Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  The Sealestial’s Weathermax didn’t work at all, ever. Somewhere along the line I ceased asking after it, as one would, say, after a dozen years cease to ask Allen how was his arthritis this morning, if the first hundred exercises in solicitude drew the identical response. We Omitted Mention of Dr. Papo’s Weathermax.

  What else? It is, in an enumeration that began with the subject of survival, embarrassing to recall: but beyond any question this was the one serious crisis we all felt. We were matter-of-factly informed, three days out of the Virgin Islands, that for all intents and purposes the Sealestial was not merely short of ice, as Dick had written, but out of ice.

  Dick and I were on watch when Diane gave us the news. I take longer than Dick to externalize True Shock. He was at least thirty seconds ahead of me when I heard him say, “What do you mean we’re out of ice?” Diane has one of those matter-of-fact voices, as in, “Sorry, we’re out of blood plasma.”

  “We can’t make our own ice in the deep freeze,” she explained, “because it’s full, and the extra supply of ice we brought on board has melted.”

  Dick and I looked at each other. It wasn’t necessary to say anything. We were wired to the same circuit, and the shock passed through us simultaneously.

  I said—I was, remember, commander-in-chief—“We have to do something.”

  That meant we called Reggie. Hours later we had arranged a kind of commutation system. The meat, chicken, lobster, and other extraneous stowaways in the deep freeze were taken out for just so long. Just so long was defined as that interval that a) kept the meat, chicken, and lobster from deteriorating permanently; and b) permitted the energy of the deep freeze to devote itself to the fabricating of just enough ice to fill our evening’s cups. Fine tuning, of the kind Walter Heller writes about, was called for; but it was not beyond Dick’s and my resources, not when faced with such an awful alternative. I engaged my companions in a flashback, about which I had very nearly forgotten, though at the time it had totally absorbed me.

  It was 1958, and the Spanish Ambassador to the United States, a close friend, called me at my office with the information that he needed most desperately to speak to me privately on a matter of august importance. Seeing me is relatively easy, even on matters of non-august importance, and an hour later José María de Areilza, Count of Motrico, Ambassador from Spain to Washington, now President of the Council of Europe, was in my tatterdemalion office at National Review explaining the nature of his crisis.

  As I knew, he said (I had been at the reception the night before), the Count of Barcelona, a.k.a. Don Juan, King (uncrowned) of Spain, was in New York, having sailed (he is a great yachtsman) from Lisbon to Puerto Rico to Washington—where he was received by President Eisenhower, the okay having been given, via Areilza, from Franco—to New York, where he was currently being lionized.

  The problem, the ambassador explained, looking at his watch, is that this is Tuesday, and at noon on Saturday Franco has scheduled a speech on the subject of succession. It is a speech deemed so important, we cannot expose the King to the dangers of impromptu reflections on it in response to questions by the press.

  “Therefore,” said José María, dramatically, “the King must be ‘absent’ from the United States when the speech is made.”

  “Well,” I said, “where’s he headed? Bermuda?”

  “Yes. But the Saltillo is not fit to sail. It needs substantial reparations. You know the boatyard people in Connecticut. You must take his boat to the boatyard tomorrow, arrange for the necessary repairs, and hide out the King and his crew until after Saturday morning—he estimates repairs will take one week. They will wave goodbye to the press from the pier at Seventy-ninth Street [at the Hudson River] as though they were setting out for Bermuda, but you will pilot them around Manhattan, up the East River, to Stamford, and hide them out. Say you will, my dear Bill.”

  I found the invitation not only enticing, but positively Grau-starkian. The next morning, however, I was off to a very bad start, having misread the current charts in such a way as to ordain a cast-off time that had us in the East River not floating with the current, but fighting a foul current approximately equal to the engine power of the Saltillo. I tried to joke about how one should cruise slowly up the East River the better to enjoy Manhattan, and fortunately the King was well-disposed, and rather enjoyed my awful miscalculation: but it was only when the King offered me a gin and tonic that I saw my advantage.

