Mrs. Tannenbaume hung up. “Ski, what happens if we lose the plant?”
Ski let out a long whistle. “Oh, no, we don’t want to do that. Not in this weather.”
So Mrs. Tannenbaume called the chief in his cabin.
“Hullo,” the chief answered, not sounding very good at all.
“Chief. Get down to the engine room. Now! The engineers are about to lose the plant.”
“Hullo.”
“Chief! This is the supernumerary! I said go below!”
“Hullo.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume hung up and told Ski to go wake up the chief. “Call him ‘Handsome Smooth.’”
Ski went down below and gently rubbed the chief ‘s shoulders as he lay asleep in bed.
“Come on, Handsome Smooth.”
The steward happened to walk in just then with the chief ‘s Benadryl. Ski looked up and saw the steward standing there.
“It’s not what you think,” Ski protested.
“Not my business,” the steward said, backing out the door. “I’ll just leave you two lovebirds alone.”
Ski scrambled up and ran down the passageway after him, trying to explain that he was only doing as he was told.
Mrs. Tannenbaume was back in the radio shack now. She was not very happy with Sparks’s progress.
“Duh- duh- duh- duh . . . ”
Mrs. Tannenbaume hip-checked Sparks out of the way and grabbed the mic. “Yoo Hoo!”
A voice broke in over the SSB. “United States Coast Guard back to the station calling.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume had no idea how to make a distress call. She did not know the ship’s coordinates, or its call sign, or even, for that matter, the exact nature of their distress. She just knew that she was in the middle of a storm and wanted no part of it.
“Yoo Hoo!”
“United States Coast Guard back to the station calling. Repeat, what is the name of the station calling?”
“This is the Motor Vessel God is Able.”
“Motor Vessel God is Able, United States Coast Guard. What type of vessel are you?”
“We’re a ‘tween decker.”
“God is Able, what is the nature of your distress?”
“We’re rocking and rolling like crazy.”
“God is Able, do you have any engineers on board?”
“Yeah. But they’re afraid of breaking their nails.”
“God is Able, did you say nails? Are you in need of spare parts?”
“Well, we are running low on nail polish.”
“God is Able, stand by.” Long pause. “God is Able, do you require a pilot?”
“Yeah, but we ran out of cigarettes.”
“God is Able, United States Coast Guard, say again.”
“I say we have no cigarettes but we’ve got plenty of hot towels.”
“God is Able, stand by.” Another long pause. “God is Able, channel 16 is a hailing and distress frequency only. Please take your business to a working channel. United States Coast Guard, out. ”
Captain Tannenbaume entered the wheelhouse just as the God is Able was passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. His appearance took his mother aback.
“Sonny! You look so rested. You look like a teenager.”
Captain Tannenbaume did not want anybody making a fuss over his appearance, mostly because he’d then have to account for his disappearance. “You’ve always told me I had a youthful look, Mother.”
“But not like this, sonny. You look like a teenager. You look like—”
Captain Tannenbaume put up his hand to stop his mother. He looked around the bridge. “Where’s Sylvia?”
“Uh . . . ” Mrs. Tannenbaume made a show of looking around the bridge. “Oh, is Sylvia not up here?”
Captain Tannenbaume was relieved that his wife was not on the bridge. And he did not have the least interest in where she might be.
“I hope there are no hard feelings about my taking the conn from you last night.”
“No problem whatsoever.”
“Good.”
“The rocking and rolling was starting to get to me, to tell you the truth. I’m sort of glad you took the conn. What was it that you did? Heaving up?”
Captain Tannenbaumed laughed at his mother’s malapropism. “Heaving to, Mother. It’s called ‘heaving to.’ In a storm, to ease the rolling, you put the waves directly on the bow. Then you keep just enough revs on the engine to hold her there. The ship’ll pitch a little, but it’s a whole lot better than taking twenty-degree rolls.”
“You can say that again.”
