Letters (136 page)

But it was her Why’s that changed my cruising plans. She kept it up over dinner—iced tea and crab cakes at a dry establishment across the street, a self-administered test to stay off the juice till her tale got told. Why couldn’t she make a go of it with any of her husbands and lovers? she wanted to know. Why had Prinz dumped her for Mel Bernstein’s slack-assed kid? Why had she ever imagined she had any talent except for drinking and fucking? (I shushed her: family restaurant.) Why couldn’t she control herself? Why was she born? Why go on living?

I sang the next line for her, to turn the edge; the one after we harmonized together, laughing around our backfin crab cakes—

—and then I reminded her (she knew the story) that a series of Why’s from her on June 21 or 22, 1937, when she was going on four years old, had led me, age 37, aboard Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, to a clarification of my resolve to end my life. Thence, not long after, to the recognition that,
sub specie aeternitatis,
there was no more reason to commit suicide than not to.

She was, Jeannine sensibly replied, not me. And she wasn’t really talking about suicide, just wishing she were dead.

Nor was I, I told her (as it here began coming clear to me), really talking about 13 L, which I now explained: that summer day I’d lived programmatically like any other because I meant it to be my last. I was,” I said, really working out for myself a detail of 13 R—which never mind, my dear. Christ, Toddy, she wondered, who’s been on the sauce? And whose crisis
was
this? And what in the (family restaurant) world was she going to do with her useless self?

She was coming out to Todds Point with me for the weekend, I informed her. To talk things over like, well, uncle and niece. Swap despair stories. Knock back a moderate volume of London gin. Maybe net a few soft crabs and try to swim between the pesky sea nettles. My vacation cruise—and her return to Fort Erie, where they were wondering—could wait till the Monday.

She was delighted; so was I. No great mystery: a relief for her not to have to think in sexual terms, which had become anxious ones; a pleasure for me to be, no doubt for the last time, host to a pretty houseguest for an innocent weekend, uncomplicated by any emotion save mere benevolence and fitly echoing, in this leisurely wrap-up of my life, our father-daughterly excursion back in 13 L.

She was also curious, all the way to the cottage. What was
I
in despair about? Could it have to do with her mother, by any chance, or was it just Getting Old? Where did I mean to cruise to, and with whom? She really
could
use a drink now, if I didn’t mind; wasn’t the old country club somewhere along the way to Todds Point? How many girls did I suppose had like herself been laid on all nine greens of that flat little golf course in a single summer, between their junior and senior years of high school?

Never mind, I said, and it’s about as quick to keep on toward home, as an old regatta sailor like herself should know: just two points farther downriver. Oh wow, said she, she hadn’t done
that
in years and years—sailing, she meant. Did I think we could slip out just for a day sail before she left? But she answered herself with tears: Left for where? Not back to that (etc.) Farm: Joe Morgan was too far gone these days in his own hang-ups to do her any good, and all the others were either nuts or feebs. Her brother rightly despised her; her mother didn’t give a damn. Did I know that she didn’t even have an apartment to call her own? She’d made the mistake of letting hers go, a dandy one on the Upper West Side, when she’d moved in with Prinz; her stuff was still there.

Et cetera. All this over Beefeaters and tonic now, here. It excited Jeannine (as it had not Jane) to be back in the cottage she remembered happily from her girlhood. She kept the alcohol intake reasonably controlled; we sat for some hours in the dark on the screened front porch, listening to crickets and owls and ice cubes and each other’s stories, watching the moon track out on the still river where
Osborn Jones
lay half provisioned. I was pleased with her, that she hadn’t got drunk or hysterical; that she assessed herself and the others fairly; that she tucked her legs under her on the old porch glider and made herself unaffectedly at home with me; that she had the presence of heart to wonder again what was on
my
mind. I advised her, unless she was broke, to find another apartment, in New York or Los Angeles or wherever; to look very carefully for a serious, conservative, happily married, physically unattractive psychiatrist, preferably female, to help her with the booze and the rescaling of her ambitions; to consider applying some of her energies to something impersonal and citizenly—why not her father’s Tidewater Foundation, for example, which certainly needed its philanthropies reviewed?—et cetera.

I did not mention the will case; seemed inappropriate. Or her chain-smoking, which stank up the sultry air. Of my own situation, not to be unfairly reticent and because it was agreeable to have that auditor in that ambience, I volunteered the vague half-truth that my health was uncertain and the truth that a 69-year-old bachelor whose accomplishments have been modest and whose relations with women have been more or less transient and without issue has sufficient cause both for occasional despair and for looking unmorbidly to last things. Handling that big boat alone, for example, was getting to be a bit much, but I’d never enjoyed vacationing in male company, had run out of companionable and willing female crew, and was no longer interested enough in the sport to swap
O.J.
for a smaller and more manageable craft. Thus my decision to make a final solo circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and then pack it in.

