The Peerless Four Read online

  The jury decided otherwise, and the drunk was sentenced to life imprisonment. Edward’s wife and children collected on the life insurance policy after all, as it was considered not a suicide but a murder.

  The time of the shooting was when Onata was in the chair looking at the clock.

  Soon after, Onata had a second bout of pneumonia. George and Ida cared for her, but she became worse and was hospitalized.

  She lay in the hospital for a week and two days. Before her hospitalization, she predicted her death, telling George, “It is done. I go where Spirit takes me.”

  I began to write and ponder the life of Onata Green, but the day came when I sat at my desk to ponder and write and I couldn’t continue, for I would never know what happened as it happened, or what it meant.

  Onata’s story would be filtered and dirtied through me.

  Now I understand that Onata made me think that I could be a serious intellect and an athlete.

  But I couldn’t finish, and I confused her story with mine.

  Instead of burning my notes and work, I burned my running shoes in our yard, and Wallace came home to a scorched pit and called the doctor for my head. But I saved her file and my outline with my journals, in the closet and then in the safe deposit box at the bank.

  Often I’ve thought of Onata thinking, The mountains will be here tomorrow and I will not, but then seeing her great grandmother’s hand reaching and gripping the soldier’s genitals, twisting, insisting, demanding, and saving her life, and that was enough for Onata, and I’ve discovered through the years that the same holds for me.

  Chapter Seven

  Winning and Losing

  I

  It was after the 100-metres, Bonnie’s race, that Jack got the idea for promoting and expanding his Athletic Club, taking advantage of the press’s fascination with the Peerless Four, and using the Dream Girl’s image, their ideal specimen (his too), as a promotional tool. He wanted to change the course of women’s athletics and to save our girls from the repercussions of winning and losing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The Albertic steamed up the St. Lawrence River, and once we moved into the open ocean, our wake frothing behind us in two creamy trails that merged into one, the girls had become accustomed to drinking milk for seasickness since “it doesn’t hurt going down or coming up,” as Farmer put it.

  Discipline and routine ruled our lives, a rigid schedule for the eight-day trip: a morning saltwater bath at eight, breakfast at nine, a workout at ten-thirty, practice until noon, lunch at one, a walk from two-thirty to three-thirty, deck games, dinner at six, dancing in the evening, bed at ten, and a final checkup from me at ten thirty. The entire ship was transformed into a large gymnasium, and it was something to behold: promenade decks covered with cork to make a track, a boxing ring and fencing strip, a place for calisthenics. The pistol team had target equipment set up. There was a small canvas pool where the swimmers swam suspended from a rope anchored above. The javelin throwers used javelins with ropes attached and threw them out to sea, dragging them back.

  Bonnie and Flo had to be watched the most, with Ginger and Danny following close behind. Flo sneaked out one night with a male high jumper, but I found them before anything happened.

  There was one night when I heard a noise coming from the dining room, but the girls were just having a contest to see who could touch this hanging light. They’d moved the tables, and the noise was the sound of them dragging the tables to give room. So we all put some money in a pot to see if anyone could touch it. Everyone tried. Even me, and five or six of the boys from the track team. No one could touch it, and then Farmer took this crazy, wild leaping run. She jumped and her fingertips skirted the bottom so that it swung slightly.

  One of the men’s track coaches, J. R. Cornelius, would have nothing to do with our team, coaching or otherwise. “This is dangerous,” he said, adding that the spectacle of our lightly-clad, sweating team engaged in strenuous activities had an unsettling moral effect on his men. “He doesn’t like women,” Jack said. “He really doesn’t like women.”

  There was considerable table discussion among the male coaches and officials about whether our girls’ athletic activities would affect their health later on. It was a favored topic. Some argued that they would have heart trouble, and there were doubts about whether they’d have children. There was so much discussion about the pros and cons of women in competition that I got tired of it all.