  “Sorry I can’t offer you any ice,” he said.

  I made bold to say, “Why not, sir?”

  “Because,” Don Juan said resignedly, “the Saltillo carries one ice chest, and it lasts approximately four hours. We are out of ice.”

  I drew the King of Spain to me, and whispered in his ear. Five hours later we were docked at Stamford, the royal ensign carefully concealed, even against the unlikelihood of its being recognized by a reporter from the Stamford Advocate. My wife and my son Christopher (aged five) welcomed the royal party, and I think it fair to say that seven days later, the repairs to the Saltillo having been effected, Don Juan departed crying bitter tears at leaving Pat to whom—as also the British admiral-navigator, the first mate, the young Count of Alcazar, the sundry younger officers, including one bearded lieutenant who spent the whole of his time on the telephone to Jane Fonda mooning his eternal devotion to her—he had become totally attached. He invited us both to sail with him as far as Bermuda, but my schedule prevented it and, fortunately, Pat declined, because the Saltillo ran into a most fearful storm, very nearly foundering.

  But the great excitement was the refrigerator. I had told the King, in the desolation of the East River, that conceivably I might arrange the installation of an ice-making refrigerator on the Saltillo, which would absolutely alter his way of life in the forthcoming 3,500-mile sail. He couldn’t believe it was true, but I went ahead and had it done at City Island, notwithstanding that the installation required the dismembering of the entire companionway, a decision that was slightly less easy to make than merely through an indulgence of royal caprice, inasmuch as the Saltillo belonged not to Don Juan, but to a close friend of Don Juan, or at least I hope he was a close friend, because the configuration of his boat was substantially and permanently altered.

  In any event, that was 1958, twenty-two years before we of the Sealestial ran out of ice. They talk of entropy, of exhausted planets, of closed frontiers; none of these satisfied Dick or me, and we resolved that come what might, we would not run out of ice. I realized then that no thought had been given to the major challenge, leg number two, Bermuda to the Azores, twice the distance of St. Thomas to Bermuda. If we were to run out of ice after five hundred miles on the first leg, how would we make do on a two-thousand-mile second leg? I summoned Danny and Reggie, and advised them that first priority must be given to that problem on reaching Bermuda. They understood. They always understand, when a situation is truly grave.

  The heavy winds came, and went. It is good that this should happen, as one thereupon feels baptized. Speaking of which, on the Sunday morning before the winds I was at the helm, and Danny approached me and said did I want to do something “about its being Sunday.” I said I did, that we could go to my stateroom, that I had brought a Bible on board, and also the text my colleague Bill Rusher had given me of the communion service at his Anglican church. That conversation had come about after my telling him on my return from South Bend, Indiana, that I had not in my lifetime been so moved as by the liturgy in the ordination of my old—in every sense of the word: I have known him for thirty years, and he is seventy-two—friend, Professor Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame, as an Anglican priest. Perhaps it was the sight of a septuagenarian lying on the floor, the whole of his body covered by white cloth, pledging a lifetime’s devotion to the work of God; but also the noble language, in such archaic relief over the Dick-Jane-Gypese with which the Roman Catholics have profaned their language, at least in America. The Bible I had brought along was the King James, and I told Danny I would
scan it for a few suitable passages.

  It pleased me hugely that Danny should bring the matter up, because in the interval since our last sail across the Atlantic he had been divorced, and now lives unabashedly with a sweet and intelligent girl. Danny and I—the best of friends, given the generation gap, since he evolved at age twelve as my son’s closest companion even though Christopher was a mere ten—have talked everything over, including religion. He used to write me long letters, a practice that ended eight or nine years ago. But he remains one of the very few people I feel I could approach in the spirit with which then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen once approached Heywood Broun, a total stranger, on the telephone. (“I would like to talk to you, Mr. Broun.” “What about?” the famous iconoclast asked gruffly. “Your immortal soul,” Monsignor Sheen answered, a few months before receiving Broun back into the church.)