Captain Tannenbaume walked out to the bridge wing and looked around. New York. He was finally home. And he was home to stay, too. The idea of being superintendent of the academy had finally gotten a grip on him. Especially now, knowing that Mitzi was going to be his secretary. And who knew? Maybe she’d become more than his secretary. The thing with Sylvia had been a mistake—he already admitted that to himself. Thank goodness Sylvia recognized it, too. Oh, he knew all about the shampoos she was giving the second. Word gets around on a ship after all.
Mrs. Tannenbaume came out to the bridge wing where her sonny boy was standing.
“Well, Mother. Tomorrow’s the big day. The unveiling of the monument. Have you talked to the Commodore? Do I get sworn in as superintendent before or after the big event?”
“The Commodore never mentioned anything about that. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume looked up at her sonny. “Oh, sonny boy. I’m so proud of you. Think about it. After all these years, you’re finally going to be accepted into kings Point. It seems like a dream.”
“I’ll admit it does feel too good to be true. I owe it all to the Commodore, and I’ve never even met the man.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said at the mention of the Commodore. “You’re in for a treat.”
“So I gather. Mitzi’s been telling me about him.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume felt a pang of anxiety. That their lives were in the Commodore’s hands was making her increasingly uneasy. There was something about the man she did not trust. She knew that he was far too self-absorbed to advance anyone’s career but his own. But at this stage in the game, what could the Commodore do to upset the apple cart? Mrs. Tannenbaume knew that the Board of Directors had approved her sonny as the next superintendent. And she knew that Mogie wanted a Jew in that position.
Oh, yes, there is the Jewish thing to worry about. She’d almost forgotten about that. Her only hope was that a little bit of Mitzi had rubbed off on her sonny after all of their time together these last few days.
What Captain Tannenbaume said next put Mrs.Tannenbaume more at ease. It was almost as if he had been reading her mind.
“To tell you the truth, he sounds a little meshuggeneh. Almost like he has to be the big maccachah all the time.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume looked up at her handsome, youthful son. “Oy, sonny, you’re going to be just fine.”
Captain Tannenbaume missed his mother’s vote of confidence. He was busy looking up at the stack. More to the point, he was looking up at the black smoke that was pouring out of the stack. It was the acrid smell more than the smoke itself that alerted him to a problem. Bad fuel. That’s because it was the last of the fuel—the dregs, the sludge-like gunk that sinks to the bottom and never gets used. Unless, of course, there is nothing left to use. Captain Tannenbaume heard the phone ringing in the wheelhouse but he didn’t need any engineer to tell him what had just happened.
The God is Able had just run out of fuel.
The ship was coming up on the Stapleton anchorage in the upper bay. For a moment, Captain Tannenbaume thought he might be able to steer his beat-up old ‘tween decker into the anchorage and simply drop the hook. But such luck was not to be. A car carrier—a big, boxy, notoriously-difficult-to-maneuver ship —bore down on the anchorage from the north.
The two ships met in the middle of the anchorage in the way that two ships are never supposed to mee
t. News helicopters were hovering above the two ships within minutes.
The collision ruined Captain Tannenbaume’s homecoming, as collisions tend to do. His long career as a sea captain was over, no one had to tell him that. And his new career as superintendent was over before it even started, and no one had to tell him that either.
LIKE A MOTH TO A FLAME
It took a while, but Mrs. Tannenbaume finally talked her sonny into going to the academy anyway. “We came this far,” she said, “why let something like a little collision stop us now?”
Captain Tannenbaume informed her that there was no such thing as a “little” collision, and besides, this collision was a big collision. The only consolation was that nobody was hurt. Yes, the engineers ruined their nails fighting the small fire that broke out when the fuel line ruptured, but fortunately, as soon as the fuel in the line was expended, so were the flames. And yes, the fact that the second engineer singed his hair, the very hair that Sylvia so lovingly washed every day, was the height of irony, although singed hair, like blackened fingernails, could hardly be called an injury. There were a smattering of other scrapes and bruises: the chief fell out of his bunk and smashed his face on the side table (although some said he chewed up his face the day before while shaving under the influence of Benadryl), and the steward burned his hand pretty badly when his pot of gumbo came crashing off the hot stove. Then there was Sparks who, in the middle of dismantling the Single Side Band radio—the one remaining piece of electronic equipment on board—poked a hole in his hand with an awl when the two ships came unexpectedly together.
