by Peter Geye
“Do you think I’m sitting here ignorant?”
“I think you’ve always believed that what happened to you was more tragic and more meaningful than anything that ever happened to anyone else. And that’s wrong. You just couldn’t shake it, that’s all, you lugged it around like a yoke and nothing else mattered. That’s what I think.”
“You’re dead wrong about all of that. Dead goddamn wrong.”
“Then tell me why you weren’t there. Tell me why you disappeared. Tell me why Mom never had a funeral.”
Olaf looked squarely at Noah, a face full of regret if Noah judged right. “I still have her ashes,” he said.
“What?”
“They’re in the shed. They’re stowed away.”
Noah was dumbstruck.
“I can’t tell you why I wasn’t there, Noah. I can’t tell you why I disappeared or why your mother never had a funeral. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
“They’re in the shed?”
“I never knew what to do with them. What are you supposed to do with your wife’s ashes?”
Noah had no idea.
They sat quietly for a long time. The night was stunning, cooling, the sky bursting with stars. Noah watched his father doze off, his chin on his chest. Twice Vikar stood and went to the shore to drink, and twice he came back to Olaf’s feet.
Eventually he thought of Natalie. He imagined her at home, curled up on the couch in the den. She was coming here. A fact Noah found hard to imagine. Sometimes, at home, before they fell asleep, they’d lie in bed conjuring up their fantasy child—a baby boy—whose ascendance into the nighttime world of forgiveness and fantasy was like religion for them. The boy would be a prodigy, of course, but a prodigy of ordinariness. This meant a Little League career that included errors and strikeouts galore but also a zest for the game straight from the little guy’s good nature. It meant a seventh grade girlfriend and questions about her. It meant high school and the prom and ski trips up to Sugarloaf with the boy and a couple of his pals. It meant college at Dartmouth, Nat’s insistence, and law school and a job in downtown Boston where the two of them—Noah and his son—could get together for lunch on Fridays. There were no dislocations in this fantasy, no shipwrecks. And certainly no ashes stowed in the shed.
“Winter’s in that wind,” Olaf said, turning the collar of his shirt up.
His voice startled Noah from his reverie. He hadn’t noticed the outright chill in the air but felt it the moment his father mentioned it.
“You fell asleep.”
“It’s awfully damn late for me.”
Noah turned his attention back to the lake and the rippling water. Steadier now, the waves lapped gently against the dock posts and onto the beach. “Two weeks ago that sky would’ve been a circus with northern lights,” Olaf said, pointing upward. “It’s a goddamn sight.
“My first year on the Loki I used to sit watch from midnight until four. Ninety percent of the time this meant just staying awake. Sometimes I’d be up in the pilothouse, sometimes down on deck, depending on the weather and where we were. It was a boring job, boring as hell to tell the truth, but my captain that first year was a German guy named Wolfgang, a hell of a guy, smart as anyone I ever knew. He introduced me to the stars, so to speak.” Olaf nodded up at the sky. “He taught me some things about navigating. Just basic stuff, but I was hooked. He said that a true seaman could sail around the world without anything more than a watch and a sextant and the sky to guide him. I didn’t even know what a sextant was, just figured you knew where to go if you were in charge of one of those boats. I never reckoned there was any science to it. Wolf taught me how to take sun sights, how to chart our course, how to estimate our position using dead reckoning when the sky was cloudy and the shore out of sight.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Now it’s just a bunch of satellites telling you where you are and where to go. Back then it was still something beautiful to steer a ship.”
Olaf stopped talking, looked up at the sky, and pointed to different clusters of stars, marking the air with fingertips. Noah, in all his life, had never heard his father say so much at one time. He’d never heard him say half as much.
“What are you pointing at?”
Olaf looked down. “Nothing,” he said. “There was a lot of down-time on the ship, especially as a kid when I didn’t have any responsibilities outside my watch. On clear nights I used to stand on the stern deck looking out at the wake. There’re a lot of things to see in the night sky, especially on Superior. And there were a lot of reasons to be lonely, especially if you were the new kid onboard. But when you’re aching to get away, which I was, even the worst loneliness doesn’t sound too bad.
