LATE one night in the summer of 1937 or 1938, a young man at a party—a cheerful fellow named Charlie, the older brother of a girl I'd once been seeing—came into the room where I was, looking for the girl he had brought and was now ready to take home. This was in a house on Parker Point, in Blue Hill, Maine, and the smoky, pretty room was full of young people I knew or almost knew—most of them part of the Blue Hill crowd, but with enough of my sixteen- or seventeen-year-old summer friends from nearby Brooklin in among them to make me feel at ease there, along about midnight. Charlie was from East Blue Hill, not my bunch, but I knew who he was looking for. "Anne? Light of my life?" he said, looking amiably and perhaps a little drunkenly around at us. "Figuratively speaking, light of my life, where are you?" There was some laughter at this, and in time Charlie found Anne—Anne Nevin—and the two said good night and went off together, as they always did. I've forgotten the rest of the evening, but I can still hear the tone of Charlie's question, which came back to me later that night, after I'd got home. Its ease and style—what I would think of in time as cool—dazzled me; I couldn't get over it. Charlie was older, perhaps twenty. I didn't envy him or want to be him, but the moment became one of those flashes which light up the long hallway stretching down the later teens to the door that opens out into adulthood. It promised that what lay ahead for me and others my age was a new life in which we would talk to each other, we young people, in these confident and amusing tones, within an intimacy shared by men and women who were ready for each other now, and eager to find the easy sensual laughter and affectionate idioms and grasped shoulders and wrists and playful glances that would come with our main preoccupation over the next few years. Romance and sex and love itself were almost at hand, and with them the discovery of what sort of men and women we would become, to ourselves and our friends, and, up beyond that, within our marriages and new families.
"Light of my life?"—would I ever be as easy and joyful as that? The delectable question turns to a wisp as we look at it across this stretch of years. It would not occur to young sophisticates today, who are given little time for yearnings before being knocked flat by the rush and crash of experience.
Another passing question that has stuck with me came five or six years later on a narrow staircase connecting some upper stories of the imposing red roofed stone headquarters building at Lowry Field, in Colorado. College has come and gone, it is the fall of 1943, wartime, and I am an Air Force corporal, most recently an instructor in machine guns and power turrets at the Aircraft Armament School but now converted to an official historian, of all things. Somebody at the Pentagon has decided that decent records should be kept about these suddenly overcrowded tech schools that are mass-producing trained personnel to maintain the floods of new bombers and fighter planes headed for the European and Pacific theatres, and has tapped its service records for young noncoms who were college English majors and perhaps can write. On this afternoon, I am going upstairs in search of some files stored in a dusty space under the roof. Ahead of me is a civilian employee in our office, a woman named Bettye, in her middle or upper twenties, and, just behind her, my boss, Tech Sergeant Maury Caples, a cheerful, informal thirty-odd-year-old type, not long ago in the advertising business in Cincinnati. Tromp, tromp we go, we three, when Maury, a step or two below the girl, says, "Have you had your Christmas goose yet, Bettye?"
"No," says Bettye, "but I think it might be coming soon."
"Nothing like a little goose for Christmas," says Caples, as we arrive, laughing together and a little out of breath. I am a married man—I've been married for a whole year now—but the bright-eyed look, a loaded glance, these two have just exchanged is outside my experience. Are they sleeping together? Isn't Maury married, like me? Is something happening between them, or is this just the way grownup men and women can talk sometimes when they trust each other? The last possibility is almost the best. I've grown up a little, myself, right on these stairs. Wow.
Getting there, becoming my adult self, was not a steady goal in my scattered youth, and changes in me, when they came, took me by surprise. Who would expect such a thing to happen on a golf course? Let's reverse directions and go back a few summers again, back before the war to a morning in late August, 1940, when I'd joined my hacker friends Freddy Parson and Bus Willis for another round, there in Brooklin. Where we played was an unfenced but privately maintained little nine holes, right in the middle of town, with bumpy, pasturelike fairways and sunburned greens, where each hole supported an old-style iron flagstick, twisted with years of use and cool to the touch. The shallow, undemanding traps had long since gone to gravel, but lichen-crusted granite ledges, here and there intruding upon a fairway or rising more boldly, like silent onlookers, to one side of a green, offered a greater threat to your score. There was one par five, a fall-away meadow that terminated in a natural bowl, where the strip of rough beyond the green was bordered by knee-high clumps of ball-swallowing ferns. Pinewoods threw their morning shadows almost to the middle of the narrower fairways, and by five-thirty or six on August afternoons began to repeat the process from the other direction. The course started at roadside, just beside the narrow two-lane macadam of Route 175, and at its farther end skirted the inner shore of our harbor. Sometimes, bent almost double under the limb of a hackmatack while I tried to extemporize an irritable slash at my Kro-Flite, nestled dangerously close to a root, I would peer out toward the green and catch a flash of rippled sunlight from the Reach beyond. Other days, again in the rough, I would straighten up to brush a twig or a bug out of my collar, and find myself monitored by a motionless gull twenty feet away, with a bit of mussel shell at its feet. It was a great seven-iron course, perfect for old gents and free-swinging teen-agers perpetually and hilariously in trouble.
