High Diver, 1929

Wouldn't that have been just like him, they all said later, the ones who knew him. That joker, that wag, that scamp. Captain Frank Durman, United States Air Force. The sort of flyboy who made all the dolls carry a torch. They sat on wooden folding chairs in Lanterman Park, their heads tipped back, their lips parted, their throats exposed and white in the glow from the neon lights along the midway—the merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel, the Tunnel of Love.

There at the edge of the carnival, in an open spot in the oak grove, Captain Frank Durman said to a boy standing near the foot of the ladder he'd soon climb, "I might just act like I'm hurt when I hit the net. How about that, bub?" He swept his arm out toward the crowd. "They all want to feel their tickers squeeze in their chests, right? If I don't move once I land? Well, wouldn't that be the ticket?"

And the girls' hearts were already thumping just looking at Captain Durman in his blue swimming singlet. The thin straps across his shoulders bared the swell of his pectoral muscles, the wings of his latissimus dorsi, and, finally, the flex of deltoids and biceps as he grabbed the rungs of the ladder and started to climb. With each step, the hearts below pulsed—those calves, those thighs, that …

Finally, he reached the top and turned to face them.

At least that's how I picture it. The news story leaves room for my imagination. It's August, the dog days, and the girls stir the air with cardboard fans from the Fessant Funeral Home. Their spit curls are damp with perspiration. Some dab their temples with hankies. Their moist skin smells of Shalimar. They hold bags of roasted nuts in their hands, or cones of cotton candy, or Dixie Cups of lemonade. They hear the screams of girls on the new ride, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the ding of the bell when a strongman swings the sledgehammer and sends the weight to the top. And always the organ music of "Over the Waves" from the merry-go-round.

Here in Bridgeport, an oil town in southeastern Illinois, the girls look up at Captain Frank Durman. They feel their hearts quicken, their breathing catch, and they think, Oh, my. Anything might happen.

________

Let's say that boy at the foot of the ladder is my father. He's sixteen, a slender boy with sloped shoulders. A country boy with mousy straight hair, unruly at his crown. He's always licking his palm and trying to tame that cowlick. Someone like Captain Durman would never have a single hair that would dare to disobey. My father feels fairly certain about that. He envies his dark hair, slicked back Valentino style, shiny with Brilliantine. He envies the rugged set of his square jaw and the way he winks at him just before he starts to climb as if to say everything's the berries. Captain Durman is a big timer, and my father? Well, to be honest, my father is a hayseed, a rube, wide-eyed and wet behind the ears. He won't marry my mother until he's thirty-eight years old, will spend his life until then living on the farm with my aged grandmother who has cataracts and can barely see. A bachelor, until one day something trips in his heart and he takes the plunge.

Do I dare imagine my mother among the girls who are looking up at the fine form of Captain Durman? My timid mother. My chaste mother. My nearly spinster mother who marries my father when she's forty-one years old. She's nineteen that night in Lanterman Park, already teaching school and helping her parents in the general store they run two miles west of my father's farm. Somewhere in the comings and goings in that rural community, have they taken note of each other? I so desperately want it to be so, to know that they had a spark when they...