The Men We Became

by Robert T. Littell

  Maurice and Mrs. Onassis presided at these dinners, though gently, somehow conjuring engaging conversation from all of us about art, books, and the day’s adventures. Mrs. O was an editor at Doubleday at that time and might mention a manuscript or book idea that intrigued her. She and Maurice loved art, and I remember a giant canvas in the dining room one year that they’d bought from a young Mexican artist in Sante Fe. One evening the topic of discussion was a question: Which two books would you bring to a deserted island to start a new civilization? I chose the U.S. Constitution and Harold and the Purple Crayon, a risky choice in that crowd, especially with Ed Schlossberg’s Einstein and Beckett: A Record of an Imaginary Discussion with Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett sitting on a table in the next room. Mrs. O, ever gracious, helped defend me against the howls of derision that rose from around the table. She said that any civilization that had the dictates of the Constitution and the imagination of Harold and the Purple Crayon would outlast Rome. How could I forget that? And she knew how to give a compliment. She’d say, as I was sitting down to dinner, “Rob, you look like a movie star again this evening.” I’d glow. She did this with everyone, as far as I could tell. Frannie still smiles at the memory of John telling her, after Caroline’s wedding, that his mother described her as the best-dressed guest at the affair. Not true, says Frannie, but kind: It was as though Mrs. O knew how worried she’d been about her mall dress and weird hat.

  After dinner we’d all move into the living room, continuing the conversation and drinking tea. John held to these traditions after his mother died. Our dinner conversations may not have been quite as elevated without her, but we always talked about a wide range of fun and interesting things. Then we’d move to the living room, light a fire, and play a game like charades or Bartlett’s Quotations. Bartlett’s, if you don’t know it, is a great game that begins when one player chooses a quote, something not too famous, from Bartlett’s Quotations. He writes the quote down on a slip of paper and then offers the name and era of the person quoted—but not the quote—to the other players. Each person makes up a likely-sounding quote, writes it down, and hands it to the leader, who reads them all out loud. Then everyone votes on which is the actual quote. If your made-up “quote” fools the most people, you win. It sounds a little intellectual, I know. But it’s not—I won a couple of times.

  Because the guest barn was a small distance from the main house, we sometimes wouldn’t see Mrs. O until dinner. Other times, though, she’d be out on the patio of the main house, reading and sunning and watching while we played volleyball or Frisbee in the yard. She enjoyed watching John with his friends, something I didn’t understand at the time but that makes sense now that I have kids. She was always completely relaxed up there. I remember walking by the patio late one morning, looking for something to do. To my surprise, Mrs. Onassis was stretched out on a chaise, her face covered with splotches of different-colored lotions. I couldn’t just stomp on by. So I stopped and said good morning, trying to think of a funny remark so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. But she wasn’t. She just struck up a conversation about the day’s activities, oblivious to the fact that she looked like an escapee from a beauty parlor. Another time she was reading on the deck while a bunch of us played touch football on the lawn. During a break in the game, while everyone went in for water, I flopped into a chair next to her and started complaining.

  “Did you see that? That was bull,” I ranted, not expecting a reply. “We need a sandbox out here for these babies.”

  I guess not everyone threw himself down next to her for a tirade, because she looked up as though she was surprised, then said, “Rob, I so love your irreverence.”

  I didn’t know that’s what I had, so I said, “With all due respect, irreverent about what?”

  Which apparently confirmed her observation. She clapped her hands together and laughed. I got up and went to get something to drink. Probably she just enjoyed being treated as a normal mom. At least once in a while.

  I remember seeing Mrs. O water-skiing off her boat one cool August afternoon, smiling and skittering about like a Cypress Garden beauty, at the age of sixty! She had strong legs and wouldn’t accept help getting back into the boat. She also had the attitude of an accomplished athlete, with the “in charge” energy of a seasoned leader. One day she chided John and me for not tying up the boat properly. It had wrestled free of its mooring after we’d used it for a quick ski and had to be towed back across the bay the next day. John naturally blamed the error on me. But Mrs. O was well aware of her son’s game. Once when we arrived late at her apartment for some reason, she admonished John, “I suppose this was Rob’s fault, too?”