Here, on a clear morning sixty-five years gone, a green Ford pulled up beside the grass shelf that constituted the first tee, and we friends were inspected by a young woman with short reddish hair and a grave stare. "Hi," she said. "Any way a person could pick up a game around here?" Without waiting for an answer, she backed up her car and slid it deftly between my ancient Plymouth roadster and the Parsons' station wagon. As she got out and pulled her clubs from the back seat, we eyed each other uneasily. We were young men in mid-college, just sprung from summer jobs in the city, and thought ourselves a suave bunch. While our casual, pickup rounds often included girls or girlfriends, or even sisters, this was our game, made exclusive by a shared age and ineptitude.
"Hi," she said again, dropping her bag next to ours. She told us her name, and the family she was staying with, out on Naskeag Point, who'd said it would be O.K. for her to just come over like this and horn in. She paused, watching us. "Now I'm not so sure," she said.
We collected ourselves and told her our names. Of course she could come along, Freddy said, but we were only duffers. Bus shook her hand and said he'd just figured out who she must be—and mentioned the name of her fiancé. Didn't he play golf?
Not this week, she told us—he was away and she'd been invited up to get to know the family. She said it lightly.
"I'd be here if I was him," Bus said.
I didn't know the family or their place, but Bus did and even knew how to talk to a self-possessed young woman in her middle twenties—an age that made her as strange to me as any movie star. She wasn't quite beautiful, as I recall; there was something too firm about the line of her jaw, but the way she stood now, looking down the first fairway with her weight cocked easily on one hip and a red tee protruding from between her teeth, was both comforting and exotic.
Perhaps a bit abashed by her own boldness, she said she didn't want to spoil our game. It would be better if she chose one of us to be victim, and to have the two others go first, go on ahead. She didn't want three of us standing around while she fought her way out of the woods. Would that be O.K.?
We agreed, and stood together, suddenly shy before her gaze. "I'll take you," she said, amazingly pointing at me. She asked me to tell her my name again.
I told her, and we two vacated the tee, leaning back against my car together while Bus and Fred teed off—Freddy for once avoiding one of his monster mishits, which had been known to bonk off a farmhouse roof adjacent to our right—and headed down the innocuous par-four first. Glancing sidewise, I noted her stylishly flapped old golf spikes and heavy leather bag, with its three woods and matching irons. The scored, expensive-looking clubfaces were flecked with blackened grass. I was way over my head.
She'd been pulling on a white golf glove, then stopped. "Oh, no," she said. "I keep forgetting." She held up her left hand, which displayed a striking ring on the third finger: a thick little blue-green chunk gleaming within a gold setting. She was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and a short skirt, with a couple of tees stuck into loops in the top, which she patted momentarily now, looking for a pocket.
"Roger, do you have a handkerchief, maybe?" she said, tugging off the ring. I reached into the hip pocket of my khaki pants and took out a faded, almost decent blue bandanna.
She took it from me, folded it into a long triangle, folded it again, and ran it through the ring. She brought the ends back over each other, making a snug packet, and handed it back. "I'm trusting you—O.K.?" she said. She retrieved the glove she'd tucked under her arm and put it on again, pulling it tight.
I was startled at the assurance and intimacy of the gesture. I took a match folder or whatever it was from inside my left-hand side pocket and stuffed the bandanna in its place, thrilling at the little lump at its center as I tucked it away next to my thigh.
When our turn came, she plucked up an iron and teed off swiftly, finishing her swing with an eloquent slide of the hips at the last moment, so that her lean body seemed to watch the safe flight of the ball. There'd been a click at contact: barely a sound at all. My own three-iron—I'd passed up my driver, which was prone to a low, diving slice—was banged off to the right, as usual, but this time missed the granite shelf out there, which could produce spectacular ricochets. "Shot," she said, picking up her bag. We diverged, and I could hear the rich, clockety sound her clubs made as she walked briskly away, her left hand swinging free.
