Runner in Red Page 11

  She removed the felt box from her pocketbook where she had placed the medal after Ellen had returned it to her at the news station. She opened the case, showing me the 1951 Boston Marathon gold medal. ‘If you’re not going to go outside and talk to the group for me, then you can go out and get this,’ he said, and he threw the gold medal out the dorm window. I found it in the grass in the rain as media types swarmed all around me.”

  I gave her a look like, wow, what a guy!

  “I thought I loved him, but I realized he could love only himself, and that’s the moment I saw his essence and woke up for good.”

  “Tell me about the medal.”

  “My mother, Pop’s wife, gave it to me the night before she died. It was beside her bed, in this box. She told me my real mother had left it for me. I guess I should call her Margaret now.”

  “Why the hole in the center? There’s supposed to be a diamond in the middle of the Boston Marathon gold medals, right?”

  “That’s true.”

  “But yours doesn’t have a diamond.”

  “It was missing the diamond when Pop’s wife gave it to me.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I never knew, and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t know either. It’s a mystery. One of the endless mysteries surrounding Pop and me.”

  We sped along, still the only car on the road, as we left New York and the sign in the thick trees said, “Welcome to Massachusetts.”

  “Where did the medal come from? I checked it out and that medal has never been on the open market.”

  “I don’t know. Pop had forbidden my mom, his wife, to talk to me about my past, even after I learned I was adopted, and of course she never disobeyed Pop. She was such a sweet, unassuming woman, Mrs. Gallagher.”

  “Does Pop know where the gold medal came from?”

  “Undoubtedly. He knew my mother was Margaret, right?”

  “But he never told you anything about her?”

  “Pop has never cooperated in any matter that would benefit me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I tampered with the immutable laws of nature, Colin.”

  “Just because you wanted to run?”

  “No, because I am a woman.”

  I didn’t say anything, though I sensed her trouble with Pop went deeper.

  “That’s why this search for my real mother has been so important to me. I want to know where I came from. I don’t value myself fully, yet I want to desperately. I don’t know who I am and that separates me from others. I want to connect to people on a more intimate level and end the isolation I feel that separates me from other people—I want to feel whole—but now that chance is gone. Margaret is dead.”

  I didn’t say anything, neither of us did, until the car engine made a clanking sound and Bridget said, “What’s that?”

  “Do you put oil in this thing?”

  “Not that I know of, what oil?”

  “Engine oil,” I said, as we clanked and bucked, and rolled slowly to a stop. At least I was thankful for the blink of an eye small town we were passing through as the engine seized and the car cut out. A moment later we came to a stop in front of a sign, “Weathervane Inn, South Egremont, Mass.”

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “Car died.”

  “Oh, now isn’t this shaping up to be a banner day.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Clapboard houses faced a church with tilted gravestones at one end of the town, while a country inn, the Weathervane Inn, sat along a curve at the other end of South Egremont. We went inside the inn to find a phone when the proprietor, a voluble and animated sort, approached us at the door. He introduced himself as Vinnie, a refugee from the corporate world of Manhattan.

  “Since this is the last weekend for foliage, it’ll be a two-hour wait for brunch,” he said. “But you can go to the bar to wait and get coffee.”

  Bridget made a motion like “charge,” and said, “To the bar, but not for coffee,” while I looked for a phone to call Triple A.

  “You won’t have luck with that,” Vinnie said. “Hank’s gone to the bank.”

  “Bank?”

  He made a motion like casting a pole. “A fishing bank.”

  “So our stellar luck continues,” Bridget said, as she climbed up onto a stool and ordered a double scotch.

  “Massachusetts law, I can’t serve you before noon on Sunday,” said Vinnie, and Bridget gave him a pained look.

  “She just found out she lost her mother,” I said, glancing at the clock that said 9:30 am. “Anything you can do, Vinnie, to help us.”

