The Ski Jumpers, page 12
For weeks they bantered about it, and for weeks Anton went to bed without the satisfaction of Pops’s word. But that changed on the first Tuesday night in February. Every other week, Selmer arranged a club competition on both hills. In those days, thirty jumpers would have showed up for each hill—kids as young as Anton, men older even than Pops—and challenged each other for club rankings. Selmer would set up a registration table in the great room on the second floor of the clubhouse. At six o’clock, we’d show up at Wirth and head for the jumps while Pops went in to sign us up for the competition. That night, when he came back out to the jumps, he handed us our bibs.
Anton took his and slid it over his sweater.
“Uh, oh, doofus,” I said. It was snowing—it was always snowing—and the jumps were haloed in the falling snow glittering in the tower lights.
“What?” he said.
“You’re number fifty-one.”
“So?”
I checked that Pops’s attention had turned to one of the other dads. “That’s the first jumper on the big hill, shit for brains,” I whispered.
The realization came down on him like snow on the treetops. His face twisted into a wicked smile that wavered between braggadocious and beknighted. “That means—”
“It means it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Come on.”
It had been my intention to usher him to the top. To be his wingman. But before he could follow me, Pops asked for a word with him, waving me on ahead.
So I trudged up the jump, nervous for my brother and, if I’m being honest, certain a new dawn was upon our family. By the time I reached the top of the jump, Anton had reached the bottom, and rather than stepping into my bindings I decided to wait for him.
From the top, one could see the downtown Minneapolis skyline lit up. Even on that snowy night, it presided over the horizon, a strobing and distant shine filtered by the snow. I loved that view of the city, felt more akin with where I lived because I got to see it so often. Off the back of the scaffold, the oak and elm trees rose to the height of the jump, cocooning it in the clack of bare branches and stubborn, papery leaves still clinging to the boughs. And us jumpers, we were a bunch of birds up there.
Three, four, five jumpers went as I waited, the snow shooting up behind them like the wake of a speedboat. When I looked down the stairs, I saw Dave Dove, one of the other dads who had been shoveling the steps clear of snow, carrying Anton’s skis. When they reached the top, Dave set Anton’s skis down and said, “You owe me a six-pack, Anton,” to which Anton guffawed and said, “Okay, Mr. Dove!”
Dave pulled a smoke out of his shirt pocket and lit it up and leaned against the railing at the top of the stairs. “I’m going to stay up here and watch,” he said. “Get your little ass in line.”
“You want to go before me, or after?” I asked.
“Before,” he said, setting his skis down as the answer escaped his mouth.
“You want any advice?” I offered.
He only shook his head.
The few jumpers ahead of us took their turns and finally Anton stood ready. By then, Pops and Selmer had both made it to the knoll, peering up through the night and the snow. It would become—that collection and placement of us all—the very definition of my childhood, but on that night it seemed as much a coronation as a Tuesday night at the jumps. Like now, finally, what had begun in Chicago some sixteen years earlier and been continued that day I was too afraid to jump off the locker room bench without Selmer’s encouragement, like all of that had finally found its purpose.
Anton raised his hand and shouted, “Clear?”
Pops looked down the landing hill, then back up at the top of the jump, and dropped his hand.
Go, I thought, but before the thought was finished Anton kicked into the tracks. Surely what followed him down the inrun was the snow blown up out of the tracks and not some celestial contrail of stardust and heavenly spirit. What attended his leap was not the ringing of bells but only my own lips pierced in a whistle. Dave Dove flicked his cigarette over the railing and winked at me as he slung the shovel over his shoulder. “Hot damn,” he said. “Maybe I should buy him a six-pack.”
