The Peerless Four Read online

  “Strength,” he said, “is not in the muscles. It’s the mind.” He tapped a finger to his skull. “The mind prevails over the body, demands it accomplish the impossible. We must feed the mind. Do you understand, Mrs. Ross?”

  He required no response.

  “The Olympics,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Politics, money, corruption. It’s the secret meaning inside that matters. The inside battle. The sacred meaning inside us . . .” He was losing his concentration.

  He took another pull from his flask, a hit from his cigarette. He coughed, looked down. “Winning’s easy,” he said. “It’s secondary. Do you understand? It’s the secret meaning inside us. The sacred that matters.”

  He looked up, attempting a smile that looked more like a wince. “Winning,” he said, tapping a long ash, “is not that different from losing, and losing’s far more important.” He paused in contemplation. “Winning feels good but it doesn’t last. Losing feels bad and that feeling lasts.”

  I took a long drink from my flask while he watched. He continued staring. “After all these years,” he said, “I’ve got something that’s larger than myself and connected to me. Something that I know how to do that’s not about me. It’s bigger than me.” His head tilted. “Is that why you’re here? I still can’t figure out why you’re here.”

  He waited for me to respond but I said nothing.

  “C’mon, Mel,” he said, looking between his knees. Then he muttered, “It’s only a game but it’s the only game.”

  I couldn’t look at his face so I focused on the sunset. “I can’t go to Amsterdam,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Wallace,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “He wants me home.”

  Jack didn’t speak after that. A sliver of a new moon became visible. We sat and listened to the sounds of the kids’ voices and then someone clanged a bell, calling them inside for supper.

  Jack sighed and put his hat on, set his flask back in its pocket. He lifted himself with a grunt, held his hand out for me. I took his help, and we went back inside.

  Chapter Two

  Amazon

  Two weeks later, I accompanied Jack in his Cadillac, driving to the Royal York Golf Club in Toronto, a plate of macaroons wrapped in a handkerchief on my lap. When Jack took the curves, I held them more securely.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” Jack said.

  “Yes.”

  “Convincing these men.”

  “Sure.”

  “Mothers don’t object.”

  “They speak through the fathers.”

  “This one should be easy.”

  “Emphasize the glory.”

  “I have the impression,” he said, “that he wants to play golf, and that’s it.”

  “Easy,” I agreed.

  “Not like Dr. Ross,” he said. We planned to speak with my husband that evening.

  I said nothing.

  “That’s why I pay you,” he said, nodding at the cookies.

  “You barely pay me,” I said, and he laughed.

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” he said, “what you look like without that hat.”

  “The same.”

  “It practically covers your entire face.”

  “That’s true,” I said, because that was why I appreciated cloche hats.

  We were quiet, the motor whirring and ticking, specks of light freckling us from outside, our clubs rattling in the trunk. Jack wore plaid knickers. I had on a pleated skirt and a sweater vest. He was pensive, about to say something and then hesitating.

  “What is it, Jack?”

  His head went back and he said, “Nothing, nothing.” He was quiet again, and after a few minutes had passed, he said, “I didn’t know that you were a runner.”

  “I was,” I said. I couldn’t leave it alone, so I asked, “Who told you?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said.

  We were quiet for a few more minutes, and then he resumed his struggle to speak, so I said, “It’s simple. I quit.”

  “Why?”

  “Who told you?”

  “I asked around.”

  “Are you investigating me?”

  He gave a sad smile and his eyes stayed on the road.

  We turned a corner, and the Royal York clubhouse came into view. A low fog layered the grass, the sun eating it up, and we parked alongside the other cars in the parking lot.

  Walter Smith, as it turned out, appreciated my macaroons, but he didn’t want me on the golf course with the men. “We aren’t closed-door,” he said. “Girls are encouraged to come out and have lunch. Really, the only thing they’re not encouraged to do is to play the golf course.”

  Jack turned a face full of apology to me but I nodded for him to go ahead. Instead of waiting at the clubhouse, I sat in Jack’s Cadillac with my window opened, listening to the repeating cracks of the clubs hitting the balls.

  Summer was here: the days getting longer, hotter, drier, and windier. A hawk circled slowly above me, and at the edge of the parking lot, three skinny coyotes paused, observed, and then trotted away.

  Raised at the edge of nature with moose, geese, foxes, and deer, I knew which plants I could eat, that I could dye wool from the lichen collected from tree branches, how the stars aligned.

  As a child I collected animal bones—antlers, a moose skull, a deer skull, the vertebrae of a bear. Nature moved me then, and it moves me now, and that afternoon, the hawk and coyotes comforted me.

  I wrote in my journal:

  “For ladies,” she’s told by the doctor, “athletics promotes excessive muscular development, depleting nerve essences.”

  She likes to run. She’s good. She’s had seven miscarriages.

  “But why,” she asks, crossing her arms at her chest, “do long hours devoted to housework, and the care of parents, husbands, and children involve no risk?”

  He chuckles but it’s not mirthful. He moves across the room, opens her chart. What does this doctor look like? Let’s say he has tufts of black-gray hair coming from his ears. Glasses. Plump and satisfied and distinguished. A gold pocket watch with a chain that he touches for comfort. He looks like her father and the four doctors she’s been to and her husband. Like that.

