I never met Susie, although Dad mentioned her to me once or twice. She was a nurse and probably became my father’s lover during this first weekend together on Bimini. I imagine a short thirty-year-old with a pleasant face and bobbed hair, white leather shoes, a good-natured girl. I can see her sitting across from my father in the salon of the Ebb Tide while Dad ate his lunch of boiled potato and a small piece of meat, chewed slowly and remained attentive to her words, encouraged her to expound upon a difficulty in her life. Perhaps it was a disagreement with her superior at the hospital or the landlord of her building was trying to raise her rent excessively. It might have been anything. I can see my father offering to help out, make a few calls. As he spoke, his eyes were unwavering and seemed to fix her in place. Susie was flattered but also a little flustered by Abe’s attention. Although she hardly knew this man she believed that he cared.
More and more Dad was having choking episodes. Phlegm would catch in his throat and it was hard to breathe. These episodes were alarming to watch. I can see Susie quickly moving to help him and my father gesturing for her to stay put. He knew what to do. With a snapping sound Dad drove air up from his diaphragm to clear himself. He did this again and again. Once more he motioned for her to sit while he gagged and then spat up a ball of brown phlegm into his handkerchief. Then he carefully wiped his mouth. He wasn’t at all embarrassed. Soon, Abe was carefully chewing his food, and Susie had the impression that more than eating, he was nurturing himself as if he were a small child.
I can see my father asking Susie for a glass of water, this petite woman bolting from the sofa to get it. There were other simple requests during the hot afternoon of trolling, and always she jumped to do what he asked. Fishing had fallen into the background like the drone of the engines. Susie wanted to help Abe. She found herself stirred by him.
I had frequently watched men and women fall within my father’s spell. It was an odd thing. As my father grew older and more frail, his magnetism and power increased. A gesture, a nod or a grimace was enough to spur people to jump, to laugh, to agree. His ability to exercise his will, to sell, achieved a near perfect economy of effort.
Tail Wrapped
DESPITE PRAYER AND VARIOUS ELABORATE WASHING RITUALS, I would feel illness close upon me like a dark storm. It could happen day or night, lying in bed, walking with a friend or watching a tense basketball game at the Garden. Any manifestation of disease might set me off. A man sitting next to me with a lump in his arm or an article in the newspaper about a dying actor would precipitate a crisis in my life. In an instant my body was covered with the rancid sweat of fear. Death was pointed my way. The constant threat of illness created a new internal logic: Doctors became the agents of bad news. I avoided being around them or even making eye contact when I was forced to be in the same room. I avoided friendships with the children of physicians lest I run into their parents. I steered clear of the news sections of papers like germ-filled rooms. But sometimes even the sports pages described diseased athletes. My eyes would shoot away from dire sentences about stars of the outfield or back court struck down in their prime by leukemia or testicular cancer.
The princess who could feel the pea beneath her mattresses had nothing over me. The faintest ache or twinge had dark meaning and swelling importance. I was forever prodding, testing, discovering my aching ribs or that my jaw hurt to open, the glands under my arms were bigger than usual. My intestines were bloated. The Clinic had missed a few cells of disease. Now it was growing.
One night I was up late finishing a report for school when I went to the bathroom and found a lump in my scrotum. Soon this small nodule between my fingers began to throb. The pain quickly spread until my world itself was this menacing discomfort, my demise.
In the first light of dawn I hailed a cab and raced down the West Side Highway toward my father. I tried to restrain my hysteria as I pounded on his door at the Concord. Why wasn’t he coming? Finally Dad opened the door an inch or so but the chain remained latched. He was alarmed by the commotion. I pleaded with him to let me in. But he kept insisting that it was too early, I should come back about nine. I could not believe he would turn me away. I left the door feeling confused and miserable. I sat in a dreary coffee shop on Second Avenue staring out the window.
