By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (18 page)

At least, that was the plan. But as the
summer rolled by at
Cup Quotes,
Quinta was finding that she
was capable of turning out very decent copy. Her initial factual
updates evolved into insightful profiles on different bit-players
in the Cup drama. She wrote a nice little piece on a Newport welder
who helped build one of the American contending yachts, and another
one on what the loss of the Cup in 1983 meant to the shops and
restaurants that lined Thames Street. Subscribers wrote in, saying
good things. One of the city's council members mentioned her in a
speech. Her editor quickly gave her a byline, then a feature column
of her own, "Quintessence." It was heady stuff for a twenty year
old. By mid-July she had secretly decided to renounce her
forthcoming job as a software engineer and become a prize-winning
columnist for
The New York Times.

Quinta Powers believed that she could do
anything, once she put her mind to it.

****

"Dad, I have a question about—well, about
morality, I guess," said Quinta one evening to her father over
dinner.

Neil Powers looked up from his corncob and
fixed a wary eye on his daughter. "I don't approve of drugs or sex.
Other than that, I have no opinion."

"Dad! I would never ask you about
those,"
she said with an ironic smile. "No, this has to do
with my column." (She loved to say that—'my column.') "I want to do
an in-depth interview that no one's been able to get. I want to
interview Alan Seton."

Quinta waited for her father's reaction. It
was the first time she'd spoken Alan Seton's name aloud since the
period of her father's accident. She had just violated a family
taboo, and she knew it. The names of every other American
skipper—Dennis Conner, Tom Blackaller, John Kolius, Rod Davis,
Buddy Melgus—were household words at the dinner table. Not Alan
Seton's. The man had never been forgiven for having married a
hit-and-run maniac who'd destroyed Neil Powers' life.

Her father wiped his lips with his napkin,
pushed his wheelchair away from his plate, and jammed balled-up
fists into the edge of the table. "Why Seton?"

"Because he's such a mystery," Quinta
admitted. "Even Dennis Conner confides more to the media than Alan
Seton does. I respect his effort to keep the
Pegasus
shrouded in secrecy; lots of the syndicates are doing that with
their boats. But I want to do a human-interest piece, and the man
won't give anyone more than his name, rank, and serial number."

"So pick another human to be interested
in."

"But don't you see? He's got a story to
tell—coming back from emotional devastation in 1983 to try again.
Let's face it, people think of Alan Seton as a quitter. Is that why
he's back? Is he afraid
not
to try again? Or is it the
simple fascination of the Cup? I want to know; everyone wants to
know. He'd be a great 'get' Dad," she added. "He really would."

"And you need my permission to go get him?
Since when have you ever deferred to my wishes?"

He sounded petulant. Anyone would think that
Quinta made a habit of hiding his food and water.

"Not your permission, Dad," she said
patiently. "Just your advice. I'm sure—I'm absolutely positive—that
Alan Seton will grant me this interview if I call and ask him.
He'll do it because he promised to help us if we ever needed
anything."

"For pity's sake, Quinta—you were a teenager
then. He was telling you what you wanted to hear. Besides, he knew
damn well there'd be a lawsuit."

"No. Those weren't the reasons. I'm sure
he'll agree to do it. But would it be right for me to take
advantage of his … well, guilt?" Her brows drew together intently
as she weighed the moral implications of her plan. At that moment,
anyone who'd ever known Quinta's grandmother, Laura Andersson
Powers, when she was Quinta's age would have seen an unmistakable
family resemblance.

Neil Powers reacted as he always did at such
times: he clamped down hard on his jaw and looked away.
Automatically he reached out to the black Lab who had settled
alongside his master for a nice long ear-rub, now that the meal was
over.

"Why bother me about this?" her father said,
annoyed. "You'll do what you want to do anyway. But I think you
should leave the man alone. Just leave him alone."

