I was tempted to observe that an emotionally troubled parishioner seeking David’s help was the equivalent of a seriously ill patient calling for the services of a mortician, but I contented myself with asking him how on earth Jackie’s behavior had suggested to him a bad case of love. “I would have thought,” I continued sarcastically, “that if the girl was in love with me she’d have stayed on board. She’d hardly have run away from me!”
“Love is very mysterious,” David said, as though that explained everything. He was in a confident mood, sure that his diagnosis was unassailable. “As you just observed,” he went on, “the girl’s reaction to the situation was extraordinary, which would suggest to any reasonably intelligent person that she was seeking a reason, any reason, to escape from what she saw as an intolerable and increasingly irksome dilemma.”
“What in hell’s name are you going on about?”
“Pour me another Irish whiskey, dear boy, and I shall tell you.”
I poured him the whiskey, choosing a moment when Stormchild was between white-topped crests. “Here!” I served him the whiskey in one of the plastic-spouted childrens’ training cups, which saved us from spilling precious Jamesons across the deck.
“As I told you, the American girl”—even now David found it hard to articulate her name—“is in love with you. I saw it in her face the moment I met you both on Antigua. There is a mooncalf quality about the young when they’re in love, and she had it. Doubtless she is searching for an authority figure, which is why she finds older men attractive. I daresay her father died when she was young?”
“He abandoned the family.”
“Ah! There you are! You don’t have to grow a beard and call yourself Sigmund Freud to pluck the bones out of that one! She’s after a father figure, isn’t she? You, of course, being a man of honor, did not return her schoolgirlish crush, which frustrated her, and, being an innocent child and uncertain how to surmount the obstacle of your indifference, she made the wise decision to cut her losses and skedaddle. It was clearly too embarrassing a matter for her to explain calmly, so instead, and quite sensibly in my view, she seized upon the first convenient excuse to make her admittedly embarrassing and hasty exit.” My reverend brother smiled very smugly at me. “Quod erat demonstrandum, I believe?”
I stared past the streaming drops on the spray hood’s screen to the ragged turmoil of the sea beyond. “She wasn’t in love with me, David,” I said after a long pause, “I was in love with her.”
David smiled as if I had made a fine joke, then he suddenly realized that I might have spoken the truth and he looked appalled instead. “Oh, dear,” was all he could say.
“I’m besotted,” I confessed. “I’m the mooncalf, not her.”
David puffed fiercely at his pipe. For a moment I thought I had silenced him, then he glowered at me from beneath his impressively bushy eyebrows. “The girl’s young enough to be your daughter!”
“You think I don’t know that, for Christ’s sake?” I exploded at him. Jackie was just twenty-six, one year older than Nicole. Indeed, Jackie had not even been born when Joanna and I had married.
“I blame myself,” David said with a noble air of abnegation.
“You? Why are you to blame?”
“I encouraged her to accompany you, did I not? But only as someone to spare you the cooking and cleaning chores. Good God, man, I didn’t think you’d make a prize fool of yourself!”
“Well I did,” I said bitterly.
“Then it’s a good thing she’s cut her losses and run,” David said trenchantly. “You said yourself that this was meant to be an adventure, and certainly not some half-baked romance.”
“Can we shut up about it?” I begged him.
“Old enough to be her father!” David, abjuring tact, would now try to jolly me out of misery with mockery. “October falling in love with April! My cradle-snatching brother!”
“Shut up!”
We sailed on in silence as David’s pipe smoke whipped back in the wind’s path. He looked very self-satisfied and very self-righteous. I probably looked miserable. I could not shift Jackie out of my head, and all I could think about was the desperate hope that she might be waiting for us in Colón Harbor at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.
We reached Colón two weeks later, dropping our sails as we passed through the breakwater entrance, then motoring through a downpour of rain toward the yacht moorings. Thunder bellowed across the sky, and lightning stabbed viciously above Fort Sherman. As soon as the customs and immigration launch had dealt with us, I insisted on unlashing Stormchild’s dinghy, dragging the outboard motor up from its locker in the engine room, then going ashore to the Panama Canal Yacht Club. I told David, with a remarkable lack of conviction, that I wanted to speak with the weather service. He gave me a disbelieving look, but did not try to dissuade me, nor did he suggest that I might use Stormchild’s radio-telephone to get a forecast. The thunder echoed back from the hills as the little dinghy buffeted its way through the filthy waters. The yacht club was the rendezvous for small boat crews, but Jackie was not waiting there, and the only mail for Stormchild was a good luck message from Betty which contained the reassurance that all was well at the boatyard. At that point I could not have cared if the boatyard staff had gone mad and burned the place to the ground. I cared for nothing but Jackie. I rang her home number and, at last, heard her voice, but only on a newly installed answering machine. “Hi! This is Jackie Potten and I’d really like to talk with you, but I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. Oh! And have a nice day!”
“This is Tim,” I said, “and I would really like to talk with you. We’re going through the Panama Canal tomorrow, then heading south to Puerto Montt. But you can leave a message for me at the Balboa Yacht Club”—I fumbled to find the number of the yacht club, which lay at the canal’s Pacific end—“that’s 52-2524, and we’ll be there tomorrow evening.”
“So what is the forecast?” David boomed at me when I returned.
“I couldn’t get through to the weather people,” I lied. “It seems the rain has tied up the phone lines.” David made a mocking noise, but was mollified when I presented him with a bottle of brandy I had bought ashore. “It’s something,” I said, “to celebrate our first trip through the canal.”
It was a trip I would normally have enjoyed; an extraordinary passage past basking iguanas and through the massive, water-churning locks, where local line-handlers, especially hired for the transit, skillfully held Stormchild’s gunwales off the towering walls. We followed a vast German bulk-carrier through the locks and Stormchild bucked in the merchantman’s wake as though she was stemming a North Sea storm. David let loose a cheer as we cleared the final lock, then uncorked the brandy.
No message waited at the Balboa Yacht Club, and the only response from Jackie’s telephone was the sprightly machine that wished me a nice day, so David and I, in a wet wind and on a gray sea, sailed on.
We sailed into sickening calms and contrary currents against which, day by day and inch by inch, we made our slow way out into the vast and empty Pacific until, a week from Panama, a real wind at last plucked us from our lethargy and bent Stormchild’s sails toward the sea. Water hissed at our stem and broke into a creamy wake astern.
The wind carried us into the chill airs brought north by the Humboldt Current. Ten days out of Panama I put away my shorts and took out long trousers, and three days later I dragged my heavy foul-weather gear out of Stormchild’s wet locker where I also discovered Jackie’s oilskins. I pushed them into a kit bag that I stored under the bunk she had used, and which was now once again given over to ship’s stores. For days I had been finding her belongings scattered about the boat. Her sprouting seeds had gone mad, luxuriating like a tiny forest in their plastic home until I had tossed the whole mess overboard. I had discovered her bikini in a wash bag, and that, like her oilskins, I stored aboard. I found an unused sound tape for her recorder, a pen, her awful felt hat, and a pathetic pair of pink socks. “Chuck ’em!” David robustly encouraged me when he saw me holding the little socks with the reverence that a Catholic might yield to a scrap of the true cross.