by James Dodson
Wishing to think no more of these things, I leaned forward to see if our guide star was still loitering around. As fortune would have it, it was—shining like the Morning Star. But in the new light of day, I realized something pretty funny. This whole time I’d been meditating on the plane’s wing navigation light, a regular Telemachus in Topsiders.
Another time, I might have laughed out loud.
THREE
A Sunday in London
I opened The Sunday Times and settled into one of the Hotel Berkeley’s overstuffed reading chairs, hoping the four aspirin I’d swallowed would soon do their job. The combination of too much scotch and too much thinking and too little sleeping had given me a doozy of a headache.
Dad was in the suite’s spacious bathroom, preparing to shower. We’d been in London only four hours. The suite had lovely fruitwood paneling. I was already bored and still worried, which is why I hoped to distract myself with somebody else’s problems.
According to the Times, John Major’s declared war on Yob Culture was a miserable failure, and London’s tourist sites were crumbling into the Thames. A sign of how bad things were in Britain these days was the fact that the Queen was reduced to digging for oil beneath Windsor Castle, prompting one Fleet Street wag to rename the place South Fork-on-Thames.
I heard the bathroom water start and stop and my father swear softly. I got up and walked to the door and knocked softly.
“You okay in there?”
“Yup. Just trying to remember how to work fine British plumbing.”
“It can be a challenge. May I help?”
“Uh…sure.”
I opened the door and went in. He was stripped naked, wrapped in a large white terry towel, standing uncomfortably by the sink. Against the harsh afternoon light, he looked pale, vulnerable, and old. He felt embarrassed, and I did, too. His shaving kit was open on the marble vanity; there were various rubber bags, frightening straps, and unopened packages of syringes lying about. I tried not to look at this medical paraphernalia, but I could smell his menthol shaving cream and see his old-style blade razor lying on a fresh towel, where he’d just laid it aside to dry. As a boy, I’d loved to watch my father shave. He shaved so slowly, standing before the mirror and lathering his face with meticulous care, making a little ritual out of each pass with the razor. He told me civilized men always shaved this way. In college I started shaving with a disposable razor in the shower and never broke the habit.
I fiddled with the ornate knobs on the shower, remarking, “Isn’t it strange that the same English brains who invented golf, the Magna Carta, and Page Three girls almost in the same year can’t seem to produce two showers that function the same way.”
“At least they have showers in hotel rooms now,” he replied. “I doubt Kate Bennie would appreciate you giving credit to the English for inventing golf, Sport.”
He was right about that. Kathleen (popularly known as Kate) Bennie was my Scottish mother-in-law, a no-nonsense daughter of Glasgow’s Netherlee neighborhood, a proud school principal, devoted grandma, and something of a one-woman Royal and Ancient rules committee whom I could reliably count upon always to take the opposing view in any discussion about God, politics, or the future of organized field sport. Scots are naturally contrary, the way Germans are naturally humorless or Russians giftedly morose.
As it so happened, at that very moment Kate was up visiting her Scottish homeland, making her annual tour of the premises just to ensure that everything was being properly looked after. We planned to try and hook up for a haggis lunch and perhaps a quick, invigorating debate of some sort in the days ahead.
“You’re quite right,” I agreed, stepping back out of the shower. “Better strike that heresy from the record.” The bath pipes were singing lustily now, the water beginning to steam invitingly. I backed away giving a butlerlike wave of the hand. “Your shower awaits, m’lord,” I said.
“Your cockney accent needs work.”
“True. So does my short game. I’ll work on both while we’re here. Meanwhile, I was thinking of ordering a sandwich. Would you like one?”
“Make mine ham and cheese. Now scram.”
I went back to my comfy chair by the window and dialed room service. At well over three hundred dollars a day, the venerable Berkeley, one of London’s premier society hotels, had been specifically chosen by me as our starting point because fifty years ago my father’s first night on English soil had been spent hunkering under a military poncho in the November rain.
