by Robert Stone
“Wasn’t Hylan a member?”
“Yes,” Riggs-Bowen said. “Alas.”
“I wonder,” Strickland asked the captain, “if you’d consider being interviewed on camera. Sort of put your two cents in.”
“Glad to,” the captain said.
Strickland, who was altogether surprised at his readiness, tried to be cool.
“What I’d like you to do, see, is to tell us what you’re telling me now.”
“Really? What am I telling you?”
“Well, interesting things,” Strickland said with all the mildeyed sincerity at his command. “What you have to say about Thorne and the Hylan company is very insightful.”
“Oh good,” said Riggs-Bowen. “I’m jolly pleased you think so. Is that what I should talk about to your cameras?”
“Absolutely,” Strickland said reverently. “It puts everything in perspective.”
“Oh good,” Riggs-Bowen repeated, and laughed in Strickland’s face. “But I think not.” He chuckled warmly as though thoroughly satisfied by the wine and his club and the view of Central Park.
“Really,” Strickland said, “you’d provide a unique perspective.”
The captain continued to bask in his own glow.
“Club history is fascinating. We’re one of the oldest in existence on either side of the ocean. Oh yes, Mr. Strickland. We have tales to tell. Ha-ha, yes. But comments on the race? On present members? Better not, you know.”
Inwardly, Strickland grew very angry. He resolved that if he could not use Riggs-Bowen’s droll remarks as commentary on Browne’s race, he would nevertheless make the captain regret his own willingness to appear.
“Whatever you want to talk about,” Strickland said, “would be fine with us.”
“We always oblige media when possible,” Riggs-Bowen said. “We like to shine. But discreetly.”
“Well today, understand, we’re talking strictly for b . . b . . .”
“For background,” the captain pronounced, as though happy to be of assistance. “I do understand.” He poured the last of the wine. “Well, the background is this: Hylan wasn’t a bad sailor. He was an unreliable little Irish bastard. From Peabody or Saugus or somewhere. Still—not a bad sailor. Had the Finns make him a great boat. Which he never paid for.”
“I think I know all that,” Strickland said.
“You know all that. Now Thorne—who knows fuck-all about boats—has a bug up his arse for victory. So he’s presented us with this Browne person whom no one ever heard of, never competed, never belonged to a club—one of his salesmen. And the theory is they take the Hylan so-called their new stock boat, Altan Forty or something, and win the Eglantine Solo with it.”
“And you think that’s unlikely.”
“If I were you, Strickland,” the captain said, “I’d look into that boat.”
“What about Browne?”
Riggs-Bowen laughed good-naturedly. “But Strickland, you know about Browne. You said it yourself. He has the eyes of a poet.”
“He has a certain quality,” Strickland said. “It’s hard to tell about him.” He was hoping the captain might volunteer an impression of his own. “If you think he’s not qualified, why are you letting him race?”
“Look, if they’re duly sponsored, they’re in. Anyway,” he demanded of Strickland, “what’s unqualified? Chay Blyth didn’t know a sail from a bedsheet when he got into his first Golden Globe. Beginners circumnavigate all the time now. And the press love it. So if he wins, I’ll be the first to shake his hand. I’ll even do it for your cameras.”
“You don’t believe he can win?”
“The sea selects,” Riggs-Bowen said, “God bless her. Hype doesn’t float. And of course he may decide not to go.”
“Ought he not to go?” Strickland asked with a smile.
“I wouldn’t,” Riggs-Bowen said. Then his eyes wandered away from the table and an expression of singular tenderness came over his even, rosy features. He mouthed a greeting and called for the bill. Strickland followed his gaze to the exhibition room. A handsome lady of a certain age stood hesitantly among the etchings, one hand half raised in a timid greeting.
“Not me,” the captain told Strickland, handing the waiter the signed bill. “Not in a Hylan stock boat.” He stood up to indicate that lunch was over.
“What if he does win?” Strickland asked.
