By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (16 page)

Harold Vanderbilt met the boy, offering his
hand and introducing himself.

"And you are?" he asked politely as he led
the way aft.

"Neil Powers, sir," the boy answered,
padding barefoot over the smooth silver surface of teak. He was
wearing knockaround clothes, and instinctively he knew his mother
would be mortified later.

"Neil? I have a cousin named Neil. Actually,
his Christian name is Cornelius. Is that yours as well?"

"No, sir. Just ... Neil." It made him feel
like a pagan.

"Your father is below, tearing down a
halyard winch that needs repair. He'll be up in a moment. He's a
fine mechanic, and an expert seaman—but I expect you know all that
already."

"Oh, yes," Neil answered breezily, "Dad
keeps everything on the
Virginia
shipshape." And he did.
Then why did the
Virginia
suddenly seem, compared to this
sleek racing steed, more like an old plow horse? For the first time
in his young life Neil Powers felt, if not exactly ashamed, then at
least self-conscious about his seagoing home. The
Virginia
was a two-masted coasting schooner stoutly built in Maine to carry
cargo, and in her time she had ranked with the best. But it was the
age of steam, and people only sailed for amusement nowadays, not
for profit; that's what his mother said. It was true that his
parents weren't rich, but then again, Mr. Vanderbilt didn't look
all that amused. It was very confusing.

The photographer and two other men came aft
to where Neil and the commodore stood beside the varnished, spoked
wheel. One of the men, addressing Mr. Vanderbilt, said, "That's the
lot, except for the preventer winch, which hasn't been bolted down
yet. How about a shot of you at the helm?"

Neil, praying quietly for a large bird to
swoop down and carry him away in its claws, tried his best to look
invisible as he waited for his father to appear.

But Vanderbilt was having none of it.
"Here," he said, taking the boy gently by the shoulders and
propelling him to a position alongside the wheel, "let's have a
shot of a future skipper."

Neil was not so blinded by embarrassed joy
that he missed the look that passed between the photographer and
the man who was coordinating things for Mr. Vanderbilt.
Wrong
wrong wrong,
their look said. Barefoot urchins do not pose at
the helms of rich men's J-boats.

By this time Neil was absurdly dazzled,
confused, and impressed with himself. One hand in his pocket, he
was shyly assuming what he hoped was a yachtsman's air when his
father appeared from belowdecks, wiping his oily fingers into a
rag.

"What's this, Neil?" Sam spoke directly and
quietly to his son, then nodded an acknowledgment of the other men.
To Vanderbilt he said quietly, "You'll excuse us, sir." And with a
look, he led Neil toward the ramp.

With an awkward goodbye to the Commodore,
Neil fell in behind his father, who did not pause until they were
at the ramp leading down to the boy's dory.

His father's first words were, "Is something
amiss, then?"

"No, Dad," Neil said, without raising his
eyes from the deck, "not exactly." When he looked up, he saw relief
in his father's sea-washed eyes.

"Straight out, then. I don't have time for
games."

Neil took a deep breath and plunged. "Mother
says there's a job for the
Virginia.
A load of cargo from
Connecticut to the Bahamas. And she says she's going to take it."
He exhaled. Actually, Mother had also said she was going to have to
use extreme diplomacy in telling Dad, and so not a word.

Well, he had to say something to his dad,
hadn't he?

"Your mother told you to bring me this
news?" Obviously Sam gave his wife Laura more credit than that.

"Not exactly. She isn't sure. I don't know.
I might've got it wrong. Can I go now, Dad?" he pleaded.

"You tell your mother to keep dinner warm
tonight," Sam Powers said grimly, and he turned back to the
Rainbow.

Normally the expression on his father's face
would have made the row back to the
Virginia
a long and
cheerless one. But the thought of being the cause of an argument
between his parents paled before the astounding five minutes Neil
had spent aboard the
Rainbow.
So he relived instead his
awesome moments on the great J-boat, taking out all the unpleasant
parts (like his bare feet) and leaving in all the good parts: how
kind Mr. Vanderbilt was, and how perfect the yacht was, and how
he'd love to be a crew member dressed in white ducks aboard the
Rainbow.
Or, no: what he'd
really
like is to be Mr.
Vanderbilt, and then he could have it all, the boat, the crew; and
he would steer. And win the America's Cup for America. When he grew
up.

