3 comments/ 14354 views/ 2 favorites Spring Green Ch. 01 By: Adrian Leverkuhn Oh yes, things change. Life forces change on us, and sometimes that change comes in the form of a woman. Cycles of life and all the other stuff we learn in school remind us -- or try to, anyway -- that 'nothing lasts forever'... it's just that with some people the idea takes a while to sink in, for the idea to take root and grow. Call 'em slow learners if you like. While you're at it, you'd better lump me in that category. Slow, as in: it took me quite a while to figure out what was going on. So, to begin: a woman comes along and bingo: big life change. Right! That's gonna make headlines? Nope. Hold the presses! Film at eleven! Not a chance. No, the change I'm thinking about resides in memory so deep you might best think of it as... genetic. This genetically empowered change is the kind of thing people miss because the process is incremental... small, slow, almost undetectable change. And although this is my story to tell, I couldn't begin to do it without tracing the faintest outlines of my 'genetic' memory for you. I'm hoping you might see parts of your own story in a new light, because maybe, just maybe you'll hear echoes of some greater memory about your own, evidence that some larger process is at work. And I'll have to begin this story by describing the most unlikely hero imaginable. I want to paint a picture of an older man, a man in his seventies but not yet withered and worn down by time. Tall, this man is well over six feet, and stocky in a muscular way. He had hair on his head once upon a time but now all that remains is a thin silver fringe around the sides, yet when you look at him the one thing that stands out is the eyes. Cool and grayish-blue, the whites clear, they feel distant in a way but the closer you get the more you feel a certain penetrating warmth: soon you see the mirror image of a happy soul in these eyes. No eyeglasses, an expensive suit that seems a natural extension of his body, he stands beside a majestic mahogany desk; behind him a wall of glass, far below the lights of a large city shimmer in golden glory. This man is, then, the very picture of success. He is Homo Americanus, and quite proud of the fact. He is mortal flesh but in his way he is unchanging. For this man is my Uncle Chuck (that's Charles Wentworth Addington, Jr. if you must know), and I say unchanging because for him change meant nothing unless he was the one in charge of it, unless he'd managed it and shaped it and beat the ever loving crap out of it. Before he'd ever admit he'd had to deal with anything so trivial and mundane as change. Change always leaves a mess -- and Uncle Chuck didn't do messy. Change was unpredictable, and Charles Wentworth Addington, Jr. just wasn't a spontaneous man. Spontaneous is combustion, often shocking and energetic. Uncle Chuck was glacial, as cool as they come -- and as deliberate. Maybe too cool, you might say, for his own good, but in the end he wasn't immune to change. No one is. Change, like time, is a predator. Change is patient, steady, waiting and ready to line you up in its sights and pull the trigger -- whether you're ready or not. And change never misses what it targets. But let's get one other detail out of the bag up front: this story isn't about Uncle Chuck, and it's not just about change, though maybe I should make that Change with a Capital C right about now. No, this is in its roundabout way a love story. Maybe love stories, as a matter of fact. Falling in love is often a messy, unpredictable, and spontaneous affair. Falling in love often generates a little combustion, leaves a little black soot that's hard to wash off. I'm sure you get the picture; if you don't, well, just remember as events unfold that things Change. And Change almost always comes along when you least expect it, whether you're ready for it or not. +++++ Uncle Chuck lived out most of his life in an office on the forty-eighth floor of what was at one time the tallest building in Boston, Massachusetts. Forty-eight was of course the top floor, and Chuck's office was the biggest one up there. Real nose-bleed territory, or so my father called it. And to give you proper context let's add that Chucked owned the building, and the bank in it, the land the building was on and a lot of the land around it. Chuck was rich in so many ways. So many ways no one understood. Not even Chuck. He had one son whom he was devoted to completely, my cousin Ham, or Charles Wentworth Addington, III; everyone called him Ham because he had fat cheeks that looked exactly like the hamster's that ran endlessly in a little stainless steel cage in the corner of his bedroom when he was a kid. Hate to say it but I find this odd, too, because that's about all I remember of Ham, that hamster in the cage running and running and never going anywhere. I remember most clicking its little claws made on the treadmill that was, it seemed to me, its life's work. Odd, because I remember thinking the hamster was happier than Ham was, but I guess some people make their own treadmills no matter the circumstance. But, and this is important, more than anything else in the world, Uncle Chuck loved his wife Ruth, and while perhaps his love for her was just another manifestation of his desire to hold timelessness in his hands -- there was never the least reason to doubt his absolute love for her. She was beautiful, yes, but so much more than simple beauty shone through; her beauty was of a timeless sort... one might even be tempted to call it an unChanging beauty, and when I speak of Chuck as we move along you need remember her presence was always in the air about him, even if she wasn't physically with him. Let me add something in case I've confused you: what made her so staggeringly beautiful was the simple fact her beauty was so much more than skin deep. She was beyond nice. She'd come from old money yet she studied sociology, worked in soup kitchens and could always be found on Tuesdays volunteering at a hospital for crippled and burned children. Beautiful, and timelessly so. She was as beautiful on the occasion of Chuck's sixty seventh birthday, the day she passed away, as she had been all his life. Everyone at the party said so, right up until she suffered the stroke that felled her while she whirled about the room, as ever his perfect hostess. That was 1969, which I remember vividly as the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius (enter Chorus, stage left -- 'let the sun shine in'); was it just me that thought the very air that we breathed was alive with Change. Or was it, as I now suspect, a vast opera that felt very much like Change -- but was instead an obnoxious a chimera. Some might call that time a period of manifest change, even dialectical change, but now after seeing where it all led I'm content to call it a False Spring. The long winter of our discontent has yet to lift, or so it sometimes seems. Anyway, Ruth passed away that year. But 1969 was about all kinds of Change: Nixon and Cambodia, hippies and Led Zeppelin, Ken dolls and Kent State. And something happened on the moon. But '69 was also the year Ham left to fly helicopters in Vietnam. He returned, a decorated war hero, in a flag-draped coffin three months before Chuck's 67th birthday. I think that was Uncle Chuck's first real experience of the spontaneous combustion Change can release. There was more change coming, of course. More than any of us knew. But let me take another tack now, show you some other pieces of this puzzle. Ah yes, my father. My dad was the exact opposite of Chuck. Chuck was Beacon Hill; Dad was The Cape. Chuck was Wharton; Dad dropped out of Harvard to go to Paris because it sounded like the thing to do. Chuck met Ruth at Penn and married her after a four year courtship; Dad was painting hookers on the Boulevard de Clichy one morning when an English girl happened by and, admiring his work, asked if he'd like tea at the Crillon. They married later that afternoon, a large quantity of Pernod rumored to be a major factor in their well-considered decision. But more on my mother in a moment; I need to talk about the dynamic between Chuck and my father now. These two brothers, it turned out, became more than just a study in contrasts: they were instead mortal enemies, opposite particles of anti-matter held apart by all the force nature could muster. Their parents failed at the enterprise completely, by the way. I'll spare you the details. But, and listen up here because this might be important, the root of this genetic memory I alluded to earlier was buried deep within the fertile soil of their contentious relationship. What grew there blossomed and grew, withered and died -- only to be reborn again as though this cycle of despair was the product of vast tidal influences. My mom, on the other hand, has always been a rather contrary creature in and of herself, a study in contradictions in her own right, so much so that her mere presence unsettles even the most well-adjusted people and, on more than one occasion, she was known to make Uncle Chuck consider a swan-dive from the top of the building just to get away from her. But I'm not going to waltz into the DSM-IV and say she's bi-polar or has Multiple Personality Disorder; I will say that right up to this very day she's doing her level best to keep half the psychiatrists in London quite busy. Mad as a balloon, as Douglas Adams was known to have said. But lovely nonetheless. She seems intent on living forever, and as she believes this possible I won't be in the least surprised if she pulls it off. Dad, on the other hand, punched out relatively early. He'd had his fill of life by the time he was thirty, or so he told us one and all during one of his brief periods of self-examination; regardless, he