addition to his duties with football, he coached the shot put and instructed those interested in weight lifting. But to the Bates family, Iowa Bob was too uncomplicated to be taken seriously: a funny, squat strongman with hair so short he looked bald, always jogging through the streets of town—“with a ghastly-coloured sweatband around his dome,” Latin Emeritus used to say.
Since Coach Bob would live a long time, he was th—e only grand-parent any of us children would remember.
“What’s that sound?” Frank would ask, in alarm, in the middle of the night when Bob had come to live with us.
What Frank heard, and what we often heard after Coach Bob moved in, was the creaking of push-ups and the grunting of sit-ups on the old man’s floor (our ceiling) above us.
“It’s Iowa Bob,” Lilly whispered once. “He’s trying to stay in shape forever.”
Anyway, it wasn’t Win Berry who took Mary Bates to her graduation dance. The Bates family minister, who was considerably older than my mother, but unattached, was kind enough to ask her. “That was a long night,” Mother told us. “I felt depressed. I was an outsider in my own hometown. But in a very short while that same minister would marry your father and me!”
They could not even have imagined it when they were “introduced,” together with the other summer help, on the unreal green of the pampered lawn at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea. Even the staff introductions were formal, there. A girl was called out, by name, from a line of other girls and women; she would meet a boy called out from a line of boys and men, as if they were going to be dance partners.
“This is Mary Bates, just graduated from the Thompson Female Seminary! She’ll be helping in the hotel, and with hostessing. She likes sailing,
Waiters and waitresses, the grounds crew and caddies, the boat help and the kitchen staff, odd-jobbers, hostesses, chambermaids, laundry people, a plumber, and the members of the band. Ballroom dancing was very popular; the resorts farther south—like the Weirs at Laconia, and Hampton Beach—drew some of the big-name bands in the summers. But the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea had its own band, which imitated in a cold, Maine way the big-band sound.
“And this is Winslow Berry, who likes to be called Win!
But my father looked straight at my mother, who smiled and turned her face away—as embarrassed for him as she was for herself. She’d never noticed what a handsome boy he was, really; he had a body as hard as Coach Bob’s, but the Dairy School had exposed him to the manners, the dress, and the way with his hair that Bostonians (not Iowans) were favouring. He looked as if he already went to Harvard, whatever that must have meant to my mother then. “Oh, I don’t know what it meant,” she told us children. “Kind of cultured, I guess. He looked like a boy who knew how to drink without getting sick. He had the darkest, brightest eyes, and whenever you looked at him you were sure he’d just been looking at you—but you could never catch him.”
My father maintained that latter ability all his life; we felt around him, always, the sense that he’d been observing us closely and affectionately—even if, when we looked at him, he seemed to be looking elsewhere, dreaming or making plans, thinking of something hard or faraway. Even when he was quite blind, to our schemes and lives, he seemed to be “observing” us. It was a strange combination of aloofness and warmth—and the first time my mother felt it was on that tongue of bright green lawn that was framed by the grey Maine sea.
STAFF INTRODUCTIONS: 4:00 P.M.
That was when she learned he was there.
When the introductions were over, and the staff was instructed to make ready for the first cocktail hour, the first dinner, and the first evening’s entertainment, my mother caught my father’s eye and he came up to her.
“It will be two years before I can afford Harvard,” he said, immediately, to her.
“So I thought,” my mother said. “But I think it’s wonderful you got in,” she added quickly.
“Why
Mary Bates shrugged, a gesture learned from never understanding her father (since his stroke had slurred his speech). She wore white gloves and a white hat with a veil; she was dressed for “serving” at the first lawn party, and my father admired how nicely her hair hugged her head—it was longer in back, swept away from her face, and clamped somehow to the hat and veil in a manner both so simple and mysterious that my father fell to wondering about her.
“What are you doing in the fall?” he asked her.
Again she shrugged, but maybe my father saw in her eyes, through her white veil, that my mother was hoping to be rescued from the scenario she imagined was her future.
“We were nice to each other, that first time, I remember that,” Mother told us. “We were both alone in a new place and we knew things about each other nobody else knew.” In those days, I imagine, that was intimate enough.
“There wasn’t
And Franny was forceful—I frequently believed her. Even Franny’s language was ahead of her time—as if she always knew where she was going; and I would never quite catch up to her.
That first evening at the Arbuthnot there was the staff band playing its imitation of the big-band sound, but there were very few guests, and even fewer dancers; the season was just beginning, and it begins slowly in Maine—it’s so cold there, even in the summer. The dance hall had a deck of hard-shined wood that seemed to extend beyond the open porches that overlooked the ocean. When it rained, they had to drop awnings over the porches because the ballroom was so open, on all sides, that the rain washed in and wet the polished dance floor.
That first evening, as a special treat to the staff—and because there were so few guests, and most of them had gone to bed, to get warm—the band played late. My father and mother, and the other help, were invited to dance for an hour or more. My mother always remembered that the ballroom chandelier was broken—it blinked dimly; uneven spots of colour dappled the dance floor, which looked so soft and glossy in the ailing light that the floor appeared to have the texture of a candle.
“I’m glad someone I know is here,” my mother whispered to my father, who had rather formally asked her to dance and danced with her very stiffly.
“But you don’t know me,” Father said.
“I said that,” Father told us, “so that your mother would shrug again.” And when she shrugged, thinking him impossibly difficult to talk to—and perhaps superior—my father was convinced that his attraction to her was not a fluke.
“But I
(“Yuck,” Franny always said, at this point in the story.)
The sound of an engine was drowning out the band, and many of the dancers left the floor to see what the commotion was. My mother was grateful for the interruption: she couldn’t think of what to say to Father. They walked, not holding hands, to the porch that faced the docks; they saw, under the dock lights swaying on the overhead wires, a lobster boat putting out to sea. The boat had just deposited on the dock a dark motorcycle, which was now roaring—revving itself, perhaps to free its tubes and pipes of the damp salt air. Its rider seemed intent on getting the noise right before he put the machine in gear. The motorcycle had a sidecar attached, and in it sat a dark figure, hulking and still, like a man made awkward by too many clothes.
“It’s Freud,” someone on the staff said. And other, older members of the staff cried out, “Yes! It’s Freud! It’s Freud and State o’Maine!”
My mother and father both thought that “State o’Maine” was the name of the motorcycle. But then the band stopped playing, seeing its audience was gone, and some of the band members, too, joined the dancers on the porch.
“Freud!” people yelled.
My father always told us he was amused to imagine that the Freud would any moment motor over beneath the porch and, in the high-strung lights lining the perfect gravel driveway, introduce himself to the staff. So here