After Neil had rowed back to the
Virginia
and scrambled aboard for lunch, he only said,
"Mother, why was the
Rainbow
named the
Rainbow
? It
isn't painted like one."

His mother had broken away from her work to
serve him lunch: baked beans thick with molasses, and corn bread.
He watched her climb back into the pilot berth and bend herself
into a shape suitable for painting the underside of the decks. Her
thick brown hair was hidden under a large workman's kerchief, and
she was wearing a pair of his dad's worn-out flannel pants with the
cuffs rolled twice and a length of manila rope belting the
thirty-six waist down to a twenty-three.

"I think," his mother answered thoughtfully
as she laid on a stroke of pale gray above her, "that the
Rainbow
is meant as a symbol of hope after the terrible
Depression we've been through."

"Hope for who, Mother?"

"Whom. Now
that
, Mr. Vanderbilt
doesn't say," she answered quietly.

Neil bit into a corn muffin, his favorite,
all hot and buttery, and asked, "Why don't we polish our brass
cleats and chocks and things?"

She paused mid-stroke and looked at him.
"Because polished brass on deck is a hopeless waste of time; it
would be green again the next day. And besides," she reminded him,
"you haven't polished the brass
below
decks this week, young
man. No more dory until you do."

Fifty years later, Neil still had the
photograph of him at the helm of the
Rainbow
. Not the framed
one—that had been lost in the wreck along with everything else—but
a small wallet-sized version that had belonged to his father.
Creased and frail, it rode with him always in his hip pocket, a
kind of temporary boarding pass to a world not available to him by
birth. In it, mercifully, his bare feet didn't show, but his ears,
next to the elegant Commodore Vanderbilt's, looked awfully large,
which had caused him intense pain, especially in his teens, until
his grandmother in Bangor pointed out that Clark Gable had jug ears
also.

Neil smiled bleakly at the memory and
shifted his weight in the wheelchair; jug ears were the least of
his problems now.

Laughter and applause brought him back to
the present. The long bolt that had held down the Cup in its
display case at the New York Yacht Club was being presented to Alan
Bond, the owner of
Australia II,
who had spent eight million
dollars for the privilege of having it. Neil was still disoriented,
somewhat confused. He had no idea why the New York Yacht Club was
now presenting a flattened hubcap to the Australians, or why anyone
would possibly find it funny. Nor did he notice his daughter
gingerly lay her hand on the arm of one of the onlookers who was
making his viewing of the ceremony so difficult. All he knew was
that some of the men in front of him melted away and before him
stood the Cup, sending off laser beams of sunlight in every
direction.

If it had been a cloudy day, maybe, or an
indoor ceremony, or if the Cup hadn't been buffed to blinding
perfection, it might not have had such seductive, spell-binding
power. But the power was there; Neil could feel it humming through
his body, skimming along his nerve endings, making his breath come
short, his eyes sting. He clenched his teeth, pressing the palms of
his hands to the arms of his wheelchair. So great, so deep was the
spell that he was actually on the verge of trying to stand up.

And then the Cup was handed over by the
Americans to Alan Bond, who held it with both hands high above his
head in a gesture of shocking triumph. A roar went up, wild,
elemental, the victory cry of one brash continent over another.

The sound rang in Neil's ears, and he bowed
his head. It was the end of a dream. When he lifted his head again
he saw his daughter, tears streaming down her face, watching
him.

"Oh Dad, I'm so sorry," she sobbed. "It
isn't fair, none of this is fair." Wretched, she covered her eyes
with her hands and sobbed. Quinta, who never cried. Nothing he said
could soothe her, and the dispersing crowd was beginning to stare
in wonder and disapproval at this golden-haired creature who had so
little control over herself.

In desperation Neil said, "Quinta, for God's
sake, stop crying. You're embarrassing me."

Immediately her chin came up. With her lips
set, she took one last, long sniffle. Breath suspended, mouth
quivering, Quinta stared blankly for a moment, looking at nothing,
at life's unfairness perhaps. And then she let out the breath and
was quiet.