Shortly before nine I was at his door again. My father was in his robe and had a sheepish expression. Kate, his secretary for a dozen years, was sitting in an armchair in the front room. She was also wearing a robe and her graying hair was badly disheveled. After an awkward silence we took refuge in our old factory banter. I asked about the job they were working on for Ruby and she answered that blueprints were just about finished by the engineering department. Things were moving along. That’s terrific. My father’s bony leg stuck out from the crack in his bathrobe. None of us was prepared for this. Kate looked out the grimy window at the traffic moving on Third Avenue.
Dad and I walked into the bedroom and I dropped my pants. For a moment my father held my testicle in his fingers, worked his way to the lumpiness and rolled it like tough macaroni. He shrugged and shook his head. “Why don’t you see a doctor?”
This hit me like electricity. I paced back and forth. What’s the big deal? he said. I don’t think he ever realized that for me doctors were shamans. They could kill me with words and innuendo, plant seeds of terror that would take hold months later. I told him finally that I wanted to see Dr. Nelson in Great Neck. He had saved my father on a hundred desperate nights. He was the only one I trusted.
At last my father agreed to the extravagant idea of driving all the way out to Great Neck to see the old doctor. He asked me to stay in the bedroom for a minute while he talked with Kate. The instant he left I turned down the blanket of the double bed and searched the sheets. I quickly found a small round damp spot as though someone had spit and without hesitating I smelled the spot, my nose grazing the cool sheets and the small dampness, surprisingly a neutral smell, next to nothing.
When I came back into the front room, Kate pulled the brush from her hair and avoided my earthy gaze. In her increased wakefulness she was entirely forlorn. But I knew that my balls were fine even before leaving for Great Neck and my last visit with the great healer of my father. I was swelling with well-being.
In this manner my life swung between the blackest illness and manic health. I was thankful for good times and never knew when I would be blindsided. Dad was my lifeline. He always had the answers. Sometimes he brought me to doctors, but often just a few words from him were enough to return me to Riverdale reenergized to hunt the fervent breasts of high school girls, to revel in the melancholia of Keats and Kerouac and to perfect my jump shot at dusk beside the Hudson River. I knew that as long as he lived, I would survive.
Within the course of my last year and a half in high school, all of the families of I.R.’s children had broken apart, the grand houses on Long Island were sold. No more pools, tennis courts and quiet moorings in Great Neck Estates Park; cousins had moved off somewhere, we were all in new schools and rarely heard from one another. Alfred was dead and within a few months Laurie remarried and family members gossiped darkly that this new husband must have been her longtime lover.
If you looked up from the sidewalk at the Globe showroom on 40th Street, the windows were blackened and smudged. The luscious secretaries were no longer directing customers through rooms of infinite fixtures. Globe was out of the huge Maspeth factory. To me this was the most astonishing change. On Friday evenings there was no longer a flood of Globe workers pouring onto Flushing Avenue heading for families and bars and ball games with fists of Grandpa’s dollars.
But my dad was at the Concord Hotel landing jobs. He was my steady compass, proof that we were still on course. Just the sound of his raspy voice on the phone, a little bullying or dismissing, gave me purchase. Dad still knew the right person to call for courtside seats for the Celtic game or airplane tickets to Florida when all the flights were booked. He was so solid. Fixtures remained our glory. F
ixtures and big fish. I dreamed of thousand-pound blue marlin cruising off the north end of Bimini in front of George Albert Lyon’s majestic home, where he, Ernest Hemingway and Mike Lerner had toasted the sunset with mixed drinks and stories about their ten-hour battles on the blue ocean.
But more and more I began to define myself within arguments I had with my father. While he smirked: Get with it, I’d tell him my ideas about Raymond Radiquet and Keats. I’d talk about Dylan Thomas and the greatness of mutability. Dad, that means the passage of time. He made a bigger smirk and I’d use some word like “pathos” he didn’t know. Stupid kid. I could never have moved away from him except that he was there, luring me back.
Dad, I’m thinking of going to Kenyon College in Ohio, I said, bracing for his anger. To study literature. He nodded a couple of times. You know, they have a top English department at Kenyon. Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom. I tossed out names I knew nothing about.
So you’re a real big shot, he answered. What’s wrong with Harvard? It’s just around the corner from Celia’s house. Is Harvard so goddamned bad?
