The boy inside the older man nursed his martini and remembered the past.
“Do you tell people when they ask?” I said.
“I do.”
I took a deep breath. “All right, then. What did happen to your father?”
“He died.”
There was a long pause.
“Is that all?”
“Not quite.” The young-old man arranged his glass on the table in front of him, and placed a napkin at a precise angle to it, and fitted an olive to the very center of the napkin, reading the past there. “You remember what he was like?”
“Vividly.”
“Oh, what a world of meaning you put into that ‘vividly’!” The young-old man snorted faintly. “You re member his marches up, down, around the pool, left face, right, tenshun, don’t move, chin-stomach in, chest out, harch two, hut?”
“I remember.”
“Well, one day in nineteen fifty-three, long after the old crowd was gone from the pool, and you with them, my dad was drilling me outdoors one late afternoon. He had me standing in the hot sun for an hour or so and he yelled in my face, I can remember the saliva spray on my chin, my nose, my eyelids when he yelled: don’t move a muscle! don’t blink! don’t twitch! don’t breathe till I tell you! You hear, soldier? Hear? You hear! Hear?!”
“ ‘Sir!’ ” I gritted between my teeth.
“As my father turned, he slipped on the tiles and fell in the water.” The young-old man paused and gave a strange small bark of a laugh.
“Did you know? Of course you didn’t I didn’t either...that in all those years of working at various pools, cleaning out the showers, replacing the towels, repairing the diving boards, fixing the plumbing, he had never, my god, never learned to swim! Never! Jesus. It’s unbelievable. Never.
“He had never told me. Somehow, I had never guessed! And since he had just yelled at me, instructed me, ordered me: eyes right! don’t twitch! don’t move! I just stood there staring straight ahead at the late afternoon sun. I didn’t let my eyes drop to see, even once. Just straight ahead, by the numbers, as told.
“I heard him thrashing around in the water, yelling. But I couldn’t understand what he said. I heard him suck and gasp and gargle and suck again, going down, shrieking, but I stood straight, chin up, stomach tight, eyes level, sweat of my brow, mouth firm, buttocks clenched, ramrod spine, and him yelling, gagging, taking water. I kept waiting for him to yell, ‘At ease!’ ‘At ease!’ he should have yelled, but he never did. So what could I do? I just stood there, like a statue, until the shrieking stopped and the water lapped the poolrim and everything got quiet. I stood there for ten minutes, maybe twenty, half an hour, until someone came out and found me there, and they looked down in the pool and saw something deep under and said Jesus Christ and finally turned and came up to me, because they knew me and my father, and at last said, At Ease.
“And then I cried.”
The young-old man finished his drink.
“You see, the thing is, I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t faking. He’d done tricks like that before, to get me off guard, make me relax. He’d go around a corner, wait, duck back, to see if I was ramrod tall. Or he’d pretend to go in the men’s room, and jump back to find me wrong. Then he’d punish me. So, standing there by the pool that day, I thought, it’s a trick, to make me fall out. So I had to wait, didn’t I, to be sure?...to be sure.”
Finished, he put his empty martini glass down on the tray and sat back in his own silence, eyes gazing over my shoulder at nothing in particular. I tried to see if his eyes were wet, or if his mouth gave some special sign now that the tale was told, but I saw nothing.
“Now,” I said, “I know about your father. But...what ever happened to you?”
“As you see,” he said, “I’m here.”
He stood up and reached over and shook my hand.
“Good night,” he said.
I looked straight up in his face and saw the young boy there waiting for orders five thousand afternoons back. Then I looked at his left hand; no wedding ring there. Which meant what? No sons, no future? But I couldn’t ask.
“I’m glad we met again,” I heard myself say.
“Yes.” He nodded, and gave my hand a final shake.
“It’s good to see you made it through.”
Me, I thought. My God! Me?!