“Anyway, I got interested in what the captain was teaching me. I used to watch him take his sights, consult our charts, mark our position, do the math. After a couple seasons I had a real sense for this stuff. I could keep time in my head. I knew where we were all the time. I got good at it.
“You see there?” he asked Noah, pointing nearly straight up at a cluster of bright stars. “That’s Andromeda, you can tell by the spiraling cloudiness of it. It’ll be lower in the sky in the next month. That’s Cassiopeia to the left there. That’s Auriga there, and that’s Capella, that bright star right on the edge of that cluster. You can’t see Orion or Betelgeuse now because they’re too low on the horizon. Jesus, those stars are a long ways away. I can hardly even think about it now. But I’ll tell you what”—he coughed to clear his throat and nodded affirmatively—“I used to sail by their light—I used to sail by Andromeda’s light—and I got around just fine.”
A long silence ensued, Olaf still calculating some impossible star equation with the tip of his finger, still conducting, Noah thought it looked like, some star symphony.
“The galley would start serving breakfast at six o’clock on every ship I ever sailed. Those first couple seasons I’d sit on deck until right before chowtime, take my morning sight, then head to the galley and eat breakfast like it was meant to be eaten.” He smacked his lips. “Buttermilk pancakes drowning in syrup, eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausage, coffee, juice, fruit. Sometimes we’d even have chops or steaks. We all ate like that, all the time. It was one of the perks for living on those boats. I still remember what it felt like to be that full. I’d go back to my cabin, slide off my boots, and lie down on my bunk.” He sighed. “Didn’t have a goddamn thing to worry about in that sleep. Nothing.”
“But later,” Noah said.
“I’ve never been a good sleeper, but those mornings were pretty damn fine. After your mother and I got hitched and you came along, the sleep got a little bit tougher. I was ten years into my career when I met your mother, though. There was nothing else I could do.”
Olaf stood and stretched. “It all blends together for me now, everything before the Rag. Each of the ships and each of the years have turned out to be the same thing unless I’ve got pictures to remind me. But I’ll tell you what, my life was split the night she sank.”
FOUR
Olaf had adjourned to bed with only a nod. So many old feelings had been uncorked down on the beach, not least of which were the ones Noah had been expecting most, the anger and reproach years in the making, stirred up by the mere mention of his mother and her wanting to play piano at his wedding.
Noah had sent his father a wedding invitation as if he were a distant relative. The reply had come by way of his sister, who had told Noah their father intended to make the drive east by himself. Noah did not believe he would, but on the night before his wedding, Olaf showed up.
They held the rehearsal dinner at Natalie’s parents’ Swampscott home, a beautiful place with huge oak trees in the front yard, a deck overlooking Foster Pond in the back, and a red-brick chimney set against the clapboard siding. When Olaf stepped from his old Suburban and looked up at the three-story house, Noah felt heartsick. In order to quell the sadness he doubted his father deserved, he summoned his anger instead, put it on as if it
were a coat of arms. From the window of the foyer he could see that the old man looked presentable if rustic. His beard and hair were longer than they’d been, but they were also more kempt. The corduroy pants and rumpled chamois shirt were at least clean. Instead of boots he wore a pair of chocolate-brown, size fourteen loafers. It wouldn’t have surprised Noah to find the box they’d come in on the floor of the truck.
They met at the front door, shaking hands as they had before breakfast at the Freighter. Noah said, “Nice shoes.”
The look of smug satisfaction on the old man’s face said all Noah needed to know.
Grudgingly, Noah said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Having been cautioned about the impending and inevitable debacle, Natalie graciously ignored Noah’s warnings. She treated Olaf like her own father from the start. When she introduced him to her parents, Olaf offered them a gift.
