by Ian Woollen
Despite Geneva’s fondness for skinny-dipping and Robbie and Duncan’s reputation for luring unsuspecting babysitters into their Indianapolis bomb shelter for strip poker, the island ménage à trois stayed celibate. The Wangert boys, in fact, were intimidated by Geneva physically. One incident in particular reinforced their hesitancy: Horace Parson’s annual bath.
Horace, the island mechanic, took one bath a year, in a large washtub placed in the middle of the road. Horace’s residency dated from a period when the circuit judges on the mainland offered men convicted of minor offenses a choice between jail time and relocation to Great Tusk Island. The ostensible reason for the placement of Horace’s washtub in the road was that he could easily empty the frothy wastewater into the ditch. Another reason for the public nature of Horace’s bath was his very large penis. Horace never put it on display otherwise. His annual bath had become a means by which this local phenomenon could at least be admired. It was understood that on his bath day, anyone could happen by when Horace emerged from the tub and dumped the water into the ditch. And on one of those bath days, Geneva and Robbie and Duncan rode by on their bicycles. Geneva pointed and off-handedly commented, “Biggest in the county.” Robbie and Duncan’s private assessment was that they should wait a while before putting theirs on display again.
“Their joint activities pose no romantic problem for now,” Mary wrote Rusalka, “although I did overhear Robbie and Duncan bickering about who Geneva would eventually marry. Robbie thinks it will be him, because he likes to play guitar with her, and Duncan thinks she’ll choose him, because he likes to bushwhack in the swamp. The funny thing is, Geneva herself seems more interested in Anthony, but he’s out sailing all day and won’t have anything to do with her.”
For Mary, personally, the island summers were a time to indulge her bookishness. She ignored her mother’s urging to plant a ‘Victory in Vietnam’ garden. She had several books going at once. A porch book, a hammock book, a fireplace book, a beach book.
Back in Indianapolis, Rusalka Jones perused Book-of-the-Month Club selections and sent along gossipy letters about her favorite page-turners and about suspected affairs among the Indianapolis Ladies’ Literary Salon. Rusalka was now proudly a member. She did not mention anything about supplying Ward with Dexedrine.
Anthony Wangert read non-fiction exclusively. His style of bookishness, one at a time, cover to cover, and always in the same chair parked at the corner of the porch at least gave Mary something to talk about with her teenage son. He was very serious about international politics and bomb diplomacy. Supper conversations focused on Brezhnev’s takeover and George Kennan’s Containment Policy.
“Did you ever see Stalin when you were in Moscow? Did you ever meet Ambassador Bolin?” Anthony demanded of his mother.
Mary questioned her decision not to tell him about his true parentage. “A different kind of Containment Policy,” she noted in a letter to Ward. She struggled with doubts about the psychological effects on her son of not knowing his real father. She dared not write much about this in her letters to Ward, in case the boys uncovered them. And she feared Ward would take it wrong.
In the summer before Anthony went off to board, as all Wangerts must, at the Rokeby School in Connecticut, Mary felt compelled to barrage her firstborn with motherly attention, usually on their walks to view the surf at Boom Beach.
“Are you sure you feel ready for boarding school?” Mary asked, “I mean, we could talk to Daddy, if you didn’t want to start till next year. A lot of boys don’t start till their sophomore year, because many elementary schools in New England go through the ninth grade.”
“It’s okay,” Anthony said, “I’m ready. I haven’t wet the bed in a long time. I learned that it takes five hours for liquid to pass through the system, so if I don’t drink anything after four p.m. I’m okay.”
“What about the all-male aspect of Rokeby?” Mary asked.
Anthony said, “Don’t take this wrong, Mother. Basically the Wangert family is a boys’ club. I’m kind of used to it.”
Mary paused to collect a few blueberries. They each carried a jar to gather fruit for the next morning’s muffins.
“Grandpa Fred and Loretta are going to miss you,” she said.
“I promised them I’d write and call every week. And Grandpa Fred said they’d come out to see me.”
“What if you get lonely?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Mother, I’m sort of a loner anyway.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. I’ll be okay,” Anthony insisted.
