Outerbridge Reach (38 page)

In spite of the danger, he went below to get the camcorder. So equipped, he brought
Nona
around and made another pass at the berg, watching the water ahead of his bow. But even as he filmed he knew that he had failed to record the ice's mystical, Shackletonian quality. How to photograph a psychological principle? He had to be content with a banal observation.

“This is your flat-topped Antarctic berg. It's the first one we've seen and we hope it's the last.”

He could think of nothing more to say. Well, he thought, I'll see the film and I'll remember.

He stayed awake at the helm during the short night. When the sun rose again the sea was clear. There was nothing he could do but set the self-steering again and hope that the radar might give him some warning. The same morning he checked his satellite position against a sun sight and located himself at fifty-six degrees forty minutes south, nine degrees fifty minutes west. He kept his northeasterly heading, waiting for the winds.

He had stopped reading. In Vietnam, at the worst of times, he had been able to read himself clear out of the war, into history or else out of it, depending on the point of view. Now, with plenty of time, he somehow lacked the patience. And about music he had found that it was necessary to be careful. Certain music produced a confusion that was hard to resolve. The best entertainment, Browne discovered, was his own thoughts. And then, as a kind of puzzle, there was the radio.

The day after he had seen the iceberg, Browne managed to locate the missionary station again. The reader, who sounded like an English-speaking African, announced that a dramatization from Genesis would be broadcast at twenty hundred Greenwich mean time. Browne decided to celebrate. In order to keep his thoughts clear, he had been fasting, living mainly on unheated, undiluted consommé. To accompany the broadcast, he undertook to prepare a homely feast: frankfurters southern-style from his
Fannie Farmer Cookbook,
with canned tomatoes, chopped onion, thyme and oregano.

Browne's feast proved a disappointment. He had spent the afternoon trying to clear his generator's fuel injectors; when he turned to in the galley, his hands were still fouled with diesel fuel. It was extraordinary the way the stuff managed to contaminate the ingredients of his proposed meal. Finally he gave up on it and opened a can of corned beef instead. He ate the corned beef with saltines and settled down to listen to the night's drama.

The missionaries' radio play was about Isaac and his family. Jacob was played by a young Canadian. Isaac sounded like an elderly southern white man. Esau was played, somewhat humorously, by an African. Rebekah was played by a young woman with a sweet clear northwestern voice, which reminded Browne of a woman from Oregon he had once known. It was apparent that there was some doubling up. Isaac was also Laban. Rebekah was both Rachel and Leah.

A narrator, who might have been the English lady Browne had been listening to before, reminded the audience of how Isaac had been spared sacrifice and of his adventures among the Philistines in the land of Gerar. She pointed out that even in today's world, travelers must be careful to protect their loved ones.

“How many of our listeners,” she asked, “have been sojourners, have been among those of some other nation? How many have feared for their safety? Do we know,” she inquired, “how we shall behave when our loved ones are threatened?”

Browne wrapped the remaining corned beef in foil, turned on his Kempar heater and wrapped himself in a dry Navy blanket on his bunk as the dramatization began.

“Oh, that red pottage,” said Esau, “that red pottage smells so good to me. I am faint with hunger.”

“Would you like some?” Jacob asked. He sounded honest enough, a wholesome North American. “Then sell me your birthright.”

Esau seemed to consider the offer in a stage whisper.

“I am afraid I going to die. What good is some old birthright to me?”

Browne thought he heard voices rising all over Africa. No! Esau!

“Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils,” recited the English lady, “and he did eat and drink and rose up and went his way.” She paused. “Thus,” she proclaimed severely, “Esau despised his birthright.”

The scene shifted to the tent of old Isaac. Rebekah spoke to her son in the voice of that daughter of the pioneers whom Browne had known in Bremerton so long ago. She instructed Jacob to kill the goats and she would cook them up the way the old man liked it. Then young Jacob would bring the meal to him and Isaac would bless him before he died.