was a free-spirit and died in his own free-spirited way, skiing in Chamonix. He was 43 at the time, and by then a decent if too serious architect; when he passed I was in college. Mom was, God bless him, still at his side. He soldiered on into the great void with a smile on his face even if he did cry a little. He was wondering, Mom told us later, if they served Pernod in heaven and was apparently quite put out when she said she didn't know. Dad's main vice, aside from my mother, was the sea, and that love of the sea was the one thing that both my father and Uncle Chuck had in common. They both reveled in the mere idea of the sea, they breathed the sea and I'm sure salt water ran in their veins, but there was a perverse quality to their lust and it took me some time to figure out from where this distorting element had arisen. Well, on reflection it took perhaps twenty years of passive observation to figure this one out. It has something to do with genes and memory and yes, change. And this is where I came to play in their unfolding drama. They both liked to race sailboats as it turned out, and they really "loved" to race against one another. When they were both out on the water, which was often, and when they were in reasonable proximity to each other, it was like witnessing the Athenians and the Persians during the Battle of Salamis. Splinters and shouted insults between boats, shaking fists and trembling lips, and me. The little kid huddled just out of sight -- taking it all in. I was the sole witness to their war, to the unending everlasting fratricide that defined our family life. In the end, Dad stopped racing his own boat because he couldn't get insurance anymore and that was the end of my life on the water. Prudent choice on the insurers' part, certainly, but apparently sailing was just another venue for their little war, for them to tear each other to shreds. I was not impressed at the time and you shouldn't be either. But there was more Change in store; the sea kept calling and eventually I kept sailing, for you see I too loved the water. After Dad passed-away the sailing fires slowly burned down to embers, it was then Uncle Chuck caught the cruising bug; I would -- on the other hand -- in short order become interested in girls and cars. But the sea was always there, I was always thinking about her. Soon I wanted to sail, sail all the time, and Chuck provided both the means and, unexpectedly, the end. And I think our coming together was as inevitable as it was unavoidable. Uncle Chuck and I discovered we both missed my dad far too much to let go of one another. All that hatred simply evaporated. It never dawned on me that what they had endured all their lives' was a peculiar form of love. Because frankly, I didn't know Chuck very well at the time, had not the slightest clue what made the guy tick. Dad had always painted an impressionist's landscape of his brother: like a Seurat it made sense from a distance -- but the closer you got all form dissolved into chaos. And while clearly in this noise there was color of a sort, the truth was not so easily found. Yet in my youth I accepted this Dali landscape as our collective Truth. I had so much to learn and the world's worst teacher. After college I took a year off and wandered through France, my mother's homeland -- I did so on foot mostly but by canal barge a couple of times -- and while I might have been following Dad on my journey there were deep family roots in that ancient soil I had yet to feel. And I needed to feel them. Needed to, like we need air to breathe. Anyway, call France an elective affinity on my part; Goethe won't give a damn and it's as close to the truth as mere words can get us. Besides, I found after graduation I had this completely inexplicable desire to paint landscapes and eat snails drenched in garlic-butter. Boston offered little to satisfy these urgings and Mom decided to move back to England then as well -- so off I went. But note here and now that Chuck had wanted very much that I come work in the bank, follow in his footsteps, and oddly enough it was this impulse more than any other that set me off on my wanderings. There is, you see, a certain gravity in the footsteps we follow. Uncle Chuck was a little miffed and I'm sure Dad was laughing his ass off while arm wrestling Toulouse Lautrec over a bottle of absinthe in the Parisian whorehouse that must surely be his heaven. I had been around enough docks and boats by that time to know that families are like tides. There's an ebb and flood to our anguish and joy, dangerous currents swirl around the rough edges of need. But there's a sort of inevitableness within these cycles, change is predictable within a certain range, as such change is so often apparent after a bad storm. Time heals all wounds -- even if after all is said and done a little pain remains. I suppose it's just our nature. In time Chuck got past the desire to control everything and accepted my departure. You might say he was learning to accept Change. Or perhaps the gravity of which I just spoke flowed through more veins than even I suspected. When I came back from France a year later I started at The Fletcher School, was taken with the grand idea that I might turn out to be a decent diplomat and so set my sights on working for the State Department. Uncle saw this as well within the range of acceptable outcomes and gave up on the idea of my working on the 48th floor; soon he was inviting me and an endless if stately progression of girlfriends out for a spin on the Bay almost every weekend. Then it was every weekend. On Thursday evenings in the summer it was soon a given I'd crew during the informal races that took place in the waters off downtown. We soon developed, you see, a little gravity of our own. He was a careful sailor, prudent, as unlike my father as he could be. Before casting off lines for even a quick sail out to the rocks and ledges around Flying Place the tanks would be filled and the larder stocked, his battered Plath sextant ever ready to take a quick sight or bearing-off if needed. He explained it to me thus one crisp autumn afternoon: suppose, he said, you're out on Mass Bay, maybe headed out to look at whales or cross to P'town, and the rudder breaks. Just snaps off. Soon you find yourself drifting off toward the Gulf Stream and your next landfall might be Ireland, or more fun still, Greenland. "Would you," he said, "rather make the trip with a little food and water on board, or make do for six weeks on a six-pack of Dr Pepper and that bag of Doritos?" An interesting philosophy of life, don't you think? And he was Prudent. His boat shoes were always double-knotted; "No need to trip and fall overboard, now is there!" So complete was my father's upbringing I didn't even know there were people who double-knotted their shoes until Chuck pointed this out. While Dad didn't mind somersaulting down the road less traveled, Chuck wasn't about to go any such place with stopping by the auto club first. "Always keep your charts up to date! It's a pain in the ass but keep up with your Notices to Mariners!" Always do your homework, in other words. Right, got it! My dad had always been too busy hurling the middle finger at his brother to teach me a thing about sailing; now I had a teacher, and a damn fine one, too. I paid attention. And soon he was looking over the girls I brought along, sizing them up. "Now that's a damn fine woman," he'd confide while we tied off the boat beyond earshot, or "Goddamnit, you can do better than that knock-kneed imbecile!" He was patient, steady, cool. I was coming to feel quite at home with him. And anyway, he was usually right about the girls, too. We started going out to dinner a couple of times a week, usually to talk about world events but sometimes to talk about football or -- yes -- sailing away to parts unknown someday: "Ruth just won't have that kind of talk at the table!" He talked a lot about crossing the Atlantic someday and cruising slowly through the canals of France in search of the perfect loaf of bread, that perfect bottle of wine he just knew was out there waiting -- for those willing to look. I tried to get him to loosen up, try to be spontaneous from time to time, to live these dreams. No such luck, he wouldn't have it. Those dreams were beyond the range of his tides. But come August every year we looked forward to the boat show in Newport, and it was always a fine day when we loaded up in his ancient Land Rover and headed south down 95 to look at the newest boats and gadgets. We called it Dreamville. Odd, now that I think of it. One year we went down and looked over a bunch of smaller cruising sailboats: "Just the thing, you know, for a week in Maine!" or "Hell, you never know, I might just get an itch and have to do the Bermuda Race next June." But there was a darker undercurrent inside his dreaminess: "Son, I'm getting too old to handle a big boat anymore." I began to hear this more frequently at dinner, and at each passing boat show. And while his thinking was methodical, logically methodical, it was always within that precious range of the comfortable. My last year of school, when we went to the show in Newport he talked to a couple of boat-builders about a boat capable of crossing the Atlantic, about this or that feature and though I heard him say "that's just a damn fine idea" more than a few times, I could see he had his eye on one boat in particular. "What do you think of her?" he kept asking me, and "I like the lines of her, don't you?" We kept coming back to that one and we crawled below time and again; there had been a nasty recession on for a couple of years and the builder looked hopeful each time Chuck came by and despondent each time we walked away. Late that final afternoon of the show as folks were