The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  That swim was the turning point of her career. She felt that she had affected and somehow even inspired a whole nation. For the first time, she became aware of the transcendent power of the solo swimmer. Breaking records no longer interested her: From now on, her swims would be used as vehicles for a more personal goal. She believed that the lone swimmer among the waves, pitting her courage against great odds, could become a symbolic figure. “My goal is not just to be a great swimmer,” she told me. “I think people identify with the athletic struggle, and I am trying to use sports to help bring people together.” The ancient Greeks felt the same way—wars between city-states were put off during the Olympic games, as if people believed that, through the spirit and example of athletic contest, individual differences might somehow be sublimated and reconciled.

  “Lynne was always interested in impossible things done in history by individual people,” her history teacher at Los Alamitos High School recalls. And there is something of Joan of Arc about Cox—the enthusiasm and the innocence, the nerve, the vulnerability, the self-belief, the courage to go to people at the highest official levels and make them sympathetic to her cause.

  Preparations for a swim are often more torturous than the swim itself, but it is in the course of these negotiations, she believes, that differences between countries are somehow made to look trivial. A year after she swam the Bering Strait, she traveled to Lake Baikal. She arrived in Russia to find herself a celebrity. Thousands of people lined the shore, throwing long-stemmed roses as she passed, crying out, in English, “Welcome, Lynne Cox, welcome, U.S.A.!” A cape on the lake was named after her, next to Cape Tolstoy.

  Cox continued to search out political challenges. In June 1990, she swam down the River Spree between East and West Berlin, escorted by East German guards in boats, who could negotiate the various mines and razors they had placed below the surface. Later that year, aware of border disputes between Argentina and Chile, she flew down to the Beagle Channel. Her aim was to somehow break the deadlock by involving the two navies in her swim, across seven miles of fierce currents. At first, the Argentinians and the Chileans refused to cooperate with each other, but ultimately Cox prevailed, and both countries provided escort boats. Afterward, she was told by the American ambassador to Chile that her swim had set a precedent. A year later, representatives of Argentina and Chile met on an oil rig in the Straits of Magellan to settle the disputes. And in 1994, while Jordan was mediating the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis, Cox swam across the Gulf of Aqaba, a narrow slip of water at the Red Sea’s northern tip, which is bordered by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. The talks, which were taking place at a nearby hotel, stopped while the politicians walked to the edge of the sea to witness the end of the swim.

  It is difficult to know if her “political” swims have affected the course of history, but as she described them I was often reminded of the hero of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” who swims home one summer day across the pools of his neighbors. I began to visualize his swims as a microcosm of hers. He moves from pool to pool, just as she travels from sea to sea, and his influence is that of some mythical figure at first awakening in those around him a sense of something missing in their lives, a certain generosity and vitality of spirit. He imagines his swims as a romantic voyage into unknown waters, a form of knightly quest. He believes himself “a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny.” As he erupts onto his neighbors’ lawns and plunges unbidden into their pools, their reaction is one of puzzled amazement.

  Cox’s life has been a form of knightly quest, and her spirit has remained essentially romantic—she has swum in the classical Mediterranean, between the pillars of Hercules, across the three-mile Strait of Messina, guarded in legend by Scylla and Charybdis. She has swum in the Orient, through the ancient bridges of Kunming Lake, below the old summer palace of the emperor of China. She is drawn, she says, to dangerous places that intimidate ships, and to straits like Cook and Magellan, because they are named after sea captains who opened up a new world.

  We had a final swim off Malibu, the day before I left California. Once again, we were the only people in the water. Cox warned me to avoid possible stingrays on the sand in the shallows, and never to wear a yellow bathing suit, because it is the color most attractive to sharks—“Yummy yellow they call it.” She had just returned from Fiji and talked about the forty-to-fifty-foot sharks that locals had claimed to spot off the reefs there. She knew which species of shark twisted over to bite, and which didn’t. I continued to wonder how, with all her acute awareness of the threat of the submarine world, she felt free to swim far out beyond the horizon. Then I thought of a passage in the autobiography of Annette Kellerman, the great Australian swimmer at the beginning of the century, that might well refer to Lynne Cox: “I learn much from people in the way they meet the unknown of life, and water is a great test. If they’ve come to it bravely they’ve gone far along the best way. I am sure no adventurer nor discoverer ever lived who could not swim. Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push. This love of the unknown is the greatest of all the joys which swimming has for me.”

  1999

  “By the time I develop a true understanding of sand, I’ll probably

  be forced into some sort of organized sports.”

