by Frank Deford
“Or the tsetse fly,” I said.
“Anyway, you shouldn’t be caught dead drinking gin and tonics once the frost is on the pumpkin. I adhere to that principle in life.” And she took another sip, then quickly dove into her purse and hauled out the tape recorder and placed it on the table.
“You brought that?”
“Well, I thought I’d tell you about the race while we were waiting for the meal.”
“The race?” I asked, clicking the recorder on.
My race, Teddy, for goodness’ sake. The Olympic one-hundred meter backstroke. Thursday, the thirteenth of August, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and thirty-six.
“If only you could have been in it,” I said, and Mom sighed.
Yeah, more’s the pity. But it was a honey of a race to watch—even if it was another nasty day. The weather just never got consistently nice that whole two weeks. Just those few odd good days, like the time Horst and I went to the beach. He wasn’t at the race, though. Leni had him doing something somewhere else that afternoon. Of course, Eleanor came. She was brandishing a press pass, but she chose instead to sit with us, her erstwhile teammates. Just to stick it to the blazers. She plunked herself right down next to me.
The waitress came back then and tried to talk us into Pellegrino instead of good Oregon tap water and, failing that, distributed the menus and asked if we wanted to know about the specials. Mom listened, but said we’d get around to ordering in due time. She shook her head when the waitress left.
The older I get, the more damn specials. I swear, if I lived another ten years, there’d be so many specials, it’ll be easier for the waitresses to hand you a sheet with the specials on it and then recite the menu. Less is more, Teddy. Nobody ever learns less is more anymore.
I commiserated with her.
But you let me wander off again, Teddy. Now where the hell was I?
“Eleanor Holm had just plunked herself down next to you.”
Oh yeah. And here came the seven gals, who were the backstroke finalists. There weren’t any Germans in the race, so the stadium was relatively sedate, but anybody who knew anything knew the two Dutch girls were the ones to beat. Rie Whatever had already won the freestyle, and Nida Senff had the best time in the heats.
Eleanor wasn’t impressed, though. She had on a bright rose outfit with a picture hat, because she knew people would be watching her, and before the race she told me, “I could handle this bunch pretty easily, Sydney, but I’ve got to cheer hard, so everybody’ll think I’m a good sport.” So right away, she stood up and yelled, “Yea, Edith” and “Come on, Alice”—things of that nature.
That was for Edith Motridge and Alice Bridges, the two American gals, you understand. And I’ll tell you, Teddy, until the gun actually went off, I think more people were watching Eleanor than the swimmers. It made me downright self-conscious just sitting next to her, because I knew all eyes were trained on her and therefore a lot of them couldn’t help but see me, too. Peripherally. If I’d known that ahead of time, I’d’ve paid more attention to my attire. I was pretty drab compared to Eleanor in that snazzy red ensemble of hers.
Of course, no one zeroed in on Eleanor more than Leni. She was there, in the usual Riefenstahlian get-up, the slacks, the white greatcoat, with the usual entourage—they call that a “posse” now, don’t they?
“Yes, they do.”
Well, I like to be au courant, Teddy, even as my clock winds down. So Leni had her whole posse, and she had two cameramen. Hans was shooting the race, and she had Willy shooting the crowd—which, when push came to shove, mostly amounted to concentrating on La Holm.
And then the race started. Edith got off well, as always, and she was in the lead with Nida Senff. And when the Dutch girl made a bad turn, damn if Edith didn’t get in front.
I said to Eleanor: “Maybe she can do it,” but Eleanor just shook her head. “Nah, she always fades, Sydney,” and sure enough, by the time they got halfway through the last lap, Nida had moved back ahead. Now here came both Rie Whatever and Alice moving real fast, though. Alice had on a yellow cap. It stood out, and for just a second there, I thought maybe she might win, but the two Dutch girls were too good. It was pretty close, though, all four of ’em—a honey of a race—so the crowd got into it even if there wasn’t any German to root for.
“Well, come on, Mom, who won?”
Oh, Nida held on, and Rie Whatever was second, and Alice touched out Edith for third. Poor Edith. She just couldn’t last. There were no big scoreboard clocks then, so we had to wait for them to check with the judges with their stopwatches. Then came the announcement: “The gold medal goes to Miss Nida Senff of the Netherlands in the time of one minute, eighteen and nine-tenths seconds.”
