by Frank Deford
“Continuing the maritime theme.”
Exactly. And then “Up A Lazy River,” which allowed Eleanor to take off her little shawl and toss it into the band, when the lyrics went “throw away your troubles . . .”
“I get it.”
And then she finished up with “The Isle of Capri.” It wasn’t a bad little act, and the crowd was very appreciative. Then, while Art Jarrett and the band resumed their musical stylings—that’s what they called them back then, “musical stylings”—Eleanor retrieved her little shawl and came over to our table. This time, I thought it was Mr. Simms who was gonna have a heart attack. He couldn’t even bear to look at her, he was so nervous being in the close company of such pulchritude. Eleanor chatted with them awhile, and since some people had begun to dance now, she told Mr. and Mrs. Simms that they had to. “If you don’t, Hilda . . .” That was Mrs. Simms name; it just came to me now. “If you don’t get up there with that good-lookin’ husband of yours, then I’m the one who’s gonna take him out on that floor and trip the light fantastic.” Well, Mr. Simms grabbed the missus pretty quickly then. I don’t think he was prepared to take Eleanor Holm into his arms. That would’ve been entirely too much for the poor man’s beating heart.
So Eleanor poured herself a glass of champagne. “Well, Sydney, whatdja think of my act?”
I said, “It was really swell. I didn’t have any idea you could sing that good.”
“I’m workin’ on it. Art doesn’t think I’m quite ready for ballads yet. Just the up-tempo stuff.”
“Well,” I said. “It really works swell.”
“Yeah, you’ll see, I do one chorus of a ballad. It’s a start. And once the Olympics are over, I’m gonna concentrate completely on my show business.” She nudged me. “Then you can win all the gold medals.”
I kinda rolled my eyes at that, Teddy. Eleanor looked down at my drink. “Hey, have some more champagne.”
“I dunno, Eleanor. I wanna stay in shape.”
Eleanor just roared at that. “Honey, I train on champagne and caviar. Don’t pay any attention to those blazers. They’d have us all living in a nunnery between races. A little champagne is not the end of the world.” I took a polite sip. She poured more into my glass. “I think the European swimmers drink this stuff for breakfast.” Then she picked up Mr. Simms’ pack of Lucky Strikes and took one out. “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” she said. That was the famous advertisement then. So she offered me a Lucky, too.
“No thanks,” I said.
Eleanor lit up. “Actually, I don’t smoke all that much. Just to be sociable, you know. And in the locker room. I can see the faces on all the other girls when I light up a coffin nail. They’re thinking: she not only beats us, she smokes, too. What could she do if she took care of herself? See, that’s the mental part, ’cause I’m playin’ around with ’em. Now don’t you let on.” She kinda nudged me and winked. I was not only the queen-in-waiting; now I was her confidant, too.
She went on: “You’ll see how much of a game the amateurs are, Sydney. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense at all. The Hollywood people want me to swim in the pictures, but I can’t do that because of the blazers. Especially that Avery Brundage—what a pompous jackass. He’s the worst. Of course, he can be, because he’s the boss—he’s the head of the AOA.”
AOA—I toldja, Teddy: that’s the American Olympic Association.
And Avery Brundage really did drive Eleanor nuts.
She said, “Brundage says if I just jump in some pool in a movie lot and swim to the other side with a rose in my teeth, then I’m a professional swimmer. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
I agreed that it was. Which, in fact, it is.
“But I can get up here and sing in a bathing suit, and that’s no problem. Even though I’m gettin’ paid for singin’ in a bathing suit, that doesn’t make me a pro. I can dance in a bathing suit. No problem with the blazers. I can act in a bathing suit. No problem. I swear, Sydney, Avery Brundage wouldn’t care if I came out and screwed in a bathing suit so long as I didn’t swim in a bathing suit. Well, you can’t screw in a bathing suit. So dry hump. Avery Brundage wouldn’t care if I dry humped in a bathing suit right here on the dance floor of the Empire Room as long as I didn’t swim in one.”
