The Summer Friend, page 8
Right now, our second Beetle—named Loon, by the way, after both the bird and the crazy person—is rolled over on one side and up on sawhorses in the barn just a few feet from the little room where I’m writing this. It looks like—well, a boat out of water, and I don’t have to look too hard to see signs of its age: black spots on the coaming, places where the deck canvas is almost worn through, a worrisome spot near the bow where it looks like the stem piece is coming delaminated. If I wanted to be anthropomorphic, I could say it reminds me a little of myself. For years I had the boat maintained by the people who built it, the folks at Beetle, but now—out of cheapness and a sense that I can take better care of it than some unfeeling stranger—I do the work myself. Wooden boats require a fair amount of upkeep, which is probably the main reason they’ve mostly been replaced by fiberglass. The bottom and topsides need to be sanded, scraped, and painted every year; the brightwork and spars have to be sanded and varnished and then sanded and varnished again. I’ve heard of fanatics who insist on six or seven coats, but I draw the line at three—“good enough for government work,” as my father used to say of something that was okay but not perfect. I’ve got all the boat work down now, and though I sometimes complain, it’s work I enjoy. Also, it helps immeasurably that Nancy recently gave me a set of noise-canceling headphones, enabling me to listen to audiobooks while I work. I even listened to “Victory,” one of Conrad’s great sea stories, while sanding last spring, though most of the time my choices aren’t so nautically appropriate. While doing the spars I listened to Len Deighton. The sanding part of me was in southeastern Massachusetts, while the rest was in Cold War Berlin.
Nowadays, with Chip gone, I do most of my sailing with Nancy, and we have it down to a wordless routine, a sort of couple’s minuet. Before I even have the dinghy tied to the mooring float she’s on board and is fitting the rudder onto the stern. This takes a certain amount of skill. The pintles—two metal pegs attached to the back of the rudder—have to be dropped into two circular pieces in the stern, the gudgeons, which can be hard to find when the boat is bobbing around. On the occasions when I sail alone I have trouble lining everything up and will often get the top pintle in while the bottom one dodges its receptacle, so that the rudder swings loose, like a broken shutter. But Nancy already has the tiller in place—passed through an opening in the stern and beneath two metal straps on the top of the rudder—by the time I climb on board and is starting to remove the cloth strips that tie the sail down. Without even looking back, I step toward the bow, undo the last sail tie, grab the two halyards—the ropes that raise the sail—and pull. Both hands tug together, until the right-hand line won’t go any farther, so I quickly tie it off to the cleat on the deck in front. With the left hand now, I raise the gaff until the sail is setting nicely, and tie that line off too. By now Nancy has the boom crutch out—the wooden piece that holds the boom in place when the sail is furled—and, ducking under the boom, I cast off the mooring line, giving a little tug to head the boat away from the wind. We’re off! When I get back to my place in the cockpit, Nancy has trimmed the sheet and is pushing the tiller toward me.
She sits on the port side, and I’m on the starboard. I don’t know why, exactly—that’s just how we’ve been doing it for decades. We tack just by passing the tiller back and forth, and sometimes if the wind is right and we’re headed to our favorite destination, a part of the river called the Let, it’s a two-tack sail. I take us out through an opening in the marsh and around a rocky point that guards the opening to the Let—if I haul in the sheet and we get lucky with a little puff here, (come on, wind!) I can just make it—and on the way back she lets out the sail and we ride the wind home. The joy of all this never gets old for me—the flutter of the sail, the slap of the bow wave, the burbling of the wake, the tug on the tiller, the lift of the stern quarter as it catches a swell. It’s like flying, in a way. And though we sometimes take the same route day after day, that never gets old either.
I used to sail on a big boat, back when I was friendly with a couple of older guys who owned a thirty-foot sloop that was a little too much for them and who were happy to have someone like me to grind winches, haul in the anchors and even, as I did a couple of times, ascend the mast in a bosun’s chair to fix the wind indicator or retrieve an errant halyard. A lot of the challenge in those days was navigational—and since none of us was very good at plotting (or sticking to) a direct compass course, we tended to stumble from buoy to buoy, like a drunk making his way from the living room to the john, heading first for an end table, then grabbing the back of a nearby sofa before slanting toward the doorjamb and bouncing down the hall. It was thrilling when, off on the horizon, we saw where we were actually headed—the entrance to Menemsha Harbor, say, or the silhouette of Block Island. But I wouldn’t trade any of our Beetle voyages to have those cruising days back again, and I find as much satisfaction now in little navigational challenges—working my way through this particular marsh or dealing with the tricky tide down by the bridge—as I did in my oceangoing days, when we just put the boat on a course and kept it there, paying more attention to the compass than to the wind and waves. Small-boat sailing is more sensual and immediate—sexy even. You’re not in a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and you find yourself making haste slowly, not unlike the way summer itself does: nothing happens for a while, and there’s nothing much to do except tweak the sheet now and then and feel the sun on your face, the breeze ruffling the back of your neck. And yet all the while the tide is changing, the clouds are moving, and you feel, in a way that you never do on land, that you’re in touch with the basic motions of the planet itself as it spins its way around.