  THE NATIONAL PASTIME

  JOHN CHEEVER

  To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim. It’s an impossible situation. This will be apparent to everyone, and it was to me, a country boy brought up on a farm—or, to be precise, in a country house—just outside the village of St. Botolph’s, in Massachusetts. The place is called West Farm. My ancestors had lived in that village and in that house since the seventeenth century, and they had distinguished themselves as sailors and athletes. Leander, my father (his brothers were named Orpheus and Hamlet), had played shortstop for the St. Botolph’s Hose Company. Although the hose-company games sometimes figured in his recollections, his memories were usually of a different order. He was nearly sixty when I was born, and he could remember the last days of St. Botolph’s as a port. My grandfather had been a ship’s master, and when I was a boy, our house was partly furnished with things that he had brought back from Ceylon and China. The maritime past that my father glimpsed had been glorious, full of gold and silver, full of Samoan beauties and tests of courage. Then—so he told me—boxwood had grown in our garden, and the paths had been covered once a year with pebbles that were brought from a cove near West Travertine where the stones were as round and white as pearls. In the rear wing of our house, there was a peculiar, very clean smell that was supposed to have been left there by my grandfather’s Chinese servants. My father liked to recall this period of splendor, but he liked even better to recall his success as a partner in the gold-bead factory that had been built in St. Botolph’s when its maritime prosperity was ended. He had gone to work as an office boy, and his rise had been brilliant and swift. He had business acumen, and he was convivial. He took an intense pleasure in having the factory whistle blown. He had it blown for all our birthdays and for his wedding anniversary, and when my mother had guests for lunch, the whistle usually blew as the ladies sat down.

  In the twenties, the gold-bead factory was mortgaged and converted to the manufacture of table silver, and presently my father and his partner were ruined. My father felt that he was an old man who had spent all his energy and all his money on things that were unredeemable and vulgar, and he was inconsolable. He went away, and my mother called my two sisters and me to her room and told us that she was afraid he had killed himself. He had left a note hinting at this, and he had taken a pistol with him. I was nine years old then, and my sisters were fourteen and fifteen. Suicide may have been my father’s intention, but he returned a few days later and began to support the family by selling the valuables that had come to him from the shipmast
er. I had decided to become a professional baseball player. I had bought a Louisville Slugger, a ball, and a first baseman’s mitt. I asked my father to play catch with me one Sunday afternoon, but he refused. My mother must have overheard this conversation, because she called him to her room, where they quarrelled. In a little while, he came out to the garden and asked me to throw the ball to him. What happened then was ridiculous and ugly. I threw the ball clumsily once or twice and missed the catches he threw to me. Then I turned my head to see something—a boat on the river. He threw the ball, and it got me in the nape of the neck and stretched me out unconscious in my grandfather’s ruined garden. When I came to, my nose was bleeding and my mouth was full of blood. I felt that I was being drowned. My father was standing over me. “Don’t tell your mother about this,” he said. When I sat up and he saw that I was all right, he went down through the garden toward the barn and the river.

  My mother called me to her room that night after supper. She had become an invalid and she seldom left her bed. All the furniture in her room was white, and the rugs were white, and there was a picture of “Jesus the Shepherd” on the wall beside her bed. The room was getting dark, I remember, and I felt, from the tone of her voice, that we were approaching a kind of emotional darkness I had noticed before in our family affairs. “You must try to understand your father,” she said, putting down her Bible and reaching for my hand. “He is old. He is spoiled.” Then, although I don’t think he was in the house, she lowered her voice to a whisper, so that we could not be overheard. “You see, some years ago his cousin Lucy Hartshorn left him a great deal of money, in trust. She was a meddlesome old lady. I guess you don’t remember her. She was an antivivisectionist, and wanted to abolish the celebration of Christmas. She liked to order your father around, and she felt the family was petering out. We had Grace and Vikery then, and she left your father the money on condition that he not have any more children. He was very upset when he found out that I was enceinte. I wouldn’t want you to know what went on. He had planned a luxurious old age—he wanted to raise pigeons and have a sailboat—and I think he sometimes sees in you the difference between what he had planned and what he has been reduced to. You’ll have to try and understand.” Her words made almost no impression on me at the time. I remember counting the larches outside her window while she talked to me, and looking beyond them to the faded lettering on the wall of the barn—BOSTON STORE: ROCK BOTTOM PRICES—and to some pines ringed with darkness beyond the barn. The little that I knew of our family history was made up of revokable trusts, purloined wills, and dark human secrets, and since I had never seen Lucy Hartshorn, this new secret seemed to have no more to do with me than the others did.

  The school I went to was an old frame building in the village, and every morning I walked two miles upriver to get there. Two of the spinster teachers were cousins of mine, and the man who taught manual training and coached athletics was the son of our garbage collector. My parents had helped him through normal school. The New England spring was in force, and one fine morning we left the gymnasium for the ball field. The instructor was carrying some baseball equipment, and as soon as I saw it, the sweet, salty taste of blood came into my mouth. My heart began to pound, my legs felt weak, and while I thought, from these symptoms, that I must be sick, I knew instinctively how to cure myself. On the way to the field, we passed an old field house that stood on some concrete posts, concealed by a scrim of rotten lattice. I began to walk slowly, and when the rest of the class had passed the field house, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled through a broken place in the lattice and underneath the building. There was hardly room for me to lie there between the dirt and the sills that were covered with cobwebs. Someone had stuffed an old sneaker and a rusted watering can under the building, confident that they would never be seen again. I could hear from the field the voices of my friends choosing sides, and I felt the horror of having expelled myself from the light of a fine day, but I also felt, lying in the dirt, that the taste of blood was beginning to leave my mouth, that my heart was beginning to regulate its beating, and that the strength was returning to my legs. I lay in the dirt until the game ended and I could see, through the lattice, the players returning to school.

