Item: Marullo was telling me the truth about business, business being the process of getting money. And Joey Morphy was telling it straight, and Mr. Baker and the drummer. They all told it straight. Why did it revolt me and leave a taste like a spoiled egg? Am I so good, or so kind, or so just? I don’t think so. Am I so proud? Well, there’s some of that. Am I lazy, too lazy to be involved? There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
There is a smell and a feel of dawn long before the light. It was in the air now, a tempering of the wind; a new star or a planet cleared the horizon to eastward. I should know what star or planet but I don’t. The wind freshens or steadies in the false dawn. It really does. And I would have to be going back soon. This rising star was too late to have much of a go before daylight. What is the saying—“The stars incline, they do not command”?[15] Well, I’ve heard that a good many serious financiers go to astrologers for instruction in stock purchase. Do the stars incline toward a bull market? Is A. T. and T. influenced by the stars? Nothing as sweet and remote in my fortune as a star. A beat-up tarot deck of fortune-telling cards in the hands of an idle, mischievous woman, and she had rigged the cards. Do the cards incline but not command? Well, the cards inclined me out to the Place in the middle of the night, and they inclined me to give more thought than I wanted to, to a subject I detested. That’s quite a bit of inclining right there. Could they incline me to a business cleverness I never had, to acquisitiveness foreign to me? Could I incline to want what I didn’t want? There are the eaters and the eaten. That’s a good rule to start with. Are the eaters more immoral than the eaten? In the end all are eaten—all—gobbled up by the earth, even the fiercest and the most crafty.
The roosters up on Clam Hill had been crowing for a long time and I had heard and not heard. I wished I could stay to see the sun rise straight out from the Place.
I said there was no ritual involved with the Place but that is not entirely true. Sometime on each visit I reconstruct Old Harbor for my mind’s pleasure—the docks, the warehouses, the forests of masts and underbrush of rigging and canvas. And my ancestors, my blood—the young ones on the deck, the fully grown aloft, the mature on the bridge. No nonsense of Madison Avenue then or trimming too many leaves from cauliflowers. Some dignity was then for a man, some stature. A man could breathe.
That was my father talking, the fool. Old Cap’n remembered the fights over shares, the quibbling with stores, suspicion of every plank and keelson, the lawsuits, yes, and the killings—over women, glory, adventure? Not at all. Over money. It was a rare partnership, he said, that lasted more than one voyage, and blistering feuds ever afterward, continuing after the cause was forgotten.
There was one bitterness old Cap’n Hawley did not forget, a crime he could not forgive. He must have told me about it many times, standing or sitting on the rim of Old Harbor. We spent a goodly time there, he and I. I remember him pointing with his narwhal stick.
“Take that third rock on Whitsun Reef,” he said. “Got her? Now, line her up with the tip of Porty Point at high water. See it there? Now—half a cable-length out on that line is where she lies, at least her keel.”
“The Belle-Adair?”
“The Belle-Adair.”
“Our ship.”
“Half ours, a partnership. She burned at anchor—burned to the waterline. I never believed it was an accident.”
“You think she was fired, sir?”
“I do.”
“But—but you can’t do that.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Insurance.”
“Then it’s no different now.”
“No different.”
“There must be some difference.”
“Only in a single man alone—only in one man alone. There’s the only power—one man alone. Can’t depend on anything else.”
He never spoke to Cap’n Baker again, my father told me, but he didn’t carry it to his son, Mr. Banker Baker. He wouldn’t do that any more than he would burn a ship.
Good God, I’ve got to get home. And I got. I almost ran and I went up the High Street without thinking. It was still dark enough but a rim of lightness lay on the edge of the sea and made the waves gray iron. I rounded the war memorial and passed the post office. In a doorway Danny Taylor stood as I knew he must, hands in pockets, collar of his ragged coat turned up, and his old peaked shooter’s cap with the earflaps turned down. His face was blue-gray with cold and sickness.
“Eth,” he said, “I’m sorry to bother you. Sorry. I’ve got to have some skull-buster. You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”
“I know. I mean I don’t know, but I believe you.” I gave him a dollar bill. “Will that do it?”
His lips were trembling the way a child’s lips do when it’s about to cry. “Thank you, Eth,” he said. “Yes—that will put me away all day and maybe all night.” He began to look better just thinking of it.
“Danny—you’ve got to stop this. Think I’ve forgotten? You were my brother, Danny. You still are. I’ll do anything in the world to help you.”
A little color came into his thin cheeks. He looked at the money in his hand and it was as though he had taken his first gulp of skull-buster. Then he looked at me with hard cold eyes.
“In the first place it’s nobody’s goddam business. And in the second place you haven’t got a bean, Eth. You’re as blind as I am, only it’s a different kind of blindness.”
“Listen to me, Danny.”
“What for? Why, I’m better off than you are. I’ve got my ace in the hole. Remember our country place?”
“Where the house burned down? Where we used to play in the cellar hole?”
“You remember it all right. It’s mine.”
“Danny, you could sell it and get a new start.”
“I won’t sell it. The county takes a little bit of it for taxes every year. The big meadow is still mine.”
“Why won’t you sell it?”
“Because it’s me. It’s Daniel Taylor. Long as I have it no Christy sons of bitches can tell me what to do and no bastards can lock me up for my own good. Do you get it?”
“Listen, Danny—”
“I won’t listen. If you think this dollar gives you the right to preach to me—here! Take it back.”
“Keep it.”
“I will. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never been a—drunk. I don’t tell you how to wrap bacon do I? Now if you’ll go your own way, I’ll knock on a window and get some skull-buster. And don’t forget—I’m better off than you are. I’m not a clerk.” He turned around and put his head in the corner of the closed doorway like a child who abolishes the world by looking away from it. And he stayed there until I gave up and walked on.
Wee Willie, parked in front of the hotel, stirred out of his nap and rolled down the window of his Chevrolet. “Morning, Ethan,” he said. “You up early or out late?”
“Both.”
“Must have found yourself a fancy piece.”
“Sure did, Willie, an houri.”
“Now, Eth, don’t tell me you’d take up with no streetwalker.”
15
The stars incline, they do not command: In Latin,