The other thing about sailing with Nancy: we have conversations. We talk about the children, the grandchildren, about what’s for supper. We talk sometimes about how lucky we are to be able to do this. I often find myself thinking of Chip then, and wondering what he would make of all our chatter. Back on the mooring it’s the whole drill, the minuet in reverse. The rudder comes out while I’m still looping the mooring line around the bow cleat. Halyards uncleated, the sail slowly drops, the pulleys squeaking a little, and the boom is lifted back into its crutch. I furl the sail; Nancy deftly slips the tie strips around the bunched fabric and makes them fast. Shipshape. Back into the dinghy then, first Nancy in the stern, then me amidships. This is the tricky part, transferring unlimber middle-aged bodies from one small bobbing vessel to another, even smaller one, and may be our undoing one day, as it was for Chip when he could no longer swing his legs over the gunwale. But so far so good. I’m pulling on the oars now, and since my back is to the bow and my neck doesn’t like to turn around, Nancy points with her hand to where we need to go. Home.
Buying In
Snowdie wasn’t for everyone. We had friends from home come to visit who were distinctly underwhelmed and drove away baffled. My mother-in-law, too. When she came to visit the first time she was visibly disapproving, a disappointment to both Nancy and me, for my mother-in-law, too, was a summer person. She loved the season ardently and brought with her high hopes for it every year. She came from Maryland, and some of her most cherished memories were of summers at the family farm on Gibson Island, in the Chesapeake, where her father, whom she adored, was a well-known yachtsman and racer of Star boats. (He’s someone I really wish I had known. Not only was he a great sailor, but he was also a legendary hockey player at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, back when hockey was just getting started in this country.) So my mother-in-law grew up doing all the things that we and our children did—sailing, swimming, beachcombing—but in a posher way. This was back when summering was still for the well-to-do. There were yacht club teas and yacht club dances. Dinner, even at home, was prepared by servants, and everyone dressed for it, the boys bathed and combed, my mother-in-law probably in a summer dress and with a ribbon in her hair.
She didn’t cling to the past. For her class and generation, she was remarkably progressive. I sometimes wondered, though, whether her dislike of Snowdie didn’t stem in part from the way it was a reminder of another, better time. Or maybe she just wanted a better mattress and some half-decent kitchen appliances. I do think she would like our present house, and not just because it contains some of her own furniture. It’s nothing special. Chip, who had high architectural standards, and liked summer houses with big windows and sweeping views, rolled his eyes the first time he saw it, and I’m not sure he ever understood why we opted for a place so ordinary. If it had been up to him, he would have had us wait for years and years (while still renting Snowdie) until the perfect house came along.
Our son, after a recent visit with his family, sent us an email saying what a good time he’d had and thanking us for our foresight in purchasing the place. It was less foresight than happenstance, and, who knows, another place might have worked just as well. But this is the one we have. The house is a 1930s Cape. There’s a big kitchen with a front window overlooking a garden; what our grandkids call the Fireplace Room—a sort of parlor, whose main focus is a hearth; and the Blue Room—formerly a garage and now a many-windowed living and dining space. A couple of downstairs bedrooms, a couple more up, reached by a perilously steep Cape Cod staircase, where I will probably break my neck one of these days, trying to descend in the dark. A basement with bad light and a noisy pump that grinds into action whenever you run the water (one of our daughter’s friends once said the basement reminded him of a horror-movie torture chamber). All in all, decidedly modest, and yet I feel an enormous sense of good fortune owning it. I’m like my father in that way.
Some of the furniture is from Ikea, some we inherited from Nancy’s parents; the rest is one step up from junk shop. There are a few nice paintings, and over the mantel a watercolor, painted by a friend and given to us by Chip and Gay, of Nancy and me sailing in our boat. Lots of books, some games, and, in the Blue Room, a big wooden dollhouse that nobody plays with anymore. Your basic summer-house odds and ends.
So what would my mother-in-law like? For one thing, the mattresses are all excellent, especially the one in the bedroom she would use. The appliances aren’t top-of-the-line, exactly, but they all work: washer, dryer, even a dishwasher. She would approve, I’m pretty sure, of the pine-sided post-and-beam barn (a place that children seem to like to visit almost as much as I do) and of the big yard, almost two acres of lawn and trees and bramble. Not much of a view, but if you look down this little path, there’s the river and (though you can’t see them from here) the dock and our boats. She would certainly like that, and she would like above all the way that this has become a place our children and grandchildren love to visit. For my mother-in-law, family was practically a religion.
Poker games in the Fireplace Room. Bubble-blowing on the deck. Ice cubes down my back, which is how the grandchildren like to wake me in the morning. Croquet, badminton, bocce. As often as not, these lawn competitions end in tears, as one grandchild or another is convinced the game is rigged, the opponents cheating and conniving. They’re like summer squalls, these weepy outbursts, soon over and forgotten. The shadows lengthen, the grass turns deep green in the afternoon light, and another summer’s day goes into the books, entirely forgettable but also durably memorable, for its happy likeness to so many others. Here we all are, doing the same things we do every summer. These activities don’t just pass the time; they also mark it, sweetly forestalling the inevitable hour of dusk—when pretty soon it’s time for baths (more tears sometimes) and bed. Not a bad moment, while the bats are darting overhead, and the coals are glowing on the grill, for the grown-ups to sip something alcoholic and feel that pleasant summertime flush, that ethery, loose-limb sensation when, like a balloon, you could almost drift right up into the trees.