shutting down for the year, Chuck ambled over to the builder and pulled out his checkbook. I thought the builder, a spry man from Maine, was going to have a heart attack right there. A Merry Christmas was, I'm sure, had by one and all that year. But... had Chuck been Spontaneous? I wasn't sure; maybe a glimmer, just maybe. Spring Green Ch. 01 Graduation rolled around that May and I was slated to head off to Virginia a few days later; Uncle was in a little bit of a funk. Hell, I was too. An important chapter in our lives was drawing to a close and we knew it; things would be Different. Our lives were going to Change, again. What was interesting about that time, as I look back on things from thirty years on, was how much I changed in those years. The impulsiveness my father had posited in me had slowly, inexorably given way to more a more immediate gravity; I had become a little less spontaneous, a little more cool and reserved, definitely better suited to the life Chuck had made of his world. I was driving down 95 through New Jersey on that first trip south when I pulled off the road to grab some coffee. I looked down and noticed my old boat shoes were double-knotted. +++++ I didn't see Ruth and Chuck for a few years. I spent a solid two years trapped in D.C. behind a desk, always preparing for another exam, before I had two consecutive days off. I did have three-day weekends all the time so made it up to Boston for Chucks birthday that first year, but that was also the first year I'd ever spent without seeing the ocean, let alone sailing on it. Mom got sick about that time and I landed a temporary posting to the Embassy in London; Chuck and Ruth came over more than once to lend a hand and I kept them posted as best I could on changes in my life -- but you could say those were brief conversations that had plenty of time to spare for rambling discussions of the weather. The temporary posting turned into a semi-permanent position and I took a flat near Paddington Station, an area teeming with Indian restaurants; I proceeded to eat curry three times a day and soon developed all sorts of interesting gastrointestinal disorders. 'The shape of things to come?' I wondered. A year later I had a three week stretch of vacation lined-up for the coming summer and called Chuck; he had decided to do the Bermuda Race and wanted to invite me along but didn't want to intrude "In case you have other plans." Right. Other plans? "Well, you never know!" I can still hear his voice. He was happy with the new boat and Ruth was as ever the light of his life. He reminded me of Dad when I heard the same deeply resonant, discontented happiness in his voice. Doing an ocean race like this was a big deal, he went on. "Grand memories are made on trips like this, William," he said. How true, how true. How very much like my father he sounded in those flooding tides. I started relearning how to shoot noon-sights with a sextant and use sight reduction tables to sort out the math for Altair; I started exercising and going to a Japanese place near the Embassy to clean out all the curry, and I even managed to find a couple of Brits with Admiral's Cup boats who wanted a semi-seasoned navigator. I was in training! I started to run again, lift weights. Change was in the air! About that time I had a semi-serious affair with a girl I'd met while out jogging one day. Sweet kid, really lovely: when I looked at Angela I got week in the knees. Her clock was ticking, however, and I seem to remember all she had on her mind was making babies. And taking me out to the family farm for a look-see. She didn't want me to go off sailing; no, she wanted to go off on holiday and stay with her family in Devonshire. Let's see... three weeks of up-tight cream teas or a mad ocean race with Uncle Chuck and three of his best, most disreputable friends. Still, breaking up with that girl really seemed to hit me hard. I can still see her face. She simply couldn't believe anyone would walk away from the wonders of Devonshire. +++++ I flew into Logan in late May, helped get the boat ready to race; Chuck took time to acquaint me with her updated electrical systems and the minor idiosyncrasies in the updated Nav setup. All this while we provisioned and got ready for the start off Newport. The Race Committee came by to inspect all the boats and their systems and especially the safety gear. Seminars were held on the hydrodynamics of the Gulf Stream and its interactions with the atmosphere; radio procedures for emergencies were detailed and our responsibilities thereto spelled-out. The whole affair was all very well organized and the entire process seemed to enliven the physicians he'd invited to come along as crew. We were getting stoked; Chuck was flat-out beside himself with excitement. He'd never raced his own boat to Bermuda and he was all raging testosterone, almost like a predator sprinting in for the kill. And really, the point I'm trying to make is this. The race was a big event, certainly, but wasn't it all about having fun. That "fun" seemed to have gotten lost in all the testosterone; as I looked around at the men in these pre-race seminars I saw more than a few hyper-competitive risk-takers among the people gathered. Probably bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers, all well-heeled and prosperous I'm sure, movers and shakers each and every one of them. But were they having any fun? Or were they just exporting their fierce competitiveness from the boardroom to the sea. Looking at Chuck was all I needed to see the answer. I would say happy, yes; maybe even having fun -- of a sort. Maybe in the same way engineering the hostile takeover of a rival business can be fun. "Oh yes, George, sorry to have snuffed out your life's work and put you on the street, but hey, business is war. I'm sure you understand..." Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but while I watched these men strutting about like peacocks in their plaid trousers and Polo shirts I began to feel a little uneasy. Maybe just a little out of my element. I think my father had been uneasy with these sorts, as well. Maybe he'd just taken to fighting their war where he could, fought the battles he thought he might win. I think I began to look at Chuck a little differently after that. If this was his idea of fun then we'd soon part company. I was, after all, my father's son. +++++ I don't want to dwell on the race; it isn't important. We knifed through the Gulf Stream with ease and negotiated the reefs around the north side of Bermuda with no problem. We finished fourth in our class, a respectable showing for a cruising boat, and Uncle was pleased as punch. I flew back to London, Chuck and his doctor-buddies sailed on to Nova Scotia and worked their way back down the coast back to Boston; I heard later they ate a bunch of lobster and had a grand time. End of story. Mom was better by then and good thing, too. Soon after my return the head of section called me to his office and told me to get my things in order and be prepared for a hot climate. He detailed my new posting and I groaned. I bitched. I hesitated -- right there in his office. Thoughts of quitting and returning to Boston danced in my mind, of maybe moving up to the 48th floor and putting my recent experience to use in more profitable undertakings; all sorts of crap flashed through my head -- and then I remembered those strutting peacocks in their plaid trousers. "Out of my element," I said softly as memory washed away anger, revealing cold stone. "What's that, Bill?" I shook myself physically away from thoughts of Boston, returned to my flat and packed my things. A few days later I was on my way to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. The assignment of my dreams. Yes. My thoughts exactly. I spent the next twelve years of my life there, and saw Uncle Chuck and Aunt Ruth only rarely. Sailing was soon little more than a fond if distant memory, and I seem to recall that my shoelaces came undone from time to time. +++++ He called the day after she passed away, the day after his 67th birthday. I hadn't talked to him in a long time, a couple of years at least by that point in our lives. He cried while he told me he'd managed to finally get her down to the boat, that they'd actually talked about doing a couple of weeks together in Maine on the boat next summer, and how he'd all of a sudden come to look upon the years ahead as a new and vital part of their time together. So the thing about it I want to bring up is that he seemed to me to love her just as much those last days as he ever had. That had not, apparently, ever Changed; she was the bedrock under all his life, the mathematical constant that governed his motion through the stars. Death did little more than Change the circumstances of his love. But he could no longer tell her how much he loved her, how much he needed her, and soon realized he would have to grow content with memories of her if he was to survive. And the trouble is I knew he was not the type of man to be so easily contented. Memories can only take his sort just so far. I took emergency leave and flew back for the funeral. Those were the toughest few days of my life because I knew there wasn't a damn thing in the world I could do to help him. I wonder if I failed him, even now. +++++ A few more years passed with little said between us; I really didn't know what was going on with him during that period. He had tried to forget about Ruth, he wrote once, by sailing up and down the east coast, but that had been a bust. Then one day another letter came. He had taken-up riding, was cruising all over the country on a Harley. I sat up when I read that letter twice. Chuck -- Uncle Chuck -- Mr Staid Plaid Pants Chuck? The Old Man in the Mountain whose glacial expression changed as