  Truly he was a refuge from Manhattan who understood cosmopolitan ways because he made a searching motion as if looking for cops, and said, “I don’t suppose the Mass Alcohol Bureau agents will be out at this hour hunting for offenders,” and he poured her a double.

  “Excellent, kind sir, thank you. We’ll drink, then think,” she said, as she motioned for me to take a stool beside her at the bar.

  “How bummed are you?”

  “You mean to learn that my mother who I’ve been seeking for more than twenty-five years is dead? Or that my car won’t start?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound flip.”

  “Colin, you’re a great kid. Just order a drink, OK? I can’t handle anything else at this point.”

  She tossed her drink down and ordered another, which Vinnie poured. I got the sense, car or not, we wouldn’t be heading back to Boston any time soon.

  “Ellen left,” she said, after her third drink. “She did not write or call.”

  I got the feeling that this was going to be a particularly painful day, especially with the New York City Marathon set to happen later that morning and us, being hundreds of miles away. I signaled to Vinnie for a beer while we waited for 10:40 am and the start of the race so we could watch it on TV. What the hell, if Hank was at the bank, what was I doing playing Bridget’s mother?

  “It began with my going to San Francisco. No, actually it began before that, in high school, when I had to choose between Jack and Steve. Do you want to hear about this?”

  Before I could answer a man in overalls walked in, the inn’s maintenance man, asking if we were the owners of the “broke down” car. “You want me to call Preston in Great Barrington? It’s Sunday, but Preston might be at Sunoco? He could look at it.”

  “Yes,” Bridget said, and she slipped him a twenty. “You do that and we’ll do damage equal to the car.”

  “After the incident with my father and the fall-out with Roman over the medal I was ready for a change,” she said picking up where she had left off. “So I moved to California in June 1971. I wanted to get as far away from Boston as I could. Frisco—they hate it when you call it that—was ‘happening.’ Everyone wore flowers in their hair and their libidos on their sleeves. That was my wild period.”

  Vinnie tuned in, an ear cocked, but an elderly couple walked to the bar and interrupted.

  “We’re here to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary,” said the wife, a round woman with a feathered hat and heavy eyeliner. “We’re up from Brooklyn to do the day justice,” she added, loud enough for all of Massachusetts to hear as her husband, a beanpole with a bad toupée, nodded.

  “Certainly,” Vinnie said and he left to check them in.

  “I found a job in an art gallery in the Fillmore district,” Bridget said, hitting stride again.

  “Then one night more than two years later as I sat on the couch in my tiny apartment, safe from the ‘anything goes’ action on Sacramento Street below, drinking Anchor Steam from a quart bottle, smoking a joint and watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show, a knock came on my door. ‘I got a question for ya,’ Jack said. It was Jack, all the way in from Boston, wearing cutoff jeans and a Red Sox t-shirt. He smelled from the beers he had throw
n down over the last hundred miles on I-80 before reaching the coast. Colin, you with me?”

  I nodded, while Vinnie, who had returned, listened also.

  “‘I come to getcha, Bridget,’ he said. ‘But I got one question since you never answered any of my letters. Will you marry me?’ Jack said. So I did. We left that night in his Pacer and Ellen was conceived in a sleeping bag somewhere between a Wyoming Hot Shoppe and an Ohio Turnpike plaza called the ‘Blue Heron.’ Prosaic, huh?”

  “Hardly prosaic with a name like ‘Blue Heron.’”

  “We got married in Boston, seconds before I showed. It wasn’t fireworks, but Jack’s a good guy. He’s tops in his office in Waltham. Sells insurance. You need a policy?” she said, killing her drink.

  “What about Ellen?”

  “Ellen’s birth made it all worthwhile,” she said, tapping the bar for another, and Vinnie was Johnny-on-the-spot. “Her life gave my life purpose.”

  “So you loved her?”

  “Of course I loved her. I had what every woman wants, Colin, a chance to make a perfect child.”

  I thought maybe that overstated it. “Some people have dogs and they’re happy.”

