Walking with Jack (25 page)

The essence of competitive golf rides on a very narrow rail inside your mind. Either you see each hole as an opportunity to make a birdie and get one hole closer to perfection, or you see each hole as another
chance to screw up and fall further behind. We were there after six holes. Jack was buried in a silent, upside-down world for the rest of the round. I stayed beside him and gave him the best I had, but I was no help to him as a caddie or a father.

He hit some wonderful golf shots before we were finished, and on the 16th tee box I finally found these words: “Here’s my take on it, Jack. You look like a professional golfer out here. You have all the shots. And if we learn how to fight, you’ll be fine this winter.”

He listened to me, but he had no reaction.

Fathers whom I know well who had talked with me about this journey told me that no matter what happens on the tour this winter, Jack will always look back fondly on this experience that he and I shared. I hope this is true. I really hope this is true. And that is what I was thinking about when I told Jack that tomorrow in our second round we were going to make five birdies and start fighting our way back. I carried his clubs to the truck while he went to the scorer’s table to sign his card.

I stood by the truck looking up into an empty blue sky, telling myself that we were at the bottom now and that on the ride back to our hotel, or tonight watching sports, I would find some words that would make things better for Jack. A few minutes later, when I watched him walk across the parking lot, there was something wrong with the way he moved. He seemed to be struggling just to walk a straight line to where I was waiting. I called out my father’s words to him: “Tomorrow’s another day, Jackie boy.”

“There is no tomorrow,” he said as he approached.

“What do you mean?”

“We missed the cut.”

“There is no cut,” I said. “Did you know there was a cut?”

“No,” he said. “But when you shoot over 86, you’re cut from the second round. The guy just told me.”

“What did we shoot, Jack?” I asked.

“I shot a 90,” he said, almost yelling at me. “I haven’t shot a 90 since high school. If you play the way I played, you don’t deserve to make the cut. It’s embarrassing, man.”

So we’re not coming back to this place tomorrow, I said to myself as we sped out of the parking lot. Then what the hell are we going to do tomorrow?

I think the only thing that saved us on the ride back to our hotel was Springsteen at full volume singing, “Good night, it’s all right, Jane …”

“I’m going to sit out in the sun and warm up a little,” I said when we got out of the truck, the first words to break our silence. “Are you okay?” I asked him.

“It is what it is,” he said as he walked away.

It is what it is
. Those had been his words after his graduation when I tried to start a meaningful conversation with him about his four years of college.
It is what it is
.

I sat on the curb by the truck, thinking about this and saying to myself: Maybe it is what it is, but we are going to have to find better words than those because saying it is what it is, is not much better than saying, look, I don’t talk with you about important things, okay? We stopped doing that before I was kicked off my golf team. Remember?

No, I thought, we are going to talk. Maybe not now, and maybe not tonight, but sooner or later we’re going to talk. I rolled a cigarette, then sent Colleen a text: “I was prepared to get our asses hauled down here for a while. But today we got our hearts torn out. Sorry. I love you.”

It was all swirling through my head, and when I stood up, I had to lean against the truck to catch my balance. I was talking to myself then, telling myself that Jack has to understand that he hasn’t played
golf competitively in three years. He is going to have to learn all over again how to do that. And fast. Because this is misery for both of us. He’s going to end up being haunted by it just as I’ve been haunted by my failures and by never letting my father inside my life when we still had the chance.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and before I opened them, I heard an ambulance racing by on the freeway. I turned and watched the flashing lights. The real world. Someone’s life being ripped apart. I walked on, but when I was climbing the stairs to the second floor, my mind was going all the way back to the days when Colleen was pregnant with our first child. It struck me that when we start out and are waiting for our children to be born, all we ask is please, God, just give us a healthy baby, with all the parts in working order. And then later, when they begin to grow up and start to leave the house, we just pray that the siren in the dead of night will not be for us. But then, as the years pass, we raise the ante. We start asking our children to work hard, to get into good colleges, and to make their lives amount to something that makes sense to us. It goes on and on. But maybe in the end, the only thing that will matter is that we treated our time together as a gift.

