CONTACT
FILM
Prologue
The summer I turned twelve years old the Wilcox Tannery went out of business, putting fifty families in Westport, Illinois out of work and laying abandoned the long brick out-buildings that stood beyond the east border of St. Luke’s Orphanage. Brother Martin, a young Benedictine priest from a small town somewhere in Florida, who taught us literature and composition, ran the kitchen and always had five or six of us working with him to prepare meals and wash pots. He had given up golf when he took his vows, but in his tiny office across from the ovens, an office with wire mesh walls like a cage and shelves of canned food, he kept the trophies he’d won in amateur competition, along with two dozen golf balls in a Wheeling’s Mill flour sack, and a three-wood whose head was made of polished hickory and inlaid strips of oak. Nothing in an orphanage is as inestimable as history. Because it was the one thing each of us lacked and desperately longed to know, there were no limits to the personal histories we invented. One boy claimed to have been abandoned by a mother who drowned herself after finishing sixth runner up in a Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Another swore his mother had been decapitated while on safari in the Congo. Our fathers, we insisted, were still alive; they were bankers and engineers, railroad tycoons and ventriloquists, men who, by implication, were too busy to raise us themselves but once they met new wives whose beauty and resourcefulness matched that of our lost mothers, they would come for us at Saint Luke’s some fine Sunday afternoon in our imaginations.
All these lies about love took their toll, and by the time we were teenagers we didn’t believe anything. Especially stories that assigned manly, real world qualities and experiences to the Brothers who cared for us and who we, as we grew older, showered with ingratitude. But that summer the tannery was abandoned I was young enough to believe urgently that the trophies in Brother Martin’s office had been presented to him for astonishing enterprises at a time in his life before he ever dressed in the shapeless black robe of the Benedictine Brothers, when his future was a brilliant shining promise and he still wore pants. I defended him to the unbelievers and suffered my first bloody nose from an older boy named Kravitz when I refused to repeat after him that Brother Martin was a queer.
At night, often under moon light, Brother Martin stood outside by the picnic table behind the kitchen and hit golf balls over the grassy meadow that divided the orphanage from the tannery, launching each ball into a glorious flight across the starlit sky. Before each shot he would play the part of a radio announcer, narrating a golf match. “ Ladies and gentlemen, a very difficult shot here facing Gene Sarazen. His ball is nearly buried in the second cut of rough on a downhill lie. He’s likely to hit a flier from here. It’s a shot that appears certain to jeopardize his slim, two stroke lead.” Brother Martin could narrate these stories with various accents; slow, deep Southern, and British snob were my favorites. And though we didn’t know it at the time, these moments he recounted before each shot were taken from championships of the past, moments that introduced us to the great golfers of the ages. Sarazen. Hogan. Varden. And the matchless Bobby Jones. We loved these performances and we waited with delight for that moment after every swing when Brother Martin would raise his hand in the air for silence just before the ball made a marvelous whacking sound as it ricocheted off the brick flank of the dark tannery building and disappeared into the night.
That began a long stretch of time in my life when I looked forward to nothing but the chance to spend time behind the kitchen with Brother Martin. He devised a game where he would hit all twenty four balls and then send us out into the meadow like Labrador retrievers to find them. Whichever boy found the most would have the chance to hit next while Brother Martin made suggestions about the grip, the stance, the position of the hands at take back, and the tempo of the swing. He, himself, possessed a beautiful flowing swing that gathered ferocious power from a synchronized, effortless, and perfectly timed unwinding of his hips and shoulders, and a snapping of his wrists, and we all worked hard to catch its rhythm and to imitate it. In the years he shared with us before he was transferred to a prison somewhere in Texas, Brother Martin became our hero and pressed upon each of us the idea that the majesty of God was revealed in the rhythms of the world, from the way a baby learns to crawl and then stand, to the changing seasons. He reached even the teenaged hoods who smoked cigarettes on the back steps of the metal shop and glared at the world with bored, superior expressions; in time they too took part in hitting and chasing after golf balls and could be heard arguing over who the great Scottish golfer Sandy Herd had beaten for the British Open title at Hoylake in 1902.
I was one of the boys who never learned the proper swing. Plagued with a terrible flaw that sent all my balls flying off miserably to the right, for all the times I tried, I never struck a single ball well enough to carry it on a straight line across the distance to the tannery wall. I hung my head after each swing, and then tried again with Brother Martin’s encouragement. He never gave up on me, and though I never benefited from his golf lessons, I think I became a teacher because of him. Looking back, I see that his gift to us was the way he took us seriously, always encouraging us to dream about what we might become in the world and using the time we shared with him to tell us things about life that I’ve never forgotten and that still retain a certain resonance and fitness in my memory. I am fifty years old now as I write this, but I remember as if it were last night an evening under moonlight when he paused before a shot to tell us that we would all fall in love someday. “And then you will understand, boys,” he said, as he cocked his thin wrists, “that every love story is a small boat set upon an open sea. And those things that imperil it, the winds of betrayal, the waves of fear and doubt, are also what earn its dignity in our memory.”