  Memorial Day weekend was our traditional visit to the Vineyard—a core group went every year from graduation in 1983 through 1999. The only year we didn’t go was 1994, the year John’s mom passed away, when we went on the Fourth of July instead. (John told me, when he planned the trip, that he didn’t want to be sad anymore, that he was determined to honor his mother’s optimistic spirit.) I looked forward to every visit, loving the afternoons at the beach, the warm dinners, the hours spent playing games I never played anywhere else. John’s and my finest air guitar moments came during those evenings, when we’d stand on the weather-worn wooden steps in front of the big glass doors that opened the living room to the outside and strum along to “Pride (In the Name of Love)” by U2.

  Spending time with Marta and Efigenio was another Vineyard pleasure, and at any given moment of the day one or another of us could be found lounging in the kitchen or out in the garden. In later years, my kids, who could never remember Efigenio’s name, called him “the wise man” because he always had some startling, cool fact about the land or the sea to share. We also liked Bert Fisher, the caretaker, who lived with his family and big sweet dog, Jesse, in a house on the property. We tried Bert’s patience, though, getting cars stuck in the sand and allowing boats to slip from their moorings.

  John moved over to the main house in 1996, two years after his mother passed away. By then he and Carolyn were engaged and they took the main bedroom, with its spectacular view of the beach and ocean. John and Bert had a few run-ins about then, since Bert had an idea as to how Red Gate should be run and John did, too. They disagreed on how much brush needed to be cleared from the property, for instance, with Bert intent on making things accessible and fire-safe and John preferring a more natural approach. I never saw them openly disagree, but John got kind of grumbly sometimes. I thought he should tread lightly and told him so. Bert’s independent streak was admirable, and there was no reason to war over turf that was in as fine a shape as Red Gate was.

  One fall weekend in the mid-1980s, with nobody else up there but John, the wild turkeys, and me, we set out to test every single piece of top-grade outdoors equipment on the property. First we four-wheeled up a sandstorm in the dunes. Bert informed us that there were endangered plover nests there and that—who knew?—flattening dunes is frowned upon environmentally. Never again. The next day, in a tree-hugging state of mind, we walked down the beach to the locally famous clay cliffs, also the site of a nudist beach. There we smudged ourselves black and played Neanderthal games. We got stuck on the beach that weekend, as we did many weekends, spinning the tires of the old Jeep Wagoneer deep into the sandy road. The first time was the most embarrassing. John and I dug and pushed and floundered for two and a half hours before dejectedly trudging back to get Bert, who pulled us out with his big orange tractor. To our chagrin, he also showed us that in order to engage the four-wheel drive, you had to lock the hubs. We said, “Uh, thanks,” and pretended to look for plover nests until he was gone.

  Back in action the next morning, we canoed around Squibnocket Pond, kayaked to Menemsha through underground pipes and homemade canal locks, water-skied off the old Chris-Craft, and motored around in the runabout. In the afternoon, we windsurfed, played tennis, rode bikes, and hiked to the “love shack” that was halfway between the main house and the beach. Thi
s was an old fishing cabin with a cut-out moon on the outhouse door. Years later Bert cut John a landing strip in front of the shack for his Buckeye, a flying machine with a motor and a parachute. From this cabin we noticed a small beach on the edge of the pond, maybe thirty feet long. Bert kept a Sunfish here.

  We walked over to the boat and got a huge scare. Hanging from the mast, in an elegantly made noose, was a large black duck. We figured the local Wampanoag tribe, Native Americans who had lived in the area for thousands of years, had left it. During the 1970s and ’80s, the tribe had begun to organize itself with the goal of preserving its history and culture and reclaiming tribal lands. I don’t know if the Wampanoag had a specific beef with Mrs. Onassis, but it’s true that Red Gate lay off a road called Moshup’s Trail. Moshup is a legendary figure revered by the Wampanoag, a giant who created Martha’s Vineyard and other nearby islands and taught the people to fish and catch whales. Moshup loved the Wampanoag and shared with them his whale meat, which he fished from the ocean with his bare hands. In one story, Moshup warned the people of coming disaster in the form of the Europeans. But when the first settlers arrived, in the 1500s, the Wampanoag allowed them to stay, against Moshup’s advice. The giant walked into the waters of the bay and disappeared forever. Bert thought the black duck was a warning of sorts, one that added a little legend to Red Gate.

