“So,” Clarice said, “this guy you picked up on the beach is teaching you how to sail.”
Whitney sat beside her on the promontory behind the Barkley house, watching the sun set over the water while Clarice sneaked a cigarette. “This particular guy,” Whitney rejoined, “crewed for your dad in summer races. So I guess he qualifies as a sailing instructor.”
Clarice gave her a droll look. “If you were interested, he might instruct you in several areas of life.”
Whitney ignored this. “Do you know him?”
“I’ve seen him. He used to help cater my parents’ parties. You don’t forget someone who looks like that.” Exhaling smoke, Clarice added carelessly, “Anyhow, my dad is willing to trust him with his precious boat. I’ll look forward to a full report.”
Whitney resolved not to let Clarice tease her into a defensiveness she did not feel. In her most innocent voice, she replied, “Thank you, Clarice. Have I ever withheld anything from you?”
The Barkley’s Herreshoff was moored about one hundred feet off a catwalk on Quitsa Pond. When they arrived, Clarice was standing on the catwalk, one hand on her hip, another leaning on a post, her pose—which Whitney thought it was—casual yet proprietary. Extending her hand, Clarice gave Ben an amused appraising look. “I’m Clarice Barkley.”
“I know you are.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Pretty much everyone does. But I think you already know mine.”
Clarice’s look of amusement resurfaced. “Hi, Ben.”
“Hi, Clarice. How’s your summer going? No tragedies, I hope.”
“None at all. Actually, Whitney is providing the high point. I’m playing an indispensable role in shepherding her into matrimony.”
“I’ll bet. Are you getting married, too? Or will you have to find a job?”
Standing to the side, Whitney felt like a spectator. Though Clarice and Ben were virtual strangers, there seemed to be a contest between them, taking place in some undefined place between aversion and flirtation—flirtation on her part, perhaps dislike on his. “I’ve considered employment,” she said in airy self-satire. “Let’s just say that it’s under advisement.”
Folding his arms, he glanced at the sailboard, a gesture clearly meant to signal his impatience. “I wouldn’t rush things. Someone has to keep the ‘idle’ in ‘idle rich.’”
Clarice gave him a measuring look. “Lassitude is such a burden. But at least it keeps me busy.” Glancing at her watch, she added, “In fact, I’m late for a tennis lesson.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ben said dismissively. “Formally, at least. I never spilled wine on your dress, did I?”
“Not that I recall.” Turning to Whitney, she said, “Call you tomorrow,” and left without another word to Ben. Nor did he mention Clarice.
They rowed out to the sailboat in a dinghy. Mooring it, they climbed onto the trim wooden boat. “It’s beautiful,” Whitney said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
“It’s from the early part of the twentieth century, made as a sporting boat for the wealthy. They call it a Herreshoff twelve and a half—its length on the waterline.” He gestured at one of two benches opposite each other. “Sit over there, and we’ll talk about what we’re doing.”
Whitney complied. “The whole point of the exercise,” he began, “is good seamanship, safety, and enjoyment. This is a great boat to learn on—comfortable, responsive, simple in design, and, most of all, beautiful under sail. They don’t make them like this now.”
The usual irony in his voice had vanished altogether, replaced by an unalloyed appreciation of the craft and its abilities. Infected by his mood, Whitney asked, “When do we start?”
“Not today. It’s essential to know a boat before you sail it.” The sardonic note returned. “Sailing a Herreshoff isn’t like driving a Fiat.”
The glancing reference to Clarice pricked Whitney’s curiosity. “Can I ask what the Bogart and Bacall routine was all about?”
“Is that what you thought it was? She isn’t Bacall, and I’m certainly not Bogart—I wasn’t having enough fun.” His manner became brisk. “Back to why we’re here, each part of this boat has a function, and a name. Before you learn how to sail, you have to master the language. So let’s start.”
Ben pointed at the sails. “The largest is its mainsail,” he told her, “the smaller the jib. The two lines controlling them are the main and jib sheets. Watch, and I’ll show you how to hoist them.”
As he did, Ben pointed out the arrow atop the mast that showed the direction of the wind, then started naming other parts of the boat. For Whitney, terms like “bow,” “tack,” “gaff,” and “head” were as bewildering as a foreign tongue. “I’ll never remember all this,” she protested.
“Don’t need to.” He took some folded papers from the pocket of his jeans. “I drew you up some diagrams with everything labeled. The artistry isn’t great, but they’re good enough to help you pass the exam.”
“What exam?”
“The one you’re taking before you sail the boat.”
Whitney felt herself bridle. “This isn’t first grade, Ben.”
“Just the functional equivalent. I want you to know this boat as well I did before I sailed it. When George Barkley let me take the tiller, it was one of the biggest privileges of my life.”
