My morning was made, and the maid was Ellen Lockwood. She was showing up for a swim, as she did, early, many mornings of a couple of summers I spent working at the Detroit Golf Club swimming pool. As she often did, if I was out around the pool, perhaps hosing down the concrete around the pool, or vacuuming the bottom, as I usually did first thing in the morning, she veered away from a straight line between her home upon the links and the door of the clubhouse to give me a cheery good morning. A child of the rich, certainly. It went without saying. Only the rich could maintain those broad links within the city limits. Only the rich could afford a house overlooking the links. However, she was polite without being stand-offish, pleasant without being silly, friendly without condescension. An ideal young lady, fourteen or fifteen years of age, and I thought she had the face of an angel.
Back at the desk near the door to the pool, I expected her to come by in her bright blue knitted Jantzen bathing suit, but when she came through from the ladies locker room, it was in something else.
"My wool suit was still wet, but, thank goodness, I had this rubber suit from last year". She dropped her terry cloth robe over a chair near the shallow end, and walked to the ladder for the three meter diving board. She was about to start her swim in her usual way, a nice swan dive into a quiet pool, something I always made sure not to miss.
A creditable dive, not much splash, a little heap of bubbles as she disappeared, but something was wrong. She was not coming up and there was something white in the rapidly dissipating bubbles. After a few seconds, there was Ellen, over at the corner of the pool by the ladder, but showing no signs of getting out of the pool or leaving the ladder. It dawned on me what the object at the point of Ellen's entrance into the water was. As I picked up the robe and started toward where she was staying in the water, it became quite evident that most, probably all, of the rubber suit was still out in the middle of the pool, and she would be very happy to simply have the robe thrown into the water near her.
As I left the scene, very obviously not watching, I could hear her thrash her way into the robe while she was still in the water. When I was sure that she was decent, I went in after the suit. It had split down the middle, broken the shoulder straps, and peeled off all in one piece. Ellen was not discouraged. A few minutes later she was back again, in her wet blue Jantzen.
Not a great rescue, you say? Perhaps not, but a bond was created that I cherished as long as I worked at the swimming pool, and apparently, in some degree, for the next sixty-three years, or I wouldn't have decided to tell you this story.