The ski jumpers, p.21
The Ski Jumpers, page 21
“You found out yesterday? How do you know it’s not a bad diagnosis? Does it make sense to get a second opinion?”
“It’s been months getting to the diagnosis. I don’t think it’s wrong. And it explains a lot about how I’ve been.”
“What do you mean, how you’ve been?”
I look down at the floor, ashamed.
Ingrid answers for me. “He’s been having a hard time with memory function. Even simple things. I don’t think the diagnosis is wrong either.”
Now Noah looks down at the floor, too. “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I’m going to retire after the sabbatical. We’re going to get all our affairs in order so that things go as easily for Ingrid as they possibly can. You’re going to be seeing more of me in the next little while.”
“More of you?”
“Ingrid kicked me out. I’m moving back in.”
There’s a flash of pleasure on his face before he recognizes I’m joking. “I’m going to spend time with the people I love. While I can. In the flesh.” I take Ingrid’s hand and hold it and look her in the eye. “That sounds better to me than dredging up the past.”
When I look at Noah, he’s tearing up.
“He wasn’t going to tell you,” Ingrid says. “He hasn’t even told the kids yet.”
“I hope it’s okay,” I say, “that I did?”
“Goddamnit, Jon.” He pushes himself up and comes over to me and as much as lifts me from the couch. The hug he wraps me in reminds me of Pops, and if there weren’t so many tears already streaming, I’d let loose myself.
Instead I say, “What do you have in that folder?”
III
Palimpsests
PATOLLO’S DEATH OCCURRED the same night I met Helene, my half-sister, for the first and only time. In the days between that fateful, chthonian hour and the morning Anton and I were set free on the Torrs’ family ski jump, I imagined a hundred versions of the child I might have been if I’d been Lena’s son instead of Bett’s.
He took many forms, this boy, this young man. Sometimes he appeared as a sort of prince, moving among the Chicago gentry with aloofness and the carte blanche a famous mother bestows. She, of course, would have doted on him at every turn. Other times he was a gangster’s stepson, a pistol-packing wise guy who walked around with hundred-dollar brogues and a fedora cocked at an angle over his slicked-back hair. Some days, he was a gambler, and others a bank robber. Several instances found him a movie actor, or a singer like his mother, or a Wall Street broker. Anything felt possible, given how beautiful and enigmatic Helene seemed in the hour I knew her.
But for all the allure these would-be boys and young men possessed, none of them ever took root, and not only because I didn’t know how to trudge a path toward them but because they always meant a life that excluded my brother. And despite the many reasons I wished my life were otherwise, without Anton it would have had no meaning.
In the years after my rupture with Bett, Anton and Pops and I soldiered on in a new and abbreviated way. That trip to Madison was the first of many others, and our tooling around to the small Midwestern towns with ski jumps for competitions became the only real connection I had with my father and brother. Our adventures, which culminated with the Olympic trials in Lake Placid, New York, in 1980, were our reward for the hard times. But before the three of us got there, Anton and I had a ski season unlike any other—one that, when I look back honestly, and kindly, I see as the defining months not only of my ski jumping legacy but of my entire life.
When Noah was eight or nine years old, his father planted half a dozen telephone poles in concrete footings. He built a scaffold around the poles that led into a natural dip in the hillside, after which they built the takeoff. On the slope beneath, they cleared the trees and shrubs and reshaped the hill where it met the lakeshore into a long and gradual transition so that after the lake froze and covered with snow it would serve as the outrun for a jump on which leaps of 130 or 140 feet were possible. All of this was made for Noah, but given the months Anton and I spent hiding out there, we probably had more jumps on that hill than the boy it was intended for.
From the top of the scaffold, off to the right and down through the treetops, we could see the cabin and the persistent wisps of woodsmoke. We used the smoke to measure the speed of the wind and to see from which direction it came, and if (as was most often the case) it streamed away from the lake, we knew the fates were being kind. We knew a headwind would soon greet our flights. And because the top of the jump was above the trees, looking down the inrun was like staring into a tunnel, the boughs of the pines reaching over the railings to shade the track even on the sunniest days. It was a narrow inrun, too, which made everything seem faster, steeper, and that narrowness encouraged us to be compact and alert. I can still feel the eagerness even before I pulled into the track. The sense the wilderness would engulf me for as long as it took to ski down the inrun. I can still remember the way it seemed I was kneeling in a bush as I squatted to put my bindings on. The way my body contracted, and not just physically but almost as if I’d be better served if I imploded.