As it turned out, Captain Tannenbaume did not have much time to think about whether or not he should proceed to the Academy as planned. It had not taken long for word to get out that the captain involved in the collision in the harbor was about to be sworn in as the next superintendent of the Merchant Marine Academy, and the irony made it too irresistible a story for the media to pass up. Several dozen vans belonging to the various news outlets were camped out waiting for Captain Tannenbaume on the pier in Brooklyn. So when a fire rescue boat dropped him, Mitzi, and his mother off at Pier 1 in Brooklyn the next day, Captain Tannenbaume was more than happy to escape into the van that was waiting there to whisk him and his companions back to the academy. Much to Mitzi’s dismay, she could not persuade the midshipman driving the van to drive over the speed limit, and the news reporters beat them back to the academy with time to spare.
Mr. Thompson, the gate guardsman, intercepted the van when it reached the main entrance. Mr. Thompson was under strict orders to escort Captain Tannenbaume directly to Wiley Hall, where the Commodore awaited his arrival. However, in his alcoholic stupor, Mr. Thompson jumped in the wrong van, and instead of escorting Captain Tannenbaume directly to the Commodore, he escorted Fox News. It was up to Miss Lambright to keep the reporters out of the Commodore’s office, where the Commodore was busy putting the finishing touches on his speech.
The Commodore had been in his office since daybreak, and his Toe Hang was still not quite right. Miss Lambright told him it was fine, but the Commodore would not listen. He explained, again, with as much patience as he could muster, that the Toe Hang was his singular chance to become “one” with his audience. He was dead in the water without an effective Toe Hang and it exasperated him that Miss Lambright could not appreciate that simple fact.
The Commodore was also unhappy with his hand gestures. They were too choppy. In fact, the Commodore fretted over every aspect of his speech. His breathing was erratic, his eye contact with the audience was jumpy. Miss Lambright told him again that she thought everything was fine and that he was going to give a great speech, but that just upset the Commodore even more.
“If you think everything is fine, my dear, then I know that I really am out of sync this morning.”
Miss Lambright left the room in tears, but the Commodore quickly coaxed her back in and asked her to comment on his pause, scan, and nod technique.
“It comes across as insincere,” Miss Lambright said.
He tried it again.
“No, it still seems unconvincing.”
“How can I develop any confidence in my speech with all of this criticism you’re giving me?”
“I really like your Toe Hang,” Miss Lambright said in a soft voice.
“You think my Toe Hang is fine? How would you know? You do not have a discerning bone in your body.”
“No, really, sir—”
“Do not coddle me, Miss Lambright! Return to your desk this moment.”
It was shortly after the Commodore sent Miss Lambright away that Fox News showed up. The truth is, Miss Lambright did not try all that hard to keep them out of the Commodore’s office.
The reporters barged in and found the Commodore in front of the mirror doing his Infinity breath. The cameraman immediately slung his clunky camera to his shoulder and began filming. When the Commodore saw the cameraman in the mirror he froze, and if it wasn’t for Mitzi, he might have remained frozen in the mirror for the entire day.
Mitzi had slipped unawares into the office through the side door and, after quickly sizing up the situation, proceeded to walk the cameraman out of the office by his ear. One look from Mitzi was all it took to make the others decide to leave the room with their colleague. When the last of the news reporters had filed out, she went back to the side door to let in Captain Tannenbaume and his mother. They stood by the door, hesitating to venture farther in without the Commodore’s permission.