I agreed, Teddy. I just agreed. This was all a bit much for me. But Eleanor wasn’t finished.
“Of course, they expect us all to be good little girls. The blazers don’t like any of their girls being married like me, because that means I’m actually having marital relations! Well, since I married Art, you think that’s slowed me up any? As a matter of fact, I’m faster. My world record for the hundred—the hundred meters—is one-sixteen and three, but whaddya think I did in practice just a couple months ago?” I shook my head. “One-fourteen and six.”
“Good grief,” I said. I actually swooned at that. “That’s really fast.” It was, Teddy. That was unworldly.
Eleanor took one more drag on her Lucky Strike and squashed it out. “Tell you the truth, I like to make love the night before I swim a big race. Art and me’ll make love tomorrow night. I think it helps.”
“You do?”
“Sure. It relaxes you, and for goodness’ sake, it doesn’t take that long. Then you just have a cigarette and go off to dreamland. And all these other gals are lying in bed alone, tossin’ and turnin’, worryin’ their pretty heads about the race. Now you just tell me: who’s getting better preparation?” And then, as I pondered this, hoping it was a rhetorical question, Eleanor asked, “You have a boy friend, Sydney?”
Actually, Teddy, I’d been going out some with a sophomore at Washington College. He was a great improvement on Buzzy Moore, and I liked him enough, but he wasn’t anything special. “Well, not really,” I told Eleanor.
“Gee, someone as pretty as you should have a fellow. Now, I’m not asking you to do anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable about, but in the future, you remember what I said.”
“I will, Eleanor. I will.” That occasioned me to take a good long swallow of the champagne, and just about then Art Jarrett wrapped up the dance numbers. The dancers could tell the set was ending, because there was a flourish from the band, and that meant the show-offs on the dance floor did a lot of dipping, the women swaying back as their partners held them.
Eleanor drained her champagne glass and patted me on the knee. “Well, there’s my cue. I’m back in the saddle again.”
And that was when Art Jarrett grabbed the mic and began singing “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” Only, of course, he kept looking over at Eleanor sitting next to me while he sang, and when they got to the second chorus, she stood up and threw that little shawl off again and started moving toward him, only like she was swimming.
“Don’t tell me it was a backstroke, Mother.”
No, she swam over freestyle. And I had to wonder what the blazers would think about that, if pretending to swim in a bathing suit on dry land made her a professional. But I guess not. Anyway, when she got to Art, they put an arm around each others’ backs and sang the last chorus together. That was the part of a ballad he let her sing—only, of course, she sang “Did you ever see a dream walking?” and he sang “Did you ever see a dream swimming?” It wasn’t a bad show, really. It really wasn’t.
Mom shook her head, smiling at the memory. Then she glanced over at the television set, but the gymnasts were still the attraction. They were on the balance beam now. “Aren’t they ever gonna get rid of those damn little imps and get the swimmers out here, Teddy? I’m an old lady, I wanna see Natalie Coughlin swim the hundred before I fall asleep.”
I looked at my watch. “It can’t be much longer now,” I said, “but come on, don’t leave me hangin’. How did you do when you raced a couple days later?”
“Actually, not bad. I told you, we were still swimming yards then in the United States, a hundred yards and two hundred yards, and I got my best times in both. But still, I was fourth. And not all the best girls were at the In
doors. If I was gonna make the Olympics at the trials in New York, I had to get third. I had to get a little faster.”
“How did Eleanor do?”
“Oh, my gracious, she not only set a new world record in the hundred, she did it by more than a second.”
“Wow.”
“Oh yeah, it made me think: Hmmm, if I can just figure some way to get laid in New York the night before the trials, I could make the Olympics.”
“Come on, Mother.”
“Oh, don’t be such an old woman, Teddy. Of course I wasn’t serious. I was still such a sweet little virgin then, I didn’t even know what a dry hump was. But . . .” She paused. “But, no, honestly, I certainly didn’t forget what Eleanor said. To make love to the man of your dreams, and then sleep in his arms and get up and beat all the other girls the next day and stand there on a podium with a gold medal round your neck and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ playing . . . well, Teddy, life couldn’t get any better than that. My gracious, queen of the backstroke . . .”
