Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “Best of luck, Dennis,” Browne said.

  “Cheers,” Dennis said. “You too, mate.”

  The young woman, whom he did not introduce, gave Browne a thin smile.

  Next he went to Kerouaille’s boat, a teak-scented beauty in which the Frenchman had spent most of the past twenty years. He stopped to chat with Massimo Cefalu, an Italian naval commander who was sailing an Italian stock boat, and Martin Held, a builder from Saint Croix, who was setting out in a boat of his own creation. There was a Pole named Stanislaw Rolf, who kissed Browne on the cheek, a Dane, two Englishmen, four more Americans. If a man was not aboard his craft, Browne would seek him out in the galleries of the seaport. After a while, Hersey and Strickland stopped trailing him.

  “He’s really got to shake everybody’s hand, doesn’t he?” Hersey said. “What’s his problem?”

  “Maybe he’s superstitious,” Strickland said. They set up on the plaza among the crowds to film the banners and signal flags that fluttered on halyards over the seaport’s piers. Strickland kept thinking about Browne’s progress among the contending sailors. Suddenly it struck him that there might be some dimension to the thing of which he was not altogether in charge.

  Later he found himself on the float dock with Anne and Owen. Hersey was dozing in the van while the band played. Pamela, as far as anyone could tell, had gone off with Preston Fowler. Out in the East River, Captain Riggs-Bowen and a young assistant were puttering up and down in a little round-bottomed motor launch flying the Southchester Yacht Club’s burgee. A procession of escort and tow boats was forming up between the seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Almost time,” Anne said.

  “I should leave you two alone,” Strickland said.

  “No need,” Browne said.

  “It’s all right,” said his wife.

  They both demurred so earnestly that he suspected they were anxious at the prospect of finally finding themselves alone together.

  Then Anne said, “Oh my God, the panels.”

  Strickland looked at Browne. His face was set and pale.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “But Christ!” Anne said. “My God! How could I have forgotten?”

  “I had to let them go,” her husband told her. “They were ordered late.”

  “But all this time I’ve been buying tapes and varnishing eggs. I should have seen to it.”

  “It was my fault,” Browne said. “I’ll make do with what I have.”

  “I’ll leave you,” Strickland said quickly. “Keep an eye on my equipment.”

  In the plaza, he saw a man wearing a police press pass and accosted him.

  “What t. . time do they go?”

  He had stumbled over the words and the man looked at him with condescension.

  “On the tide.” He glanced at his watch. “Less than two hours, I’d say.”

  He went over to the van and woke up Hersey.

  “They’re saying their goodbyes. Let’s go.”

  Just before they locked up, Strickland paused.

  “We ought to give them something,” he told Hersey.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go buy a bottle of champagne,” he said suddenly. “So he can drink it at Christmas. Drive over to Chambers Street or somewhere and buy one.”

  Hersey knew his rights.

  “Bullshit! We’ll lose our parking space. Anyway, it’s Sunday.”

  “I have to give him something,” Strickland said.

  “Why?”

  Ignoring Hersey, he rummaged through the back of the van. It was loaded with the detritus of old projects and locations: ruined stills, film cans, fast food containers, plastic bags of marijuana seeds, paint-spattered tarps. From under one of the last, he pulled out an oversized book of his Vietnam War photographs that had been published as a companion piece to LZ Bravo. The book was stained with coffee rings and its jacket photograph was faded but he decided to take it along for Browne.

  “Let me tell you,” Hersey said helpfully, “you appear a little fucked up.”

  Strickland ignored him.

  When they got back to Nona’s space, Strickland saw that Duffy and Harry Thorne had arrived. Everyone stood on the float admiring a pair of binoculars that Anne’s father had sent Browne for Nona’s journey.

  “Too bad he couldn’t come himself,” Harry said.

  “All the same,” Browne told them all, “it’s quite a gesture.”

  Anne had the same tense, almost stricken look she had worn before.

