“I didn’t ask him his name, but he wanted to make sure you had worked on the old New York World.”
“Probably a touch,” I said.
I went out to our tiny patio, and a man got up to greet me. He was wearing a white sombrero, the kind that costs about seventy-five dollars, and a gabardine coat and trousers that in the West they call a stockman’s suit. “You don’t remember me?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“Well, I shouldn’t have expected you to. It’s a long, long time,” he said. Then, suddenly, he said: “Jack Pyne.”
“Jack Pyne,” I repeated. “Jack Pyne?”
“You think I was dead?”
“As a matter of fact I did,” I said.
“Now you recognize me?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Sit down. What can I get you to drink?”
“Not a thing,” he said. “I just happened to hear in a roundabout way that you were living out here, so I took it in my head to look you up. I bought your book. You must be coining money. I see it every place I go. Airports. Drug stores. You coulda cut me in.” He smiled to show he was joking. “I reccanized Ella Haggerty, and I said to my wife, I said I introduced him to her.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“I know I didn’t, but it impressed the hell out of my missus. Like we took a trip over to Europe a couple of years ago, and did you ever hear of the famous entertainer, Les Dents? You know who that is?”
“Yes. Teeth, from the old Leisure Club.”
“Oh, you knew that. Well, he remembered me right off. I was twenty pounds lighter then. Good old Teeth. He sat and talked with the wife and I for a couple hours, and all those French people and the international set, they couldn’t figure out who we were.”
“What are you doing now, Jack?”
“Well, I got a couple of things going for me. Different things. I got my money all invested in various enterprises. I only live about ten miles from here. You ought to come and take a look at my place. You have a car, don’t you? Or I could send one for you.”
“We have a car,” I said. “But, Jack, what ever happened to you? You just disappeared into thin air.”
“You mean way back? Oh, I just took it into my head one night, what was I wasting my time sitting around those night spots. So I sold my business—”
“What business?”
He shook his head somewhat pityingly. “Jack Pyne. I had one of the first if not the first really successful public relations concerns. You know, your memory ain’t as good as it ought to be. I noticed a couple things in your book. Sure it was fiction, but you sure did take a lot of liberties. I mean, didn’t you know Ella was my girl? I kept that dame for three years. She cost me a fortune. Maybe you were afraid I’d sue you for libel, but that’s not the way I operate. I told my wife, I said this book was about an old girl friend of mine. That was before I read the book, and then she asked me which one was me and I said I guess you were afraid I’d sue you for libel. I wouldn’t take an old friend into court. You ought to know me better than that.”
“Well, I’ll put you in my next book.”
“No, don’t do that. You don’t have to make amends. But you and your wife come out and have dinner at my house and I’d like to straighten you out on those days. You remember Pete Buckley?”
“Sure.”
“Always pestering me to meet Ella, but I said to him one night, I was glad to help him out any time he needed a send-in with one of those underworld characters. I knew them all. But it was one thing to tell my mob friends a guy was all right, and a very different story to introduce a thirty-five-dollar-a-week police reporter to my girl. I sent them a cheque when they had that memorial for Pete. Very sarcastic when he made his load, but a great newspaper man when he was sober. Great. No doubt about it.” He stood up. “Old pal, I gotta see a couple executives downtown, but you and I are going to have a lot of fun together, cutting up the old touches. Right?”
We have not gone to his house, although we have heard it is one of the showplaces. But we see him a great deal. A great deal. He has found out where we are and he knows when we’ll be home. It is a sad thing after so many years to have a house you love seem to turn into a night club table. Suddenly I miss Pete Buckley, too.