The reverence in his tone surprised her. “Did you ever race it yourself?”
“I did.” He spoke softly, gazing at the sailboat. “Someday I mean to own a boat just like it. Perhaps even this one.”
“I don’t know if Mr. Barkley would ever sell it.”
“You never know. I can’t see your friend bothering with it, and as near as I can make out, she’s an only child. She certainly acts like one.” He handed her the drawings. “Anyhow, take a look at these, and compare them to the real thing. It’ll be easier to remember than you think.”
Whitney began. Leaning back, Ben gazed out at Quitsa Pond in the bright sun of early afternoon, the woods and meadows on the gently sloping hills surrounding it half-concealing the houses—some old, some very new—which had a charmed perspective on the pond. With the sun on his face, Ben seemed to relax, his expression softening. After awhile, Whitney looked up at him again. “You must love this place,” she said. “What was it like growing up here?”
“It had its moments. A life lived outdoors is bound to. You learn things other people don’t.”
He still had not mentioned his family, Whitney realized. “Did your dad teach you how to sail?”
Without looking at her, Ben gave a quick explosive laugh. “My father was a lobsterman. All he taught me was to set lobster pots, like his father taught him. My brother and I learned to sail by begging our way onto rich men’s boats.”
Whitney hesitated, then let her curiosity take over. “Are your parents still living?”
“If you can call it that. As far as I know, Dad’s still breathing. Long ago I learned to my sorrow that being dead drunk isn’t the same as being dead. My solution is not to deal with my father or my poor pathetic mother. Unless Jack ratted me out, they don’t even know I’m back.”
If anything, his emotionless monotone made the words more corrosive. Groping for a response, Whitney said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Early on I learned a valuable lesson—that family can be a snake pit, with all the Rockwellian archetypes of love and warmth rubbing salt into the gaping wounds of reality. It’s the setting in life where the gap between reality and myth is the widest and most damaging, all the more so because family claims us at birth and never lets go. Hobbes disguised as Santa Claus.”
Thinking of Janine, Whitney wondered at the protective instinct that made her say, “Maybe I’m lucky, but my family isn’t like that.”
Removing his sunglasses, Ben gave her a long, skeptical look. “Fitzgerald said to Hemingway that ‘the rich are different.’ No doubt your parents are well educated and well mannered—as Hemingway retorted, ‘they have more money.’ But Yale gave me a window into the pretenses of the privileged. Affluent families can be even more lethal because their lies are more seductive, their methods of entrapment more subtle and sophisticated. Maybe when your father is a vicious, ill-educated drunk, and your mother timid and weak-willed, they’re harder to sentimentalize. But don’t you ever stand outside your family and question it?”
“Of course,” Whitney said at once. “But that’s different than being trapped in a lunatic asylum. Which is how you make it sound.”
“Which is how it felt,” Ben said, his tone matter-of-fact. “For islanders, they say, this is the poorest place in Massachusetts, with the richest life. For some that’s no doubt true. Most people here farm or hunt or fish or grow things—they learn how to cope and how to share. A lot of them have extended families to help out. But my father was an only child—a drunk, an isolate, and mean as a snake. So we were on our own.
“The only relief came at night, after he’d passed out. On summer evenings I’d lie in the bedroom with Jack, listening in the dark to the Red Sox games, the announcers’ voices and the sound of the crowd barely audible through the static, and try to imagine I was there in Fenway Park. I didn’t want Jack to say a word, shatter the illusion. After a while I forgot our dad sleeping in his chair, or our mom praying he didn’t wake up and hit her, and imagined that Ted Williams was my father—not just the greatest hitter who ever lived, but a fighter pilot in two wars, an ace, who gave up five of the best years of his career rather than be a coward. And I swore I’d become like him.”
Surprised by this moment of self-revelation, with its undertone of melancholy and desperate hope, Whitney thought of her first memory of baseball. Her father was a fan of the Yankees, the Red Sox’s hated rivals; the Yankees’ president, a neighbor in Greenwich, had given her a baseball cap and a ball signed by Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and their housekeeper Billie’s favorite, Elston Howard. But none of these heroes held the totemic power Ted Williams did for Ben. Perhaps he needed to identify with Williams—or Robert Kennedy—in order to reinvent himself; compared to fighting in two wars, or running for president, dropping out of Yale was a mere down payment on courage. Then Whitney remembered interviewing her own father for a school project on family history. In contrast to his usual indulgence of her, Charles had been terse—his only interest was in the present, he told her, and the future. Instinctively, she sensed that he did not like to remember himself without money or advantages; it was as though he might become that person again, the solid ground of his achievements collapsing beneath him unless he were able to control his surroundings. But Ben had not yet left himself behind, Whitney saw—his scars were too fresh, and any hope of success lay in the future.
