Chapter Thirty-Two #2
“It was a stupid, childish thing to do, and I’ve wanted to tell that truth and to apologize to Margery, for many, many years now, but I’ve been too cowardly to do it, hiding away from the world instead.”
“My goodness.” Rutherford looked shocked, but Adele forced herself to continue on relentlessly.
“The thing that the press got wrong,” Adele said, “was that I did not intentionally throw my racket at that woman. That was an accident. I was angry, yes, I was furious, I was confused; I wanted the pill to affect her. That’s a hideous thing to say, but in that moment, I was so obsessed with winning, I threw that racket, yes, I admit that.
But I did not throw it at her. It ricocheted off the court and hit her eye.
I did a terrible thing that day, but I never, never intended to do that. ”
When she finally took a breath, she saw the disturbed look on his face. There, he had it, the full truth. The papers would go wild after this.
“Well, I have to say, you’ve rather astonished me and likely our audience, Miss Léglise. I had no idea.”
Adele looked away, not sure what to make of the feelings swirling around inside of her. Was that relief she felt, to finally get the truth out, or was that dread and fear of how everyone would now react?
She took a deep breath and hardened her face, preparing herself for Rutherford to demolish her on television.
“I was there that day,” he said, and Adele tilted her head in confusion.
“I didn’t know about the sleeping pill—I don’t think anyone did—but I witnessed the incident just as you describe it.
I tried to speak with you at the end of the match, but you were too distraught.
I saw up close everything that happened, and I saw your frustration and rage.
But I can attest that you did not throw your racket toward Margery; I saw you direct it toward the line where you asserted the ball was in—”
“It wasn’t in.” She cut him off. “That was another act of desperation.”
“But you didn’t intentionally hurt her with your racket.
I know that, and I think every other journalist on the court that day saw that too; they just chose not to report it.
You have your regrets, but my regret,” Jonathan said, and he looked at her sincerely now, “is that I didn’t fight hard enough to tell the truth about that.
I wrote the story the way I saw it, but my editor didn’t want that story; he wanted the villain and the good-girl story, the sensationalized version, the story that sparked a fire, that caused the greatest public outrage.
I was just a junior reporter, and I wrote what he wanted in the end, but I should have fought harder to print the truth, and for that I’m truly sorry. ”
Adele tried to absorb this information. She couldn’t quite believe it. Had he really been there? Was he too using this moment to assuage his guilt?
“How can you defend what I did, after what I just told you?” Adele said.
“If I had succeeded in getting an interview with you that day,” he went on, “and not just writing what was expected of me, maybe you would have told me what was really going on. I had been following your career for several months, and I noticed you had a fraught relationship with your father.”
She tried to arrange an expression of neutrality on her face, but she felt the camera zooming into her and realized she was too late.
“He was strict. Yes.” she said, sitting upright.
“If I may, he was more than strict; he was abusive,” Jonathan said.
“I noticed the way he spoke to you. He berated you in public, at tournaments, and humiliated you. You were a child when you started to compete. Most would say that he was cruel in his treatment of you. Would you agree with that statement?”
She shook her head; she couldn’t have her father’s name tarnished on television like this.
“You need to understand,” Adele said, “he was very gifted, but his life had not provided the opportunities he gave me. My father needed me to win. He could be cruel because he himself was crushed anytime that I let him down. As a child, I could see that winning made him happier, but it never lasted.” Adele paused and looked down at the floor, flooded by memories that threatened to consume her.
“Both as a child and then a young woman who knew nothing about the real world outside of tennis, except what he taught me, I knew I had to do better, always, that I always had to win, above all else, or I would lose my father.”
Adele stared past Jonathan to the framed photograph of her father and her that hung on the wall behind him, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“Adele,” Jonathan said, “did he demand too much? Was he responsible for your downfall?”
She wiped away the tear, then forced her eyes back to his and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “You would have had to ask him, but he died soon after that day.”