(1962)
THE TACKLE
Hugo Rainsford’s name became prominent in the East, back in the Twenties, when he was so often referred to as the giant Harvard tackle, although he was actually only 6 feet 2 and his playing weight was never more than 220. But he looked big, and he was big against Yale and Princeton, especially in one Yale game in which he blocked a punt and scored a touchdown which won for Harvard; and in a Princeton game in which he tore the ball out of Eddie Gramatan’s grasp and literally stole a touchdown from Princeton. You had to be strong and alert to do that. Hugo did not make Walter Camp’s First All-America, because there was a tackle at Illinois and another at Wisconsin who were getting the benefit of Camp’s fairly recent discovery that Western Conference football was superior to the brand played in the Big Three. Teams like Colby and Tufts were always trying to knock off Harvard, but the Big Ten schedules were really tough—and in addition to the conference teams there was always Notre Dame. Nevertheless Hugo Rainsford as a Second All-American tackle made a bigger and more lasting reputation than the men who played his position in the Western Conference. The eastern sportswriters had a way of forgetting about those Westerners and remembering anecdotes about Rainsford of Harvard, and he was called the giant tackle by reporters who had never seen him play. Moreover, he got a certain amount of publicity in the news columns, in which his football reputation was a secondary consideration. He was sued for breach of promise by a dancer in George White’s Scandals (an action which was settled out of court); and he was arrested for punching a policeman outside a cabaret called the Pre Catelan on West 39th Street. Hugo’s father, who was one of the Republican friends of Alfred E. Smith, managed to have the matter taken care of. Hugo was sent off to a ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming, where he fell in love with Gladys Tompkins, of Tompkins Iron & Steel (Pittsburgh, Sandusky, and Birmingham, Alabama). They were married that fall, in Sewickley, attended by 10 bridesmaids and 14 ushers, and to the music of Mike Markel. To the utter amazement of those who knew him—and thousands who did not—Hugo immediately settled down and vanished from the public prints. If you looked on the financial pages you would see his name and a one-column photograph of Hugo, wearing a starched collar and Spitalfields tie, and the briefest of announcements to the effect that H. B. Rainsford had been admitted to this partnership or elected to that directorate. He was, of course, the same Hugo Rainsford who by coincidence might be mentioned that same day in that same paper as the giant Harvard tackle, but he could not control the sportswriters’ reminiscences. Once a year he would go to New Haven or to Boston for the Yale game, and he made his private contributions to the funds for the education of thick-calved high school boys from Brockton and Medford who might otherwise have turned up at Holy Cross. But he was not so impatient to learn the results of the Brown and Dartmouth games that he could not wait for the Sunday papers. Politeness to his friends rather than postgraduate enthusiasm of his own sustained Hugo’s interest in football. Downtown in the daytime and at dinner parties in the evening, through the months of October and November, he was expected to comment as an expert, but all he really knew he got from George Trevor and Harry Cross, The Sun and the Herald Tribune. One afternoon on the fifth tee at Piping Rock a man in a suede windbreaker, playing in a foursome behind him, said, “Hugo Rainsford? What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you at Princeton?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake lay off,” said Hugo. The man was older, and Hugo did not know his name, but whoever he was he achieved the distinction of being the first football nut who irritated Hugo to the point of rudeness.
Gladys Rainsford stepped in. “Why don’t you p
eople go through?” she said. “I’m a terribly slow player.”
The rebuffed suede windbreaker and his companions thanked her and hit their tee shots in silence. They tipped their caps to Gladys and left the tee.
“Well, you know what they’re thinking,” said Hugo.
“What?” said Gladys.
“They’re sure you and I had a fight and that’s why I’m so disagreeable.”
“Do you know who he is? I think he’s the father of that boy that plays for Yale. I’ll think of his name in a minute.”
“I suppose I ought to apologize to him later, but my heart won’t be in it.”
“Then don’t say anything,” she said.
“Oh, I’ll tell him I took a nine on the fourth or something. No use antagonizing him unnecessarily. But suddenly I finally got fed up.”
“Oh, I know. I’m on your side,” she said. “Don’t forget, they bore me too, and I don’t even know anything about football.”
“You know a damned sight more than most of them do. I only thank God I’m not Red Grange or Bronko Nagurski. I hate to think what they must have to put up with. Backfield men, and those western colleges. Oh, boy. I probably could have made the crew, but I didn’t like rowing and I did like football. And with my marks I couldn’t do both and hope to stay in college. Tough enough as it was.”
“Well, Giant, the price of fame,” she said.
“Now you cut that out,” said Hugo.
“Go on, hit one out and show them how good you are,” she said. “Anyway, the season’ll be over in a week or two.”
But the end of the season did not mean the inauguration of an annual moratorium on football talk. Since he had become—for a lineman—only a little less legendary than Tack Hardwick and Frank Hinkey, Jim Thorpe and Eddie Mahan, who played the end or the backfield, he had to accustom himself to surprise recognition, not so surprising to him as to the delighted individuals who were meeting him for the first time; and with the passing of the years they seemed to grow more astonished at his durability. It was hard to reconcile their points of view, held simultaneously, that he had been built of marble and iron, indestructibly, and that he was not only alive but playing golf, swimming, and engaged in the daily transactions of financial business. They seemed to believe he had accomplished prodigious feats of agility and strength while existing as a piece of statuary, heroic size. There were times when he wanted to remove his two front teeth, to pull up his pants and let them see a 10-inch scar, to show how vulnerable he had been to the taped fists and the pointed cleats of the gods who had played against him. But by the time he was in his thirties he had learned that the easiest way to handle a football nut was to let him do all the talking.
• • •
Hugo and Gladys had two daughters. “If you had a son would you want him to play football?” was a question that people felt compelled to ask him from time to time. His usual answer was that if the boy wanted to play, that would be all right. But on a trip to Bermuda, in the ship’s bar, a woman who almost certainly had been a sociology major at her college asked him the same old question, and Hugo told her that he was bringing up his daughters to play football. “You’re not serious,” said the woman.
