Safe from the Sea (8 page)

A long silence ensued, Olaf still calculating some impossible star equation with the tip of his finger, still conducting, Noah thought it looked like, some star symphony.

“The galley would start serving breakfast at six o’clock on every ship I ever sailed. Those first couple seasons I’d sit on deck until right before chowtime, take my morning sight, then head to the galley and eat breakfast like it was meant to be eaten.” He smacked his lips. “Buttermilk pancakes drowning in syrup, eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausage, coffee, juice, fruit. Sometimes we’d even have chops or steaks. We all ate like that, all the time. It was one of the perks for living on those boats. I still remember what it felt like to be that full. I’d go back to my cabin, slide off my boots, and lie down on my bunk.” He sighed. “Didn’t have a goddamn thing to worry about in that sleep. Nothing.”

“But later,” Noah said.

“I’ve never been a good sleeper, but those mornings were pretty damn fine. After your mother and I got hitched and you came along,
the sleep got a little bit tougher. I was ten years into my career when I met your mother, though. There was nothing else I could do.”

Olaf stood and stretched. “It all blends together for me now, everything before the
Rag
. Each of the ships and each of the years have turned out to be the same thing unless I’ve got pictures to remind me. But I’ll tell you what, my life was split the night she sank.”

FOUR

Olaf had adjourned to bed with only a nod. So many old feelings had been uncorked down on the beach, not least of which were the ones Noah had been expecting most, the anger and reproach years in the making, stirred up by the mere mention of his mother and her wanting to play piano at his wedding.

Noah had sent his father a wedding invitation as if he were a distant relative. The reply had come by way of his sister, who had told Noah their father intended to make the drive east by himself. Noah did not believe he would, but on the night before his wedding, Olaf showed up.

They held the rehearsal dinner at Natalie’s parents’ Swampscott home, a beautiful place with huge oak trees in the front yard, a deck overlooking Foster Pond in the back, and a red-brick chimney set against the clapboard siding. When Olaf stepped from his old Suburban and looked up at the three-story house, Noah felt heartsick. In order to quell the sadness he doubted his father deserved, he summoned his anger instead, put it on as if it were a coat of arms. From the window of the foyer he could see that the old man looked presentable
if rustic. His beard and hair were longer than they’d been, but they were also more kempt. The corduroy pants and rumpled chamois shirt were at least clean. Instead of boots he wore a pair of chocolate-brown, size fourteen loafers. It wouldn’t have surprised Noah to find the box they’d come in on the floor of the truck.

They met at the front door, shaking hands as they had before breakfast at the Freighter. Noah said, “Nice shoes.”

The look of smug satisfaction on the old man’s face said all Noah needed to know.

Grudgingly, Noah said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Having been cautioned about the impending and inevitable debacle, Natalie graciously ignored Noah’s warnings. She treated Olaf like her own father from the start. When she introduced him to her parents, Olaf offered them a gift.

Natalie’s mother sold real estate and presented the agent’s facade that everything was always fantastic. In fact, she was a whip-smart pessimist with a master’s degree in art history. Mr. Maier had served as an Essex County public defender for thirty years before retiring that summer. As they leaned against the granite countertops of their newly remodeled kitchen, sporting their Ralph Lauren garb, each with a long-stemmed glass of chardonnay, Noah knew the cut of their jib would not sit well with his father. In fact, he knew his father hated people like them, people who had no discernible faults, no tragedy in their lives.

“What
is
it?” Mrs. Maier said, withdrawing a brown bottle from the paper sack.

“This is aquavit, Linie aquavit, to be precise. Comes from Norway. I have a friend, captain’s a salty running Minnesota wheat to South Africa, he brings me a case each year.”

“This is very thoughtful, Mr. Torr.”

“This stuff has been across the equator twice. There’s caraway in it, and in order to blend the flavors, it needs the roll and pitch of the ocean waves. This bottle started out in Norway, crossed the Atlantic, come up the St. Lawrence, went back down the St. Lawrence, spent a week bound for Cape Town, then back again to Duluth. Now here it is. Won’t work for taking paint off the house, but enough of it will put the feeling fine in you.”

“Should we open it?” Natalie asked.

