Outerbridge Reach (23 page)

Anne was waiting on the dock when they arrived at the yard, together with Duffy and Hersey. As they tied up, Duffy and Anne applauded.

On the drive home, she asked him how it had gone and he had said, “Pretty good. She's very fast. Handles well.”

The same night they had planned dinner in New York with Harry Thorne, Strickland and Duffy.

“I can easily cancel,” she said. “We'll go later in the week.”

“Good idea,” he said.

He was afraid of what he might tell her. He thought he might say something negative, something to make her afraid.

Browne put his coffee cup in the galley sink and went out on deck, nursing his taped wrist. Over the city, the sky was clear, the wind brisk and westerly. The yard was still with Sunday silence. After a while he went ashore and started walking along the waterfront, hands thrust into the pockets of his windbreaker. He kept thinking about rolling overboard. “What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What ugly sights of death . . .” He knew that one.

At the end of the yard property was a metal gate topped with razor wire. He let himself out and followed the shore along a private street of neat wooden houses. There were Neighborhood Watch signs on the telephone poles. A garage door displayed the colors of the Italian flag. Where the street ended, he eased himself around the sunburst spikes of an iron barricade and onto the cement sea wall that continued beyond it. Beside the water, a slope of littered, balding parkland rose to the squat brown rectangles of a city housing project at the top of the hill.

He met no one on his walk. Farther along, ringed with dying maples, was a deserted playground. A huge herring gull sat atop a children's slide that was slashed with black curling graffiti. There were chipped crack vials and broken glass underneath the ruined benches. Beyond the project was a cemetery, and beyond that the Veterans' Hospital and then, across a cove, the Bethlehem Steel shipyard. In that yard, Browne had reported aboard the only ship of his naval career, an attack transport called the
Mount McMurdo.
He had gone to her straight from the Academy and before leaving for Nam, a temporary billet. His first watch as officer of the deck was on her quarterdeck, returning the drunken salutes of men staggering back from the gin mills of New York.

Browne found himself among the gravestones of the cemetery. There were rusted VFW markers and beside some of the graves small flags were stiffening on the westerly breeze. On his walks he had passed through the same cemetery many times before. Most of its fellowship had died of influenza while being mustered out of the First World War.

He leaned against the cemetery wall. Are you languid, are you weary? An old hymn. He knew the nature of his lassitude. It was fear.

Fear, he thought, was something he had come to terms with. He believed himself as capable as any man on earth of putting the spongy stuff aside and getting on with the day's business, no matter how bad the day's business might be. Still, the thing had such variety. It could change temperature and color, taste and odor, hit you high or low. Sensations of an indeterminate nature so often resolved themselves into fear.

Fear of death, he thought, no. Nor of pain, nor of other people's anger. Hardly. Neither snakes nor the cries of your well-motivated oriental infantry, startling and demoralizing though they had been one dark night, had paralyzed his hand. Still, such variety.

He was no great shakes of a sailor but of course that was not necessary. Inexperienced adolescents had single-handed around the world and the winners always looked good after the fact. It was a question of what was inside. He had begged all his life for such a chance and all his life done what had to be done and never once regretted risk or contest. Quite the opposite, he had always regretted the lost chances, played safe and been sorry. It seemed to him he was dying of the last of his youth and strength as day after gray day they went untested and his blood thickened. Now the action had come for him and he was afraid. Such variety, he thought, had fear.

On the harbor, a lighter shot past, its decks piled with coils of wire. Across the lighter's wake stood the Lady and the exotica of Ellis Island. Suddenly he thought of his conversation with Strickland, his interview given dead into the camera. Utter crap, absolute drivel! He cringed recalling it. Strickland must think him a complete fool.

On the way back, he walked through the streets of the project. People at the yard were warned against it but there were only a few drunks and middle-aged black women walking back from church and children, little girls in taffeta, big-eyed little boys in bow ties.

