Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (10 page)

Sunday morning dawned
over a strong breeze offshore at Charleston, with waves still running five to seven feet, according to the weatherman in my ship’s radio. It was not certain at first that these conditions would continue into the afternoon, but as the day wore on and the wind did not abate, I knew that my departure would be delayed yet another day. That was all right by me.

I spent the better part of the day getting provisions squared away and the boat ready to sail. When I had done all I could do and it appeared that there was nothing left but to wait, I called Susan. She would be home that evening, and I was invited to come for dinner—our third together in as many days.

It was a big step. Single mothers are rightly cautious about introducing their children to any men they might be dating. Although Susan’s children were not babies, at fifteen and seventeen they were still at an impressionable age. I would learn later that I was the only one in a long line of suitors who were accorded the honor of meeting them, but that did not surprise me in the least. Through words unspoken, I knew we shared the same plan. Things were moving fast.

That Sunday afternoon, I had written my innermost thoughts in a letter to give to Susan after dinner, knowing that I would be sailing the next day and at sea for perhaps a week after that, without the kind of constant communication that new love demands. I will spare you the seasickness that would surely overtake you were I to recite that purple prose. But I make no apologies to anyone for the way I felt then and still feel now. In those letters I spoke to Susan from the heart, and she gave me hers in return.

The next morning, I sailed out of Charleston Harbor a changed man living a changed life. I smile inside each time I recall hearing Susan’s words through the fading signal on my cell phone as I worked the
Gypsy Moon
into the channel headed offshore on that bright Monday morning: “I am totally committed to you.”

The die was cast. I was leaving to complete the voyage I had begun, but I had found at last the safe harbor that I knew would shelter both of us for the rest of our days. Eight months later, with the
Gypsy Moon
nodding at her lines in Nassau, we were married in the garden of our home in Raleigh. It was a simple ceremony conducted in the presence of our children, other family, and a small group of friends. As Susan spoke her vows, I saw again in her eyes that fearless surrender to love that I had discovered while waylaid in the harbor at Charleston. That was her gift to me. She was the Pearl of Great Price that I had searched so long and far to find. I pledged all that I have and all that I am to make her my own, and I will never let her go. I made that pledge in the words of a poem that I wrote for her as a wedding gift:

It was December
21, 2009. I was sailing out of the harbor where I had just met the woman I believed I would someday marry. I didn’t yet know but hoped she kindled the same flame. With Christmas only four days away, I was as giddy as old Ebenezer Scrooge in his moment of salvation. The dolphins that escorted me through the channel at Fort Sumter could have been sugarplum fairies, for all I cared or might have noticed on that heady morning.

The tide that swept me out of Charleston and back to the sea on a Monday in December had been a long time coming, but its sudden arrival was unexpected. To fix the latitude and longitude of my position in that moment and understand where I was headed from there, it is necessary to look back at the time and place where I first began.

I grew up in what is politely described in therapeutic circles nowadays as an “alcoholic family,” which is an odd way of imagining a family. After all, a family doesn’t take a drink—a man does, or, as F. Scott Fitzgerald more closely observed, the drink takes him. A man who drinks with purpose, not pleasure, is a lit fuse for whom booze is a powder keg. However slowly and quietly the fuse may burn, sooner or later any wives and children on the scene will be blasted skyward like so much cannon fodder, suspended awhile in a spectacular, wild flight from the pursuing laws of time and gravity.

Time and gravity always get their man.

Eventually, everyone who is elevated by the explosion falls back to Earth, scorched and smoldering, landing necessarily at the bottom of wherever they happen to be. When my dad hit bottom he kept rolling in a cloud of hot smoke, but the rest of us landed in Baltimore.

It was not long before that big bang when my mother, at the age of thirty-six, gave birth to me, her fourth and youngest child by ten years. She had no career and only a high school education. The year was 1958, and the women’s movement was still a distant dream. Undaunted, she taught herself to type, took two jobs, and worked days, nights, and weekends. By the time I was eight, my brother and two sisters had left to make their way in the world. My mother moved the two of us from inner-city Baltimore to a one-bedroom apartment in the county that we could scarcely afford. The apartment was located next to Boys’ Latin, a private prep school with a meandering campus on which I would come to trespass with impunity.

Baltimore, I discovered, is a “provincial” town. The word “province” describes a place that is defined more by its boundaries than its possibilities, more by what it excludes than what it welcomes. The boundaries in Baltimore in the sixties were ones of money, education, and social class, which were really just branches of the same tree. Baltimore then was exceedingly well organized along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, and cross-pollination was rare.

