Stephen Rensselaer was named after the famous and sometimes infamous Hudson Valley Stephen Van Rensselaers of earlier times. But years before Annapolis, and perhaps why he chose the Naval Academy, he came to associate his first name with that of Stephen Decatur, the youngest captain in the Navy’s history and the hero of the Barbary Wars, whose life was heroic but whose death was not. Neither the Barbary pirates nor the British were able to kill Stephen Decatur. Rather, he died at his house across Lafayette Square from the White House, after a duel occasioned by his opinion in a court-martial. Politics are more dangerous than battles at sea, and when a sailor leaves Washington for a theater of war, he often breathes a sigh of relief.
Bravely then, when Stephen Rensselaer was assigned to four years of Pentagon staff duty he made the biggest investment of his life, stretching to buy and furnish the top floor and roof terrace of a large Federal town-house in Georgetown. He added a few English and American pieces from the same period and before, all of which, like the house itself, had the inimitable patina of survival.
The longest wall was lined floor-to-twelve-foot-ceiling with bookshelves symmetrically graced here and there by lighted nautical paintings and a river study of misty terrain in rural nineteenth-century France. Framed in gold and glowing beneath their lights, the paintings were portals to another time. On the street wall, between two triple-hung old-glass windows, was his ceremonial sword, spotlighted by cold-blue halogen beams that flashed against its silver.
Decked in teak, the roof was his alone, a quiet place in which to read in the open air. From here he could see a plain of roof gardens visually broken by brick chimneys, colorful chaises, green umbrellas, and rickety grills. Though the treetops and church spires that rose amidst all this danced in waves of heated summer air, in the fading blue dusk of winter they became black and austere against the snow. His neighbors may have wondered why he didn’t have a garden. Had they asked, his answer would have been that because he would have to go to sea he didn’t want to raise plants he would betray. Had a neighbor volunteered to take care of them—the low walls separating rooftops were easy to cross—he might have added that abandoning something can be more painful than never having had it.
*
Long before Athena ever set to sea, before she was fitted out in the Bollinger Algiers yards across from downtown New Orleans, Rensselaer returned to his house in Georgetown on a cold night early in the fall. Freed of summer blur and haze, every light in Washington sparkled.
He and a lieutenant serving under him in Rensselaer’s own capacity as an aide to the Secretary of the Navy had had dinner in a seafood restaurant on M Street. They were unable to talk shop in a public place, although such strictures are frequently ignored, especially in the densely surveilled Barnacle on Capitol Hill, where senators in their cups give away to half a dozen intelligence services more secrets than Aldrich Ames ever could have. Were that place swept for bugs, a hundred entomologists would have to sort them out. But because the lieutenant and Rensselaer had little in common other than secrets, to the recently divorced Rensselaer’s embarrassment the conversation consisted of him giving career and family advice to a blissful young newlywed.
In the restaurant, old wood and a hundred gem-like bottles behind the bar in pools of light were bathed in the murmur of conversation, the sounds of cutlery settling upon china, and the sparkling crash of ice in silver shakers or tumbling into glasses. As intended, it was both tranquil and exciting.
“Our apartment is up on Wisconsin, Captain. It’s near Whole Foods, which we go to only sometimes. Too expensive. We’re near the park. It’s not bad. We’re just starting out.”
“Right.”
“What would you say?”
Rensselaer was half surprised and half trapped. “About what?”
“About being married, sir, starting out.”
Rensselaer took a deep breath. “It’s . . . it’s a wonderful time. But you’ll have to be careful. Depending upon your assignments, you can be at sea so much she’ll learn to live without you. If she’s sharp, she’ll understand that aboard ship the weight of the missions and the near-constant activity make the time pass more swiftly than for someone who doesn’t have the same pressing demands. So you might be moving on separate tracks, and at different rates.”
The lieutenant hadn’t thought of things that way.
“Let’s say, for example,” Rensselaer went on, “that she has depleted much of her energy in pursuing a highly advanced education, and then she finds herself teaching infantilized college students offended by everything and expecting the world to honor their inflamed sensibilities. So . . . she’s watching everything go to hell around her, teaching below her level, self-censoring, under pressure from the administration. When she comes home, like everyone, she needs to share her daily life. She needs to be comforted. But the house is empty, and where are you? You’re in the goddamned Sunda Strait trying not to collide with a supertanker some moron is driving in the wrong lane. Needless to say, the loneliness is extremely difficult for her.
“Is she going to ask you to resign your commission? Like me, you began as an eighteen-year-old midshipman at the Academy. You’ve spent your adult life in the Navy. You have a calling. If she asks, you probably would. But she’s considerate, and she doesn’t, so she begins to resent you, and she feels guilty about her resentment. Meanwhile, you’re apart. The enforced separation becomes ordinary and natural. When you come home, the tensions are laid bare and you fight. Which only makes things worse when you’re away.
“It doesn’t have to be like that, but unfortunately it often is. You have to work hard for it not to be.”
“Okay. Then that’s exactly what I need to know. How do you do that?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh.”
Because the restaurant was packed, only now did the waitress arrive, rushed and holding her pad. She was beautiful enough to shock the two naval officers out of their previous conversation.
Uncharacteristically, and to relax himself after what for him had proved to have been a somewhat difficult discourse, Rensselaer ordered a scotch with his meal, and the lieutenant followed suit. The lovely waitress appreciated very much that, without the slightest hint of predation, they appreciated her. And then, pressed just right, and for those who didn’t have to wear it, the uniform was an advantage of sorts.
So she brought single-malts in cut-glass tumblers three-quarters full and three times what they expected. “What’s this?” Rensselaer asked.