Relieved, her father said, "That's better.
Now. Do you think you can get me home all in one piece? Or do I
have to wheel myself down Bellevue Avenue?" He had not meant to be
scathing, but weeping invariably frightened and angered him. Nancy,
too, had hardly ever cried.

And Quinta knew that, had known it since she
was a little girl. How she had let herself collapse this way ....
"Of course I can drive," she answered with something like bravado.
"What do you take me for? A girl?" And she took hold of his
wheelchair, to help guide it over the rough spots.

Summer 1986

Technically, she was a burglar: Cindy Seton,
pencil-thin and chic as ever, stuck a key in the door of Mergate,
the Georgian manor in Westport, Connecticut that had been in her
husband's family for four generations, and pushed it open. Nothing
had changed. The strange bronze sculpture that her husband called
The Thing was still in the hall, and so was the threadbare Persian
runner that he'd dragged down from a family lodge in the Adirondack
Mountains. She thought she even smelled lingering, three-year-old
traces of her perfume, A Jamais. Nothing had changed, not even the
breaker for the alarm system. Cindy might have been out shopping
for the afternoon, instead of having been living with her lover in
a rundown villa near Lisbon for three years.

And yet everything had changed. After her
arrival from Portugal, Cindy had driven straight from Logan Airport
to the Newport Library. At the end of an afternoon of poring over
three years of newspapers, she'd been forced to accept the
unthinkable: she was legally dead; the man she thought she'd killed
was still alive; and her widower-husband was involved—still or
again—in an America's Cup campaign.

Cindy wandered randomly through the house,
renewing old hostilities. There had been a time, when she was newly
wed, that she'd wanted to do Mergate over. But no. Alan wouldn't
hear of it. He preferred to keep it a shrine to his dearly beloved
ancestors. She fingered a little silver-framed photograph of his
grandmother, Amanda Seton, that stood on the mantel of the drawing
room fireplace. On an impulse she lifted it up and dropped it to
the floor.
To hell with him,
she thought. Where were any
pictures of
her?

She drifted from room to room after that,
taking whatever little
bibelots
caught her eye, tossing them
into her bag like canned vegetables into a shopping cart: a
scrimshaw letter opener, a brass rope-twist candlestick, a crystal
bird by Lalique. When she finished with the ground floor she moved
up to the second, to the bedrooms and study. They were the reason
she had come.

It was obvious that Alan had slept in his
room last night, which surprised her. She assumed he was in
Newport, putting the finishing touches on his latest 12-meter yacht
before shipping it off to Australia for the latest races. But his
bed was unmade—and there was a scent of something other than A
Jamais in the air. The thought that some other woman had been there
with Alan electrified Cindy, reminded her of the times she had
caught other scents on her own pillow in Delgado's Lisbon
villa.

So. A woman. Permanent? She peeked into her
husband's closet but found only men's clothes; disappointed, she
lifted his America's Cup tie from its rack and added it to her
booty. Then she noticed that Alan's pajama tops were heaped on one
side of the bed, his bottoms on the other. To Cindy that meant
Alan's lady friend had not brought her own nightwear; it had been a
spur-of-the-moment lay. Cindy took the pajama tops from the bed and
dropped them into the toilet of the master bath.

Oddly satisfied, she turned her attention to
the study, converted from a dressing room which once connected
Alan's room to her old one. The study was no tidy gentleman's
retreat but a real workroom, littered with correspondence, file
folders, half-models of the hated
Shadow
from Alan's 1983
Cup campaign, plans, sketches—all the paraphernalia of an America's
Cup defense. This was where Alan used to squander his time and his
money; this was where he squandered them still. Only now he was
throwing away
her
money, she supposed; he was her heir,
after all.

The thought infuriated her. She swept one
arm across the top of his cherrywood desk, sending everything
tumbling to the floor. She hated Alan Seton and his quixotic
pursuit of the America's Cup. She hated this room and everything in
it. How could she hurt him? She stabbed the heel of her shoe
through half a dozen papers, crumpled others, wreaked havoc. When
she was finished, she passed on to her old room.