A dented green sedan took Brother Martin away from us, off to his next assignment and the rest of his life. It was a late autumn morning. Leaves blew around the orphanage courtyard and when he was gone I felt trapped inside a hollow space. This would have been just before I turned thirteen and joined the hoods on the steps of the metal shop where we pretended nothing mattered to us as we steeled ourselves against the next person who would vanish from our lives.
The night before, long after dinner was finished, after the last of the pots had been washed and we were supposed to be asleep on our cots, I found Brother Martin out beyond the kitchen swinging his golf club. He looked different in some way and it wasn’t until I was a man myself that I realized he had been crying. Before we went inside he told me that I was going to want to play golf someday. “At times when you’re confused or lost, you’ll want to play the game,” he said. “Trust me, you will.”
He stood behind me and ran his hand the length of my left arm. “For a righty, he said, the most important thing is to keep the left arm completely straight on the take back. If you forget everything else anyone teaches you about the swing, and just keep your left arm straight, you’ll have a decent chance. Here, pretend you can’t bend your arm at all. Pretend your elbow doesn’t work. I tried a few swings which failed to win his praise.
“Well,” he said apologetically, “you’ll catch on in time.”
“I’ll keep practicing,” I promised.
He nodded, then paused and looked up at the sky. “Some scientists say we’re made out of stardust. Did you know that?”
“No sir,” I said. I stared at the stars while he went on.
“You need to become a reader,” he said thoughtfully. “Books will help you navigate your way through the world. All the great authors have wrestled with the questions about life that will confront you. Who are you reading now?”
“Just my school books,” I admitted.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Perfect for Jack London,” he concluded. “Eight more years and you’ll be ready for Thomas Wolfe.” He smiled at this thought. “Coming from this place,” he said, “being on your own in the world, you’re different from most people. What you accomplish will belong to you and to no one else. And you’ll make mistakes. That’s alright, mistakes are good. You’ll fall in love easily. You’ll depend upon friendship more than most people do. And you’ll be disappointed. That’s all part of life. Learn to rely on books to carry you through the lonely times. Books and golf. Both will bring you comfort.”
When we were back inside the kitchen he sat at his desk and wrote names on a piece of paper for me, not the titles of the books he loved best, but the names of their authors. “Read everything they’ve written,” he said, as he handed me the list, shook my hand, and wished me well. I had already turned to leave when he called to me. “One more thing”, he said. “I want to give you something else.” It was a handsome bronze cup mounted onto a piece of mahogany. One of his golf trophies. I was embarrassed of course, awkward as I held the trophy in my hands; but an orphan, like survivors of the Great Depression and other catastrophes finds it impossible to turn down charity and to walk away from anything he might find a use for after the next disaster struck. “Take these too,” he said to me, reaching for his golf club and the balls in the flour sack. I started to thank him, but he raised a hand to stop me. “No, no, I’m thanking you for taking them from me. I’ve had a life long battle against my addiction to golf. I’m going to make a clean start in Texas. No golf to get between me and the Lord’s work.” He handed the club and balls to me, telling me to keep them for good luck, as if he knew that I would need good luck. As if he knew that I would be lost for much of my life, led by the reckless longing of my heart down a narrow path of sorrow and despair. Cursed and blessed and haunted by the story I am telling you now. It is one of those love stories that Brother Martin spoke about. And the sea I set it upon with these words lies far beyond our diminished hopes,in the vast open silence that holds everything we have not yet learned.
Doubleday | 268 pages | ISBN 0385508506 | November 20, 2010
WINTER DREAMS
A Novel
REVIEWS
FROM BOOKLIST
In his latest novel, Snyder (Fallen Angel, 2001) constructs a golf-is-life rubric and, in the process, creates a memorably, dismally lonely protagonist. Ross Lansdale, raised in an orphanage, now finds himself teaching literature at a Massachusetts university, circa 1969. One day at golf practice, he hits the ball and causes a train wreck, but the accident brings photographer Julia into his life. And a train wreck is what their romance becomes, with a pregnant Julia fleeing in midnovel, returning a dozen years later at story's end to explain things to Ross. Meanwhile, befriending new faculty colleague Johnny Durocher, married with raucous children, just deepens Ross' moroseness. Prior to his death in an automobile accident, Durocher confided that his name was on a lottery list for golfing at the sport's sacred shrine, the Old Course of the Royal and Ancient Club in Scotland. Ross inherits Durocher's slot and there tinkers with his swing and his sadness. Readers with a taste for the golfing motif will best like Snyder's quiet, introspective hero.
THE WASHINGTON POST
If there are any hopeless golf-loving romantics out there, they will snatch this book off the shelves.
DISCUSSIONS