The girl of whom Rebekah reminded Browne had been the daughter of the captain of the USS
Pollux
out of Bremerton. It was she who had asked Browne to sail with her around the Queen Charlotte Islands. Out of fidelity to Anne, he had not gone. Then he had lied about sailing the same waters.

“But,
Mother
,” said Jacob in a slightly epicene tone, “brother Esau is hairy! My skin is smooth. Father might feel my arm. Then he'd say I was a deceiver. He'd give me a curse instead of a blessing.”

Rebekah's reply was sweet as country water. She sounded more resigned than conniving, like someone doing what she had to do.

“Upon me be the curse, my son. Only obey my voice.”

So of course Jacob did. Any boy would.

There was one line that caught Browne's particular attention because he had often heard his father use it: “The smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed.”

Later, when Esau found he had been displaced from his father's blessing as well as his birthright, his anguish was unsettling. The actor's voice trembled terribly. Who knew, Browne thought, over there in Africa, what his life was like, what things he'd seen?

“Have you only one blessing, Father? Please bless me, Dad. Bless
me
also.” But he was out of luck.

“And Esau lifted up his voice,” declared the stern English lady, “and wept.”

Browne listened to all of it, huddled in the blanket. He was unaware of the tears that coursed down his cheeks. Isaac let poor Esau know that he was basically on his own. Then Jacob went to work for Laban and Laban deceived him, substituted Leah for Rachel, extorted his labor. Then he returned and simple-hearted Esau welcomed him and miracles ensued.

When the dramatization was over, the lady returned.

“When Esau came in from the field,” she asked the public, “was he really starving to death? I hardly think so. Wasn't he only being greedy after a day in the field? Listeners will remember how he despised his birthright. Wasn't he a thoughtless young man?”

The English lady allowed that many listeners would feel sorry for Esau because of the way things turned out for him. She admitted it was only natural to do so.

“But what are we to think of Jacob's behavior?” she asked. She paused again for general reflection. “Didn't he act wrongly? What do listeners think?”

Jacob's behavior was absolutely unjustified, the lady maintained. It was wrong of him to impersonate Esau. She made no comment regarding Rebekah.

“What are we to think of this story?” the lady asked. “What message does it hold for us?”

“Good question,” Browne said from his rack.

“Its message,” the lady replied, “is that of God's almighty will. Never forget that God is strong. What is God's is likewise strong. The will of God binds the world and everyone in it. There is no setting it aside. There is no pleading against it.”

Browne stirred in the bunk, his teeth set in rage.

“When we say that our God is a fortress,” the lady declared, “we proclaim His strength. Would a weak God be worshipful? Would a weak God be worthy of love?”

In spite of the tender emotions he was experiencing—the selfpity, the loneliness, the disappointment—Browne found himself compelled to admit that a weak God would not be worthy of love. As for the English lady, she had no doubts whatsoever.

“Certainly not!” she declared vigorously. “The weakness of a little child is moving,” the lady said. “We have all seen sick, unhappy children. There are millions of them today. We pity them. We help them. This does not mean that we are worshipers of weakness. Almighty God is our all-eternal father, the Lord of Hosts and stronger than the strong. Almighty God makes provision for the weak in His mercy,” the lady went on, “as provision was made for Esau. But his weakness and heedlessness were not blessed. They were forgiven but not forgotten. There was no covenant with Esau.

“Doesn't all of nature proclaim the great strength of God? Can we not see the strong plants forcing their way through the earth? Can we not see our strong cattle thriving and providing for us? Don't we rejoice in the strength of our young men? Whom would listeners prefer for a son? Esau? Or Jacob?”

Browne considered his daughter, the only child close to his heart. She was without guile. There were many things he wanted to explain to her.

“I think they should prefer Jacob,” the lady declared. “Just as Rebekah did. In preferring Jacob, Rebekah anticipated God's will. She was its instrument.”

Browne pondered the admission into which he had just heard the Christians trick themselves. They were talking to Africa, engaging primary process. You had to come a long way, he thought, to the margins of the world, to get the message straight. Of course, the woman was absolutely right.

