Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  We left our clubs locked in the trunk of my car and set off, each swinging an iron back and forth through the sopping grass in front of us as we walked. Within ten strides the road had vanished. "Over here, I think," I said, angling off toward the right. I led the way to the flat ledge and the junipered rough beyond, where we could look in wider circles. Nothing. By the time we'd jumped the trickly stream below the first hole and walked up the patch of rough, our pants were soaked to the knees, and our hair and shoes speckled with weeds and grassheads. She peered down into the first hole, actually lifting the flagstick—you never know—and we turned away and went on, leaving our trails across the whiter sheen of the wet green.

  At the third, we had to visit the bog where I'd lost a ball, then cross the fairway to the edge of the opposite woods, where my next shot had landed. Each bush and branch we touched showered us icily, and when we got back to the edge of the fairway my shoes were making squashy noises. She stopped to pull up one sock, then shook her head like a dog and pulled her hair free of her neck. We scarcely spoke, muted by the hopelessness of our work. Every twenty or thirty strides we had to stop to straighten our backs and waggle our wrists, aching from our ceaseless swashings. Anger thickened inside me—this was insane—but I said nothing. Neither of us could be the first to stop. She'd moved out ahead now; perhaps she didn't want me to see her face. I didn't say it, but the fog made it hard to be sure where I was, once I'd stepped off the fairway in search of a reconstructed slice or clunker. The course had gone two-dimensional, a gray page with only the odd birch limb or moldering stump to let me venture a guess.

  On the short seventh, we had to climb the steep side of the granite cliff just to the right of the green, where another errant shot of mine had landed amid thick trees. I gave her my hand at the top, pulling her up behind me. There was a touch of breeze off the cove, closer to us now but still invisible in the all-surrounding fog, and you could hear the balsams and the smaller spruce branches beginning to stir overhead. The fog would lift soon. Then we heard another sound, steps and rustlings behind us, and with one instinct dropped to our hands and knees on the crumbly granite together, out of sight. There was the startling plock! of a golf shot, back on the tee, then a pause and the softer sound of a ball invisibly striking the green to our right. A man appeared below us, foreshortened, striding out of the mists with a putter and a single midiron in his hand. For a crazy moment, I thought it was her fiancé, what's-his-name, come to find us, but this was a tanned white-haired man, perhaps in his sixties. He had a canvas sailing hat pulled down almost to his ears and wore waterproof golfer's pants. I'd never seen him before: some demented rich friend of Don Parson's who thought he knew this course well enough to play it blind. Perhaps he'd even rowed across the cove from the stone Parson house on the point, and clambered up to the holes here at the back of the shore.

  His ball must have rolled off the green after it hit. We could hear him sighing and muttering under his breath as he cast about beyond the green, looking for it, and then a private expletive—grasht! or brasht! it sounded like—when he gave up and walked away, not bothering to drop a fresh ball for his putt. Perhaps he'd been too intent on his game to mark our path before him through the wet or to wonder why it had stopped.

  I was laughing, my hand over my mouth. "God, wasn't that something?" I whispered. "He never knew. Did you hear him!"

  She turned toward me, rising from her knees. "It's no use!" she said fiercely. "It's gone forever. This is crazy—we'll never find it. I'm leaving tomorrow and it will never turn up. Now I've got to think of something to tell them. This is all so like me—you have no idea."

  I couldn't go on watching her, up so close. I dropped my gaze and saw the minute reddish-blond hairs on her wrist and the backs of her hands. Perhaps the wet on her cheeks was from her dank and darkened hair or from the fog. I must have looked as strange and small to her as she did to me. We were helpless, children on a bad outing. She bent to pick up her iron, and, my heart thumping, I walked away.

  We didn't leave the fairway for the rest of our round, but when we came downhill on the eighth I took out a ball I'd been carrying, dropped it on the green, and putted it, with my iron turned upside down to make a blade. The ball threw up a little wheel of water as it rolled across the green and past the cup. I held out my club, inviting her to play, but she shook her head.

