Outerbridge Reach (28 page)

“I watched,” Jack Campbell said. He inclined his glass toward a telescope on a tripod beside one window.

“We thought your eye was on us. Thanks for the binoculars, by the way.” She took a sip of the old malt. “Why didn't you come down to the boat?”

“Ah well,” Campbell said. “I couldn't take the time. I get a lot done on Sunday. I don't like the crowds at the seaport.”

“All good reasons,” Anne said. “But your not being there was noticed.”

“By Harry Thorne, you mean?”

“By Harry. By Owen. By me. When I got home Maggie asked me if Granpop had come down. I lied and told her you had.”

“You shouldn't lie to her. She'll stop believing you.”

She sighed and looked away.

“So,” Smiling Jack said smugly after a moment, “he's on the bosom of the ocean.”

It was the sort of observation to which she had learned not to reply.

“We're keeping a map of his progress,” Jack went on. “Antoinette is keeping it in her office. Did you see it?”

Anne shook her head.

“Great fun if he actually won, eh?”

She contemplated her drink.

“Yes,” her father said. “That would confound the whole damn world. Love to see it happen.”

“You know,” Anne said, “we may end up in very good shape. We could come out of all this very well.”

“Think so?”

“Harry's been great.”

“Has he?”

“Owen might get his own operation out of this. Maybe a dealership.”

“That's great,” Jack said. “Win or lose?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, will Harry stake him win or lose? If the Coast Guard fishes him out of the drink tomorrow, does he get his dealership?”

She sipped her drink. “Harry's a good guy.”

“You realize, don't you, that Harry and his whole opération are holding the bag for Matty Hylan? He may be in no position to help you. Regardless.”

“Owen will get a book out of this, Dad. He's a good writer. A video. Everyone knows him in the boating world.”

Campbell got up and went to his telescope and looked down at the harbor. On the wall nearest him was an oil painting of the waterfront at night, an unsentimental balance of shadows and harsh light, painted by an East European émigré.

“Maggie's doing well in school,” Anne said.

“We'll keep her in school. Don't worry about it. And your highly strung husband need never know the source.”

“Please, Dad.”

“Sorry. But I know how proud he is. His concept of honor and so forth.”

He sounded like an anthropologist, she thought, describing, with a touch of humor, the denizen of some exotic alien culture.

“Obviously,” Jack went on, “the man's got you buffaloed. You even had to wait until he sailed to see me.”

“We didn't come up,” Anne said. “You didn't come down.”

“I take it Harry and the Hylan group are supposedly paying for this mystical voyage?”

“Yes.”

Campbell turned to the window and folded his arms.

“It's such a fantasy,” he declared. “By God, I can't believe it! Even of him. Around the bloody world!”

“You're just not a sailor, Dad.”

“Let's say,” Jack suggested, “that I'm just not a yachtsman.”

Jack Campbell was a little too well spoken to pass for a true proletarian around New York harbor but he liked to think of himself as a working man. He had graduated from Yale at twenty-five, just after the Second World War, having interrupted college for the Merchant Marine. There he had advanced from able seaman to deck officer, with eight trips from Davisville to Liverpool and ten to Murmansk from Scapa Flow. Before that he had been out between college terms, as ordinary, messman and wiper, in the grimmest billets, fighting for his virtue against convicts with a bunk chain. He was not given to nostalgia about his youthful adventures.

His own father had been an even harder man, a Newfie from Kings Cove turned ship's engineer. Old Jack and his brother Donald had imposed Campbell tugs on the harbor by serviceability and terror. They had finally put it all together when Old Jack had married Anne's grandmother, a wealthy chandler's daughter whose people had once lived in shanties along Broad Channel.

“If Owen had gone to work for you,” she said, “it probably would have been worse. It's a good thing he didn't.”

“Too good for us,” Jack said. “Too high-minded.”

“I'm very proud of him, Dad.” She said it with a smiling complacency she knew enraged him. “And Maggie will be.”