“Save it for a special night,” Olaf said. “There must be something else to drink around here.”

Noah led his father to the study, where two guys in tuxedos manned the bar. Olaf ordered a drink and turned his attention to the room.

“What is all this shit?” he said. “It looks like some kid’s bedroom.”

“Mr. Maier is a huge Red Sox fan. This is his memorabilia. You don’t even have to ask and he’ll tell you Johnny Pesky grew up right down the street.”

They stood silently for a few minutes while Olaf looked over the autographed baseballs and jerseys, the framed ticket stubs and bobble heads. “Well, it beats the hell out of me. To each his own, I guess.”

“Listen, he’s a really good guy. They’re all good folks. Take it easy on them.”

Olaf had already turned back to one of the bartenders and signaled for another. “Take it easy on them? What am I, a lout? Chrissakes, I’m here. I brought them a gift.”

“That was thoughtful,” Noah admitted.

Olaf quaffed the first third of his cocktail in a single, effortless pull. “Anyway, I don’t need a goddamn babysitter.”

“I know.”

“Then go mingle with your friends.”

At the end of the rehearsal dinner Olaf stood at the curb with a half-drunk beer in his paw. He had his eyes on the night sky. Noah stepped from the front door and walked down the brick footpath to say good-night.

“There isn’t a cloud in the sky and still hardly a star to be seen,” Olaf said. “But you can goddamn smell the ocean.” His words were slightly slurred. “Funny, all that time on a boat and I never saw the ocean.”

“How about I take you back to the hotel?” Noah said.

“I’m okay to get back to the hotel.”

“Really,” Noah insisted. “I can show you the town. Solveig can drive you to the wedding tomorrow.”

Olaf relented.

The silence on their short trip was broken only by the din of traffic. When they pulled up under the hotel marquee, Olaf drummed his fingers on the dash. “Why don’t you come in for a nightcap? The least I can do is buy my son a drink the night before his wedding.”

“I don’t need a drink.”

“Didn’t say you did. We’ll call it old time’s sake.”

Noah looked at his watch, thought of many reasons not to have a drink with the old man, and pulled up to have the valet park the car.

In the bar Olaf ordered twelve-year-old bourbon from the top shelf. Noah asked for beer, trying to estimate the number of cocktails the old man had put down. It didn’t seem possible a man could drink so much and still be coherent. The drinks arrived, and Olaf twirled his slowly. Tea candles flickered in small bowls of water beside ramekins of cashews on the mahogany bar. Through the curtained windows they looked onto a harbor with sailboats still in their slips.

“Natalie’s a nice gal,” Olaf said. “How she came out of that brood I can’t imagine.”

“I told you they’re decent people.”

“That is what you said.”

A piano concerto that both men knew filtered through the faint conversations taking place around them. Occasionally Noah could hear the halyard lines ringing on the masts of the boats in the harbor. Olaf finished the last of his drink and signaled for another.

After it arrived Olaf said, “Marriage, it humiliates a man.”

“What?” Noah said. He had not been expecting this.

“Makes a man less of what he is.”

Noah shook his head in complete awe of the old man’s audacity. He looked at the jigger of bourbon set before his father and said, “It’s not marriage that makes him less of what he is.”

“I’ve got firsthand proof, boy. I know what a lifetime of marriage can do to a man.”

“What do you know about a lifetime of anything but coming and going, huh? You were always
gone.
I’m really supposed to sit here and listen to life lessons from you?”

“I’m doing you the favor my old man should’ve done me.”

Noah faced him. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Can you not see how insulting this is? To Mom. To me. To Natalie.”

“I don’t mean to insult anyone.”

The calm in his father’s voice only made Noah more upset. “What bullshit. It’s
exactly
what you mean to do.”

Olaf didn’t waver. “Someday you’ll—”

“For god’s sake, spare me the rest of the lesson. I won’t hear it,” Noah interrupted.

“You will hear it, goddamnit,” Olaf boomed, loud enough that
people turned to look. “Marriage dogs a man his whole life. Your mother dogged me. Natalie will dog you. Mark it down.”

Noah took a minute to memorize his disdain. When it was burned in his mind, he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and stood to face his father. “What happened to you?” he said. He wanted to continue, but his loss of words overwhelmed him, and he left without saying another.