It took a moment for the Commodore, in his agitated state, to realize that this was Captain Tannenbaume—the Captain Tannenbaume. He looked at Captain Tannenbaume, then at Mitzi, and then back at Tannenbaume. He knew that the only thing standing between him and his dream of being admiral was this man standing across the room from him. The Commodore felt his throat tighten. He turned to Mrs. Tannenbaume but could not bring himself to ask if this was her son. All he could manage was a raise of his eyebrows.
“Yes,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said, breaking the eerie silence. “This is my sonny boy.”
The Commodore went to Captain Tannenbaume like a moth to a flame. He stood before him and, without addressing him, inspected his person. It distressed the Commodore to find that Captain Tannenbaume was so youthful in appearance. The man did not have a gray hair on his head. And his skin! How on earth was his skin so smooth after all those years at sea? To compound the Commodore’s distress, he found that if he did not stand up as straight as possible, his counterpart might even be a smidgen taller than he. Captain Tannenbaume’s jaw was firm and he seemed well muscled under his khaki uniform. The Commodore sensed that Tannenbaume was well aware of his superior physical attributes. The man exudes confidence. Or is it arrogance? Captain Tannenbaume’s steely eyes unnerved the Commodore.
Well, two could play that game. The Commodore stepped an inch closer to Tannenbaume—they were now nose-to-nose—and stared deep into his eyes. He would penetrate this man’s soul with his gaze, he determined. We shall see how long he can take it.
But Captain Tannenbaume could take it for a long time.
It was, ultimately, the Commodore who looked away first. And then his knees went the way of his eyes.
The Commodore was not expecting this. He was not expecting this at all. What with Miss Lambright’s rudeness, the intrusion of the news reporters, and now this—why, his morning was not going at all as he had planned.
The Commodore broke away and left Captain Tannenbaume without ever having uttered a word.
Captain Tannenbaume walked after him. “I’m Mort Tannenbaume,” he said, to the Commodore’s back as the Commodore walked over to the window.
The Commodore ignored him and kept his back to everyone while he stared out the window. A deep breath, as deep a breath as he could muster, made him feel a little better. Looking out the window made him feel better too, the way a seasick sailor feels better when he keeps his eyes glued to the horizon. In the distance, by Eldridge Pool, was the monument, still un
der wraps, and the white bleachers the groundsmen had set up for the unveiling. The day was bright, the air clean and cloudless with just a hint of a breeze blowing out of the northwest. In his mind’s eye, the Commodore envisioned the unveiling. He heard the crowd gasp at the sight of their bronze hero, the way the sun glinted off Edwin’s square jaw, the gleam in Edwin’s eyes. He had visualized this day for so long now that he knew precisely how it would all turn out.
But he had not foreseen all of these distractions. He had not envisioned this at all. Tannenbaume was certainly not the man he had expected. He had had no idea the man possessed such corporeal superiority. And he also could never have foreseen all of the unwanted attention Tannenbaume would bring with him that morning. Now, instead of a tightly controlled guest list, a slew of unsavory news hacks would also be at the ceremony. Who knew how many people would be there? Their very presence would surely spoil Edwin’s big day.
The Commodore resolved that the man would not ruin Edwin’s day. He would not allow it. He would personally ban Tannenbaume from attending the unveiling. And with no Captain Tannenbaume in attendance, there would be no news reporters—at least not the unwanted ones. No, he had not practiced his speech, had not worked on himself in all areas of self-improvement simply to have Tannenbaume be the center of attention. This was his day, not Tannenbaume’s. In fact, the Commodore had assiduously planned the day so that it would be all about him. He had choreographed everything, down to arranging for a car service to take Tannenbaume back to his ship after the Commodore revealed to Mogie that the man was a fraud.
The Commodore knew he had to finesse this one, but he was off his game this morning. This Tannenbaume was clearly an arrogant man, and the Commodore knew he had to be careful. Indeed, his instincts told him it was wiser he not talk directly to Tannenbaume right this moment.
“Ms. Paultz.”
A Commodore of Errors Page 30