****

Even in the gray July rain Mergate looked
pleasing. There was something about its solid brick sturdiness that
appealed to Quinta, who had spent her childhood hiking up and down
Cliff Walk past some of the most ostentatious and oversized estates
in the Western hemisphere. Alan Seton's Connecticut house offered
reassurance, and she hoped it offered hot tea; it was not a nice
morning. She pulled into the circular cobbled drive, looking around
for a car. She saw none, so she parked in front of the house.
Hurrying to the door, she lifted the knocker and let it drop
several times, not at all surprised to hear her heart thumping in
time to the signal: this was her first big-time interview.

The door opened, and there he was: three
years older, presumably three years wiser, and to her, still
irresistibly dashing. The last time they were face to face, Quinta
had been holding a puppy who'd just peed on the back seat of his
car.

"Hi," she said with a self-conscious smile,
and whipped her head around to indicate her car. "I hope I'm not
blocking you; do you still have the silver Mercedes?" she
blurted.

His friendly look turned blank for a moment,
and then he said, "Ah! No. The car was leased. I have a black one
now."

She nodded wisely, as if he had progressed
through a logical color sequence, and waited to be invited in.
That sure was a dumb way to start things off,
she told
herself.
Remind him, why don't you?

"Uh ... come in, come in," he said at last,
stirring. "I was a little taken aback by how much you've grown
up."

She didn't know how to respond, so she
settled for saying, "College can do that." Which also sounded dumb.
Well, too bad. She wasn't raised around witty banter and clever
repartee.

In any case, they weren't there to talk
about her. "It's good of you to agree to this on such short notice,
Mr. Seton. And to let me barge into your home. I thought for sure
you'd be in Newport when I called the syndicate office."

"Yeah, well, I've got some compelling
business at this end. Call me Alan. Coffee?"

"That would be nice," Quinta said, wishing
he'd offer her tea. Following him into the kitchen, she remarked,
"This is a really lovely home, Mist—it has a wonderful personality,
um, Alan." She winced in distress; Barbara Walters would not be so
tongue-tied.

"Mergate's been in the family a long while,"
Alan explained as he punched the brew button. "Anything you see
that has dignity and taste was probably put there by my
grandfather, Geoffrey Seton, when he took over the house from his
in-laws. He was a transplanted Englishman. If it's strange or
whimsical, like that sculpture in the entry hall or the warped
banjo on the wall there that's been made into a planter, for that
my grandmother can take credit." He smiled to himself in
recollection. "They played off one another perfectly. I've never
known a more suited couple."

"Did your parents ever live here?" Quinta
asked, vaguely envious of happy couples.

"Actually, they didn't. My mother's a proper
Bostonian, and she'd never consider leaving Beacon Hill. My dad is
surprisingly okay with that, but he's more or less okay with
everything. After my grandmother died, Mergate was put on the
market, so I bought it. I spent a lot of happy summers here. I
learned to sail here. Sailed with my granddad all the time. And, of
course, the family shipyard is nearby. Am I telling you all this
for public distribution?"

"Well, I'm not really …." she trailed off.
Her attention had been caught and held by a dozen white pizza
boxes, piled high on a soapstone countertop.

"Oh—those," he muttered. "I haven't got
around to throwing them out."

"Your eyes were bigger than your stomach?"
she ventured.

He gave her a quick appraising look, then
said, "Someone's idea of a practical joke; everyone knows I hate
anchovies. Look, are we on the record yet? Because I'd rather those
weren't mentioned. I can see the tabloids now: 'Pizza Man Vies for
Cup.'"

"I don't think the tabloids are much
interested in the America's Cup Races, to be honest," Quinta
responded, surprised by his egotism. "Maybe if one of your crew had
eight fingers on each hand, or if the
Pegasus
was haunted by
a poltergeist …."

He looked chastened. His tanned face flushed
darker, and he said, "Weren't you just a
little
girl not
that many years ago?"

Now it was her turn to color. She bit her
lip and said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to belittle the Races. It's
just that when I visited my cousins in Minnesota and went
blathering on about the America's Cup, they received me with polite
yawns. 'Sounds a lot like watching corn grow,' is how one of them
put it. So now I think it's a case of maybe you have to be
there."

Alan filled two mugs with strong-smelling
coffee. "Wait until Australia. Do you take cream or sugar?"

