Straight On 'Til Morning

"Who wrote that last song?" she asked Paul.

"I did."

"The lyric, too?"

He nodded his head.

"Are you, like, into Byron?"

He nodded his head – again.

And that was all there was to it. That simple exchange was all it took. Like a couple of eagles, they met in flight and mated – for life. No hysterics, no fireworks – they just met and connected: end of story. I say this fifty years on – as Godfather to their three kids. Okay?

The point of all this, and there is one, concerns yours truly when I got back from Christmas break, when the reality of Jen's breaking up began to sink in. I think I mentioned I was despondent, that my housemother tried to intervene? I think Paul saw what was going down long before I did – and he'd just been waiting for Jen to cut me up into little pieces and send me to a sushi bar.

Around October we were sitting around after lights out, sitting in the dark, looking at a storm coming up the Connecticut River Valley, and I could see a little New York Central passenger train across the valley, headed south towards Springfield. "Wish I was on that train," I said.

"Where would you go?" Paul said, sighing.

"Away from this fuckhole."

"Fuckhole? Man, this is about the nicest place in the world. Why would you want to get away from here?"

"Sometimes I just can't stand it here..."

He sighed again, longer this time, then he was quiet for a while, but I could tell he was thinking of the best way to put me out of my misery. "Spud, what do you hope to accomplish by going out with the most vicious, manipulative cunt in the entire universe?"

I was too stunned to answer. "Paul? Did you just say the word 'cunt'?"

"Yeah, she's a manipulative cunt. What about it?"

"I've never heard you swear before. I may faint."

"Don't deflect the question, asswipe. Try answering one – for a change."

"You know, I was thinking about it over the summer. I realized how much like my mother she is..."

"Oh, God no. You're not going to blame it all on Freud, are you?"

"I don't think I'm trying to blame anything on anyone, Paul. I just realized how much like my mother she is."

"You're saying your mother is a scheming, manipulative cunt?"

"You really think Jen is manipulative?"

"Jesus H Christ, Spud! She's Lady Fucking MacBeth – only with really nice teeth!"

"Paul? You said another cuss word. Are we having an epiphany?"

"No, but you're going to...when I throw your skinny ass through that window."

Which gets back to returning from Christmas break, and how I was coming apart at the seams – after the breakup. He asked me questions about Jen a few nights after our return, asked me about my feelings – now that Jen was out of the picture, so to speak. I think I sounded more depressed than I realized, because my house-mother came in the next evening and talked to me, and then there was that ill-chosen race and my father coming up to check on me. Yeah. I think it was because Paul was seriously concerned about me, like maybe he thought I was about to do something stupid.

Well, I did. I joined the ski team. And while it was stupid, I'm not sure it was that stupid. But here's the thing. He was taking organic chemistry. So was Mary Ann. And guess who was whose lab partner? Reckon he talked to her about me? Or could it be she had been asking about me? And after dad left Mary Ann waltzed into my life.

Hey, what are friends for, right?

So, yeah, we graduated. Jen got into Rice, said she'd decided to stay near home. Paul, like I mentioned, was going to USC – on an archery scholarship that was going to pick up about a third of his tuition. I should mention that during his second day on campus a football coach took one look at him and asked him to try out for the team.

"I don't want to do anything that will compromise my studies," Paul told me he said to the coach.

When the coach assured him it wouldn't he suited up and went down to the practice field, and two hours later he had a full scholarship. Four years later he was drafted by the Detroit Lions, but turned it all down to go to med school at UCLA. He asked Sara to be his wife at Disneyland after his second Rose Bowl appearance, while they were on the It's a Small World After All ride. She said yes, by the way, but you already knew that.

And I flew down to the British Virgins and had Sirius put back in the water, while Mom and Dad came down a few days later. I could tell things were strained between them, and Dad told me this was probably their last chance to patch things up, to hold things together.

"Who are you holding things together for, Dad?"

"You, I guess."

"You think it makes me happy to see you guys miserable?"

"I don't know, Spud. I can't give up on her. She'll always be the love of my life."

"I think if you're miserable you ought to find out why, then do something about it."

"Maybe that's why we're here," he said, smiling. "By the way, is Jen coming?"