Dad, I don’t have the grades for Harvard. I’d never get in.
That’s not your concern, he snapped. You just have to fill out the frig’n application.
I don’t know, I said. Dad scowled: Are you nuts? His eyes bulged with incredulity. I knew he could pick up the phone and take care of it. I was tempted. But Kenyon struck a chord, and I figured what’s the harm in trying. I could always transfer. Harvard wasn’t going anywhere. Dad could always make a phone call.
Some weeks later I visited him again at the Concord and he brought up a conversation with his sister. He had been feeling under the weather, his back was out, and when Celia had called, Dad couldn’t stand and had to crawl to pick up the phone. Celia had said to him, Abe, you don’t have to live like this anymore, in a hotel. Come home. I can take care of you. Your family is here in Cambridge. As Dad spoke, I wasn’t sure where he was going with this and I thought, What’s wrong with her? Doesn’t Cele understand the deals he has in the air, what Abe Waitzkin has accomplished in New York?
Celia invited Abe to move back into the house in Cambridge, to have meals at her place on the second floor and share the downstairs with his dad, who was now old and sick. Abe, you can work for Lee, she had said. It’s your business.
How ridiculous. Lee Products was hardly more than a garage and had a workforce of only six or seven men. The little shop couldn’t manufacture one of his orders in fifteen years. I looked at my father for reassurance. He’d always told me that his sister and her husband were never going to accomplish anything in business, they didn’t understand the big picture.
But this was not another occasion to commiserate about his father and brother-in-law’s small-mindedness. Dad was making plans to move back to Cambridge to work for Lee Products selling wiring troughs and electrical enclosures as he had done during his first years with Mom. He was looking forward to making a study out of the sunroom of the Fayette Street house, where he’d played with blocks as a little boy, put in a color television.
Dad had already convinced Alan Fischbach to take on Kate as his private secretary. He paused so I could appreciate the loftiness of this legacy. Kate Turner was going to sit at Alan’s side at the very top of Fischbach and Moore.
I was speechless. How could he go back to Cambridge? After so many big deals. The UN, the Socony Building. Aqueduct Race Track. What about the lighting business? How could he go back to that droopy house and his sick father who didn’t understand selling? Wouldn’t he lose all of his connections? What about the Bahamas?
Loverman
ONE EVENING ON BIMINI I CAME TO THE COMPLEAT ANGLER WITH Dad, who was still on the mend from major surgery. While he sat outside on the porch I walked through the rooms looking at pictures of Hemingway on the varnished walls—in one of my favorites he was shooting his tommy gun at a giant hammerhead—and read selections from his writing reproduced in large type. There were keenly observed moments of tremendous billfish striking the bait, of anglers strapped into the chair struggling mightily to boat marlin and tuna before the hooked fish were mutilated by sharks. The wanton plenty of the sea pulsed through all of this writing. Boxing matches on the Bimini beach were flavored by the lusty fishing that had preceded them on the blue water north of the island. This writing made me desperate with excitement, and it seemed inconceivable that the author was no longer himself plying the waves pulling baits.
Abe and Harcourt, Ozzie’s father, had sat outside on the porch and I soon joined them. These two clever, wiry men toasted the balmy evening and agreed that they were lucky to have sons who would someday take over their businesses. I had smiled at my father like a puppy. Harcourt was protective of his wounded friend as though they were both part of an elite circle. Even when he was down on his luck, my father arrived in the Bimini harbor on the bridge of his Ebb Tide like a maharaja. Although Harcourt was Bimini’s most prosperous citizen, owned the power plant and Brown’s Hotel and Marina as well as the Compleat Angler Hotel and Bar, it would not have occurred to him that his own business interests far outstripped Abe Waitzkin’s.