“Then good on him,” Riggs-Bowen said. “You’ll have a happy ending for your film. Which I’ll be in, I hope. On behalf of the club. I’ll talk about the race then, you wait and see. We’ll all be in clover.”
Captain Riggs-Bowen turned and marched toward the exhibition room with a sprightly step. “Dear lady,” he crooned to the woman waiting there, “was the lunch dreadful? And how are our friends at the Urban League?”
Strickland left quietly. Walking across the park in the spring sunshine, he pondered the captain’s usefulness. Riggs-Bowen was cagey but vain, a scurvy, overconfident politician. My meat, Strickland thought. Yet he had none of it on film.
On his way west, he found himself at the Mother Goose playground and, on an impulse, cut through it. Once he had picked up a young nannie there. The recollection guided his steps, a halfformed notion to check out the nurses and young mums.
An aged pigeon lady was scattering crumbs for the birds by a broken drinking fountain. As Strickland passed, a toddler ran headlong for the fountain from the bank of swings, scattering the feeding pigeons. When the flock settled down, the child charged them again and this time they took wing and made an aerial circuit of the playground. Their flight and flutter fascinated Strickland at a level beyond words. Some unspoken, unspeakable truth there, he thought. Central America. He felt ready to work again, to edit, for the first time in days.
17
HE CALLED the boat Nona after a boat of his father’s. His father had named that boat after the sloop Hilaire Belloc sailed in the Irish Sea. After Nona, Browne’s father had acquired a schooner of twenty-four feet and fearlessly christened it Don Juan. The original Don Juan was the schooner that failed Shelley in the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley’s boat had been a hot dog, stripped for maximum speed. He and his friends had died running before the storm, billowing sails up, in imitation of the west wind. Browne’s father, in his cups, could recite long bits of Adonais. Browne himself supposed he knew more about Shelley’s boat than about his prosody.
Early in the summer, he began spending nights at the boatyard on Staten Island, sleeping in one of Nona’s finished compartments. He had conceived the idea of testing her living space and accustoming himself to her interior.
Each evening, at the dead end of a street on a low bluff overlooking the yard, neighborhood teenagers would gather to drink beer and sometimes to smoke marijuana. Browne would lie in his makeshift rack, listening as their mean, barren laughter drifted across the water. Later in the night, crack smokers arrived, cackling and howling like night creatures of the jungle. Some evenings he turned on his radio to drown it out. He was used to being outside other people’s laughter. After a while he came to cherish his own dark solitude at the edge of the city and its voices. It was as though he were preparing a new, secret life for himself.
Browne’s favorite music had always been old jazz and blues numbers from before the Second World War. He had found a station that played them several times a week and sometimes he would stay awake through most of the night with Russ Columbo, Buddy Bowen or Bessie Smith. He started keeping a radio log, alert for pieces of any sort that might engage his ear. Certain music had particular associations for him. His father had liked Wagner and Elgar, whose full knightly title he had never failed to pronounce.
During the day, Nona was hauled up on chocks for her refitting. The work was loosely overseen by Fanelli or Crawford. Browne’s relations with the two yardmen had stabilized at the point of awkward correctness. They allowed him to understand that they had not forgotten his out-of-season voyage up the Kill. As a result, he tended to supervise their work
with a mixture of intrusive zeal and diffidence. Browne was aware of his own inconsistencies but he could not seem to break the pattern. He tried not to comport himself like a naval officer. Yet that was the only public style he had.
In spite of the tension at the yard, Browne found himself spending more time there. The nights were what he enjoyed. From Nona’s cockpit he could look across the harbor to the lights of Manhattan and ease back into memory. The skyline had lost some of its magic since he was a child. There were square, brutal buildings whose rectangles of light diminished the soaring, triumphant towers above them. But he could remember standing on the Staten Island ferry, holding his father’s hand and seeing the pinnacles of Wall Street lit like cathedrals in midair.
It would have been a Wednesday in summer, his father’s day off. His father would be slightly drunk.