"Nope. She told me she's decided Galveston is where she wants to be."

"Can't say I blame her. She's had a rough year."

"Yes, she has," I said as I looked at my mother, still lithe – still athletically inclined – and still morbidly depressed. She was the walking contradiction in our lives – she looked like a marathon runner who'd just lost the most important race of her life – and had decided to commit seppuku. Perhaps, my father and I used to say in jest, she was just waiting for us to lay out the ritual mats and hand her the knife.

I say that because my mother was, and always had been, the laziest human being ever to walk the face of the earth. Father enabled this behavior by surrounding her with housekeepers as soon as he figured out her routine – which was simple enough to understand even after casual observation. She slept til noon, drank a glass of orange juice then went for a run. Usually ten miles, give or take. She'd come home, shower, then go to the country club for a strenuous afternoon playing bridge, though occasionally she'd play tennis – but no matter which she started in on her bourbon and orange juice around two in the afternoon – then she'd meet up with father in the evening for some serious drinking.

Absent from this routine is, of course, any mention of her son – and taking care of same. This was not in her game plan, and I say this with little regret and no remorse in my heart. I thought then and I still do think that spending more time with her would have been a poisonous venture with a dubious outcome, and my father apparently thought so too, which was why I was shipped off to my first private boarding school, this one in Massachusetts, as well, when I was eight years old. So I was, in effect, raised by a succession of headmasters and house mothers, all who I'll happily admit did a much better job raising me than my mother would have, even if she'd been so inclined.

So, I lived for vacations, from time off from school, because that's when I got to spend time with my father. And though he taught me to play golf and tennis, he also introduced me to his one true love: flying. And so with vacations, that added up to about four months a year. We made good use of that time, too.

Because he knew the score, understood what had broken down in our lives, and he felt awful about it. No, he felt guilty as Hell about it. He overcompensated be doting on me, by indulging my desire to grow up too fast, to not do the things other kids my age were doing. I had four different ratings, pilot-speak for something akin to merit badges in the Boy Scouts, before I got my learner's permit to drive a car. I had no need for a car, or to drive. I was tucked away in western Massachusetts nine months out of the year – with no cars allowed – or at home with father. Note I do not say home with mother. By the time I was a senior in high school she was with Jack Daniels every waking moment of her life, and if she wasn't walking around drunk, it was because she was asleep.

If you think I hated her, you'd be way wide of the mark. Neither did I pity her. I simply did not understand her. Why she'd chosen to live her life this way. She'd had every material advantage a human being could ask for: a powerful, monied family, a truly superior education, and she married a man with equal amounts of brains and ambition in his heart. She'd had it made since she was in diapers, and yet she had simply turned her back on it all and disappeared into the darkness.

Yet I looked at her now – looking at Sirius – and I saw something like magic come alive in her eyes. She walked the length of her down on the dock, her hand caressing the mahogany rail as she walked along, putting her head down on the wood and sighting her lines. When she got to the stem, the very point of the bow, she leapt – cat-like – across the five foot chasm and her foot caught the bobstay, her hand the bow-rail, and she pirouetted up on deck like some kind of able seaman right out of Nelson's fleet off the Nile.

I was stunned.

My father only smiled.

"So, who else did you talk into making this little trip?" he asked.

"Paul's here, his girlfriend too. She's cooked on boats before, has a lot of sailing under her belt."

"And?"

"Mary Ann Oberon. I don't think you've met her yet."

"Ah. The girl you've been hiding from us. She must be something special."

Mother was walking aft along the rail, positively radiant I might add, and she sighted up the shrouds, fiddled with a turnbuckle and asked where the rigger's tape was.

"The what?" I replied.

She ignored me and looked ashore. "Is there a good marine supply store around here?"

I pointed and she nodded her head, then continued her inspection.

"If there's one thing your mother knows, it's boats," my father said as we watched her disappear down below. "She practically grew up on her grandfather's yachts, raced old J-Class monsters before the war."

I was, of course, clueless about all this. After she married my father she turned away from all things Maine, even sailing, and had vowed – if only to herself – to never go back. And she hadn't. And now I could plainly see the repercussions of that oath. When she turned her back on the sea she had simply begun to come undone.