frequently as those on Mount Rushmore -- that same Chuck? The guy who thought change was a four-letter word not fit for polite company, not even in the country club locker room? Let's see here: Uncle Chuck has gone and bought a hawg and is doing cross-country road trips? Hell, at this rate he'd join a commune and start dropping acid before he hit seventy. I asked the ambassador for vacation and got a month, then called Chuck and told him I was on my way. "Good," I heard him say through the scratchy connection, "we've got some unfinished business to get out of the way." +++++ He met me at the airport in the same old slate blue Land Rover and we drove over to his slate blue-hulled boat. He had her completely provisioned and cleaned-up, by the way; she shone like a diamond -- her teak and chrome was all glittering-faceted brilliance under the sharp April sun -- as we jumped on board stood-to to cast off our lines like I had done so many times before -- with him. Chuck brought her into the wind while I raised the main and unfurled first the Yankee, then the staysail. We reached out the inner channel under the final approach to Logan, jets screamed by just overhead as he pointed up a bit into the wind and the little cutter bit into the breeze. We quickly made our way out of the inner harbor and beyond, onto waters so familiar they seemed like home. We'd hardly said a word to one another through all this and I wondered why that felt so natural. Had we really so little to say to one another? Or did we have so little need for words? I watched him as he sat behind the wheel, his grey eyes focused on the pulling sails, his ruddy cheek turned a little into the wind to feel each molecule hitting his skin. He made course corrections with each little Change in the wind so gently, so intuitively, that I wondered why other Change had been so difficult for him. Was it that he didn't know how to react to things he didn't feel on his skin? Surely not. Then I thought about Ham, his boy, his son, and all the Change that had rained down on Chuck in the years after his son's death. Had he handled that grief so badly? What would I have done that he hadn't, I wondered: follow in my father's footsteps and paint whores in Paris? Or... had all that steely resolve been an act? Had Chuck pushed Change aside to better provide stability and comfort for the woman he loved? Hell, hadn't he done that for my benefit too? Had Chuck been trying to provide stability for his kid brother and in the end resented my father because within their peculiar gravity Dad always seemed so exuberantly, maliciously unappreciative? There had never been any doubt about Ruth's love, had there? But what of my love for the old guy? What did it say about me that I had to ask that of myself? Hadn't I been just as relentlessly unappreciative as my father? Did I love the old fart, or was love beyond my understanding too? Why hadn't I fallen in love? Where had this wall I felt enclosing me come from? Would it take the raging winds of a storm to push me to the edge of understanding? Just what would it take? +++++ "I don't want to dwell on the reasons," he said, "but there are a few things I need to go over, that you need to know." He seemed unnaturally calm as he sat there in the boat, calm even for him. We'd just dropped the hook in the bay beside the Kennedy Library; he had of course already loaded sandwiches and soda before I arrived, probably enough to feed an army for three weeks. Surprise, my what a surprise! After eating in silence, the sun on our necks and a fresh breeze rippling through the remnants of our hair, this odd turn of chilling calm felt more than a little ominous. I noticed his shoelaces then -- single knotted and one was coming undone. "Is everything alright, Chuck?" "Probably not." He looked lost. "Maybe. Who knows?" He proceeded to tell me that over the past year he'd been treated for a mass behind his right knee. "A mass?" I said -- but I felt like the world had just dropped out from under me. "What is it?" "It's malignant, Bill! What difference does it make what the goddamn thing is." "Is or was? You said it is malignant?" "Yeah, it is, and not responding to radiation. Remission's always a possibility, though. But look, that's not what I want to talk about," he turned away, turned to face the sea. "Okay Chuck, let's have it." Why did it suddenly feel like I was the father, and he the son? What did he feel? Did he feel like he was talking to his son? Or to his brother? What about me? Did he feel like he was talking to a nephew or was I suddenly his uncle? "We've got some papers to go over. Family stuff. While you're here." Now he was speaking in staccato bursts, like he had Change in his sights just before the helicopter he piloted spun out of control and fell towards the Mekong. "I've got a Will ready. Family I'll need you to look after, William. Here, in Boston." That was news to me. I struggled with the math: let's see, there was Ruth -- but I doubted she'd figure prominently in his will at this point. He had me, my mother. There was some distant family in France that I'd heard mention of once or twice in passing. But no one else. Oh! That I was aware of. I felt. Confused. A little. Upset. By the direction. This conversation. Was taking. Something was. Changing. Something big. Unexpected. Out of. Character. He was watching me, gauging my response. I remember my left eyelid twitching, my mouth growing dry. "My secretary," he said so softly. "Masterson. Judy. Masterson. You remember. Her?" I did. Maybe I nodded my remembrance, maybe I didn't. I was shaking inside. Earthquakes tore at the foundations of my understanding. "I have a daughter, William." "Indeed? Bravo!" "You know, Bill, you sound a little like I imagine I used to sound. Disapproving. Pompous." "You left out incredulous. Did Ruth know?" He shook his head, looked away. "No," he whispered. "You have a daughter, you've provided for her for, what? For how long, Chuck?" "She's twenty, will be anyway, this summer." "Twenty? Twenty years? This has been going on for twenty years?" I was blown away and am certain I was beginning to sound a little hysterical. He nodded his suddenly leonine head. He looked tired. The lonely and tired of an old lion. The head of his pride and no longer as quick as he used to be. "Her name is Madison." "Madison Masterson?" I chuckled. "Isn't that a little over the top?" He shook his head again. "Madison Addington. I adopted her some time ago. I call her Maddie." "That was thoughtful. Have you married, what's her name? Judy?" I think he was crying now but I don't remember. "She passed away, oh, a few years before Ruth." "I see. Who raised her, Chuck? Did you hire someone, uh, to take care of that, too?" "Bill?" "Yes, Chuck?" "Fuck you, Bill." I looked away. I'd never heard him so much as whisper anything remotely resembling that word in all my life, and anyway, having been locked away within the inner sanctums of the diplomatic world for a dozen years his was an unforgivable breech of etiquette. My feathers were ruffled. But maybe I deserved it. Every bit of it. I was cornering the market on assholes that afternoon, that's for sure. "Alright, Chuck," I said as I watched him, "what do you want me to do?" He turned, looked at me with all the intensity an old lion can muster: "Cross the Atlantic. The three of us. I want the three of us to cross together." The world grew fuzzy and dim and I wondered why, then I heard myself laughing... laughing so hard I almost fell overboard. But maybe I was crying a little, too. Hard to tell. Things got a little quiet after that. We had trouble pulling the anchor up from the deep muddy bottom and even the jets roaring in as we motored past the airport seemed unnaturally quiet. I found myself holding my breath from time to time, and I think I even wondered why. End part I Spring Green Ch. 02 (c)2009 Adrian Leverkuhn Part II We made our way to The Chart House for dinner after we'd tucked the boat in for the evening; going there with Uncle Chuck had become a tradition for us. It would be, I thought, neutral ground. Safe. He did his scotch and water thing and I had my usual Mai-Tai. I take that back; I had six. In about a first half hour. I was well on my way to full blown diabetes when Chuck told the cocktail waitress I'd had my limit for the evening. Oh! Did I mention that Madison was going to join us for dinner? The cousin I'd not known about until about two-thirty that afternoon? Had the trap been perfectly set, or what? She was, he told me, 'somewhat-kinda-sorta' bright. She was at Harvard finishing up her BS in biology – in three years, mind you – and going to medical school at Columbia in the Fall – at the age of 20. He was understandably quite proud of the girl, this daughter of his. He loved her, and after spending a half hour with her I understood why. She was just about the nicest human being one could ever hope to meet and, Chuck advised, one helluva sailor on top of that. She was smart as hell, sure, but she was nimble and quick-witted, as well. She had come prepared to do battle with me but visibly relaxed when she saw she'd only have to match wits that evening with a quite well-toasted blithering idiot. She came with her boyfriend, by the way – whom Chuck quite naturally disapproved of. The hapless kid had majored in philosophy and wanted to go into the Peace Corps. "Bad move, fella," I slurred, "better take up Mai-Tais!" Yes, I was charming. But Chuck had already told Madison about his idea of slogging across the Atlantic – together, the three of us. She was all for it, head over heels infatuated with the idea – as a matter of fact. Yes, a nice little trap had been set. And I'd walked right into it. "So when," I tried to say as I picked at the salad that had somehow quite mysteriously appeared on the table before me, "do you plan on embarking on this little adventure?" "That depends," Uncle said. "On what, may I ask, does this depend?" By the way, I talk funny when I'm inebriated. Learned it from Dad. I took to it quite naturally, so I've been told. "You, William." "Me? Moi?" I launched into a grand soliloquy in my very best French, no accent, about how they were quite foolish to make this enterprise contingent upon myself; of course Madison came back in her very best French, no accent, that I couldn't possibly be so selfish as to deny our beloved Chuck the chance to make this once in a lifetime crossing – the chance to make his dream come true. 