I sank a lucky putt on the first—eight or ten feet, with the ball bumping and wobbling as it rolled, which happened on these greens—for a five on the hole: five to her four. Possibly we each managed fives on the comeback second, which brought us to the road again, next to where we'd started. Maybe I'd be O.K. We lit cigarettes while we waited for Fred to find his ball, up ahead of us in the marshy right rough of the dogleg third, and I filled her in a little, in response to questions. We were more tennis players, really. We'd grown up here in the summers and had taken up golf early in our teens, because of this handy little course. The proprietor, a shy man named Donald Parson—Freddy's uncle—had leased these acres and converted them to his own use. He allowed his friends and his friends' kids to play here without charge, while he himself turned up only now and then, mostly alone. Sometimes the course stood empty for days on end. None of us had had lessons. We were terrible golfers but not as bad as Fred's older brother Kornie. Kornie was a sketch out here, but a demon sailor who won most of our races. Suddenly sensing the need to account for my pathetic array, I explained that two of my clubs had belonged to my grandfather and the rest—well, I couldn't remember where I'd picked them up. Weirdly, I had only odd-numbered irons—a three, a five, and a seven—along with a thick, garden-tool sort of sand club, plus my putter and stiffish driver. "I should really get organized someday," I said lamely.
She was too good for me, of course, much as she tried to hide it. I lost a ball in the same boggy stretch where Freddy had gone on that third, and took a seven. I half-shanked my drive on the downhill fourth, and when I'd at last rejoined her on the green it seemed to me that she intentionally misdirected her putt, sliding it well clear of the hole. When I wrote down our scores, I trailed her by four or five strokes. "Let's just play, shall we?" I said, stalking ahead.
She didn't apologize, but went on with her effortless round, gazing with evident pleasure as we topped the hill again, and the green with its circling birches and low bay-berry thickets came into view. I stopped sulking. Never mind the painful difference in our scores, I'd take on a different role here: I'd be her host. A couple of holes later, emerging onto the shelf of a west-facing tee, I named three or four of the cruising sloops and yawls at anchor amid the more numerous lobster boats before us in Center Harbor, and pointed out our modest yacht-club fleet, off beyond the spindle. A handful of broad catboats were beginning to stir at their moorings, to the first breaths of the afternoon's reliable southerly. "Ours is the blue one with the tan deck," I said, pointing. "See?" I sounded like a six-year-old.
Something encouraged me to go on. I was an O.K. sailor, I said, better than my sister. These Brutal Beasts ould capsize in races sometimes, but mostly you could sail them home again after a squall, with the main reefed way down, even if they were half swamped. One time, I'd rigged a beer jacket between a stay and the mast and run home under that. I couldn't shut up.
She gestured apologetically at the boats and the long sweep of Eggemoggin Reach and the dark line of Deer Isle at its farther rim. "I don't know the first thing about sailing," she said.
Our game finished too quickly—I loved it by now. I can't remember our scores, but she was better by eight or nine strokes. After our last putts had rattled home, I asked if we couldn't play on for another few holes. No—too bad, but she couldn't, she said, making it sound friendly. Something was on with the family that afternoon. She had become a woman again, a stranger.
She pulled off her golf glove, and when I reached in my pocket for the bandanna the lightness of it gave me a shock. When I took it out—my mouth was open—it was partly unfolded, with no weight to it: nothing at its center. "Jesus," I said. I scrabbled in the empty pocket, then pulled it inside out. Nothing.
Her hand was up to her face. "Roger—you'd never?" she said. She'd gone pale.
"It's just got to be—" I cried, pulling out my other pockets, madly frisking myself. "I never touched it—not once."
She seized the pocket where the handkerchief had been, shaking it now and rubbing it frantically through her fingers, and in the same instant we saw that there was a fraying along the seam—a place where you could push the tip of a little finger through. She'd folded the ring away but hadn't tied it, and the repeated motion of the packet against my leg while I walked and swung and walked again had worked the weighted thing free and allowed it to drop. It was gone.
She'd begun to make quick little circles around this last green, staring about intently, as if the ring had only now slipped out of my pocket. She made an anguished sound and stared back down the narrow meadowy stretch toward its tee—the way we'd just come—and then off to the left, her gaze sweeping over the rising grassy spaces and the brushy and sloping wood edges we'd walked, now whiter in the midday sun.
