Straight On 'Til Morning

He always had several secretaries working in his office, and a couple of them had stayed with me before I was shipped off to Massachusetts, kind of baby-sitter/nanny assignments they undertook with smiles on their faces. They were all, at one time or another, sleeping with him and, I suspect, hoping to find a way to push my mother out of the picture and move into greener pastures. That never happened, of course, and as a result there was a constant flow of women moving into and out of his office, and my mother, not being stupid, knew what was going on and retreated more deeply into her private conversations with Jack Daniels. Their's was, in the vernacular of the day, a game of mutually assured destruction, a cold war stand off all their own – and we talked about that war in light of what they had rediscovered on our sailing trip.

"That was a miracle," he sighed, speaking of their coming together again, and of Ben's coming into our life. But she had, he continued dourly, done with Ben what she'd done with me. She had shut him out, turned him away, and with nowhere to go he fell into the gravity of a new secretary's orbit – again. "Only this time, Spud, it's different."

I nodded my head, could see it in my eyes. He was in love again, with this new girl, and of course – she was preggers. We met for dinner a few weeks later, at Trader Vic's up in The City, and she was indeed a lovely woman – seriously easy on the eyes, genuinely warm-hearted and giving, and in a way I felt happy for my old man.

But not nearly as bad as I felt for Mom.

I left for Puget Sound a few weeks later, for Officer's Candidate School, and my mother moved onboard Sirius – with Ben. I suppose in other circumstances it would have seemed weird, but we realized with starting med school soon, Mary Ann was going to need all the help she could get.

Yet at the time nobody realized just how much help my mother was in need of. Still, Mary Ann figured that out quickly enough.

And so, in the company of babies made at sea – they grew close.

+++++

Not quite a year later I finished jets in Pensacola and was to report to Puget Sound again, in two weeks, this time to qualify on the A6 Intruder, so with two weeks off I went home – to Dallas, to check-in with father and see his new family – before setting my course back to Sirius.

And I hardly recognized anyone there.

My mother, still not drinking, had gained serious weight. Like eighty pounds serious. She had stopped running, stopped playing tennis, and the transformation was disconcerting. But then I saw Mary Ann.

Who had, apparently, stopped eating. She was a wraith, pale and ghost-like, a woman who hadn't seen the sun in months.

And both were seriously depressed. When I stepped aboard both clung to me like ivy on a brick wall – and I doubted the wisdom of all my choices as I never had before. I should be here, I said, taking care of them. Taking care of these kids.

And we talked, the three of us, about what lay ahead. Four more years away, maybe at home a month a year, but they reassured me they had things under control and that what I was doing now was as important as Mary Ann's medical schooling. And I listened to them, I even believed what they said – perhaps because it was what I wanted to hear – and I went north. Not too many months later I found myself walking the decks of the USS Constellation, a nugget in VA-165 getting ready to fly my first combat mission – over North Vietnam.

We flew a variety of missions over the north, from SAM suppression to hitting military targets in and around Haiphong, and we usually flew at night. I'd completed a dozen missions when orders came down that a Soviet freighter was inbound – carrying dozens of new, and very advanced, surface to air missiles. Our mission was to hit the docks along the Cám River – and only the docks – just before the freighter attempted to tie up alongside.

We took off at midnight – in a raging gale. These conditions were the Intruders specialty, however, and we wouldn't be expected to strike on a night like this.

Of course, no one told that to the Soviet radar operators watching as we approached the coast, and no one bothered to mention that to the pilots flying brand new Mig-21D all weather fighters – as they took-off and turned to intercept our formations.

The kid on the other team was named Durong Thánh; he was not quite my age and had been schooled by the French in the south, he spent time in France as a kid with his diplomat father, and learned to fly in the Soviet Union. He was, and remained, a fine pilot, as good as I was, anyway.

In this attack plan, my section of four approached Haiphong from the east, and we came in low with an EA-6 jamming enemy radar sites all along the river entrance. The alleged main attack vectors were from the southwest and north, and they were high altitude sections easily spotted on radar. These two sections were supposed to draw enemy fighters to the north while our group came in low from the east. The plan might have worked if we hadn't tried this little stunt a few times before, but we had and it didn't.

