Of Song and Water (13 page)

“I'll find one.”

“First,” says Havelock, “mind the store.”

 

FOR THE rest of the season, showing up every day at Halyard & Mast, Dorian answers the phone, takes orders, and rings up purchases both large and small. He stocks and straightens the shelves, wipes the finger-marked display cases, files the charts by letter and number, and keeps the books and manuals in alphabetical order. He checks the hardware for oxidation and watches the canvas and line for fraying or discoloration. He studies the ledgers, talks to the store's accountant, and takes a salesman or two out to lunch.

He ranges over the length and breadth of his father's kingdom.

He stops making mistakes.

 

MEREDITH visits more often after haul-out.

Over the summer, on days with warm, southerly winds, Havelock had tried twice but failed to get her out on the water. He'd found her resistance puzzling
but attractive, listening with amusement to her complicated excuses and assuming that she'd go out only with Dorian. Now he wants to hear the whole story.

“So how is she?” says Havelock.

“Fine,” says Dorian.

“By Christ, I don't mean how is she today. How is she on deck?”

“She's good.”

“I guessed it,” says Havelock. “You can see she has the legs for it – the hips, too.”

“She's strong,” says Dorian.

“Does she take to it like a Moore?”

“Almost.”

“You'll bring her around,” says Havelock. “You've got time.”

“Plenty of time,” says Dorian.

“When did it happen?” says Havelock. “Did you run out when I wasn't looking?”

“No,” says Dorian. “It was a boat I'm thinking to buy.” He's glad to have said it. Now they'll stop talking about Meredith.

“A shakedown?”

“Call it that if you want.”

“Takes gumption – a new woman and a strange boat.” Havelock pulls on his beard. “Listen, don't make an offer before I see it.”

Dorian waves off the advice. “I'm not buying it,” he says. “She seemed unhappy in the water.”

“Was she cranky or stiff?”

“A little of both.”

“You gotta wait for the right one,” says Havelock.

“I know.”

Dorian remembers how the owner, watching from the dock, seemed wary. He'd tossed off the line and tried to reassure him. “Don't worry,” he said. “I can handle the boat by myself.”

He motored out hoping for a steady wind, but even before he raised the main, the boat felt dull and clumsy, a disappointment after he'd seen the smooth fiberglass hull and believed that it would outdo his father's sloop. Even the rudder felt sluggish, as if the boat were moving through oatmeal instead of water.

It's dead, he thought, just like H.M. says. Maybe he's right. Maybe a boat, when it isn't built of wood, is a dead thing. I can't be entirely sure. This one, at least, should be put out of its misery.

 

AT THE new store, hypnotized by monotony, oblivious to the bare trees and the snow falling, Dorian unpacks boxes and sorts merchandise. He works slowly, methodically, designing the floor plan, building shelves, installing counters and display cases – and then driving to Saginaw or Bloomfield Hills when the small summer cottage, chilly in winter, seems too quiet and too lonely.

In the dead of January, he travels through the dark and arrives at Meredith's door feeling shaky, the journey having been treacherous, slowed by whiteouts and sudden drifts.

He rings the bell. He sees a neat row of jackets hanging on pegs in the front hall. He keeps ringing the bell and Meredith, wearing only a blue towel, finally answers the door.

She sweeps her wet hair to one side. “Nobody's home but me.”

He glances over her shoulder and into the dark house. “There's hardly a soul in Port Austin,” he says. “I think you'd like it.”

Meredith agrees.

In the morning, before rising from bed, she suggests a possible date for the wedding.

He smiles. He pictures her standing at the door wrapped in the blue towel. It occurs to him that he'd meant to propose and that Meredith had accepted. “You choose the day,” he says.

THEY exchange vows in the summer with Meredith showing – but taking no pains to hide it – and with the minister dripping sweat on her white gown.

Havelock drinks too much at the reception.

Behaving like a well-mannered thief, he cuts in on Meredith's dance with her father. “Stop your stumbling,” says Havelock, nudging the man aside.

He takes hold of Meredith and they turn and counter-turn, the guests looking on, some of them shaking their heads.

Faya grabs Dorian and they waltz onto the floor. “Reclaim your bride,” she says.

Before Dorian can find an opening, Meredith's father taps Havelock on the shoulder. Havelock ignores him, beaming with pride, moving off with Meredith in the opposite direction.

Undeterred, Meredith's father waits and taps again.

This time Havelock turns and takes the man's hand and grabs his waist and the two of them start dancing, whirling across the floor, faster and faster, until Havelock, leading through a broad turn, sends his tuxedoed partner careening toward a table.

A circle of guests fly from their chairs and scatter. In the next instant, Meredith's father, his coattails flapping, lands on a steaming plate of spaghetti, the wineglasses spilling and shattering on the floor.

The episode clears the hall.

Dorian makes apologies while Meredith rocks back and forth between laughing and crying. They say their good-byes and drive through a gentle rain to Port Austin.

On the following Monday, they unlock the store and put a bright banner in the window. It says GRAND OPENING.

 

ALL DAY in a good wind, Dorian watches the gulls drift and climb, down-curving at last to the water's deep mirror. He wonders why one bird searches for a partner while another won't. Is it accidental or entirely by design?

Two sloops had followed him out, and the three of them, in their heeling moment, entering the vast body of Lake Huron, shadowed each other for a time. They made a small but impressive symmetry. But then, as time passed, they seemed to think of why they'd come or, as it happened, where they were going, and finally they took up new headings, the first boat falling away to the south.

He aimed his boat higher, to the southeast, dreaming of an up-bound cruise, remembering a trip with his father to the northern reaches of Lake Huron, passing the De Tour Light, a squat white tower, where freighters make the turn toward Drummond, past De Tour Village. They sailed though the turn and spent the night in St. Martin Bay.