Soon after I left Riverdale for Kenyon College, my fourteen-year-old brother ran away from home and settled in central Florida. For months Mother had no idea where he was. She was beside herself. Dad hired detectives, but they couldn’t find him. Bill worked on a farm picking cotton and eventually moved to Boca Raton, where he had his hair straightened and dyed jet black like Liz Taylor’s. In Boca he met a lady bartender also named Billy, who was twice his age and had two children. Billy believed my brother was eighteen. They fell in love and Bill moved into her place. Late at night while her kids slept, they drank Jack Daniel’s. Sometimes they left the kids and walked swiftly to the beach and made love on the cool sand. Holding Billy was beautiful and sad.
After a half a year Bill decided that it was time to move on. When he left Billy she was pregnant and Bill never learned if she had had his baby. The memory of Billy haunted him. Years later he tried to find her in Boca but she had vanished.
Bill moved from Boca Raton to Bimini. By then he had managed to have his German shepherd, Black Jack, shipped south. Bill and Black Jack moved into a room on the top floor of the Bimini Hotel, which was located at the south end of North Bimini overlooking the entrance to the harbor. My brother woke in the morning to the sight of leopard rays and tiger sharks cruising past the white beach on the inside of the reef near the small boat cut.
Bimini assuaged Bill’s sense of loss and he decided this was his home. On the island he was free to indulge his love of the sea without the immense weight of his father’s fishing hardware and his brother’s conventional big game fishing ambitions. Bill quickly discovered Bimini’s magic for allowing fantasy to run free.
Living on top of the ocean, he was inspired to write the first draft of his romantic thriller, Rogue Shark, in which an eighteen-foot hammerhead wanders through the small boat cut discovering the peaceful island of Bimini. In Rogue Shark the islanders are a naïve, idle people with a gross appetite for rum and copulation. Everything changes once the savage creature develops a taste for Biminites.
Many afternoons Bill could be found sitting in a foot of water in the bay near Ansil Saunders’s house playing with a baby lemon shark or shovelnose. My brother had the knack of calming these fierce little creatures until they grew docile and allowed petting like cats. Ansil was an accomplished fisherman and fifteen years older than Bill, but still he found himself swept up in my brother’s charisma and absurd fishing schemes. Though exhausted from poling his skiff around the flats for bonefish, he and Bill spent nights fishing with handlines from the beach in front of the Bimini Hotel, where big sharks swam in with the tide. The two friends chummed the water with amberjack and bloody tuna and held their thick lines while Bill shared his ideas on the Carcharodon megalodon or Egyptian mummies or his plans to climb the ruins of Machu Picchu while taking a break from stalking large black marlin in t
he Humboldt Current off Cabo Blanco, Peru. Fishing in the blackness with the tide rushing past, the friends were braced for all of life’s adventure.
There were scores of nights when they hauled big sharks up onto the beach, the largest a twelve-foot hammerhead that they admired and then pushed back into the ocean. Another night they caught two ten-foot blacktips, and while the beasts heaved on the sand, Ansil found himself convinced by Bill to drag them a hundred yards to the Avis Club’s saltwater pool and roll them in. The following morning the two sharks appeared to be asleep on the bottom of the pool. Ansil and Bill were watching from behind a palm tree when a sleepy bather dropped his towel on a chair and took a dive into the deep end. The startled sharks came to the surface in a frenzy, racing around, smacking the walls to break free. The unnerved swimmer burst out of the pool and then stared back at the frantic sharks, shaking his head.
A producer for the popular television show The American Sportsman contacted Ansil about doing a piece on the dangerous sharks of Bimini. Soon a television crew was on the island filming the segment starring Bill and Ansil.
In one part of the show, which was Bill’s brilliant conception, the two friends stalked two large lemon sharks on the flats east of the island. When the skiff was on top of the two eight-footers, Ansil and Bill jumped onto their backs. The sharks were powerful and aggressive, and in four or five feet of water they were nearly impossible to control. As Bill and Ansil held their sharks in a bear hug, the creatures twisted and yanked their heads, tried to sink their teeth into thighs and arms. After a few minutes, half-drowned and dizzy, they let the sharks go. Back in the skiff they discovered that their bodies were skinned raw from wrestling against the whipping tails and flanks of the sharks. And to make things worse, their wounds were greased with a foul stinging slime. Bill thought this was hilarious.
The Last Marlin Page 13