Outerbridge Reach (33 page)

“Greetings,” Browne called. “Happy Thanksgiving. Is Strickland there? Let me speak to him.”

She felt foolish extending the receiver. Strickland took it with a show of good nature.

“Yes, sir,” he said to Owen Browne. “How's the ocean?”

“Are you getting everything?” Browne demanded. “Any problems? Over.”

“No,” Strickland said affably, “I don't think so. Any instructions?”

Anne kept looking at the Severn, still and cold under the willows at the foot of the Wards' garden.

“I have no idea how all of this looks from your end,” Browne said to Strickland. “Just get it all, O.K.?”

“Don't worry, Owen.” He glanced at Anne, who kept her eyes on the river. “Just get around, man. Don't forget to take lots of footage. I'm supposed to say ‘over,' right?”

“Affirmative, over.”

“Right,” said Strickland. “Over.”

He handed Anne the phone and went to pick up his camera.

“Do you remember what I told you the other night?” Owen asked. “Over.”

She glanced around the room uneasily. It was as though he had somehow forgotten, over the absurd distance, that his voice was projected on a speaker. She looked unhappily at the contraption itself.

At the same moment, Buzz hit the speaker's switch so that Browne and his wife might speak in privacy from the other people in the room. Only the thousands monitoring at sea and ashore would hear them.

“Did that go well?” he asked. “Over.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess so.”

“Did it sound pompous and corny? Over.”

“A little,” she said. “But it's Thanksgiving, right? Over.”

“I heard it on the radio last night,” Owen said. “Some missionary station. I liked the sound of it. I hope I'm being clear. I find that out here my thinking is clearer. Over.”

“It must be wonderful. Do you want to talk to Maggie? Over.”

The silence of the sea came back to her. She turned to look for Maggie, who had gone out of the room. Strickland was filming her on the phone, Hersey taking sound. She put the receiver down and went in search of her daughter.

“When did you disappear? Your father's on the line.”

Maggie looked up from her book in terror.

“Please talk to him,” Anne said.

There was no way out. Trapped in her chair, Maggie let the life and intelligence drain from her face, transforming herself into something coarse, low and unworthy of attention. It was her most effective mode of disengagement. Avoiding her mother's eye, she gave a cruel and foolish laugh.

“No. I don't want to.”

“Owen,” she said, going back to the phone, “I can't locate her. She's made herself scarce. Over.”

“Bless you all,” Owen said after a moment. “We'll talk on Christmas. Out.”

Anne sat for a moment with the dead receiver in her hand, then replaced it.

Strickland had seated himself at the table and was sipping port. To her surprise, the company were discussing Vietnam. She hurried back into the living room to have it out with Maggie, who had put the book aside and was crying. Anne's anger fled.

“Don't cry” was all she could think of to say. “He's all right.”

“What were you in the hospital for?” Mary Ward asked Strickland.

“A lot of things. I had parasites in my kidneys. I had side effects from dengue. Broken bones I hadn't treated. I had just come back from Vietnam.”

“I saw your film,” Buzz said. “It was shown here.”

“Here?” Strickland asked. “At the Academy? That surprises me.”

“I think it was,” Buzz said.

Joan Conley regarded Strickland as though he were a large lizard on the runway. The film makers left at about seven. Anne, the Wards and the Conleys sat by the fire. Maggie wandered outside, then came in and picked up her book again.

As the Conleys were leaving, everyone but Maggie stood in the vestibule. Buzz and Joan Conley helped the lieutenant on with his bridge coat.

“I don't like that photographer guy,” Benny Conley said. “I don't think he's my friend.”

“I didn't either,” said Joan.

Anne was seeing them out with a bourbon in her hand.

“He has a bad stammer,” she explained. “Maybe he's compensating.”

“Wonder what he did in Nam,” said Conley.

“Made a movie,” Buzz said. “Very antiwar. Antimilitary.”

Conley nodded in recognition of the type.

