The Peerless Four Page 2

No, Hugh, he said. You’re just beginning.

  I started to cry.

  Stop, he said. You’re a champion. Stop crying.

  The sky, I said.

  What?

  The sky. It’s inside me, and I can’t breathe.

  The sky? he said.

  Yes. The sky.

  That’s enough, he said. You’re a winner. You’re a champion.

  I don’t care, I said.

  I care, he said. Your mother cares.

  He shook his head in confusion, raised my arms above my head. He begged me to stop talking nonsense, said it scared him. No more crying, he said. He bent my knees toward my chest, stretched out my legs.

  Just let go, he said. Unclench. You’re all clenched up.

  I did what he said, and I never burdened him with crazy-talk about the sky again.

  Ginger Hadley

  One day, when I was six years old, my father reluctantly gave me permission to try the high jump in our backyard. I always liked to jump things. We have a fence around our yard, and when I got older, I never went through the gate. I always jumped it. My older brothers used the high jump, and I wanted to try even though I was too young. My dad set the bar as low as it would go. I waited until I was alone. I didn’t want anyone watching me. When I reached the jump, I was afraid. I hesitated, and then I barreled into the bar. Before I could block it with my hands, the bar hit the back of my head. The accident left a scar several inches long. Today I barely notice it. Sometimes I forget what side it’s on.

  After my dad stitched the cut, he gave me a rag doll. I still have it. Soon the high jump became my greatest preoccupation, more than anything else. It’s amazing how many times I can try and not make it; then, after I make it once, it becomes easy, and I have to try for more.

  Later, when I beat my record and everyone else’s, my dad gave me his ukulele. I don’t know how to play but I’m teaching myself.

  Quiet, shy, forlorn, pretty. These are the things people say about me. For the most part, they’re true.

  Muriel Ziegler

  I was eleven when I saw from the stands a man down near the green and brown of the lacrosse field, drunk and staggering. My parents had taken me to the game for my birthday because that was what I wanted. No dolls or dresses or anything like that, ever. I watched him for a long time as he eyed the players and watched the game. He swayed, mumbling to himself, hands in his big trench-coat pockets. A former player? Coach gone crazy? A fan? I went through the possibilities but none seemed to fit. How did he get so close to the field? I watched and wondered for a long time. Then, to my shock, he made a great running break for the game. I sat up straight, a tingling sensation through my spine. A line of men at the field blocked the drunken man. He was thrust back, and the men watched him. He seemed to accept his defeat, glowering, turning, and walking away. They all went back to watching the game, but not me. I watched the man. He paused. His shoulders went down, as if sensing something. Then he turned and made another great leaping run, his coat flapping behind him. He lunged but he couldn’t break through. Three of them had him, and he struggled in their clutches. He broke free, made another lunge—but they thrust him back and then tackled him. By this time, I wasn’t the only one watching, the crowd jeering and cheering and laughing. My mom said, “What a shame,” and she put her warm hand at the back of my neck. “Poor sot,” my dad mumbled. “He’s gonna get killed.” But the man wasn’t done. Somehow, he tricked them into letting go of him a little, maybe making them think he was calmed. He managed to shake free, and he was up again, bursting through, running head-on into the field. Inside I shouted Go! Go! Go! even as I understood he’d disrupted the game, players moving to the sides. But he had a purpose that we didn’t understand; I tried but I could only sense it. Quarter-field, the man slowed and a policeman ran from behind him, caught his arm, and slung him down in a tackle. The crowd cheered. A pack of security men hurried to assist, and they lifted him, hauling him—twisting and kicking the whole way—off the field. At one point, he almost got loose again—Go! Go! Go!—but there were just too many of them.

  The game was back on but I continued to watch the man. I had to turn my body all the way around and watch behind me, away from the field and at the parking lot. All the other heads in the stands were turned to the game except mine. The policeman restrained the man with handcuffs behind his back, and then the officer and the security men took him—carried him, truth be told, his feet off the ground—to a police car. I saw that there was a bloody gash at his cheek. A security man placed his hand on the man’s head and pushed hard, and the policeman used a baton to make his knees buckle, so that he squat-sat into a forced position in the backseat. After the door shut, the side of his head pressed against the glass of the window, a splotch of hair and skin. Then the car started, drove off, and he was gone.