  “Are you saying,” she continues, “that pedaling a sewing machine is all the exercise I need?”

  She wears a robe over her slip. Her feet dangle from the examination table, but she sits straight.

  He continues to read her chart. “Women’s natural sympathies,” he says, “shouldn’t be replaced by assertiveness and competitiveness. Muscular achievement will outpace moral development, and the pure qualities of women’s natural expression will give way to Amazonian qualities.”

  Athletics make you too ugly to get a husband. She’s heard this before, but she’s married now and it doesn’t frighten her. In fact, it appeals. To become an Amazon!

  She’s read the latest articles, one claiming, among other things, that athletics arouses undue stimulation in females. Once stimulated, women’s sexual energies will exceed the bounds of intervention and control. What then?

  “Women are physically and intellectually vulnerable,” he says, and she knows that this is code for inferior. “Facts,” he continues. “Don’t blame me. Smaller brains, lighter bones.” As if to make up for everything, he adds, “You’re our moral superiors. Natural models of sexual and moral virtue.”

  She knows that this means women are more blameworthy when they fail. When she fails.

  “To jeopardize your God-given capacity to bear children,” he says, “by straining your body, well, it defies both common sense and divine decree.”

  She looks down. Her heart opens and clenches, opens and clenches.

  She folds her hands in her lap. Tears slide. Her spine curves, body caving. Soon, her cheeks are wet.

  “To fulfill your destiny as a mother,” he says, and she feels him looking at her, even though she’s still gazing at her h
ands, “you’re expected to monitor your activities in light of possible dangers to your reproductive functions. Overdeveloped arms and legs rob the reproductive system of vital force.” He pauses. “Failure to do so,” he says, “constitutes a failure to fulfill your religious, moral, and wifely duties.”

  She doesn’t respond, and for a long moment, they listen to her crying.

  “Motherhood,” he says, “as you well know, is the most sacred trust the Almighty can bestow.”

  She’s not thinking, not remembering the female athletes with six, seven, eight children. A space opens in her chest and sorrow bleeds.

  “All that running,” he says, “does often lead to displaced uteri.”

  I crossed the passage with ink, embarrassed by its maudlin tone. Then I found some old notes for an article about marathon women walkers—peds—in the late 1800s:

  Walking was approved and encouraged—women forming “walking clubs”—no coaches, no unusual physical exertion, not considered “masculine,” no rules, no equipment, no provocative clothing.

  Lulu Loomers walked over 700 miles in 1878. Ada Anderson walked a quarter of a mile every fifteen minutes for a month. The majority of spectators women, fascinated by women performing a feat of which the majority of men incapable. Watch for hours and hours and days and days, unbridled interest.

  Ada Anderson told the ladies that she hoped she was an example and that they would walk more and depend less on horse cars.

  From the Toronto Gazette, April 12, 1879, detailing a walking match:

  They were a queer lot. Tall and short, heavy and slim, young and middle-aged, some pretty and a few almost ugly . . .

  The struggle in the early part of the last days was between a young woman and middle-aged Mrs. Wallace. The girl sixteen developed a great endurance and pluck. She gained gradually on her opponent, who vainly endeavored to shake her off, until, at about 4 AM, she passed Wallace. Then there were signs of war, and nearly a collision as the rivals labored . . . Wallace said something spiteful, being worked almost to a frenzy.

  I read a clipping from The New York Times dated July 6, 1886, describing a race of 220 yards for women:

  The race excited immense enthusiasm, and the ropes were broken down in several places by the eagerness of the crowd to get a good view. There were nine starters, and prettier girls could not have been found in the whole park. They started off splendidly at the pistol shot, and for half a minute there was continuous applause and excitement. Miss Bessie Edwards led all the way, but somehow just as the tape was reached, Miss Kate McDonald was found at her side, and a tie was declared for the first two places, with Miss Lily Fleming third. Misses Edwards and McDonald went again over the course and each tried her best to win the silver dinner service. Miss Edwards got to the tape two yards ahead.

  And another clipping from the Toronto Gazette on January 26, 1895:

  There are some queer results of the invasion by young women of the athletic field. Eligible bachelors are selecting their wives from among this class. Physical strength in a woman attracts rather than frightens men. Some people think that a girl’s capacity to ride thirty miles on a bicycle, to swing clubs and to punch a bag makes her strong minded; that muscle makes her masculine and lung power loquacious. This has been found to be a mistake. The up-to-date athletic girl who patronizes the gymnasiums that are now numerous and fashionable is not a blue stocking, although her stockings are often blue. She is essentially feminine. She does not as a rule want to vote, and the desire to command or govern, except in her own province, is furthest from her thoughts.

  A poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

  Witch-Wife

  She is neither pink nor pale,

  And she never will be all mine:

  She learned her hand in a fairy-tale,

  And her mouth on a Valentine.

  She has more hair than she needs;

  In the sun ’tis a woe to me!

  And her voice is a string of coloured beads,

  Or steps leading into the sea.

  She loves me all that she can,

  And her ways to my ways resign;

  But she was not made for any man,

  And she never will be all mine.