  “I never said I have perfected being a modern woman, Colin,” she said, throwing back her glass. “The thing I loved most about being a mother was the control I had over this new person. I could shape Ellen’s life and instill values I considered important. Things I had missed in my own life. I could prepare Ellen to deal with the world in a way that I was not capable. Am I making sense?”

  She didn’t wait for my answer.

  “It was similar to the control I had over my body when I had been a runner, the hard work and sacrifice, and I relished the responsibility and the challenge.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Wrong?” She looked at me crookedly. “You think anything’s gone wrong?”

  “I mean,” I said, but she laughed, that wonderful laugh.

  “You’re perceptive, Colin. That’s why we pay you your paltry salary.”

  “Why did you hire me?”

  “What?”

  “If your purpose was to have a perfect child, a job you’re fucking up royally, pardon the expression, why do you need me?”

  “You want another beer?” Vinnie said, and I accepted, as I waited for Bridget’s answer, but she ignored my question.

  “Ellen was a bright baby. And she did well. Too well. Too early in any case. It’s not that I didn’t want her to run. Jack says I never wanted her to run. But that’s wrong. I didn’t mind her eclipsing me. That’s what Jack called it, my opposition to her, he said I was afraid she’d eclipse me as a star, but that’s a hundred percent wrong. That’s just Jack being bitchy.”

  “Bitchy?”

  “Yes, bitchy. Jack agreed to let Pop train her for the Olympic Trials when she was a sophomore at BC, though I knew she was too young. ‘She can get hurt,’ I told Jack.”

  “What happened?’

  “She got hurt, of course. She loved running, from the love Jack had for the sport, and from Pop’s love also. Which is OK, that Pop took an interest. But Pop took too much interest.”

  “Now who’s bitchy?”

  “I know it sounds like sour grapes, but I disagreed with Pop training my little girl so hard when she was so young. The newspapers wouldn’t let go of it, though. They loved the connection, that Ellen was following in her mother’s footsteps. But Ellen is a pure girl, with a pure heart, and she got mixed up in a misguided sense of loyalty, as if she owes Pop, which is what he plays on.”

  “She’s smarter than that.”

  “Pop’s bad for her. He’s pushing her, for his own purposes, so he can win the Boston Marathon through her, but she’s the one who will pay the price, believe me.”

  “She can handle stardom.”

  “I’m not talking about stardom. Ellen accused me of trying to direct her life, but despite her histrionics I refused to support her. Then she got hurt, like I predicted, and she married that empty suit.”

  “Crutchfield?”

  “Yeah, let her tell you about that zero sometime. I’m not going to discuss miniature Romans. But I was devastated when she announced she was getting married, leaving school and moving away. First to Florida, with her child-husband, then after they broke up, to Oregon to try again for that track team out there. Then of course Jack had an opinion, he told me, ‘Your problem is you can’t have a daughter with spark and not think she’s not going to want to leave a mark.’”

  “A mark? Hell, it’s dangerous out there!” I shot back.

  “Then, sure enough, she got hit by a car and whatever wheels were left on the wagon with Jack and me rolled off. Where’s the ladies’ room?” she asked Vinnie, who she sensed was listening, which he was. He pointed down the corridor and she got up.

  “Whoof. She Irish by any chance?” said Vinnie, and I nodded.

  “Mind if I turn on the TV? I’ve got a nephew in the New York Marathon today, and it’s about time for the start,” he said.

  “No, do that, please. We want to watch it, too.”

  When Bridget returned, walking a little shaky, there was a commercial on and she continued with her story.

  “The next day I read a story in Runner’s World, which is how I kept in touch with Ellen’s life. Can you believe it? That’s how I kept in touch with my daughter, through a magazine. The article said Ellen had nearly been killed by a hit-and-run driver three months earlier.”

  “Three months?”