  My job had become strangely culinary, and in Amsterdam, our first meal at the pension consisted of an orange with dry pith inside, no juice to spoon out, and a hard roll, with a small and useless curl of butter. A husky woman with a black mustache was in charge, and I fostered a relationship with her, so that she would make oatmeal in the mornings, and for lunches and dinners, either a round of steak, roast beef, chicken, lamb chops, and peas and spinach, and, occasionally, fried potatoes, though the girls regularly got gas from this treat.

  Amsterdam was wet and sometimes cold but a different type of wet and cold than we were used to. Instead of outright raining, the moisture hung in the air, as if we mostly lived inside a cloud for six weeks, and the cold crept inside you before you even knew you were cold, refusing to leave entirely once you figured it out, even after a hot bath.

  That north wind blowing off Norway and Sweden, down into Amsterdam, was all kinds of cold.

  I did my best to ignore the newspapers, following my own ban that I imposed on the girls, but whatever was printed made them crowd favorites, and at the opening ceremony, they heard their names being shouted when we marched, along with Canada! Canada! Canada! We wore scarlet hats and heels, white blazers piped with red, white stockings, pleated white skirts, and silk blouses, and each of their faces lighted to the sound of her name, setting her apart, except for Ginger, who seemed to go deeper inside herself.

  There was also the big cheer that went “Rah, rah, USA, A-M-E-R-I-C-A,” and the Americans didn’t dip their flag when they marched past the receiving stand, all going back to the 1908 London Games. One of the New York Irish Whales refused to dip the flag to the English king as a demonstration against British rule in Ireland, and now they don’t dip, just because they’re America.

  The French cheer went, “Un, deux, trois; un, deux, trois; un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq,” with the crowd clapping their hands together.

  The grand stadium was a swamp that had been drilled with holes and filled with a million cubic yards of sand. A Dutch detective took my camera to protect the photographic monopoly the government had sold to one firm. But I got it back, along with an apology, by flashing my official badge.

  Queen Wilhelmina decided not to show for the opening ceremony to avoid any religious controversy, since it was a Sunday, but over forty thousand others had no religious objections, and a large number more were unable to get tickets, jamming the streets and blocking the stadium, forcing the Finnish team to scramble over the wall to gain entrance.

  Speeches were made, bands played, and when I looked back, Farmer and Ginger had removed their shoes. They hurt, Farmer mouthed, and I didn’t respond, for even the thought of Farmer in heels was wrong. We applauded the hoisting of the Olympic flag, and then it was up and flapping, its five-colored interlocking circles representing the five major land masses of the world, and at least one of the colors of the circles appearing in every national flag in the world. There was the oath, and the contestants agreed to compete in “the true spirit of sportsmanship for the glory of sport and the honor of country.” Then a blast of trumpets and the roar of a cannon, and forty-six pigeons blooming skyward, each with a ribbon bearing the color of one of the competing nations tied to its neck, and Farmer said, “Better duck, unless you want to be crowned with something other than laurels,” and we laughed.

  So the games began with much pomp, and we ate our meals and slept and ignored the papers, and I soothed the girls. It took a while to adjust to Amsterdam. Bonnie said that everything looked old, and Flo said that that wa
s because everything was old, and Farmer said that the air even tasted old.

  We kept busy with practice to take our minds off home. The girls had never had an adventure like this before and would never have one like it after, and we all knew it and tried to appreciate without being homesick. Then Hugh Williams, a shy, small, unassuming nineteen-year-old high school student from Vancouver who’d taken a shine to Ginger and vice versa, won the gold medal in the 100-metres. He had this awkward elegance to his running style, sprinting straight up, with high knees, and at the finish line he leapt at the tape with his arms extended wildly. The crowd sounded like an ocean, with Hugh standing on the podium not saying a word and moving only to bow his head to receive his gold medal, his hair falling over his forehead.

  Hugh’s coach was a dictator, not letting Hugh leave his room, rubbing him with coconut oil, making him practice his starts by leaping forward and crashing into a mattress propped against the wall, so that all the way at the women’s side of the pension, we could hear the soft boom from his body smacking against it. But now that Hugh had won, everyone was calling the coach a genius, wanting to shake his hand.