  Duffy announced that he had a plan.

  “You’ll love this, Ron,” he told Strickland.

  According to Duffy’s plan, Browne would spend his last minutes ashore in prayerful meditation in the chapel at the Seamen’s Welfare Association farther down South Street.

  “It’s five minutes from here. The room is terrific—it’s white wood, original glass. They have a big bell, a steering wheel, all shit like that. Has to be a great picture, as even I can tell you.”

  “But it’s bullshit,” Browne said amiably, “because I don’t happen to be a churchgoing fella.”

  “That’s true, Owen,” Duffy said quickly. “It’s bullshit but that’s no reflection on you.” He turned to Strickland for support. “He’ll bow his head in manly silence. They’ll put it on calendars. What do you say?”

  “Why not respect his beliefs?” Thorne asked.

  “C’mon, Harry,” Duffy said. “Don’t be so Jewish.”

  “Let’s do it,” Strickland said.

  “Yes,” Anne said. The men on the float all looked at her.

  “No,” Browne said. “Forget about it.”

  Aboard Nona, Strickland gave Browne more videotape and his last instructions. He sat at the top of the companionway, watching the lone sailor burrowing among his gear to find the last fraction of space. Browne had jammed the camcorder and tape between two two-hundred-centimeter diving cylinders.

  “You planning on diving?” Strickland asked.

  “I might have some underway repairs. I thought about it and decided it was worth the space.”

  “Right,” Strickland said.

  “Well, I guess I’m set,” Browne said, looking up at Strickland with a smile. “It’s been a long haul.”

  Strickland found himself unable to speak, which in itself was not unusual. He felt a sudden desperate reluctance to let Browne go. Part of it was merely technical anxiety. How to supervise a documentary whose subject was seven thousand miles away? But he felt also the blade of some intense, elusive emotion. It might be pride, he thought, in the degree to which he had occupied Browne’s space with his own observation.

  “How’s your leg?” he managed to say at last.

  Browne shrugged without answering.

  “Too bad about your solar panels.”

  “Let me worry about that,” Browne said.

  Strickland felt himself shudder. He began to speak but failed again, at first.

  “Don’t go,” he told Browne. “Don’t.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Just kidding,” Strickland said.

  “Maybe I should not do it,” Browne said, “and say I did.”

  Strickland scrawled his signature on the title page of the book of Vietnam photos he had brought from the van and tossed it on the navigation table.

  “Good luck.”

  As he got up and turned away, Browne was still smiling up at him.

  On the dock, he joined Duffy and Thorne. Anne went aboard Nona.

  “Well,” Thorne said, “a new phase.”

  “This guy is gonna burst on the scene,” Duffy said. “Mark my words.”

  “They’re deserving people,” Thorne said. He turned smoothly to Strickland. “They’re the kind of people this society doesn’t put forward. But it ought to recognize them, don’t you think? It might learn something from them.”

  “There’s always something to be learned,” Strickland said, “from people.”

  Thorne gav
e him a long and not altogether respectful look. He walked away and went to stand by himself. After twenty minutes, launches chartered by the Southchester club began towing the entries out into the East River and across the Upper Bay. Strickland had hired a lighter from which to film the departure as far as Fort Hamilton, the starting line. At the last minute he decided to let Hersey cover it alone.

  “Make sure you get the city behind him,” he told Hersey.

  Thorne, Hersey and Anne rode in the towing launch. Duffy went aboard the lighter. Strickland stood on the dock and watched Nona, under bare poles, hauled out on the tide. The musical tars performed “The Leaving of Liverpool.” Out in the roads, two Department of Marine and Aviation ferry tenders sounded their whistles. A city fireboat played its hose in salute. A layer of high gray cloud closed off the bright weather and the wind picked up.

  As Strickland stood on the end of the pier and watched Nona head out, Pamela came up and stood beside him.

  “Where were you?” he asked her. “I thought you were going around the world with that redneck.”