Eleanor stood up to cheer—you know, still playing the good sport—but out of the corner of her mouth, she said to me: “Sydney, that is so piss poor. I could’ve beat ’em all by ten feet.” She clapped some more, and then she turned back to me and said, “And you would’ve beat ’em by five.”
Well, she was absolutely right, Teddy—based on that practice race I’d had with Alice and Edith when I let ’em win, and then the one I’d had with Eleanor a few nights before. I swam much faster than the winner, so I took some pride in that, but it was cold comfort. That and a nickel would get me a cuppa coffee. I certainly never went around saying, well, I was really faster than the Olympic champion.
“But you’re saying it now, right?”
Mom sipped her gin and tonic, considering.
Sure, Teddy. I might as well air it out now. Damn straight: I was already the Queen of the Backstroke, even if nobody knew it but me and Eleanor.
The waitress came back then, and when I flipped off the tape recorder, Mom said, “Can you tell us the specials again, please?” After she heard them all, she said, “I think I’ll order off the menu.”
Now that I think about it, I can’t ever remember Mom going for one of the specials. She was always pretty much a meat-and-potatoes lady.
Mom was tired after dinner, so as soon as we got back to her place, she went into her bedroom. I sat down and picked up a magazine, but before long, I heard her call for me. She was propped up in bed, with a light quilt jacket over her pink nightgown. She’d taken off her wig, but wore some sort of nightcap. Next to her, lying on the bed, was the purple acetate folder. She patted it. “I guess I can give you this now,” she said.
“I’ll know where to find my place?”
“Oh, it’s easy. Just look for the part when I get back from the Olympics.”
“So, nothing much else happened in Berlin?”
“No, after the backstroke was over, it was mostly just me and Horst being lovey-dovey. I’ll spare you that.”
“Oh, go on and tell me the rest, Mom,” I said. “You haven’t left much to my imagination.”
“Well, then, just for a minute more, Teddy,” and she patted the sheets. I sat down there, on the edge of the bed, just as she used to sit next to me on my bed when I was a little boy about to go to sleep. But then she crossed her arms and made a bit of a face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, actually, Coach Daughters got a bit put out with me because of Horst.”
“Why was that?”
“He told me that even though I hadn’t been able to compete in the Olympics, I could walk in with the American team for the closing ceremony. But I told him that while I appreciated that very much, Horst had gotten real good seats from his father, and I was gonna watch with him. And Coach Daughters said, ‘You know, Sydney, you’re a very pretty girl, and I’m sure you’ll have lots of boyfriends, but the Olympics is a once-in-a-lifetime thing.’
“I didn’t want to contradict him and tell him that Horst wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill boyfriend, but was the love of my life. I let that go, Teddy. Instead, I just said: ‘No, Coach, I promise you I’ll be at Tokyo—and I’ll win you a gold medal there.’
“Coach Daughters shook his head and sai
d, ‘I hope so, Sydney, but a lot can change in four years. Just look what happened to Eleanor. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of a closing ceremony.’
“I could tell how much he wanted me to march in with the other gals, but that was going to be my last night with Horst, Teddy, and wild horses weren’t going to tear me away from him, even for a minute. I told Coach I’d think about it, but I was just fibbing and he knew I was, so that was that.”
“So you went with Horst?”
“Oh my, yes, and it was wonderful. Remember, I hadn’t gotten to Berlin in time for the opening ceremony, so the spectacle was all new to me. Of course, nowadays everybody sees everything on television, so there’s never anything new under the sun. Nobody just says: this is wonderful. This is absolutely breathtaking. Nobody ever says that anymore. No, everybody has seen everything, so they just compare whatever it is with something else. Well, sure, this is a nice ceremony in Athens, but it isn’t as nice as the one in Sydney. Or Barcelona. Or Disneyworld was better. Or that dreadful Las Vegas. We’re all so jaded, Teddy. We can’t take anything at face value. All we do is compare things. Isn’t it funny? I’m the old person. I’m the one who’s seen so much, and I still marvel at new things. It’s the younger people who don’t possess that facility anymore. They’ve grown up different. They don’t like surprises.”