Then I’d stand again, and slide my skis back and forth, and look out over the treetops to the lake that spread before me in a dazzling, blinding whiteness, one framed by the winding shore and the greenness of the trees that held it. Such strangeness it was to mark that spot fifty or sixty yards out on the water as my destination. The lake, in winter, was made of ice several feet thick. I knew this, and knew how safe it was, but still it gave me pause. From up on top, we twice saw the neighborhood wolf pack traipsing through a new snowfall, emerging from the shadows beneath the palisade on the north shore of the lake and heading for the creek, where they no doubt hoped to find open water. We’d watch them from the safety of the top of the jump, certain the wolves knew we were there and that they’d let us have our fun, but recognizing that here, in this wilderness, we were the visitors. More than once I told my brother—my little brother, who’d hardly speak at all—that if he didn’t get his shins forward, or flatten his back in the inrun, or cock his ankles in flight, or get some other element of his jump right, that I’d sic the wolves on him. If he smiled in response to this, I didn’t see it, and after the wolves retreated into the woods, at the mouth of the creek that in summer spilled into Lake Forsone in a fine rushing cascade, I’d jump first, because I knew my brother was nervous about the wolves, even from a mile away.
I taught him many things that season, and mastered as much. Technique, yes, but also mindset. It was a hell of a time for that. And what did those jumps look like? Those leaps my little brother took with his audience of one, standing down on the lake, watching his performance as though to see it would make everything all right. And it did. Those mornings. From the top of the slide, up over the trees, he’d wave his mittened hand, asking permission to go. As though there were something or someone to get in the way of his jump. I’d wave him on, and the minute my hand dropped, out there on the lake, he’d pull onto the inrun and disappear in the tunnel of trees, emerging only at the end of the transition, in his inrun position, his arms back and resting on his hips instead of flung out in front of him. That was one of our great discoveries, that that arms-back position allowed for so much more precision and quickness and smoothness on the take off, where every jump was decreed. For Anton those jumps became better one after the next, almost without exception, from New Year’s Day until the last of them in March.
Where I was powerful, he was quick. Rabbit quick, and just as springy, and I could see that he had an instinct for flight. He found it so fast, his position in the air, his short, little body commanding so much from itself, his skis stick straight and practically touching, the taped tips coming up over his right shoulder. Willful. That’s what he was. And light. And elated, no doubt. His shadow would fall from him as he came over the knoll and then lead him in flight down the hill until it met his feet in landing. An effortless telemark every time.
Twenty jumps in the morning. Twenty more in the afternoon. Hardly a day missed because what else was there to do in our exile? They were our clock and our schoolroom and our psychiatrist’s office, those jumps were. They were our church and our prison and our hospital room. And of course, they were our playground, and our window to normal, and not even the fact of two boys living alone in the woods, orphaned and on the lam, could corrupt the simple pleasure of those thousand-and-more jumps. Or the thousand-and-more walks back up the hill. Or the thousand-and-more utterances between us to Have a good one.
Those scant words, by the way, were often the only thing he’d say all day. Unless he was talking in his sleep, which he often did.
So it was we lived ten seconds at a time. Pull out of the start and into the track for one two three seconds down the inrun, our bodies, as strong and lean as they’d ever be, still tensed and ready, like a hot engine waiting for the clutch to be disengaged. I felt for three things as I sped toward the take off: that my shins were pressed as far forward as I could make them; that my forearms were relaxed and resting in straight lines along my flanks and hips and that they culminated in straight fingers pointing back up the jump; and that my bottom rib pressed against the meat of my thigh. If all those things aligned I was in the right position, and once I finished the inventory—in the first and second seconds of the inrun—I could shift my focus to the take off, which I’d see only in the half second before it was time to leap. By then, I was going thirty-five or forty miles per hour and the difference between jumps of 100 feet and 130 feet was just a matter of timing. A quarter second too early or too late and I’d be on the short side. But if I hit it just right, if my legs pistoned me from the ball of muscle and bone into the wing of flight at precisely the moment my feet hit the end of the inrun, well, then the lift I felt was immediate, and the results preordained. It became, during those perfectly timed jumps, only a question of the finer points of flight, and because this jump was relatively small those nuances were less important. But still, I might add a few feet by will alone, and once I was flying over the knoll, the thrust of my chin, the cocking of ankles, the ruddering of hands, the determination to wait for the right gust of wind coming up under my skis—any of these things might add feet to my distance. But any of these things had to be done with a subconscious mind.
This is one of the things we disagreed on, and one of the reasons he was so much better than I was. I accounted for those machinations of flight only in memory, but he could manipulate them while he was up there. He was conscious in every moment, even at the sprightly age of ten or twelve or fourteen, so that by the time he was fifteen, and I was twenty, he’d already be on the verge of besting me.
I understood he could control himself in a way I couldn’t. I could see it from out on the frozen lake. His adjustments, how he’d inventory his position and account for it. How he could coax from flight consciously what I could only hope for. It was being witness to genius. It was like watching the anointed.
Because ski jumping is a sport that demands the inward gaze, because its yield is so individualized, and because so many factors out of the jumpers’ control affect their safety and performance, it’s not a sport that lends itself to vicarious experience, not even for ski jumpers themselves. But standing out among the wolf tracks, watching my brother’s angelic flights, it was impossible not to wonder what it was like to be chosen.
I can still see the look on his face, the humble, deferential modesty. The simple happiness. The clear focus. How could a boy in his spot possess all that, jump after jump, day after day, week after week? If ever I was inspired in this life, it was on those days. They dazzled. So did he.