Now, with the sun fading, he aims for home, thinking of the Straits of Mackinac, regretting how, in foul weather, they'd made the decision to turn back.

He swears that someday he'll climb Lake Huron again, that when he does he'll turn toward Drummond, ascend through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, and then rush into Whitefish Bay, looking ahead, waiting for the blue of Superior to spread out before him like an endless sky.

 

HAVELOCK and Faya sign over the deed to the summer cottage, a last gift to the newlyweds.

Havelock also sends a crew to Port Austin with plans to build an addition, a nursery, nothing too large or fancy, just a simple room suitable for his grandson. He tells the contractor to paint the walls light blue.

Faya scolds him for being presumptuous. “What if it's a girl,” she says. “You shouldn't paint until the baby arrives.”

Havelock listens but goes ahead with his plan, and Meredith, exactly three and a half months to the day of her wedding, gives birth to a boy.

Dorian hangs a mobile of red, yellow, and blue sailboats over the crib.

“I like the boy's calling card,” says Havelock. “Jason. Jason Moore makes a fine sound. It's one hell of a name.”

 

WHEN the cottage feels cramped, Dorian goes to his new boat and keeps busy with maintenance and minor repairs. Meredith stops by only out of necessity. Upon arrival, she waves, puts her left foot on the dock, and then freezes.

They'd started this routine from the very first when she stood on the dock's threshold and he shouted from the cockpit vouching for the boat's safety and comfort, trying to convince her that she needn't be afraid.

“Jason's too little,” she said. “Maybe when he's older.” She pulled back her foot. “You can always make a trip with Havelock. I'm sure he's dying to go.”

“H.M.'s angry,” he said. “I didn't ask for his advice or approval.”

“Call him,” she said. “He can't stay away forever.”

Quietly, without invitation or warning, Havelock finally turned up. “Does your wife like it?” he said. “How does she look standing on the bow? She'd certainly be an improvement. A plastic bobber needs something to dress it up.”

“It's fiberglass, not plastic.”

“I know. The wave of the future. At least Meredith is beautiful.”

“I can't argue with that,” he said, mindful of the old man's preoccupations and the secret of his wife's fear, her trembling at the sight of water.

He thinks now that if she wore a bathing suit and sunned herself on the foredeck, if she came up the companionway carrying drinks, he'd adore her completely. He'd call her the Lady of the Lake. He'd drop anchor in an unknown bay and they'd go below.

But she stays at home or in the store.

He works on the boat and in the summer he eats dinner there.

After dark, he goes home and lies down beside her, the room quiet and cool and her face peaceful, the lines of her body quite visible beneath a thin cotton sheet.

“JASON,” says H.M., “you spoke your first words on the water – you'll be a natural.”

He smiles at the old man. He's heard this before. He's also been told that he learned to walk on the ketch, his feet following the toe rail, his pudgy hands gripping the lifeline.

He's tried to learn the boat's language but he always forgets the words, distracted by sounds and rhythms – the sibilance of wind pouring over sails, the water when it laps the hull or rushes past with a sigh, the surf's rise and fall, the lake breathing.

A sharp command brings him back and sets him in motion, but he drifts before long and forgets the order and leaves the job incomplete.

“Show me your hands,” says his grandfather.

He holds out his hands, palms up.

“That's what I thought. Better for work that's delicate.”

 

HIS FATHER nods, “Your name has a story, too.”

Then they wave at H.M., who stands like a post on the seawall and grows smaller as they move away from shore.

“It kills me,” says his father, “when H.M. goes off about fiberglass. According to him, new boats – each and every one of them – come decked out in lies. ‘No maintenance! No worries! That's how they're sold,' he says. ‘Why believe it when you know it's not true?'”

The wind picks up and the boat heels.

“But H.M. goes sour – you can see it on his face – when the wind's thin and his boat refuses to point high, the hull designed to an old rule, too much underbody and too much keel.”

He watches as his father trims the main. “Are you and H.M. fighting?” he says.

“No,” says his father. “I like wood, too. It gives a boat character, a solid foundation, or, as your grandfather would say, a place in the long history of trees.”

“When I was out with Grandpa, we saw a big sailboat that he said was made of wood – but I didn't think so.”

“Was the hull perfect and a blinding white?”

“I had to squint.”

“Then you were probably right.”

He likes the sound of his father's words. “Grandpa wouldn't listen,” he says.

Now, with the shore disappearing and the wind even stronger than before, he imitates his father and looks up at the wind vane, a buffeted black arrow, and checks the forward edge of the jib. He feels the boat gaining, gliding, skimming across the water like a perfect stone.

 

“JASON,” says H.M., “I need you to give a hand.”

He helps his grandfather pull and then listens to the gulls and pretends that he's a bird migrating from one summer to the next – flying through seasons and school years, watching almost everything in the world, except the huge lake, disappear beneath him in a blur.

He hears everyone talk about time. His dad worries about how much of it gets spent at the store as opposed to sailing. His mom looks forward to the day when they'll leave their small house forever. “Sometime soon,” she says. And Grandma and Grandpa talk about time running out, as if tomorrow they'd cease to exist.

He feels his stomach drop when the boat heels, then he watches for the light at Port Austin Reef, the one marker he recognizes from a distance.

Floating in the water is a large bird, not a seagull, with its wings stretched out and unmoving like the arms of a crucified man.

“Did it drown?” he says.

“Probably not,” says his grandfather.

“Then how did it die?”

“A broken wing, maybe. Or a sickness. Maybe it was old.”

“Why do things stop when they're old?”

“Things run down. They get tired.”

“What makes them?” he says, turning away from the bird.

“A lot of things or nothing. It isn't easy to say. All right, Jason, prepare to come about.”