Natalie’s mother sold real estate and presented the agent’s facade that everything was always fantastic. In fact, she was a whip-smart pessimist with a master’s degree in art history. Mr. Maier had served as an Essex County public defender for thirty years before retiring that summer. As they leaned against the granite countertops of their newly remodeled kitchen, sporting their Ralph Lauren garb, each with a long-stemmed glass of chardonnay, Noah knew the cut of their jib would not sit well with his father. In fact, he knew his father hated people like them, people who had no discernible faults, no tragedy in their lives.
“What is it?” Mrs. Maier said, withdrawing a brown bottle from the paper sack.
“This is aquavit, Linie aquavit, to be precise. Comes from Norway. I have a friend, captain’s a salty running Minnesota wheat to South Africa, he brings me a case each year.”
“This is very thoughtful, Mr. Torr.”
“This stuff has been across the equator twice. There’s caraway in it, and in order to blend the flavors, it needs the roll and pitch of the ocean waves. This bottle started out in Norway, crossed the Atlantic, come up the St. Lawrence, went back down the St. Lawrence, spent a week bound for Cape Town, then back again to Duluth. Now here it is. Won’t work for taking paint off the house, but enough of it will put the feeling fine in you.”
“Should we open it?” Natalie asked.
“Save it for a special night,” Olaf said. “There must be something else to drink around here.”
Noah led his father to the study, where two guys in tuxedos manned the bar. Olaf ordered a drink and turned his attention to the room.
“What is all this shit?” he said. “It looks like some kid’s bedroom.”
“Mr. Maier is a huge Red Sox fan. This is his memorabilia. You don’t even have to ask and he’ll tell you Johnny Pesky grew up right down the street.”
They stood silently for a few minutes while Olaf looked over the autographed baseballs and jerseys, the framed ticket stubs and bobble heads. “Well, it beats the hell out of me. To each his own, I guess.”
“Listen, he’s a really good guy. They’re all good folks. Take it easy on them.”
Olaf had already turned back to one of the bartenders and signaled for another. “Take it easy on them? What am I, a lout? Chrissakes, I’m here. I brought them a gift.”
“That was thoughtful,” Noah admitted.
Olaf quaffed the first third of his cocktail in a single, effortless pull. “Anyway, I don’t need a goddamn babysitter.”
“I know.”
“Then go mingle with your friends.”
At the end of the rehearsal dinner Olaf stood at the curb with a half-drunk beer in his paw. He had his eyes on the night sky. Noah stepped from the front door and walked down the brick footpath to say good-night.
“There isn’t a cloud in the sky and still hardly a star to be seen,” Olaf said. “But you can goddamn smell the ocean.” His words were slightly slurred. “Funny, all that time on a boat and I never saw the ocean.”
“How about I take you back to the hotel?” Noah said.
“I’m okay to get back to the hotel.”
“Really,” Noah insisted. “I can show you the town. Solveig can drive you to the wedding tomorrow.”
Olaf relented.
The silence on their short trip was broken only by the din of traffic. When they pulled up under the hotel marquee, Olaf drummed his fingers on the dash. “Why don’t you come in for a nightcap? The least I can do is buy my son a drink the night before his wedding.”
“I don’t need a drink.”
“Didn’t say you did. We’ll call it old time’s sake.”
Noah looked at his watch, thought of many reasons not to have a drink with the old man, and pulled up to have the valet park the car.
In the bar Olaf ordered twelve-year-old bourbon from the top shelf. Noah asked for beer, trying to estimate the number of cocktails the old man had put down. It didn’t seem possible a man could drink so much and still be coherent. The drinks arrived, and Olaf twirled his slowly. Tea candles flickered in small bowls of water beside ramekins of cashews on the mahogany bar. Through the curtained windows they looked onto a harbor with sailboats still in their slips.
“Natalie’s a nice gal,” Olaf said. “How she came out of that brood I can’t imagine.”
“I told you they’re decent people.”
“That is what you said.”