It was as though, he thought, some rat lived around your heart. But not a rat—a child, a brother. Your late brother, the infant reprobate, beaten senseless by the rod, by the drill sergeants and the good nuns of life. Smacked proper but always back for more, always appearing in the clutch, the stretch, the shadow of the goal, to ask who you think you are. So insistent, so persuasive, and above all innocent, a choirboy who didn't do it, snitching on you to yourself. Terrified and enraged by the threat of accomplishment. All childish urges, excuses and despairs. No rat, no other, but snotty, weepy, fearful self, the master of most men. The contemporary God.

Had he not, babbling to that film maker, said something about all the big battles being with yourself? Something of that sort had got said. It was true enough of him. That was at the heart of his fear. In his nightmares he was powerless and craven. The sensations were so familiar that even though he had behaved well enough up against the real thing, his weakness and cowardice in dreams were more real to him than the courage he had actually mustered. When you were good and scared it could never be undone.

His fear was not of being overcome but of
failing
from the inside out. Discovering the child-weakling as his true nature and having to spend the rest of his life with it.

It all made him think of his father. Good-naturedly. Yes, he thought, I remember him fondly now. In spite of everything he was a friend to me.

S
TRICKLAND
opened the street door of his building to find Harry Thorne waiting for him, offering an umbrella against the rain. Thorne had a complacent expression. He seemed eager. All spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch, Strickland thought.

“Mr. Strickland, my good friend,” Thorne inquired, “how are you?”

Strickland was taken with Thorne's good-humored, patronizing manner. He stammered a half-reply and let Thorne conduct him to the limousine, a Lincoln Continental. When they got to the car, a chauffeur in dark glasses hastened out from behind the wheel, anxious to display his readiness to stand uncovered in the rain.

“Relax,” Thorne told the man, and opened a rear door for Strickland. Strickland murmured his faltering gratitude and settled down in the back seat for a look at Harry Thorne. Thorne caused Strickland more difficulty in his speech than was usual. He was so avid.

“How's it going?” Thorne asked. He oversaw Strickland's attempt to reply. Some people endeavored not to stare at Strickland when he stammered. Not Harry.

“Fine,” Strickland managed at length. “How's business?”

The counterquestion provoked a tight bitter smile.

“Never better,” Thorne said, and kept his eyes on Strickland. “What's the matter, don't you believe me?”

“Sure,” Strickland said. “I was wondering if you could give me some time in the next week or so. Before Owen sails.”

The limo prowled the streets of the theater district. Thorne removed his attention from Strickland and eyed the dinner crowds.

“Pose for you, you mean?”

“Well,” Strickland began, “n . . not pose, necessarily, but—” Thorne interrupted him. “I don't want to be in your movie, Ron. Sorry, but I don't think it's appropriate.”

“You have to be,” Strickland said. “I'll have to convince you.” Thorne returned his attention to Strickland's person. “Why's that?”

“Because your presence is necessary,” Strickland said. “Without it the story can't be told.”

“What story?”

“You'll see.”

“I will?” Thorne asked lightly.

Strickland swore an inward oath. He would make Harry Thorne sit in the dark and watch himself.

“Well,” Thorne said, “maybe I can give you five or ten minutes on a weekend.”

“Five or ten minutes won't do,” Strickland told him. “Two afternoons might.”

Thorne nodded. “We'll see.” Strickland understood that his forthrightness had claimed Harry's attention. “When do I get to see some of it?”    .

“It's too soon. When he's under way I'll edit what I have.”

“Good,” Thorne said. “I look forward with interest.”

Outside the restaurant, the chauffeur escorted them through the rain. The place was a steak house with red banquettes, racing pictures and sawdust on the floor. Its downstairs dining room adjoined a bar at which a great many boisterous and competitive New Yorkers were gathered three deep. Strickland saw Browne and his wife at a table that was only a few feet from the crowded bar. The din was considerable.

“Welcome home,” Harry said to Browne, and shook his hand. He kissed Anne attentively. Then he gestured abruptly to the waiter. In hardly any time a maître d'hotel arrived. Thorne drew him aside. Strickland hovered close to hear.

