Letters

I did not mention the will case; seemed inappropriate. Or her chain-smoking, which stank up the sultry air. Of my own situation, not to be unfairly reticent and because it was agreeable to have that auditor in that ambience, I volunteered the vague half-truth that my health was uncertain and the truth that a 69-year-old bachelor whose accomplishments have been modest and whose relations with women have been more or less transient and without issue has sufficient cause both for occasional despair and for looking unmorbidly to last things. Handling that big boat alone, for example, was getting to be a bit much, but I’d never enjoyed vacationing in male company, had run out of companionable and willing female crew, and was no longer interested enough in the sport to swap O.J. for a smaller and more manageable craft. Thus my decision to make a final solo circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and then pack it in.

I said nothing about suicide, of course. But I realized at once I’d said too much about female crew. Jeannine became her-mother-back-in-May all over again, when I’d first felt my life’s odd recycling. O Jesus, how she’d love to see Dun Cove again, and Queenstown Creek, and What’s-its-name Cove off Gibson Island Harbor — Red House! Red House Cove! And I shouldn’t forget how she’d raked in the silverware back in her dinghy-racing days against the best Hampton One-Design skippers on the circuit; and she remembered how to read charts and take bearings and play the currents and handle lines. Couldn’t she for Christ’s sake pretty please

go along with me, if I hadn’t a full company lined up? At least for a few days? She’d cook, she’d crew, she’d drink no more than I, she’d smoke downwind of me and the sails, she’d stay out of my way, she didn’t mind mosquitoes, she loved foul weather, she’d never been seasick in her life, she even had shorts and sneakers in her bag, though alas no jeans or swimsuit, but who cared, she’d use Off in the evenings and swim in her shorts and T-shirt when there were People around. I could put her ashore whenever I tired of her company. Please say yes, Toddy! Unless you’ve got something else going?

It was no time to lay another rejection on her. The notion even sounded agreeable. To’ve had a son to sail with is a thing I’ve often wished; to’ve had a daughter, even more so. But I didn’t trust Jeannine’s sobriety — alcoholics don’t reef down that readily — and had no use for a drunk on board. And I did (this much I told her) want not only privacy but some solitude on my Last Go-‘Round. I felt her tensing for my no: the stab of her cigarette, the swish of her drink. Let’s take a shakedown sail tomorrow, I proposed. Dun Cove for the night; Gibson Island on Sunday if we still like each other. You can get a cab to the airport from the yacht club there, and I’ll go my solitary way.

It took her a hurt half-second to remuster her enthusiasm; then she was all aye-aye sir and asking like a kid could she go to bed now so the morning would come sooner, or was there work she ought to do first?

Yes to the first and no to the second: it was near midnight. I showed her the shower (my addition), put out sheets for the hide-a-bed, and turned in, not without noting the level in that Beefeater bottle, which I deliberately neglected to put away. Jeannine gave me a daughterly kiss good night and thanked me without fuss. She doubted she’d go back to that Farm except to collect her belongings; she had no further use for Reg Prinz, she thought; she would consider my other advice seriously.

I fell asleep listening to her shower and thinking, inevitably, of Jane. Some time in the night the telephone rang me up from sweet depths; before I was collected enough to get it (I’d not bothered to move it from the living room to the bedroom jack), Jeannine had answered and been hung up on. Not a word, she said from her bed edge, fetching in her summer nightie, her hair unbound. She’d lit a cigarette, but I was pleased to see that the bottle hadn’t been moved or, evidently, touched. Some fucking drunk, she guessed with a wry chuckle: many’s the time. Nighty-night.

Next morning was a bright one, unusual for August, a good dry high come down from Canada with a light northwesterly. More and more pleased, I found Jeannine up and perky, in cut-off jeans and T-shirt, the hide-a-bed stripped and stowed, the gin bottle unselfconsciously returned to the bar cabinet, its level undisturbed (of course I hadn’t checked the other bottles), coffee brewed and breakfast standing by. She gave the skipper a good-morning peck, asked him how he liked his eggs, predicted that the breeze would freshen enough by noon to make even that clunker of a skipjack move, and declared that such late-night no-response phone calls made her homesick for NYC: nothing missing but the heavy breath. Did they happen often?