“When God had made His covenant with Jacob, Jacob was raised up into Israel,” the lady concluded. “It is easy for God to raise man to His purposes when that is His almighty will.” During the white night, the glitter of distant ice beguiled his mind's eye and denied him sleep. Around one in the morning, he started up the engine to charge his batteries and found one of the starboard fuel tanks contaminated with algae. His other tanks, it turned out, were fine but the injectors were glutted now with an animal-vegetable-mineral jelly that took him hours to clear away. Eventually, he was able to hook up and charge.

Wiping the scum off his hands, Browne considered God's will, how hard it was. Toward morning, he climbed into his bunk. For a long time he lay awake. His mind was racing and it struck him suddenly that there might be some form of false thought, notions that had their origin outside the brain and even outside ordinary reality. He went to sleep trying to work it out.

Sleeping at last, he dreamed. In the dream, he was swimming with difficulty, his chin raised awkwardly for breath. In reality, Browne was a strong and skilled swimmer. There was turmoil in the water behind him and he was paddling away from it. There was a gray sky and an angry voice. Browne knew that his father was behind him, drunk and enraged. It was some kind of swimming lesson. He woke up breathless and terrified.

Something had happened in life to suggest the dream, Browne thought. Then he was aware of the noise. It was a rending, the kind of sound that could be made by tearing open a taped package but ten times magnified. It was not the ordinary noise of bulkheads creaking, although he heard that as well. In the galley, hanging pans rang together. He climbed out of his bunk.
Nona
was rolling in heavy seas. The wind had come with a vengeance.

Browne hurried up the companionway and opened the hatch to see the gray sky of his dreams looming above a scattered ocean.

L
ATE ONE
snowy afternoon, Anne took tea with Harry Thorne at his apartment on Seventy-first Street. The tones of the living room ranged from creamy white to tan. There were pale Chinese vases full of fresh flowers and a Raphael Soyer ballerina above the mantelpiece. Outside, whirling flakes softened the confining geometry of the East Side streets, obscuring the lines of shaded, lighted windows across Park Avenue.

“What kind of tea do you like?” Harry asked. “Irish tea?”

Anne, who would have preferred Irish whiskey, smiled bravely and tried to remember how long she had been on the wagon. There were cucumber sandwiches. An unsmiling West Indian woman in black and lace poured the tea.

The apartment had been decorated by Thorne's late wife. It was his pied-à-terre, he told Anne, for evenings at the opera and the theater. He had changed nothing.

“It's beautiful,” she said.

Harry seemed to be assessing the sincerity of her opinion. His eyes were bright. At first he had appeared cheerful but she shortly saw he was upset.

“The man I bought this place from,” Harry declared, “was well known. He believed in maxims.”

“Maxims?”

“This place was hung with maxims. Proverbs. Fables. Little tales of wisdom. Framed. Out of books. Out of Bartlett's. About the only book he owned.”

“I see.”

“Once I got a look at his corporation's prospectus. Each section began with a maxim. That was the mark of the guy.”

She laughed.

“Ask me if he went broke,” Harry said.

“Did he?”

Thorne did not really answer her. “Very soon,” he said, “we are going to see bad news in the papers. Bad news for us. Things are worse than we understood.”

Anne had become impatient with the fortunes of the Hylan Corporation. Sometime after Hylan's disappearance she had begun to think of that whole corporate world as one that might be all behind them. Her dreams now were of a life of sailing and writing.

She half listened as he talked about damage control and gutter politicians and the gutter press. He himself had done nothing wrong. He was indifferent, he told Anne, to the insinuations of snide reporters and the attitude of the fool in the street. It was her faith he valued. And Owen's. They must continue to believe in him.

In their other meetings he had always seemed so tough, cool and humorous. Now his eyes were lustrous, like those of a man who carried some humiliating wound. His passion intrigued her although she could hardly follow his words.

“Did you know him?” he asked her. It took her a moment to understand that he meant the absconded Hylan.