Let Me Finish by Roger Angell

Author:Roger Angell [Angell, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We raced the next day and I did well. Not a win but maybe another one of the little red cotton burgees they handed out in those days—red for second—or a third-place yellow. I used to smoke fifteen-cent cigars during the races then: Blackstones. When my regular girlfriend, Evelyn, came back—she'd been in New Hampshire, visiting her grandmother—I told her that I'd played golf with this woman who'd showed up and asked in, and next day went back with her to look for some lost keys. Fred and Bus asked me how we'd come out that weird day and I said she'd been too tough for me. I didn't tell anyone that I'd driven out to Naskeag the last morning and parked my car near where I thought her new family's driveway might be. She didn't come by. The next year, I had a full-summer job in New York and only got to Maine for a few days, and the year after that the war came and everything was changed. At some point after Evelyn and I were married, I told her about the ring. After the war, the Donald Parson course was abandoned—now there's a patch of alders down where the first hole was, a driveway in place of the third fairway, and a cottage on the granite ledge above the shore. Nobody remembers a visiting young woman who might have lost something valuable on the forgotten old golf course once.

For a time, I wished I'd paid more attention to things she had told me the first day we played golf. She lived in New Jersey, I think, and she'd met her fiancé ... well, perhaps on Cape Cod. She'd gone to some college in Ohio. But none of that mattered. Our two walks together stayed with me, and felt stranger and more intimate as time went by. I kept losing the image of her, but when I thought of her golf swing she'd reappear. I've grown suspicious of some of the colors and details that have worked their way into this account, which may be overpaintings intended to hold a fading work. I was about to start my junior year at Harvard that fall, but in my version of the story I am younger than that, more boyish; she is the expert and I the apprentice. In time, our morning in the fog became more abstract and significant, almost leaving memory for some other place in my mind. She and I, a strange couple, had had a few hours in common and a secret—something no one else could guess. A woman and a younger man, myself at nineteen, had become intimate by association. I'd done my part, held up. Was this what she'd meant with those strange parting words—that I would grow up and be trusted?

Like everyone else, I traveled a lot during the war, and sometimes I caught myself looking for her in a crowded San Francisco restaurant or among the people pushing onto a downtown Denver streetcar.

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