I said nothing about suicide, of course. But I realized at once I’d said too much about female crew. Jeannine became her-mother-back-in-May all over again, when I’d first felt my life’s odd recycling. O Jesus, how she’d
love
to see Dun Cove again, and Queenstown Creek, and What’s-its-name Cove off Gibson Island Harbor—Red House! Red House Cove! And I shouldn’t forget how she’d raked in the silverware back in her dinghy-racing days against the best Hampton One-Design skippers on the circuit; and she remembered how to read charts and take bearings and play the currents and handle lines. Couldn’t she for Christ’s sake pretty
please
go along with me, if I hadn’t a full company lined up? At least for a few days? She’d cook, she’d crew, she’d drink no more than I, she’d smoke downwind of me and the sails, she’d stay out of my way, she didn’t mind mosquitoes, she loved foul weather, she’d never been seasick in her life, she even had shorts and sneakers in her bag, though alas no jeans or swimsuit, but who cared, she’d use Off in the evenings and swim in her shorts and T-shirt when there were People around. I could put her ashore whenever I tired of her company.
Please
say yes, Toddy! Unless you’ve got something else going?

It was no time to lay another rejection on her. The notion even sounded agreeable. To’ve had a son to sail with is a thing I’ve often wished; to’ve had a daughter, even more so. But I didn’t trust Jeannine’s sobriety—alcoholics don’t reef down
that
readily—and had no use for a drunk on board. And I did (this much I told her) want not only privacy but some solitude on my Last Go-‘Round. I felt her tensing for my no: the stab of her cigarette, the swish of her drink. Let’s take a shakedown sail tomorrow, I proposed. Dun Cove for the night; Gibson Island on Sunday if we still like each other. You can get a cab to the airport from the yacht club there, and I’ll go my solitary way.

It took her a hurt half-second to remuster her enthusiasm; then she was all aye-aye sir and asking like a kid could she go to bed now so the morning would come sooner, or was there work she ought to do first?

Yes to the first and no to the second: it was near midnight. I showed her the shower (my addition), put out sheets for the hide-a-bed, and turned in, not without noting the level in that Beefeater bottle, which I deliberately neglected to put away. Jeannine gave me a daughterly kiss good night and thanked me without fuss. She doubted she’d go back to that Farm except to collect her belongings; she had no further use for Reg Prinz, she thought; she would consider my other advice seriously.

I fell asleep listening to her shower and thinking, inevitably, of Jane. Some time in the night the telephone rang me up from sweet depths; before I was collected enough to get it (I’d not bothered to move it from the living room to the bedroom jack), Jeannine had answered and been hung up on. Not a word, she said from her bed edge, fetching in her summer nightie, her hair unbound. She’d lit a cigarette, but I was pleased to see that the bottle hadn’t been moved or, evidently, touched. Some fucking drunk, she guessed with a wry chuckle: many’s the time. Nighty-night.

Next morning was a bright one, unusual for August, a good dry high come down from Canada with a light northwesterly. More and more pleased, I found Jeannine up and perky, in cut-off jeans and T-shirt, the hide-a-bed stripped and stowed, the gin bottle unselfconsciously returned to the bar cabinet, its level undisturbed (of course I hadn’t checked the other bottles), coffee brewed and breakfast standing by. She gave the skipper a good-morning peck, asked him how he liked his eggs, predicted that the breeze would freshen enough by noon to make even that clunker of a skipjack move, and declared that such late-night no-response phone calls made her homesick for NYC: nothing missing but the heavy breath. Did they happen often?

Fact is, Dad, it was the first such ever, in my memory; outside the cities such annoyances are rare. He’d said nothing? Not a syllable, either apologetic, explanatory, or obscene. That in that case our attribution of gender was presumptive didn’t occur to me till the evening, 2200 hours, as I made the day’s final entry in the ship’s log. I was after all a lawyer
on vacation,
eagerer by far than I’d expected to get
O.J.
loaded and under way.

Jeannine was a delight: her complexion fresher, eyes brighter, spirits higher than I’d seen them since her first divorce. She took my car to fetch the last of the groceries and the first of the ice while I topped up the water tanks, loaded and stowed, closed the cottage, singled up the dock lines, and started the diesel to kick us out into sailing room. We went over the checklists together—a disingenuous tête-à-tête which Jeannine smartly called me on by blowing her breath in my face. Cigarettes, coffee, and toothpaste, okay? No booze till the hook goes down.