He’d come over with three thousand other GIs on the Queen Elizabeth but had had it better than most. Having been picked by the brass to serve as a military liaison to the ship’s head purser, he was given the run of the ship, an actual cabin bunk, a dry wool blanket, as much bad coffee as he cared to consume, and at least one hot meal a day. Many of his friends slept either in the QE’s congested hallways, on the passenger decks, or in the empty swimming pool and had to live off cold rations or marmalade sandwiches, which the QE’s crew sold for the extortionate price of three dollars apiece.
Dad’s job, as a de facto peacemaker and policeman, was to make sure nobody got thrown overboard during the inevitable disputes that arose from negotiations in the thriving marmalade black market, as well as help the crew keep a sharp eye posted at the stern for lethal U-boats. Because of severe military food shortages on land, his first three meals on British soil had been vanilla ice cream.
A Jeremy Irons impersonator answered the Berkeley’s room service phone. I told him I wished to place an order for two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, lightly toasted, with a dollop of real English mustard and perhaps a splash of mayo, two large Cokes, chips if available, and perhaps a nice sturdy dill gherkin or two.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Jeremy. “The hotel kitchen is closed for the afternoon.”
This surprised me. A world-class hotel kitchen shut down on a Sunday afternoon? Jeremy didn’t sound the least bit sorry, though. He sounded as if I’d thoughtlessly interrupted the annual reading of Brideshead Revisited to the housekeeping staff. I explained that my father and I had been up most of the night flying in from Atlanta, gotten lost taking the shortcut I knew like the back of my hand from the airport to the hotel, and missed both lunch and a scheduled teetime at Sunningdale Golf Club. Jeremy was unfazed by this tragic summary of our day thus far.
He explained that the kitchen staff of the Berkeley had been given the day off because they were recovering from a big debutante party in the hotel the previous week. London’s social season had just wound up, he explained, a tradition “that dates all the way back to the restoration of the monarchy.” Sniff, sniff.
“We don’t require a whole lot,” I reassured him. “How about a nice nutty cheese log, or just some baloney and cheese wedged between some bread? A nice pot of real British tea would help take the chill off.”
“I don’t believe we have any…cheese logs or baloney, sir. But I’ll see…what can be done.” Jeremy softly recradled his phone. I pictured him shaking his head, picking up his Waugh, and clearing his throat.
I went back to our sitting room and turned on the telly, hoping to get the weather for Royal Lytham, our first stop the next morning. Instead, as usual, championship snooker was on because it’s on at any hour of the day I come to Britain. Championship snooker is about as thrilling as watching your neighbor wash his Buick. Next to televised soccer—which Brits call football—and possibly cricket, a game named for an insect that can take weeks to play, championship snooker is the world’s greatest cure for insomnia. I know how Philistine this sounds because Kate Bennie constantly reminded me what an uncultured boob I was for saying soccer is an appalling waste of good fairway grass. “British football is so boring,” I once told her, to no noticeable effect, “the fans have to kill each other in order not to fall asleep.”
There was no weather report, but I did find a spellbinding football match. The Middlesex Morons were tied one-to-one with the Shropshire Sheep Worriers. I turne
d the channel again and found two men in clerical shirts having a heated theological argument on a stage. I knew they were arguing because one man’s eyebrow was arched indignantly. “The problem with England, Bishop,” said the man in the gray dog collar, “is we’re a nation of churches where polls show no one goes to church anymore. It’s a worrisome trend, you see.”
I switched off the TV and looked at my watch. It was now approaching early Sunday afternoon in London. Too late for golf, too early for dinner. Dad was bushed, the Berkeley had no baloney, and all my fabulous plans—a round at Sunningdale, perhaps a motor-carriage tour through the city, followed by dinner at the Savoy River Grille—seemed to be trickling hopelessly down the tubes with the bathwater.
Just then, Dad appeared, washed down and redolent of the House of Aramis, dressed in fresh golf duds. I was happy to see him wearing the green Ashworth shirt I’d sent along with the new golf clubs two Christmases ago. At least he’d kept the shirt.
