“Too good for the boat,” I protested.
“Nonsense. It isn’t for decoration anyway, but for use. Take it.”
Billy, on behalf of the boatyard staff, then presented me with a ship’s bell that he ceremoniously hung above the main companionway. “It’s proper brass, boss,” he told me, “so it’ll tarnish like buggery, but that’ll make you think of us every time you have to clean the sod.”
We opened still more champagne, though I, who would be taking Stormchild down channel when the tide ebbed, only drank two glasses. It was a sad, bittersweet day; a parting, but also a beginning. I went to find my daughter, but I also went to fulfill a dream that had given such joy to Joanna — the dream of living aboard a cruising boat, of following the warm winds and long waves. I was going away, leaving no address and no promise of a return.
At midday, as the tide became fair, my guests climbed back onto the pontoon. Friends shouted farewells as the rain slicked Stormchild’s teak deck dark. I started the big engine. Billy disconnected the shoreside electricity, then slipped my springs, leaving the big yacht tethered only by her bow and stern lines. David was the last to leave the boat. He gripped my hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and God bless.”
“Are you sure you won’t come?”
“Good luck,” he said again, then climbed ashore. I looked ahead, past Stormchild’s bows, at the rain-beaten river, down which Joanna had sailed to her death, and from where Nicole had sailed into oblivion. Now it was my turn to leave, and I glanced up at the hill where my wife and son were buried, and I said my own small prayer of farewell.
People were shouting their goodbyes. Most were laughing, and a few were crying. Someone threw a paper streamer. Billy had already let go the bow line and David was standing by the aft. “Ready, Tim?” he shouted.
“Let go!” I called.
“You’re free, Tim!” David tossed the bitter end of the aft line onto Stormchild’s deck. “Good luck! God bless! Bon voyage!”
I put the engine into gear. Water seethed at Stormchild’s stern as she drew heavily and slowly away from her berth. Next stop, the Canaries!
“Goodbye!” a score of voices shouted. “Good luck, Tim!” More paper streamers arced across Stormchild’s guardrails and sagged into the widening strip of gray-white water. “Bon voyage!”
I waved, and there were tears in my eyes as the streamers stretched taut, snapped, and fell away. One of the boatyard staff was sounding a raucous farewell on an air-powered foghorn. “Goodbye!” I shouted one last time.
“Mr. Blackburn!” A small and determined voice screamed above the racket, and I glanced back across the strip of propeller-churned water, and there, crammed among my friends and dressed in a baggy sweater and shapeless trousers with her bulging handbag gripped in a thin pale hand, was the lady from Kalamazoo. Jackie Potten had surfaced at last. She had not let me down after all. “Mr. Blackburn!” she shouted again.
I banged Stormchild’s gearbox into reverse. White water foamed and boiled as the propeller struggled to check the deadweight of over twenty tons of boat and supplies. I slung a line ashore, David and Billy hauled, and ignominiously, just thirty seconds after leaving, I and my boat came home again.
Jackie Potten was panting from the exertion of running through the boatyard carrying a suitcase and her enormous handbag. “A man at the marina office said you were leaving, and I just ran,” she explained her breathlessness, “and I can’t believe I caught you! Wow! This is some boat! Is it yours?”
“Yes, mine.” I ushered Jackie into Stormchild’s cockpit where I introduced her to David and Betty, who, alone of the rather bemused crowd who had come to bid me farewell, had returned on board the yacht. My brother now behaved with an excruciating gallantry toward her. He invited her down into the saloon, enjoining her to watch the stairs and not to crack her skull on the companionway lintel.
“I tried to telephone you from London Airport”—Jackie talked to me all the way down into the saloon—“but they said your home number was disconnected, and then I telephoned the boatyard and they said you were leaving today, and I would have been here hours ago, but British Rail is some kind of joke. They just pretend to run a railroad. Anyway I caught a bus in the end, which was kind of interesting. Is this some cabin! Are those books for real? You read Yeats?”
“The Yeats belonged to Nicole,” I said. I had put a lot of Nicole’s books onto the shelves, which were equipped with varnished drop bars to hold their contents against the sea’s motion.
“Is this really a stove? That’s neat. I didn’t know you could heat boats. And a carpet! Wow! This is more comfortable than my apartment!”
David, standing beside me at the chart table, watched Jackie explore the big saloon. “I see I did you an injustice,” he said softly.
“Meaning?”
“She’s hardly a Salome, is she? Or a Cleopatra. Not at all the sultry Jezebel I had imagined.”
“I hired her for her journalistic skills,” I said testily, “not for her looks.”
“Thank God for that,” David said with amusement, and Jackie, in her voluminous and colorless clothes, did look more than ever like some drab, wan, and orphaned child, an impression that was not helped by a brown felt hat of spectacular ugliness.
“Can I use this?” Jackie Potten referred to the saloon table, where she sat and spread some crumpled and dirty papers. “I have to account for your money, see? I guess I really did some pretty dumb things, and I’m not really sure that I separated out all Molly’s German expenses from mine…”
“You took Mrs. Tetterman to Germany?” I interrupted to ask.
“Sure! But not on your money. Really!” She sounded very anxious.
“Guide’s honor?” David, instantly divining the girl’s innocence, could not resist teasing her.
“Guide’s honor?” Jackie frowned at him. “Oh, you mean like Girl Scouts? Sure, Scout’s honor. Except maybe some of the receipts got muddled and that’s why I need to run through the paperwork with you, Mr. Blackburn, because you never said that Molly should go, but she kind of insisted and she’s really hard to turn down, know what I mean? And she speaks German, too, so it was a real help having her along, but we got those tickets you book thirty days in advance and we traveled midweek, only my ticket cost a lot more because I had to come here as well and Molly didn’t. She’s flying straight back to Detroit, while I’ve come to report to you. I don’t think we were really extravagant. I mean we stayed at this real fleabag. It was weird. They had a pool, which I thought was kind of neat, but the Germans swim naked! These fat guys, right? Really gross! Molly said it was just natural and healthy, and she went skinny-dipping with them, but I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t. And the food was awful — they don’t know what vegetarian food is—”
“Quiet!” I sang out.
“I was only trying to tell you…” Jackie made another valiant effort to keep going, while David and Betty were trying hard not to laugh aloud.
“Quiet!” I had entirely forgotten this girl’s capacity to talk. I put a finger on my lips to keep her silent as I walked slowly to the cabin table. Once there I put my hands on the table’s edge and bent toward Jackie Potten’s indignant, pale face. “Did you find out why Caspar von Rellsteb sailed to Europe four-and-a-half years ago?” I asked her at last.
“That’s exactly what I was about to tell you!” Jackie said very indignantly. “Yes, I did!”
“Oh, blessed girl,” I sat opposite her. “So tell me now.”