The ninth and final station on Milford's nine-hole course is a long par-4 that elevates uphill to the clubhouse, and I had never played it well. There were many paths to failure on this hole, and I had trod them all. To my eye, the tee-box seemed set at an odd, uncomfortable angle. Left and right, tangles of bracken bordered the narrow fairway, and a shallow, muddy ditch lay concealed just within reach of a well-struck drive. Beyond, the fairway narrowed further, tilted leftward, and rose steeply up to a platformed green. The green itself lay encircled amid trees and shrubs and bunkers, and its surface undulated like a tidal swell frozen into place. Perhaps it was because I was usually dragging with fatigue by this point, worn down from battling the course with the ever-changing vagaries of my mediocre game. Perhaps it was only a mental thing. For whatever reason, however, the simple fact was that the ninth hole had always brought me disappointment.
And so, inevitably, once again, my tour of the course ended with a thud. I sprayed my ball left, then right, then left again, while Hugh, without ceremony, poked his way down the middle of the fairway and neatly up onto the green. In the end, I needed to sink a thirty-foot putt to halve the hole and halve the match; too daunting a task. By the time I bent over to gauge my line, I had already resigned myself to the outcome. I missed the putt before even striking it, thus losing the hole and losing the contest; undone by an excess of intoxicating reminiscence.
Resolute Hugh had prevailed more often than not back when we were boys. It seemed fitting, therefore, that he should prevail again today. In fact, our little rivalry had resembled perfectly so many of our bygone competitions that its conclusion was entirely satisfying, in an ironic sort of way. Had I held my lead and claimed the win, some fundamental rule of the course would have been subverted, some iron verity of history shattered. Better to keep things as they were meant to be. No need to tamper. Looking into boxes of memories is one thing; rearranging their contents is another. I had returned to Milford to seek what survived from the world I had left behind those many years ago, not to upset or remake it. We smiled, therefore, shook hands, loaded our clubs into Hugh's car, and made our way to the pro shop.
I bought my father a shirt, upon the left breast-pocket of which was imprinted the club's seal (prominently featuring waves and anchors, of course), and chatted with the boy at the desk. The shop was crisp and modern, well-lit, well-stocked, even colorful, and bore not the slightest resemblance to Mr. Flynn's old cave-like nook. And of course, Mr. Flynn himself was long gone too. Never heard of him, the boy said flatly. Who is he? Hugh had told me the boy was a local sensation, an aspiring tour pro, a long hitter with nerves of steel. I examined the lad closely, and saw only a lanky teenager with curly brown hair and a raw, unlined expression. Soon enough, I reflected with a certain perverse satisfaction, time and the world would notch their marks upon that unmarred surface. As he handed over my receipt I told him I had lived here when I was young, and had learned to play golf on this course; he listened perfunctorily, with no interest. I took the shirt and thanked him.
We crossed the parking lot to the clubhouse, where we sat in the barroom overlooking the course and Hugh bought me a Guinness. Lining the walls were plaques engraved with the names of all the club's past Presidents, year by year. I located 1966, 1967, and 1968, and saw inscribed upon those markers the names of three of my father's friends and golfing partners – Arthur Pledger, Gareth Gaines, Ollie Frost – each of whom I had known, and caddied for more than once. Mr. Pledger, in particular, had been a handsome tipper; Frost less so, but a jocular gentleman with whom to pass a morning. Hugh knew nothing about them; whether they were alive or dead, or where they might reside.
Over the bar, there seemed to hang a dreary, soggy atmosphere – so unlike that place which, in memory, long ago, had rollicked with no end of laughter and good humor. Today, however, every association it evoked seemed mildewed, moth-eaten. The afternoon was deepening, the sky beginning to cloud. Finally, I located one lone patron, an elderly man in a black woolen sweater, huddled alone at a table in the corner, who remembered Mr. Flynn. I sat with him briefly, hopeful for information – but learned only that Mr. Flynn now dwelt absent-minded and doddering in a small house off the Dale Road, rarely venturing out. The man recalled him as frail and unsteady when last seen, at the chemist's on Charles Street, sometime last winter, fumbling for change at the checkout, assisted by a woman, perhaps his day-nurse. We sat silently. He had nothing more to tell. The old gentleman tapped his mug absently on the table, both of us thinking our thoughts. Old Dick Flynn, he then muttered softly, rising, shaking his head, and moving away. Oh, a mighty golfer, he continued, descending the stairs, as if reminiscing now to himself alone. A mighty golfer indeed.
I finished my beer and felt like leaving too. Hugh and I stared out the big bay window across the course to the Haven. A tanker eased slowly and deliberately to the west, toward the mouth of the Haven where the watercourse welcomed the sea. Two tiny tugs accompanied the giant ship. The sun was obscured, partially, by approaching clouds, and half the scene beyond the window lay in shade, the other half washed with that familiar, yellow, late-day glow. It was a panorama intimate yet remote; intimate because I had lived within it, breathed within it, walked and worked and reached and puzzled within it, and remembered it so well; but remote because now I was merely a spectator, and no longer a part of what stretched before my eyes. Watching evening settle over the Haven through the thick glass of the clubhouse window made it seem like just another one of my recurring, emotive dreams; or like watching a movie, or glancing idly through an open door into another person's life.