'True,' I said in defeat. She had marshaled her argument, was ready for me. Poor me, she said; I had come to the battlefield unarmed. Who knew a grown man could be so stupid? "Moi? Stupide? Allez et laissez-moi en paix!" "Oui, stupide, et vous sentez mal, aussi!" Chuck, scotch in hand, watched the two of us going at it with his nicest, most benevolent smile just barely smothered. I had just met someone as stubborn and obstinate as myself. A good sailor, too. The Bastard! He knew she had me, too. I never had a chance. Not a prayer, even. +++++ Which is how, three weeks later, I found myself sitting at the chart table starting our plot as we set a northeasterly course off the northern tip of Cape Cod. And here I need to digress. Most people who make an eastward crossing of the Atlantic in small sailboats do so by heading for Bermuda, there stopping for fuel and a brief sanity check, and then, once there insanity has been confirmed, by heading on to the Azores and perhaps on to Portugal or the English Channel. Assuming of course they make it to the Azores in the first place. Then there is another group, another type of sailor. Let's call members of this group the 'well-and-truly crazy' crowd. Mad as a balloon does nicely, too. Those people whose insanity has never really been at issue, the 'well-and-truly-crazy' who walk among us, make their crossing by sailing along the western edge of the Gulf Stream north and east past Nova Scotia with an eye to skirting icebergs along a northern route that just misses Greenland and Iceland. Basically, the same track the Titanic took, only back-asswards. This route is cold, prone to sudden storms from both the north and south, and I'll not forget to remind you that in mid-May icebergs are still present in rather alarming numbers. By the way, this is the route that 'macho' sailors take, those that are racing or trying to beat some sort of record. Or just the plain crazy among us. Cruisers in small sailboats just don't take this route unless they absolutely, positively need to. As we weren't at the moment fleeing religious persecution I thought it safe to mention to Chuck that this necessity was in the instant case notably absent, that their decision to take the northern route was flawed and even dangerous. I think my first hint that things were destined to be 'interesting' was when – on hearing the word 'dangerous' – Chuck and Madison smiled and nodded their heads vigorously. C'est la vie. Il ya, mais pour la grace de Dieu je aller. But the weather was glorious that first day. Even the first few days, as it turned out, and as I began to lay out our plot on charts, the fresh sea air and abundant sunshine all too apparent, I had the audacity to think that our crossing might just be uneventful and that we'd arrive in Ireland sometime in mid-June with deep suntans and grand memories to share over pints of Guinness. Like I said; C'est la vie. Je peux etre assez stupide. +++++ I think, looking back on it all, the third day out we should have taken stock of things and turned back. I would have, anyway, given the choice. Sometime right after sunrise Madison and I were in the cockpit, the windvane was steering and I was feeling pretty good about the world when we heard an ungodly booming-smashing sound and the boat lurched sideways off a wave. Chuck was up the hatch a nanosecond later; in time, anyway, to see the nice bright blue and very nearly submerged shipping container that we had just slammed into. This metal colossus had just struck us a glancing blow and was now gurgling away in our wake, in seconds it disappeared completely from view. Our target had been one of those box-car size iron boxes they stack about ten-high on large "container ships"; while Madison and I shook in our seaboots Chuck told us that every year thousands of these things get washed off ships and float around like land-mines for years, hitting ships and submarines and occasionally sinking small yachts. Oh gee what fun! If only I'd known! And we were, I knew, lucky. Had we nailed the thing dead-on our bow instead of taking that grazing blow to the side we'd have, I think it safe to say, very probably gone down in less than a minute. The ocean felt very big those first few hours after impact and the boat very small indeed. That the hull was deeply gouged and had not fractured was testimony that Uncle had indeed chosen the very best quality boat he could have; I remembered the grateful old builder quite fondly from that moment on – and do to this day. You get what you pay for had never been proven more true. For the next few days the weather remained fairly benign: cool and growing cooler by the hour, yes, but storms had so far passed well ahead of us or developed so far behind that they posed no threat. In the middle of my watch on our sixth afternoon I was alone in the cockpit, scanning the horizon for ships or – yes, shipping containers! – when I saw our first iceberg. Humbling sight, really. I called out "Iceberg, Ho!" just like the lookouts on the Titanic, I assume, had, and Chuck and Maddie came dashing up, Nikons in hand and motor-drives firing away; then Uncle suggested we close on the berg and photograph her in earnest. And so we did. Slowly, carefully, I might add, the way one circles a rattlesnake on a cold morning, not sure of the chilled creature's striking distance, we came within a quarter mile of the berg. It was huge, or so it felt, and the water around the base of it glowed with an ethereal silvery-blue-green sheen, radiantly so. Uncle decided to inflate the Zodiac and we lowered him away; he buzzed off and took photos of the boat next to the iceberg that still gives me the shivers to this day. But within a few hours icebergs were no longer a novelty and we altered course south a little to clear the floating packs that lined the northern route that year. An awe-inspiring sight, to see the moon rise over vast ranges of floating mountains adrift below endless stars. And it got cold after that, and with May poised to become June. I'm not saying it was cool, not even chilly – it was cold, and interestingly enough I'd been living in equatorial Africa for almost twenty years. When it made just up into the forties one afternoon I grew a little panicked; when I sat my watch that night, when it fell well below freezing under those same eternal stars, I became stoically resolved that death was imminent. But the experience was so primal! It was immediately apparent out there that the boundary between atmosphere and space was immaterial; that we exist within this faint layer of gases between an unknowing earth and the vast infinity of our universe... that had never been more obvious to me and, again, I found the experience quite humbling. I felt small out there yet never had my life felt more precious to me. Maybe that's what Uncle Chuck had been searching for... some sense of himself beyond the stony persona he'd cultivated all his life, some sense of place beyond the constructs of the 48th floor. I remember him out there under those stars bundled up in a bright yellow parka and with a musty old wool beanie pulled down smartly over his ears, looking up at the sky the way a kid looks up at a Christmas tree. There was hope in his huddled form, hope that life went on somehow, but I think more than that there was the simple aura of heartfelt gratitude blazing from his failing body. +++++ Every voyage has its storm, just as each life comes face to face with events that define our strengths, and our weaknesses. Our voyage happened upon one doozy of a storm, but it found us well prepared and as ready as we could be emotionally. We had cleared Greenland and were in the gap between her vast mountains and Iceland, though both were still well north of our track, when a huge low-pressure system formed in the vast arctic north and barreled down on us. We had weatherfax on-board so had more than ample warning, yet sometimes warning induces more worry than is warranted. I can attest to that. Grey clouds like mackerels' scales drifted down from the north that afternoon; there was a large halo around the sun before it disappeared behind towering walls of the storm that soon was charging down on us from the rear. Seas built slowly with each increasing gust and I waited and watched as each new fax came in, and as I plotted the center of the low on our chart I think I managed to force a sense of control over myself, over my fear. The center of the low seemed to be tracking a little north of us and it soon looked as though we might escape being in the dangerous northeast quadrant of the storm, but as always most things in life are relative. One man's ceiling is another man's floor and all that; what Chuck found exhilarating I found terrifying. While I was struggled to master my fear Maddie became short-tempered and withdrawn. No one ate a damn thing for two days, however, and I will never underestimate the nutritive powers of Gatorade ever again. It tastes just as bad coming up as it does going down, too. But whatever nascent sense of control I fashioned soon came undone as the center of the low approached. We were running before the storm