The Nine Lessons (12 page)

He looked at his watch. “Indeed. You’re right. In fact, I’m already a tad late. I’d better be off then. So… feel free to call… you know, if you happen to get mugged again any time soon. Otherwise, I’ll see you next month, eh?”

“Next month it is.”

We went our different directions, but only long enough to give my father a sufficient head start to the clubhouse. Then I circled back and followed him, taking care to stay out of sight. He was obviously up to something that he didn’t want me to know about, and I was determined to discover what that something was. I found a thick pine tree about thirty yards from the main entrance to the pro shop where I could see everyone coming and going. It wasn’t long before I figured out what was going on. I knew I’d smelled something fishy, and sure enough, just a few minutes after going into the building, London came walking back out again—followed by a fish. “Hello, Delores,” I whispered to myself.

The pair made their way to the first tee box, where London gave her a few pointers before teeing off. I was glad to see him spending time with someone who seemed to genuinely like him. Since my mother died, he’d resisted any sort of emotional bond with anyone—even me. His heart, I knew, was still stuck somewhere back in the seventies, held firm by the woman who stole it in a shoe store and then took it with her to the grave. As I watched her merrily chatting up my father, I suddenly felt bad for Delores, for the mere fact that she was not Jessalynn. I could tell the first time I met her that she was hooked on my father—the question was whether he would be interested in reeling her in. Or, for that matter, if he was even fishing at all.

When they were beyond my view I stepped out from behind the tree and started for the parking lot. “Fishing is life!” I said, laughing. “I wonder what London would have to say about that?”

CHAPTER 12

Golf is based on honesty. Where else would you admit to a seven on a par three?

—Jimmy Demaret

E
rin’s twentieth week
of pregnancy, which fell during the early part of August, was significant for two important reasons. For starters, at the beginning of that week Erin received an unexpected package in the mail. It had no return address. She opened it up to find, of all things, the purse that had been stolen a couple of weeks earlier. As near as we could tell, there was absolutely nothing missing. “It’s all here,” Erin said, bewildered, as she pulled the contents out one by one. “The money, credit cards, my makeup and jewelry. Everything.”

There was a very short note pinned to the outside of the purse. It said simply, “I couldn’t go through with it. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” No name was given, but we knew who sent it—the Teenage Drama Queen.

The other reason that the twentieth week was important is that it crossed a significant milestone on the trail to parenthood. The magical twenty-week mark meant that we were far enough along in the prenatal process to warrant an insurance-paid trip to the hospital for a real-time viewing of the baby via ultrasound.

For Erin, the ultrasound was a thrilling opportunity to glimpse her precious child-to-be, but for me it was just another glaring reminder that fatherhood was inching closer every day. I dragged my feet as much as I could when our midweek appointment rolled around, taking extra time at work checking and rechecking that all of the animals were well cared for. My receptionist finally kicked me out the door ten minutes before I was to meet Erin.

As we sat waiting for our names to be called in the hospital lobby, Erin announced that she wanted to make a little wager. I wasn’t really in the mood, but I knew I had to participate. Early in our marriage we began placing bets with each other, and before long it turned into one of those quirky things we did as a couple, just because. Our first bet happened on a drive to my in-laws’ house in Bar Harbor, Maine. The car was low on fuel, and Erin had warned me several times to pull over and fill up. When I told her we had plenty in the tank to get us all the way there, she bet me a dollar and a kiss that we’d run dry. Five miles from our destination, as the car sputtered to a halt along the side of the road, I pulled a dollar from my wallet and gave her a kiss, then started hiking for the nearest gas station. From that moment on, intramarital gambling had been a staple of our relationship. Neither of us ever backed down from a bet, even if we knew the odds were stacked against us. We’d placed hundreds of bets over the years, and anything was game: sports, movie endings, number of days in a row below zero, local and national politics, whether the fast-food cashier would ask us to Super-Size it—we wagered on anything and everything, and the stakes were always the same. One dollar, plus a kiss from the loser. We never spent that dollar, but just kept passing it back and forth between us until the next bet came along.

“I bet you a dollar and a kiss it’s a girl,” Erin said, grabbing my hand and interlocking our fingers. She was looking right at me, smiling with her eyes.

“A girl?” I taunted. “I don’t make girls. You should know better.”

“So, we’re on?”

“Of course we’re on. That baby is a boy, or my name isn’t Augusta Witte.” A few minutes later they called us back to an ultrasound room. Erin’s stomach was doused in cool jelly, and then the technician went to work. Our first priority was verifying that all of the standard equipment was there—fingers, toes, brain, and the like. But with a semiserious bet on the line, we also wanted to find out the sex of the fetus that was growing ever bigger inside my wife’s blossoming belly. Even before our wager, Erin and I had agreed to determine sex, much to the chagrin of our friends who insisted that we not spoil the surprise. I told them we weren’t spoiling anything, but were simply electing to be surprised a few months early.

The ultrasound technician was a courteous young lady, transplanted to Vermont from her home several hundred miles to the west in Buffalo, New York. Every time she spoke, she did so as sweet and politely as she could, always making sure to use Sir or Ma’am when she addressed us.

“I feel older than sand when you call me Sir,” I said at one point.

“Yes, sir.” She smiled. She worked quietly for five or ten minutes taking measurements, pushing and prodding her handheld probe on my wife’s abdomen, occasionally stopping to point out one organ or another. “Ma’am, would you like to know what you’re having?” she said after everything else had checked out okay. Erin responded affirmatively. “And you, sir?”

