An Independent Woman (24 page)

Barbara rose and threw her arms around him, and he kissed her gently.

“No!” she said. “Don't kiss me like that! Open your mouth and kiss me as if you want to crawl inside of me.”

He did, and then they walked down the path to join the others in the kitchen.

I
T WAS A STRANGE DINNER
that evening at Highgate, and Barbara was both the observer and the observed, intimately entwined yet apart from it, thinking that it was some sixty-five years ago that Jake Levy, newly discharged from the service, and Clair Harvey, his bride, had driven down the Silverado Trail and bought Highgate for a song from a bitter old Irishman who spent his days cursing the Volstead Act and staying drunk. Sixty-five years—what a long, long time! Her father, Dan Lavette, had brought her there for the first time at age eight—Jake was his partner's son—and Jake kept a saddle horse. Dan had swung her up in front of him, and up the path to the hilltop they went, until the whole Napa Valley was spread out before them.

And now, after all the rejoicing, the family was strangely silent around a dinner table that always bubbled with sound. The toasts were over. They were confronting America's agony, a black woman who sat among them. Barbara asked herself,
If I were Judith, what would I be thinking?

Adam was carving a leg of lamb. Dinner was late. It was nine o'clock—but Barbara had only pecked at her lunch, and a glass of wine had given her a strange, heady feeling. Freddie filled her glass again, and she rose, glass in hand.

“Am I permitted another toast?” Barbara asked. “I will make it short because I am hungry. Somewhere in the Bible—which I must confess I have not read in more years than a duck has feathers—it speaks of the stranger within your gates. But there are no strangers here. When you break bread at this table, you are part of our family. Judith, I toast you and welcome you. I am the senior member of this gathering, and I thank whatever gods may be that I have lived long enough to welcome a beautiful black woman into our hearts.”

They drank and both Eloise and Judith wept. Freddie had never seen Judith weep before. He went around the table, embraced her, and kissed her. Barbara's eyes were wet, and she said to herself,
What a sloppy, sentimental toast that was.
She wouldn't dare put it in her book, yet it had worked, and everyone was talking and eating, and Adam even explained to Judith that this was not their best vintage, that their best vintage had disappeared into the bellies of the wedding guests.

F
REDDIE HAD A TWENTY-FIVE FOOT CATBOAT
that he'd named
Thrush
, and that he anchored at a marina in Sausalito in Marin County. It was a wooden boat with a tiny cabin forward, an outboard motor of ninety horsepower, and no wheel but an old-fashioned tiller—a very simple boat, built by his grandfather, Dan Lavette, more than forty years ago. All this he explained to Judith while driving out to Sausalito. The boat had been kept in perfect condition, hardly ever used by Dan Lavette, and had come to him as a birthday present from his grandmother, Jean. Now, on the Saturday a week after the wedding, he'd asked Judith to go sailing with him.

“This is the worst time for me to try to get away from the winery,” he said, “now when the crop is being harvested. Everything goes frantic, but Adam insists on Saturday as a day of rest, thank God. The
Thrush
is no yacht. They used to call them mosquito boats, and I guess they were the first small pleasure boats to be used on the Bay. But any idiot can sail a catboat. They're beautiful, responsive little craft.”

“Not this idiot, Freddie. I've never been sailing. The men I've dated have had no boats—not a black thing.”

“Can you swim?”

“Can a fish swim?” Her laugh was like a soft, musical ripple. “I was captain of the swimming team in high school and again in college. I won first place in the West Coast Women's Trials. They wanted me for the Olympics, but I couldn't face a year of spending four hours a day in a swimming pool. My breasts are already small enough, and they were beginning to disappear under a pair of oversized pectorals. Forgive me for boasting, but you touched a nerve. Truth is, it's my height that gives me the advantage.”

He glanced at her. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans, her feet in sneakers, and Freddie felt, as he often had, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“—which is why I've always kept my woolly hair cropped close. Good for swimming, and the photographers love it. But swimming—oh, Lord, Freddie, how could you live without it? I'm in the pool every day, right behind my house, twenty minutes. It's the only exercise I take—I hate exercise. I read a book by a Welsh woman—I forget her name—who claimed, and with a lot of good proof, that the evolution that created man took place on the seashore, that women were constructed so that they could nurse their babies in the surf out of harm's way, and that the only place where there was enough protein for the taking was on the seashore. You know, the only animals that have a brain the size of man's are the amphibious mammals, the sea otter, the orca, the whale, and the dolphin. I wrote a long piece for
Natural History
about it, and they pooh-poohed it, the way they discard any new idea offered by a woman. But swimming—yes, I can swim.”

Freddie, listening with a bit of awe, admitted that he had never thought of that. Each time he was with her, he discovered a new side of her. “Who wrote that book?” he asked her.

“I'll find it in the library, and I'll get it for you,” she promised.

The marina man took them out to the boat. Freddie unhooked it from the buoy and began to haul up the sail. “Take the tiller until I get the sail. Just straight on, just hold it straight and steady. The wind's from the west, so I'll rope her on a slight tack until we face Alcatraz, and then we'll head for the Golden Gate.” He crawled into the tiny cabin while Judith, thrilled with an utterly new sensation, held the tiller. Freddie checked his radio and then came back with two life jackets, one of which he tossed to Judith.

