10
When he arrived at Miami’s Miamarina, whose facilities he had read about in the Florida Cruising Guide, one fifth of the rented yawl’s library, the burly dockmaster indicated an empty slip, took the spring line tossed to him, and then the bow line, and Blackford proceeded to make the boat fast. He stepped over the safety lines to the dock, his face red from the sun, his chin stubbled with a day’s growth.
His first impulse was to leave everything and go to the hotel to read the letter. But he realized that nothing in the letter could, really, help; on the contrary. It would seek to make plausible what she had apparently done, which could not be undone.
So instead he attended there and then to necessary arrangements. He located, with the help of the dockmaster, an idle captain of a 50-foot yawl whose owner would be gone the balance of the month. They made the deal: a straightforward delivery, back to Key West, of the yawl, plus bringing Blackford’s car back to Miami: a hundred bucks plus expenses. The captain wouldn’t be going outside, into the Florida Straits and against the Gulf Stream. He would sail and power down the inland waterway, stopping one night, probably in the vicinity of Marathon. Blackford told him there were a couple of beers and nearly a full bottle of gin in the boat, “nothing else.”
“I’ll bring my own provisions,” he said. “My boat’s full of stuff. Don’t worry.”
Blackford noted, and memorized, the skipper’s name and the name of his yacht, and gave him the two vouchers from the Key West marina. He told him exactly where his car was parked, wrote out the license number, handed him the keys, and said he would expect to see him, and Blackford’s car, at the Fontainebleau Hotel “in a couple of days. If I’m not in, you can leave the car with the doorman, and leave your bill for expenses with the desk, Room 1202.”
There was nothing now to do except to go and read the letter.
“Got a ride?” the captain called out, as Blackford began walking toward the main office.
“I’ll call a taxi.”
“No. I’ll drive you. I’ve got my car up there.”
The captain, a heavy man of about fifty, chatted that he was happy to have the diversion. “Gets boring as hell sitting in a boat, doing nothing.” His wife was away, visiting her parents in Arkansas, and wouldn’t be back for a week. Would Oakes mind if he took a companion with him to Key West, “just for the ride?”
Blackford said he wouldn’t mind.
“She just loves to sail, and she can do the cooking,” the captain said, driving into the Fontainebleau Hotel. They shook hands.
The letter was in his box. He took it up to his room and decided he would shave and shower before reading it. Half dry, he sat down in his shorts and opened the letter.
It wasn’t long, though Sally, with her fine hand, could crowd more words onto a sheet of paper than a typewriter with an elite type.
“Dear Blacky: You will have heard from Anthony that I tried, but failed, to write this letter earlier.
“What you now know I have done is, really, the central message: I decided to marry another man. You will ask yourself (why shouldn’t you? I did): If you had asked me some time during the last ten years to marry you, would I have done so? Answer: Yes—yes, provided it hadn’t been during those special years, off and on, when I was concentrating so hard on my work.
“And if I had asked you the same thing, you’d have said Yes—except when this mission, or that one, simply required postponement. We did decide, that night in Taxco, on an actual date, which is little more than a year ahead, and I just don’t know whether something would have happened to postpone a June 1964 wedding. We’ll never know. What did happen was that six weeks ago I met Antonio Morales.
“I’m not going to describe him, I don’t think you’d want that. All I can say is that when he asked me to marry him, I found myself saying, Yes—to a whole other world, a world I knew only in literature. Suddenly my whole nature moved me in that direction. I decided I’d give that Yes the supreme test, by weekending with you in Acapulco. My agreement to marry him survived that test.
“And yet what I said to you in Acapulco—don’t think it was just post-coital hyperbole—remains true. I do love you, and I will always love you. But I have selected another man to be my husband. It’s that simple, and that complicated.