"I'm so sorry," I said over and over as we walked back slowly toward our cars. Fred and Bus had finished and gone home. "How could I have—" She held up her hand and I stopped.
"I can't begin to tell you how bad this is," she said. "This is very, very serious. You have no idea. I can't believe I was so stupid."
She shook away the cigarette I was offering. She couldn't do anything about this now, not today, she went on. But we had to meet again, she said—come back here and walk over the course again, foot by foot, where we'd gone just now, and find the ring. Every shot, every place we were. Agreed?
I nodded—yes, agreed. For a moment, I thought I might be the one to cry.
She kept shaking her head. "Can't God-damned believe it," she whispered. "Jesus H. Christ!" She looked at me miserably, staring at my face. "It's all my fault, not yours," she said. "Don't even think such a thing—O.K.? And one more thing: don't tell anybody. Don't tell a single soul. Not your family or your friends. Nobody."
I promised, nodding my head again. She could count on me. We'd meet here at the first tee again, first thing in the morning. Eight-fifteen—no, eight. No one would notice—they'd think we were out there for a fast early round. I'd see her again.
Nobody asked. I'd said "Golf" at lunch with my mother and stepfather and kid brother, but they rarely pressed me for details about my days. Before evening, I went back and walked the first couple of holes again on my own, swinging an iron through the tufts and furrows and sedges where I thought I'd been. If anyone stopped to ask I'd say I'd lost a couple of balls. It came to me that a ring was going to be hundreds of times harder to spot than a golf ball; only a gleam, a moment's flicker from the sun, might give it away. I swivelled my gaze to and fro as I tramped, peering intently at grass roots and pebbly shadows and bits of twig. What a triumph if I could produce the ring for her tomorrow morning, holding it up between my fingers like a jeweller: "Voilà!"
It rained in the night, and there was a thick, wet fog everywhere the next morning. I was there first and watched the soft globes of her headlights grow more distinct as she wheeled up quietly, the tires whispering on the wet road. She was wearing red duck pants and an oilskin top, its hood back behind her neck, and when she got out we looked at each other like conspirators. She needs a name here, though I've searched my memory in vain for it. "You sleep?" she said.
We left our clubs locked in the trunk of my car and set off, each swinging an iron back and forth through the sopping grass in front of us as we walked. Within ten strides the road had vanished. "Over here, I think," I said, angling off toward the right. I led the way to the flat ledge and the junipered rough beyond, where we could look in wider circles. Nothing. By the time we'd jumped the trickly stream below the first hole and walked up the patch of rough, our pants were soaked to the knees, and our hair and shoes speckled with weeds and grassheads. She peered down into the first hole, actually lifting the flagstick—you never know—and we turned away and went on, leaving our trails across the whiter sheen of the wet green.
At the third, we had to visit the bog where I'd lost a ball, then cross the fairway to the edge of the opposite woods, where my next shot had landed. Each bush and branch we touched showered us icily, and when we got back to the edge of the fairway my shoes were making squashy noises. She stopped to pull up one sock, then shook her head like a dog and pulled her hair free of her neck. We scarcely spoke, muted by the hopelessness of our work. Every twenty or thirty strides we had to stop to straighten our backs and waggle our wrists, aching from our ceaseless swashings. Anger thickened inside me—this was insane—but I said nothing. Neither of us could be the first to stop. She'd moved out ahead now; perhaps she didn't want me to see her face. I didn't say it, but the fog made it hard to be sure where I was, once I'd stepped off the fairway in search of a reconstructed slice or clunker. The course had gone two-dimensional, a gray page with only the odd birch limb or moldering stump to let me venture a guess.
On the short seventh, we had to climb the steep side of the granite cliff just to the right of the green, where another errant shot of mine had landed amid thick trees. I gave her my hand at the top, pulling her up behind me. There was a touch of breeze off the cove, closer to us now but still invisible in the all-surrounding fog, and you could hear the balsams and the smaller spruce branches beginning to stir overhead. The fog would lift soon. Then we heard another sound, steps and rustlings behind us, and with one instinct dropped to our hands and knees on the crumbly granite together, out of sight. There was the startling plock! of a golf shot, back on the tee, then a pause and the softer sound of a ball invisibly striking the green to our right. A man appeared below us, foreshortened, striding out of the mists with a putter and a single midiron in his hand. For a crazy moment, I thought it was her fiancé, what's-his-name, come to find us, but this was a tanned white-haired man, perhaps in his sixties. He had a canvas sailing hat pulled down almost to his ears and wore waterproof golfer's pants. I'd never seen him before: some demented rich friend of Don Parson's who thought he knew this course well enough to play it blind. Perhaps he'd even rowed across the cove from the stone Parson house on the point, and clambered up to the holes here at the back of the shore.