  Back at her car, I told her I'd call her fiancé's family if the ring ever turned up: Bus Willis would know how to reach them. She may have given me a slip of paper with her name and address on it. We shook hands once again, then she took hold of my arm, next to my chest, with one hand. "You've been—" she began but stopped. "Everything's going to be fine, Roger," she said. "You know what I mean."

  We raced the next day and I did well. Not a win but maybe another one of the little red cotton burgees they handed out in those days—red for second—or a third-place yellow. I used to smoke fifteen-cent cigars during the races then: Blackstones. When my regular girlfriend, Evelyn, came back—she'd been in New Hampshire, visiting her grandmother—I told her that I'd played golf with this woman who'd showed up and asked in, and next day went back with her to look for some lost keys. Fred and Bus asked me how we'd come out that weird day and I said she'd been too tough for me. I didn't tell anyone that I'd driven out to Naskeag the last morning and parked my car near where I thought her new family's driveway might be. She didn't come by. The next year, I had a full-summer job in New York and only got to Maine for a few days, and the year after that the war came and everything was changed. At some point after Evelyn and I were married, I told her about the ring. After the war, the Donald Parson course was abandoned—now there's a patch of alders down where the first hole was, a driveway in place of the third fairway, and a cottage on the granite ledge above the shore. Nobody remembers a visiting young woman who might have lost something valuable on the forgotten old golf course once.

  For a time, I wished I'd paid more attention to things she had told me the first day we played golf. She lived in New Jersey, I think, and she'd met her fiancé ... well, perhaps on Cape Cod. She'd gone to some college in Ohio. But none of that mattered. Our two walks together stayed with me, and felt stranger and more intimate as time went by. I kept losing the image of her, but when I thought of her golf swing she'd reappear. I've grown suspicious of some of the colors and details that have worked their way into this account, which may be overpaintings intended to hold a fading work. I was about to start my junior year at Harvard that fall, but in my version of the story I am younger than that, more boyish; she is the expert and I the apprentice. In time, our morning in the fog became more abstract and significant, almost leaving memory for some other place in my mind. She and I, a strange couple, had had a few hours in common and a secret—something no one else could guess. A woman and a younger man, myself at nineteen, had become intimate by association. I'd done my part, held up. Was this what she'd meant with those strange parting words—that I would grow up and be trusted?

  Like everyone else, I traveled a lot during the war, and sometimes I caught myself looking for her in a crowded San Francisco restaurant or among the people pushing onto a downtown Denver streetcar. I was a soldier now, no longer a boy, and if our paths should cross we would meet as equals. In wartime, surprise encounters happened all the time. Early one morning when I was heading home on furlough before going off to the Pacific, my train stopped in a place called Ottumwa, Iowa. I lifted the window shade next to the seat where I'd slept all night, and there was Kornie Parson, in uniform, standing on the platform, six inches away outside the glass. He was a flight instructor at a naval air station there, heading to Chicago for a day at the track.

  Dry Martini

  THE martini is in, the martini is back—or so young friends assure me. At Angelo and Maxie's, on Park Avenue South, a thirtyish man with backswept Gordon Gekko hair lowers his cell as the bartender comes by and says, "Eddie, gimme a Bombay Sapphire, up." At Patroon, a possibly married couple wa
nt two dirty Tanquerays—gin martinis straight up, with the bits and leavings of a bottle of olives stirred in. At Nobu, a date begins with a saketini—a sake martini with (avert your eyes) a sliver of cucumber on top. At Lotus, at the Merc Bar, and all over town, extremely thin young women hold their stemmed cocktail glasses at a little distance from their chests and avidly watch the shining oil twisted out of a strip of lemon peel spread across the pale surface of their gin or vodka martini like a gas stain from an idling outboard. They are thinking Myrna Loy, they are thinking Nora Charles and Ava Gardner, and they are keeping their secret, which is that it was the chic shape of the glass—the slim narcissus stalk rising to a 1939 World's Fair triangle above—that drew them to this drink. Before their first martini ever, they saw themselves sitting on a barstool, with an icy mart in one hand, one leg crossed over the other, in a bar where a cigarette can be legally held aloft, and a curl of smoke rising above the murmurous conversation and the laughter. Heaven. The drink itself was a bit of a problem—that stark medicinal bite—but mercifully you can get a little help for that now with a splash of scarlet cranberry juice thrown in, or with a pink-grapefruit-cassis martini, or a green-apple martini, or a flat-out chocolate martini, which makes you feel like a grownup twelve-year-old. All they are worried about—the tiniest dash of anxiety—is that this prettily tinted drink might allow someone to look at them and see Martha Stewart. Or that they're drinking a variation on the Cosmopolitan, that Sarah Jessica Parker–"Sex and the City" craze that is so not in anymore.