“In order to know what kind of pain you are experiencing, I have only to ask myself what kind of pain would I be experiencing if it had been the other way around, and I had heard that you had got married? You will tell yourself that The Other Way Around couldn’t have happened. I thought the same thing. I was wrong. Maybe you will find, sooner rather than later, that it’s so with you; and I know that when you find her, you will also continue to love me. But I think it only prudent (ah, what would my beloved J. Austen have done without that word?) to say goodbye. I don’t expect to hear from you.
“Blacky, my darling, I don’t want to hear from you.”
She signed it just her ornate, tiny “S.”
In Mexico city, Señora Antonio Morales de Guzmán sat in the patio of the house in Coyoacán, the verdant district south of the center of the city which at the time of Porfirio Díaz had been countryside but was now an elegant residential pocket in the tight city sprawl that stretched beyond Coyoacán to University City, on the road to Cuernavaca, Taxco, and Acapulco. Antonio had inherited the mansion when his mother and father were killed, nine months earlier, in an airplane crash in Venezuela.
It was a quiet but elegant wedding reception, here in the patio and outside in the garden. Antonio (he was still officially in mourning) had invited fewer than a hundred friends, Sally only two or three of her professional colleagues and M’Lou Weeks, her roommate at Vassar, together with her husband, who was attached to the Embassy. Antonio’s best man, Pedrito Alzada, had participated too zestfully in too many champagne toasts, and now he escorted Sally to the large garden, intending—he said—to show her the remains of the treehouse he and “your husband” had built as playmates.
At the end of the garden, by the large oak tree, he confided to her that the previous owners of this lovely estate, dead so recently and prematurely, in their fifties, had been the victims of an awful delinquency. “As you know,” Pedrito bent over her, looking down on her floral head wreath, “I am Tony’s”—they called Antonio “Tony,” and apparently had done so even before he went off to school in America—“lawyer, and it fell to me to do the investigation. I flew to Caracas. What I discovered was—that the airplane had run out of gas!” Pedrito choked his own throat with his right hand, in melodramatic horror. “While flying high over the mountains, on the way to Angel Falls. I was in Caracas when I discovered the company’s dirty little secret—the newspapers didn’t have it. By that time the company flying the plane had declared bankruptcy. There was no possibility of collecting damages. So I had to decide: Shall I tell Tony? Or isn’t he better off thinking that his mother and his father died in an unavoidable crash? I think I did the right thing. Do you?”
Sally looked at the party-dressed, self-assured, animated young lawyer, like Antonio in his early thirties; probably—no, manifestly—more than merely a lawyer to Antonio. (Would she ever get around to calling him Tony? She doubted it.) She knew the answer his friend wanted to hear. “I’m sure, Pedrito, that your judgment was sound. You know—Tony—very well, you grew up with him. If for whatever reason sometime in the future you think—we think”—Sally reminded herself that she was now the primary consultant in respect of anything that bore on Antonio Morales de Guzmán—“that he ought to be told what really happened, we can do so, and give the reasons for not having told him earlier.”
Pedrito nodded his head vigorously, in extravagant recognition of her sagacity, and they strolled back toward the little knots of Mexican family friends, bejeweled socialites, university dons, matronly aunts, childhood servants. And, also, the recently retired triumphant Spanish matador whose Mexican investments Antonio Morales, now the principal figure in the firm of Morales y Durango (t
here were no Durangos left), handled. Luís Miguel Dominguín, slim, handsome, bright-toothed, sensual, was a splendid figure, whose historical renown was guaranteed by the single act of having fought with Manolete mano a mano at Linares in 1947 when Manolete—Manolete the Great—was killed by a Miura bull which, while mortally wounding Manolete, was mortally wounded by Manolete, talk about two scorpions in a bottle. The bull died before the matador, but not by much: Manolete lived only ten hours. Dominguín had gone on to establish that his light did not shine only on that one successful afternoon. His luster, almost unique, was finally overshadowed by young Antonio Ordonez, but there were those who believed that no one in memory would ever outshine the brilliant young Luís Miguel, dressed now like an Italian movie star, with a a tiny palette of colors below his handkerchief pocket, the flora and fauna of Latin American honorifics. He approached Sally, and said in modestly fluent English, “I hope you will be happy here, Señora—”
“Sally.”
