A Very Short Book with a Lot to Think About
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The Most is a very short novel, 134 pages long. The story takes place all in one day, Sunday, November 3, 1957. It is an Indian Summer day in Newark, Delaware where Kathleen and Virgil Beckett live with their two young sons, Nathaniel and Nicholas. When Kathleen decides not to go to church that day, she sends her husband and kids off without her. As her morning progresses, she eventually finds herself in the swimming pool of the apartment complex in which they live. When Virgil and the boys return, they find her there. As much as Virgil tries to convince Kathy to come out of the pool, she will not. Ultimately, wanting to take advantage of the warm day, he goes off to play golf. When he comes back late in the afternoon, he is shocked to find that she’s still in the pool. Evening is setting in and it’s beginning to get cold, but still she won’t come out of the pool.
In the course of the book, the author alternates back and forth from Kathleen’s point of view to Virgil’s as the reader gets their entire life histories and the history of their courtship and nine-year marriage. Readers learn of every decision each of them made leading up to their standstill in the swimming pool.
In Virgil’s case, he had been one of the most handsome men in college, which is where he and Kathleen met. On campus, people called him “Coop” after Gary Cooper. He tells us that his mother, Bitsy, was also beautiful, describing her as a “willowy blond stunner”. He recognized early on that he was not a competitive person, but Bitsy told him not to worry about that. She said, “Good-looking people didn’t have to be.” Hence, we have a man whose life plan is to get by on his looks.
As for Kathleen, in her younger years, she was a tennis player. She even considered playing tennis professionally after college, especially when a tennis scout, Randy Roman, saw potential in her. But fearing that she was not actually good enough to be a winner in the sport, she chose the safer bet, marriage to Virgil.
In 1942, in her pre-college days as a tennis player, she took lessons from a man named Billy Blasco. She was a junior in high school and he was a twenty-one-year-old foreign student from Czechoslovakia. His father was a famous Czech tennis champion who had played in the Olympics in 1908. Now, the dad and the rest of Billy’s Jewish family were unable to leave Europe. Billy taught Kathleen his father’s famous move, which the dad called, “The Most.”
Billy said the word “most” in Czech meant bridge. And thus we start to find references to bridges in the book. The city Billy was from was famous for having a bridge that was blown up in World War I, with people trapped on it, people who died just walking home. It was then rebuilt and blown up again in World War II. Additionally, there is a bridge in Virgil’s past.
When Billy asks Kathleen to state what a bridge does, she says it covers water. He adds to her answer saying it is a passage, but it can also be a trap as it was for the people in his home town.
Billy teaches Kathleen how to use The Most in her tennis game. He tells her to use it sparingly so it wouldn’t be copied or predicted. It worked for Billy’s father, bringing him victory in every match he used it. Ultimately, it worked for Kathleen in her brief tennis career as well. And now she is going to use elements of it to resolve the many problems we have learned about in her marriage.
I will borrow from Simon & Garfunkel and call this book a bridge over troubled waters in the lives of both Virgil and Kathleen. Will “The Most” prove to be a passage or a trap? You’ll have to read the book to see.
And very cryptically, let me conclude with this: Sputnik 2 launched on the same day as this marital standoff. It’s very cool how beautifully that fact works in this story.
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