The Peerless Four Read online

  The Peerless Four

  The Peerless Four

  Victoria Patterson

  COUNTERPOINT|BERKELEY

  Copyright © 2013 Victoria Patterson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The timeline is provided by AUWW courtesy of Donna Seymour

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Patterson, Victoria.

  The Peerless Four : a novel / Victoria Patterson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-264-5

  1.Women athletes--Canada--Fiction. 2.Olympic games--Fiction. 3.Swimming--Competitions--Fiction. 4.Swimming for women--Canada--History--Fiction. 5.Swimming--Canada--History--Fiction. 6.Sport stories.I.Title.

  PS3616.A886P44 2013.

  813’.6--dc23

  2013014416

  Cover design by Ann Weinstock

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  Contents

  Florence Smith

  Bonnie Brody

  Hugh Williams

  Ginger Hadley

  Muriel Ziegler

  Toronto Daily Star

  Chapter One: Backyard Jumper

  Chapter Two: Amazon

  Chapter Three: Beauty Contest

  Chapter Four: Farmer

  Chapter Five: Slip Aways

  Chapter Six: Onata Green

  Chapter Seven: Winning and Losing

  Chapter Eight: Good Wife

  Chapter Nine: Bell Lap

  Chapter Ten: Flight Phase

  Before the Peerless Four

  “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.”

  —Engraved on memorial for Babe Didrikson and attributed to her

  “I don’t see any point in playing the game if you don’t win.”

  —Babe Didrikson

  “It doesn’t really matter if they’ve forgotten me.

  I haven’t forgotten them.”

  —Gertrude Ederle, asked why the world had so quickly forgotten her as the world’s greatest athlete

  Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

  I’m martyr to a motion not my own;

  What’s freedom for? To know eternity.

  I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

  But who would count eternity in days?

  These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:

  (I measure time by how a body sways.)

  —Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”

  The Peerless Four

  The Peerless Four and Hugh Williams Before the 1928 Olympics

  Florence Smith

  Basketball brought me to life, and once I was awake and alive, there was no turning back. I’m not good at school, never have been. There’s a clarity and straightforwardness to basketball, to sports, that I understand. There are rules. You follow the rules and try to win. Life isn’t like that. Too bad, because in life you have to work to make anything make sense. Life is deceptive. In basketball, I’m asked to be smart: to get the ball, pass the ball, fake a pass, dribble, and to shoot the ball through the hoop. When I run, I’m asked to run as fast as I can, beat the others. Cross the finish line first. I have a job to do, and I either get it done or don’t. There’s nothing vague about it. It’s very clear. Life is tough and disappointing and I can’t control anything, so to me the best answer is sports. There’s no right or wrong answer like with arithmetic. I’m not asked to come up with something like you have to in English. I don’t have to decipher a story or a poem. I’m connected to others, and we’re connected through time, when it was clear and straightforward then, like it is now. There’s no trick answer, nothing that you have to interpret or guess. I don’t understand Shakespeare or algebra or why a poem makes people cry, but give me the ball, and I’ll dribble and pass, and I’ll take the elbow to the face, the lumps and the bruises, gladly, to know that I’m doing something truly fine, something that’s as good as Shakespeare, if you ask me, as good as any poem, even better, if you ask me. It’s action. It has the kind of power and force of the known, and I gave myself over as soon as I discovered basketball. I knew that I’d found an answer to my life. I was alive.

  At first, my dad wouldn’t let me play basketball. I was ten and we would go to my brother’s games at the high school. I’m the only girl of five children, and being from a family of boys, I did everything that they did, which confused my dad, since it wasn’t ladylike. That’s how I got into running, because of my three older brothers. I ran to keep away from them.

  “I want to do that,” I told my dad at the basketball game, and he shook his head and said, “That’s not for girls.” It’s very simple, really. Boys play sports and girls watch the boys play sports. My dad believes that girls should stay home and work and bring the money home until they get married. Girls shouldn’t go to college—fine by me! Only the boys should. But I wanted to be on the basketball court, and I didn’t care what my dad said.

  I’d watch my brother with his squeaking shoes crossing the court, dribbling and passing, making his shots, and he gave meaning to my life, gave me a purpose. I cheered for him with such yearning and enthusiasm that my dad would put his hands on my shoulders, beg me to sit back down. But he couldn’t keep me sitting. It was bigger than him, bigger than me. I became so involved in the games, in my desire to break free from life’s confusions, to have a purpose within me. It was like I became my brother, and I was in the competitive world of men, and I was important.