“Any luck with the grub?”
“Yes. It’s being prepared by a man who believes in no baloney, even as we speak.”
“Good. Maybe I’ll scoot in the bedroom and give your mom a little wake-up call.” I saw him consult his watch, mentally trying to figure the time back in Carolina.
He disappeared into the bedroom to call my mother, and minutes later I could hear him avidly describing seeing St. Paul’s Cathedral for the first time in half a century (“…can you imagine something that big, Jan, and the Gerries just couldn’t hit it! The bombs just bounced off the roof, actually…it was made of lead, you see, the roof I mean…”) and other landmarks on our way into the city. A few minutes later, I heard someone start up a small chainsaw in the bedroom and went to look. My father was flat on his back on the bed, gently snoozing. Out for the count.
I settled back in my chair and switched to the Sunday Telegraph, which was reporting that there was a pesky hole leaking water into the Chunnel, the recently opened $10 billion wonder tunnel linking England to France, the people they most love to detest. Maybe more interesting, a secretary from Luton had caused a major row in Parliament by having her breasts lifted on the National Health Service, and the Ministry of Health was reporting that there were now approximately two rats for every man, woman, and child residing in Britain.
Restlessly, I set the paper aside and stared out the window at the street below, where a young man and a pretty dark-haired woman of about twenty had just emerged from a black London taxi. They were laughing and holding hands. I tried to imagine their names.
Suddenly, my autumn ghosts had returned, and I found myself thinking: Good lord, I’ve been here before.
—
The two years following Kristin’s murder were difficult for me.
I finished my undergraduate studies, passed on the teaching assistant’s job, stalled a very patient newspaper editor indefinitely, and took a three-month job selling advertising space for my father. I told myself I needed time to “cool out” and play some golf and make no formal plans.
I sold one pathetically small ad to a man in Atlanta who made industrial cloth belts. He had an office window that overlooked the state prison and a murky blown-up photograph of St. Andrews on his cheaply paneled office wall. I remember sitting in his wardenlike office one gray winter afternoon listening to him drone on about the exciting advances in synthetic belt-binding technology, unable to keep my eyes from drifting back to the garish photo of St. Andrews. He caught me eyeing it. “I took that myself,” he said proudly, shifting the toothpick slowly between his lips. “That’s St. Andrews. The birthplace of golf. Ever been there?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“You play golf?”
Used to, I said.
He snorted gently and signed the ad order, and I walked out to my Chevy Monza in my new Palm Beach suit wondering what the hell I was doing there.
Something weird was happening to me. I’d lost interest in playing the classical guitar, and little by little, I could feel even my desire to play golf leaking away, too. A short time later, I sold my guitar for a fraction of its value to a former student and discovered that every time I went to Green Valley my game seemed to get worse, my scores ballooning. It was as if I were forgetting the game or the game forgetting me. People kept telling me how well I was “handling” Kristin’s death, but beneath the skin I felt like a walking triple bogey—so angry I wanted to beat somebody to a pulp. But whom? A seventeen-year-old kid? I honestly wondered if this might not be the early stages of madness.
I got it into my head that going to the Episcopal seminary would calm me down. I did the necessary paperwork, gathered the necessary recommendations, and got admitted—only to abruptly back out. I went out to the Greater Greensboro Open that spring at Sedgefield, thinking I’d clear my head by maybe latching on to a caddy job and spend a year hanging around the PGA Tour. Unfortunately, I learned, PGA players had their own professional caddies, but I was assigned to carry the bag of a marginal star from a bad television sitcom in the tournament’s celebrity pro-am, an obese comic who had a spectacular talent for loudly passing gas after he four-putted. The comic tipped me two dollars for my work and informed me his mother could have read Sedgefield’s greens better than me. She’d been dead for years. Ta-dump. He nearly doubled over laughing. It seemed like an omen of sorts.