  The man never gave up. He never gave up.

  When I was a little girl, my mom read to me at night about Jack going up the beanstalk and killing that giant, and Little Red Riding Hood getting the better of that Big Bad Wolf, and runty David slaying nine-foot Goliath with nothing but a rock and courage, and many other stories that as I got older, I realized weren’t true, weren’t facts. People invented the stories to console us. The weaker don’t win. The giants do. But I decided, like the drunken man, that even if I couldn’t beat down Fate, that I would rock it back on its heels as much as I could, putting my entire body and heart into the blows. I would get joy from it. I would taste what it means to be free.

  I had my first real test three days after I witnessed the drunken man. For just about three minutes in the afternoon after school. It was at the back of an empty parking lot when I fought Jimmy Harper, the school bully, and almost won, with a crowd of kids watching. No sooner had I challenged Harper to the fight than I was certain that he’d win, as surely as I knew that the stars would be out that night and the sun up the next morning. He was bigger than me, older. He was a boy. He knew how to fight. But I challenged him anyway. He wasn’t bullying me but I was sick and tired of him bullying others.

  There is nothing to compare to that flash of power I felt when my right hand smacked into his jaw. His head went back and his eyes flamed and I knew right then that victory should not be confused with winning. Something even better came from losing, from almost winning. That some might mistake it as a tragedy but not me: weak, pitiful, helpless, insignificant no more.

  Harper was a big, ugly, angry kid, two years older than me, and he sprung and tightened like a coil, came back at me, hitting with a whistling left-handed hook. I ducked but it caught the side of my head and I went dizzy. He was a blurring of arms and fists, battering at me, and I knew it was over. But then I heard the kids yelling my name, wanting me to take him, and I realized there weren’t any of them cheering for Harper. Not anymore. It would be like rooting for the seeing man in a shootout against a blind man, the second before the blind man gets shot in the heart. I was smiling and smiling when I went down to the ground, nose broken, face bloodied, and the fight ended. About three minutes had passed. Harper won but he wasn’t smiling like me. He seemed a little shocked by it all.

  After that, I went after everything full force, whether I won or not. It didn’t matter and the only thing that mattered was the feeling I got from it.

  I joined the Athletic Club, and when I first ran at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, I didn’t have my running clothes or shoes with me, and there were no stores that carried track and field attire for women. So I wore my brother’s swimming trunks, my father’s socks, and a gym jersey, and I borrowed a pair of shoes from one of the boys. I placed first in the discus, the javelin, the shot put, the 220, and the 120-yard low hurdles, and second in the 100-yard dash, despite never having been coached in the discus, shot put, or javelin.

  I watched the boys who went before me, and then tried to do what they did. I don’t know how I did it, to be honest. I just had the feeling like I could do anything. Really, we girls didn’t know what
we were doing. We had to try to work things out for ourselves. We were the first ones to try, so there was no one to copy. And it was then that I was told that I would go to the Olympics. But none of this would have been possible had I not decided that I didn’t need victories and championships. I just wanted to rock Fate back on its heels and taste freedom.

  I’ll always remember how Harper won that fight but I got all the glory. They were calling my name, not his, and I had the feeling like the drunken man whom they couldn’t stop at the lacrosse field, fierce and not ever giving up. Call it tragic, call it losing, but I say it’s all victory.

  Toronto Daily Star

  Editorials, June 1928

  We feel that the Olympic Games must be reserved for the solemn and periodic manifestation of male athleticism with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, arts for its setting, and female applause as reward.

  —Baron Pierre de Coubertin, esteemed founder of the modern Olympic Games, and the International Olympic Committee

  No female should be seen swaggering around, pretending to be male. If females must compete in the Olympics, they should be consigned to participating in ladylike sports that allow them to look beautiful and wear some pretty cute costumes: archery, figure skating, and horseback riding being the best examples—activities that would not cause them to perspire. Furthermore, there is scientific evidence that the rigors of athletic activities weaken women for motherhood.

