Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  Maggie’s face assumed the scarlet tones of which only her circulation seemed capable. Anne was sorry for her. Teased about blushing, Maggie had once declared, “I wish I could have my blood removed.”

  She shook her head and looked at the floor. “Not yet, sir. Just an apprentice.”

  “Well answered,” said Mary Ward. Anne saw that Mary had gone almost completely gray. She looked plump and prim, sweetfaced and serene, a prairie preacher’s wife. She wore her hair back with a turquoise clip.

  When the next round was poured, Anne put her hand over her champagne glass. “Be a sport, Buzz. Give us a shot.”

  Buzz made much of it.

  “I should give her a beer-and-a-ball. That’s what these New York Irish girls like,” he declared. “A beer-and-a-ball,” he repeated, attempting the New York pronunciation. They drank to absent friends.

  The Wards had a way of ordering the events. It fell out that Mary took Maggie into the kitchen to assist with the preparations while Buzz, Anne and the Conleys remained in the living room.

  “Do you sail?” Anne asked the lieutenant. It was the best she could do at the moment.

  “No, ma’am,” Lieutenant Conley said.

  “Where Ben comes from,” Buzz said, “there was neither wind nor water.”

  “But frequent tornadoes,” the lieutenant said. His wife laughed fondly.

  He was from Texas, it developed, a pilot like Buzz, assigned to a squadron aboard the USS Ticonderoga.

  “They both fly,” Buzz explained to Anne. “Young Joan, she’s no slouch in the cockpit. She’s a first officer with Air Chesapeake.”

  “Well, good for you,” Anne said. “You’ll be in space together.”

  It proved the right thing to have said, and they relaxed with her. Joan Conley, who did not at first appear a likely first officer of anything, turned out to be a gravely serious young woman. Her laughter was nervous rather than humorous and she had a dark fanatical frown with which to discuss matters of principle. Her husband was black and gorgeous, with the manner of a rural Christian athlete, which was what he was.

  They must have prayed together, Anne thought. It was easy to picture them doing it. Kneeling, holding hands in front of that Anglo-Saxon-Protestant bookstore Jesus. Should we do it, Lord? Will you bless our love? Are we ready? Is the Navy? How about America? Apparently they had got the word to proceed.

  When the turkey was carved and everyone seated Buzz said grace.

  “O Lord, for Thy bounty make us truly thankful, these things we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  While everyone’s head was duly bowed, Anne had a quick look at the company. The Conleys were where she expected to find them, deep in prayer. Maggie was sneaking a peek at the lieutenant. Buzz was in his pontifex maximus trance. Anne found herself eye to eye with Mary Ward, whose gaze had also been prowling the table. She winked. Mary looked fond.

  During dinner, troublesome topics kept emerging and having to be put aside. They began by talking about a series of accidents that had been occurring in the fleet over the past year. Then, since there were three pilots at the table, the question of aviation safety came up. There were carrier-landing stories and stories of stunts gone wrong. Buzz recited his list of commercial airlines one must never, under any circumstances, fly. Then he talked a little about the battles over the Dragon Jaw Bridge. The missiles were the worst, he said, the most devastating antiaircraft weapons in history. But there were a few MiGs too.

  “I’m boring you,” Buzz said to Anne. “You’ve heard all this before.”

  “You’re mistaken,” Anne said. “You’ve never talked about it. Not to me.”

  “Well, I’ve heard it,” Mary said.

  “Who flew the MiGs?” Lieutenant Conley asked. “Russians? Koreans?”

  “Maybe at first. After a while I think they were all Vietnamese.” Buzz took a sip of wine. “You know, you can teach those people to do anything.”

  The furies of comparative racism threatened to issue forth. “From plebe year on,” Benny Conley said, “I’ve noticed that trigonometry is culturally biased toward Asian people.”

  For a moment no one laughed. Then everyone did, except Joan Conley.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “There are a lot of Vietnamese midshipmen here,” Buzz said, to complicate the topic. “Revenging their daddies.”

