It is certainly true that not every first impression of mine has been authoritative, nor have all those decisions I have made quickly been wise. Prudence would have counseled more caution in coming to conclusions about my feelings for Susan, but my heart would hear nothing of it. I could have pretended after our first evening together that I didn’t know she was the one, and she could have pretended the same thing about me. But had we been the kind of people for whom pretending came so easily, we would not have experienced such a powerful mutual attraction in the first place.
When I looked across the table at the face of the real woman smiling back at me over dinner, I noticed again that thing—that intangible something—that had caught my attention when I first looked at her photographs. For most of the evening, I struggled to put my finger on it, like the name of someone you think you might know but just can’t recall. Then suddenly I realized what I was seeing. It was a face without guile.
There was no subterfuge and no artifice about this woman. She was not jaded or cynical or sarcastic. She was not gaming me. There was no come-hither stare, no intention to use her feminine charms to her clearly superior advantage. She was surrendered to the possibility that we might fall in love, with all its attendant dangers and complications and costs. Those were secondary or tertiary concerns for her. She wasn’t afraid of that possibility or the risks it portended. She wasn’t shrinking from the challenge before us. She wanted more than anything, it seemed, merely to be with me. I was defenseless against the honesty in her eyes.
I had been looking for these very qualities in a woman for so long, and my hope of their discovery had for so long been a mirage, that I did not have the capacity at first to understand that what I was seeing was real. Yet when the flicker of my understanding finally became a flame, it ignited my resolve with all the urgency of a five-alarm fire. I knew, in the course of an evening, that my life had been forever changed and that so, too, had hers.
Mr. DeMille had been characteristically busy, and so it was to be expected that an offshore gale followed the rain. Because of this weather I would be unable to leave the next day, which became the happy occasion for Susan’s second invitation to dinner. This meal would be served on Saturday night aboard the Gypsy Moon by her captain. It was a camp-style affair brought forth from the ship’s larder and prepared upon her antique alcohol stove. Canned chicken, diced tomatoes, onions, black beans, and garlic were sautéed in olive oil and served in a white sauce over pasta topped with grated Parmesan cheese, accompanied by candlelight, wine, and music for dancing in the two-by-two-foot space afforded by the cabin sole.
She brought family photo albums, we curled up in the vee berth together to go through them, and we both laughed at how everyone looked in the sixties. That was such a time of hopeful innocence. Examine the photographs of young families back then, and you can see it in their faces. It was a time when Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed that we would all one day be free, and when John F. Kennedy called us to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” to see such dreams come true. But that burden proved too great for those men alone to bear, and an entire generation saw the shadows of that twilight struggle grow longer with their passing. We lost our innocence, and in some ways I think many of us from that generation have never regained that feeling of exuberant hope.
Looking across the table of my ship’s salon at Susan, I had those feelings of hopefulness once more, and the innocence to believe that my hopes could come true. Kennedy needn’t have worried about the Russians. Another American flew over the moon that night, and he made the trip without a rocket.
Chapter 24
The Pearl of Great Price
Sunday morning dawned over a strong breeze offshore at Charleston, with waves still running five to seven feet, according to the weatherman in my ship’s radio. It was not certain at first that these conditions would continue into the afternoon, but as the day wore on and the wind did not abate, I knew that my departure would be delayed yet another day. That was all right by me.
I spent the better part of the day getting provisions squared away and the boat ready to sail. When I had done all I could do and it appeared that there was nothing left but to wait, I called Susan. She would be home that evening, and I was invited to come for dinner—our third together in as many days.
It was a big step. Single mothers are rightly cautious about introducing their children to any men they might be dating. Although Susan’s children were not babies, at fifteen and seventeen they were still at an impressionable age. I would learn later that I was the only one in a long line of suitors who were accorded the honor of meeting them, but that did not surprise me in the least. Through words unspoken, I knew we shared the same plan. Things were moving fast.
That Sunday afternoon, I had written my innermost thoughts in a letter to give to Susan after dinner, knowing that I would be sailing the next day and at sea for perhaps a week after that, without the kind of constant communication that new love demands. I will spare you the seasickness that would surely overtake you were I to recite that purple prose. But I make no apologies to anyone for the way I felt then and still feel now. In those letters I spoke to Susan from the heart, and she gave me hers in return.
The next morning, I sailed out of Charleston Harbor a changed man living a changed life. I smile inside each time I recall hearing Susan’s words through the fading signal on my cell phone as I worked the Gypsy Moon into the channel headed offshore on that bright Monday morning: “I am totally committed to you.”
The die was cast. I was leaving to complete the voyage I had begun, but I had found at last the safe harbor that I knew would shelter both of us for the rest of our days. Eight months later, with the Gypsy Moon nodding at her lines in Nassau, we were married in the garden of our home in Raleigh. It was a simple ceremony conducted in the presence of our children, other family, and a small group of friends. As Susan spoke her vows, I saw again in her eyes that fearless surrender to love that I had discovered while waylaid in the harbor at Charleston. That was her gift to me. She was the Pearl of Great Price that I had searched so long and far to find. I pledged all that I have and all that I am to make her my own, and I will never let her go. I made that pledge in the words of a poem that I wrote for her as a wedding gift:
On Our Wedding Day
He sailed for Nassau, a man alone,
But a Siren’s song he heard.