When I was a child, it seemed so strange listening to my parents talk about their lives before I was born. I mean, however irrational, in a way it just didn’t seem possible that they were around before I arrived on the scene. In my parents’ cases, too, it was even more difficult, because I grew up in Montana, and they’d both come from Back East, and for those of us from Out West, Back East might as well have been The Mysterious East. That made it that much more confounding to hear of times past that had transpired in such alien territory.
Actually, it wasn’t just the war that my father didn’t care to talk about. He was reluctant to bring up his childhood, too. I gathered enough to appreciate that it had been a terribly sad one for him. His family had been hard on one another, lacking much love, and they were poor, too, and as things had grown so terribly hard in the Depression, Dad simply saw no reason to bother any longer with the blood he’d been dealt. The best I could glean from him, one lovely summer’s day after high school, he just said good-bye, took off from home, which was upstate New York, and started looking for work. It seems that his folks hardly missed him; he certainly didn’t miss them.
As near as I can tell, he was a hobo for a while (although he was ashamed, I think, ever to say that in quite so many words), then he got into the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and that seemed to give him both hope and purpose. Dad was bright and self-confident. It was a bit odd, but whereas Mother would sometimes drift back into the rural argot of the Eastern Shore, Daddy—who’d come from far worse circumstances—always spoke with the finest diction. It was as if he was determined to leave that dispiriting youth of his completely behind. You could say Daddy remade himself.
Certainly, he began to improve his lot after he left the CCC, if only little by little. By that time, two or three years later, when he somehow happened to run into my mother, he’d already transformed himself into a young man of some evident potential, who had his eyes fixed on the main chance.
Now, mother was certainly more forthcoming about her upbringing. There were funny little stories, silly adventures she’d had with Carter Kincaid, tales of struggling in the Depression and, always, fond memories of her father. The only perplexing omission was that she’d never bring up her swimming in any detail.
Mother’s mother would also visit us periodically, bringing the latest breaking news from the Shore. Mom would listen to Grandmother’s reports, but she never seemed that engaged about the old homeland. I guess both Mom and Dad were like so many Americans. Once they’d left Back East and moved Out West, they simply didn’t look behind them, and without other family to connect them to the past, soon the tides of time washed over their earlier lives.
When Grandmother died in 1978, Mom returned for the funeral. Daddy had always been close to his mother-in-law, so it surprised me that he didn’t go, too. But Mom went alone, and I suppose because she hadn’t been back to the Shore for so many years, it made her, when she was there by herself, that much more sentimental. She told me, in fact, that she’d cried as much standing by her father’s grave as she’d wept for her Mother’s death. “All this time, Teddy, all this time he’s been gone,” she said. Part of her was really crying about her own past, about how it had all drifted away.
I asked her, then, if she’d stayed in touch with Carter. “No,” she said. “Not after we moved to Missoula.”
“But you were so close.”
“Oh, Lord, yes. When I was a girl, I never had a better friend than Carter Kincaid.”
“But you lost complete touch with her after she went to Baltimore?”
“No, I saw her there,” she said. “Well, the once.”
“But . . . ?”
Mom paused awhile, not so much to consider a response, I thought, as she did to use this occasion to remember Carter. She smiled broadly, fondly. Finally, though, she just said, “It’s complicated, Teddy. It was just too complicated.”
I had to assume there must’ve been some sort of falling out. In my experience, when there are sad ruptures among old friends, it usually has to do with new husbands or wives. Perhaps Carter’s husband didn’t get along with Mom. Whatever it was, I could tell that she didn’t want to discuss it, and so, reluctantly, I had to let the matter drop and consign Carter Kincaid forever to Mom’s childhood.