  “That’s right. I hurried to Waltham to show Jack the story, but he had a look on his face, and I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That he knew already. For God’s sakes, even Pop knew. Jack had kept it from me. Unbelievable. He would fly out there on a regular basis, supposedly for work, and he never told me.”

  “What did you do?” Vinnie said, pouring himself a scotch.

  “I got on the next plane, with Jack in tow. By then Ellen was out of the hospital and I found her lying on a couch watching Seinfeld reruns, sobbing.”

  “‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked her.’”

  ‘“I’m a failure,’ she said, sobbing.’”

  ‘“No, you’re my daughter.’”

  ‘“I never wanted you to say I told you so.’

  ‘“Oh, baby,’ I said, and I told her I would take her home. But she refused. Then Pop wrote her a note, offering to train her, and she came back to Boston, only after he wrote to her.”

  “Is that the hardest part for you?”

  “He took my life away, now he was taking my baby again.”

  “That’s why you’re so mad at Jack?”

  “I can never forgive Jack for permitting it.”

  “Another one?” Vinnie said, answering her signal as she rapped the bar with her wedding ring, hitting it hard.

  Then the commercial ended and the picture cut to an aerial view of the Verrazano Bridge in New York as ABC Sports’ coverage of the 1999 New York City Marathon began, and I watched Bridget’s face fall.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bang! went a gun—a cannon—at 10:40 am, and we watched on the screen above the bar as 26,000 runners exploded onto the bridge with the force of a dam bursting.

  A cheer rose from the runners with the cannon’s smoke and mixed with the chopping air as dozens of helicopters whirled overhead in the gray blowing sky. The runners spilled forward in a continuous stream and the flow rolled up the long slope to the bridge’s crest, then down again toward Brooklyn, and the New York City Marathon was underway in the morning light.

  I glanced at Bridget to see how she was doing, and though hardly sober, her face took on a pensive expression and she became very quiet.

  “You all right?” I said, and she nodded, engrossed in the race, yet the change in her was not unlike a
car going from 90mph to zero after hitting a wall.

  A trio of reporters in the studio bounced the commentary to Amby Burfoot, Editor of Runner’s World, who rode in a motorcycle side-car in front of the lead pack of male runners. Amby gave a report on the men’s race, then the ball was bounced to Kathrine Switzer to do the same for the female leaders from her motorcycle side-car. What fascinated me was to see Pop sitting in the side-car with Kathrine. ABC Sports knew the irony of the pairing, I’m sure, to twin Pop with Kathrine who, in the years since Jock Semple and Pop had chased her down the road in the 1967 Boston Marathon, had parlayed her fame into becoming not only an advocate for women’s running globally, but a famous sportscaster.

  As she and Pop talked back and forth about the women’s field—including Kathrine highlighting the presence of Ellen Maloney, America’s “Comeback Gal,” in the field—I was reminded of the story about John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. It had always fascinated me how the skipper of the Japanese cruiser that had rammed JFK’s PT boat in the Pacific during World War II—nearly killing the president to be—rode second in the parade behind the new President and Mrs. Kennedy that day, as if in some way he had played a role to make his enemy president. Which he had, and I suppose Pop had, too, in terms of the running game, played a hand in making Kathrine famous. He had helped (along with Jock) usher in the thing they both had fought to stymie—women’s running. Now Pop was a color commentator on the women’s race. Ah, the world!

  “I don’t see her, Pop, do you?” said Kathrine, meaning Ellen, as the lead pack comprised of a dozen runners from ten countries—none of them America—passed the four-mile mark.

  “Don’t worry,” Pop said. “She’s in there.”

  We listened as Kathrine, red hair flying in the wind, told how the women in the lead pack—including the two favorites, Rita Turganov of Russia and Sonia Nita of Kenya—had come out of the gate fast and after four miles the group was ten seconds ahead of record pace.

  “It just goes to show how far women have come in a short time,” Kathrine said. “That the leaders can buck a headwind like this and still run at this speed.”