William F. Buckley Jr. (4 page)

He wondered for a moment: Should he have awakened Lila and brought her along? It would be nice to have her with him,
but he dismissed the thought quickly. He felt only contempt for surviving parental rules governing his own movements, but intuitively he understood any precautions designed to protect Lila. She was just
too young
for grown-up stuff. Maybe next summer.

He thought there might be a security guard, but he had his wallet with him, and the guard could check that
Listless
was owned by an O’Hara. If the guard needed further persuasion, Danny could invite him to be present when Danny opened the combination lock, to establish that he was familiar with it. And, of course, he could describe to the guard exactly what lay in the boat, establishing his familiarity with it.

What reason would he give for boarding the boat just before midnight?

He would tell the guard that he needed to rise early to complete the arrangements for their “ocean trip.” He wouldn’t say, “the trip to Nantucket.” That would sound too routine.

But there was no guard, so Danny bicycled along the marina dock until, against the new moon, he could discern the configuration of the little sloop he had come to know so well.

He put down the bicycle suddenly, quietly. He had spotted a faint light on the
Listless.
The forward hatch, he could see, was open. His heart began to pound. If a light was on, that meant someone had to be on board, because a master blade switch shut off electrical circuitry throughout the boat, and always that switch was disconnected when the last person left the boat. Might it be that a workman had forgotten—left on the master switch, and also a cockpit light? If so, the batteries would drain in a matter of hours.

He walked with extreme caution along the slip the
Listless
was tied up to. Ducking very low, he walked past the fo’c’sle light to examine the cockpit.

Its hatch was open.

That had to mean that someone was below. The yard men would never leave a boat with two hatches open.

One hand on the safety-line stanchion and another on the shroud, he pulled himself lightly over the lifeline to the deck, lowered himself, stomach on deck, and slowly, noiselessly, inched
toward the forward hatch. He was several feet from the forward hatch opening when he heard the sound, a woman’s moaning. He lay still; and, after a moment, continued to crawl forward. He raised his head only enough to look down into the fo’c’sle. He was looking now on his father’s naked torso. A blond woman was gyrating rhythmically above him, looking down on his tortured, pleasured face with a half-smile.…

Danny was riveted. The fire in his own loins was instantaneous. He was mortified, entranced, frightened, mesmerized. He thought quickly, silently, to leave, but he could not remove his eyes from the scene below. It was several minutes before his father’s moans joined with the groaning of his partner, and then a little animal yelp, after which she bent over, covering his father’s body.

Surely, Danny—sweating, breathless—kept thinking, his heartbeat could be heard below? He inched himself back a few feet; then, one leg over the lifeline to the scupper, he swung the other around to the dockside and walked silently back to the bicycle, drawing it along by hand until he had passed a dozen boats, only then mounting it and heading back for home.

In bed again his thoughts were tumultuous, his excitement finally uncontrollable. So much about which he had vaguely wondered was—so much clearer now. It was that way with Danny. What was not clear was what he would say when he saw his father the next day. It was clear to him only what would be on his mind.

“Come on, Danny, let’s you and me take this load to the boat, stow it, and I’ll come back for the ladies.” Clement O’Hara had on his skipper’s hat and carried his seabag over his left shoulder, displaying a muscular forearm bronzed right up to the short sleeves of his polo shirt.

Wordlessly, Danny got into the front seat of the boxy Buick station wagon with his father. He wedged his bare knees up against the last-minute grocery bag so that he could close the car door.

“I called the Coast Guard,” his father said. “They told me the wind is building. An easterly. Not ideal. But what the heck, it’ll
probably change, and it won’t hurt if we have to tack for a while.”

Danny said nothing. After a moment his father spoke again. “If we do tack, I’ll make Mom go below, camp down on the leeward side. She’ll be comfortable there. Lila can stay in the cockpit—fresh air—and hand us things. You and I, we can alternate on the wheel, and tend to the sails.” Clement looked over at his dark-haired son with the trim profile and expressive lips. “You looking forward to it, son?”

Danny said yes, he was looking forward to it.