When the nice lady editor at the Greensboro Daily News called a few weeks later to make one final job offer, I accepted the reporter’s job. My father, after all, had begun there as a copy runner, and I’d been the wireboy at the News the night Richard Nixon resigned. It seemed to be a family tradition and the work I was destined if not happily determined to do. Three months into the job, though, haunted by something I couldn’t quite place a name to, I walked into the lady editor’s office and resigned, saying I had to go to Scotland. She asked me what was so all-important in Scotland.
“I don’t know,” I said, then added: “Golf courses.”
Nobody except my father believed it was the right thing to do. Colleagues told me it was career suicide, indicating mental flakiness. Dad drove me to the airport and gave me an extra thousand dollars. “Emergency money,” he called it. I remember how we sat in the empty airport lounge having Budweisers and not saying much, and then he gave me a new blue Seiko watch. Instead of graciously accepting the watch, a belated graduation gift, I asked my father if he would hold on to it for me until I got home from Europe. I explained that I didn’t want to risk losing it. The truth was, I thought it was the ugliest watch I’d ever seen, the kind of gaudy timepiece a car salesman would wear.
If my father’s feelings were hurt, he didn’t show it. He tucked the watch back into the box and put the box into his pocket. We stood, embraced, and I went off to Europe. It was almost exactly two years to the day since Kristin died.
I roamed around the continent for nearly three weeks, riding trains from Luxembourg to Germany, down to the south of France and back up to Paris, ludicrously dragging my unused golf bag with me the whole time. I read Graham Greene novels and slept in cheap hotels filled with hungry-looking East European students and sometimes went to museums or just hung out in cafes drinking strong black coffee and reading Greene on rainy days. My rough idea was to make St. Andrews the grand finale of this strangely rudderless pilgrimage, but on a train from the Gare du Nord to the Normandy coast, my golf bag got swiped and I found myself arriving in London short of funds and golf clubs. I stayed with a friend’s friend in Clapham for a week, then caught the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh, where I rented a car and drove across the Firth of Forth and down the little peninsula of the Kingdom of Fife into the village of St. Andrews.
It was raining lightly, but the Old Grey Toon, as it’s called, looked pretty much like my old man’s picture of it, dark, windswept, oddly majestic. I stood on a knoll beside the Road Hole and watched several groups of golfers play through, the October sea wind penetrating my skin. It was too late in the day to find rental clubs, and most of the shops along the Links
road were closing, so I wandered up around the town until I found a small hotel. I checked in and went back out and found a crowded pub in the basement of a hotel not far from the eighteenth fairway of the Old Course, and drank enough ale to make sure I felt it in the morning.
I remember wobbling home through the quaint streets thinking how strange it was that I’d finally reached the birthplace of golf but felt none of the magic I’d grown up believing was there. I’d finally seen the famous Old Course, but to me it looked just like any other golf course in the rain, and I felt no real desire even to play it. What was the big deal? My little pilgrimage, I decided, was a bust because I was still as sad as the day I’d left home. I remember wanting to weep, but I couldn’t even be bothered to do that.
It felt like my childhood was over.
—
There was a soft knock at the door. I opened it and found a pleasant young waiter pushing silver service on a rolling table.
He asked me if I was having a nice afternoon at the Berkeley. I told him if London got any more thrilling that afternoon, I’d probably soon require a respirator. He laughed and said, “You should see if there’s a football match on, mate.”
Under one ornate silver hood was a crustless sandwich with a thin swipe of fish paste and a sprig or two of parsley, what Brits call gents’ relish. It was basically inedible by anyone who hails from below Richmond, Virginia. Under hood number two was a toasted cheese sandwich hard enough to use as a drapery sashweight. There was no pickle or chips. It was a lunch fit for a title by Conan Doyle—“The Curious Case of Jeremy’s Revenge.” At least the tea was delightful. So I sat by the window drinking the tea, listening to my stomach growl, and watching traffic pass through the late sunny afternoon, alternately wishing we were playing golf and wondering if I hadn’t made an enormous mistake dragging my dying father to Britain.