He bowed. “Sally.—Luís Miguel. And, if I may ask, where are you going on your wedding trip?”
“We are postponing a trip. Antonio has urgent business in the office, and I have another six weeks before midterm break.” She laughed. “Obviously we did not plan our marriage months ahead.”
He smiled, and said he was certain that if this “felicitous event” had been planned years ago, it could not have been “a more auspicious union.” And, lowering his voice: “Tony is mad for you, loco mad.”
Pause.
“I can see why.”
The way he said it … Of course, Luís Miguel was renowned for his habits, the ribald taurino street-question being, Had Luís Miguel gored more bulls than women? To which the conventional reply was, ¿Quién sabe? He had just now said what he said with a smile of which sensuality was the principal constituent. Sally came very near to saying, “Antonio has not yet seen what you call ‘why.’”
And indeed Antonio had not Iain with Sally. It wasn’t only that the Spanish tradition was so firm on the subject, it was that Antonio believed so wholeheartedly in that socio-religious tradition, among others—so many others—and would never have made a prenuptial advance. Tonight would be the first time she saw … Tony … unclothed. She assumed that, for a while at least, all the initiatives would be his; and she was, in the anticipation, acquiescent. It was inconceivable that in bed his nature would be—transformed. She looked past the head of Dominguín at her husband, kissing the hand of an exiting matron, and her eyes involuntarily stripped him of his clothes, and she felt a surprising thrill of anticipation. Even as she had, at New Haven, the night she decided to surrender her virginity to Blackford.
11
Sally Partridge always associated her early childhood with the lake in Connecticut by which her family lived, in the little cottage designed, during the twenties, for summer use, but used by the Partridge family year-round. Sally remembered when first she began to wonder, at an early age, whether the cottage belonged to them, or to the Phoenix State Bank & Trust Company in Hartford. “They must hire that fella full-time to come collect my payments,” Hal Partridge said one summer afternoon, closing the front door on the bank clerk—it did no good to try to reach Hal Partridge over the telephone, because Southern New England Telephone had cut off service owing to a delinquent bill. Moreover, during the summer there was no income from Sally’s mother, Faith, who taught English at Indian Mountain School, the little preparatory day school down the road from the boys’ prep school, Hotchkiss, which lay grandly on the opposite side of the lake. But indigence wasn’t Sally’s concern as a young girl. Nothing troubled Sally except the mood of Ronnie, her brother, older by two years. If Ronnie was sad, Sally was despondent. If he was exuberant, she was elated. If he was reprimanded or chastised by his father, Sally felt the pain.
Ronnie’s interest, above all things, was a 16-foot sailboat. In August of 1938, his father had sold a long piece to the Reader’s Digest, and had received in payment one of those prodigious checks. That check made him for a full day feel and act like J. P. Morgan. He caught up six back-due months with the Phoenix Bank; the telephone was put back in service, and he brought home a steak for dinner. It was at that complacent dinner that Ronnie, who at age fourteen had been serving as a counselor at the little boys’ summer camp half a mile up the lake, asked his father if he could borrow ninety-five dollars. It had been a very long time since anyone had thought to go to Hal Partridge in pursuit of a loan, but, feeling flush with his success, the father had asked his freckled son, with the volatile face that registered the nuance of every mood, what it was he wished to do with ninety-five dollars.
The words came tumbling out. Jack Fisher, the senior counselor, was leaving the camp. He was going off to work at Sun Valley, a budding ski resort out West. Obviously there would be no point in taking his boat to Idaho, so he had decided to sell it. At lunch yesterday he mentioned at the counselors’ table that he was going that afternoon to place an ad in the Lakeville Journal, describing the Barracuda and giving the price.
“How much?” Ronnie had asked.