Mary warned, “A lot of those teachers at boarding school are mean, strict, crusty, old bachelors.”
“They can’t be any crustier than Grandpa Fred.”
“True,” Mary conceded, “but what if something happens unexpected?”
“UnexpectedLY,” Anthony corrected her.
“Thank you, smarty-pants,” Mary said.
“Like what?” Anthony asked.
“What if you discover something about yourself that you didn’t know? That you’re not who you think you are. I know you’re confident and mature in many ways. But sometimes we discover sides of ourselves. For example, when I went away to Moscow—”
“What? What happened in Moscow?” Anthony pressed. “Were you a secret agent?”
“No, I was a starry-eyed Midwesterner out to see the big world and I discovered it could be a cold place,” Mary answered, and changed the subject to fonder memories of working on her high-school newspaper.
On their walks Mary repeatedly advocated for Anthony to sign up to work on the Rokeby student newspaper. “It’s fun. You’ll automatically make friends.”
As further encouragement, Mary invited her journalist friend, Breezy Merritt, out for another visit. Unlike Ward, who seemed to be losing touch with many of his Yale classmates, Mary spent her summers on Great Tusk nurturing her college pal friendships. Usually reticent about displaying her married wealth, Mary enjoyed treating her Vassar dearies to lavish lobster bake weekends.
Breezy arrived on her sea plane with an apprenticeship plan for Anthony. After publishing the article about Johnny, she had gone on to become an editor for the Bangor newspaper. Her marital status was still single. Anthony had never met a grownup who so loudly championed an unmarried existence. “I don’t need a husband to light my stove,” she said.
Anthony noticed waves of hooting laughter from his mother that he rarely heard in Indianapolis. He found her in the kitchen with Breezy stirring a bisque, and the two of them recruited Anthony into helping on an article about the Great Tusk old-timers who had sailed as crew members in the early America’s Cup races.
Sailing was Anthony’s sport, so he couldn’t refuse. Anthony’s highest form of praise for anything was, “I like the cut of her jib.” He was popular with the local yacht owners, because he followed orders. Reefed sails promptly and did not lose winch handles overboard. He trimmed mainsheets snugly and snared moorings on the first pass.
Anthony went along with Breezy’s idea for the article, though he doubted she would get much. On his own, he had already tried unsuccessfully to inspire the old sailors to open up. “You’ll be lucky to get one or two words,” he warned.
Breezy replied, “Maybe I can teach you a bit about interviewing.”
Anthony soon understood how she got her nickname. They sat down with Marsden, who had crewed aboard Resolute in 1920, the last race in New York Harbor. Before she even broached the subject of his America’s Cup experience, Breezy got him going about the weather, his flower boxes, and wood carvings. Without ever looking down at her notepad, always maintaining eye contact with Marsden’s rheumy, reminiscent stare, she ended up with pages about the improbable come-from-behind triumph over “that poor limey Lipton” who was so angry over his loss that he had his boat, Shamrock IV, cut up into kindling.
Anthony learned to decipher Breezy’s shorthand scrawl and helped her type up the notes from their inter
view with Ralph Eaton, who was the helmsman on the Enterprise in 1930. Ralph particularly liked Breezy reaching over and stroking his forearm to induce further recall. Enterprise was a J-Class boat, designed by a Yank who introduced the use of winches, which “the soggy Brits thought un-seamanlike, and we won in four straight.”
With his own Brownie camera, Anthony photographed the spinnaker tattoos on the forearms of Miss Lizzie’s brother, Gooden, who handled the first use of the spinnaker, nicknamed ‘Mae West,’ on the Rainbow in 1934. Gooden was known to dine on stewed cormorant, a detail Breezy used to get him talking about other local delicacies.
Breezy gave Anthony a photo credit and also included him on the byline when their article appeared in the fat Sunday edition of the Bangor Daily News. So far, Mary’s plan was a success. Anthony admitted to his mother, “In Indianapolis I often feel like world events happen a world away, but now I realize that a journalist can find news anywhere.”