A piano concerto that both men knew filtered through the faint conversations taking place around them. Occasionally Noah could hear the halyard lines ringing on the masts of the boats in the harbor. Olaf finished the last of his drink and signaled for another.
After it arrived Olaf said, “Marriage, it humiliates a man.”
“What?” Noah said. He had not been expecting this.
“Makes a man less of what he is.”
Noah shook his head in complete awe of the old man’s audacity. He looked at the jigger of bourbon set before his father and said, “It’s not marriage that makes him less of what he is.”
“I’ve got firsthand proof, boy. I know what a lifetime of marriage can do to a man.”
“What do you know about a lifetime of anything but coming and going, huh? You were always gone. I’m really supposed to sit here and listen to life lessons from you?”
“I’m doing you the favor my old man should’ve done me.”
Noah faced him. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Can you not see how insulting this is? To Mom. To me. To Natalie.”
“I don’t mean to insult anyone.”
The calm in his father’s voice only made Noah more upset. “What bullshit. It’s exactly what you mean to do.”
Olaf didn’t waver. “Someday you’ll—”
“For god’s sake, spare me the rest of the lesson. I won’t hear it,” Noah interrupted.
“You will hear it, goddamnit,” Olaf boomed, loud enough that people turned to look. “Marriage dogs a man his whole life. Your mother dogged me. Natalie will dog you. Mark it down.”
Noah took a minute to memorize his disdain. When it was burned in his mind, he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and stood to face his father. “What happened to you?” he said. He wanted to continue, but his loss of words overwhelmed him, and he left without saying another.
The next afternoon Olaf showed up in his rented tuxedo. He had trimmed his beard and combed his rim of white hair. He sat there easily during the ceremony, kissed Natalie on the cheek while they danced at the reception, even offered Noah a wink from across the ballroom.
That had been the last time they’d seen each other.
OLAF WAS SITTING in the great room with a cup of coffee when Noah woke the next morning. Noah was still smarting from their talk on the beach the night before, but he said good-morning and poured himself a cup and sat down.
Without pleasantries Olaf said, “You mind running into town for me?”
“Not at all.”
“I need a length of chain. Forty feet. Polyurethane coated. Go to the hardware store. Knut will help you.”
“I’ll
go after this.” He held up the coffee. “You mind if I take your truck?” Noah wanted to see what it felt like to be behind the wheel of that thing.
“The keys are hanging by the door.”
“Anything else you need?”
Olaf shook his head. An awkward moment passed while Noah sipped his coffee. Before it was a quarter gone, he got up to leave.
By the time he got to Misquah he’d made a short list of things to do himself, and as he dialed his sister’s number on the pay phone outside the Landing, snow flurries began to blow across the parking lot. Solveig answered on the first ring, singing hello and asking how he was. They exchanged pleasantries, but the conversation became as dismal as the weather the moment he announced his whereabouts. She had managed, through her own adult years and despite the fact that her childhood had been just as fatherless as Noah’s, to forgive the old man most of his disgraces. Perhaps this was because Noah had borne most of Olaf’s brutishness. Solveig still dutifully visited the old man each Christmas, still invited him to her summer home each Fourth of July. Though Noah had never understood her devotion, he was glad for it.
She of course knew that only extraordinary circumstances would have brought Noah to Misquah, so she asked plainly what he was doing there. Noah filled her in, sparing no detail. When he neared the end of his recounting, he told her how feeble and sickly their father appeared. It was as if Noah had forgotten his audience altogether.
Solveig paused before commencing her litany of questions and concerns: She begged for clarification, asked Noah to repeat his story and elaborate on what he meant by sickly and feeble, instructed Noah on their father’s habits and proclivities, spit out her husband’s trial docket—he was an attorney in Fargo, where they lived—and her kids’ hectic schedules. Noah could practically hear the machinations of her distraught mind. Finally she told Noah she would get there as soon as possible, though she admitted she had no idea when that would be.
It was only after he had hung up that Noah realized he hoped her arrival would be delayed, realized that he wanted some time alone with the old man, come what may.