Like that, once Grandmother died, the Shore was, for my mother, gone for good. There was nothing Back East but cemetery plots, so thoughts of that past only surfaced again when Mom knew her own death was approaching—which also happened to be at the same time that Michael Phelps came out of Maryland, storming the Olympics and triggering the memories of swimming and all that went with it, way back then.
Mom slept late the next morning. She always ate a good breakfast, although one of the few tedious things about my mother was that all too often she’d go on (and on) about how she missed having scrapple for breakfast. They’d had that growing up on the Shore. “Most people don’t even have a clue what scrapple is,” she’d whine. They certainly didn’t in Missoula, Montana, or Eugene, Oregon—and, I assume, in most other places. “Just as well, I suppose,” she would then add. “I never was sure what was in it, but I think it was all the stuff that wasn’t good enough for sausage.”
“Not good enough for sausage? I thought you shouldn’t even ask what went into sausage.”
“Yeah, Teddy, scrapple is probably just nasty scraps, but it sure was good. We’d pour maple syrup on it.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone putting syrup on meat.”
“Well, we did on scrapple on the Shore, and it was delicious. For all I know, maybe they don’t even have scrapple anyplace but the Shore. All I know is, I sure do miss having a choice of scrapple for breakfast.”
But this morning, after her scrapple-less Oregon breakfast, when she found me out in her garden, she was raring to resume reminiscing. Mom was still in a good mood from the night before, because late in the evening, when she’d despaired that NBC would never desert the teeny little heinie-less gymnasts, they’d switched to the swimming. Then, not only did Natalie Coughlin win the hundred backstroke—hooray!—but Michael Phelps also won another gold medal in something or other.
It was a gorgeous morning in Eugene, and I’d sort of drifted off in the sun, reading the newspaper. Mom took it off my lap and turned right to the sports pages, looking for the certification in print of what she’d seen with her own eyes on TV the night before. She searched the agate. “I just can’t get over it, Teddy. The time.”
“What time?”
“Natalie Coughlin’s time. Just thirty-seven hundredths of a second over a minute. Remember what I told you Eleanor swam it in—a minute, sixteen and something. Imagine that. And now they’re down to almost a minute.”
“That doesn’t make Eleanor or any of your crowd look very good, does it?”
She glared out me with eyes that suddenly seemed much younger than the rest of her. Angry eyes. The veritable headlights people always have that poor, clichéd deer caught
in. “That’s both rotten and ignorant of you, Teddy Branch. Jesse Owens was running in those Berlin Olympics, and his times look pretty slow now, but would anybody think the less of him?”
“No, I’m sorry, you’re right, Mom.” I realized I’d waded into rushing waters and had better try to negotiate my way safely back to shore. But too late. She snapped at me now:
“The artists—the painters and the writers don’t get any better, do they?”
“What?”
“What? There’s nobody around today who’s supposed to give Shakespeare or Rembrandt a run for their money, is there?”
“No, that’s for sure.”
“Are any of the current would-be geniuses any smarter than Leonardo da Vinci was?” I shook my head. I saw where this was going. “So just because athletes have better times now doesn’t mean they’re intrinsically better, does it?”
“I see your point, Mom.”
“Well then, you’re not as ignorant as you let on. They’re swimming today in those skin-tight suits that look like something out of science fiction. Put me in one of those new-fangled suits!” She paused to consider that for a moment. “I don’t mean me now, of course. Me then. And the pools weren’t so streamlined either, so there were waves that would wash back on us. And in the backstroke, my stroke, the rules made it much more difficult to make a legitimate turn. You had to touch with your hand, like you were playing tag. You saw Natalie last night. They can just sort of flip around.” She threw her hands all around in some representation of a backstroke flip turn. Mom had gotten herself quite worked up. “Hell, Teddy, that in itself is whole seconds right there.” She shook her head in despair at me again. “Besides, there wasn’t any money in it then. The blazers wouldn’t allow it. These kids today can work at it all the time. I don’t imagine Natalie Coughlin is working nights singing at any Empire Room—”