I kissed her forehead; we raised the sails, cast off, and for the sport of it (but with the engine idling in neutral in case the breeze set us too far shoreward), fetched out to deep water under sail alone, close-hauled on a tricky port tack, by lee-bowing the outrunning tide to offset our leeway and lowering the big centerboard inch by inch as we beat out of shoal water. A neat bit of seamanship, landlubberly Father, which brought a cheer from the crew when we cleared our mark—a particular brush-topped stake on the last three-foot spot before good sea-room—by no more than that same three feet. Jeannine bounced happily back to the wheel from her watch at the bowsprit (those breasts bounced too, under that T-shirt, a man could not but notice with pleasure, whatever the possible consanguinity) to hug me (Ah) and take the helm while I cut the engine and made the first log entry:
Day 1 (Sat 819): Choptank R. 1030: Last Cruise off to good beginning.

But even as I went on to log our weather, speed, heading, and trim, I decided to take no further chances that day. Tempting as it was, in that breeze from that quarter, to come about and close-reach straight into the Bay, we crossed the wide river-mouth instead, tacked up Broad Creek, anchored for lunch and a cautious dip off Hambledon Island (sea nettles, like a gross of old condoms, everywhere one looked). Then we ran back down again, banged out past Cooks Point to the Sharps Island Light to get a taste of open Bay and a bit of spray in our faces, and back into the Choptank and up Harris Creek to Dun Cove. The rationale was to get a good anchoring spot for the night before the weekend fleet piled in from the western shore—there’d be 50 boats by nightfall in that first snug anchorage on the Choptank. But we were also, as Jeannine airily observed, only eight nautical miles from home in case I wanted rid of her in the morning.

We could quit that now, I suggested. It had been a good day’s sail, the better for her having been aboard, and I hoped she’d have a drink with me after we swam. The hook was down in eight feet in the western arm of that roomy cove, off which yet another, lagoonlike little cove makes, too shoal for cruising boats to enter but a fine secluded spot for swimming. The breeze had waned from fifteen knots to near calm; the late afternoon had hazed over and stoked up; furling sail and setting the anchor left us both perspiring. With my permission, not to soak her only pair of shorts (they would never dry out in the overnight damp), Jeannine swam this time bare-assed, her T-shirt pulled demurely but sexily over her hips while she used the boarding ladder. That sort of modesty, she acknowledged, was not her long suit. On a sailboat especially, in her view, clothing was for comfort, protection (including against unwarranted attention), and other folks’ proprieties only. In hot weather, alone or with others, she preferred going naked, and never cared who looked so long as
they
didn’t care and left her alone.

Mm hm. My sentiments exactly, despite my local fame as a coat-and-tie-skipper in the spring and fall. The fact was, I told her, it was Arrow shirts or nothing, and after half a century of watching our rivers get yearly more crowded, I still found swimsuits unnecessary more often than not when at anchor on our side of the Chesapeake. That ice broken, we dinghied through the nettles to what we now christened Skinny-Dip Cove, where, as we’d hoped, we saw fewer of them; and wary as I was of medusa stings on my privates, at her challenge and example I Took a Chance.

I report to you, Dad, that at age near-70 it is still a pleasure to feel one’s male equipment floating free in the amniotic waters of the Chesapeake, so warm by August that they don’t even tighten the scrotum, and to splash about with a long-legged, suntanned, gold-haired (but, one observed with interest, brown-fleeced), not-at-all-bad-looking woman half one’s age. I had first done Dun Cove in the buff (we called it “buckbathing” back then), crewing for friends, when a woman of 35 was
twice
my age, and had I looked with awe upon a naked and unattainably mature 21-year-old, the skipper’s girl friend. I had skinny-dipped there in the 1920’s and ’30’s and ’40’s and ’50’s and ’60’s, with friends coeval to each decade. How old Polly, as late as last August, used to love to peel out of her Playtex and leap with a whoop from
O.J.‘s
bowsprit, nettles be damned! And beautiful Jane, modest Jane, who would strip only at night lest someone see her from the woods alongshore—how she loved the sparkle on us of Dun Cove’s phosphorescing algae, her nipples twinkling before me in Franklin Roosevelt’s second term! My itinerary for the rest of the cruise did not call for another visit to this first of my Favorite Anchorages; I was immensely happy to have a Naked Lady-Friend to swim with on my last stop in Dun Cove.