The final score of the meet was West Alton 37 ½, Olinger 18. My father stood at the pool edge and said to his team, “I’m proud of you. You’re damn good sports to come out for this at all-you get no glory and you get no pay. For a town without even an outdoor pool, I don’t see how you do as well as you do. If the high school had its own pool like West Alton does-and I don’t want to take any credit away from them-you’d all be Johnny Weismuellers. In my book, you are already. Danny, that was one beautiful dive. I don’t expect to see a dive like that again as long as I live.”
My father looked strange making this speech, standing so erect in his suit and necktie among the naked torsos; the vibrating turquoise water and beaded cream tiling framed his dark and earnest head as I saw it from the bleachers. Across the listening skin of the shoulders and chests of the team a nervous flicker now and then passed, swiftly as a gust across water, or a tic in the flank of a horse. Though they had lost, the team was boisterous and proud in their flesh, and we left them in the shower room carousing and lathering like a small herd joyfully caught in a squall.
“Practice this Wednesday as usual,” my father had called to them in parting. “Don’t drink any milkshakes or eat more than four hamburgers before you show up.” Everyone laughed, and even I smiled, though my father was a heaviness upon me. In all the events of the night that followed there was this weight and inertia about him that blocked and snagged at every turn my simple plan, which was to get him home, where he would pass out of my care.
As we were walking up the hall from the concrete steps the West Alton coach Foley caught up with us, and the two men talked for what seemed an hour. The damp air around the pool had put their suits out of press, and they seemed in the dimness of the green hall two shepherds soaked in dew. “You’ve done a superhuman job with those boys,” my father told Foley. “If I was one-tenth the coach you are we would have given you a run for your money. I have a few naturals this year.”
“George now, no crap,” Foley replied, a thick sandy man all courtesy and ginger. “You know as well as me there’s no coaching to it; let the tadpoles swim is all you can do. There’s a fish in every one of us, but you have to soak to get him out.”
“That’s good,” my father said. “I never heard that before. Bud, how did you like my big man in the breast stroke?”
“He should have had the two-twenty, too; I hope you burned his ass for letting up like that.”
“He’s dumb, Bud. D-U-M-B. The poor devil has no more brains than I do and I hate to bawl him out.” My throat rasped in sheer pressure of impatience. “You’ve met my son, haven’t you, Bud? Peter, come over here and shake this man’s hand. This is the kind of man you should have had for a daddy.”
“Why hell I know Peter,” Mr. Foley said, and there was something deeply agreeable about his handshake, gritty and warm and easy. “The whole county knows Caldwell ’s boy.”
In their twilit world of Y.M.CA.s and recreational programs and athletic banquets, this sort of wildly congratulatory blarney passed for conversation; I minded it less in Mr. Foley than in my father, whose affectation of it always seemed to me embarrassed.
My father was for all his talk at heart a man of silence. He walked through the events of that night in a mood that has become in my memory silence. Once outside, his mouth made a firm line and his heels gathered in the pavement with a kind of aloof greed. I wonder if any man ever enjoyed walking in the small ugly cities of the East as much as my father. Trenton, Bridgeport, Binghamton, Johnstown, Elmira, Altoona: these were the cities where his work as cable splicer for the telephone company had taken him in the years before and the years just after he married my mother, the years before my birth and Hoover ’s Depression stalled him in the sticks. He feared Firetown and felt uneasy in Olinger but adored Alton; its asphalt and streetlights and tangent facades spoke to him of the great Middle Atlantic civilization, bounded by New Haven in the north and Hagerstown in the south and Wheeling in the west, which was his home in eternal space. To walk beside my father down Sixth Street was to hear the asphalt sing.
I asked him how his X-ray had gone and in answer he asked me if I were hungry. It occurred to me that indeed I was; the popcorn and the Jordan Almonds had settled into a sour aftertaste. We stopped at the trolley-shaped diner beside the Acme’s parking lot. My father conducted himself in the city with a simplicity that was soothing. My mother made too much of a decision of everything, as if she were trying to ex press herself in a foreign language. Just so, in the country my father was confused in action and circuitous in thought. But here, in Alton at quarter after eight o’clock, he handled himself with the deftness, the expertness that is, after all, most of what we hope for from fathers: the door pushed open, the glare and stares calmly blinked down, the two stools located side by side, the menu knowingly plucked from its place between the/ napkin dispenser and the catsup bottle, the counterman addressed without stridence or equivocating, the sandwiches-his a Western egg, mine a toasted ham-consumed in manful silence. My father quietly sucked the three central fingers of his right hand and pinched his lower lip with a paper napkin. “First time I’ve felt like eating in weeks,” he said to me. In conclusion we ordered apple pie for me and coffee for him; the check was a stiff green tab cryptically nipped by a triangular punch. He paid it with one of two dollar bills left in the worn hip wallet that had curved through the years to fit his haunch. As we rose my father noncommittally slipped, with a practiced flick of his wart-freckled hand, two dimes beneath his empty cup. And as an afterthought he bought for 65¢ one of the diner’s ready-made Italian sandwiches. It was to be a present for my mother. There was a vulgar side to my mother which apparently enjoyed smelly slippery Italian sandwiches and to which my father had, I saw jealously, more access than I. He paid for the sandwich with his last dollar and said, “That cleans me out, kid. You and I are penniless orphans.” Swinging the little brown paper bag, he walked us to the car.
The Buick was still alone, brooding on its shadow. Its nose was tipped up the slope, toward the unseen tracks. Menthol like a vaporized moon suffused the icy air. The factory wall was a sheer cliff mixed of brick and black glass. The panes of glass were now and then mysteriously relieved by a pane of cardboard or tin. The brick did not yield its true color to the streetlamp that lit the area but instead showed as a diminution of black, a withdrawn and deadly gray. This same light made the strange gravel here glitter. Compounded of coal chips and cinders, it made a loud and restless earth that never settled, crackling and shifting under foot as if its destiny were to be perpetually raked. Silence encircled us. Not a window looking at us was lit, though deep in the factory a blue glint kept watch. My father and I could have been murdered in this place and until dawn no one would have known. Our bodies would lie in the puddles near the factory wall and our hands and hair would freeze solid into the ice.
The car was slow to start in the cold. Unh-uh, unh-uh, the engine grunted, at first briskly and then more and more slowly, self-discouraged. “Jesus, don’t quit on me now,” my father breathed in a dancing stream of vapor. “Start one more time and tomorrow I’ll get your battery charged.”
Unnh-uh, unnnnnh-ah.
My father switched off the ignition and we sat in the dark. He made a loose fist and blew into it. “See,” I said, “if you’d worn your gloves you’d have ‘em now.”
“You must be frozen to death,” was his answer. “One more time,” he said, and switched the ignition back on and de pressed the starter button with his thumb. In the pause, the battery had gathered a little juice. It commenced hopefully.