However, events took a strange turn. Angry letters to the editor arrived from elderly sailors over in Stonington who claimed that Breezy Merritt had been hoodwinked by the drunks on Great Tusk, and everyone knew the best America’s Cup crewmen hailed from Stonington, and that Gooden had notoriously muffed the spinnakers on Rainbow in 1934, the year the English challenger came the closest to winning.
Breezy and Anthony paid a call on Marsden at the store. “This mess is just a part of the rivalry between the Stonington and Great Tusk fishermen,” he said. He suggested the best way to resolve it would be for the Bangor Daily News to sponsor a put-up or shut-up race between the old-timers.
Breezy and the owners of the Bangor Daily News liked that idea. Mary got Ward involved from a distance. He contacted a Yale classmate of his father’s, a boatyard owner in Bar Harbor who offered the use of two Concordias that had been sailed over from Bremen for safe-keeping before WWII, but their owners never returned.
The course was set at two laps around Great Tusk. The rules: no sailor could be under seventy years of age, and no sailor could step aboard until the start. They would man identical boats, sight unseen. Word leaked out and tourists came from as far away as Boston. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, until race day dawned with twenty-knot winds blowing hard out of the northeast, which Anthony knew would only get worse.
Mary and Breezy and quite a few others feared disaster. They appealed to the Great Tuskers to cancel, so that nobody would get hurt. They appealed to the Stoningtons to reschedule for next year. They appealed to the boatyard owner, who said, “The legal issues surrounding the Concordias’ provenance are such that, insurance-wise, they are worth more to me sunk than afloat.”
No need here to recount the event, and its photo finish, known up and down the coast as the first Retired Crewman’s Race. What is of note: in addition to interviewing techniques, Anthony learned that a journalist who is willing to stick his or her nose in far enough can kick up one heck of a fuss.
Chapter 25
The Dark Star
He Who Remains Classified savored the reports on this sailboat race with nostalgic delight. Installed in a plush Ambassador’s office halfway around the globe, he devoured the monthly Wangert reports like letters from home. He recognized that they brought him a much-needed taste of the good ol’ U.S.A., during extended periods on foreign soil.
As much as he dreamed of face-to-face contact with Anthony, he realized that Mary and Ward were giving his son the kind of solid upbringing that he could never provide. He even felt a glimmer of kinship with Robbie and Duncan, whose childhood transgressions summoned memories of his own mischievousness. He’d always thought it appropriate that April Fool’s Day was his birthday.
As for Anthony’s interest in journalism, He Who Remains Classified pondered how he could anonymously help his son along in that screwy business. He didn’t much like reporters. But as a longtime fan of Edmund Burke, he begrudgingly acknowledged the role of the Fourth Estate, especially for between-the-lines data. The dour, visor-clad analysts back at Langley who pored over minute discrepancies between Izvestia and Pravda skillfully discerned, with remarkable accuracy, fissures between the Politburo and the Kremlin. That might be a good place for Anthony to start his professional career. He Who Remains Classified sent a twist-the-arm telegram to a Rokeby trustee to secure Anthony a regular column in the school newspaper.
Chapter 26
The Black Moth of Meaninglessness
After tearfully dropping Anthony off at the Rokeby School in Connecticut, Mary drove home alone, with only the dog for company. She insisted the others fly back separately. Nobody else in the car, clamoring for soda or doughnuts or a bathroom. It was both pleasant and unsettling. Mary launched into emotional monologues with Darkie the way she used to talk to Zippy, but cut herself off, realizing that she never talked to Darkie that way, and for all these years must have subconsciously forbade herself to feel close to a dog again.
She glanced frequently in the rearview mirror, as if expecting to see Anthony running after her. Maybe she wanted to see Anthony running after her. In the mirror, she also noted a faint line of gray in her hair, exactly where Loretta had one. She stopped at historical markers and scenic turn-offs, and then for no reason at all at truck-stop coffee shops.
She nursed a bottomless cup and watched the crowd for an hour. Eventually she called Ward to report another rainstorm. She insisted that she’d always hated driving in the rain, and when he claimed he didn’t know that about her, she blamed him for not paying attention.
