The death of my cousin Roger was a dark episode in my childhood and not because I knew him so well but because I heard such horrible grief in my mother’s voice when she took the call. She was standing in the upstairs hall of our house and picked up the phone on the second ring and a half-minute later said, “Oh no,” in a tone I’d never heard before. Roger was Aunt Margaret’s youngest, seventeen years old, and it had been only fifteen years since Margaret’s husband had run off and never come back, leaving her to a straitened life, and then came this even harder blow. Roger was a sweet-tempered kid, something of a comic, and was graduating from high school when he went out on Lake Minnetonka with his girlfriend. I met the girlfriend on a flight to New York fifty-some years later and wanted to ask her about Roger and she didn’t want to talk about him. “Drowning 1954” is all true but it would be even truer if she could be here in it somehow.
When I was twelve, my cousin Roger drowned in Lake Independence, and my mother enrolled me in a swimming class at the YMCA on La Salle Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. Twice a week for most of June and July, I got on the West River Road bus near our home in Brooklyn Park Township, a truck-farming community north of Minneapolis, and rode into the stink and heat of the city. When we rounded the corner of Ninth Street and La Salle and smelled the chlorine air that the building breathed out, I started to feel afraid. After a week, I couldn’t bear to go to swimming class anymore.
Never before had I stood naked among strangers (the rule in the class was no swimming trunks), and it was loathsome to undress and then walk quickly through the cold showers to the pool and sit shivering with my feet dangling in the water (Absolute Silence, No Splashing) and wait for the dread moment. The instructor—a man in his early twenties, who was tanned and had the smooth muscles of a swimmer (he wore trunks)—had us plunge into the pool one at a time, so that he could give us his personal attention. He strode up and down the side of the pool yelling at those of us who couldn’t swim, while we thrashed hopelessly beneath him and tried to look like swimmers. “You’re walking on the bottom!” he would shout. “Get your legs up! What’s the matter, you afraid to get your face wet? What’s wrong with you?” The truth was that my cousin’s death had instilled in me a terrible fear, and when I tried to swim and started to sink it felt not so much as if I was sinking but as if something were pulling me down. I panicked, every time. It was just like the dreams of drowning that came to me right after Roger died, in which I was dragged deeper and deeper, with my body bursting and my arms and legs flailing against nothing, down and down, until I shot back to the surface and lay in my dark bedroom exhausted, trying to make myself stay awake.
I tried to quit the swimming class, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it, so I continued to board the bus every swimming morning, and then, ashamed of myself and knowing God would punish me for my cowardice and deceit, I hurried across La Salle and past the Y and walked along Hennepin Avenue, past the pinball parlors and bars and shoeshine stands to the old public library, where I viewed the Egyptian mummy and the fossils and a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. I stayed there until 11:30, when I headed straight for the WCCO radio studio to watch Good Neighbor Time.
We listened regularly to this show at home—Bob DeHaven, with Wally Olson and His Band, and Ernie Garvin and Burt Hanson and Jeanne Arland—and then to the noontime news, with Cedric Adams, the most famous man in the upper Midwest. It amazed me to sit in the studio audience and watch the little band crowded around the back wall, the engineers in the darkened booth, and the show people gliding up to a microphone for a song, a few words, or an Oxydol commercial. I loved everything except the part of the show in which Bob DeHaven interviewed people in the audience. I was afraid he might pick me, and then my mother, and probably half of Minnesota, would find out that I was scared of water and a liar to boot. The radio stars dazzled me. One day, I squeezed into the WCCO elevator with Cedric Adams and five or six other people. I stood next to him, and a sweet smell of greatness and wealth drifted off him. I later imagined Cedric Adams swimming in Lake Minnetonka—a powerful whale of happiness and purpose—and I wished that I were like him and the others, but as the weeks wore on I began to see clearly that I was more closely related to the bums and winos and old men who sat around in the library and wandered up and down Hennepin Avenue. I tried to look away and not see them, but they were all around me there, and almost every day some poor ragged creature, filthy drunk at noon, would stagger at me wildly out of a doorway, with his arms stretched out toward me, and I saw a look of fellowship in his eyes: You are one of us.
I ran from them, but clearly I was well on my way. Drinking and all the rest of the bum’s life would come with time, inevitably. My life was set on its tragic course by a sinful error in youth. This was the dark theme of the fundamentalist Christian tracts in our home: one misstep would lead you down into the life of the infidel.
One misstep! A lie, perhaps, or disobedience to your mother. There were countless young men in those tracts who stumbled and fell from the path—one misstep!—and were dragged down like drowning men into debauchery, unbelief, and utter damnation. I felt sure that my lie, which was repeated twice a week and whenever my mother asked about my swimming, was sufficient for my downfall. Even as I worked at the deception, I marveled that my fear of water should be greater than my fear of Hell.
I still remember the sadness of wandering in downtown Minneapolis in 1954, wasting my life and losing my soul, and my great relief when the class term ended and I became a kid again around the big white house and garden, the green lawns and cool shady ravine of our lovely suburb. A weekend came when we went to a lake for a family picnic, and my mother, sitting on the beach, asked me to swim for her, but I was able to fool her, even at that little distance, by walking on the bottom and making arm strokes.
When I went to a lake with my friends that summer, or to the Mississippi River a block away, I tried to get the knack of swimming, and one afternoon the next summer I did get it—the crawl and the backstroke and the sidestroke, all in just a couple of weeks. I dived from a dock and opened my eyes underwater and everything. The sad part was that my mother and father couldn’t appreciate this wonderful success; to them, I had been a swimmer all along. I felt restored—grateful that I would not be a bum all my life, grateful to God for letting me learn to swim. It was so quick and so simple that I can’t remember it today. Probably I just stood in the water and took a little plunge; my feet left the bottom, and that was it.
When my boy was seven, he showed some timidity around water. Every time I saw him standing in the shallows, working up nerve to put his head under, I loved him more. His eyes are closed tight, and his pale slender body is tense as a drawn bow, ready to spring up instantly should he start to drown. Then I feel it all over again, the way I used to feel. I also feel it when I see people like the imperial swimming instructor at the YMCA—powerful people who delight in towering over some little twerp who is struggling and scared, and casting the terrible shadow of their just and perfect selves. The Big Snapper knows who you are, you bastards, and in a little while he is going to come after you with a fury you will not believe and grab you in his giant mouth and pull you under until your brain turns to jelly and your heart almost bursts. You will never recover from this terror. You will relive it every day, as you lose your fine job and your home and the respect of your friends and family. You will remember it every night in your little room at the Mission, and you will need a quart of Petri muscatel to put you to sleep, and when you awake between your yellow-stained sheets your hands will start to shake all over again.
You have fifteen minutes. Get changed.