“Absolutely,” I chimed. “I’ve got big bucks riding on this.”

“Well, then,” she said, “if you wouldn’t mind, sir, take a look right here and tell me what you see.” She moved the computer cursor to the center of the screen.

I tilted my head in multiple directions to try to make out the image. “A hand?”

She smiled politely. “Very good, sir! That
is
a hand; five little fingers all bunched together, covering the exact spot we need to see.”

“Can you move it?”

“No, sir. I’ve tried.”

“Can you look from a different angle, perhaps?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

I scratched my head. “So do you have any idea what we’re having?”

“Yes, sir.” She smirked. “You’re having a baby. And in about fours months you’ll find out if it’s a boy or a girl.”

I looked from the technician to Erin, and then back to the technician. I didn’t want to wait four months to find out. I was ready to know right then. I wanted my dollar back (Erin had won the last seven bets). “Well…” I ventured, grasping at straws, “based on your experience, and from what you saw earlier in the examination, can you make any sort of an educated guess?”

The woman smiled politely as she considered how best to respond. “Yes, sir,” she said finally. “Based on what I saw, and with some help from an applied statistics course I took in college, I can tell you that I am at least 50 percent sure that your baby will be a boy.”

“A boy!” I shouted instinctively, raising my arms in celebration. Erin giggled. I did the quick math and chuckled as well.

We left the hospital that day completely blind about the sex of our child, but with an assurance that he—or she—was healthy and doing well. All things considered, that felt pretty good.

When I met my father a week later for my golf lesson, I surprised him with a small gift. After he gave me the next installment of his scorecards I reciprocated by handing him a framed ultrasound photo of his future grandchild. It was not the best of the bunch that the technician had given us, but it was still a nice profile of the head and face.

London was genuinely grateful for the offering. “He’s got your funny chin,” he said dryly. “That comes from your mum’s side of the family.”

“Or
she,
” I pointed out. “Apparently we don’t know which.” As we were waiting for the tee box to free up, I gave him a brief synopsis of our experience getting the ultrasound done. “It just made this whole pregnancy thing so real. I’m
really
going to be a father,” I concluded.

“Five months ago that terrified you. Are you okay with it now?”

I knocked a clump of dried grass off the bottom of my shoe. “I’m still terrified. And I’m still not overjoyed about becoming a father. But even knowing that I’m not nearly ready for it, I guess now I’m at least okay with facing it.”

My father took a slightly different tack with our fifth golf lesson. Instead of deciding himself what I needed to learn, as he’d done previously, this time he came right out and asked me if there was anything important I wanted to learn while playing golf that day. For the life of me I couldn’t think of a single thing.

“Well, maybe you’ll think of something while we play,” he said. “It’s our turn to tee off.”

For the next four and a half hours we played a round of golf without any purpose other than to play the game. As we were walking and talking I eventually told him about the interesting ultrasound technician who had been so unwaveringly polite.

“It was kind of refreshing to talk to her,” I said. “She made both Erin and me feel… I dunno… important, I guess. Have you ever met someone like that? Someone
really
nice?”

“I’ve met a few very affable people over the years, yes.”

“Do you think niceness is like my recessive chin—inherited? Or is it learned? I’d like my child to grow up and be nice like that.”

London rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. “I honestly don’t know,” he answered. “I’ve never given it any thought.”

It was strange seeing my father in a pleasant mood. As a child, I’d always known him to be more on the bitter to downright angry end of the emotional spectrum. Even when it wasn’t obvious to the casual observer, I could always feel it simmering just below the surface. But for whatever reason, on this day he seemed to be making a serious effort to be affable. It was hard for him to do, I could tell, but he was trying. Still, we’d had so many contentious years that this new version of London felt a little bit like a ray of warm light breaking through Vermont’s stormy winter skies—it was nice for the moment, but I wondered how long it would last.

“Well if it’s genetic, I can only hope that it isn’t passed down from the paternal grandfather,” I said, half-teasing, “or else there’s no hope for the poor kid.”

For the rest of the round we covered all sorts of different topics—politics, greenhouse effect, sports, cars, sports cars, work, and even the mythical water creature living in Lake Champlain—whatever came to mind was open for discussion. When we finished the eighteenth hole I felt something I had never before experienced at the conclusion of a round of golf: sadness that it had come to an end.

While we were eating hot dogs and sauerkraut in the clubhouse restaurant, London wiped a trail of mustard from his chin and made an announcement. “Learned,” he said triumphantly out of the blue. “I figured it out while we were golfing.”

“Great,” I replied while chewing my last bite. “What are you talking about?”

“Niceness is not inherited. It is learned.”

Our earlier conversation about the polite ultrasound technician came flooding back. “Why?” I asked. “And how?”

“Think about it. What is niceness called in golf?”

I slurped on my soda while thinking. “I don’t know.”

“Etiquette, Augusta. It’s called etiquette. Things like holding the flagstick for others, letting faster golfers play through, or waiting to speak until your opponents are done putting. We call it etiquette, but it really just boils down to being nice. Golf is a game of courtesy, and in life we would all be better off if we tempered ourselves like we do on the golf course.”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded.

“Probably?” he scoffed. “Give an old golfer the bloody benefit of a doubt, eh? The first few times I took you out on the golf course you were the most obnoxious little thing, running around and yelling, causing a ruckus for everyone within earshot. I could hardly keep you quiet long enough to swing a club. But I taught you the right way to behave, and eventually it sank in. It’s learned,” he said again emphatically. “Niceness is learned.”