under bare poles – just the storm's momentum pushed us onward as we'd lowered all sail by that point – but mercifully the seas didn't become unmanageable and the temperature actually increased into the fifties and (gasp!) sixties. Waves of maybe twenty, twenty five feet, winds in the forties with an occasional gust in the high fifties; not a hurricane certainly but enough to get your adrenaline going. Mine, anyway. And there was Chuck, tethered to the boat in his safety harness, smiling like the high school quarterback who'd just thrown that nifty touchdown in the fourth quarter to beat an old nemesis. He was in his element and happy as hell, happy to be alive and to be with two people he cherished. He never once felt like we were in any danger so I guess Maddie and I came to feel that way too. Chuck was the strength we tapped into, and his was a sustaining strength, a soul nourishing strength. If fear is contagious, so too can power be found in a smile. Thank you, Chuck, wherever you are. Thank you for that smile. +++++ Waves towering, winds howling, then scattered, scudding clouds, gentle warmth in the air. Maddie down below making fresh bread and some kind of stew that tasted better than anything I'd had before – or since. The bloody miracle of seeing another shadow! The sun casts shadows, doesn't it? And what is that in the air? Earth? Tilled soil? Green hills on the horizon? I refine our position with fixes from all manner of bearings, and two days later we slipped into the Irish Sea. Time ebbed slowly now but soon the Isle of Man was ahead to port, Dublin two more days ahead. We could smell the Guinness from two hundred miles out and were intoxicated with the joy of our arrival. +++++ We made good time; I had tentatively planned to leave Chuck and Maddie in Ireland and make my way to Africa via London but now the thought of leaving before making a final landfall in France seemed obscene. I called Washington. I twisted arms. I begged. I got two more weeks so had three to go before I had to be high-tailing it south. It would be just enough, we reasoned, so we re-provisioned and took to the sea together one more time. And there was something else in the air now: this would be our last journey together. It was unspoken, but we all knew it. Chuck's plan was to take the boat up the Seine to Paris then wander the French canals for as long as he could. It was his life's ambition, he'd told me once, to while away his last days on a slow boat as he drifted between limestone cliffs and vineyards bursting with life. Not a bad way to go, I remember thinking at the time. We had another 700 or so miles to fetch Le Havre, where the mast would be un-stepped and stored, and time and a bit of luck permitting I'd stay with Chuck and Maddie all the way to Paris. But the Irish Sea is a harsh mistress. She often has other plans. Cold currents funnel down this stretch from deep beneath arctic seas; they collide with a weakening Gulf Stream as she deposits the last of her vast energy into the English Channel and North Sea. Cold air masses arc down over arctic waters and slam into warmer masses that have crossed the Atlantic with the Stream; when collisions occur between these air masses the results can be stupendous. The Fastnet Race is held in these waters; in 1979 such a storm formed with little notice. Of the 306 yachts that started the race more than 69 dropped out, 23 were lost or abandoned, fifteen men dead and gone when the reckoning was complete. Clearly the area is not chanced upon lightly; the prudent skipper keeps his eye on the weather. Like a hawk. These thoughts weighed heavily on my mind as we motored between Land's End and The Isles of Scilly on a mirror flat sea; it was so calm and hot on our last leg of the journey that I'd have cheerfully gone naked had Maddie not been aboard. The deck broiled the bottoms of our feet and the refrigerator chose this most opportune time to give up the ghost. No storms threatened, the only thing standing in our way during this last passage was the heavy shipping that floods in and out of the Channel day and night, and while one does not cross this shipping lane without due care, radar reduces the stress of the exercise to modest levels. So we made Le Havre with burned shoulders and blistered feet; checked into a decent hotel while the mast was removed and the balky fridge fixed, then after a few days standing under cool showers, we motored up the Seine. Calm this stretch of river is not; it comprises industrial wastelands punctuated by idyllic scenes of pastoral beauty, all underscored by heavy commercial barge traffic that roars by in a never-ending parade. But it was enchanting nevertheless. I could see why Chuck wanted to see this ancient beauty and make this a parting gift to us – and to himself. We made Paris in a couple of days and found moorage in the marina by the Bastille, then in a remarkable act of symmetry we took rooms at the Crillon – where my parents went for tea, and Pernod, the day they met. We spent a good week together wandering Paris; neither Maddie nor Chuck had ever spent any real time in the city and both were fascinated as well as good students. We even managed to look over the shoulder of a rather talented young fellow painting hookers on the Boulevard de Clichy. When I left a week later Maddie remained for a time, they spent the summer together wandering canals and following their noses, I'm sure, to each new bakery, into each new alluring vineyard. I remember turning and looking at him as I left; he was alone in the cockpit tinkering with a disassembled winch when he looked up and saw me watching. He smiled, gave me a little salute, and a smiled back, waved before I turned away. It was the last time I ever saw him. +++++ I took her call one day in April, almost a year later. He was gone, Maddie told me, after a last brief struggle with his own wayward cells. Those cells had, I think, imposed Change from within and Chuck simply wasn't going to have it. Rather than submit to their prevarications I imagined him just giving them the finger one more time and deciding it was time to move on and find something more productive to do with his time. What was Death to a man like him? I thought about Uncle off and on during the flight from Nairobi to France. I thought about sailing to Bermuda and crossing the Atlantic even as Africa rolled by miles below, and the thought hit me: were all those journeys little more than metaphors? What did they represent to Chuck? To me? And what of me? I'd been working at State for twenty plus years. I could retire soon. I was young enough to start a second career yet old enough to realize that for me that was out of the question. I had at heart so much of my father's impulsive wanderlust thrown in with Uncle's resolute curiosity, all my father's antipathy for corporate nonsense and absolutely none of Chuck's will to dominate that world; and any business sense I had was from monitoring economic developments in faltering banana republics. So what? That and a dime, right? I could remain at State simply by giving in to inertia; my life would pass comfortably and predictably into – what? Memory? Whose memory? In truth I had no one beside Maddie now; mother was falling into a fierce dementia and was beyond my physical ability to care for – she hardly knew what planet she was on half the time. I had no wife, no children, no prospects at all along those lines. And I was tired. Tired of an encroaching sense of pointlessness that lurked behind everything I thought I might try to do to Change my life, and yet I had failed to understand the one basic element of Change. Change all too often is spontaneous, messy, combustive and unplanned for. It happens. Shit happens. When you least expect it perhaps, and whether you want it to or not, Change – like a leopard – finds you unawares and springs for your throat. You don't plan on that, do you? My thoroughly worn out and confused throat arrived at Paris/Orly in the middle of a hazy afternoon in April and I made my way pensively into the city. Maddie and her current beau met me at the Crillon; we raised a quiet toast to Uncle, wished him a 'bon voyage' at dinner later that evening, but in the end we were not sad. Spring Green Ch. 02 How can you be sad about a life so well-lived? The three of us walked along the Seine all the way to the Ilse St Louis, then across the little bridge that carried us to the marina by the Bastille. I wanted to go there and see the boat nestled in her slip, find Uncle stripping a winch and re-greasing it. I wanted to hear him cuss in his own unique way when he barked his shin coming up the companionway. A particularly hard blow might elicit an 'Oh, Fudge!' but more often than not you'd catch 'Piffle!' or perhaps 'Fark!' slip unawares from his lips. I remember him saying 'Shit!' once and when he turned and saw he'd been caught red-handed he'd blushed, then slunk off to hide somewhere. No shit. He was that kind of guy. Anachronism doesn't even begin to cover it; he wasn't born in the wrong era – I think he ended up on the wrong planet! But as with everything he else he did on his journey, he made our lives the better for it. Eventually he found an end to his journey in a small city southeast of Paris, a charming medieval university town with the singularly discordant name of Dole. The boat was there, too; tied up and getting filthy – I supposed. I could just see her gleaming teak weathered and dull, bird crap an inch deep all over everything, and I wondered what I would do about it. So, you may now if you'd like think that it is of endings that I write, but I'd beg to differ with you. You might think our story had quite naturally found its way to an end, but in truth it was only just beginning. My understanding of Chuck was just beginning. Maddie