Growing up, I knew Baltimore—and specifically my neighborhood of Roland Park—as a place where an elite tribe wearing horn-rimmed tortoise shell glasses drove boxy forest-green Volvos with round headlights and tan leather seats so cracked and peeling that the sheepskins that covered them were clearly a thing of utility, not fashion. Their ancient axles creaked at every bend in the road like the timbers of an old ship. For every hundred thousand miles on the odometer, Nordic medallions were clamped to the front grille as proof that the owner’s choice of something initially costlier and dowdier than his neighbor’s Chevrolet, like his choice of investments and a wife, had been proven wiser with time. His neighbor likely had sent three Chevrolets to the junkyard in the same span of years, at greater total cost, while the quirky Volvo and its knowing owner soldiered steadily on.

I learned that no matter how elderly the member of this elite tribe, his trusted Volvo was tattooed with emblems readily identifying him to other tribesmen (and presumably protecting him from attack) as a member of a particular regional band, spelled out across the rear window in letters like
Y-A-L-E
or
H-A-R-V-A-R-D
or
P-R-I-N-C-E-T-O-N
or
V-I-R-G-I-N-I-A
.

As it came more clearly into focus in my teen years, I found the WASP ethos of Roland Park simultaneously fascinating and bewildering. I could never quite put my finger on it. Yet however indecipherable was its source code, in application it became something instantly familiar to me. As an adult, I would have the distinct sense whenever I watched the elder President Bush on television that I was seeing someone I had met before. When my brother-in-law Terry described him as “the ultimate Yalie,” I knew exactly what he meant. Nowadays, a Yale man is more likely to be a Korean woman with perfect SAT scores, but not then. Terry didn’t have to explain it. You knew. We all knew. These were the people “to the manner born,” and we were keen if involuntary observers of the manner.

Boys’ Latin was considered, by academic standards, on the third rung among the local prep schools, below Gilman and St. Paul’s. By social standards, though, it wasn’t even on the same ladder as the public school I attended as a boy.

I can still hear my friend Tyrone’s voice as he stepped onto the school bus in the morning, singing “Hot Fun in the Summertime” just like Sly and the Family Stone. He was the fastest sprinter in my elementary school, and I was the fastest over distance. I remember how the sweat glistened on his skin during the races we ran together in the heat of Indian-summer afternoons. I think I knew, even then, that there wasn’t anyone named Tyrone at Boys’ Latin.

Two basketball hoops had been erected at opposite ends of the Boys’ Latin parking lot, and I wore a groove in the concrete running between them. Every Christmas brought a new ball, and most mornings throughout the year I rose early to shoot for an hour or two before catching the school bus. I would shoot for another hour during recess, two more hours after getting home, and all day on Saturday.

Eventually, I could hit from anywhere on the court. No evening could end until I had hit ten shots in a row. As night fell, a lone spotlight from a nearby building threw off a dim glow behind the backboard. Eventually the hoop became a shadow and the swish of the ball dropping through the net my only clue to its location. Though I couldn’t drive for a layup or jump worth a nickel (you don’t acquire those skills playing by yourself), I was a 100-percent three-point shooter before there was such a thing as the three-point shot.

Although I was a fixture at Boys’ Latin, even wending my larcenous way through the sumptuous buffet line at homecoming, I rarely talked to the kids who went to school there. My intimidation was largely a self-inflicted wound. I knew you had to take tests to get into the school, and I was sure that those who had been admitted were much smarter than I.

They wore a uniform that set them apart, although their clothes were usually disheveled from after-school horseplay as they stood around waiting for the aforementioned Volvos to arrive. Most of those who hadn’t gone home by the afternoon were on the field playing lacrosse—a game I did not know. Every once in a while, though, some kid who had missed his ride would wander down to the parking lot and make the mistake of challenging me to a game of one-on-one in basketball. A boy who fancied himself a player took it particularly hard when he lost. I remember what his classmate said to him as he urged him just to walk away: “Don’t worry about it. That’s all he does.”

It wasn’t all I did, by a long shot, and I wanted to say so. I wanted to say that I played jazz piano when I was supposed to be practicing Bach, that I loved to write and was a pretty fair shot with a bow and arrow, and that I knew exactly what the surface temperature of the water in Lake Roland had to be before the largemouth bass would begin to move into the shallows. But I also knew that these skills would be laughably beside the point. I wasn’t part of that tribe. A child of an alcoholic is, in his own mind, the last surviving member of a lost civilization. He sees no point in trying to fit in with society at large, because he is certain he never will.

My mother combatively resisted such self-depravation. Her own father was a drinker, but she had an almost pugilistic confidence in her own potential and firmly believed in the American gospel of personal transformation. For her, the finer sensibilities of the upper classes were to be emulated, while their pretensions were to be avoided. Eleanor Roosevelt best embodied that balance for my mother and many others of her generation. A New Dealer to her grave, Mom felt a visceral aversion to the country club set even as she longed to experience the finer things that their intelligence and education had brought them.