  Looking about, it occurred to me that our little extemporaneous Sunday service would end up being rather exclusive. Dick is Jewish-agnostic; Tony’s journal contains an agnostic inflection; Van manages to stay clear of the subject but, pace the exhibitionist iconoclasm of a Mark Twain or Henry Mencken, as is true of most men of great humor not grounded in cynicism, there is piety there somewhere. I could not invite the crew—there would be no way to make the gesture without intimidation. Only Reggie would react naturally and spontaneously. The last time he and I had bowed our heads in unison was at his wedding, when I served as best man, almost two years earlier, at which he and his beautiful, vivacious, imperious southern divorcée with four children plighted their troth, till death should tear them asunder. A year and a half later she had flown to the Dominican Republic, where troths can be unplighted in a single day. Reggie had told me a few days earlier, at St. Thomas, that he could not yet spend one entire day without thinking of her. I would, without singling him out, find a prayer of a quite comprehensive sort, importuning providence for the contentment of everyone aboard. But that afternoon the storm came in, and the service went clear out of our minds.

  Two days before landing, the weather having settled down, I had a sudden and entirely unforeseen access of literary energy, and fished out of my briefcase a sorely neglected commission from Esquire magazine—to write about someplace I had never been, one thousand words. If I wrote it now, Dick could take it to New York! … It was five, and the wind semitropical on the flesh, but cool enough to ward off torpor, and the boat moved serenely, as if on ice skates, the angle of heel absolutely steady. I went below and zipped it off, bringing it up fresh from the typewriter to show Dick, who loves better than anything in life to see manuscripts, and for good reason, because he is a peerless editor and knows, in most cases (I have one exception in mind), what works and what doesn’t. I wrote:

  … I have never been to Heaven. Please note the capital letter. Ten years ago Ralph de Toledano wrote a novel in which he capitalized the word and also the word Hell, wherever they appeared; and always the copy editor would return his manuscript with the initial letters in lower case. Painstakingly, Toledano would recapitalize them. And so it went until, exasperated, the copy editor scribbled a note: “Why do you insist on capitalizing heaven and hell?” “Because,” Toledano replied, “they’re places. You know, like Scarsdale.”

  To describe the Heaven of my fantasy requires a series of negations, principal among them that Heaven is a place where you cannot be unhappy. When I was a schoolboy, we heard, during a three-day Lenten retreat, from an amiable old Jesuit who ruminated on a friend of his, a widowed lady of advanced years who had said to him, “Father, do dogs go to Heaven? Because if my Fido can’t go to Heaven, I shan’t be happy there.”

  “I told her,” the priest explained, “that if it were true that she would not be happy in Heaven save in the company of Fido, then she could absolutely be confident that Fido would go to Heaven.”

  You will see that there is a sizable Jesuitical banana peel there, lest the priest commit an enthymeme, which for a Jesuit is a cardinal sin. You begin a) with the proposition that you will be happy. If b) for this you need Fido, Fido will be there; on the other hand, c) perhaps it will prove that you can be happy without Fido, even though you do not now know this. The Jesuit was sophisticatedly, but not sophistically, stating that his friend should perhaps consider the possibility of happiness without Fido.

  Christianity tells us about the resurrection of the body. This is at once reassuring (one gets used to one’s body), and distracting (bodies need a great deal of maintenance, particularly when the time comes to die). One must assume that the only way to square that circle is to contrive a maintenance-free body, and that is the responsibility of the Lord, not of Elizabeth Arden health centers, or the Mayo Clinic. So, in my fantasy, I leave the problem to Him, with full confidence.

  The editor inquires, “How does the architecture look, what does the food taste like, how does the place smell and what about the people?” Well, let’s take that last question, which is the most delicate, first. Is Heaven crowded? Or is there a divine metabolism that prevents that overpopulation about which Margaret Sanger and Dr. Malthus were so concerned? I pen these words in a small craft with ten souls aboard, and there is a sense here of crowding, because you can walk only 71 feet from stem to stern, only 18 feet from beam to beam. In the intimate sense of the word, there is a little crowding. On the other hand, it is probably safe to say that there aren’t ten more people within one hundred miles of us in any direction. (Oh, sure, there is the random freighter. But we are not in a shipping lane, and we haven’t spotted a vessel in four days.) In that odd way, there is totally absent any sense of crowding. Here I think is something that touches on a divine dialectic: intimacy without crowding. Mustn’t it be better yet in Heaven than here, midway between St. Thomas and Bermuda?