Now she came up the aft companionway – dragging Mary Ann up the steps behind her.

"Who's this?" she demanded to know. "And why is she in your stateroom!?"

"Ah, mother, this is Mary Ann, the love of my life. Mary Ann, welcome to the family."

And with that my mother turned to Mary Ann and looked her over – from stem to stern, if you will – and then pronounced her fit enough. For what, I had no idea – but then my mother hugged my girlfriend and that ice was broken. "Anyone else down there I need to know about?"

"Paul and Sara are bunked forward, but they're in town right now."

"So, five staterooms?" she asked.

"Six, if you include the pipe berths in the stem."

"Let's not," she said sarcastically. "So, you're all the way aft, and Paul and his girl are forward?"

"Aye, skipper."

"The biggest stateroom is by the forward mast. Why haven't you taken that one?"

"I thought you two should have it," I said.

She considered that for a moment, then let it go – with Mary Ann watching all this warily, as one might a rattlesnake that'd just slipped into the dining room – during Thanksgiving dinner.

"Sara's at the farmer's market," Mary Ann tossed-in helpfully. "Said she's going to make some kind of curry tonight."

My mother smiled. "This could be interesting," she sighed.

Interesting wasn't the half of it. Sara and Mary Ann cooked while my mother interrogated Paul. "What do you know about sailing?" she began, which led to an endless series of questions and drills, knot-tying demonstrations and verbal floggings. And Paul, poor, stoic Paul, didn't know what to make of my mother – didn't know what had hit him. I'd rarely mentioned her existence at school, if only because I barely knew her myself – and wouldn't have known a polite way to describe her perpetual drunkenness. We were both meeting a creature that had been caged out of sight for twenty years, and who had just regained her freedom. It was a stunning, startling metamorphosis, and even my father was a little amused by her performance.

For she still was, as I mentioned previously, an actress.

A good one, too.

And if you didn't understand that one true thing about her, you might have taken her a bit too seriously.

And that my father would not let us do. He knew her acts, all her routines, and had had them down pat for years. But he had never, I repeat never, been sailing with her, and what we were proposing to do, in three months, was almost monumental in scope.

We were going to take Sirius from the British Virgins west along the Venezuelan coast to the San Blas Islands, then through the Panama Canal. From there the objective was San Francisco, but because of south setting currents along the Pacific coast of North and Central America, we planned to sail west from Panama to Hawaii, then arc east to the Golden Gate. We planned on two months, two weeks at sea, leaving us just a few weeks margin before school started.

Dad and I had almost no sea time, Paul a bit more, while, oddly enough, the girls were all accomplished sailors in one way or another – so we had a little role reversal thing going on, which was interesting – and mother seemed to be coming into her own as the skipper of my little menagerie.

That said, we planned to spend the next two days stowing provisions while mother went about completing her inspection, then – barring the unexpected – we'd push off on Friday from Saba Rock, Virgin Gorda, bound for Aruba – a not quite 600 mile run to the south-southwest. Another 650 miles the San Blas Islands, where we planned to spend a few days, then an overnight at the canal for measurements and fees – then a day or so to transit, then, once in the Pacific we'd dash for Honolulu, a 5000 mile, twenty one day sprint, before turning to San Francisco, another 2200 mile, ten day grind – and this time into the wind.

And the Doc had spent tons getting Sirius ready, too. She was as well equipped as any sailboat could be, in 1965, anyway. Which meant we had two really good sextants onboard, a couple of VHF radios, a Ham rig as well as an ADF/VOR set – which would have been more appropriate in Dad's Baron. We laid in supplies and stowed everything safely out of harm's way, and we spent that Thursday before departure going over our duties and responsibilities while on watch. With hurricane season breathing down our neck, mindful we couldn't make excuses and postpone our departure even a day, we went ashore for one last meal on dry land that evening.

And I hasten to add that my mother had not consumed one drop of alcohol since her arrival. Take that as you will, but she wasn't even sneaking a snort after midnight, and it was beginning to show. Alcohol is addictive, and alcohol withdrawal is real. She was becoming grumpy, occasionally grouchy, then downright mean, and as my father had cued us in we did our best to help her along. She stopped eating, until we forced her to eat – something, anything – but it turned out the only thing she wanted to eat was – my father.