  I felt that the fault was Leander’s, and that if I could bring myself to approach him again, when he was in a better humor, he would respond humanely. The feeling that I could not assume my responsibilities as a baseball player without some help from him was deep, as if parental love and baseball were both national pastimes. One afternoon, I got my ball and mitt and went into the library, where he was taking books down from the shelves and tying them up in bundles of ten, to be taken into Boston and sold. He had been a handsome man, I think. I had heard my relations speak of how he had aged, and so I suppose that his looks had begun to deteriorate. He would have been taken for a Yankee anywhere, and he seemed to feel that his alliance to the sea was by blood as well as tradition. When he went into an oyster bar and found people who were patently not American-born eating oysters, he would be stirred. He ate quantities of fish, swam daily in the salt river, and washed himself each morning with a sea sponge, so he always smelled faintly of brine and iodine, as if he had only recently come dripping out of the Atlantic. The brilliant blue of his eyes had not faded, and the boyish character of his face—its lightness and ovalness—was intact. He had not understood the economic fragility of his world, his wife’s invalidism seemed to be a manifest rebuke for the confusion of his affairs, and his mind must have been thronged with feelings of being unwanted and also feelings of guilt. The books he was preparing to sell were his father’s and his grandfather’s; he would rail about this later, feeling that if histrionics would not redeem him, they would at least recapture for a minute his sense of identity and pride. If I had looked closely, I might have seen a face harried with anxiety and the weaknesses of old age, but I expected him, for my sake, to regain his youth and to appear like the paternal images I had seen on calendars and in magazine advertisements.

  “Will you please play catch with me, Poppa?” I asked.

  “How can you ask me to play baseball when I will be dead in another month!” he said. He sighed and then said, “I won’t live through the summer. Your mother has been complaining all morning. She has nothing to say to me unless she has a complaint to make. She’s complaining now of pains in her feet. She can’t leave her bed because of the pains in her feet. She’s trying to make me more unhappy than I already am, but I have some facts to fall back on. Here, let me show you.” He took down one of the many volumes in which he had recorded his life, and searched through the pages until he found what he wanted. “Your mother wore custom-made shoes from 1904 until 1908, when Mr. Schults died. He made her six, twelve, fourteen—He made her seventeen pairs of shoes in four years. Then she began buying her shoes at Nettleton’s.” He wet his finger and turned a page. “She never paid less than twelve dollars a pair there, and in 1908 she bought four pairs of shoes and two pairs of canvas pumps. In 1910, she bought four pairs of shoes at Nettleton’s and a pair of evening slippers at Stetson’s. She said the slippers pinched her feet, but we couldn’t take them back because she’d worn them. In 1911, she bought three pairs of shoes at Stetson’s and two at Nettleton’s. In 1912, she had Henderson make her a pair of walking shoes. They cost eighteen dollars. She paid twenty-four dollars for a pair of gold pumps at Stetson’s. In 1913, she bought another pair of canvas pumps, two pairs of suede shoes, golf shoes, and some beaded shoes.” He looked to me for some confirmation of the unreasonableness of my mother’s illness, but I hung my head and went out of the library.

  The next time the class went out for baseball, I hid in a building closer to the school, where rakes and rollers and other grounds equipment were stored. This place also was dark, but there was room to stand and move and enjoy an illusion of freedom, although the light of day and the voices on the field from which I was hidden seemed like the lights and the sounds of life. I had been there only a
few minutes when I heard someone approach and open the door. I had thought it would be the old grounds keeper, but it was a classmate of mine, who recognized, a second after he saw me, what I was doing, and seemed—since he was doing the same thing—delighted to have a conspirator. I disliked him and his friends, but I couldn’t have disliked him more than I disliked the symptoms of my own panic, for I didn’t leave the building. After this, I had to hide not only from the ball game but from my classmate. He continued to hide in the tool shed and I hid near the playing field, in some woods behind the backstop, and chewed pieces of grass until the period ended.

  That fall, I went out for football, and I had always liked winter sports, but in the spring, when the garbage man’s son took the balls and bats out of the chest near the door of the gymnasium, the taste of blood in my mouth, the beating of my heart, and the weakness in my legs were keener than ever, and I found myself stuffed in the dirt under the track house again, with the old tennis sneaker and the watering can, horrified that I should have chosen or should have been made to lie in this filth when I could be walking freely over a green field. As the season progressed, I began to find new hiding places and to invent new ailments that would excuse me from having to play baseball, and the feeling that Leander had the cure to my cowardice returned, although I could not bring myself to approach him again. He still seemed to preserve, well on the dark side of his mind, some hard feelings about my being responsible for the revocation of Lucy Hartshorn’s trust. Several times when I went to a movie or a dance, he locked the house up so tight that I couldn’t find any way to get in, and had to sleep in the barn. Once, I returned in the daytime and found the house locked. I heard him moving inside and I rang the bell. He opened the door long enough to say, “Whatever it is you’re selling, I don’t want any.” Then he slammed the door in my face. A minute later, he opened the door again. “I’m sorry, Eben,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was you.”