If I close my eyes tight enough, I can still see that little boy piercing the air off the takeoff, can still see his hands clutching his sides, not flailing around like most kids on their first rides, can still see the snow kicking up off the top of the landing hill as he stuck his telemark. And I can still see Pops and Selmer, nodding their heads—in what? Admiration? Astonishment? Of course, both of those. But also something more, something special. They believed it then, and they weren’t wrong. Anton would become, ten years later, fifteen years later, the very best jumper ever to come out of that program, never mind the Olympians and national champions on the same shortlist of contenders for that honor.
But on that first night, Anton’s leap was merely the beginning of five perfect years. Hundreds of days and nights. Thousands of jumps, almost all of them in each other’s company, with Pops standing on the knoll, a witness to it all. At the end of each season, in some American Legion or another, the trophies lined a table under the dais, like the heads of so many ski jumpers atop the jump at Wirth. They were our awards for the season past—for the Saturdays and Tuesday night competitions, the Golden Skis and Silver Skis and Evergreen, and the memorial tournaments for the previous club greats—and Anton won more of them than anyone. Pops built shelves in his bedroom, but by the time Anton turned ten, those shelves nearly rent from the wall, so full were they.
We were on our way, Pops always said. And he wasn’t wrong. But more than that, the three of us were as happy as we’d ever be together.
* * *
*
We were less happy in the few years before Anton began his reign. On the Saturday I began my career at Wirth, a seven-year-old afraid of his own shadow, after we said grace at dinner, Pops replayed for all of us what had transpired that day. He recounted the entire morning and reserved special attention to my crying and insisting I couldn’t jump from the bench. But he was teasing and sweet and delighted in a way I’d not seen him before. He’d often tell me, later in life during those nighttime phone calls, that for all he had accomplished in the sport himself, it was the joy and success of his sons that delivered his greatest prize. I still believe him.
If he viewed that night as though I were a prince ascending my throne, as I did myself, Bett must have seen it as a kind of palace coup. Probably I’ve conflated what happened that season into a single evening, but as sure as I began the day at Selmer’s program, she began, that night, what would be a lifelong withdrawal. And as sure as I cried that I couldn’t fall off the locker room bench into a telemark landing earlier that morning, she spent that evening around the kitchen table in stoic, befuddling silence, eventually making her way into the darkness of her bedroom with only the quiet and door between us, weeping herself to sleep.
There were plenty of nights like that that season, and to this day I don’t understand what happened. Though it’s true she’d never been especially kindly or affectionate, we’d always depended on her the way children should. She got us ready for church on Sundays, she made sure I got home from school each afternoon and to bed each night before she left for her shift at North Memorial hospital, where she was an admissions clerk. She’d take me to Glenwood Lake to swim on hot summer days and to see the Christmas show at Dayton’s each December. But aside from the kiss she gave my forehead each night as she tucked me into bed, I don’t recall a single instance of affection from her, and never once in my childhood did she tell me she loved me. In fact, she never said it at all. If, as Pops always insisted, that love was implied in her devotion, then that season she abandoned even the pretense, at least with me.
How does a child know they’re unloved? How might I describe my mother’s evanescence? Those tearful nights behind her bedroom door accumulated with shocking speed. By the time ABC started broadcasting the Olympics that February, we hardly ever saw her except when she came out to refill her coffee cup or from our bedroom window as she backed the car out of the driveway, on her way to the hospital. Anton, only two years old that winter, was already asking Pops questions. But with Bett he seemed able to recognize, or could at least intuit, that she needed his silence to survive the worst of her spells. While Pops and I watched Peggy Fleming or Jean-Claude Killy or, on the best night, the local ski jumpers John Balfanz and Jay Martin in Grenoble, France, on the TV, Anton went into the maw of our parents’ bedroom and somehow consoled Bett enough, until he fell asleep, that she was able to limp off to work each night.