  I wrote more:

  Wallace and I have had many discussions about sports. “Athletes,” he once told me, “are compelling because they embody achievement and competitive superiority. Darwin’s theory of evolution manifest with irrefutable data, whereas it’s impossible to qualify the best wife, husband, doctor, lawyer, tax accountant. Athletes embody truth.”

  “Like poetry,” I said. “Abstractions become tangible: grace, control, power, beauty.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The spirit brought to earth. There’s part angel in the best athletes.” He laughed then. “They can be so ignorant and dull.”

  “Unappreciative,” I agreed, and then, “Profundity does not an athlete make.”

  This was the same year my body fell apart. I’d followed the doctors’ orders and became prone to bizarre accidents and injuries, even inside the supposedly safe confines of our house: stubbing my toe against a wall; bumping into a door and blackening my eye; rolling off the bed during a nightmare and snapping my radius; flipping a pot of boiled water, burning my forearm.

  Outside the house, more of the same: choking on a crouton at a restaurant, my face contorting until my companion thumped my back and the food left me, clearing my airway; bit by a friend’s French poodle, after she swore the dog’s friendliness.

  My confidence plummeted and then I gave up and the accidents stopped. No more trying to get pregnant and then bleeding it away. That earlier youthful mastery of my body, which at my best felt like a communion with the gods, an immortal feeling, had succumbed to a great physical uncertainty.

  I learned the far more important and less alluring lesson that I was not in control, and that everything around me—and especially me—was fragile and impermanent. Losing because of powers beyond my control was like death, and then I had to go on living, and that’s what I’m doing.

  Then I closed my eyes and napped.

  Jack was full of apologies on the drive back, saying that the worst part was that he knew I would’ve played golf better than Mr. Smith, whose swing was as stiff as a broom. His cheeks and nose were flushed and his lips chapped from the sun and wind. We had Mr. Smith’s blessing now, and Flo would be joining the team in Amsterdam. We stopped and ate at a coffee shop, and Jack tipped his flask in his coffee, adding some to mine as well. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, but I declined when he offered me one. My stomach was churned up, knowing that we were about to meet with Wallace. I tried to eat my meatloaf. Jack ate scrambled eggs, covering them in hot sauce. He would eat and drink just about anything. He was curious about how I’d spent my time in the Cadillac, and why I hadn’t gone inside the clubhouse. I said that I’d used the time to think and write, and he went quiet. He was still suffering with guilt since he’d been the one to want me to come golfing in the first place. I excused myself to the restroom for the third time, and he asked if I had the nerves. After the look I gave him, he went quiet again.

  Driving through the city made me thoughtful. Jack was full of questions and brimming with things he wanted to share but he left me alone. I leaned my cheek against the cool of my window, letting my breath fog it. I remembered how my mother said I was running from the time I was born. She’d send me to the store and I’d run instead of walk. No tightness in my lungs, the ground beneath me disappearing and reappearing new. A self-assuredness similar to what the whiskey brought me at its very best. At picnics, I’d beat the boys in races. Before I’d take off, I’d feel like I was in a dream, weightless. But then my weight would come behind my knees, down to my feet and into the earth, and the pistol shot or the man yelling on your mark, get set, go, would explode through me, and I’d go weightless again, flying, my arms up and down and the world quiet, passing the boys in a blur.

  The remembering made me thirsty, so I reac
hed beneath my dress and unhinged my flask from my garter. The whiskey fought with my nerves in an explosion, and my face must have shown it, because Jack said, “Easy, now.” I worried that I might have to ask him to stop, unless I wanted to soil his Cadillac. But then the nausea passed, and I set my head against the window again. I started talking, surprising myself as much as Jack, who stayed very quiet, not even nodding his head.

  I told him about Stamata Revithi, a thirty-year-old Greek woman, the first unofficial female Olympian. Determined to run the inaugural 40-kilometre marathon in the first Games in Athens, she left her hometown, on foot, traveling with her seventeen-month-old son strapped to her back. Ridiculed and barred, she decided to run anyway, a day after, in protest. She finished about five and a half hours later, drenched in sweat, covered in dust, and panting. Police denied her access inside the stadium, so she ran one angry lap around the perimeter.

  I told him that at my high school, there were no competitive sports for girls. I sat in the stands after school each afternoon and watched the boys run track. One afternoon, the coach asked me why I was there. I told him that I wanted to run. He invited me to run a 400-metres with the boys. He thought it would be funny. In my long gym bloomers, a blouse, and black cotton stockings, I beat the entire boys’ team.

  “The captain,” I said, “was the only one to come over and talk to me after. He wanted to find out who I was and how I could have beat them.”

  Jack waited for me to keep talking but I was done. He waited some more until he couldn’t take it, and then he said, “And?” I remained silent, and he said, “That’s not right, Mel. Finish your story.”

  I turned to face him. He was looking at the road but he acknowledged my stare with a nod.

  “Dr. W. R. Ross,” I said.

  “That’s how you met?”

  I said nothing.

  He shook his head and said, “Captain of the boys’ track team. Of all things. That’s quite a love story, Mel.”