I’m not sure what prompted us to buy this place. We had talked for years about someday owning, instead of renting, but never did anything about it. Every place we heard about seemed to cost too much, and, besides, the drive up to our summer town from where we live in New Jersey can be brutal: hours and hours on Route I-95, a road under perpetual construction and subject to inexplicable traffic jams. I wasn’t sure how often I wanted to make that ghastly trek, which seemed so arduous compared with just cruising up to the Camp. Even so, one late-winter afternoon Nancy and I drove up to Massachusetts, on a whim almost, to look at a house—a dump, as it turned out—that we had seen advertised on the Internet. The Realtor took us to see a second place, one we hadn’t known about, and on the spot we knew. Love at first sight again—except that this was wintertime folly, not summer madness. In our eagerness we probably paid too much. I like to imagine that in a closet at the Realtor’s there’s a chart that special visitors are sometimes invited to examine. It shows the upticks and downturns of the real estate market for the past fifty years, with a big upward bump in the seventies, when vacation property around here became popular all of a sudden, and then a ski-slope falling off in 2008. At the very top of the chart, just before the line plunges down, is a spiky little peak marked with a blue star, like the top of a scraggly Christmas tree. “That’s the McGrath purchase,” the Realtor whispers, shaking her head in disbelief.
What was percolating in our heads was the notion that by owning a place we could extend summer, instead of just cramming it into a few frantic weeks. We had our first grandchild by then and wanted a summer place she and those to come could feel was theirs. It helped that I had left an editing job to become a full-time writer and didn’t need to report to an office anymore. And something else that influenced our thinking—or mine, anyway—was that more than a decade earlier, at the height of our Snowdie days, Chip had gotten sick. In the winter of 1999, he found out he had prostate cancer. He was just fifty-seven. I’m not sure exactly how he learned this. From a routine physical presumably, and probably one long overdue. His combination of boundless optimism and determined repression made him avoid doctors and take his good health for granted. I seldom saw him sick. He never even got colds. But his cancer, when they found it, was pretty far along and of a particularly aggressive sort. His doctors told him that radiation or chemo would be pointless—the prostate had to come out. A prostate removal in those days was much messier and more invasive than it is now, and it took him a long time to recover. I drove up to spend a few days with him after the operation, and I was surprised by how weak he was. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” he said. I was also surprised by how grateful he was for my having come to visit. He was emotional in a way that I had never seen before, and it made me a little uncomfortable. This was the part of our friendship that neither of us was very good at.
The first day we sat around and watched Monty Python movies. Chip was both tired and incontinent, embarrassed by how often he had to excuse himself for a bathroom visit. But after a few days he grew a little stronger, and we ventured out on short expeditions. We visited a guy on the Cape we’d heard about who had a “thermometer museum” in his basement—a huge, random assortment of souvenir thermometers picked up from all over: Statue of Liberty thermometers, Eiffel Tower thermometers, Betty Boop and Pink Panther thermometers, you name it. We went to Newport, Rhode Island, and poked around in bookshops and visited a boatbuilding school there. We also drove out to Brenton Point, where one summer Chip had been a babysitter/companion for a rich kid who lived in one of the mansions. Another day we drove to Marion, Massachusetts, and, even though it was cold and gray, looked at a golf course I had heard about, a nine-holer dating back to 1904 and little changed. The bunkers were squarish, and on a couple of holes old stone walls guarded the greens, just as they do at Berwick in Scotland. It was like old times, our company effortless, and Chip mentioned his illness only once, when he said to me, “Pal, I hope this never happens to you.” I hoped so, too, and in fact became a pain in the neck at my doctor’s office, demanding a PSA test far more often than necessary.
After the surgery, Chip’s cancer went into remission, and he seemed almost to forget what had happened, or, with that remarkable facility of his, to push it to a corner of his mind he seldom visited. But death, or the thought of it, began to weigh on me, adding a certain urgency to all our activities. I began to fret about my blood pressure and bought a little gadget that enabled me to check it obsessively.
So when we bought our house the idea that time might be running out was in the back of my mind. If we were going to put down roots, now was the moment. As it happened, a couple of months after we closed on our house, a routine scan discovered spots on Chip’s hip and pelvis: the cancer had returned and spread to his bones. But it was all under control, he assured me. A little radiation and he’d be as good as new. I don’t know whether he believed that or not. We went back to our old routines, only now there was more time for them, not just one overly busy month. There were weekends in the spring and fall, even an occasional trip up in the winter, when the landscape there acquires a particular kind of spare, clarifying beauty. The marsh grass turns brown, the dunes get scoured by the wind, and with the leaves down, you see vistas—sweeping views—normally hidden.