“Like when they take pictures and can see what they’ve taken.”
“Exactly. I’m glad we discussed that.” Of course, with Mom, there wasn’t ever much discussion, but I let that go. She sighed. “At any rate, the closing ceremony was beyond my wildest dreams. Let me see now. Let me get this in the right order. There was a choir singing—all dressed in white, like angels—and a whole squadron of trumpeters trumpeting and a battery that fired a farewell salute, with rockets cascading across the sky.”
She swept one arm in a rockets’ arc.
“Of course, from hindsight we can say how typical it was of the damn Nazis to be so martial, but I promise you, at the time, that never crossed anybody’s mind. You see, that’s a metaphor for it all. There’s so much we don’t put together even though it’s right before our very eyes. It’s so easy to say: well, couldn’t you see what was going on, Sydney? And what was the matter with Horst? Was he blind? But very few catch on, Teddy. Very few.
“There was this old comedian. I forget his name. He was what they used to call a ‘baggy-pants comedian.’ But he had a famous line—and with a German accent. German accents were cheap laughs, because the language sounds so pompous. He’d just say: ‘Vas you dere, Charlie?’ and everyone would die laughing.”
“‘Vas you dere, Charlie?’”
“That’s right. He’d just say it and everyone would break up. Lord knows why. But as much as people laughed, it had some wisdom to it, because if you weren’t there, wherever the there was, you couldn’t get it. What do they say now: ‘You don’t know jack.’ Right?”
“Yep. That’s what they say.”
“Well, if you weren’t there, you didn’t know jack. But you see, here’s the point: even if you were there you still probably missed it anyway.” She sighed again, and slapped my leg. “Oh shoot, Teddy, I got off the track. You’re not supposed to let me get off the track.”
“Well, I just didn’t want to interrupt. I mean, it certainly sounds like the ceremony was a sight to behold.”
“Oh my, yes. It’s imbedded in my memory. Now, let’s see. Oh yeah, the band—well, it wasn’t a band; that makes it sound like Tommy Dorsey or Ted Weems or somebody. It was the Berlin Philharmonic. The Philharmonic began to play a hymn by Beethoven. And I just snuggled up to Horst, and I never wanted it to end. Never.
“We always remember the wonderful times we had, don’t we, Teddy? Of course we do. And, much as we hate it, we can’t put some of the horrible moments out of our heads, either. But you know what’re the most memorable moments of all in our lives?”
I shook my head. Another discussion.
“They’re at a time like that was. It’s when you’re part of something wonderful, you’re so happy, you’re exhilarated . . . but you not only know it’s gonna end—hell, everything ends—you know it’s gonna end very soon, and that sadness will follow. That’s the way it was with me. Because here I was with Horst, and we were so incredibly in love, and we were together at this amazing spectacle, and yet I couldn’t drive it completely from my mind that soon it’d be over, and I’d be torn away from him, and no matter how much we professed that we’d meet again and be together forever, no matter how much we wanted to believe that, we knew we didn’t know for sure.
“And, Teddy, we weren’t even thinking about something like a war. That wasn’t on anybody’s radar, even if they’d had radar then, which they didn’t. It was just that he was in Berlin, Germany, and I was in Chestertown, Maryland, and it was the Depression. I only knew that despite my ecstasy, I’d soon be paying with just as much sadness. The extremes, juxtaposed, Teddy—that’s the most memorable of all.” Quickly then, she looked right at me. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’”
“Yes?”
“Who said that? Shakespeare?”
“Of course, Mom. That’s Romeo and Juliet.”
“I should’ve known. Shakespeare said everything the Bible didn’t. But that’s just nonsense. That’s just the poet showing off. What’s sweet about parting, Teddy? Huh?”
“Well, you know, Mom, kissing goodbye. That’s a sweet part: kissing.”
“Oh stop it. You’re just defending Shakespeare because all you theater people have to defend Shakespeare. I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna feel anything sweet about parting from Horst. Damn well.
“But, before that, at the stadium, oh my—all that majesty. It just made being with Horst that much more joyous.” She paused and glanced away, wistfully, and then, still without looking back at me, she reached over and squeezed my hand. She took a breath and began again.