“Put it on,” he said.

“No way. It's too hot.”

“It'll cool off. Put it on or we go back. I'm the captain, remember? Law of the sea. It gives me the power of life and death.”

“Bullshit,” she said succinctly.

Freddie slipped on the sleeveless life vest, and tied it. “Seriously,” he told her, “you must wear it.” He dropped on the seat next to her. “The Bay is treacherous. I've seen boats flipped in a sudden squall. I'll hold the tiller, and if you're hot, you can take off the sweatshirt and wear the life vest.”

“All right, Freddie… I never want to have a real fight with you. I was stopped one night by a mugger with a knife—yes, a black man. We don't discriminate. I grabbed his wrist and flipped him over and broke his arm.” She smiled soothingly and leaned over and kissed him. Then she peeled off the sweatshirt and put on the life vest. “Let me hold the tiller, please. I love it. And tell me what tacking is. I hear about it all the time.”

“All right. We're tacking now. The wind is coming from the west. We're sailing southwest, obliquely to the wind. That's why I have the boom, the wooden pole that holds the bottom of the sail, roped and almost over our heads. It creates a suction and the boat moves off the direction of the wind. Now we're in the Bay, and there's Alcatraz, and to reach the Golden Gate, we're going on what we call a broad reach. In other words, we're sailing against the wind.”

“It sounds impossible.”

“If it were, Judy, we'd be in an awful fix. But look at the other boats, how they're zigzagging. We'll do the same thing. Now, here's the tiller.” He loosened the sheet and told her to keep her head down. With one hand on the tiller, moving it slightly, he pulled in the boom. “Now we're reaching. Watch the island, and you'll see that we're moving against the wind.”

“We are, we are! I love it!” she cried, throwing her arms around Freddie.

“Watch it!” he cried. “The tiller's alive when you're on this tack.”

“Let me steer, Freddie, by myself.”

“All right, but keep her into the wind. Watch the sail. Don't let her get away from you.”

“We can't turn over?” she asked, alarmed for a moment.

“No, don't worry. Just keep her into the wind.”

The Bay was alive with boats, some of them running before the brisk west wind, others on the same tack as the
Thrush.
Freddie, hanging on to a rope, leaned back for balance, watching Judith, impressed with the facility with which she managed the tiller. Then he sat down beside her. “Let me take the tiller. We're coming about. Keep your head down.” The sail flapped idly for a moment and then filled out as they took the other tack.

Judith appeared to be ecstatic. “Freddie, I want a boat—I want to sail for the rest of my life.”

“You have a boat. You're sitting in it.” Her excitement communicated itself to him. He pointed to a large oiler making its way ponderously through the Bay. “That piece of junk is going to make us wallow. Just be easy. You're not getting squeamish?”

“Me, squeamish? Freddie, I was born for this.” And then she suddenly said, “Freddie, I love you. What right have you to that fuckin' golden hair? You're so goddamn handsome, and you know it—why aren't you black or brown or something?”

“We'll make it with the kids. They'll come out brown or something.”

“I'll never marry you and I'll never have kids! Am I crazy enough to bring kids into this lousy white world?”

“It's a damn nice world right at this moment.”

She burst into laughter as the boat pitched and tilted in the wake of the oiler. “Right on!” she shouted.

“Keep it this way,” Freddie said.

She threw her head back and in her deep, throaty voice, sang:

I sing because I'm happy,

I sing because I am free.

The Lord has his eye on every sparrow,

So he must have his eye on me!

On the next tack, a sightseeing boat passed them, its rail lined with tourists whose eyes were fixed on the black woman and white man in the little catboat. As they pitched in the wake of the sightseeing boat, Judith stuck out her tongue at the tourists.

In sudden exuberance, she pulled at the laces of her life jacket, dropped it off, and sat half naked, letting the spray wash her body. The tourist boat had passed by. She spread her arms.

“Put the damn jacket on!” Freddie yelled. “Have you gone nuts?” Yet he could not help admiring the beauty of her body, the breasts so firm and taut, her torso like a bronze sculpture.

“Put it on!” he yelled again.

“Freddie, have you ever made out in a catboat?”

“We're close-hauled. If I let go of the rudder, we'll go over. Please, Judy, put the damn jacket on.”

There was a note in his voice that had not been there before. Like a small girl caught in some egregious act, she put on the vest, tied it, and said, “You're sulking, Freddie. You're really angry at me.”

“Absolutely. You can swim to shore. I can't.”

“Freddie, beloved, I'd never let you drown. I love you.”

“Not that I can't swim,” he said.' “Only, no one ever asked me to join an Olympic team… I'm not really angry.”

At the Golden Gate he swung the boat around and they ran before the wind, Judith cuddled against him. “This is glorious, Freddie. Can we do it again?”

“And again and again.”

“And I'll never take off the vest. I promise.” She opened a picnic basket, and they munched sandwiches and drank beer while Freddie cradled the tiller under his arm.

“Tell me about your aunt Barbara. She fascinates me.”

“Yes, she's something.”

“How old is she?”

“She'll be seventy in November.”

“I don't believe it. She moves like a young woman.” Judith was looking at the City now, the streets climbing the hills like lines drawn on an enormous map, the white buildings piled one on another. “The most beautiful city in the world. It's a miracle. She's like the City, she's something else entirely.”