.”

  “Sure,” I said, because it was true.

  “That’s not a guarantee.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

  She was waiting for more but I was in no mood to appease.

  Bonnie looked at me expectantly, her hands at the back of her chair.

  “Everyone wants to win,” I said. “It’s no secret. What makes you different? You think God’s got you picked out? You think the world owes you?”

  She looked at me, giving me a full-shock stare.

  “I was eight,” I said, “when my mom died.”

  That got her to sit again.

  “You lose,” I said, “and life goes on.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know if mine will. I’ll die.”

  I was going to try to explain that she could learn about life from losing. That defeat was bitter, but that you have to analyze a loss. But just then, Flo came in, giving us a scanning look. “What’re you talking about?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Bonnie said.

  Flo sensed the weight in the room. She hated school, got poor grades, but she was one of those athletes who excelled at playing head games with her opponents, so I was never sure if she was as simpleminded as she acted. She was our 800-metres girl, trained for the long run, so I knew she had some depth.

  “Come on,” Flo said.

  I didn’t answer and Bonnie said nothing.

  Flo pulled a chair and sat next to Bonnie to prove that she wasn’t going anywhere. She wore a low-waisted blue dress, the shapeless popular kind that looked best on skinny girls with small breasts and no hips. She looked like a twelve-year-old boy, especially with her short hair, but she wore dark red lipstick, and a flower clip pulled back her bangs.

  “Mel was talking about God and country,” Bonnie said
.

  “What about it?” Flo asked.

  Bonnie believed she was clever and didn’t expect me to answer. But I thought about it a moment and responded. I told them that most of us believed that God wanted us to win, not our opponents. God favored us. Our country. But that deep down, each of us knew that this wasn’t really true, and that it didn’t really matter.

  “How can you say that?” Bonnie said.

  “Before I run,” Flo said, looking very serious, “I tap my left thigh three times with my right hand and my right thigh four times with my left hand, real fast so no one notices.” She paused, and then she demonstrated.

  “If I don’t,” she said, “I’m afraid I’ll lose.”

  We were quiet for a bit and then Bonnie said, “I have to wear the same underwear.”

  Flo pinched her nostrils and said, “P.U.”

  “I wash them!” said Bonnie. “Actually they wore out. So I cut patches and sewed them on my others.”

  “For God and country,” said Flo, and we laughed.

  “I raced this girl,” said Bonnie, “who told me before our race that Christ was on her side.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I got the biggest kick out of beating her.”

  We laughed again. Then Bonnie said that even when she was watching others compete, she’d sometimes hold her breath and close her eyes, as if the outcome depended on her. Flo said that when she was a girl, she used to believe that the whole world issued from her, like photographs from her mind projected outward.

  “Then you grew up,” said Bonnie.

  “I guess so,” said Flo, and then she said that she still felt that way when she won a race. “There’s this thing inside me,” she said, “that doesn’t want to be the same as everyone else.”

  “I always have this dream,” Bonnie said, “that I’m running and my feet fall off.”

  Right around that time, Jack knocked on the door and I yelled for him to come in. “Hello,” he said, giving us the once-over. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarette case. I thought he might offer me one but he decided against it.