“The hymn. The Beethoven hymn they played was entitled “The Flame Dies.” Talk about on point. And as they played it, the searchlights came down lower and lower until it was like a tent of light. A veritable tent, Teddy. Then, from down at one end of the stadium, here came fifty-two tall German gals, all dressed in white. They must have scoured the land to come up with this bunch, all tall, all blonde, all about the same size. Maybe Leni Riefenstahl found them when she was out looking for the cute boys. Or that creepy Goebbels.
“Anyway, they marched in by twos, like Noah’s Ark, and went over to where the flag bearers were holding the flags of the Olympic nations. Fifty-two of them. That’s why the fifty-two girls in white. Of course, that’s like a drop in the bucket now, fifty-two, what with all those countries that used to be Yugoslavia and all the jack-istans and mack-istans and so forth, but fifty-two seemed like a great deal of countries to me at the time. So the flag bearers lowered the flags, and the girls put laurel wreaths on the flag poles.
“And then they lowered the Olympic flag itself, and there was this whole procession, with about a dozen German fencers as the escort, their sabers drawn, takin’ the flag over to the burgomeister of Berlin, who was sittin’ there with Hitler. The idea was that the burgomeister would take care of the flag till Tokyo. That was the tradition. God only knows what happened to that poor flag. But anyway, when the music ended, everybody rose, and there was dead silence. A hundred thousand souls, and you could hear a pin drop. And the lights began to dim. And that was when, down at the end of the stadium, by the Marathon Gate, the flame began to go out. Down, down, down. Then poof—it was gone. Extinguished. You had to get goosebumps. I snuggled up closer to Horst.
“I know you’re not supposed to say anything good about the Nazis, but let’s give the devil his due: those SOBs could put on a show, Teddy. They were great at massing multitudes. Nobody ever did multitudes better than the Nazis, except maybe the Chinese, but they’ve got the advantage when it comes to multitudes because there’s just so damn many of them, the Chinese. The Nazis could do great multitudes without as ma
ny multitudes.
“Then, in the silence, here came the voice of the head Olympic pooh-bah, the chief blazer of them all. He spoke in English. He said”—and here Mom intoned again, like an announcer: “‘After offering to the Führer, Adolf Hitler, and the German people, our deepest gratitude, we call upon the youth of every country to assemble in four years at Tokyo, there to celebrate with us the twelfth Olympic Games.’
“You bet your sweet life I remember that. I was the youth they were calling.
“I couldn’t help myself. I just hugged Horst and whispered, ‘We’ll be there.’ And he answered by kissing my forehead. Oh, it was all so sweet and lovely. I was so happy, Teddy. I was suddenly absolutely sure that whatever would happen to us, me back in America, him at college and then in the navy, by 1940 we’d be there in Tokyo together and I would win my gold medal and Horst and I . . . then, then somehow we would never be apart again.
“My eyes began to mist up just as the choir started to sing the finale. They sang in German, of course, but the lyrics were up on the scoreboard in English. ‘Friends, farewell,’ it said. ‘Even if the sun should sink for us, others will beckon. Friends, farewell.’
“And the music faded away, softly, softly, until it was quiet again. I was breathless from all the beauty, Teddy. In fact, at first, I don’t think I even noticed it, I was so lost in my own reverie, but somewhere in the stadium a chant began, and it grew and grew and grew: ‘Sieg heil,’ it went. ‘Sieg heil, unserem führer, sieg heil.” Over and over, all these right arms outstretched and raised. And louder and louder until it became a roar. ‘Sieg heil, unserem führer, sieg heil.’”
I dared ask: “Did Horst join in?”
“Yes, he did. He even took his arm from round my waist so that he could raise it in salute with all the others. He was proud, Teddy. At that moment, he was so proud to be a German. And it went on and on for quite a while. But here’s the thing: as soon as it died out, I pretty much forgot that part. It’s like: who remembers ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ after the ballgame is over? When it was done, it was gone, and I only kept thinking about everything beautiful that’d come before. ‘Vas you dere, Charlie?’ Ya, I vas dere, Teddy, but I still didn’t get it. And neither did anyone else.