And each night, before Pops put me to bed, he’d go in and fetch my sleeping brother. He’d carry Anton down the hallway and lay him in the bed next to mine and make sure he was tucked in and still sleeping before coming back to the living room, where we’d watch the ten o’clock news, just the two of us, me under his arm like I’d freeze to death without him. He wouldn’t talk about Bett, but I knew his affection was as much an acknowledgment of her lack as it was his own tenderness. As often as not, he’d carry me to bed next, and in the morning wake me and feed me oatmeal and orange juice and, when Bett got home from her shift, her eyes sunken and blank, her touch the cold my father’s embrace protected me from the night before, he’d bundle me up and set me in the Radio Flyer sleigh and pull me to John Hay Elementary School, where he was a custodian. When we got there, he’d crank up the furnaces and set me to sleep on a cot he’d arranged between two asbestos-covered boilers, and I’d doze for an hour while he made his rounds before the students arrived.
Those hours were then, as they remain now, dreamlike. The snow on the walk, the vapors in the boiler room, Bett’s lingering rejection, my own exhaustion—all of it compelled in me a wistfulness that to this day I can’t quite shake.
* * *
*
Ingrid would say it’s this very quality of heart that has pulled me from the bed early each morning for the past twenty years to write my books. She would say it’s the same quality that has made me a fine father. She’s no doubt at least partly right. Back in the winter of 1968, I learned not only to ski jump but to care for and worry about my brother, to revere my father and his tenderness, to dread Bett and her dark moods. These lessons were hard won and have reverberated in my life in every way, not least artistically. But more than any of these, the most enduring fact of that year is that I learned to long for something better, something happier.
“It’s a far view across the lake. But is it that long?”
I look at Ingrid, blink away the cobwebs in my eyes.
“I haven’t seen that gaze in a long time. Are you all right?” she asks.
She’s taken the scenic route to Two Harbors and we’re almost there, tunneling through the dense evergreens on either side of the road.
I blink again. “Was I sleeping?”
“Dreaming, maybe. Working, maybe. But not sleeping.”
How is it possible she knows me this well? I smile.
“Well, which was it?”
“What’s the difference?” I smile again, and she reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze.
“Do you think you’ll try again, Jon? With The Ski Jumpers?”
“Funny you mention it. I was just thinking about it.”
“Thinking about the book or about some old trouble you and Noah got into?”
“I must have told you about the day I started? At Wirth Park?”
“How you wouldn’t jump off the chair? Only fifty times.”
We pass the car dealership and merge with the expressway that also connects Duluth and Two Harbors. There’s more snow up here than in the city, and all the gas stations and fast food places have piles of it plowed into mounds surrounding the parking lots. Everything is sharp and dazzling, even under the dull sky. Ingrid pulls up to the stoplight on the west end of town.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.
Now I reach over and take her hand, and as soon as the warmth of her skin courses through my fingers and into my blood I remember something long forgotten. I may even be thinking about it for the first time in my life.
“Do you know that that same year, when I was seven, Bett returned to Chicago for a few days?”
“I thought she hardly left the house, much less the neighborhood, never mind the city.”
“All of that’s true. But I’m certain of it. We took her to the Greyhound station. I can see her waving goodbye from the bus window. I can see the hat she wore.” I take my hand from Ingrid’s and press my thumbs to my eyes. “In fact, I can see the Christmas wreaths hanging from lampposts on the street. It must have been sometime around the holidays.”
“Do you remember why she went?”
I sigh.
“Did it have something to do with her sister?”
“It must have. That was the winter everything changed. I mean really changed.”
She glances at me and then grips the steering wheel more firmly as she passes through town. “Is this all part of what you wanted to talk to me about?” If she had been teasing about it before we left, I now sense apprehension in her voice.
“No,” I say, but then close my eyes and look back again. “Well, not exactly.”
“Have you been thinking of Bett?”
“Only sort of. I was thinking about when I started ski jumping. That whole winter. And how she changed. Pops, too. I only just now remembered her going to Chicago.” Again I press my thumbs against my eyes. “Do you think I could be mistaken? Is it already happening?”