  I happened to encounter the so-called Peerless Four while sitting at the counter of a Toronto restaurant that shall remain unnamed. I was having a cup of chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich when it occurred to me from my quick glance that the party of seven seated in a booth a few stools away from me included the Peerless Four, along with their sponsor, a large man I later found out is a dubious character by the name of Jack Grapes, and a female chaperone whom I know from social circles, Mrs. Ross, married to Dr. W. R. Ross, and one more, a female of unknown connection, though my conjecture is that she is a sibling to one of the four.

  My eyes on my soup, I listened to their animated chatter about their upcoming trip to Amsterdam. When I finally did look up, I almost jumped from my stool at the sight of Muriel Ziegler.

  Ziegler is the leader of a breed of women that is more man than woman, and more sexually uncertain than heterosexual. I saw a thin-skinned, masculine face with a slit for a mouth, hawkish nose, and black eyes. She happens to have a man’s body, and one is not sure whether to use the address of Miss, Mrs., Mr., or It. She acts like a man, sounds like a man, looks like a man.

  One gets the impression that Ziegler chooses to compete against women in athletic contests simply because she would not or could not compete at their best and most noble game—courting and marrying a man. Athletics are an escape, compensation, because without athletic contests, she’d have no way to catch a man’s eye.

  Next to Ziegler was Ginger Hadley—the Dream Girl—unmistakably. Now I understand why she is called that name. She was dressed in a blue dress, more like a gown, long and drape-like, very graceful and floaty, with a charming sweater and hat, and I saw no evidence of the masculinity that burdened her peers. Her black silky hair curled out from her hat, she has porcelain skin and a bow-shaped mouth, and her figure is long, lean, and perfectly shaped. I was only able to give her four or five frantic glances. She has the type of dazzling beauty that you can’t linger on too long. It makes the observer feel indecent.

  I had an overwhelming desire to free her. How this would be accomplished, I had no idea. I wanted to say, “With your beauty you demonstrate that in athletics women don’t belong. It would be much better for you to stay home, get yourself prettied up, and let that phone ring. For undoubtedly it will! You are a stunner, a glamour girl!” I didn’t, of course, say anything.

  The one named Bonnie Brody wouldn’t have been called good-looking, certainly not by this judge. She seems to be built satisfactorily, but she wore an awful bulky skirt and blouse, socks to her calves, as if to make one forget her immediately. She made awkward, almost violent gestures when she spoke, and she had an absolute buzzing intensity that loaded her young features with an aged severity. Her short hair ringed out from her head in a wild and electric manner, as if fleeing her brain.

  The fourth, Florence Smith, has the demeanor and shape of a ten-year-old boy. Yet she has the high-pitched giggle of a ten-year-old girl. She strikes me as foolish and easily swayed. She wore a flower clipped in her hair as if to offset the masculine. If she is not careful, she is bound to become a she-man like Ziegler.

  Mrs. Ross, their chaperone, once prepared a delicious meal for a party of six that included me as one of Dr. Ross’s dinner guests, a business-related invitation, the details of which are unrelated.

  I remembered Mrs. Ross’s sober intent dark-eyed stare from that dinner, and at first I wasn’t sure that the woman at the restaurant was the same Mrs. Ross, for that afternoon she wore a hat low to her brow, so that it was a challenge to see her face.

  But then, from her place at the table, she turned her attention to me, and there was no mistaking her stare. Her commanding dark eyes took me in, with a seeming indifference.

  I shook my head in question to her, as if to say, Why? and she gave no acknowledgement, and then she turned away.

  I remembered how she wore a blue apron that night, and how after the dinner plates had been cleared, and as we waited for coffee and dessert, through an open doorway to the kitchen, we saw that she sat with a book beside a lamp at the kitchen table. So consumed was she by what she read, she did not hear her husband calling for her, and we at the dining room table had a nice chuckle about the situation.

  Finally, Dr. Ross had to stand and go to her, and when she came back to the dining room table bearing a platter of cobbler, she apologized in earnest for neglecting her duties as our hostess.