“The American dream, old son,” Browne’s father would say. He had seemed to be laughing and crying at once, or at least his voice suggested that. Browne’s father disliked the Statue of Liberty, which he associated with low immigrants as opposed to tragic exiles like himself. He disliked Charlie Chaplin films for the same reason. Chaplin was the only thing English he would not defend utterly.
Browne was aware of the variety and intensity of the moods that beset him. Part of his preparations for sea consisted of selfobservation. Eventually, he believed, he would develop an interior voice, a commanding self able to cope with sea and solitude. The barometer of his inward state was finding a fair level. At the worst of times he felt much better than he had during the past sickly winter: that had been very bad, a season of paralysis and despair.
Since Maggie had come back from school, he and his daughter seemed to be coexisting. It also seemed to Browne that spending some time away from the house added to his pleasure in Anne. He believed the intensity of his marriage bed had been somehow renewed. The prospect of the voyage seemed to create a salutary state of nerves that resulted in frequent arousal. Browne had even begun to mystify his sexuality, trying to read the future, like a haruspex, in the turns and duration of their love.
One day at the yard, he fell to talking with a cabinetmaker who was building a system of lockers and shelves into one compartment of Nona’s wooden interior. Browne had hired him through one of Altan Marine’s customers, who had advised that the man was the best in the business but independent-minded and best left alone. Browne had devised a basic weight-distribution plan and the man worked according to it.
The cabinetmaker was named George Dolvin and he altogether justified his reputation for thorough and conscientious work. Browne was well pleased with him. His tight, ingeniously fitted woodwork gave Nona’s interior the beginnings of a sound, shipshape aspect that was good for morale. Dolvin wore steel-rimmed glasses and an old-fashioned green eyeshade. His hair was gathered behind his head in a graying ponytail. He was a music lover and kept the radio tuned to WBAI.
On the day in question Browne had brought over a thousand dollars in cash to the yard as an installment on his fee. Dolvin was customarily paid off the books; his employers located him by word of mouth.
“I’m really pleased with what you’re doing,” Browne told him when he had counted the bills out for Dolvin. Dolvin put the money at the bottom of his toolbox and smiled slightly. He was generally unforthcoming. On that occasion, though, he seemed prepared to chat with Browne.
“I’m glad to have my wood circumnavigate the globe,” he said. “You can give me a testimonial.”
“Got a boat of your own?” Browne asked. He was curious about Dolvin and wanted, vaguely, to continue the conversation.
“Used to have a beaut,” Dolvin said. “Government got her.”
Browne assumed Dolvin’s boat had been confiscated as a consequence of the drug wars and said nothing further. But Dolvin’s episode of extroversion continued.
“Feds took her for the taxes I withheld. After the Vietnam War.”
“I see,” Browne said.
“I had her up in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, see. I’d moved up there when I was drafted but I kept working for the same contractor. Got married. Built her from keel up. Then I brought her down to Cape Ann in seventy-seven. Somebody must of turned me or something. Ex-wife, maybe. I got the amnesty but the bastards grabbed my boat.”
“Bad luck,” Browne said. And then, without much thinking about it, he said, “I was over there myself.”
After a moment Dolvin asked, “Vietnam? No kidding?”
“No kidding,” Browne said. “For four years.”
“You must have seen some awful things,” Dolvin said.
Browne thought the man sounded a little driven. He only shrugged.
“What did you do there?” Dolvin asked him. Then Browne had a sudden sense their conversation might take a difficult turn.
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” he said. “It’s all over.”
“Yeah,” Dolvin said. He had adopted a tone of mock innocence as though to spy out transgression. “But what was it you were doing?”
“I’m not supposed to say,” Browne told him with a laugh. That was true enough, although the electronics involved were no longer so secret.
Dolvin was sanding the edge of a drawer with sandpaper. “That’s funny, ain’t it? You’re over there doing stuff you can’t even talk about and I’m the one got to have amnesty. I’m the one loses my boat.”
“I wasn’t doing anything unspeakable,” Browne said. “It was just classified.”
“Didn’t involve killing?”