  Before the games, I couldn’t eat because of nerves. I’d pace the house, going over game plans in my head. “Sit down!” my dad would say. “You’re making everyone nervous.” During the games, I’d pace the stands, clenching my fists, waving my fists, shouting. I couldn’t stay still. Cheering is what you call it, but it was more than that. I strutted up and down the aisles, dribbling my imaginary ball with my brother. I faked defenders, turned and made my shots. I took low, sweeping passes. I trotted and swerved and blocked players, careful not to foul. All this I did with a very loud commentary, letting my dad and the spectators and the refs know that I knew everything, that I was in the game, and that I was part of this world whether my dad let me play for real or not. Truly, I believed that my brother depended on me, that in some magical way, I was him, and that his success and his team’s depended on my vigilance. When he made a shot, when he passed the ball with beauty, and the crowd clapped and roared, I believed that they were roaring for me, as much as for him. It felt like an assurance that life could be understandable.

  I couldn’t stop moving and talking and my dad became concerned. People stared, moved away from us. A few stayed, fascinated by my antics.

  “You’re like a crazy person,” my dad said.

  Then my dad decided that I couldn’t come to the basketball games anymore. My cheering was too much. The games were my delight, my reason for living, and I locked myself in a closet and cried for two days. I refused to eat. My family couldn’t get me to come out. Even my brother, whom I love with all my heart, because he believes in me and plays sports with me, and he taught me what he
knows about basketball—he couldn’t get me to come out. My mom made blueberry pie, my favorite, put it right outside the closet so that I smelled it. But I didn’t care.

  “Let her play,” I heard my mom tell my dad. “Girls play basketball all the time now,” said my brother, and my dad said, “Not my daughter.” But he gave in, because I wouldn’t come out of the closet or eat, and I’m his daughter, and he loves me.

  He never watches me compete, but he might take pride. I don’t know. Whenever I bring home a ribbon, he says, “Don’t get a swelled head,” and that’s it.

  So when it came to letting me go to the Olympics, it was difficult. I wasn’t going to be able to have children, he said. Everyone knows that’s not true, I said. My grandmother wants to put a chastity belt on me, and she practically disowned my dad when he relented. They’re Lutherans and serious. Sturdy, good workers, farmers, and grim about life.

  Bonnie Brody

  The first time I kissed my coach, he pulled away. The second time I kissed him, he didn’t. He tries to blame our relationship on his difficult home life, and on my mother’s death, my grief, but the truth is, when we’re together, we’re not usually thinking about any of these things, and he knows it. We’d known each other for over ten years by then, and he’d watched me grow up. He’d watched me become an athlete and recognized in me the potential for greatness. He said I had rawness, power, grace, and perseverance, and that he wanted to work with me.

  The first kiss came after one of our practice sessions. We were in the boys’ locker room, no one there but us, and he was leaned up against the wall, his head tilted, smiling a little, even though he was sad, and I didn’t think about how he is so much older than me, or that he has a wife and kids, or that I’m only sixteen. I never really worry about these things, even though I know that’s what everyone else thinks about, and I’m supposed to as well. He was telling me about his mother. We have the same shape of eyes, and my laugh sounds like hers. His mother died a few years back. He wasn’t crying but he looked like he wanted to. The desire I felt for him up to that point had been a childhood crush—harmless and sweet—but it switched, just like that, into something inside my body. Something large and disobedient and not so sweet but more important. It just seemed like an extension of what we had been doing before, with his touching and guiding me, watching me. When I ran, his eyes were on me, and that was what I loved.

  Besides, he looked like he needed me to kiss him. He really did. So I leaned in and did so, and when he pulled away, he looked shocked and scared, and he took a step back.

  Our next practices we pretended like nothing happened. But I would catch him looking at me strangely, a desiring and haunted look—looking, looking, and looking, and he couldn’t stop watching and looking.

  Then finally by the lockers, the same spot, I kissed him again, and this time he kissed back. Hard. Pressed against me.

  Now we’re together.

  My running has improved. He only has to gaze at me and I can read his mind, as if he’s running through me, instructing me from the inside. I do exactly what he wants, and all the problems with my form, I can correct, because I know what he wants just from his feeling inside me. Elbows closer, head straighter, knees higher, spring faster. I feel so powerful in my body because it belongs to him.

  Last week, at the track, he told me that we had to stop. The sun had gone down, no one was out there but us. He could no longer coach me, he said, because he couldn’t resist me.

  I stared at him, and then I started bouncing on my toes.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I kept bouncing.

  “I love you,” he said. “You know that. But this will ruin your life, and mine.”

  I started to run and he reached for my arm, knowing what I would do, but I shook him loose. He didn’t even try to catch me. I’m that fast. He called, “Come back!” but I kept running.

  He stood and watched and waited, and every time I’d pass him on my loop, he’d shake his head and look down. Once, I reached out and scratched his neck as I passed. He crossed his hands across his chest, looked at me disapprovingly, but I kept at it, not a jog, but a full-out run.

  An hour or more passed, I’m not sure how long. My face and hair were dripping with sweat, but I continued my pace. I wouldn’t slow. My leg muscles were trembling and everything was going in and out of focus, but I kept at it.