About two miles from the river threat receivers started howling – SAMs, we thought. Then air-to-air radar receiver warnings started screaming, meaning we had enemy aircraft on our tails and air-to-air missiles were locked on our aircraft. We called our CAP, our escorting F4 Phantoms, but they were north of us, and at very high altitude.

My BN, or bombardier-navigator, a kid named Norman Puckett, started jamming radars, I started pumping off flares and chaff – as my section spread out for our final approach. The Mig's first missiles went wide, our Phantoms joined the fight, and small arms fire started reaching up into the night, rounds slamming into the Intruder, sounding a little like metallic hail-strikes. I pickled my load and turned hard left over the city, saw an air-to-air missile streak by just yards away – then detonate in the sky just ahead – and little shards of the windshield and canopy came in on us. Fire warning lights started popping and hydraulic pressure falling, then oil pressure and engine ratios, too.

Durong was still behind me, still trying to get off another shot, when we decided to eject. We were too low, but the aircraft was coming unglued – so I gave the order and we reached overhead and pulled the lanyards.

And nothing happened. Well, almost nothing happened. The canopy did it's thing and blew away in the slipstream, but the seats resolutely refused to fire – and then Puckett looked at me – and we both started laughing.

"Well, Spud, we're somewhat kinda screwed, ain't we?"

And just then, for some reason, I thought of Jennifer. Jennifer, in the field across Greenfield's Road in the autumn before we broke up. I could see her by my side, smiling at me, her eyes at peace – and I leveled the wings, popped the spoilers and tried to bleed off as much energy as I could – before we slammed into the muddy waters of Ha Long Bay.

+++++

Durong Thánh apparently never knew a Phantom was behind his Mig, and never knew two Sidewinders were sliding up his tail – but somehow he managed to eject – and his parachute blossomed overhead, his seat fell away, then he looked down at the sea below.

And who know? Maybe he laughed I would have..

Because we, Norm and myself, were about five hundred feet below, climbing out of our Intruder's cockpit as it filled with water, and we watched as his Mig came apart in the sky and cartwheeled into the sea.

I saw him first and pulled my 45 ACP from it's holster on my thigh, and I chambered a round. I sighted in on the falling pilot, was going to shoot the ever-lovin' hell out of his ass, too, but for some reason I didn't. Instead I watched him fall into the water and struggle with his parachute. When I was sure the guy was about to drown I dove into the water and swam to him, helped him out of his harness and pulled him to our still-floating aircraft, then Norm helped us up on the wing and the two of us sat there, gasping for breath, wondering what the hell had just happened.

Then Durong started cussing – in French, mind you – and of course, having gone to a school that valued such things, I began cussing out Durong for having shot my ass down – in perfect schoolboy French. Norm crossed his arms and picked his teeth, wondered when this little dog and pony show was going to wind up and leave town, then he noticed I was bleeding. Bleeding all over the place.

One of the Phantoms was circling overhead and Norm got on his handset and gave a rundown of our situation, and the Phantom driver told us a helicopter was inbound, and that it looked like our Intruder was sinking – which of course it was. And I was bleeding out too, my blood flowing out into the sea in huge billowing clouds of dark red life.

Sharks heard that dinner bell ringing, and they came running, were soon circling our sinking aircraft.

Norm and Durong figured out what was happening and got the life-rafts from under our seats deployed, and me into one of them, just as two Sikorskys roared by. We were hoisted aboard and took off for the Connie as Boomer five-oh-five slipped beneath the waves. I nearly lost my leg as a result of the night's festivities – not from lacerations but from, rather, organisms in the water that got in the tissue and caused a series runaway infections.

Durong Thánh was taken to Hawaii for a little chat with some new friends, and from there to Leavenworth, Kansas, for a prolonged visit to the interior of our country; I too visited Hawaii, but stayed in a somewhat less than pleasant medical facility, but that's not how the performance played out back in California.