“You used to call them peace creeps, didn't you?”

“Not me,” Buzz said. “I never called them that.”

After the Conleys were gone, Buzz, Mary and Anne went back to the fire.

“How's Teddy?” Anne asked.

Buzz shook his head.

“He's in the hospital,” Mary said, “taking the cure. He's in and out.”

They looked gloomily into the fireplace for a while. Then Mary Ward got up and went to make her holiday family calls. Anne had another drink.

“How do you think he sounded?” she asked Buzz. “Owen, I mean.”

“He sounded all right.”

She wanted a little more.

“Sort of rising to the occasion?”

“Yeah,” Buzz said. “On his soapbox.”

“Right.”

“Didn't he sound all right to you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I guess so. Did he talk to you before he went? About going?”

“Well,” Buzz said, “we talked some when we were out fishing.”

“Did he ask your opinion?”

Ward shifted in his armchair.

“Yeah, well, we batted the breeze. Out fishing. I even got him to take a drink . . .”

“Did he ask you what you thought about the trip?”

“We talked about the trip, sure, Annie. We talked about a lot of things.”

She laughed at his evasiveness, but her smile quickly disappeared.

“What did you tell him?”

In the silence that followed they both took a sip of whiskey.

“Did you tell him not to go?”

Ward sat up straight in his chair and folded his arms.

“It never came to that.”

“No?”

He looked at her in pain.

“Regarding that conversation, Miss Annie, I b'lieve you'll have to ask Owen.”

“I see,” she said. “Now tell me. Can he do it?”

“Of course he can do it,” Ward said. “Certainly he can.”

“I mean,” she said, “I ask you because I think you know about these things.”

“Owen is not about to lose his nerve,” Ward said. “Don't you lose yours.”

“We both know him, don't we, Buzz?”

“That we do.”

His Kentuckian solemnity struck her as amusing, and to his annoyance she laughed. She had not meant to offend him. She stood up and went and poured herself more bourbon. “He's physically brave. And you are too. You both are. But not all men are.”

“No,” Buzz said.

“How does that work?”

Ward shrugged. “Men are different.”

“It's good, I guess. For a man to have balls. As they say. Isn't it?”

“Yes,” Buzz said.

“Why exactly?”

“Come off it, Annie,” Buzz said. “You know as well as I do.”

“No I don't. Tell me.”

“All good men have physical courage,” Ward explained. “Without physical courage there is no other kind.”

“Really?”

“Alas,” Ward said.

“But that's not Christian,” Anne said. “It's undemocratic.”

“Never thought I'd hear that word from you, Annie Browne. What do you care what's democratic?”

“I don't,” she said. “I thought you did.”

“You do what you can,” Buzz explained. “The strong look out for the others.”

She stared at him.

“So if you're physically brave, you can cope with anything. Is that it?”

“Negative,” Ward said. “You can't have moral courage without physical courage. But you can have physical courage and moral weakness. Anyone who's been around the military knows that, including you.”

He grew shy in the luster of her addled admiring smile. She could feel her power over him.

“And you figured all this out over there, Buzz? In the Hanoi Hilton?”

“I was not confined in the Hanoi Hilton,” Ward said. “It was known as the Zoo.”

They sat in silence until Mary came in.

“We're drunk,” Anne told her. “Don't let him kid you,” she said, nodding toward Ward. “He is too.”

Ward grunted.

“So what am I going to do?” Anne asked the Wards. “Just wait it out? Like before?”

“Affirmative,” Buzz Ward said. “Traditional situation.”

“L
IGHT AIR,
horse latitudes” read his log entry. He filmed the flying fish. Then he lazed against the mast, reading. He had brought along some published memoirs by solitary sailors to reacquaint himself with the form. As it turned out, he found the books hard going. Except for Slocum, even books that had kept him reading through the night ashore seemed to lose pertinence at sea. The authors all sounded alike. He suspected them of cribbing from each other. The style was that of naval history, British and high-hearted.