In a joint outside Pittsburgh, a waitress asked Mary where she was headed. Mary surprised herself and the waitress with, “I’m going home to a boys’ club, where, yeah, I know they say they love me, but I’m sure taking my time about getting there.”
The waitress said, “Lady, don’t get lost.”
Mary promptly did get lost, impulsively turning south toward Washington, D.C., blindly determined to act out a scene from a recent bad dream: barging into the State Department building, not knowing where to find the office of Anthony’s father, marching up and down the broad hallways shouting his name and demanding child-support payments.
Mary came to her senses and changed course, trying to find the old highway that ran parallel to the railroad tracks she and Ward had travelled back and forth to college. Speeding alongside a lumbering coal train that was actually heading into West Virginia, Mary waved to the track bed and blew a kiss. She spoke aloud to Darkie again. “I remember my mother always repeating, ‘life is rich and full, oh, life is rich and full’ and I thought that was just an adage. Now I know what she really meant: ‘One more thing, and I’m going to flip.’ ”
Crossing the border into Ohio, Mary picked up a hitchhiker. Two hitchhikers. A teenage couple dressed in tie-dyed shirts. They tossed their packs in the backseat and piled in up front with Mary, thanking her profusely for the ride. High school graduates, they had spent the summer detasseling corn to make enough money for a romantic journey west.
Mary imagined herself phoning Ward. “Sorry, I’ll be a few more days getting home. I’m taking a couple of young lovers, possibly even more crazy than we were, out to California.”
She said, apologetically, to her riders, “I can only get you as far as Indianapolis.”
The gray City-County Building loomed on the horizon. The city’s first skyscraper. “An ugly attempt to keep the town up to date,” Ward grumbled. He joined his in-laws and Mary for a welcome-home drink and jointly bemoaned the needless destruction of the old City Hall, but he resisted Mary’s suggestion to write a letter to the editor. Despite Ward’s efforts, Wangert Public Relations failed to get a piece of the action on the contractor RFPs.
“Wangert Public Relations does not get involved in politics, other than as an intermediary. We have to be seen as neutral. I’ve explained this to you before. Governor Roscoe laid down that law a long time ago,” Ward spouted.
Something was different about Ward, other than his receding hairline. Mary couldn’t put a finger on it
. Maybe it was the effect of Anthony’s departure for boarding school on the Wangert Boys’ Club. The dog moaned and scratched at Anthony’s bedroom door. His absence certainly hit Robbie and Duncan harder than anticipated. They insisted on using Anthony’s bedroom for their nightly homework, claiming they wanted to soak up his “smartness.” And maybe Ward’s preoccupied demeanor had nothing to do with Anthony’s absence, which worried Mary in a different way, as if Anthony was now a closed chapter between them.
At bedtime, sipping brandy nightcaps, Mary and Ward continued to improvise developments between Lubya and Mikel and the diplomat’s estate. The content became more fantastical. A Russian nesting doll, its tiniest inside member, clawed its way to freedom and informed the diplomat of an imminent threat from an angry creditor. A winter with so much snow that the entire village went colorblind. An impoverished church congregation who attracted new members by starting a nudist colony. It was as if Mary and Ward were trying to share coded information that couldn’t be expressed otherwise.
Until Mary found the Dexedrine.
“What are these pills in your sock drawer?” Mary demanded. She was putting away laundry and her husband was pretending to help.
“Doctor’s prescription,” Ward replied, casually.
“For what? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick. It’s for, uh, quitting smoking.” Both Ward and Mary were beginning the long effort to give up cigarettes.
Mary locked the bedroom door. “Do you think I don’t know what Dexedrine is?”
“A lot of people use it,” Ward explained, “for a boost. Rusalka and Elbert say it’s just like vitamins.”
“Since when is Rusalka your authority?” Mary asked. “Did she give these to you?”
“At first,” Ward admitted. “She noticed I was kind of down. The pills make it a lot easier to put one foot in front of the other.”