It was late morning and the day was gray. Newport gray: sullen clouds, leaden seas, wisps of agitated white. Getting the boat as far as the Brenton Reef lightship at the mouth of the Bay was no problem—heading south in an easterly. But father and son had to struggle against the wind pressure to tuck in a reef. While they worked on it, posting themselves on opposite sides of the boom, Lila was at the wheel. Her pigtail swung over her shoulder when the puff was heavy. She focused with fierce attention on the compass, determined to keep the course prescribed by her father.

It was when they got to open water that tacking became necessary. “The course to Vineyard Sound is 110 degrees magnetic,” Clement O’Hara pronounced, seated below at the chart table. “We’ll do a long port tack, maybe a couple of hours”—he looked down again at the chart—“three hours, maybe, then decide whether to head for the fair current up Vineyard Sound, or go southeast and then on up to Martha’s Vineyard. Hit it at the eastern end, go up by Chappaquiddick.” He glanced down again at the chart. “Then … more beating to Nantucket. Damn”—he looked up and spoke as to himself—“the wind couldn’t be worse for our purposes.”

And then, to his wife, “Rachel, I’ll have a Bloody Mary with lunch.”

Two hours later, Rachel pleaded with her husband to return to Newport. “It would be an easy run going back, wouldn’t it, Clem? With this wind?” Clement O’Hara was working on his fifth bottle of beer. He tightened the grip of his cap over his head and
said nothing to his wife, who was leaning back on the bunk, one foot up on the vertical rail to keep her balance in the rolls. He stood up, leaning his head into the cockpit where he felt the force of the wind and the sultriness of the air. “What course you holding, Danny?”

“One three five.” Danny needed to shout out the words to be heard through the din of the wind. The rain had begun to come down an hour earlier. Danny had on foul-weather gear, jacket and pants, a baseball cap, and a towel around his neck. The boat heeled sharply. The wind against the shrouds whistled, the pitch varying with the speed.

“Can you see Gay Head?” Clement shouted out to the helmsman.

“I don’t know whether it’s Gay Head,” Danny called back. “But it’s something. At about ten o’clock, maybe eleven; four, five miles off.”

Clement went into the icebox for another beer.

“Clement, goddamnit,” Rachel struggled against the movements of the boat, her hand clutching the grab rail above the bunk, “you have had
enough
beer. Now throw that overboard or give it to me!”

Clement did not lift his face from the chart. Rachel looked over to one side at her daughter. But Lila worried only about Danny, more than an hour now alone in the cockpit. Clement removed his foul-weather jacket. His sweat shone through the polo shirt. He began to fiddle with the dials on the radio direction finder. He leaned up into the cockpit again and shouted out to Danny, “I’ll see if I can bring in Gay Head and New Bedford. That will give us a fix.” In the rolling boat, heeled twenty, twenty-five degrees over in the puffs, Clement fumbled with the parallel rules and the dividers and the pencil and the pad over the chart. Rachel, back on the bunk, one foot again up on the rail, could see that her husband was not succeeding in whatever it was that he was attempting. Danny’s voice called out, and Clement arched his head into the cockpit to make out the words.

“What you say, Dan?”

Danny shouted out into the wind. “We’re getting close to that land, Gay Head, maybe. Should we go on a starboard tack?”

“Yes,” Clement said, ambiguously. “I’ll come up and do the lines.”

It was an unclean business. Danny brought the boat’s bow into the wind. His father began to release the jib sheet, became confused and reached for a winch handle, which fell from his hand into the agitated sea, bouncing over the leeward rail which was several inches under water. The jib sheet was now tangled on the winch. Clement had not freed it when the wind batted the sail to starboard, and now, the jib caught aback, the hull pitched and the starboard rail went deeper under water, the end of the boom poking into the sea.

“Loose the main! Loosen the main, goddamnit, Danny!” But the main winch was in the cockpit, not at the helmsman’s side—a responsibility of the sail trimmer. Danny was wrestling to get way—with no forward motion, the rudder was ineffective. He had to bring the boat back on a starboard tack until the jib sheet could be untangled.

The maneuver never executed, and the jib back in place,
Listless
continued on a port tack, fifty degrees south of course. A half hour later, Danny could no longer see land. It was after six. The rain ended but fog came in and the wind’s velocity heightened. The main’s double reef still left the boat overcanvassed.