Jack, a gigantic young man of twenty-eight, especially liked Ronnie, who crewed for him so vigorously during the summer races—twice in the afternoon on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The races were for Ronnie not only the high points of the week, but, it sometimes seemed, the only points of the week; and when it was not his turn to crew, he would teach his charges how to swim, or how to make clay pots, or whatever, but always keeping his eyes on the six little sailboats maneuvering for one more point toward their own America’s Cup, a twelve-dollar trophy donated by the Community Chest of Salisbury, to be held by the winner of that year’s two-month regatta and kept for one year, until placed back in competition the following summer.
“Why do you ask, Ronnie?” Jack Fisher knew that Ronnie’s father was impoverished (everybody knew it).
“Just wondering.”
“Well,” Jack said, “I’m going to ask $150 for it. But I’d give it to you for $110.”
All of this Ronnie spilled out breathlessly, leaving his steak untouched.
“How would you raise the balance?” Hal Partridge, pouring himself a fresh glass of whiskey and water, asked his son.
“I have—lined up fifteen dollars.”
“How is that possible when your whole summer pay is only ten dollars?”
Mrs. Partridge caught the furtive glance her son shot at Sally, and guessed correctly: Sally had contributed her savings to the pool. Faith Partridge was an ascetic woman, in part by nature, in part by necessity; she needed to hold together a household headed by a freelance writer whose work was mostly rejected, which rejections drove him to despondent drink, even as his occasional acceptances drove him to festive drink. His erratic income required him to spend two or three days a week writing local news stories for the Lakeville Journal, at five dollars per story.
But Faith Partridge’s husbandry did not make her lose all perspective. She had a sense for truly important psychological moments, and she knew that this was one. She turned to her husband. “I can get an advance from Indian Mountain. They are used to the faculty asking for an advance toward the end of summer. I can handle it.”
With a howl of delight, Ronnie ran out of the cottage. He bicycled the four miles to Salisbury, to Jack’s house, to give him the news that his boat was sold, that he must be sure to withdraw the ad from the Journal. Jack shook the boy’s hand in a formal manner, then, laughing, gave him a fatherly hug. “I’ll write out the transfer papers tomorrow, and the Barracuda is yours.”
Two days later, Hal put up the last twenty-five dollars left over from the Reader’s Digest check and the mother came up with seventy dollars, plus Ronnie’s fifteen. The money was breathlessly counted by Ronnie, and deposited in an envelope.
The money in the envelope, Ronnie said with some formality that he would be returning not on his bicycle, as usual, but on his boat. Indeed, from now on he would commute to work on his boat. Hal and Faith exchanged
a smile. After the little boys went home in the bus (4 P.M.), Ronnie sailed the Barracuda in a light following wind to the makeshift buoy he had moored in front of his house. He swam in to the beach. Sally was waiting for him.
“Did you do what I told you?”
“Yes” she said, pointing to the tin bucket. “It’s all in there.”
“Did you tell Mum?”
“Yes. And Dad’s away. All she said was, Be careful.”
In their old wooden rowboat, they paddled out to the buoy. Sally made the rowboat fast to the buoy and climbed onto the little sloop. Her brother was already at the tiller. He told her to pull up the jib halyard. “I’ll handle the main. I can do that and steer at the same time.”
Sally didn’t doubt it for a minute. “Where are we going?”
“That depends,” said Captain Partridge, with some deliberation, “on the wind.”
The farthest point they could go on Lake Wononskopomuc was just under one mile, diagonally across, to Hotchkiss School. It was there that they beached and had their picnic, and Ronnie told Sally about great ocean passages. She knew about Columbus and Magellan, but not about Captain Cook, or Joshua Slocum, and she listened admiringly, and then Ronnie said that he would be entering the Navy “in a little while”—in a little while, Sally calculated, would mean at least four years from then.
In less than a little while, however, Ronnie did enter the Navy when, after Pearl Harbor, the age requirements for service were reduced to seventeen, parents’ consent required. And, a very little while after that, Ronnie’s destroyer was torpedoed, sinking off Guadalcanal.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 9