  Mrs. Ross is a distracted but otherwise dutiful wife. Her presence at that restaurant table, in all honesty, confounds me. Yet it is also a small comfort to know that the girls will have a significant female example. She and Dr. Ross have no children of their own. Her maternal instincts have found the opportunity to bloom, however misguided the destination.

  I found my disgust steered toward the sponsor, Jack Grapes, a man around my age though more than twice my size, and I wanted to shout at him, “Listen, you son of a gun, what do you think you’re doing? How dare you corrupt these youths!” I was so upset, I could no longer continue to eat, and left to pay for my meal with the cashier.

  Soon enough, Mr. Grapes was standing right next to me, waiting to pay the cashier as well. Unable to resist, I turned my head to face him. When he looked at me, I said, “So you’re going to Amsterdam, are you?” and my face and voice were full of scorn, because he answered back, “What’s your problem, buddy?” He looked at me mockingly, then he smiled a terrible, ingratiating smile, and I walked out the door shaking with anger, overwhelmed by my fears for these girls.

  The Peerless Four are a disgrace to athletes. They need our protection, not our support. Ziegler is too far-gone, but the others might be saved from a fate such as hers.

  The ancient Greeks kept women out of their Games entirely, even as spectators. If caught, a woman was to be thrown off a mountain.

  I’m not suggesting that we go back to this approach, but I am suggesting that perhaps the ancient Greeks were right to protect their male athletes. With de Coubertin’s resignation, the Games are under threat. When we allow females a few acceptable competitions, they only end up demanding more.

  Sincerely,

  Edward P. Brundage

  Chapter One

  Backyard Jumper

  I was in Jack Grapes’s Cadillac, with Jack driving. A sleek black Cadillac that reminded me of a hearse, the motor thrumming beneath us. Ginger Hadley and her sister Danielle, or Danny, as everyone called her, in the backseat. Hazy beams of sunlight flickered through the trees. Behind us on the road, another car followed with a photographer and Sam Sacks, the high-ju
mp coach whom Jack had hired to train Ginger for the 1928 Olympics, even though Ginger swore that she didn’t need him. Seventeen years old and she knew everything. She did what came natural, she said, scissoring those legs so that she flew-stepped across the bar. Jack was sponsoring Ginger, and Danny was part of the package.

  I watched Jack using his thumbs to steer on the straight shot of the road, his big thigh next to me flexing now and then. He was unusually quiet. The photographer would snap the Dream Girl (they’d already started calling Ginger that), in her shack of a house in Beechy, Saskatchewan, drumming up more support and money, and Jack would soothe the sisters’ father. Jack had it all figured out, and he was silent now, mulling it over.

  His hand left the steering wheel and went inside his jacket, fingering a flask nestled in the lining of his inside pocket. His eyes glimmered in my direction and he sucked in his cheeks, blew some air through his mouth.

  When I moved to Canada from Ohio, my suitcase handle was engraved with my initials M.E.L. (Marybelle Eloise Lee). The train steward looked at my suitcase and called me Mel, and I took the name because it fit me more than the other. I glimmered my eyes back, letting Jack know that I had my own flask, fitted tightly in the garter at my thigh, its metal cool against my skin.

  “You’re something else, Mel,” he said, staring straight ahead.

  Jack was the founder of the Parksdale Ladies Athletic Club. Jack is Irish and Scottish with some French and Italian thrown in. A former professional hockey player and a self-made mining millionaire, with brokerage firms where he didn’t work much and where he employed amateur women athletes whether they had skills or not. Typists, stenographers, and mailers, women in their late teens and early twenties worked for Jack and played for his basketball team, advertising his business.

  Jack had a knack for getting people to hand over their money. Forty-two with a patch of scalp near the back of his silvery-haired head that had decided, after all, not to go bald, he wore a brown fedora, insecure about that one naked spot. The bridge of his nose flattened and switched directions midway, lending an appealing confusion to his features, and a scar pitted his freshly shaved jawline. His big dark sleepy eyes had an inward look that opened itself to me in dazzling flashes.