  Not to worry. In time, I think, these young topers will find their way back to the martini, to the delectable real thing, and become more fashionable than they ever imagined. In the summer of 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park—it was a few weeks before the Second World War began—and as twilight fell F.D.R. said, "My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea." The King said, "Neither does my mother." Then they had a couple of rounds of martinis.

  I myself might have had a martini that same evening, at my mother and stepfather's house in Maine, though at eighteen—almost nineteen—I was still young enough to prefer something sweeter, like the yummy, Cointreau-laced Sidecar. The martini meant more, I knew that much, and soon thereafter, at college, I could order one or mix one with aplomb. As Ogden Nash put it, in "A Drink with Something in It":

  There is something about a martini,

  A tingle remarkably pleasant;

  A yellow, a mellow martini;

  I wish I had one at present.

  There is something about a martini

  Ere the dining and dancing begin,

  And to tell you the truth,

  It is not the vermouth—

  I think that perhaps it's the gin.

  In John O'Hara's 1934 novel, Appointment in Samarra, the doomed hero, Julian English, and his wife, Caroline, observe Christmas with his parents, as usual. They live in the Pennsylvania coal town of Gibbsville, but the Englishes are quality, and before their festive dinner Julian's father, Dr. William English, mixes and serves up midday martinis; then they have seconds.

  In the 1940 classic movie comedy The Philadelphia Story, the reliable character actor John Halliday plays Katharine Hepburn's reprobate father, who has returned home unexpectedly on the eve of her wedding. Standing on a terrace in the early evening, he mixes and pours a dry martini for himself and his deceived but accepting wife (Mary Nash) while at the same time he quietly demolishes his daughter's scorn for him and some of her abiding hauteur. It's the central scene of the ravishing flick, since it begins Tracy Lord's turnabout from chilly prig Main Line heiress to passably human Main Line heiress, and the martini is the telling ritual: the presentation of sophistication's Host. Hepburn had played the same part in the Broadway version of the Philip Barry play, a year before, which also required that martini to be mixed and poured before our eyes. Sitting in the dark at both versions, I was entranced by the dialogue—only Philip Barry could have a seducer-dad convincingly instruct his daughter in morals—but at the same time made certain that the martini was made right: a slosh of gin, a little vermouth, and a gentle stirring in the pitcher before the pouring and the first sips. Yes, O.K., my martini-unconscious murmured, but next time maybe more ice, Seth.

  This is not a joke. Barry's stage business with the bottles and the silver stirring spoon in one moment does away with a tiresome block of explanation about the Lords: he's run off with a nightclub singer and she's been betrayed, but they have shared an evening martini together before this—for all their marriage, in fact—and soon they'll be feeling much better. In the movie, which was directed by George Cukor, the afternoon loses its light as the drink is made and the talk sustained, and the whole tone of the drama shifts. Everyone is dressed for the coming party, and the martini begins the renewing complications. Sitting in the theatre, we're lit up a little, too, and ready for all that comes next—the dance, the scene by the pool—because the playwright has begun things right.