  “On whom?” Anne asked.

  Urged by some other spectral presence at the feast, Lieutenant Conley brought up Challenger, the space shuttle flight that had killed the pretty schoolteacher and all on board.

  “Terrible,” Mary Ward said calmly.

  “Ben and I got into a literary argument after that,” Buzz said. “Didn’t we, Ben?”

  “It was the only time I’ve known him to be wrong,” Conley said.

  “Buzz wrong?” Anne asked. “Tell us about it. That’s a side of him we’ve never seen.”

  “When the accident happened,” the lieutenant told them, “I was shocked like everyone else. Then I read about it and I was proud.” He pronounced the last word with an almost imperceptible roll of black passion. “Because it was everyone up there. Everyone.”

  “A black man,” Joan Conley explained when he did not go on, “a Jewish woman, a Japanese American, a white Protestant male.”

  “It was a terrible moment,” Conley said, “but a great moment too. I mean an inspirational moment.”

  “And Ben was much taken,” Buzz Ward said, “with the then-President’s quotation.”

  “I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,” young Conley recited, “and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

  Anne watched the young officer who believed in inspirational moments and found it difficult not to weep drunken tears over him. His wife sat rigidly, lips pursed.

  “That poem helped me decide to be a pilot,” Conley said. “But my old professor there”—he pointed at Buzz—“insists it’s not a good poem.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not,” Buzz said. “The pilot in me rejoices. But the English teacher insists it’s not a good poem.”

  “Come on, Buzz,” Anne said. “It’s a perfectly lovely poem. It’s beautiful.”

  Buzz only shook his head.

  “But it’s so moving,” Anne said. “It is too a good poem.”

  “Negative,” Buzz said.

  “How can you arrogantly sit there,” Anne asked, “with people so moved by a poem and insist it’s no good? You really are an English teacher.”

  Suddenly she realized she was disproportionately angry. No one seemed able to tell. They had risen from the table when the telephone rang. It was not Owen but Strickland, asking to shoot in the last of the light. Mary Ward told him to come ahead. Together they cleared the table.

  Everyone retreated back to the dining room when Strickland and Hersey arrived. Anne, still slightly drunk, made a mess of introducing the film makers. The project and their presence embarrassed her. Everyone simply exchanged nods.

  Addressing the group, Strickland fell into his stammer.

  “Why don’t you all sit down at the table?” he said finally.

  The Wards, the Conleys, Anne and Maggie all resumed their seats. Strickland studied the composition.

  “If you all held hands,” he said to Anne, “this would look like a seance.” He said it directly to her, looking at no one else.

  “Come on, Ron,” Anne said brusquely, “get on with it.”

  Immediately she regretted the sound of her own words. She had sounded imperious and familiar. The Wards exchanged looks.

  “I’ll get some port,” Mary said.

  “Good idea,” said Buzz. “So we’ll get a drink while we’re looking pretty.”

  Strickland filmed Buzz’s naval toast and the passing of the port. Maggie briefly giggled. Everyone, Anne was convinced, was as strained and stilted as could be and would surely emerge on film that way. Strickland and Hersey spoke softly to one another.

  At six o’clock, at what Anne had a feeling m
ust be dead midnight Greenwich mean time, the telephone rang and it was Owen. Mary put his call on the speaker.

  “All at home, this is sailing vessel Nona. Over.”

  “Ask him to say it again,” Strickland said, “to see if we have sound.”

  “Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three, say again, over,” Anne said, and he repeated it. Strickland nodded the O.K.

  “Our present position,” Browne reported, “is six degrees forty minutes south, twenty-one degrees twenty minutes west. Over.”

  “Well hurray, then,” Anne said, “because you’re still leading the division.”

  She read the list Duffy had given her but Browne did not acknowledge.

  “I’m going to recite Scripture,” he declared.

  Nearly everyone laughed. Hersey strained to catch the sound.

  “Except the Lord build the house,” Browne declared, “they labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman watcheth but in vain.”