They are writing about what cannot be fully described, Browne thought. They reduced things and provided no more than what they knew was expected. It was useless, Browne decided, to speculate about the men themselves. Who knew what they were really like? They seemed not much like him but there was no way to tell. The books gave nothing away.

Browne was used to being where others were not like him. In the past, it had sometimes been possible to find a few kindred spirits. But not out here, he thought, inspecting the horizon. It looked untroubled, perfectly benign. No kindred here.

In his Thanksgiving conversation with Anne, he had lied about the weather. It had been difficult but it seemed to him a little deception was necessary to confuse the opposition. The trades had been intermittent. The boat was not quite so fast as he had hoped.

Seated atop the hatch, he leafed through the stack of books, inspecting the jacket photographs of his memoirists. They were all suitably lean and leathery. Well, he thought, I can do that. Things had their public side and it was not altogether dishonorable to pose. He wanted a book or a cassette of his own. He was sure he could come up with the necessary posture and humorously tough-minded prose.

The sun rose higher and Browne sought the shade of his mainsail with Francis Chichester. As he half dozed the thought struck him of what it might be like to record the reality of things, matched with the thoughts and impressions it brought forth. To find the edge on which the interior met the exterior space. It would not be something of general interest, Browne thought, only of a morbid fascination to certain minds. Something for private reflection that might or might not lend itself to very selective sharing. If he could keep some sense of how things really were, he might retain a little of it over time. The past was always disguising itself, disappearing into the needs of the moment. Whatever happened got replaced by the official story or competing fictions.

Once he had succumbed to the temptation to telephone home via the high-seas operator, in violation of his own instructions. He had been worried about the Thanksgiving business, about the way it had sounded.

“Baby,” Anne had said, “you don't have to perform so much. No one expects it.”

“I know what people expect,” he had told her. “I've read the books and I know the lingo.”

“Just be yourself, Owen.”

Later that day, the true trades had risen, preceded by their long blue swell. It was as though lies summoned forth the things themselves.

He had put on an Elgar tape,
In the South.
Very grand it was.

When the wind rose again, he decided to rig the spinnaker. He set Strickland's camera in the cockpit to film himself as he did so, passing the jib sheet over the pole. When that was done he took a sponge bath and put on clean clothes in celebration of the bright brisk weather.

His face in the mirror showed a bad sunburn. He had not been shaving and hadn't seen his own face for some time. The sight of it gave him an odd thrill of fear. He stuck a Band-Aid on his nose, put on his windbreaker and a Tacron-9 squadron cap and settled in the cockpit to wait for the next position reports. He kept a notebook by his side.

The wind was steady all through afternoon but Browne found no reflections worthy of his notebook. Voices from the false sea stories he had been reading stayed with him. He could achieve neither the correct attitude nor the appropriate language. It was another case of things not being what they were supposed to be.

Around evening he had another great attack of desire for his wife. After the lust was temporarily taken care of, came loneliness.

She had told him not to perform so much. That people did not expect it. To be himself.

His father had been a professional authority on expectations. He lay back and watched the fluttering telltales.

“What about it, Dad?” he asked aloud. “Can I just be myself then? How about it?”

The very notion of such a question filled him with hilarity. He rolled in the cockpit laughing, imagining his father's voice gathering force for the reply.

“Yerself?”

It was too funny, Browne thought. First the mild and reasonable mode.

“Be yerself, you mean?”

That had been the time of terror, when the pitch changed and the voice ascended sweetly toward the thunderous heights on which it would charge itself with fury.

“Are you inquiring, my son, as to whether your private person will be deemed suitable for the station in life toward which you aspire?”

Browne clapped his hands and laughed harder. He could actually hear the old man's voice.

“Right, Dad. How about it?”

“You?”

The guy went slack, the wind changed, there was a luffing in the main. He heard his father, not enraged but cursing and weeping. That, of course, had been the other side of things.