Several aircraft were shot down that night, a few airmen killed, a few taken prisoner, and so in the confusion Mary Ann received a telegram from the Secretary of the Navy telling her that I'd been killed. My mother came unglued, father flew out to console them, and was there when a second telegram arrived, indicating that, no, your son is not dead. I was, rather, en route to Pearl Harbor where no doubt an endless procession of round-eyed nurses would fellate me into oblivion. Well, that was Dad's version of the telegram, but I think you see the nature of the sequence.

Our presence in Southeast Asia diminished somewhat after that, and I left the Navy after my time was up and returned to San Francisco somewhat different than I'd been just a few years before. I was older, true enough, but I was no longer in any real hurry to grow up.

Life's funny that way.

+++++

I haven't talked much about my daughter, Mary Claire. It's a difficult subject.

After I returned from my time in the Navy I went to work trying to find a job flying, and it was not easy. Airlines were struggling with inflation and higher fuel prices, along with people generally not traveling as much as an economic downturn hit, and that meant a tight market for pilots – despite many hired after WWII and Korea retiring. And wanting to be based in the Bay Area further constrained my choices. I ended up working for Air California, flying 737s to Orange County and back, for a couple of years – before I got on with Delta, which I considered my first real job. It was also my last real job. I stayed with them until I retired, and I mention this as a frame of reference. It's what I did, what I'd always wanted to do, and Delta was one of the few constants in my life.

Mary Ann seemed to find equilibrium after I returned, and she finished her internship at USF, and then her residency at back at Stanford, where she specialized in pediatric cardiovascular surgery. She was busy, and in demand, from the beginning, and she became less a resident and more an infrequent visitor to Sirius.

Mary Claire's was a sad, burdened soul from the beginning, like she knew her life was going to be short and full of pain. While I was still at Air Cal she was diagnosed with leukemia, and while her fight was valiant, it was brief. She passed a few months shy of her tenth birthday, and her death marked a terrible turn in all our lives.

We were together, the three of us, almost all the time our first four years, so we were extraordinarily close. That time together, those first years, grounded me in who I was – and by that I mean when I thought of myself in passing I thought of myself as her father first, above anything else, and the hardest part about being in the Navy was being away from her. After she left us I spent a time not really knowing who I was anymore – like if I was her father above all else, then what was I now – now that she was gone?

And Mary Ann wilted after her death. A physician unable to help? Unable to change the outcome of her own daughters fight? The experience left her burdened for years – and her work placed her on the front lines of endless desperate fights, with children facing death, her patients facing impossible odds in their fight for life. I watched her struggle under the load for almost ten years before I knew she was finally going to be alright.

And then there was Paul and Sara. He breezed through school, zipped through his training and went straight into general surgery, and they bought a house, once, in the Hollywood Hills and there they lived. Sara played for studio orchestras while she went back to school, and began teaching Music History at USC after her three kids were out of diapers.

And it's kind of funny, but I looked at my experience with Jen, then Mary Ann, and I looked at Paul's with Sara – and I found the differences amusing, if instructive. He always knew what he wanted to do, as did I, yet he'd never been possessed with the almost self-destructive impulse that had gripped me in high school. There were no Jennifers in his life, there had just been that one moment at the coffee house in Cambridge when he met Sara. He knew, he just knew. So did she, and that was it. I always wondered why, what made us so different? Simple chance, nature versus nurture? What? What made our experiences so different?

Just life, you say?

Hah.

+++++

Father's divorce wasn't so unpredictable, was it?

Two people more different was hard to imagine, yet I think he never stopped loving my mother – yet because my mother set such an impossibly high mark their marriage was troubled from the start. We lost touch during those years, but he came 'round more when Mary Claire got sick. He was divorced by then of course, and he stayed with Mom more and more when he visited, and Ben was ecstatic.

Yes, Ben. He was my daughter's age, yet he was my brother, and he was there with us all along, yet when Mary Claire fell ill I think it hit him hardest of all. He wasn't her brother, after all – he was her uncle. An adult relationship had been, in effect, forced on him – if only by social convention – yet I think that set him on his way. On my way, I mean, on wanting to be an adult before he'd had a chance to fully experience being a kid.

