“She seems like a nice girl.”
“And they’re leaving in the morning.”
“Honey, I flew in from Houston to meet her, and I have to go back there tomorrow. And it is still my intention to have dinner with them at the club tonight and be a genial father of the groom.”
“You’re in no condition to go.”
He stared at her and then laughed. “No, you don’t, Mary Agnes. You could make ammunition like that last forever. I’m going, and you better come along because it would look strange if you didn’t.”
She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. “You laughed at me!”
“You look ready to go. I’ll change. Better phone them at the club and tell them we’ll be right along.”
“What were you laughing at?”
He took a shower and shaved and dressed with the efficiency of a man who has spent half his adult life in hotels and learned to reduce basic tasks to simple routines. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided he was far too eroded a knight for the shining Gretchen. After the June wedding, when Mary Agnes was less tense, a summer cruise with her might be a good idea. He had gone stale recently. The mistakes thus far had been small ones. Mary Agnes was all right. Just a little irritable.
When he was ready to go, he found her in the kitchen. He stopped just inside the door, as abruptly as if he had run into a wall of glass. Obviously she had not heard him coming. He saw her with such a terrible clarity that she became someone he did not know at all. The clock of all the days and years seemed to stop. Her face was red and shiny and intent. With the heavy kitchen shears, straining at the tough fabric, she was chopping his old tweed jacket to fragments. He could hear her breathing. She seemed to be killing something. She cut the last piece in two, let the fragments fall to the floor and dropped the shears on the counter.
“Have you lost your mind?” he asked.
She whirled and stared at him. The red faded out of her face. Then she smiled. “Just try to rescue it this time,” she said. “Just try! I’m going to do that to all your bummy clothes. The men in my family never left the house unless they were immaculate. I’m just not going to let you continue to humiliate me, Boyd. Shall we go?”
He picked up a piece of the jacket.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Break into tears?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
He didn’t know just what he would do. If he did not go to the club he would be in for months of punishment. And he had laughed at her. He saw a strand of pale, tan hair on the lapel of his chopped-up jacket, caught in the heavy Irish tweed. As long as we must have symbols, he thought, it’s nice to have a complete set. He picked up the dozen pieces of the jacket and piled them on the counter.
“What are you doing? Put it in the trash.”
“Let’s be off,” he said, smiling.
At the club he sat comfortably back inside the nest of himself and with mild interest watched himself release upon his son and the girl and the woman all the charm and alertness he had used on all the strangers in all the far places. He was sensitive to them, aware of their response, bringing them into a glow of talk and laughter, handing them their cues deftly.
The children went off to find some music, and he took his wife home. She kept telling him how nice he had been, how astonishingly, extraordinarily nice, until somehow she had turned the compliment into a criticism of all the other evenings of their life.
When they were in the living room he interrupted her by saying her name with an odd force and inflection.
“Yes, dear?”
“Mary Agnes, I’d like you to go gel that jacket you ruined and sew it back together for me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. It doesn’t have to be invisible stitching. It doesn’t even have to be wearable. But go get the pieces and sew them back together, Mary Agnes.”
She was wary. “It certainly didn’t lake you long to spoil this evening too, did it?”
“It might be important.”
She hesitated for just a moment and then laughed. “For goodness’ sake, don’t pout like some stupid little boy. That coat was ratty. I did you a favor.”
“I just want to be certain. You won’t make the effort?”
“Absolutely not! What do you think I am?”
“All right. We’ll drop it.”
“Why you should ask me to do such a—”
“Good night, my dear wife.”
Jimmy married his Atlanta bride on the twentieth of June. On the twenty-second Boyd Robbins went to one of the big commercial boatyards, accompanied by Hal Foreman, one of his most trusted young executives. A man from the yard showed them through the Gay Lady, It was the first lime Boyd had seen it since it had been overhauled and refurbished. The man was very enthusiastic about all that had been done to the old craft.
“It’s nice to get a go-ahead for a really total job, Mr. Robbins. It’s a good piece of money, sure, but I’d cast off in a minute to lake her around the world.”
Boyd admired it appropriately, the new suit of sails, heavy-duty generators, new auxiliary, navigation aids, stainless-steel galley, new hardware. He thanked the man and sent him away and sat in the main cabin with Hal Foreman.
“She couldn’t trace who really bought it?” Boyd asked.
“Not a chance.”
The hull moved in the breeze, nudging the fenders, creaking the lines.
Foreman looked uncomfortable and said, “Boyd, is it any of my business?”
“That’s hard to say at the moment, Hal. You couldn’t help guessing. I haven’t seen this boat in three months. Or the lady. And I haven’t decided anything worth telling anybody. Maybe the Sea Scouts will get this, Hal, and there’ll be nothing to tell. Or maybe an awful lot will change, if so, you’ll be the second to know. I’m going to stay here for a little while. Take the car along. I might not come back in today. I don’t know yet.”
Foreman hesitated and then unexpectedly shook hands. “Boyd, whatever, whenever, however… I want the luck to run good for you.”
Foreman went topside, stepped onto the dock and left quickly.
Boyd opened the canvas bag he had brought aboard. He took out the three texts on seamanship and navigation and put them on the cabin table. He had been reading them for three months, on airplanes, in terminals, in hotel suites. The rules of the road. “Red right returning,” he murmured.
He look out two stainless-steel cups and put them beside the texts. He took the bottle of Barbancourt and poured an inch of rum into the cups. He could look out through one of the ports and see the public telephone fifty feet away. She would be working at the doctor’s office for another sixty-five minutes. He leaned back in the chair, sipped the rum and listened to the beating of his heart.
This was decision time, and he had sixty minutes. This is the way you do it. You expose yourself to all the pros and cons, and you hold back until the deadline is inescapable, and then they all balance out, and you know. The big answer always comes in two sizes. Yes and no. Yes or no. With regrets but no remorse either way, because you put yourself right into the scales with everything else. And you watch which way they tip.
They never balance perfectly. There is always some small object that makes the difference. Such as a frayed shoe without a mate, of a size to fit a girl of twelve. Or a leather-covered button rolling across a kitchen floor.