“My hand slipped,” she said with a slight smile as she turned to leave.
“Evidently twice,” the lieutenant clarified. “If we don’t finish them she’ll be deeply hurt.
“Never get over it.”
“You think?”
“I’m sure.”
“I don’t react so well to alcohol. And look at all this,” Rensselaer said, swirling the scotch in the glass.
“Give it a try, sir.”
*
Perhaps because Rensselaer had spent many years on rolling decks and in yawing passageways, when he walked home even Carrie Nation wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss. He got up the stairs rather well, but in the enormous, book-filled living room he lurched a bit as he approached a credenza laden with photographs in silver frames. Here were several iterations in black-and-white of his mother and his father, and in the center two 8x10s in modern color: one of a woman who, he knew, was ravishing, brilliant, and sweet; and, the other, a wedding photograph of a couple passing beneath a canopy of raised swords. Brides are gorgeous. She was especially so. He opened a drawer in the credenza and put the two color portraits in it, with a clatter, face down. Then he closed the drawer. Had he been younger he might have cried, but he hadn’t cried in decades.
While lighting a fire, his movements were exaggerated by the alcohol as it grew in effect. These were slightly and pleasantly involuntary and, he thought, somehow perfectly . . . Italian. When he stood up he walked backward without looking and crashed into his chair.
Fearing that he would not feel very well in the morning, for the next two hours he stared at the flames, his emotions simultaneously anesthetized and intensified, until they and the fire burned down and all that was left were forge-like coals that seemed to breathe as they pulsed red and then became dark crimson in exhalation before turning to white ash as light as snow.
In the two hours until the fire was safe to leave—fire at sea is as dangerous as incoming water, and in this regard sailors are habituated to be more careful than most—he surprised himself with disorganized thoughts as wild as had been his movements before he fell into the chair: deep, beautiful, musical thoughts as impossible to retrieve as the will-o’-the-wisps of flame over wood or coals, which sometimes made half-circles in the air and fled up the chimney like sprites. Such was alcohol for someone who, before his divorce, had rarely drunk it.
Just as he was rising from the chair, the phone rang. He straightened irritably, walked to his desk, and answered. It was the night duty officer. “Good evening, sir. The secretary”—that is, Freeland, Secretary of the Navy—“would like you to be here tomorrow at o-six-hundred. “I just received the call, sir.”
“Very well.”
Hurriedly, Rensselaer hung up, brushed his teeth, set his alarm for four thirty, undressed, and threw himself into bed. Despite his agitation and what seemed to him an unnatural beating of his heart, he fell asleep almost instantly. And, eventually, he dreamt.
*
Dreams are the natural art of every soul. A preview of freedom from mortal constraint, by impossible juxtapositions of suppressed desires they reveal what in life is hidden by trouble and necessity. And they can be prophetic.
Other than in combat, the national ensign—that is, the flag—is not flown at night from the gaff of a United States ship. Nor would its colors be recognizable in moonlight, much less in the monochromatic light that barely escapes a solid layer of cloud. But in Rensselaer’s dream, the Athena, which he had never himself seen, was no longer in the Algiers yards but forging through the Indian Ocean. Quietly rising and falling in perfect rhythm as if on a sine wave, she was alone on the dark sea, the ensign lofted and straight-pressed by the wind. Though it was night, even if it was dimly lit and by memory alone he could see its colors, and the white foam unfurling brightly from the bows. Like music, a ship in motion is a beautiful thing purely in itself, but also for what the eye sees. And, like music, it speaks to the soul.
As if a bodiless spirit, he watched while suspended in air off the port side. Knowing it was a dream and yet believing it still, as if he were a lookout he heard himself reporting to the bridge that he was at “bearing zero, niner, zero, position angle ten, movement of contact tracking that of the ship.” He knew they couldn’t see him. Nor did they need to. The darkened bridge was crowded with men in light so dim it took an hour for the eyes fully to adjust.
Absorbed in their jobs, now and then speaking quietly and formally, they stood their watches in expectation of both nothing and everything.
Constant surveillance and readiness made them alert to the tranquility and emptiness of the sea and wedded them forever to the smooth pitch of a ship riding forward on wind-driven swells. Minor changes in weather, wind, sky color, water, and cloud loomed large.
Major changes were exciting enough to overwhelm the senses. From Rensselaer’s vantage point in the dream, the motion of the ship, almost like that of a living thing—a horse in smooth canter, or a dolphin blending the curve of its back to the roll of the waves—seemed purposeful, conscious, and sad.
There she was, at three-quarters ahead whether in sunlight, rain, storm, or under the stars. Smaller than even a frigate, she was far from land, separated from the fleets or any ship that might have sustained or protected her. Her color was darker than even the sea, which when the moon is imprisoned by cloud has at best a barely visible wash of silver.
A surge of affection and admiration overtook Rensselaer as he watched the flag stiffly oscillating within very narrow bands, but sometimes, with changes in the wind, snapping like a whip. Though Athena proceeded as if hurrying to a destination, in the absence of a visible coast or another ship she appeared only to be chasing infinity.
Unlike a yacht, she was not smooth of aspect but roughly faced with guns, missiles in boxes, towers, radomes, antennae, and other accoutrements of war. He watched the unceasing roll of waves rebuffed by her bows, their luminous foam hushed down into the deep.
The sea was speaking to him in silence. Its message was: as your spirit rises to fill the place of appetites and illusions, take stock and be comforted, for all time is lost in the oceans and the stars. You’ve left behind the things of life on land that shield you from a truth the sea will not let you forget—that you are first and last a spirit, that you are alone, and that this can be borne.