So when my mother and my father drifted back into the same orbit their children, both of us, were only too happy to see it happen.

I could say that the story ends here, but it didn't.

It couldn't say that now, you see, because the most important part of the symphony, the conclusion, had yet to be composed. And the composer, if you will, had yet to play much of a role in our lives – beyond trying to kill me one dark and stormy night.

+++++

Sirius was a wooden boat, and time does not treat such things kindly. She required regular, extensive work on such varied things as her hull, the decks, and even her masts. Over the years we'd kept her in just two marinas, one by the airport and the other downtown, and she was surrounded by other boats we called Clorox bottles – or fibreglass boats. Plastic boats, in other words, unstable little things that stank of industrial solvents from the day they were made 'til the day they started cracking up from too much exposure to the sun.

Plastic boats don't require too much cosmetic maintenance, which is why they're so popular, and the people who buy plastic boats tend not to invest much time or energy into their upkeep. Their hulls become chalky, the cheap plastic portlights misty and streaked with crazing, and most of them tend to be under-built with the cheapest grade hardware the builder can get away with. There were exceptions, of course, but many plastic boats, most built in Florida, were a danger to their owners if they were used for anything other than dockside condos.

But so are wooden boats – if you don't keep up with the regular maintenance required to keep them seaworthy. We did, and for fifteen years our efforts kept up with her needs, but then seams started to open in her hull planks, and the teak decks had been sanded all they could. The time had come to make a decision: invest real money in a major refit or put her on the market. All of us, including Paul and Sara, met one Saturday morning to talk about the old girl's fate, and that discussion rightly centered on what our plans for her going forward might be.

The truth is, Mary Ann and I were ready for a house, but we weren't ready to get rid of her – yet. After Mom and Dad remarried, and soon after she returned to the old house on Belclaire, yet she had come to view Sirius as a vital part of the fabric of our lives, and my father echoed that very sentimental view. It was Paul and Sara that, of course, held to a singularly practical view of her role in our lives: make plans to sail her, they said, and sail her hard, or sell her. Boats like Sirius were meant to be sailed, Sara said, and to see her relegated to life as little more than a mobile home wasn't right.

We knew she was right, Mary Ann and I, but the truth of the matter is we were not even forty years old. Retirement was decades away, for four of us, at least, and that's when I noticed Dad leaning back in his chair, grinning as an idea bubbled up from just under the surface and sprang into life.

"What if your mother and I clean her up and take her out for a few years?"

"What?" my mother said, smiling. "Are you serious?"

And we all started talking about the difficulty two seniors faced if taking a 72 foot monster out into the Pacific – alone. Of course the more we said about that, the more both my mother and father grinned, the more they wanted to do it.

Then Sara chimed in again: we could, each of us – she said – join Sirius whenever a long ocean crossing was in the offing, and the old farts could enjoy her when they got where they were going. So a list of possible places to visit took shape in the air and that was that. Mary Ann and I bought a little shack in Menlo Park and settled in, and on my days off went to the yard in Sausalito, where Sirius was undergoing major surgery, to get paint under my fingernails. Eight months – and almost 200 grand later – she was back in the water, ready to go – and she looked brand new again. We sailed her back to the marina in downtown San Fran and tourists regularly came by and snapped rolls of film standing beside her.

Mom and Dad moved back onboard, and though Ben was now a junior in high school – yes, in Massachusetts – he planned to take part in the first leg of the adventure that coming summer. We all, as a matter of fact, were planning to take part in this second coming of Sirius, her first real trip in almost seventeen years. The plan took shape quickly, too: sail through the Golden Gate and on to O'ahu. Kind of closing the circle, I think you could say, before helping Sirius begin the next part of her life.

And we, Mary Ann and myself, began looking at life shoreside as the beginning of the second part of our life together. I have to say that, after just a few weeks in the new house, we began to regret the decision to move ashore. And the house was empty of kids, of all the routines that make a house a home. We tried to have another, but something was wrong, and all of a sudden that little house felt like a hall of carnival mirrors. We were lost, bumping into each other, trying to find a way out of the maze we'd just created for ourselves.