And so she launched me like a deep-sea probe into their midst.

I was christened at three months of age in Baltimore’s venerated old stone Cathedral of the Incarnation, known for the extravagance of smells and bells that are the mark of “high church” Episcopalians. At the first opportunity I was enrolled in the cathedral boy choir, where I and a restless horde of others were paid one dollar per month for the fleeting beauty of our soprano voices. Owing to my short stature and the length of a choir robe intended for a taller boy, there was a spectacular trip-and-fall incident involving a candelabra and a great deal of noise during the solemn procession of the choir at midnight Mass one year. Only my pride and the pageantry of the moment were damaged, but my memories of cathedral life mysteriously end there.

At age ten I went off for the first of two summers at a day camp at the McDonogh School, where 1930s Wimbledon champ Don Budge offered tennis clinics for delighted children, and cool college kids taught us the rudiments of English riding and jumping. How my mother found the money for this extravagance I have no idea. Alongside my peers, who were dressed in proper English riding hats, I clearly stood out—if not for my riding, then unmistakably for the shiny white miner’s helmet I wore. It came free of charge from Mine Safety Appliances, where my mother worked as a secretary. No one except perhaps my horse was more astonished than I one summer when we were called into the ring to accept the first-place ribbon. It was my earliest experience of victory over my own diminished expectations.

Elkridge Estates, as our apartments were ostentatiously named, seemed to be mostly a place for well-to-do empty-nesters and gay divorcees. My mother’s ambitions notwithstanding, it was clear we didn’t fit in there, either. The younger residents drove natty sports cars and played squash at local clubs—except for one guy.

Hank Bauer, manager of the 1966 World Series Champion Baltimore Orioles, lived in the second apartment down from ours. There was no missing him when he arrived in his conspicuously long white Cadillac. Though I later learned he had been a star in his own right for the Yankees as a younger man, he seemed more like us than the rest of our neighbors. I was a Junior Oriole at the time. Membership came with a wad of fifty-cent bleacher tickets, and I could name every starter on the 1966 team.

Rumors circulated about the famous man on our street who seemed rarely to be at home. When I came with a brand-new ball looking for an autograph one day, he appeared at the door of his apartment wearing a white undershirt. He had what I don’t pretend actually to recall but would confidently guess was a can of National Bohemian beer in his hand. Had it been Brooks Robinson’s autograph I might have hesitated, but Mr. Bauer was just my neighbor, and before long I had whacked that ball as hard as any other, never to be seen again.

Hank Bauer, alas, didn’t notice any remarkable talent in the Junior Oriole living two doors up from him, and it was also becoming clear that at 5 feet 10 inches tall and 140 pounds, I was unlikely to star on any school’s basketball team. About the same time those doors of my childhood were closing, however, another opened to me.

A man in his early forties named Crawford moved into the end unit of our building. Spotting me around the neighborhood, he invited me to test out a lacrosse stick made of urethane plastic in a new design that he and some fellow investors had just patented. It was going to be manufactured by a newly formed company named STX. I didn’t know it then, but in the rarefied world of big-time lacrosse, that moment in history was something akin to the advent of Microsoft.

Mr. Crawford became a friend. My mother confided in him the story of our family, and he shared with us the story of his own father and mother. He was unmistakably a member of the elite tribe, but he had somehow escaped and learned to speak our language.

Before long, I was outfitted—free of charge—in all the lacrosse gear STX was selling at a premium to kids at Boys’ Latin and other prep schools around the Northeast. I began practicing in earnest with the newfangled stick that would revolutionize the old-school game.

William Chauncey Crawford knew a thing or two about the old school. He was an All-American in lacrosse at the University of Virginia in the 1950s when sticks were still handmade of wood and strung with rawhide by Indians. He also did a stint on the admissions committee at Princeton. In that day, people would sometimes lament the number of applicants from elite private schools whose only distinguishing characteristic was the number of summers they had spent at Nantucket. Bill would beg to differ, and—to be fair—there were kids from public schools and modest backgrounds who made it into the Ivy League on their own merit. But I listened with interest and made the wrong mental index card: Nantucket. Vacation. Elite.

Mr. Crawford encouraged my mother to enroll me at Gilman and advance my prospects for acceptance at a better college, but I was hardly complicit in that plan. Traditional schoolwork held little interest for me, and my grades showed it.

Besides, by the time I was of high school age I had spent years balancing a chip on my shoulder and was rather good at keeping it there. Private schools and the social expectations that came with them seemed daunting. It never occurred to me, as it never does to adolescents of any generation, that every other child harbored some version of the same anxiety. I preferred to go my own way. Like most children of alcoholics, I had become skilled in the subterfuge necessary to protect “the secret.”