  One morning a big group was having breakfast when John got a call from his friend Barry Clifford, an accomplished diver whom John had worked with in salvaging the pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod. The ship had sunk in 1717 while serving as the flagship of “Black Sam” Bellamy’s flotilla of buccaneers. Barry was on the island, and although we never actually met up with him, his call inspired us to go diving that day. We scrounged up four scuba sets (it was that kind of place—if you looked, you could almost always find what you wanted) and went out for some underwater spearfishing. It was so much fun that the boys decided more diving was in order, specifically diving for lobsters at midnight off the lighthouse at Gay Head. I’m not a certified diver, so the plan was that I would pilot the boat.

  We set out after dinner, about ten P.M., carrying about 1,250 pounds of expensive and brightly colored gear. After several ship-to-shore trips in the dinghy to load the gear, we were under way. We motored at slow speed toward Menemsha, where the harbor cuts to the sea. The night was a little foggy, and after about five minutes the shoreline disappeared. We were lost. On a pond. John was at the helm, with the mutinous crew consisting of Kevin Ward, Kevin Ruff, me, and Willie Smith. Willie, the son of John’s father’s sister Jean Smith, was one of John’s favorite cousins. We saw a fair amount of him in the early nineties as he was going through and then getting over his trial for rape in 1991. John and I never discussed Willie’s trial directly, but John went out of his way to support him, both privately and publicly, even showing up at the courthouse one afternoon. Willie is maybe the smartest in that clan, as far as I could tell: quick, outwardly cynical, and funny. Now a doctor and the head of the organization Physicians Against Land Mines at the Center for International Rehabilitation, that evening he was simply adrift on the pond, like the rest of us. Progress was slow, especially after we ran aground, good news because it meant we were close to shore, bad news because we were stuck. The tide was coming in, so we knew we’d be afloat again soon, but we had no idea which direction to go. Willie and Kevin W climbed out of the boat to look for deeper water. For a good hour—and with each passing minute we laughed harder—they circled the boat, calling out the water’s depth.

  “One foot … one foot … one foot.”

  And then excitedly, “Two feet! Two feet…”

  Willie, his voice rising, “Two and a half…”

  And then with a comic thud, “Two feet, one foot, no foot.”

  Finally the tide lifted us off the bottom. We probably should have turned for home (okay, not probably, obviously), but it was nice out and we’d barely left shore. We slowly found our way out of Menemsha Harbor. As we did, the clouds vanished and the moon revealed that we were a mere quarter mile from the Gay Head lighthouse. The divers went in without incident, leaving me at the wheel. Feeling sort of alone out there on the water, I maneuvered the boat in a slow circle above the flashlights flickering thirty feet below in the relatively clear Atlantic waters.

  Fairly quickly, the moon vanished and the fog returned, thicker and, to my mind, more ominous. Since we’d just spent hours foundering in a cozy little harbor, I was already running “lost at sea” scenarios. I put the boat in neutral, grabbed an oar, and pounded the water above where the flashlights danced below. The beams of light, which had been moving north with the current, were becoming harder to see. Bouncing in the swells, I checked that the lighthouse was still in view, noting the compass heading in case we needed it to get back. I kept banging the oar on the starboard side of the boat until John finally popped out of the water. Yanking off his mask, he yelled out, “Whaaat!?”

  Fear made me concise: I noted the things we could no longer see and said we should head in. John took one look around, said, “Okay,” and promptly retrieved the other divers. They scrambled aboard with a cheerful chorus of “We’re gonna die!” as the thick fog smothered the lighthouse in a big blanket of white. And then all went black. I kept the wheel and slowly tracked back toward the harbor, a good mile away, using the compass. We’d been tediously poking along like that for maybe half an hour when we saw a lantern of some sort swinging wildly to the right of us. Someone was in distress. What luck! Perhaps we could turn our ineptitude into an act of heroism.

  We made our way toward the lamp, calling into the fog, “Are you okay?”

  Then, “Can we help you?”

  Because we really wanted to help. Alas, when we finally stopped shouting long enough to hear the response, it was not good news. About twenty-five yards from the light, which was now swinging frantically, I turned off the engine. A young man’s voice called out, “Yeah, we’re okay, we’re playing flashlight tag on the beach.”