His ball must have rolled off the green after it hit. We could hear him sighing and muttering under his breath as he cast about beyond the green, looking for it, and then a private expletive—grasht! or brasht! it sounded like—when he gave up and walked away, not bothering to drop a fresh ball for his putt. Perhaps he'd been too intent on his game to mark our path before him through the wet or to wonder why it had stopped.
I was laughing, my hand over my mouth. "God, wasn't that something?" I whispered. "He never knew. Did you hear him!"
She turned toward me, rising from her knees. "It's no use!" she said fiercely. "It's gone forever. This is crazy—we'll never find it. I'm leaving tomorrow and it will never turn up. Now I've got to think of something to tell them. This is all so like me—you have no idea."
I couldn't go on watching her, up so close. I dropped my gaze and saw the minute reddish-blond hairs on her wrist and the backs of her hands. Perhaps the wet on her cheeks was from her dank and darkened hair or from the fog. I must have looked as strange and small to her as she did to me. We were helpless, children on a bad outing. She bent to pick up her iron, and, my heart thumping, I walked away.
We didn't leave the fairway for the rest of our round, but when we came downhill on the eighth I took out a ball I'd been carrying, dropped it on the green, and putted it, with my iron turned upside down to make a blade. The ball threw up a little wheel of water as it rolled across the green and past the cup. I held out my club, inviting her to play, but she shook her head.
Back at her car, I told her I'd call her fiancé's family if the ring ever turned up: Bus Willis would know how to reach them. She may have given me a slip of paper with her name and address on it. We shook hands once again, then she took hold of my arm, next to my chest, with one hand. "You've been—" she began but stopped. "Everything's going to be fine, Roger," she said. "You know what I mean."
We raced the next day and I did well. Not a win but maybe another one of the little red cotton burgees they handed out in those days—red for second—or a third-place yellow. I used to smoke fifteen-cent cigars during the races then: Blackstones. When my regular girlfriend, Evelyn, came back—she'd been in New Hampshire, visiting her grandmother—I told her that I'd played golf with this woman who'd showed up and asked in, and next day went back with her to look for some lost keys. Fred and Bus asked me how we'd come out that weird day and I said she'd been too tough for me. I didn't tell anyone that I'd driven out to Naskeag the last morning and parked my car near where I thought her new family's driveway might be. She didn't come by. The next year, I had a full-summer job in New York and only got to Maine for a few days, and the year after that the war came and everything was changed. At some point after Evelyn and I were married, I told her about the ring. After the war, the Donald Parson course was abandoned—now there's a patch of alders down where the first hole was, a driveway in place of the third fairway, and a cottage on the granite ledge above the shore. Nobody remembers a visiting young woman who might have lost something valuable on the forgotten old golf course once.
For a time, I wished I'd paid more attention to things she had told me the first day we played golf. She lived in New Jersey, I think, and she'd met her fiancé ... well, perhaps on Cape Cod. She'd gone to some college in Ohio. But none of that mattered. Our two walks together stayed with me, and felt stranger and more intimate as time went by. I kept losing the image of her, but when I thought of her golf swing she'd reappear. I've grown suspicious of some of the colors and details that have worked their way into this account, which may be overpaintings intended to hold a fading work. I was about to start my junior year at Harvard that fall, but in my version of the story I am younger than that, more boyish; she is the expert and I the apprentice. In time, our morning in the fog became more abstract and significant, almost leaving memory for some other place in my mind. She and I, a strange couple, had had a few hours in common and a secret—something no one else could guess. A woman and a younger man, myself at nineteen, had become intimate by association. I'd done my part, held up. Was this what she'd meant with those strange parting words—that I would grow up and be trusted?
Like everyone else, I traveled a lot during the war, and sometimes I caught myself looking for her in a crowded San Francisco restaurant or among the people pushing onto a downtown Denver streetcar. I was a soldier now, no longer a boy, and if our paths should cross we would meet as equals. In wartime, surprise encounters happened all the time. Early one morning when I was heading home on furlough before going off to the Pacific, my train stopped in a place called Ottumwa, Iowa. I lifted the window shade next to the seat where I'd slept all night, and there was Kornie Parson, in uniform, standing on the platform, six inches away outside the glass. He was a flight instructor at a naval air station there, heading to Chicago for a day at the track.