Alex was behind her. He made a face at me, then silently mimicked a laugh at the absurdity of a forty-two-year-old man taking consolation from his mother.
“Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” Alex said and imitated my voice, “Pass the spaghetti, Mom!”
Joe had started to relax. Now he had an ally, and I was being mocked. We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents. Home is so often the simple past.
“What’s he been telling you, Joe?” Alex asked.
I went to wash my face.
“He said I don’t know anything about boats.”
Just before we sat down to eat, I said, “It’s pretty rough out there.”
Alex seized on this, looking delighted. He made the sound of a strong wind, by whistling and clearing his throat. He squinted and in a harsh whisper said, “Aye, it’s rough out there, and you can hardly”—he stood up, banging the dining table with his thigh—“you can hardly see the bowsprit. Aye, and the wind’s shifting, too. But never mind, Mr. Christian! Give him twenty lashes — that’ll take the strut out of him! And hoist the mainsail — we’re miles from anywhere. None of you swabbies knows anything about boats. But I know, because I’ve sailed from Pitcairn Island to Rock Harbor by dead reckoning — in the roughest water known to man. Just me against the elements, with the waves threatening to pitch-pole my frail craft …”
“Your supper’s getting cold,” Father said.
“How long did it take you?” Mother said to me.
“All day,” I said.
“Aye, captain,” Alex said. “Aw, it’s pretty rough out there, what with the wind and the rising sea.”
“What will you write about?” my father asked.
“He’ll write about ocean’s roar and how he just went around the Horn. You’re looking at Francis Chichester! The foam beating against the wheelhouse, the mainsheet screaming, the wind and the rising waves. Hark! Thunder and lightning over The Gypsy Moth!”
Declaiming made Alex imaginative, and stirred his memory. He had an actor’s gift for sudden shouts and whispers and for giving himself wholly to the speech. It was as if he was on an instant touched with lucid insanity, the exalted chaos of creation. He was triumphant.
“But look at him now — Peter Freuchen of the seven seas, the old tar in his clinker-built boat. He’s home asking his mother to pass the spaghetti! ‘Thanks, Mom, I’d love another helping, Mom.’ After a day in the deep sea, he’s with his mother and father, reaching for the meatballs!”
Joseph was laughing hard, his whole body swelling as he tried to suppress it.
“He’s not going to write about that. No, nothing about the spaghetti. It’ll just be Captain Bligh, all alone, bending at his oars, and picking oakum through the long tumultuous nights at sea. And the wind and the murderous waves …”
“Dry up,” Father said, still eating.
Then they all turned their big sympathetic faces at me across the cluttered dining table. Alex looked slightly sheepish, and the others apprehensive, fearing that I might be offended, that Alex had gone too far.
“What will you write about?” Mother asked.
I shook my head and tried not to smile — because I was thinking: That.