  Of the six finalists remaining from a field of thirty-one for the women’s 100-metre heats, one was Bonnie, favored to win as the world-record holder. In the dread of the slow minutes before the final race, Bonnie gave me a brief, dazed glance, and my heart tried to leap from my chest. I was at the side, closer than the spectators in the stands but not with the athletes. The air was spongy and full of drizzle.

  The runners paced back and forth, jiggling and jumping, and Bonnie was avoiding my eyes now, shaking out her legs whether they needed shaking or not, and I was thinking, Oh hell, pacing up and back, because I couldn’t sit. Each of the runners jumped up and down, shook out her legs and arms, and did other private, concentrated, ritualized calisthenics, both exorcist-like and prayerful, hoping to bring divine grace into her body, while at the same time casting out fears, worries, strains.

  I was remembering Bonnie’s saying she had to win, and how that didn’t bode well when you needed something and wanted it too much, because that was the kind of world we lived in. You couldn’t get exactly what you wanted, no matter how much you tried, and she shouldn’t have wanted it so badly, but it was too late. There she was lined up for the race.

  I’m not one of the anointed athletes. Yet we’re connected, and as a spectator, I’m necessary to witness, transcribe, and bring to life the experience. Besides, if you ask a great athlete to describe the secret behind her athletic genius, she most likely won’t respond adequately. “I gave it a hundred percent,” she might say, or, “God was on my side!” or “I was just able to take it to the next level,” or another variant of the athletes’ interchangeable clichés. We want more. We want to know what it means. Why her, and not us? But she can’t explain the blind nothingness at the essence of her athletic gift. She’s required to burrow into this nothingness, with an ascetic concentration, in order to win. She has to give everything over, not hold back, truly clean and free and full of maximum effort, and therefore reduced in complexity. For her athletic genius to have meaning, for us to understand, we need to be spectators.

  I watched a male javelin thrower slogging in his sideways motion, hurling his spear. The male broad jumpers bounded around, and the high jumpers were taking their run-ups. Then my attention was back on Bonnie, as she dug her feet in for the start, her shoulders dipping down. The front of her white jersey bore a red maple leaf that looked like a large bloody handprint. She and Farmer had cut the sleeves to allow freer movement, and her jersey billowed over her shorts like a sail in the breeze.

  She’d been sick that morning, cramping from her period. In the white-hot event of the 100-metres, everything had to be perfect, and I saw that her back leg was shaking. For a second I was inside her body—one big jolting nerve.

  So when she broke before the gun, taking the German girl with her, I wasn’t surprised even though I wanted to be. Both were charged with a false start and warned by the starter that a second false start would mean disqualification.

  The six lined up again, and the German command “Auf die Plätze,” and then “Fertig” came as the order for the set position, and Bonnie was down, dug in, and—oh hell—she sprang and broke to a roar from the stands. My heart jumped so hard that I thought my head would burst off, and then Bonnie’s face was on mine, a ghost look—a giant blank nothing look that swallowed me whole—and the starter walked down her lane and waved her off the track.

  Bonnie stood unbelieving for a moment, shaking her head. Her face went red and she started blinking. The crowd was making noises—booing, clapping—they couldn’t decide what they felt. Then a spasm passed through Bonnie’s body and her face contorted and the tears came.

  I approached and led her to the side and watched as a third attempt was made to get the runners underway, but then the German had a second false start. She responded the opposite of Bonnie, by shaking her fist under the starter’s nose and threatening her, and she had to be dragged from the scene by two officials.

  I had Bonnie sitting near the starting line and I was hovering over her, trying to quiet her, but she was grieving loud. I pulled her to a pile of cushions on the grass, where we remained, her head buried in her arms and her body shaking with sobs.