The next afternoon Olaf showed up in his rented tuxedo. He had trimmed his beard and combed his rim of white hair. He sat there easily during the ceremony, kissed Natalie on the cheek while they danced at the reception, even offered Noah a wink from across the ballroom.

That had been the last time they’d seen each other.

O
LAF WAS SITTING
in the great room with a cup of coffee when Noah woke the next morning. Noah was still smarting from their talk on the beach the night before, but he said good-morning and poured himself a cup and sat down.

Without pleasantries Olaf said, “You mind running into town for me?”

“Not at all.”

“I need a length of chain. Forty feet. Polyurethane coated. Go to the hardware store. Knut will help you.”

“I’ll go after this.” He held up the coffee. “You mind if I take your truck?” Noah wanted to see what it felt like to be behind the wheel of that thing.

“The keys are hanging by the door.”

“Anything else you need?”

Olaf shook his head. An awkward moment passed while Noah sipped his coffee. Before it was a quarter gone, he got up to leave.

By the time he got to Misquah he’d made a short list of things to do himself, and as he dialed his sister’s number on the pay phone outside the Landing, snow flurries began to blow across the parking lot. Solveig answered on the first ring, singing hello and asking how he was. They exchanged pleasantries, but the conversation became as dismal as the weather the moment he announced his whereabouts. She had managed, through her own adult years and despite the fact that her childhood had been just as fatherless as Noah’s, to forgive the old man most of his disgraces. Perhaps this was because Noah had borne most of Olaf’s brutishness. Solveig still dutifully visited the old man each Christmas, still invited him to her summer home each Fourth of July. Though Noah had never understood her devotion, he was glad for it.

She of course knew that only extraordinary circumstances would have brought Noah to Misquah, so she asked plainly what he was doing there. Noah filled her in, sparing no detail. When he neared the end of his recounting, he told her how feeble and sickly their father appeared. It was as if Noah had forgotten his audience altogether.

Solveig paused before commencing her litany of questions and concerns: She begged for clarification, asked Noah to repeat his story and elaborate on what he meant by sickly and feeble, instructed Noah on their father’s habits and proclivities, spit out her husband’s trial docket—he was an attorney in Fargo, where they lived—and her kids’ hectic schedules. Noah could practically hear the machinations of her distraught mind. Finally she told Noah she would get there as soon as possible, though she admitted she had no idea when that would be.

It was only after he had hung up that Noah realized he hoped her arrival would be delayed, realized that he wanted some time alone with the old man, come what may.

T
HERE WAS AN
agate and smoked-fish shop on the northern edge of town. He’d seen it on the day before. When he walked in, a synthesized loon call startled him from above the door. On the left a refrigerated deli case—an antique thing that hummed and clinked and dripped—was filled with smoked fish. There were sockeye salmon, ciscoes, lake and rainbow trout, whitefish and smelt, all whole, all golden, desiccated, and eyeless. On the right another glass case full of agate jewelry sat under canned lights. A counter spanned the two cases, and an antique cash register sat in the middle of it.

“How do?” a man said from behind the fish counter. Thin and long-fingered, he offered his hand. The two sides of his gray goatee were unevenly trimmed. “Rocks or fish?” he said as Noah shook his hand.

“Agates,” Noah said. “I’m looking for something for my wife.”

“Normally it’s my own wife who handles the rocks, but she’s visiting our daughter out in Portland.” He wiped his hands on a dirty apron as he circled behind the counter to the agate case. “I can help you, though. What’re you looking for? A nice necklace? Maybe a bracelet?”

The only piece of jewelry he’d ever bought Natalie was the half-carat diamond ring he’d given her when he proposed. “A necklace maybe. Something simple, not too gaudy.”

“What color eyes has she got?”

“Green-gray.”

“You like the green or the gray better?”

“The green, I guess.”

“Then you want a green agate.” He fumbled with the latch on the case. There were hundreds of pieces of agate jewelry on display, arranged without any regard for appearances. Gold-and silver-chained bracelets and necklaces lay heaped and tangled together, earrings and rings were dumped in ceramic bowls. There was even a tiara on a Styrofoam bust.