“There was a war on.”
“And money to be made by the corporations,” Dolvin said. “And promotions for the officers.”
Dolvin, Browne reflected, was a Yankee character and a firstrate worker. It was absolutely necessary to put up with him.
“The way I heard it,” the carpenter said, “it was wholesale murder.”
Dolvin’s voice was mocking and distinctly unmusical. It was easy to see why people kept their distance from him.
“You heard it wrong,” Browne told him.
“I doubt that,” Dolvin said. “I doubt it very seriously.”
The sight of Dolvin’s unearned gray hair outraged Browne. An impulse toward explanation overcame him.
“There were supposed to be rules,” he said coldly. “There were Rules of Engagement. They were sometimes violated, either in the heat of battle or by criminal behavior. But they were part of everybody’s orders.”
Dolvin put his tools down and threw back his head as though he would break into song. “The Rules of Engagement,” he crooned in smiling mockery. It seemed to Browne that Dolvin was even imitating his inflection. “The Re-yewls of Engagement. What a crock! You sound like Nixon. I suppose you think it was a noble struggle! You sound like Ronald Reagan! The Rules of Engagement, my ass.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Browne told him. “You don’t know any more about the Vietnam War than a pig knows about Sunday. You don’t have a right to an opinion.”
Dolvin appeared astonished. After a moment, Browne jumped down from the scaffold and walked over to buy a Coke at the machine that stood beside the yard office. He drank the soda standing at the edge of the dock, squinting across the harbor toward Jersey City. It was a hot, hazy day with hardly a breeze off the bay. They never wanted to hear that about their opinions, Browne thought. They prized their opinions, which were all they had. It was not the first time he had recited the same line. People didn’t like to hear it.
Above all, Browne wanted his vessel launched without ill will. Before going back to Nona, he bought a second Coca-Cola for Dolvin as a kind of peace offering. Essentially, he had a low tolerance for conflict. He found the carpenter still frozen in his tracks among Nona’s timbers. The cabin space stank of their anger.
“Why don’t we talk about something else?” Browne suggested.
Dolvin only stared into Nona’s bilges. Browne shrugged and left the Coke on the scaffold. He was a little embarrassed at having invo
ked the Rules of Engagement. They had not really counted for much. And in spite of himself, in spite of the provocation, he felt a compulsive, superstitious need to heal the quarrel.
Browne spent the evening at a Mets game with Maggie and her boyfriend, a shortstop for Portsmouth Priory of whom he and Anne approved. When he arrived at the yard the next morning, Dolvin’s van was not in the lot. He climbed the scaffold, looked down into the cockpit and then saw the naked ribs and plywood of Nona’s skeleton. The mahogany cabinets were utterly stripped and gone, with not an anthill of sawdust remaining. At first, Browne could make no sense of what he saw. Stepping down into the desolate compartment, he found his money lying unconcealed on a folded tarp. There was five hundred dollars there. Underneath it was a check for two thousand dollars, the amount he had given Dolvin earlier for retainer and materials. He left the money where it lay and climbed out of the boat. Crawford and Fanelli were waiting for him, arms folded, deadpan.
“I guess he quit,” Crawford said.
Browne gave him a long slow look. “Looks like it.”
All at once he realized that Dolvin had returned the whole sum, and that the yardmen had stolen five hundred dollars of it. He felt certain of this. It was as much as they had dared to take.
“You must of hurt his feelings,” Fanelli said with labored seriousness. “You must of criticized him, am I right?”
“No,” Browne said, “you’re not.”
“He was into last night gettin’ everything together,” Crawford volunteered. “He had his old lady out here. They put it all in his van.”
“What do you think you’re gonna do?” Fanelli asked innocently.
“I don’t know,” Browne said. “What would you do?”
“Jeez,” Fanelli said. “Shit if I know. So,” he asked Browne, “you argue with him or what?”
“I told him I was in Vietnam,” Browne said. “That seemed to bother him a lot.”
For an instant, Crawford and Fanelli looked genuinely surprised.