| brake. My car fed down through evergreen forest onto a gravelly, circular parking area. I cut the engine and stepped out. I stood listening, through the trees, to the trout stream that sweeps along the base of South Mountain. |
| Down through the pines the low, mossy roofs and silent chimneys of his bungalow unnerved me. What would he be like? Would he find my questions ignorant? Would he approve of me? Even if my questions were intelligent, would I understand his answers? A door flung open and here he came, huffing, puffing, his arms swinging, the moustache unmistakable. Bounding up the flight of railroad-tie steps to the parking circle, herding his daughter Nora ahead of him, he waved me toward his car, pumping my hand only when I offered it. He was agitated and genial and distant all at once as if he and I and his car and Nora and the golf clubs he and Nora were carrying were a set of puzzle pieces he was running out of time to figure out the fit of. "All right," he bustled, "hello ah, yes. Hop in. How-do-you-do. My daughter, Nora. You're here for the interview .. ahh, hm. Ah .. play golf?" |
| .. his game was so awful, so touchingly, spectacularly bad, it was fascinating. A trick-shot artist would've been hard pressed to replicate some of the mistakes he made. |
| He would play for minutes on end in boiling suspenseful silence. Then, rankled by a terrible shot, or startled by a good one, he would mutterto himself, Nora, me, a rhetorical audience, or would shout, or laughat himself bitterly or happily or both at the same time as he followed his shots to the course's extremities to lurch, swipe and stab his white ball for the most part forward. |
| We were coming into the final few holes when Nora gave me to understand, in tense tones when her father was out of earshot, that as pitiful as his play was, believe it or not here and nowtodayhe stood to shoot the best score of his life. |
| So don't like act, she confided, not meeting my eyes, as if anything's like unusual or out of the ordinaryadvice she seemed to have trouble following herself. As we climbed to the final tee I noticed she was mov- |
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