GOLF Mystery

GOLF Mystery

By Robert R. Anderson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Robert R. Anderson

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GOLF Mystery | Robert R. Anderson

She is gone now, and, if I believe that young pup of a doctor, it will not be long until I follow her. I suppose he knows what he is talking about. I have played in the same foursome with his father for nearly forty years, and I have watched him grow up into the right sort, like his old man. If he says I am doomed, so be it. I have little to complain about and nothing now, if truth be told, to look forward to without her. If I had my way, I would keel over out on the golf course some sweet spring morning with the sun sparkling on the velvet grass and soft clouds floating overhead. That would be a nice end. I read somewhere a long time ago that if a fellow has three happy years to look back upon then that constitutes a pretty good life. Well, I had that and then some. A friend had carved on her tombstone Thank you, I had a lovely time. I guess I could say the same. So let me tell you a love story from one of those years, but a love story that got tangled up in some rather odd and mysterious goings on. I got out of the service in ‘forty-six. Because I was a college boy and also near sighted, I spent my days serving the war effort as a clerk and typist and occasionally as a courier. The last two years were based in London and the smell of the brick dust that hung in the air of that blasted city will always be part of me. It was incredibly boring work interspersed with moments of terror when the buzz bombs came overhead. We used to joke somewhat ruefully that we also served who only sat and typed. I was billeted in a back room of a cheap hotel near Russell Square. To while away the boredom, for there was nothing to do and nowhere to go in the evenings, I took to writing a simple little mystery novel. It became something to look forward to on a dreary evening, and the characters took on lives of their own and I became more their chronicler than their creator. For background, I set the story in the hunt country where I had grown up, and that helped to dispel the occasional moments of homesickness to which all who served in the armed forces overseas were frequently subject.

Perhaps now I should tell you a little about myself, not that there is anything remarkable or noteworthy, but because it bears upon the subsequent story.

I was pretty certain as a child that I was the despair of my parents although they, to their credit, never said what I am sure they must have felt. My mother descends from one of the old Boston families. You would recognize the name, but I would rather not get into that. She grew up in the horse country of Dover, some dozen miles southwest of Boston. Today it is fast becoming suburbia, but then it was still rural and agricultural.

My father grew up in the horse country north of Baltimore, and when he was a student in Cambridge they met and fell in love. Their equine affinity, I am sure, was a great help in cementing their union. They married and moved into the rambling family home on a winding back road in Dover, raised horses, and hunted with the local pack. Father, being a bookish sort, entered the book publishing business, and, at the time of which I write, was a senior editor with the distinguished old house of Little, Brown and Co. on Beacon Street.

I do not know when it dawned upon me that I was a disappointment, but it was fairly early on. I was small for my age, scrawny, and did not seem to be destined to be a success at anything. By age eight, my poor eye sight revealed itself and I was compelled to wear glasses, an embarrassing state of affairs that ruled out any rough and tumble during my grade school years. Further, I was shy and retiring, the last picked in any school games.

But I could ride, well and fearlessly. And despite my slight physique, I was strong. Long before I weighed anything close to the weight of a hundred pound feed bag, I could sling one onto my shoulder and carry it upstairs in the barn. Since we had no near neighbors, and thus no playmates, I learned to amuse myself investigating the countryside both on foot with father’s bird dog and on horseback. For miles around, I knew every field and woodlot and stonewall.

All mother’s family, the males that is, attend St. Paul’s School. That is a given. The family expects it and St. Paul’s expects it. Thus, after my inglorious years at the town school, I was packed off, no questions asked, to that great old Episcopal institution in Concord, New Hampshire as a first former ( a seventh grader to the rest of the world). The problem was with me, not it, and I was a miserable failure. As one of the meek and lowly that our faith encompasses, I found some consolation in the daily chapel services, but I was a hopeless student. Further, in a school that excelled in ice hockey and had actually begun the game in this country, I could not skate. The school had the oldest squash courts in the country, but more often than not the hard little ball struck me rather than I it. When I tried to pull an oar, for the school had a great rowing tradition, I was demoted to coxswain.

At the conclusion of my third form year, it was jointly agreed by all concerned that I should pursue my education elsewhere. Since we were well into the Depression with no end in sight, and my parents had already cut back on their horses and were doing all the stable work themselves, my departure from St. Paul’s might well have been a welcome financial relief.

What to do with me? Then, just as I was about to enroll in the public high school, fate took over and provided an answer. A retired mathematics professor had had come to town, and my parents were able to secure his services as a tutor. Mother, who had been educated in Switzerland as a teenager, spoke fluent French and was willing to teach me. She simply refused to speak to me during the daytime in anything but francais. My bookish father would provide readings in literature and history (you would be surprised how much knowledge an editor picks up in the course of his work). And, of course, he would make damn sure that I would learn to write the English language properly. I should add that, as an editor, he was often driven to despair and fits of fury by his authors.

These, oddly enough, turned out to be happy years for us all. Out of the school setting, I began to enjoy learning. I took over the stable work, and rode almost every afternoon. And I began to grow, finally reaching an almost respectable height and a nearly presentable appearance. I rode with the hunt, helped out at the kennels, and became an accepted face at the hunt’s social activities. Even the young ladies of the hunt began to show a mild interest in me, and I began to acquire, for the first time, a tiny bit of self confidence.

The on-going problem of what to do with me began to manifest itself. I had no secondary school degree or scholastic or athletic honors with which to impress, being home tutored, so colleges understandably would look askance at my credentials such as they were. My mother’s family all matriculated from St. Paul’s to Harvard, but acceptance there, despite the family legacy of attendance, was highly unlikely. And, frankly, I had no interest in the college due, no doubt, to a lifetime of over-exposure to the place. Again, fate intervened in the form of father’s college roommate.

Hillary Knight was the scion of an old Hartford family that had been one of the city’s founding settlers, and was a partner in one of the large law firms there. He and father still kept in touch, and he must have been well aware of my precarious situation. He volunteered to use his influence at Trinity College where he had been a past trustee, and so it came to pass that I was accepted into the freshman class. No doubt an eyebrow or two must have been raised by the admission committee.

The college occupies an old piece of ridge top pasture on the south side of the city of Hartford, Connecticut. From the brownstone gothic pile that stretches along the ridge, there are glorious views to the far off line of hills to the west. To the east, the ridge drops down to grassy playing fields on which we competed against our Little Three rivals: Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan. Above all, the shining white marble tower of the collegiate gothic chapel punctuates the skyline. The college had a self-contained quality, a part of Hartford yet separate from it.

I was happy there among the two thousand bright and hearty young men that constituted the student body. Hillary Knight kept an avuncular eye on me, frequently inviting me to dine with him and his family in their large west end home. Often he would invite me to lunch with him at his clubs downtown where I was introduced to the influential men of the city. I believe that I was emerging from my shell of shyness and made a tolerable appearance. At least I could no longer detect the wondering frowns that had been so much of my childhood and adolescence.

And then the war came along. Midway through my junior year, I decided to enlist rather than wait to be drafted. And so it was in spring of 1946, as I previously mentioned, I returned home to America having done my duty for my country behind a typewriter. I brought with me two Savile Row bespoke suits and one pre-war MG sports car.

Since I could not resume my education until the fall semester of ’47, having already completed two and one half years at Trinity and the current spring semester being well advanced, father decided that I must obtain gainful employment rather than hang around home riding horses and playing golf.

Ah golf! My parents were long-time members of the Dedham Polo Club, several miles down the road from our home. The name is a misnomer.