Aware of her own silence, she said, “How did that affect your brother?”
“Jack?” Ben repeated with veiled scorn. “It shrunk him. I’d watch my father beat my mother, then turn to Jack—two years older—praying he’d do something. He never did.” Ben stared out at the pond, and Whitney could feel the rage trapped inside him escaping in words her presence had somehow catalyzed. “That’s the reason I won’t go to prison to avoid Vietnam, anymore than I’d run off to Canada. It was prison enough watching Jack placate our father, or tell our mother not to provoke him. Only cowards turn petty tyrants into gods.” He paused, then spoke more deliberately. “When I was fifteen, I realized that it was going to be one of us—my father, or me. So I decided to take control for good.”
The iron in his tone left Whitney caught between dread and curiosity. “How?” she asked.
Still Ben did not look at her. “I studied a book on boxing. Then I hung up a heavy bag in a neighbor’s barn and tore into it everyday after school. Not to let the anger out, but to train, until the stuffing bled through the canvas. A sign from God, I thought.
“That night, at dinner, my father slapped my mother—there was something about the stew he didn’t like. She was cowering in a corner with that same look of incomprehension, a small animal petrified of a big one. I got up from the table and grabbed him by the wrist. ‘You’re a pussy,’ I told him. ‘Good only for beating up women and small boys. You’re just smart enough to know I’ve gotten way too big for that. But way too stupid to know what that means.’”
Whitney felt her stomach clench. “The bastard’s eyes get big,” Ben continued. “Suddenly he takes a swing at me. I duck, like I’ve taught myself, and Jack tries to step between us. ‘Get out of my way,’ I shout at him, ‘or you’ll come next.’” Ben’s speech quickened. “Jack backs up a step. Before my father can move I pivot sideways and hit him in the gut with everything I’ve got. He doubles over, groaning. As he struggles to look up at me, I break his nose with a right cross.” Ben’s voice was thick now. “His blood spurts on the floor. I’m breathing hard, years of hatred welling up. ‘Remember hitting me?’ I manage to say, and send a left to his mouth that knocks out his front teeth.
“My father starts blubbering, and he looks like Halloween. I pull him up by the throat and press my thumbs on his larynx ’til his eyes bulge. ‘I run this house now,’ I told him. ‘You just live here. Hit her again, and I’ll cut your balls off with a butter knife.’”
Whitney felt herself recoil. Suddenly Ben stopped himself, as though sensing her reaction. He breathed once, then turned to her, eyes filled with shame and fierceness, his mouth twisted in a smile of self-contempt. “Listen to me,” he said in a chastened voice, “awash in self-pity masked as heroics. I never talk to anyone like this. God knows why I inflicted myself on you.”
“People talk to me, Ben. They always have. As strange as that may seem to you.”
Ben looked at her intently. “Not so strange,” he said more softly. “Anyhow, I’ve kept you here long enough.”
Whitney did not protest. On the trip home, Ben said almost nothing. He stopped at the foot of her driveway, well short of the house. To her surprise, he got out of the truck as she did.
Once more his tone was expressionless, his face closed. “I’m sorry, Whitney. You didn’t need any of that. I’m not quite right yet, and I’ve spent too much time alone.”
“I didn’t mind listening, really. A lot has happened to you.”
The smile he gave her was more like a grimace. “If you want to, we can try this again in a few days. Without the family portrait.”
“I’d like that,” Whitney told him, unsure of whether she would. As if perceiving this, he turned abruptly, got back in the truck, and drove away.
She watched him go, trying to imagine how it felt to be Benjamin Blaine. Then she heard footsteps on the gravel.
Turning, she saw Peter, freshly arrived on the Vineyard, still wearing a suit from work. “Who was that?” he asked.
“Just a guy I met—the caretaker next door. He’s teaching me how to sail.”
Peter’s usually guileless eyes were questioning. “Looked to me like you were pretty caught up in him.”
“Hope so. Mom always taught me to look at whoever was speaking to me.” Before he could answer, she kissed him, pressing her body against his. “Only two days, and I’ve missed you already.”
Mollified, Peter took her hand. “Not as much as I’ve missed you. Why don’t we get a gin and tonic? Pretending to be a grown-up is hard work.”
The next morning, Whitney drove to Dogfish Bar alone. Instead of swimming first, she opened her journal, wanting to write but unsure of where to start. Finally, she began.
I’ve never met anyone like him. Maybe this is melodramatic, but somehow I think he’ll end up famous—or dead. There’s something brilliant about him, and something terribly damaged. If I truly believed in prayer, he’s someone who I’d pray for.
She stopped, thinking about his family, feeling lucky in her own. Then honesty caught up with her, and she picked up the pen again.
I’ve done nothing about Janine.