She called to him from Old Charles Town,
And his voyage was deterred.
* * *
Hull and heart did find repair,
Where the lovely Siren sang.
Enraptured by her beauty, there,
He felt love’s old sweet pang.
* * *
Hold fast now, lads. Let the rollers run.
Let the sea her treasures bear.
But of all the pearls beneath the waves,
There is none so fine or fair.
* * *
She takes her place, now, at his side,
On this, their wedding day.
The sea’s brightest jewel is a blushing bride,
And the captain is come home to stay.
LATITUDE 28.40.88 N
LONGITUDE 80.62.73 W
PORT CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
Chapter 25
The Secret
It was December 21, 2009. I was sailing out of the harbor where I had just met the woman I believed I would someday marry. I didn’t yet know but hoped she kindled the same flame. With Christmas only four days away, I was as giddy as old Ebenezer Scrooge in his moment of salvation. The dolphins that escorted me through the channel at Fort Sumter could have been sugarplum fairies, for all I cared or might have noticed on that heady morning.
The tide that swept me out of Charleston and back to the sea on a Monday in December had been a long time coming, but its sudden arrival was unexpected. To fix the latitude and longitude of my position in that moment and understand where I was headed from there, it is necessary to look ba
ck at the time and place where I first began.
I grew up in what is politely described in therapeutic circles nowadays as an “alcoholic family,” which is an odd way of imagining a family. After all, a family doesn’t take a drink—a man does, or, as F. Scott Fitzgerald more closely observed, the drink takes him. A man who drinks with purpose, not pleasure, is a lit fuse for whom booze is a powder keg. However slowly and quietly the fuse may burn, sooner or later any wives and children on the scene will be blasted skyward like so much cannon fodder, suspended awhile in a spectacular, wild flight from the pursuing laws of time and gravity.
Time and gravity always get their man.
Eventually, everyone who is elevated by the explosion falls back to Earth, scorched and smoldering, landing necessarily at the bottom of wherever they happen to be. When my dad hit bottom he kept rolling in a cloud of hot smoke, but the rest of us landed in Baltimore.
It was not long before that big bang when my mother, at the age of thirty-six, gave birth to me, her fourth and youngest child by ten years. She had no career and only a high school education. The year was 1958, and the women’s movement was still a distant dream. Undaunted, she taught herself to type, took two jobs, and worked days, nights, and weekends. By the time I was eight, my brother and two sisters had left to make their way in the world. My mother moved the two of us from inner-city Baltimore to a one-bedroom apartment in the county that we could scarcely afford. The apartment was located next to Boys’ Latin, a private prep school with a meandering campus on which I would come to trespass with impunity.
Baltimore, I discovered, is a “provincial” town. The word “province” describes a place that is defined more by its boundaries than its possibilities, more by what it excludes than what it welcomes. The boundaries in Baltimore in the sixties were ones of money, education, and social class, which were really just branches of the same tree. Baltimore then was exceedingly well organized along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, and cross-pollination was rare.
Growing up, I knew Baltimore—and specifically my neighborhood of Roland Park—as a place where an elite tribe wearing horn-rimmed tortoise shell glasses drove boxy forest-green Volvos with round headlights and tan leather seats so cracked and peeling that the sheepskins that covered them were clearly a thing of utility, not fashion. Their ancient axles creaked at every bend in the road like the timbers of an old ship. For every hundred thousand miles on the odometer, Nordic medallions were clamped to the front grille as proof that the owner’s choice of something initially costlier and dowdier than his neighbor’s Chevrolet, like his choice of investments and a wife, had been proven wiser with time. His neighbor likely had sent three Chevrolets to the junkyard in the same span of years, at greater total cost, while the quirky Volvo and its knowing owner soldiered steadily on.
I learned that no matter how elderly the member of this elite tribe, his trusted Volvo was tattooed with emblems readily identifying him to other tribesmen (and presumably protecting him from attack) as a member of a particular regional band, spelled out across the rear window in letters like Y-A-L-E or H-A-R-V-A-R-D or P-R-I-N-C-E-T-O-N or V-I-R-G-I-N-I-A.
As it came more clearly into focus in my teen years, I found the WASP ethos of Roland Park simultaneously fascinating and bewildering. I could never quite put my finger on it. Yet however indecipherable was its source code, in application it became something instantly familiar to me. As an adult, I would have the distinct sense whenever I watched the elder President Bush on television that I was seeing someone I had met before. When my brother-in-law Terry described him as “the ultimate Yalie,” I knew exactly what he meant. Nowadays, a Yale man is more likely to be a Korean woman with perfect SAT scores, but not then. Terry didn’t have to explain it. You knew. We all knew. These were the people “to the manner born,” and we were keen if involuntary observers of the manner.