They would disappear down below every few hours and we'd hear them giggling and carrying on, and it was contagious. Paul and Sara would disappear as soon as my parents got back in the sunshine, then Mary Ann and I would have a go, and pretty soon I imagined we'd be bounding across the Spanish Main fucking our brains out every few hours. It was a happy, if inconceivably naïve vision of what waited for us.

For you see, when we got back to the Sirius later that night, there was a new duffel bag on deck.

And there was Jen, sitting in the cockpit – waiting for me.

+++++

One of the, shall we say, benefits of mother's alcohol withdrawal was insomnia. She could not sleep, and did not even want to try after the first few attempts. Her motor ran until it stopped, then she conked out for a few hours and was soon up for another twenty hours. When she got too grumpy she grabbed father by the nuts and took him below and cleaned his clock for a half hour and then all was right with her world – for a few hours, anyway.

And to set the matter straight, they weren't old, not then and really, not ever. They graduated from Harvard, well, she from Radcliffe, in 1941, so they were not yet fifty years old, and they were both strong, active people. I say this by way of re-introducing Jennifer back into our midst, and as the last crew member to join the Sirius on her voyage of discovery.

Because my mother took one look at Jen sitting in the cockpit and shook her head. "What are you doing here?" my mother asked.

"This was my father's dream," Jen answered, and I'd have to say with more than a little defiance in her voice, "and I'm going to be a part of this."

Even in the dark I could see Mary Ann glowing, perhaps I should say radiating, fierce heat. Anger? Rage – murderous rage – was seething, all banked down and seething – in her eyes. Paul, bless his heart, walked right on by with Sara in hand and they disappeared to their forepeak stateroom – shutting the stateroom door behind them as they went.

My father of course went to Jen and picked her up, hugged the snot out of her and kissed her on the forehead – so of course my mother grabbed him by the nuts and dragged him to their stateroom. They were quiet about it, but I feel sure she got him off repeatedly, for an hour later we heard cries of 'Enough, woman! It's chapped half to death...you're going to kill me if you keep this up!'

And Mary Ann had the grace to leave me with Jen in the cockpit.

And then we were alone, under the stars and alone in the deepest night of our lives. I went and sat next to her, and she leaned into me. "I'm sorry," she said.

"I understand," I had the temerity to say.

"Do you?"

"I loved him too."

"And I still love you," she whispered. "I'm not going to do a thing to break up what you have with Mary Ann, but I still love you. And I always will."

I could forgive you for thinking I was naïve enough to believe her, but yes, I had my doubts. It was impossible not to after the Doc's parting words, and especially not after the blond headed freak episode, so I stood and picked up her duffel and carried it to a stateroom on the far side of my parent's, and showed her where to stow her foul weather gear and sea boots – then I said goodnight and went aft to Mary Ann.

Who was beyond seething now. She was in full melt-down mode, livid tears falling freely in an uncertain gravity that now seemed too heavy, too burdened with grievous expectation.

And I sat beside her, smothered her tears with a blanket of kisses, then I looked into her eyes. "There is nothing that girl could ever do to change the way I feel about you, and I'm going to spend every waking moment of my life loving you, so stop it. Just stop it, right now."

And the strangest thing happened.

She did.

I had flipped the right switch, for her – and for me. I declared the truth, and she knew I was telling the truth – and that was the end of that. We made love and went to sleep; the next thing I knew sunlight was streaming in open portlights and I smelled bacon frying in the galley. I went on deck and helped Paul with the sails, and with Dad standing at the chart table we cast off lines and motored into the well-marked channel. Once we were off the eastern, lee shore of Virgin Gorda we hoisted sail and were off. Off like a herd of turtles, as my father liked to say.

We, and I mean all of us, Jen included, ate Sara's breakfast in the cockpit – and in the freshening sea air my mother wolfed down her plate – and asked for more.

I looked at my father – who simply smiled and winked at me – and I shook my head, wondering what lay under the building clouds just ahead.