“Why are my friends at this table?” Thorne asked. The man inclined his head, taking his medicine.

“You know what they say about these tables?” Thorne asked Strickland when he saw him eavesdropping. He gestured toward the banquettes over which the racing watercolors were hung. “They get the horses.” With an identical gesture he indicated a horizontal intersecting the bodies of the customers at the bar. “And they get the asses. That
is
what you say, isn't it, Paul?”

“I'm very sorry, Mr. Thorne,” Paul, the maître d', said. The Brownes seemed unaware of the exchange. Paul led them to a different room in which the lights were softer and the conversation more subdued. Harry walked between Owen and Anne, arms linked.

The house sent over a bottle of wine and Thorne offered it for Anne's inspection.

“But that's wonderful,” she cried. “Obviously,” she said archly to Thorne, “you've been here before.”

Over the appetizer, Strickland watched her flirt with Harry. Her presence made him feel irritable and frustrated; he had to consciously resist looking at her all the time. It was not usual for him to be reticent with women. Generally, he was happy to let them notice his attention and figure things out for themselves. Browne himself was very quiet, Strickland observed. He was sunburned and apparently very tired, which was likely enough after a few days on the ocean. Watching him, Strickland tried to measure the bias between the man himself and the image he left on the screen.

On the screen, Strickland thought, Browne looked pretty good, a tame tiger. His features were strong but so regular that the effect was of overhandsomeness. That, together with his mild eyes, gave him a soft appearance, at least on first glance. His good looks caught one's attention but their blandness did not inspire the proper measure of respect.

In person, he did not seem so easygoing. His moves were full of anger, something the camera could not convey in the absence of perspective. At rest, his face could look quite haunted and unsound. There was something violent about Browne, Strickland decided. It was a quality he was good at spotting.

The wine was so good that Strickland, lost in his own observations, found himself smiling on Browne like a doting patron on a protégé. All at once he understood why Browne, in spite of his clean-cut aspect and beautiful wife, had been given a bad table in an establishment like the one in which they sat. His physiognomy was unlike that of a winner, Manhattan-style. In one quick look he could be seen as naive and anxious to please and remotely dangerous.

“Younger people should understand,” Harry was telling Anne, “that private commerce does not have to mean selfishness. Because you can't live and work in the name of self alone, not any more than you can live and work in the name of nothing. Do you know the phrase ‘the moral equivalent of war'? Politicians use it but they don't know what it means.”

Duffy arrived at their table from the bar, where he had apparently been rallying some of his fellow publicists. Owen seemed at the point of going to sleep.

“You know,” Duffy announced, largely, it seemed, for Thorne's benefit, “when I first saw Owen I said right away: Lindbergh! I said it right away.”

Thorne broke off his conversation with Anne by putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Duffy, does anyone but you under the age of seventy care about Charles Lindbergh? Or even know who the dickens he was?”

Having said it, Thorne looked at Anne to see if she was amused. They ordered another bottle of the same wine.

If Thorne seduced her, Strickland thought, he would have to find a way to get it in the film. The notion displeased him. He decided he thought it unlikely.

“What I mean is the personal quality,” Duffy said. “The way one man can exemplify the best of America.”

At that point Browne—to his credit, Strickland thought—rebelled and roused himself.

“Give me a break, Duffy.”

When he saw that everyone was waiting for him to go on, Browne began to tell them about the shakedown. Together with Fanelli and Crawford he had sailed
Nona
to a point east of Block Island and back, a three-day voyage. At one point, Browne told them, he had fallen overboard.

“Where was that, Owen?” Anne asked him.

“Off Bridgeport, I think.”

“Where else?” Harry asked, and everyone laughed.

As Browne told them the story of his shakedown cruise, Strickland found himself watching Anne again. She had put away quite a lot of wine. Though she continued to play the coquette with Harry Thorne, it seemed to Strickland that she avoided
his
eye. Perhaps, he thought, an interesting sign. The sight of her responding to Thorne's charm made him impatient.