Boys’ Latin was considered, by academic standards, on the third rung among the local prep schools, below Gilman and St. Paul’s. By social standards, though, it wasn’t even on the same ladder as the public school I attended as a boy.
I can still hear my friend Tyrone’s voice as he stepped onto the school bus in the morning, singing “Hot Fun in the Summertime” just like Sly and the Family Stone. He was the fastest sprinter in my elementary school, and I was the fastest over distance. I remember how the sweat glistened on his skin during the races we ran together in the heat of Indian-summer afternoons. I think I knew, even then, that there wasn’t anyone named Tyrone at Boys’ Latin.
Two basketball hoops had been erected at opposite ends of the Boys’ Latin parking lot, and I wore a groove in the concrete running between them. Every Christmas brought a new ball, and most mornings throughout the year I rose early to shoot for an hour or two before catching the school bus. I would shoot for another hour during recess, two more hours after getting home, and all day on Saturday.
Eventually, I could hit from anywhere on the court. No evening could end until I had hit ten shots in a row. As night fell, a lone spotlight from a nearby building threw off a dim glow behind the backboard. Eventually the hoop became a shadow and the swish of the ball dropping through the net my only clue to its location. Though I couldn’t drive for a layup or jump worth a nickel (you don’t acquire those skills playing by yourself), I was a 100-percent three-point shooter before there was such a thing as the three-point shot.
Although I was a fixture at Boys’ Latin, even wending my larcenous way through the sumptuous buffet line at homecoming, I rarely talked to the kids who went to school there. My intimidation was largely a self-inflicted wound. I knew you had to take tests to get into the school, and I was sure that those who had been admitted were much smarter than I.
They wore a uniform that set them apart, although their clothes were usually disheveled from after-school horseplay as they stood around waiting for the aforementioned Volvos to arrive. Most of those who hadn’t gone home by the afternoon were on the field playing lacrosse—a game I did not know. Every once in a while, though, some kid who had missed his ride would wander down to the parking lot and make the mistake of challenging me to a game of one-on-one in basketball. A boy who fancied himself a player took it particularly hard when he lost. I remember what his classmate said to him as he urged him just to walk away: “Don’t worry about it. That’s all he does.”
It wasn’t all I did, by a long shot, and I wanted to say so. I wanted to say that I played jazz piano when I was supposed to be practicing Bach, that I loved to write and was a pretty fair shot with a bow and arrow, and that I knew exactly what the surface temperature of the water in Lake Roland had to be before the largemouth bass would begin to move into the shallows. But I also knew that these skills would be laughably beside the point. I wasn’t part of that tribe. A child of an alcoholic is, in his own mind, the last surviving member of a lost civilization. He sees no point in trying to fit in with society at large, because he is certain he never will.
My mother combatively resisted such self-depravation. Her own father was a drinker, but she had an almost pugilistic confidence in her own potential and firmly believed in the American gospel of personal transformation. For her, the finer sensibilities of the upper classes were to be emulated, while their pretensions were to be avoided. Eleanor Roosevelt best embodied that balance for my mother and many others of her generation. A New Dealer to her grave, Mom felt a visceral aversion to the country club set even as she longed to experience the finer things that their intelligence and education had brought them.
And so she launched me like a deep-sea probe into their midst.
I was christened at three months of age in Baltimore’s venerated old stone Cathedral of the Incarnation, known for the extravagance of smells and bells that are the mark of “high church” Episcopalians. At the first opportunity I was enrolled in the cathedral boy choir, where I and a restless horde of others were paid one dollar per month for the fleeting beauty of our soprano voices. Owing to my short stature and the length
of a choir robe intended for a taller boy, there was a spectacular trip-and-fall incident involving a candelabra and a great deal of noise during the solemn procession of the choir at midnight Mass one year. Only my pride and the pageantry of the moment were damaged, but my memories of cathedral life mysteriously end there.
At age ten I went off for the first of two summers at a day camp at the McDonogh School, where 1930s Wimbledon champ Don Budge offered tennis clinics for delighted children, and cool college kids taught us the rudiments of English riding and jumping. How my mother found the money for this extravagance I have no idea. Alongside my peers, who were dressed in proper English riding hats, I clearly stood out—if not for my riding, then unmistakably for the shiny white miner’s helmet I wore. It came free of charge from Mine Safety Appliances, where my mother worked as a secretary. No one except perhaps my horse was more astonished than I one summer when we were called into the ring to accept the first-place ribbon. It was my earliest experience of victory over my own diminished expectations.
Elkridge Estates, as our apartments were ostentatiously named, seemed to be mostly a place for well-to-do empty-nesters and gay divorcees. My mother’s ambitions notwithstanding, it was clear we didn’t fit in there, either. The younger residents drove natty sports cars and played squash at local clubs—except for one guy.
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