  “Stop!” I heard him yell. “Stop, stop! You’re going to hurt yourself!” But I whipped past him. “You’ll pull a muscle,” he called out, and then finally, “Okay, okay. I take everything back that I said earlier.”

  When I didn’t stop, he yelled, “I take it back!”

  I came into my body, realized that he was right—I felt like I was going to die. I lunged to a stop but my legs wouldn’t quit, and so I buckled over, going down in the dirt, grasping my knees, coughing, heaving. The sound coming from me was raw and awful, from deep inside, and I was shaking all over.

  Coach ran to me, put his hands on my back and neck, legs, arms, all over me, trying to help.

  I gasped for breath, watching his solemn face above me, a welt on his neck where my fingers had dug into his skin.

  After some time had passed he said, “Okay? Okay, now?”

  I nodded because I still didn’t have enough breath to speak.

  Hugh Williams

  Once, after having inhaled a large quantity of nitrous oxide to assist in what was described as a painless procedure, the extraction of two of my rotted molars, I sat in the dentist’s chair believing that a piece of the blue sky would climb through the opened window directly in front of me, and into the dentist’s room, like a person. Once inside, the sky would walk up to my face and cover my gaping mouth, suffocating me, without anyone able to see it besides me, for it was sky. I was six. My mother waited for me in another room. I had cried for her but they wouldn’t let her inside. The sky had the color of light blue and no face but arms and legs and it would stroll up to me and move inside my brain, covering my mouth along the way, until I could no longer breathe. Mid-extraction, I squirmed and resisted, gasping and coughing, the sky moving toward me. I tried to alert the dentist and made a gargled cry for help. Then I cried for my mother but she couldn’t hear me. The dentist had large, hairy knuckles, and he called over two assistants. “We’ve got a live fish,” he said. One held my shoulders, the other my legs. A third was summoned to keep my head steady, and before the first extraction was done, hairy knuckles at my face, I lost consciousness, everything dissolving into blackness. But before that happened, the sky jumped toward me—a flash of brightness—and it was laughing, and then it vaporized like smoke.

  This is what it feels like to run. No matter how good of shape I’m in, during a race, the lights go on and off. In my mind. I see blurry things all the way. I never ran when that didn’t happen.

  Maybe the sky did enter me that day in the dentist’s chair, because when I awoke, I was different. I was in bed and when I turned my head, the first thing I saw was my mother, and I knew then that I would do anything to keep her near me. My tongue probed for the usual soreness of the molars and was met with a soft hollow of gums. The accompanying throbbing inside my head was now cottony and numbed. There was a great relief, as if ten pounds of weight had been removed from my face. This sensation, too, is like running for me, when I’m done, having crossed the tape to completion, and to the exaltation of my mother and Coach.

  I started running because my mother told me that I either had to learn how to fight or to run. “It’s as simple as that,” she said, because I’m scrawny. So I learned to run. I thought it was the easier thing to do. I was always very perceptive and sensitive, and I used to cry in the high school bathroom. Then I started running so I wouldn’t have to fight. Of course I didn’t know anything about technique. I’d never even seen a track meet. Then one day Coach saw me and timed me. He took his watch to the repair place because he thought it was broken, but it wasn’t.

  Coach
told me that I’m a child of nature, and that my ability comes directly from Christ our Father. Like I said, I’m skinny and small and no one would ever mistake me for an athlete, so maybe he’s right. But I got those rotted teeth from God as well.

  Coach believes I run best on hate, and once before a race, when I was just beginning to compete and hadn’t won yet, he forged a letter from my father, who’d left my mother and me sometime after I was born. A no-good musician, and I never met him that I remember.

  In the letter, my dad said that he had never loved me or my mother and that I couldn’t possibly win the race, and then Coach signed it Your Father. I knew that it was from Coach because he crossed his t’s downward like Coach and he probably knew that I knew. But I got angry like it was from my father, and I probably did that for Coach, because I would do anything for him. Building up my ego has a lot to do with winning, and the only thing that drives my legs is my mind and my desire. So I think about Coach and Mother. He and Mother are the happiest when I win.

  The next morning after stewing all night in hate over that letter that I knew in my head was forged but kept in my heart as real, I licked the track with my feet in the 100-metres, beating the second runner by five yards.

  But that one time, when I crossed the tape, I came down and there was no relief, no numbed and cottony feeling, no weight lifted, and Coach was at my side.

  I love that man like a father.

  Coach, I said. What’s wrong with me?

  Breathe, he said. Stretch out.

  I can’t, I said. It hurts.

  What hurts? he asked. Is it a cramp?

  No, I said. I can’t breathe. Then I whispered: Please let this be over. I don’t like this.

  What? he asked. What, what?

  I can’t breathe, I said. Please, let this be over.