  Cocktails at Hyde Park or on Philadelphia's Main Line sound aristocratic, but the Second World War changed our ways. In the Pacific, where I was stationed, a couple of Navy fighter pilots told me a dumb story they'd heard in training, about the tiny survival kit that was handed out to flight-school graduates headed for carrier duty. "Open Only in Extreme Emergency," it said—which seemed to be the case of a pilot north of Midway whose Grumman quit cold a hundred miles away from his flattop. After ditching, he climbed into his inflatable raft, regarded the empty horizon that encircled him, and opened the kit. Inside was a tiny shaker and a glass, a stirring straw, a thimbleful of gin, and an eyedropper's worth of vermouth. He mixed and stirred, and was raising the mini-cocktail to his lips when he became aware that vessels had appeared from every quarter of the Pacific and were making toward him at top speed. The first to arrive, a torpedo boat, roared up, and its commanding officer, shouting through his megaphone, called, "That's not the right way to make a dry martini!"

  Dryness was all, dryness was the main debate, and through the peacetime nineteen-forties and fifties we new suburbanites tilted the Noilly Prat bottle with increasing parsimony, as the martini recipe went up from three parts gin and one part dry vermouth to four and five to one, halted briefly at six to one, and rose again from there. The late George Plimpton once reminded me about the Montgomery—a fifteen-to-one martini named after the British Field Marshal, who was said never to go into battle with less than these odds in his favor. What was happening, of course, was an improvement in the quality of everyday gin. The Frankenstein's-laboratory taste of Prohibition gin no longer needed a sweetener to hide its awfulness: just a few drops of Tribuno or Martini & Rossi Extra Dry would suffice to soften the ginny juniper bite.

  Preciousness almost engulfed us, back then. Tiffany's produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth. Serious debates were mounted about the cool, urban superiority of the Gibson—a martini with an onion in it—or the classicism of the traditional olive. Travellers came home from London or Paris with funny stories about the ghastly martinis they'd been given in the Garrick Club or at the Hotel Regina bar. And, in a stuffy little volume called "The Hour," the historian and Harper's columnist Bernard De Voto wrote, "You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest."

  We appreciated our martinis, and drank them before lunch and before dinner. I recall an inviting midtown restaurant called Cherio's, where the lunchtime martini came in chalice-sized glasses. Then we went back to work. "Those noontime cocktails just astound me," a young woman colleague of mine said recently. "I don't know how you did it." Neither do I, anymore. My stepfather, E. B. White, sometimes took a dry Manhattan at lunch, but his evening martini was a boon forever. Even when he'd gotten into his seventies and early eighties, I can remember his greeting me and my family
at the Bangor airport late on a summer afternoon and handing me the keys to the car for the fifty-mile drive back to the coast. Sitting up front beside me, he'd reach for his little picnic basket, which contained a packet of Bremner Wafers, some Brie or Gouda and a knife, and the restorative thermos of martinis.

  At home, my vermouth mantra became "a little less than the absolute minimum," but I began to see that coldness, not dryness, was the criterion. I tried the new upscale gins—Beefeater's and the rest—but found them soft around the edges and went back to my everyday Gordon's. In time, my wife and I shifted from gin to vodka, which was less argumentative. At dinners and parties, I knew all my guests' preferences: the sister-in-law who wanted an "upside-down martini"—a cautious four parts vermouth to one of gin—and a delightful neighbor who liked her martinis so much that when I came around to get whiskey or brandy orders after dinner she dared not speak their name. "Well, maybe just a little gin on some ice for me," she whispered. "With a dab of vermouth on top."

  We drank a lot, we loved to drink, and some of us did not survive it. Back in college, the mother of a girl I knew would sometimes fix herself a silver shaker of martinis at lunchtime and head back upstairs to bed. "Good night," she'd say. "Lovely to see you." I met entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze. John Cheever, the Boccaccio of mid-century America, wrote all this in sad and thrilling detail. What seems strange now about celebrated stories of his like "The Country Husband," "The Sorrows of Gin," and "The Swimmer" is how rarely the martini is mentioned, and how often it's just called gin. Alcohol was central to this landscape, its great descending river.