With each jump came the need to climb back up the hill, wearing footholds into the compacted snow like a game trail. The snow by midwinter was shoulder deep on Anton, so that if he got far enough ahead or behind me, he appeared to be little more than a hatted head bobbing among the hummocks of snow. When fresh snow fell, and it often did, the two of us would sidestep the landing hill, packing the new snow down. Out on the lake, we’d shovel the heavier snowfalls off to the side so there was a kind of horseshoe-shaped berm of snow and on very fast days, instead of skidding to a stop, we’d crouch down as we got onto the lake in order to carry as much speed as possible to the end of the outrun, then ride up the berm and launch for a second flight into the cold air.
When we finished, in the short light of the winter afternoons, we’d climb the hill one last time and where the ground met the scaffold, instead of taking the two-by-fours pounded into the wood deck of the jump up to the top, we’d veer left, with our skis on our shoulders, and march to the cabin, where we’d lean those skis under the eavestrough and go inside and unlace our boots and put them under the woodstove to dry. We’d hang our jumpsuits behind the stovepipe and lay our mittens next to the boots, and while Anton spread out on the couch to doze, I’d put on a pan of beans and franks and make a pot of coffee and stand at the window in my long johns staring into the wilderness, hoping nothing would ever find us.
Unlike the hundreds of other days we spent jumping, that time north of Misquah was singular. They did not—they do not—beget other memories of other jumps in other places. Maybe it was the fact of our being alone. Maybe it was the fact I felt as much a father as a brother. Maybe it’s because those days were standing in for real life, when real life attended every other ski jumping memory.
It could have been any of these things, but it’s also true there was an aspect of my brother’s flights that was as unmistakable as the perplexity he wore on his lonesome face. And it was that aspect I’d spend the rest of my ski jumping days chasing. Hell, even after that season, and the winters that followed, and in the almost forty years after, I kept searching. Or some part of me did. I searched for it in my friendships, in my love for my own children and my darling wife. I even searched for it in the books I wrote, through the characters I filled with longings and imperfections.
And though it’s true we became strangers, though whole years passed without so much as a phone call between Anton and me, never mind an evening spent with a couple of beers and burgers, it struck me always as unconscionable that I never got a chance to tell him that.
* * *
*
“Grace. Godly grace, that’s what it was,” I say, the sound of my voice surprising on the cold expanse of the snow-covered lake. For a moment, I’m startled to be here and to discover it’s Noah I’m talking to. We’ve snowshoed down to the shore and then up it. Now we stand at the spot where the landing hill used to be.
“What the hell are you talking about, old man?”
“Grace,” I say, as though I were some sort of Christian thinker. “I’m talking about Anton.”
Noah puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “You weren’t talking about anything.”
I hold his arm where it lay. “I know. I’m not gone yet.” With my free hand, I point up into the woods. “Walking down the hill, I was remembering our winter here. His and mine.”
“The best use ever of this place.” He takes his hand from my shoulder and turns toward the palisade across the lake. He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s thinking about. And I know there’s nothing to say about the long look in his eyes. After he settles that moment’s account, he turns back to me.
“Do you actually believe in God?” he says.
“Most of my adult life I’ve wished I did.”
“So, you don’t?”
I shake my head. “The closest I ever came was that winter.”
Noah glances again across the lake.
“Do you?” I ask.
“There’s a Lutheran church in Misquah and I spent a few winter Sundays there after Nat and I split. But I haven’t been in what, five years?”
“Which I guess is a way of not answering the question.”
“I’ve tried. How about that?”
I nod.
“This diagnosis,” he says, his voice trilling on the s.
“I’m pretty scared, Noah. Especially for Ingrid. I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I haven’t even told the kids yet.”
He bites his lower lip, and looks at me from up in his rare air. “How’s it going to go? What can I do to help?”
“Slowly or quickly, I’ll lose all my memories. I’ll become impossible to live with. I’ll need assistance. Might be five years, might be more, but the memories and some of my faculties are already starting to fade. The absentminded professor is now truly absent minded.”
“What about work?”
“I’ve taught my last course. I’ll retire.”
“I mean the books, Jon.”
“I had only one more I wanted to write anyway. If five years of trying couldn’t get it done, there’s no point now. And like I said, I’m happy to hold on to the good memories rather than dredge up the bad.”
“That’s bullshit. You’re standing here like what you see up there is your salvation. They aren’t bad memories. They’re the best you have.”
“They might be some of the most important, but they’re not the best.” I look through the trees, to the woodsmoke rising again from the cabin’s chimney. “The best I have is sitting up in your cabin. She’s studying that map you drew, waiting for us to finish our ramble along the shore.”
“Fair enough.”
“What about you?” I ask.
“Me?”
“What do you see when you look up there?”
He gazes up the hill, which is overgrown. There’s no sign that a ski jump resides on that slope save for the six telephone poles lingering among the treetops. “My dad. The prick.”
“He was no prick.”
“Not to you, he wasn’t.”
Now I turn and stare in the direction he’s spent so much of his time out here looking at. “Must be awfully damn weird, having him out there.”
