In the great tiled chamber where the pool lived, a barking resonance broke everything into fragments. On the little wooden bleachers at the poolside my father sat with a wet and naked boy, Deifendorf. Deifendorf wore only the skimpy black official trunks; the droop of his genitals was limply defined between his spread thighs. Hair flowed down his chest and forearms and legs and a stream of water was running across the wood where his bare feet rested. The curves and flats of his hunched white body were harmonious but for his horny red hands. He and my father greeted me with grins that looked much the same: snaggled, ignorant, conspiratorial. To annoy Deifendorf I asked him, “Ja win the breast stroke and the two-twenty?”
“I won more than you did,” he answered.
“He won the breast stroke,” my father said. “I’m proud of you, Deify. You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.”
“Shit if I’d seen that guy in the far lane I’d’ve taken the two-twenty too. Bastard he sneaked in on me, I thought I’d won it, I was just gliding in.”
“That kid swam a good race,” my father said. “He won it honestly. He paced himself. Foley’s a good coach. If I was any kind of a coach, Deify, you’d be king of the county; you’re a natural. If I was any kind of a coach and you’d give up cigarettes.”
“Fuck I can hold my breath eighty seconds as it is,” Deifendorf said.
There was in their talk a mutual flattery that annoyed me. I sat on the other side of my father and concentrated on the pooclass="underline" it was the hero here. It filled its great underground cage with staccato glitter and the eye-flagellating stink of chlorine. The reflection of the bleachers across the pool, where the opposing team and the judges sat, made on the rattled water a figment that for split seconds seemed a bearded face. Shattered again and again, the water yet sought with the quickness of crystalline reaction to recompose itself. Shouts and splashes broken by echoes and countersplashes made in collision new words, words of no language I knew, garbled barks that seemed to be answers to a question I had un knowingly asked, cecrops! inachus! da! No, it was not me who had asked the question, but my father beside me.
“What does it feel like to win?” he had asked aloud, speaking straight ahead and thus equally to Deifendorf and me. “Jesus, I’ll never know.”
Flecks and blobs skidded back and forth across the volatile aqua skin. The lines of lane demarcation on the pool bottom looped and wavered, refracted, toward the surface; the bearded face seemed about to constitute itself when, each time, another boy dived. Everything was over but the diving. One of our divers, Danny Horst, a runty senior with a huge mane of black hair that for diving he did up in a hairband like a Greek girl, came forward on the board, muscles swirling, and executed a running forward somersault, knees tucked, toes taut, so perfectly, uncoiling into the water through a soft splash as symmetrical as the handles of a vase, that one of the judges flashed the 10 card.
“In fifteen years,” my father said, “I’ve never seen the ten used before. It’s like saying God has. come down to earth. There is no such thing as perfection.”
“Thatta baby Danny boy,” Deifendorf yelled, and a patter of applause from both teams greeted the diver as he surfaced, tossed his loosened hair with a proud flick, and swam the few strokes to the pool edge. But on his next dive Danny, aware we were all expecting another miracle, tensed up, lost the rhythm of the approach, came out of the one-and-a-half twist a moment too soon, and slapped the water with his back. One judge gave him a 3. The other two gave him 4s. “Well,” my father said, “the poor kid gave it all he had.” And when Danny surfaced this time, my father, and only my father, clapped.
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.