When the match was over, officials and Margery’s family and coach had rushed to the court along with the press. As reporters were shooed away from Margery, they turned to Adele, harassing her with questions.
“What happened today? Why were you so angry? What happened to your game? Why did you strike her?”
They closed in on her, and Adele had to push them away, feeling the breathlessness and panic rise up in her. She looked around for her father, or even her mother, to help her out of the situation, but they didn’t come.
“I didn’t mean to,” Adele had whispered. “C’était un accident.”
She watched as they carried Margery off the court, limp and fatigued.
With the energy and excitement of the match behind her, replaced instead with pain and disappointment, her body must have finally given in to the powder.
Adele wanted to shrink into herself, to disappear into the darkness that was enveloping her, to never be seen again.
A young reporter came to her side. “Adeline,” he said, “are you all right?”
She looked at him, but everything was going blurry. She needed her father, she needed him to ask her that very question. She pushed past the reporter.
“Adeline.” He jogged to keep up with her. He pressed a piece of paper into her hand. “I’m with The Times. Please contact me when things calm down.” But she threw the paper back at him and ran off the court, alone.
Adele looked up at Rutherford. “You were there that day. I remember you now.”
He nodded.
Adele was stripped of her previous years’ Wimbledon titles and shunned by the public for her horrific display of poor sportsmanship.
Margery suffered an eye injury that took months to heal, and though she did eventually return to tennis, she never won another championship.
It was a media frenzy; the papers went after Adele, calling her La Bête, La Reine Vicieuse, Le Monstre.
She couldn’t go out in public without being harassed and hounded.
Her parents retreated to their home in Nice, and Adele got as far away from it all as she could.
She left London, couldn’t bear to return to her beloved France for fear of adding to her parents’ humiliation, so she went to America to hide until she could figure out what to do next.
She wrote letter after letter to her father, begging forgiveness for her outburst and for wasting all those years he’d spent training her when she’d just thrown it all away.
She wrote to her mother, asking her to try to explain her feelings of regret to her father, but none of her letters could fully express her guilt and shame; nothing seemed sufficient, so she didn’t send a single one.
Instead, she let them pile up on her bedside table.
Three months later she read in the national paper that her father, “Beloved coach and father of disgraced former tennis champion Adeline Léglise,” had died of a heart attack.
Adele was sure she had caused his death.
And when her mother didn’t call or write to share the news or ask her to come to the funeral, she was convinced that she blamed her too.
She stayed in the quiet, almost desolate town she found on Balboa Island, and she used the last of her money to buy a small, cheap house where she wouldn’t bother anyone else, and they, hopefully wouldn’t bother her.
“I tried to reach your mother before this interview, yesterday, actually,” Rutherford said. “I was able to get in touch with her caretaker in Nice, but as you likely know, your mother is quite ill and was not available for a comment.”
“You spoke to my mother?” she asked, but it came out in a whisper.
“Only her caretaker,” he said.
At this Adele stood abruptly. “Cut,” she said, glaring at the cameraman. There was some commotion among the staff behind the lights; someone rolled their hands in circles, someone else encouraged her to sit down.
“We’re still live,” Jonathan said calmly, “but we will pause for a word from our sponsor in just a few moments.”
Adele obliged and sat back down. She was angry and wanted to know more.
What had the caretaker said? How long had her mother been sick?
She could have inquired about her mother’s health and whereabouts at any point over the past twenty-four years, and her mother could have inquired about hers, but neither had.
Now hearing this unexpected news made her desperate.
“What would you say to your father today, Adele, if you had the chance?”
The question rolled around in her mind for what felt like several long minutes, but no one urged her to respond faster, and she hoped it might be her imagination.
She could say that her father broke her, that he had ruined her, that he had crushed her spirit.
She stared at Jonathan for a moment longer and then said, “I’d tell him I forgive him. ”
At the ad break for Lucky Strike, she marched over to Jonathan.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d been in touch with my mother?” she asked.