  A few people at the table applauded. Anne glanced at Strickland and noted his cold polite smile.

  “That’s my Thanksgiving message to the Republic!” Browne announced. He sounded exhilarated.

  “How are you, Owen?” Anne asked. “How is everything?”

  “Sublime,” he said. “How do you like my Thanksgiving text?”

  “It’s fine,” she said in confusion. It had frightened her.

  “Tell him it’s a worthy text,” Buzz said. “But word for word pretty expensive at the going rate.”

  “Buzz,” Anne reported to her husband, “says it’s a worthy text. Over.”

  Anne and Ward looked at each other, grinning uncertainly.

  “Are you getting religion out there?” Anne asked brightly.

  “I’m getting the southeast trades,” Owen said. “They’ll do until religion comes along. Over.”

  Her spirits rose. She told him who was present. She noticed then that Maggie had left the room.

  “Greetings,” Browne called. “Happy Thanksgiving. Is Strickland there? Let me speak to him.”

  She felt foolish extending the receiver. Strickland took it with a show of good nature.

  “Yes, sir,” he said to Owen Browne. “How’s the ocean?”

  “Are you getting everything?” Browne demanded. “Any problems? Over.”

  “No,” Strickland said affably, “I don’t think so. Any instructions?”

  Anne kept looking at the Severn, still and cold under the willows at the foot of the Wards’ garden.

  “I have no idea how all of this looks from your end,” Browne said to Strickland. “Just get it all, O.K.?”

  “Don’t worry, Owen.” He glanced at Anne, who kept her eyes on the river. “Just get around, man. Don’t forget to take lots of footage. I’m supposed to say ‘over,’ right?”

  “Affirmative, over.”

  “Right,” said Strickland. “Over.”

  He handed Anne the phone and went to pick up his camera.

  “Do you remember what I told you the other night?” Owen asked. “Over.”

  She glanced around the room uneasily. It was as though he had somehow forgotten, over the absurd distance, that his voice was projected on a speaker. She looked unhappily at the contraption itself.

  At the same moment, Buzz hit the speaker’s switch so that Browne and his wife might speak in privacy from the other people in the room. Only the thousands monitoring at sea and ashore would hear them.

  “Did that go well?” he asked. “Over.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess so.”

  “Did it sound pompous and corny? Over.”

  “A little,” she said. “But it’s Thanksgiving, right? Over.”

  “I heard it on the radio last night,” Owen said. “Some missionary station. I liked the sound of it. I hope I’m being clear. I find that out here my thinking is clearer. Over.”

  “It must be wonderful. Do you want to talk to Maggie? Over.”

  The silence of the sea came back to her. She turned to look for Maggie, who had gone out of the room. Strickland was filming her on the phone, Hersey taking sound. She put the receiver down and went in search of her daughter.

  “When did you disappear? Your father’s on the line.”

  Maggie looked up from her book in terror.

  “Please talk to him,” Anne said.

  There was no way out. Trapped in her chair, Maggie let the life and intelligence drain from her face, transforming herself into something coarse, low and unworthy of attention. It was her most effective mode of disengagement. Avoiding her mother’s eye, she gave a cruel and foolish laugh.

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “Owen,” she said, going back to the phone, “I can’t locate her. She’s made herself scarce. Over.”

  “Bless you all,” Owen said after a moment. “We’ll talk on Christmas. Out.”

  Anne sat for a moment with the dead receiver in her hand, then replaced it.

  Strickland had seated himself at the table and was sipping port. To her surprise, the company were discussing Vietnam. She hurried back into the living room to have it out with Maggie, who had put the book aside and was crying. Anne’s anger fled.

  “Don’t cry” was all she could think of to say. “He’s all right.”

  “What were you in the hospital for?” Mary Ward asked Strickland.

  “A lot of things. I had parasites in my kidneys. I had side effects from dengue. Broken bones I hadn’t treated. I had just come back from Vietnam.”

  “I saw your film,” Buzz said. “It was shown here.”