When I got to the room, Jack was talking with Jenna on his phone. His voice was low and solemn. I made a call on my phone, talking loudly enough for him to hear, as I spoke with the pro at Cypress Lakes Golf Club, where our next event is being played in three days. “Can we get a practice round in tomorrow?” I asked. “Noon is great. Thanks.”

Midnight. My thoughts at the end of this long day are about something I wrote in my new novel: “When we lose the people we love best in this life, most of the time it is our own fault.”

We are so close to our children when they are small. They tell us everything. We hold them and kiss them whenever we want to, and we cannot imagine that this will ever end. But somehow a space
opens between us, and it grows wider each time they turn on the television when we enter the room, or plug themselves into their iPods, or send us a three-word text instead of answering the cell phone we bought for them when we call. It just happens. And after a while, we are grateful when they give us an excuse
not
to talk because it is easier to fill the silence with music or television or another trip to the mall than to try to find the words.

Tonight Jack broke the silence for both of us after he took a walk just before dark. We hadn’t eaten anything and had just filled two tense hours staring at the talking heads on ESPN as if we were waiting for them to tell us something meaningful.

When I heard Jack opening the door, I was thinking that I would just pretend I was asleep, but as soon as he entered the room, he said, “I’m sorry for being so negative today.”

I sat up straight on the couch. I wanted to jump into his arms and thank him as I had never thanked anyone for anything before in my life. But I was afraid that might scare him away. Instead, I said as calmly as I could, “That’s all right, Jack. But could you sit here and talk with me for a few minutes?”

He looked surprised by this, and when I clicked off the TV, that space of silence between us felt even more intimidating. For some reason, I thought it best to begin with a confession. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” I said. Then I got up and opened a couple of beers and handed him one while I said that our tendency is to believe that our lives are shaped by our achievements and that this is how we will be remembered. But it’s not true. It’s the mistakes that really determine the shape of our lives. The mistakes we make and then how we recover from those mistakes, exactly like a round of golf. There will be mistakes, that is given. The great unknown in a round of golf is whether you will be crushed into despair by your mistakes or whether you will recover. “So we could say that Jack Snyder’s story is how he left home three days after his high school graduation to chase his dream of playing Division I golf and he made the team at the University of Toledo as a walk-on. Or should we say
that he was kicked off the team? Both are part of his story. We are here now because of both parts, right? Or maybe not. Maybe we are here because of the mistake you made. You are trying to recover from it. What do you think?”

He considered this for a moment, then said, “I don’t know, man. It is what it is, I guess.”

Not what I was hoping he would say.

“Okay. Look at me and my life,” I said. “There is something I never told you. The greatest mistake of my life. In order to make it clear for you, I have to go back to the beginning when I first met your mother. We fell in love. And when you fall in love, you make a silent pledge that you will do everything possible to help that person reach her dream. Colleen’s dream was to have a family. A big family. Four or five kids. And I was on this path to try to become a writer, to write books that matter in some way and that deprive the world of some of its indifference. That was my battle cry through the ten years I had been writing before I met your mom. She was twenty-one years old; I was already thirty-one. I’d written three novels no one would publish. Dozens of stories. I had no prospects really. In golf terms I was shooting rounds in the upper 80s and telling myself that I was going to make the big tour. Nothing less. In those days there was the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where a new writer could earn an MFA degree and land a college teaching job, a good job for life. The chance to work with young students. I decided I had to go there. It took nine years for me to write something good enough to get in, but eventually there we were in Iowa City. Erin was born my third semester there. Iowa got me my big break, the chance to teach at Colgate University. We had Nell by then, and you were born three weeks before I went there for my interview. Anyway, there we were and it was paradise. I loved my students. We loved the town. We bought our first house on Maple Avenue, five blocks from campus. That first semester I would look out my office window and see your mother with the three of you, playing in the leaves. We spent the winter sledding down the big hill on campus.