“
We need less sail.
” Danny’s reasoning was in part book learning, in part seat-of-the-pants.
Something
had to be done. He closed his eyes and forced his mind to sort out the alternatives. One was to haul down the mainsail entirely. A second was to replace the jib with a smaller sail—there was a storm jib on board. But, he realized achingly, that operation was complicated. 1) Bring up the storm jib from the locker below. 2) Lower the number 2. 3) Take off, one by one, the number 2 hanks. 4) Hank on, one by one, the storm jibs. 5) Attach the halyard. 6) Switch the jib sheets from the old to the new sail. 7) Raise the new jib.

Even with an able seaman at the helm, the operation required two men forward—though one man alone could do the forward deck, moving deliberately, the helmsman cooperating attentively.
Though Danny had never before put up the storm jib he considered doing it now, for the first time. But could his father, at this point, handle the helm?

No. There was no prospect of success.

The only thing left to do—

Danny peered down into the cabin area. “Dad,” he shouted out. His father’s bleary face leaned out into the cockpit. “What do you say we take down the main?”

Clement O’Hara pursed his lips, as if giving solemn, profound thought to the suggestion. “Not a bad idea,” he nodded.

Danny: “Do you want to go forward and loosen the halyard, or do you want me to? If so, you’ll have to take the helm.”

It was clear to Danny that his father hadn’t understood him. Clement O’Hara stayed where he was, his two hands tight on the handrails, his eyes unfocused, a half smile on his face.

Danny felt a twang of fear in his stomach, a dryness in his throat. The situation was bad. The mainsail had to be let down. How to do it single-handed in a heavy breeze? He took the end of the port sheet, tied a loop, placed it over an appropriate peg on the wheel and, four feet or so from the loop, fastened the line to a cleat. The pressure on the rudder was leftward, the oversize jib pushing the bow of the boat to leeward. The wheel immobilized, Danny sprang forward and payed out the main sheet until the wind spilled and the tension on the halyard was relieved. The boat substantially righted itself; the furious flapping of the mainsail was deafening. Danny maneuvered his way forward to the mast and loosed the halyard, clutching down on the main luff to bring the sail down.

It was heavy work, but finally the sail was down. Danny tossed the end of the halyard over the sail, down, and back, to bind down the sail on the boom, however untidily. Then quickly back to the helm. He whisked off the improvised becket and brought the boat right around, jibing, back onto a port tack. When he had got forward motion and the rudder was active again, he loosed the port sheet and drew it in to starboard. He needed to jump back and forth between the sheet and a wheel that needed constant adjustment.

Finally
Listless
was back on the wind, headed southeast, the heel greatly reduced, but also the boat’s speed. She was moving, in all that wind, at only four knots.

Danny looked below. His father’s head was on the chart table. He was asleep.

His mother got up and made her way to the companionway—it was easier now to move about. She put her head up over the companionway, protruding to the cockpit. She had to raise her voice to be heard but she spoke gravely.

“Do you know what to
do
, Danny? Can you bring her in? Bring her in
anywhere?
”

Danny was now scared. Once again he forced himself to think the situation through, one step at a time. Over the past excited ten days he had spent hours studying the charts. He drew now from a basic navigator’s intelligence and began by asking himself the primary question:

Where were they? Approximately, even. Where—next question—would they find land?

“I think, Mom, that with this fog we don’t want to …” He stopped and thought. “Dad was doing a course over to the east end of Martha’s Vineyard. If we keep this up for two or three hours, then come about again, we should be heading up toward Katama Bay. South of Edgartown. When we get closer to land maybe the fog will clear and we’ll see some lights.”

He looked at his mother’s distraught face. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he managed.

At nine o’clock Danny calculated he might as well bring the boat about and head north, toward land. The rain had returned, the wind’s velocity had stayed steady at twenty-five knots. He let one sheet go and drew in on the other as, in spurts, he turned the wheel. Little by little he was able to winch the sail in tight. They were now on a course to Martha’s Vineyard … somewhere in Martha’s Vineyard, which stretches from end to end over twenty miles.