was as clueless as I. Things are never as simple as they might at first seem, at least not until you clear away the bird shit. Change happens, I think I remember telling you some time back; Change happens whether you're ready for it – or not. While Change all too often marks an end to things, I was beyond any and all doubt unprepared for the beginnings that lay just ahead. Was Maddie? No, I doubt even she was. I doubt anyone could have been prepared for what lay ahead. There's no way you can prepare for an emotional holocaust, just as there is little you can do to prepare yourself for a miracle. You do, however, need to learn how to accept love when it comes your way. Even if you are unprepared for it. End part 2 4/23/09 Spring Green Ch. 03 Breathless reports came in, sightings of over a hundred tanks drawing near and more massing west of Saint-Vit to join the assault, troops in division strength. The town was in peril, there was no time to lose. No official history of the night's action remains; it was an insignificant battle in the greater scheme of things and of importance only to those who took part in it. The real war was being fought along the Rhine far to the north and east; the Americans and British were racing to Berlin, trying to get there ahead of the Red Army. Allied forces were overrunning concentration camps and encountering the remnants of unspeakable horror as Adolph Hitler crawled down into a shadowless earth to end his life. A great war was ending, a new era beginning; the running battle that developed along the southern bank of the river Doubs the night of 21 April was but a one of the dying beast's death spasms, a furiously ill-conceived attempt by the German General Staff to divert Allied Army units from their final objective. That the attempt ultimately failed was of little interest to those who would study the war in years to come, but of intense interest to the citizens of small towns along the river Doubs. All that stood between the town and the massed German infantry and armor that approached along the south side of the river was a handful of bridges; to keep the Germans from taking the town these bridges had to be destroyed. A handful of resistance fighters and British commandos worked through the night to cut off this advance, the German counter-offensive stalled and Allied air forces attacked before they could regroup. Bridges could and would be rebuilt; everyone knew it is much more difficult to rebuild a thousand years of history... and these were a people who cherished their past. Chuck Addington was one of those men who fought, one of those who helped save the town that night, though he was one who had little to gain and everything to lose. He wasn't a proud son of the town or a local resistance fighter, but that didn't matter to him or the people who lived and loved there; here was a people facing ruin and in need of his strength, and as all he had to give was that strength he gave it gladly, and overnight he became something like a local hero. The details are sketchy at best. Addington and a group of local partisans took out the highway bridge at Brevans in the early evening, the bridge at Rochefort-sur-Nenon fell just before midnight; the German formation rushed for the town but had been kept on the far side of the river and bogged down at a natural choke point near the village of Azans. The Germans rushed engineers to the front to span the river and take the town but resistance fighters, and Captain Addington, harassed them all through the night with sniper fire and grenades. As the sun rose on the 22nd a formation of low-flying American B-26 bombers arrived and decimated the German formation. The battle was over. And Captain Charles Addington remained in the town for some time; he had not deserted the military, he just did as the locals suggested. He waited for the Allied army to come and secure the area; he simply had no idea that would not happen for three weeks, long after the armistice ending the war was signed. And it was during this time he met the girl he had startled when he tumbled from the rooftops, trailing a ripped and shredded parachute, and fell so ungraciously into the Canal des Tanneurs. +++++ 21 April 2005 "It was an impossible night," Yves Bertand continued, "impossible! There were so many of them, they just kept coming and coming... at one time more than we could count!" Though there were, I think, about fifty people in the room having lunch with us, every one of us was focused on this old man's retelling of events that night so long ago. "They were shooting their tanks at us, their machine guns, and we would change our location and start shooting Germans again. On and on it went, until your uncle figures out their tactic. They were pushing us away from town, and we were all that was left protecting the river. It was your uncle who broke off from the main group, and I went with him. He was a brilliant fighter, by the way. Did you know that, William?" "I don't know what to say, Yves. As I've said, he never talked about the war..." "But of course he wouldn't, he was never the sort to boast. But he was the man of action, was he not? I mean, in business? He was very successful, no?" "Yes, he was at that." "So you see, he remained the brilliant fighter! He never changed, did he? He was not the sort to give up! No, not our Charles!" Our Charles. Our Charles. So that was it. They'd laid claim to him, at the end of his journey. Uncle Charles was a part of their history, a solid and vital part of an ongoing, evolving mythology. And no, he never did Change; he remained cunning and protective, merciless and loving, for the rest of his life. Indeed, right up into the very last moment of his life – and no doubt beyond. "We got back just in time, too, William. The German were firing lines across the river, big thick ropes; they were going to pull some sort of bridge across, a floating thing, very clever. Men were swimming the river – it is still very cold this time of year, too – and no doubt they would have been successful had we not returned when we did..." "Why was that so important?" I asked, and a pall came over the room. Yves shook his head – I was the stupid student who refused to grasp the obvious. "But don't you see? If the Germans had taken the town, when the bombers came they would have destroyed everything! The town would be no more!" He held his hands out and waved them around the room, gestured at stonework that was probably six hundred years old. "You saw the street, yes? The street named after your uncle? At the bottom of this street, down by the river," and he pointed toward what I assumed was the river, "that is where our Charles made his stand. From there he and the few of us with him stopped the Germans!" The old man told the story of that night as if it had happened just hours ago. He spoke a narrative that would soon slip into the realm of myth but for now held the immediacy of personal tragedy. He spoke for some time, and we listened. "And then the bombers came," Madison said when Yves was at an end. "Precisely!" the old man said quietly. "You understand the night now. What Charles did for us." "But why," I interrupted, "did the Germans want to take the town? What was so important here?" "Here? Nothing, but beyond lay the center of France, the route from Paris to Lyon. Who knows what was in the German mind? Perhaps to drive a wedge into the heart of France and force a change of strategy? It doesn't matter though, does it? Charles stopped them from destroying our town." I nodded. "I had no idea. Extraordinary!" "We must leave," the Mayor said, standing and looking at his watch. "Time to go to the river, to the boat." "But! But when are you going to..." Yves protested, and the Mayor cut him off: "When it is time!" the Mayor whispered harshly. "Not now!" Well, I love a mystery as much as the next fellow... +++++ 22 April 1945 He slept well into the afternoon, his body spent and beyond the grip of mere exhaustion. He had come back to Yves Bertand's house and crawled up an interminable number of stairs and flopped down on a bed made of straw and horsehair and passed out. The others in the house left him alone, let him sleep, but soon everyone was talking about what the stranger had done during the night. People came by the Bertand house to see the man and thank him for saving the town but still he slept and no one would disturb him. He woke late that afternoon, as evening came. He stood too quickly and slammed his head into the sloped ceiling of the attic room and he cursed loudly: "Piffle!" he said. "Where the Fudge am I?" He found his way to the stairs and looked at them, then remembered where he was and what he'd done last night – and his surroundings rushed inward and real focus returned to his mind. His need to use the bathroom was, however, pressing – so he galloped down the stairs. "Yves! Hello! Anybody home?" he shouted in his New England accent. And there was indeed someone home, Charles Addington found as he tromped down the wooden stairs. The girl from the river was home. She had a tray of food and coffee, stood wide-eyed looking at the giant American as he thundered down the stairs and shuddered to a stop. "Excuse me, but I really, really need to find a bathroom!" The girl looked at him, her apparent confusion evident. He tried to remember the little French he'd learned in school. "Excusez-moi, ou sont les toilettes? S'il vous plait, vite!" The girl bit her lip and stifled the little laugh she felt rising: "Venez, de cette facon!" She led him down the stairs to the ground floor and to the little room and pointed: "La bas! De la bas!" "Merci," Addington said as he hopped into the room, "Vous avez sauve ma vie!" He came out a while later and the girl had laid out his 'breakfast' on a small yellow table in