"A lot of each, thanks," she answered,
eyeing the liquid cautiously.

"Here's the thing: at the very least, the
America's Cup is a race for technological prestige: why else would
most of the European Common Market—and the United States, a
defeated but still formidable past champion—and Australia, a smart,
rich country with an inferiority complex—be spending untold
millions of dollars the past couple of years? Because prestige is
beyond price. It's also a prime marketing opportunity, like the
Statue of Liberty centennial or the Olympic games. Everything from
Levis to Budweiser will be hawked at these races."

He handed Quinta a mug and slipped onto the
bar-height stool beside her. "It's not a contest anymore between
genteel men of two countries; it hasn't been since the
nineteen-sixties. Every challenge brings more and more syndicates
from more and more countries. It's a shame the Soviets didn't throw
in their lot. The president could fire up the whole country then,
including your Minnesota cousins. Why aren't you taking any of this
down?"

"Oh! I ... don't have any idea why not," she
answered, blinking.
Because I haven't heard a word you've said.
I'm only looking at you.
"Hold on. Don't say anything more
until I set up my tape recorder. I hope you're not averse to taping
... I'm a stickler for the exact quote ... is there an outlet? My
battery's low, I forgot, so …."

"Wait." His hand was on hers, restraining
her fumbling plunges into her bag. "Wait." His voice turned low and
more serious. "Before you turn it on, tell me. How is your
father?"

Quinta looked back at his handsome face with
its earnest blue eyes, and suddenly they were at the hospital
outside her father's room, and she was a kid in jeans, holding
herself together with emotional baling wire. Three years. She'd
changed; she'd changed so much. But he seemed just the same. "Dad's
… good," she said. "Better. As well as can be expected," she
finished up, covering every possible base in her confusion.

"He hasn't got over it, then," Alan said
quietly.

"Well, how
can
he?" she snapped.
Obviously Alan Seton hadn't followed her father's painfully slow
progress at the Vanderbilt Rehabilitation Center, hadn't noticed
the flowers in the front of their house go to weed and brush,
hadn't watched an already shy man turn into a reclusive one.

Alan stared into the brown pool of his
coffee cup and said, "I suppose I hoped he was going to be one of
those special cases you read about. You know, the kind of guy who
seems to outperform the rest of us, without the benefit of the use
of his legs or eyes or whatever—all the while keeping an enviable
sense of humor. I suppose I wanted a miracle. I wanted Stevie
Wonder. I wanted Franklin Delano Roosevelt." He took a deep breath,
held it, blew it out his cheeks, grimaced.

"You tried to get in touch with him during
those first months after the accident, didn't you?" she said.

"Well, yes. To see if he needed anything
...."

Quinta shook her head. "He didn't want any
of us—you or me or anyone—to spoil the intensity of it with our
sympathy, you know," she said, amazed that she was confiding a
theory to him for which she'd been ridiculed by her sisters.

"Spoil it
?"

She was reluctant to go further, but his
voice was so soft, so sympathetic, that she went willingly on. "My
father is convinced that he's ruled by a blighted star. I know I
told you that he lived on a coasting schooner during the
Depression, and that he was still a boy and was aboard when the
boat was wrecked. Well, not long after that, his father died in a
freak accident: he got backed over by a truck. And then, of course,
this last and worst tragedy of all. You've got to admit, he's
suffered some pretty awful misfortunes. But I think that he feeds
on the larger-than-life aspect of them. He never dwells on the
ordinary, positive sides of his existence, because that would be
inconsistent with his vision."

"He's in love with his misery, you're
saying," said Alan.

"Well, he sure doesn't get any satisfaction
from his success as a consultant. Just like he never thinks of the
wonderful marriage he had with my mother; only that she died of
cancer. For that matter, he doesn't seem aware that he did manage
to live through a shipwreck; only that they lost the boat and
everything in it. I guess there really is a kind of tragic grandeur
to his life, but ...."

She trailed off, feeling disloyal, and took
a sip of coffee. "Clearly you and I both want Franklin Delano
Roosevelt," she said with a crooked smile. "Boy. I sure know how to
conduct an incisive interview."