  Then, “Are you okay? You’re heading onto the rocks.”

  A little girl who should have been in bed chimed in, “You’re gonna ram the beach. Bee-eeee careful!”

  Deflated, we muttered, “Uh, thanks,” restarted the engine, and turned the boat to hug the coastline, using the shore lights to get to the harbor. We’d been gone four and a half hours and didn’t even have a lobster to show for it. But things got worse. When we got home, we learned that the women were not amused. Daryl Hannah, who was John’s girlfriend at the time, was pacing the porch, mad as a hatter. Helen, Kevin Ward’s wife, was keeping pace with her. Frannie had gone upstairs, but not before they’d all called the Coast Guard, who were out there looking for us. We were stunned they’d made such a big deal of things. They were shocked that we were so dim-witted. They marched John inside and made him dial the Coast Guard to apologize for the alarm. But they calmed down, and soon we were all sitting around the fireplace, helping embellish the story as dawn crept near. I don’t know why, but that night, or morning really, as I lay in bed listening to the ocean, I thought for the first time that heaven might be on earth. And that the big riddle of life was to figure that fact out.

  Several years before John began working on his pilot’s license, he managed to get himself aloft in a flying contraption called a Buckeye. He bought it about 1994. A Buckeye is referred to by the manufacturer as a “powered parachute.” They say that it is “the world’s safest and easiest way to fly.” The machine consists of a triangular metal-tube frame set on two wheels, with a seat in the front and a piston motor with a fan directly behind. A foil parachute attached to the back of the frame catches the air propelled from the fan as the machine speeds along on its wheels, and the resulting lift causes the thing to get airborne. It looks like the offspring of a swamp buggy and a lawnmower. The Buckeye needs about fifty yards to take off and ten yards to land, abruptly. It attains a maximum altitude of ten thousand feet, can stay up for three hours, flies at a constant s
peed of thirty-four miles an hour—and you don’t need a license to fly it. Even if the engine dies a mile up, you’re still going to glide, at thirty-four miles per hour, to the ground safely. Of course, if something happens to the parachute, it becomes an airborne anvil of sorts, despite the craft’s “outstanding safety record.” John didn’t mess around, though, traveling to Indiana one weekend to get trained by the company’s instructors. He mastered the Buckeye quickly and loved to fly above Gay Head, circling up in the thermals with the hawks. And because he was John, he wanted to share his toy, urging everyone he knew to try it out. Nobody said yes until he asked me. It really did look quite safe to me, and I enjoy a thrill as much as the next guy.

  Frannie heard us plotting, though, and opposed the idea. She barked at me, “No way. You’re not going up in that thing. You have a kid now, remember?” (It was true, and I hadn’t forgotten.)

  We scurried around the corner, pretending we hadn’t heard her. Soon enough, we were out on the beach, driving a workhouse blue Blazer and towing the Buckeye behind us. We took it out of its aluminum hutch and set the parachute, and John carefully instructed me on the essentials of Buckeye aviation. I took a simple view of things, reasoning that I wasn’t going very high. John gave me a headset for a two-way radio, but I couldn’t really hear much. It was better that way—I’m sure his instructions would have confused me. Really, I was thinking of Larry Waters. Waters achieved his fame, and his Darwin Award, by attaching forty-five weather balloons to a lawn chair in 1982. He’d always loved the idea of flying and thought that with his homemade craft he could hover over his house for a few hours, at about thirty feet, and satisfy his dream. He brought with him several sandwiches, a six-pack of Miller Lite, and a loaded pellet gun to pop the balloons when he wanted to float back to earth. Larry lashed himself in and cut the cords anchoring the lawn chair to his Jeep. And shot up like a rocket to an altitude of 11,000 feet. It was so cold that he dropped the pellet gun. A full fourteen hours later Larry drifted into the approach corridor of Los Angeles International Airport and was reported by a United Airlines pilot, who radioed the control tower that he’d just seen “a guy in a lawn chair with a gun.” This unlikely fact was confirmed by the airport’s radar, a rescue helicopter was sent up, and Larry was towed back to land. He was immediately arrested for violating LAX airspace. As he was being led away in handcuffs, a reporter asked him why he’d done it. Larry answered, “A man can’t just sit around.”