“So it’s spring of my first year, and an old friend of mine from Iowa had become an editor at
Harper’s Magazine
, and he was willing to come to campus and talk with my students. It was great. We had a class where he went over my students’ work, and then we all had dinner together. The next day I was heading down the hallway in Lawrence Hall to my office when the head of the writing department, the fellow who had hired me, stopped me and said, ‘I hear you had an editor from
Harper’s Magazine
here.’

“I began telling him how much it had meant to my students, and he stopped me and said, ‘You brought an editor from
Harper’s Magazine
to campus and you didn’t introduce him to me? What are you trying to do, cut me out of an important contact in New York?’

“He said it and then just turned and walked away. I remember standing in my office at the window, lighting a cigarette, and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Then I went to his office. I knocked on his door, and when I opened it, he looked up at me from behind his desk, and he said, ‘As hard as I worked to bring you here, I will now work to send you on your way.’

“I still remember those exact words. I tried to reason with him, but he dismissed me. ‘Why are you still standing there?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have any work to do?’

“So I started walking back to my office to try to think. Only I didn’t get all the way back. I couldn’t even breathe. I was thinking, Okay, just let it go. It will all disappear in time, and everything will be all right. But I had been listening to a lot of Springsteen in those days, and there was this one song with the lyric about how we grow up and we keep our silence and hope that it passes for honor. I turned around and went back to his office and threw open the door and I said, ‘From now on, I’m going to think of you as nothing more than a fat asshole.’ I slammed the door and that was it.

“He was my boss. He was the big deal in the English department. I had three more years on my contract, but when my vote for tenure came up, he killed me. And during the last year, when I was applying for teaching jobs at other colleges, he blackballed me. I remember we
were out in the parking lot one afternoon and he smiled at me and said, ‘I heard from Cornell today. I’m telling them everything I know about you.’

“ ‘Fuck you,’ I said.

“I never told your mother about this when it happened that spring. We had just moved into our first house, and she was pregnant with Cara. When summer came around, we were back in Maine, and my closest friend at Colgate came to visit with his family. John Hubbard was the photographer there. You don’t remember him, but he was a really great guy who took all the pictures of the university. He only saw what was beautiful about the place. The students, and the magnificent campus. He and I were out in my sailboat, just the two of us, and when I told him the story about what had happened—I’ll always remember this—he just bowed his head. I said, ‘John, will I be able to survive this?’ He shook his head and said no.

“So I knew. It was tough. You were almost four years old when we left Colgate. I applied to over a hundred jobs and never even got invited for an interview. They were jobs teaching writing, and there was no way they weren’t going to call Colgate and speak with the head of the writing department. I was cooked and I knew it.

“So then we were broke. Worse than broke. We had you and your three sisters, and I couldn’t pay for our heating oil. It was winter, and I took the only job I could find, working as a laborer at a construction site down the shore where they were building a mansion house. I kept a journal and wrote a book about it.”

“
The Cliff Walk
,” he said.

“Yep. It was your mother who came up with the title. The next thing I know, the book is under contract with Little, Brown and we’re all going to New York to celebrate. You remember?”

“Of course. I got my Yankees hat.”

“Then I’m on
Oprah
. Then Disney buys the film rights, and we’re off to Ireland for the summer. That book opened the doors for me to live a writing life. I wrote five books and a movie in the next seven years. The movie enabled me to help your grandfather get into the
assisted-living place, which was great for a while. You know, before he got too sick. But the reason I’m telling you this is that for the last twenty years I’ve regretted that I didn’t keep my mouth shut at Colgate, because when I turned around in the hallway and walked back to that asshole’s office and told him what I thought of him, I placed in jeopardy your mother’s dream and the life we were building together. I always thought that she and I would get to grow old on a college campus. You know, shuffling through the leaves with Colleen to go see a football game on a Saturday afternoon. It would have been a wonderful life for us. But now I see that this great mistake also gave me something I never could have even dreamed of in those days. It gave me the chance to be here with you. I let you down today. In the first place, as your caddie, I should have known that there was a cut line. That was inexcusable. And when you gave up on yourself after we pissed away our first chance for birdie, I should have found some way to keep you in the game.”