“I suppose,” the old man said, “it's an excellent way to get away from it all.”

“We could all use a little of that.”

“What is it they say?” Jack asked. “Get in touch with your feelings? Be your own person? Sweet self-awareness and all that malarkey? By Christ,” Campbell said, “I've wrung more salt water out of my socks than that man of yours ever looked at.”

“He's not trying to compete with you.”

Jack laughed, as if at the very notion.

“I have guys who like to sail that work for me,” Campbell said dismissively. “They're very taken with what he's doing.”

“He's not like the guys who work for you,” Anne said.

“Meaning what?”

“He thinks there are more important things than money.”

“Am I missing something?” Jack asked. “Isn't money what you're here about?”

“He believes there are other standards. Harry Thorne understands that, if you don't.”

“I understand Harry favors him for your sake.”

She stared at him. “What do you mean? Where did you hear such a thing?”

“Around,” Jack said.

“You guys are a stitch,” she said after a moment. “You macho high rollers.”

“Your husband doesn't make himself respected,” Jack Campbell said.

“What passes for respect around town lately?” she asked. “If I wanted to find out about human respect”—she made a gesture that took in his office and the world it overlooked—“would I come here?”

“You have a lot of nerve, kid.”

“In this place full of flunkies? Where no one knows the meaning of the word? Don't you tell me about my Owen, Dad.”

“You're a couple of assholes,” Jack said. “The two of you. You deserve each other.”

Playing by their own rules, they sat and sipped their good whiskey and waited to calm down. She had been at the point of threatening to keep him from Maggie. Eventually she walked to a south-facing window and looked out. The sight of the Narrows, through which Owen had passed, filled her with dread. Her father's words about getting away from it all had stayed with her. She thought of Owen away from it all, lost to her.

“I can't understand your attitude,” she said to her father at last. “I never could. I've been with him twenty years and I've never seen him do a cheap thing. He could have gotten out of combat. He could have gone to work for you in some overpaid no-show job like certain people I won't mention. Why are you always putting him down?”

She had spoken facing the window. She heard her father's laughter over her shoulder.

“It's not fair, is it?” he asked. “Well, I don't know.”

“I know he makes some people uncomfortable,” she said.

Jack laughed again, to her irritation.

“I know he's a pretty good provider, Annie. And he doesn't drink and he doesn't beat you. But”—he looked at her in slight confusion as though he feared he would be unable to explain—“you know around the docks—how can I say this—a man had to carry himself a certain way. There was one way to walk the street. One way to handle yourself in a saloon. Christ, I don't know, a way to handle yourself. He's got it all wrong.”

“And that's it?” she asked.

“I know he has good qualities,” Jack said. “But his best qualities don't speak to me.”

“I hope you understand,” she said, “that I encouraged him every step of the way in this trip.” Saying it, she felt a flutter of panic in her throat. “It's something he needs to do. For himself and for us.”

“Not something I would have chosen.”

“Look, he loves boats. He loves the sea. Those are clean, simple things. I love him because he loves those things.”

Jack's tolerant mood seemed to contract slightly.

“Romance of the sea? Christ, the ocean is a fucking desert. Nothing out there but social cripples and the odd Filipino. You don't find Americans out there anymore because we've come beyond that.”

“Yes, well,” Anne said, “Owen has a few things to say about the state of the country in that regard.”

“Jesus,” Campbell said, “spare me! I yield to no one in my patriotism. But spare me your husband's reflections on the state of the Union.”

In a moment they were both laughing.

“Is he really that good a sailor?” Jack asked gently. “Does he have the temperament?”

“He has the smarts and the strength, Dad. Believe me.”

“Christ, he's really put himself on the spot, hasn't he? Do you really think he's doing it for you?”

“Yes, I'm sure of it, Dad. To make us proud of him. That's how he is.”