  This begs, of course, the question, who the people are with whom you are intimate. But from this exercise I am saved by the injunction that I judge not, lest I be judged. To be sure, it is axiomatic to this fantasy that I have been judged and, after sitting it out in the cooler for a few millennia, admitted. What then happens, surely, is that the people there, while not losing their flavor, manage somehow to lose that about them which once made them—human. They are transfigured, by the central energy; and so you find sweetness that does not cloy, argument that does not vex, humor that does not lacerate, work that does not tire. The oxymoronization of life, the use of which word may jeopardize my chances of making it to Heaven.

  But isn’t that an appealing fantasy? And if this is possible, then doesn’t it follow that the least likeliest people can make it there? Oh, not Giovanni—it would be a theatrical disaster to pass through the gates and stumble over Don Giovanni—but …well, we all know one or two people whose presence in Heaven would surprise us. But in the nature of things, that surprise would turn out to be a delight. Right? And anyway, this is my fantasy, over which I am sovereign.

  As to the food, well: food is a sensual pleasure, so we may as well lump all the sensual pleasures together, and face that problem. Would we eat if we had no appetite? If we had no appetite, would this be because, as on earth, our organs are not functioning properly? No sir, it wouldn’t be that, not at all. You will not be hungry because you are sated. Not sated in the Neronic sense; sated as St. Francis was sated merely by looking out at nature. Even here on earth there are moments when you are not hungry and would reject the pleasures of cuisine—because you are, simply, too content. Would you hail the Good Humor man while listening to Flagstad singing the Liebestod? But that brings perhaps a tougher question: will there be music? Music is my Fido. If ever I harbored a blasphemous thought it was that Heaven without J. S. Bach would leave the carper with something to say for earth. But, of course, it cannot be. The Jesuit, in disposing of the problem of Fido, disposed of the problem of Bach: either he will be there—or we won’t want to hear him.

  Architecture? Well, how about many (stately) mansions? Isn’t there authority for that …metaphor? I shall conceive of Heaven as containing stately mansions.
If you don’t like stately mansions, the beauty of what I’m talking about is that you don’t have to quit Heaven: I won’t be there to say to you: “Love it or leave it.” You just won’t see any stately mansions. But I will. Did you ever see a dream walking? Well, I did.

  We come then to the dynamo in my fantasy. Well, the major poets, with maybe one or two exceptions, have described Him, and I shan’t try. But it is part of the rules that you cannot succeed in describing that fantasy: For it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. I understand this to mean that a No Trespassing sign has gone up for the fantasist, and I for one intend to observe it.

  We would come in, I calculated, sometime near dawn the following day. When you do a lot of navigation, particularly if you are incorrigibly sloppy concerning detail—a problem that has plagued me all my life (my father reached the point of terminal despair over my penmanship when I was fifteen and ordered a typewriter to be sent to me, along with instructions that I was never again to address him in longhand)—you are often rescued from grave error by needling instinct. I had set course for Bermuda, and my logbook gave the longitude of St. George’s at 64 degrees 24 minutes. At this point we were about one hundred miles south of there, so that I put aside the plotting sheet and pulled out a large-scale chart that shows the actual island of Bermuda. I then extended the rhumb line as drawn on the plotting sheet and found it rising north merrily, passing Bermuda about thirty miles east of the island.

  How in the name of God could that have happened? And so, in navigation, you start the process: the patient retracing of your steps, one after the other to see where you went wrong. It was a full ten minutes before it occurred to me to measure the longitude of St. George’s right there on the chart. It wasn’t 64-24. It was 64-42.