Hugh had fallen silent as well, gazing pensively upon the view, and I wondered what he saw. I wondered if, perhaps, he saw two carefree youths roaming the course and peering intently after their shots as they vanished in the blue gloaming. I wondered if he saw how the elements that form our lives, the people and places, the choices, the acts – those committed as well as those omitted – all the triumphs, the yearnings, the failures, which, in their immediacy, burn and sting with such ferocity, come eventually to fade and blur like the light upon the course itself was fading with the onset of night. I wondered what Hugh discerned out the window, because this was what I saw as I cradled my empty mug and stared through the glass across the expanse now divided into realms of light and dark. I saw that memory, and its meaning, and all the bits and parts from which it is stitched together, paddle furiously against the irresistible current of time. I saw Milford and its people safely encased in the eternal dream world of reminiscence – but also saw that, in the corporeal world of flesh and blood, rock and wind, memories are merely specks of dust floating in the sunlight, and the foretime dissolves and disappears like a mirage, as time ultimately devours all things past and present and future like a heartless, marauding beast. And in this grim land, under this ruthless regime, a person's history, I thought, is destined to become but a carcass gutted and abandoned by the sated monster. Only a fool would struggle against its certain disintegration, much less undertake to keep its spark alive – vain and doomed, like a cupped hand endeavoring to shield a tiny flame against a cold night gale.
Yet here I was – and this was a fact. Many years had come and gone. Time had not stood still - the mighty Mr. Flynn rendered shattered and feeble, and all but forgotten; Hugh lined and ruddy; myself gray and bespectacled. I wondered anew how this place had dug its hook so deep; and enjoyed a quiet pleasure, a quiet flush of triumph, because the little raft that carried my history here had held its heading against the cruel, decaying beat of time, and Yes, my memories endured, intact and whole and good, and undevoured yet.
We left the club for town. I was staying at The Crescent, on Hamilton Terrace. Hugh dropped me at the door and sped off to run some errands before the reunion dinner. I was still a bit weary from the trip over, and wanted to rest before the big event. On an impulse, however, I walked up the Terrace toward the Rath, to the shuttered remnants of Marshal House, and stood for some minutes on the sidewalk studying its crumbling paint and dingy trim, staring at the door, now boarded shut, through which my father and I had entered on our first morning in Milford. I circled around to the back entrance, the one through which Alan and I would rush home from school every day that first month, when the hotel had been my home, the base from which my father and I launched our explorations of this new-found territory.
It was silent and abandoned now – no laughing schoolboys, no feet clambering on the pavement and clattering into the kitchen – but the old sounds and old memories hung heavy nonetheless. I remembered having dreamt once – a strong and clinging dream; my friends were waiting for me up on Charles Street, up the steep hill from the Marshal House. I had bolted out the front door and was straining to race up the hill, laboring and gasping, but my legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Regardless of how I struggled, I made no progress, and they finally drifted away, faded away, one by one – and I had, I recalled, awoken bathed in disappointment, clammy and melancholy, wrapped once more in the deep, inconsolable sense of loss that inevitably followed these nighttime sojourns to the Haven.
Before long, I headed back to the hotel, and up the creaking stairs to my room. I had requested a view facing the Haven, and indeed my window opened across the old docks, the flat blue sheet of tranquil water, and the old refineries’ spires against the green slope of the southern shore. A mammoth tanker lay at rest at the jetty, and a single tug plowed lazily toward the west. Three sailboats skimmed by, heading also to the west; to Dale for the evening, I supposed. The street below was quiet, but I could hear gulls squawking as they swooped and plunged above the water. I perched on the edge of my bed and looked out the window for several minutes, then grew sleepy, set the alarm, and dozed off to the cool touch of the late afternoon breeze and the rising, falling, familiar chorus of the birds.
The occasion for my return to Milford, the rope that pulled me back, was the class reunion Caron had organized. Like all things avidly awaited – perhaps too avidly awaited – the actual event itself came and went quickly, and exists now only as a fast-moving reel of episodes or frames. Many are blurred. Many run together. A few, however, stand out, like sequences of color in a black-and-white film. These, I have lodged securely in that stubborn storage bin which holds my strongest Milford memories.
The reels’ opening frames commence with waking refreshed after my golfing foray, showering, changing clothes, and departing my room at The Crescent, bound for the marina, our gathering place. The reels end several hours later with a bus pulling away from a restaurant in darkness, my hands pressed against a cold glass window, staring back into the night. Here now, however, the first reel is loading, threading neatly onto its track, the projector's wheels and gears beginning to whir with a subdued metallic hum, and the frames streaming and clicking into view through the grainy lens of remembrance.