“Well, I should say I am,” said Hugo. He thereupon got carried away with his fantasy and for the better part of an hour, as the Daiquiris came and went, Hugo described the weekends at his house in Locust Valley, the half-size football field on his place, the regulation goal posts, the tackling dummy, the eagerness with which his two Chapin School daughters were learning to place-kick, forward pass, and do the body-building calisthenics that he himself had learned at St. Bartholomew’s and Harvard. “It’s character building as well as body building,” he told the woman. “Naturally I never expect them to really play football, but it’s very good for them to learn to protect themselves. The give and take of life, you might say.”
“You’re not afraid they might hurt themselves?” said the woman.
“A few bruises,” said Hugo. “Actually no more dangerous than if they went fox hunting, when you stop to think of it.”
“I suppose so,” said the woman. “And there’s just the two of them.”
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t go to all that trouble just for my two. They have two teams. The girls from Miss Chapin’s on one team, and the other team consists of girls from Spence and Green Vale and the Brearley. There’re the Greens—they’re the girls from Miss Chapin’s—and the Blues, from the other schools.”
“Is that so?” said the woman.
“It’s really lots of fun,” said Hugo. He looked at his watch. “Lord, I hate to break this up, but I’ve got to change. And so have you. My wife’ll give me hell.”
He had no further conversation with the woman, although she made some effort to get some more information. “I think you’ve made a conquest,” said Gladys Rainsford. “That woman from Cleveland.”
“Keep her away from me,” said Hugo.
“Don’t worry, I will,” said Gladys.
It was about six months later that Gladys placed a clipping before him and said, “What the hell is this?”
The clipping was from a magazine published in Cleveland for local consumption. There was an old photograph of Hugo Rainsford in his football uniform, and a more recent picture of him in business clothes. “Where did this come from?” said Hugo.
“Lydia Williamson sent it to me. Read it,” said Gladys.
The article was a reasonably accurate report of the conversation that had taken place in the bar of the Furness liner Bermuda, and was signed by Edith Trapnell McGaver. The title of the article was Football for Girls, and the subhead was “Ex-Harvard Star Tutors N.Y. Society Girls in Grid Tactics.”
Hugo read the article with horrified fascination. Mrs. McGaver had had to use her imagination to depict the Rainsfords’ Locust Valley football field, and she did so. She had expanded Hugo’s remark as to the comparative safety of football and fox hunting, and had inserted a few observations of her own on the character-building aspects of contact sport. But in general the interview, as she called it, stuck to Hugo’s statements.
“I never should have left you alone with her,” said Gladys. “You’re going to have a fine time living this down.”
“Well—Cleveland,” said Hugo. “Nobody around here’ll see it.”
“You hope,” said Gladys.
But a Yale man in the Cleveland branch of a stock brokerage sent a dozen copies of the interview to New York friends, and in no time at all Hugo was being greeted as “Coach” Rainsford. Wherever he went—The Lunch Club, the Down Town Association, The Recess—some wisecracker had something to say about the article. They rang all the changes, from the evils of proselytizing young athletes to the fun Hugo must have in the girls’ locker room. Inevitably, the Rainsfords’ daughters saw the article. Marjorie, the firstborn, was tearful. “Daddy, how could you?” she said. The younger one, Mary, said, “Well, I guess there goes the Junior Assembly.” So many of Hugo’s and Gladys’s contemporaries asked to be shown the football field at Locust Valley that Gladys had to warn them beforehand that it was a touchy subject. Hugo put an end to the use of the “coach” nickname by his friends. “Do you want me to swat you?” he would say. The word got around that Hugo had swatted an unidentified friend, and as no one wanted to be swatted by those ham hands, the joke got to be unfunny. “Hereafter, you’ll know better than to get tight with strange women,” said Gladys.
“She was strange, all right,” said Hugo.
More or less indirectly the episode of the Cleveland interview caused his friends to avoid the whole topic of football. They stifled the impulse to make humorous mention of the interview, and having become overconscious of that restriction they hesitated to speak of football in any connection. Except for rare and casual references to the Yale game and Harvard’s prospects they finally had begun to relegate his football
exertions to his youth—and he was already in his thirties. The sportswriters continued to celebrate his exploits; he was, after all, a kind of brand name. It was practically a tradition among the writers to compose at least one column a year in which the Golden Age of Sport was recalled, and the basic cast of characters was always the same: Babe Ruth, Walter Hagen, Bill Tilden, Tommy Hitchcock, Earl Sande, Jack Dempsey, and Red Grange. (No matter how plainly the writers stated that they were writing about the Twenties, they got angry letters from fans of Bobby Jones, who forgot that Jones’s Grand Slam was in 1930, and from admirers of John L. Sullivan, who died in 1918.) Hugo Rainsford was an added starter, but he was legitimately of the glamorous decade, and his was a name that broke the monotony of the traditional list. “I saw your name in Grantland Rice’s column the other day,” somebody would say.