  I saw Jack, his mouth open, and the reporters taking their notes, writing down all the reasons girls shouldn’t be here—they were too emotional and fragile and couldn’t handle competition and were prone to attacks of hysteria—and there was Bonnie, giving herself over to tears, proving them right. We were competing on a trial basis, and our future participation depended on us, and when I tried to remind her, she wouldn’t listen, because she had messed everything up already and couldn’t hear.

  Farmer came and relieved me, taking Bonnie by the elbow and leading her back to the pension and to her room, where she continued to cry, making up for not crying when her mother had been hit by a car and she heard the screeches and screams and imagined it from the inside. Crying for the man she loved, Coach Frank, who loved her and was married with a child due. She cried and cried, and we thought she might not stop, and her face and eyes puffed and went red but she kept on crying. She cried for all sorts of reasons, but mostly she cried because she never got to run, and she was favored to win gold. Training and dreaming of winning, telling herself in the mirror 125 times every night, Hello Bonnie Brody, gold-medal winner, and she never got to run and that made no kind of sense and she cried because that was the world she lived in.

  That night, I could barely keep my eyes open, wanting to fall into a dream with no competitions, no winning or losing, no disappointments. On my way to my room, hungering for nothing but my pillow, the clerk saw me and gave me a note. I read the note and heard Jack’s voice saying, “Jesus Christ, Mel, get over here now,” and he didn’t have to tell me where to go.

  I headed to Bonnie’s room, but not before getting a pack of cigarettes and lighting one, to hell with who might see me, standing there for a moment in the lobby, sucking it down in a hurry, sedating my nerves.

  Jack was sitting outside Bonnie’s room, as if he’d propped himself on the wall and slid down in defeat. When he saw me, he stood and walked to me, grabbed my arm and kissed me on the mouth before I could object, which I did once his lips left my face.

  “Sorry,” he said, and I objected again, saying that I might just quit, and for a second I imagined it, a powerful feeling, but then it was gone.

  Jack slid back to his sitting position and I sat beside him, and we passed his flask some, and he told me that he needed me, and I knew that it was true and said as much.

  He twitched his head the direction of the door and said, “I’m worried. She might do something stupid. It’s quiet in there; maybe she’s sleeping, but I doubt it. I don’t think she’s got a bottle. She won’t let me in, won’t let anyone in,” and I said that I’d try.

  “I got a key,” he said, fishing in his pocket and handing
it to me. “Got it from the front desk. Said it was an emergency, and I suppose it is.”

  “Where’s Flo?” I asked, since Bonnie and Flo were rooming together.

  “With the sisters, sleeping on the floor.”

  I shook my head, thinking of them crammed in the room, Flo on the floor. Bonnie’s selfishness angered me, no matter how much she was suffering.

  “The newspapers,” I said, “are going to bury us.”

  “They already have. They’re having a field day.”

  “Trial basis,” I said.

  “The girls don’t understand,” he said. He paused, gave me a probing look, and then I could tell that he was about to say something to try to lighten my mood.

  “You must love me,” he said, “because you’re not working for money, and you’re not working for fun.”

  “No,” I said, standing, “it’s certainly not for the money, and it isn’t fun.”

  “So why?” he asked. “You love me?”

  “How about you keep telling yourself that.”

  “It’s how I sleep at night, Mrs. Ross,” he said, “dreaming my dreams.”

  By then, I was knocking on the door. “Bonnie,” I said, knocking again, “Bonnie, it’s me. It’s Mel. Open up, Bonnie.”

  More silence, and when I looked over my shoulder, Jack was nodding for me to go ahead. I took the key, and in the quiet hallway, we heard the turn and click of it unlocking, and I opened the door.

  Bonnie didn’t move or say anything, sitting in a chair directly in front of me. She just looked up at me, and I saw that there were no more tears and that she was dried up and empty, her eyes puffy slits. Her hair was up and all over the place, like petals on a sunflower. It spooked me thinking of her staring at the door the whole time, moving the chair right in front of it, and I wondered if she’d heard us talking. “All right,” I said, and I went to her, lifted her and directed her to sit at the bed.