Content she had what she'd come for, Anne embraced Antoinette on the way out. Doing so, she suddenly imagined something predatory about the woman's sympathy. She felt the suggestion of a waxen, widowy twilight the two of them might share, with windowless rooms for ballroom dancing in the afternoon. It made her straighten up abruptly.

Descending alone in the express elevator, she understood for the first time the nature of the solitude she would have to endure in the coming months. It would really be the two of them, each alone against the world, as it had been during the war. There was no support and no sympathy she could altogether trust. No one shared the risk finally.

Above all, the thought of having to endure encouragement filled her with disgust. It was too much like consolation. Winning was all, she thought. It was the only revenge on life. Other people wanted reassurance in their own misery and mediocrity. She required victory.

 

 

 

J
UST AFTER SUNRISE,
forty-eight hours and over two hundred miles off Ambrose Light, Browne sat in
Nona
's open cockpit and looked at the western horizon. Astern, the last fat white clouds of home were falling away. A northwest wind whistled in the rigging, force 5 and steady.

Months before, on the night of Harry Thorne's first phone call, he had gone straight to the Admiralty charts and begun to plot his way around the globe. But he was not inclined now, watching the morning's white horses roll by, to chart courses. In the last hours of darkness he had dozed off and then awakened to find himself on a sunlit ocean of sultry blue—the Gulf Stream. For such a long time, he thought, he had been promising himself unfamiliar skies. Leaning over the side, he dipped his hand in the quarter wave and felt it warm. The sensation made him smile.

At some level he felt involved in an escape. His impulse was simply to head out and put the land behind him. Beyond that, it made sense to keep on easting while the wind held and get across the Stream as quickly as possible. The first weather fax had carried nothing but sweet assurance; there were no tropical storms on the prowl and no threatening northers.

Browne had slept very little since clearing the Narrows. Propped up in the cockpit against a stack of foul-weather gear, he had drifted in and out of consciousness, fighting to outlast darkness. His radar alarm was set for a fifteen-mile radius. Through two nights in the coastal shipping lanes, he had stayed on deck, scanning the dark horizon. A few hours on the sky-bright waters of the Gulf Stream inclined him to rest easy. In the afternoon he went below, cleared the last-minute gear from his bunk and stretched out.

When he went on deck again, the sun was low and the pastel water overlaid with a puritan October light. The wind was steady and he kept
Nona
eastward. In the last daylight, he checked the screws in the self-steering vane and eased the lines against chafing. According to his knot log he had come 154 miles since the day before, a speed of close to seven knots.

For dinner he cooked a can of chicken broth and poured it into his usual coffee cup, a Navy mug in the Navy pattern. Anne had packed it for him in tissue with a blue ribbon. Inside was a note detailing the boat's stowage plan. He needed only to glance around the main cabin to realize how much of the stowage she had overseen. Tossing the homely red and white Campbell's soup can in the scraps gave him a momentary flash of incongruity. Home away from home.

On deck at dusk, he sipped his soup and listened to the accommodating wind. The loneliness he felt rather surprised him. Except for Anne's presence, he thought of himself as a solitary. In his deepest recollections, it seemed to him, he was always alone.

Browne's last solo passage over blue water had been five days spent between Florida and Cape Fear. It was a passage he had trouble remembering. One time at sea blended into another when things went well, and that one had gone well enough. Some of the time, mainly at night, his mind had played tricks. It had been easy to get the wind in tune and start it singing. On the open sea, the eye tended to impose form on random patterns of wave and light. The same thing happened in deep woods. It happened to everyone.

After a while Browne found that trying to recall the Cape Fear trip made him uncomfortable. It reminded him of the lie he had told Riggs-Bowen about sailing around Queen Charlotte Island. Alone in his cockpit on the dark ocean, he rapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. The thing was so outrageous it made him laugh out loud. Of all the godforsaken fog-shrouded coasts on earth to claim, he thought, bound in killer rocks and floating fir trunks, of all outrageous lies! But there was no unsaying it. It had been a primitive spasm from some morally underdeveloped area of the nerves. Remembering it was very painful and strange.