  “Here?” Strickland asked. “At the Academy? That surprises me.”

  “I think it was,” Buzz said.

  Joan Conley regarded Strickland as though he were a large lizard on the runway. The film makers left at about seven. Anne, the Wards and the Conleys sat by the fire. Maggie wandered outside, then came in and picked up her book again.

  As the Conleys were leaving, everyone but Maggie stood in the vestibule. Buzz and Joan Conley helped the lieutenant on with his bridge coat.

  “I don’t like that photographer guy,” Benny Conley said. “I don’t think he’s my friend.”

  “I didn’t either,” said Joan.

  Anne was seeing them out with a bourbon in her hand.

  “He has a bad stammer,” she explained. “Maybe he’s compensating.”

  “Wonder what he did in Nam,” said Conley.

  “Made a movie,” Buzz said. “Very antiwar. Antimilitary.”

  Conley nodded in recognition of the type.

  “You used to call them peace creeps, didn’t you?”

  “Not me,” Buzz said. “I never called them that.”

  After the Conleys were gone, Buzz, Mary and Anne went back to the fire.

  “How’s Teddy?” Anne asked.

  Buzz shook his head.

  “He’s in the hospital,” Mary said, “taking the cure. He’s in and out.”

  They looked gloomily into the fireplace for a while. Then Mary Ward got up and went to make her holiday family calls. Anne had another drink.

  “How do you think he sounded?” she asked Buzz. “Owen, I mean.”

  “He sounded all right.”

  She wanted a little more.

  “Sort of rising to the occasion?”

  “Yeah,” Buzz said. “On his soapbox.”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t he sound all right to you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I guess so. Did he talk to you before he went? About going?”

  “Well,” Buzz said, “we talked some when we were out fishing.”

  “Did he ask your opinion?”

  Ward shifted in his armchair.

  “Yeah, well, we batted the breeze. Out fishing. I even got him to take a drink . . .”

  “Did he ask you what you thought about the trip?”

  “We talked about the trip, sure, Annie. We talked about a lot of things.”

  She laughe
d at his evasiveness, but her smile quickly disappeared.

  “What did you tell him?”

  In the silence that followed they both took a sip of whiskey.

  “Did you tell him not to go?”

  Ward sat up straight in his chair and folded his arms.

  “It never came to that.”

  “No?”

  He looked at her in pain.

  “Regarding that conversation, Miss Annie, I b’lieve you’ll have to ask Owen.”

  “I see,” she said. “Now tell me. Can he do it?”

  “Of course he can do it,” Ward said. “Certainly he can.”

  “I mean,” she said, “I ask you because I think you know about these things.”

  “Owen is not about to lose his nerve,” Ward said. “Don’t you lose yours.”

  “We both know him, don’t we, Buzz?”

  “That we do.”

  His Kentuckian solemnity struck her as amusing, and to his annoyance she laughed. She had not meant to offend him. She stood up and went and poured herself more bourbon. “He’s physically brave. And you are too. You both are. But not all men are.”

  “No,” Buzz said.

  “How does that work?”

  Ward shrugged. “Men are different.”

  “It’s good, I guess. For a man to have balls. As they say. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Buzz said.

  “Why exactly?”

  “Come off it, Annie,” Buzz said. “You know as well as I do.”

  “No I don’t. Tell me.”

  “All good men have physical courage,” Ward explained. “Without physical courage there is no other kind.”

  “Really?”

  “Alas,” Ward said.

  “But that’s not Christian,” Anne said. “It’s undemocratic.”

  “Never thought I’d hear that word from you, Annie Browne. What do you care what’s democratic?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I thought you did.”

  “You do what you can,” Buzz explained. “The strong look out for the others.”

  She stared at him.

  “So if you’re physically brave, you can cope with anything. Is that it?”

  “Negative,” Ward said. “You can’t have moral courage without physical courage. But you can have physical courage and moral weakness. Anyone who’s been around the military knows that, including you.”

  He grew shy in the luster of her addled admiring smile. She could feel her power over him.