“No, Jon. Doctor Zheng said it would come on gradually.”
“What if she’s mistaken?”
“I don’t think she is.”
“Or maybe I’ve been wired all wrong my whole goddamned life. Maybe that’s the problem.”
Ingrid pulls onto the shoulder of the highway just after the last stoplight in town. She puts the car into park and takes her sunglasses off and sets them on the dash. She swivels to face me and takes my hand. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We all forget things. Or misremember them. You know that. It’s no sign at all. It’s just regular life.”
It sounds like pleading. Not to me or even for me, but for a sense of normalcy that we won’t have much longer.
“You’re right,” I say, then clear my throat and say it again, my gaze fixed on the lake.
Now she cups my chin and turns my head to face her, demanding my attention. “I’m right here, Jon. And I will be. No matter what.”
“I know that.”
“I’ll help you remember. I’ll help you keep track.”
I lift my chin from her soft hand and turn back to the lake. “This is why I want to tell you things. In case I forget them. For when I do.”
“I’m listening.”
“I can’t even imagine where to begin. There’s so much to say.”
“What about Bett? What about that year she went back to Chicago?”
“Bett. Yes. I can start with her.” I wipe a tear from my eye. “In order to understand Bett, you need to understand about Lena. And me and Anton the night of Pops’s funeral.”
She nods. “It’s about an hour to Misquah.”
“Okay,” I say.
She puts her sunglasses back on, shifts the car in gear, looks over her shoulder, and pulls back onto the highway. She drives for another five minutes before she says, “I understand your stories rarely go in a straight line. And I think I understand how whatever’s on your mind is gnawing at you. But we’ve never kept things from each other.”
As we speed into the tunnel at Zhooniyaa Cliff, she risks a glance in my direction.
“You’re right, love. About my stories. Both the ones I write and the ones we’ve lived together. I’m not great with chronology. But you’re wrong about keeping things from each other. We’re both guilty of that.”
I’ve kept my eyes on the road in front of us, but when we get to the end of the tunnel I risk a look at her.
“I guess this is what you meant by secrets?” she says.
Conscience Does Make Cowards of Us All
SECRETS, LIES—maybe those are the wrong words. What prevails between Ingrid and me might be better described as faithlessness. Not because we’ve withheld from or denied each other, but because we’ve believed our silence protected the other, or our children, or our ideas of ourselves.
Everything that happened with Pops and Anton and Bett and Sheb, though? That was unfaithfulness. It was disloyalty. Betrayal. And that night in Anton’s office at the bar, after I jotted those words in my notebook—after I jotted that all ski jumpers were liars, and that Pops was the best of them—I felt the shame pass over me like a stiff headwind. And what a complicated shame it was. I felt it because of who we were. And because my first impulse was to use Bett’s illness as fodder, and because my own complicity in our family mythology was so depraved, and so grave, I put the notebook back in my pocket and let myself cry. They were the first tears I’d shed for my kin since I was eighteen years old, when I walked out on them and into a city night rotten and without prospects.
What was worse is that even with the truth excoriating me (and in the shabbiness and tightness of that cinderblock room, no less) I wanted to get even with my brother. I wanted to punish him for being wiser than I was. I wanted to abandon Bett all over again, to hate her with a new and more righteous zeal. Instead of conjuring Pops’s gentle voice urging patience and forgiveness or consoling myself with the memory of my own wife and children, safe and adoring and loving at home in Duluth, as I should have, I listened instead to the kick drum and electric guitar of another song pounding through Boff’s and completed that minute’s metamorphosis from opportunist to sad sack to foe. And because I’m being honest, I felt, after Anton’s big reveal about Bett, as I stood and wiped my face with the sleeve of my shirt, that I had to hold serve against my brother. I had to match him grievance for grievance, secret for secret, wound for wound. With my bile churning, I pushed open the door into the bar, intent on vengeance. Thinking of it even now quickens my heart.