  Pamela shook her head and gathered the collar of her leather jacket closer.

  “I didn’t like him,” she said. “He said lousy things about Owen.”

  “Like what?”

  “The usual shit guys like him say.”

  “I understand,” Strickland said.

  Shivering, she looked bleakly out at the harbor. Her eyes were red. She appeared worn out, rheumy and pale.

  “My God, I hope he wins,” she said.

  “Do you really?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t you really?”

  “I haven’t approached it in those terms,” Strickland said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “It’s a race, isn’t it?”

  It occurred to Strickland that he might want to use Pamela in the film after all, in spite of the confusion it might occasion the public.

  “Indeed. Indeed it is,” he said, and laughed and put his arm around her.

  29

  WHEN ANNE was a little girl, her father’s office had been in a nineteenth-century building on the corner of Broadway and Rector Street. Visits there had always been treats, often at Christmastime, so that she remembered his chambers as decorated and cheerfully lit against the gloom of late December afternoons. Outside, there had been holiday crowds and Trinity Church and a walk to Schrafft’s across City Hall Park in the winter’s first exciting flakes of snow.

  At Schrafft’s she would have a Broadway soda and her father would tease the Irish waitress and drink whiskey. His drinks had always appeared rich and festive, an elixir, the stuff of adult happiness.

  During the early seventies, Campbell and Olson had moved its offices into the sky, occupying a suite on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center. Whereas the old offices had been filled with ship models, company pennants and brass nameplates, the new place, as Anne still thought of it, might have been a bank in some shopping mall in space. Clouds dissolved against its sealed windows. Impossibly far below, the new landscape—gentrified North River and sleek condominiums along the Jersey Palisades—spread out like a conceptual rendering of itself.

  Yet, as ever, Antoinette Lamattina, who had been her father’s secretary for thirty-five years, was waiting for her in the outer office. Antoinette was old times and good times personified, Anne’s gift-giving fairy godmother.

  “Annie, honey,” Antoinette cried. “It’s been so long we haven’t seen you!”

  Looking into the secretary’s shrewd, kind black eyes, Anne nearly choked up.

  “Oh, Antoinette,” she said as they embraced. She had never called Antoinette Lamattina by her first name until she herself was out of college. “You look wonderful.”

  So Antoinette did at nearly sixty, gray, slim and elegant, as though she thrived on chaste bereavement, frequent communion and the occasional excursion to Roseland Ballroom. She was a childless policeman’s widow. Glowing, she led Anne toward her father’s inner office.

  “Captain! Look who’s here.”

  Watching her father rise to meet her, Anne was at once impressed with his quickness and apparent health. He was just under six feet tall, only an inch or so taller than she. All that remained of his notorious good looks were slimness and a smooth face. His handsomeness had been of the softer, youthful sort. His regular features and fair skin had grown a little roseate.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Have a look at you,” Jack Campbell said to his only daughter. Smiling Jack, they called him around the harbor. Bitterly.

  She had been halfway toward embracing him when he stopped her for his inspection. Blushing and self-conscious, she stood her ground.

  “You look fabulous,” he said. “Want a drink?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jack had Antoinette summon one of the illegal Irish girls the firm employed. The colleen brought them a single-malt, as irregular as herself. It was tanked across the Atlantic in barrels and bottled, a few dozen measures at a time, in Halifax. This private stock was the last vestige of the family’s rum-running days.

  “I watched,” Jack Campbell said. He inclined his glass toward a telescope on a tripod beside one window.

  “We thought your eye was on us. Thanks for the binoculars, by the way.” She took a sip of the old malt. “Why didn’t you come down to the boat?”

  “Ah well,” Campbell said. “I couldn’t take the time. I get a lot done on Sunday. I don’t like the crowds at the seaport.”

  “All good reasons,” Anne said. “But your not being there was noticed.”

  “By Harry Thorne, you mean?”

  “By Harry. By Owen. By me. When I got home Maggie asked me if Granpop had come down. I lied and told her you had.”

  “You shouldn’t lie to her. She’ll stop believing you.”

  She sighed and looked away.

  “So,” Smiling Jack said smugly after a moment, “he’s on the bosom of the ocean.”

  It was the sort of observation to which she had learned not to reply.

  “We’re keeping a map of his progress,” Jack went on. “Antoinette is keeping it in her office. Did you see it?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “Great fun if he actually won, eh?”

  She contemplated her drink.

  “Yes,” her father said. “That would confound the whole damn world. Love to see it happen.”

  “You know,” Anne said, “we may end up in very good shape. We could come out of all this very well.”

  “Think so?”

  “Harry’s been great.”

  “Has he?”

  “Owen might get his own operation out of this. Maybe a dealership.”

  “That’s great,” Jack said. “Win or lose?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, will Harry stake him win or lose? If the Coast Guard fishes him out of the drink tomorrow, does he get his dealership?”

  She sipped her drink. “Harry’s a good guy.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that Harry and his whole opération are holding the bag for Matty Hylan? He may be in no position to help you. Regardless.”

  “Owen will get a book out of this, Dad. He’s a good writer. A video. Everyone knows him in the boating world.”

  Campbell got up and went to his telescope and looked down at the harbor. On the wall nearest him was an oil painting of the waterfront at night, an unsentimental balance of shadows and harsh light, painted by an East European émigré.

  “Maggie’s doing well in school,” Anne said.

  “We’ll keep her in school. Don’t worry about it. And your highly strung husband need never know the source.”

  “Please, Dad.”

  “Sorry. But I know how proud he is. His concept of honor and so forth.”

  He sounded like an anthropologist, she thought, describing, with a touch of humor, the denizen of some exotic alien culture.

  “Obviously,” Jack went on, “the man’s got you buffal
oed. You even had to wait until he sailed to see me.”

  “We didn’t come up,” Anne said. “You didn’t come down.”

  “I take it Harry and the Hylan group are supposedly paying for this mystical voyage?”

  “Yes.”

  Campbell turned to the window and folded his arms.

  “It’s such a fantasy,” he declared. “By God, I can’t believe it! Even of him. Around the bloody world!”

  “You’re just not a sailor, Dad.”

  “Let’s say,” Jack suggested, “that I’m just not a yachtsman.”

  Jack Campbell was a little too well spoken to pass for a true proletarian around New York harbor but he liked to think of himself as a working man. He had graduated from Yale at twenty-five, just after the Second World War, having interrupted college for the Merchant Marine. There he had advanced from able seaman to deck officer, with eight trips from Davisville to Liverpool and ten to Murmansk from Scapa Flow. Before that he had been out between college terms, as ordinary, messman and wiper, in the grimmest billets, fighting for his virtue against convicts with a bunk chain. He was not given to nostalgia about his youthful adventures.

  His own father had been an even harder man, a Newfie from Kings Cove turned ship’s engineer. Old Jack and his brother Donald had imposed Campbell tugs on the harbor by serviceability and terror. They had finally put it all together when Old Jack had married Anne’s grandmother, a wealthy chandler’s daughter whose people had once lived in shanties along Broad Channel.

  “If Owen had gone to work for you,” she said, “it probably would have been worse. It’s a good thing he didn’t.”

  “Too good for us,” Jack said. “Too high-minded.”

  “I’m very proud of him, Dad.” She said it with a smiling complacency she knew enraged him. “And Maggie will be.”

  “I suppose,” the old man said, “it’s an excellent way to get away from it all.”

  “We could all use a little of that.”

  “What is it they say?” Jack asked. “Get in touch with your feelings? Be your own person? Sweet self-awareness and all that malarkey? By Christ,” Campbell said, “I’ve wrung more salt water out of my socks than that man of yours ever looked at.”

  “He’s not trying to compete with you.”