the kitchen; Yves was sitting there, drinking black coffee and rubbing his eyes when Addington walked in. "God but I'm tired! I feel like shit!" Bertand said. His eyes were glowing red orbs, his skin sallow, almost lifeless. "You look it, too!" Addington sniffed the air as he took the offered chair. Cheese, some ham and bread, coffee. The food looked old and past its prime but he knew it was probably the best they had; life in Vichy France had been pleasant for the few who collaborated with Germans but very hard for everyone else. He took a little and ate. He sipped the coffee and tried not to choke; the stuff tasted like it had been made from ground acorns and squirrel shit. "Another column of British went by an hour ago; they are chasing the German retreat back toward Saint-Vit. I think they are finished now, at least here. There are many prisoners." "Prisoners?" Addington gulped. "Who's going to take care of prisoners?" Bertand shrugged. "The British, I suppose. Not us. We have no room here." The girl hovered just out of range, listened and tried to understand but her English was spotty at best; Addington tried to ignore her but found he couldn't; his eyes kept drifting to her eyes. They were lovely. "Who's the girl?" he asked when he could stand it no more. "Oh! Pardon! My sister, Marie-Claire." Yves turned, made introductions; the girl blushed but took Charles' offered hand. "She says she thinks you are not a very good swimmer!" "Ah! Well, tell her I did the best I could under the circumstances! Sorry I scared you!" he turned back to Yves. "So, this is your house?" "My family's, yes. We have lived four hundred years here!" "In this town, you mean?" "Yes, yes, but in this house four hundred years. Before that, we lived on the outskirts of town. I can show you if you like. Later." Addington shook his head. What kind of history guided the lives of these people! Time did not simply mark the seasons of life here, time was the very fabric of life. Yves was clothed in this fabric, his sister, this house; everything he saw had been woven by time into the fabric of this town until a brilliant tapestry remained. To be cherished and preserved at all cost. "Where are your mother and father?" "Mother is at the market. We heard a rumor there might be some fresh carrots and she could not take a chance on missing, you understand?" The season of renewal. Spring. Crops would be coming in, life would go on. "Yes." He knew. And yet, Yves hadn't mentioned his father and Addington knew not to press. So many had died during the war – it remained far better to let these things remain unsaid. The girl turned away to hide her grief. They left after a while, walked down to the river and looked across the smooth water to the smoldering carnage wrought by the bombers; the air smelled of burned rubber and cooked meat and Addington wanted to vomit when he realized the full extent of what lay before them. The ground beneath his feet was a wasteland of stone, rubble and spent shell casings; the walls of houses everywhere he looked were pockmarked, windows speckled with tiny holes striated with spidery cracks held the last of the day's sun in them. "So much waste," he said as he looked over the battlefield. "Oui, so many boys perished last night," Bertand said as he waved away the spirit of death that threatened to overwhelm him. "All to quench a madman's hate – his thirst for revenge." "We can be a sorry lot, can't we?" Bertrand turned to look at the university, at the tower: "But we are capable of great things to, when we put our minds to better use." Bertand looked at Addington for a long time before speaking again. "And what of you, Charles? Will you find your way back to the war now?" Addington shrugged. "I fought all the war I wanted last night." "Yes, it is a little exciting, isn't it?" Yves turned back to the river and pointed at the wasteland of twisted iron and burned flesh: "But that is the reality of war. That is..." "...Hell." "Precisely. It is best not to make a home there, don't you think? Better to turn away from hatred?" Addington stayed at the Bertand house that night and many more that followed. He grew close to Yves' mother, her soft smile and kind eyes, the way she naturally took care of him as she took care of her own children in spite of her grief. Bertand soon became like a second brother and Addington helped the townsfolk as they cleared away rubble and debris – and more than a few bodies – from the cratered streets and collapsed buildings that scarred the town. While he worked he thought of Ruth back in the States and all they had dreamed of doing together when he returned – yet... all that seemed so far away now, like fragments of a once forgotten dream or wispy memories of a life that might have been, but wasn't. And on the third night of his stay Marie-Claire slipped quietly up the stairs into the little attic room where Addington lay, and she did not leave until morning skies came for her. +++++ 21 April 2005 We walked down to the river and Bertand showed me the spot where that last battle had taken place. In the new cement sidewalk that lined the river brass shell-casings had been carefully placed as a kind of memorial. Whether officially placed there or not, these casings had become a part of the town's fabric too, a proof that the town's mythology was not fantasy. They were there to remind one and all that an American had once been among them, that he had fallen from the sky in their hour of darkest need and that this stranger had stood with them shoulder to shoulder and fought to save their history from the ravages of thoughtless men. And the Spring Green was everywhere, life was everywhere. The field that had been a killing ground was alive; the river was full of life, all was just as nature wanted. The seasons come and go, but there is always this one season of renewal to hold on to. I saw the boat through budding trees and white flowers; she was warped to a jetty along the river's edge, and she screamed at me. 'I am life! Take me!' The area was lined with chunky white powerboats – hired out for week-long holidays, the mayor told us – and Uncle Chuck's sleek, blue-hulled sailboat looked as out of place as a hooker in a convent. But she gleamed. The boat was radiant. Even from a hundred yards it was apparent every square centimeter had been polished to within an inch of its life. Dappled sunlight reflected off the hull, starbursts flashed from polished chrome and freshly varnished teak. I smiled at the latent possibility coiled up in the boat, at the memories she'd help of fashion from the raw stone of life. She had her own mythology now, too; she was a part of the town now herself. And... there was a man standing on her deck, apparently waiting for us to arrive, and as we approached I felt more and more that he looked familiar to me. The man watched us all the way, never took his eyes from me even as I walked up to boat, then he hopped down onto the wooden quay and stood resolutely in place, as if blocking my way. It was my father! My father dead and gone for decades had been reborn and given a new life to squander! Holy shit! Maddie of course had not the slightest clue; she'd never met Father. The Mayor and Yves Bertand were by my side, however, and I waited for them to smash me over the head with this latest revelation. The stranger held out his hand and I took it. "You must be William," he said to me, then: "My name is Charles. Charles Bertand Addington." "Fudge!" Maddie said. I was tempted to say something, anything, but I was speechless. Not so long ago I had been alone in the world; now it seemed I was positively awash in relatives. "Well, Piffle!" I think I said eventually. "Don't that beat all." For a Puritan, Old Chuck sure got around. +++++ I take it Chuck hung around Dole a few weeks after his private war, until an Army unit stopped by anyway, and then he'd gone as quickly as he'd come. Swooped down from the beanstalk and saved the village from a big, mean giant, then just up and ran away. That was Chuck. And ever the honorable man he returned to the woman he always knew he was destined to love. And he did. I thought he must have never returned to Dole in all those intervening years, but I was wrong. He slipped away from time to time, Yves told us, and came back to this other world, to his other family, and none of us in Boston ever suspected a thing. Business trips, I guess, can cover all manner of sin. When all was said and done, when we thought of Chuck as that poor old man all alone in the world, well... little did we know. His affinity for France? Perhaps it was a genetic predisposition, perhaps it was his life having been subtly woven into the fabric of faraway history that called him, but whatever the reason he came to die with his family, with those who loved him, with the other woman into whose sheltering arms he had once fallen. There was a certain gravity, you see, to the footsteps he followed. +++++ Charles had a fat envelope for me, instructions from Chuck to hand the package to me and me alone. Later that afternoon he gave it to me and everyone seemed to read the storm clouds boiling over my head and moved off a discreet distance; even Maddie, bless her heart. There was a letter on top of his Last Will and Testament, and a stapled heap of important documents as well. His handwriting seemed at once so familiar, so comforting, and yet alien now – like it too was just another tool he had deployed over the years to hide his careful duplicity. I'll spare you the details and get to the heart of things. Near the end of his covering letter I came upon a couple of paragraphs that seemed so startlingly like Chuck, yet so different from the man I knew: "I know, Bill, in your smart-assed way you'll find these facts hard to stomach, that you'll struggle to reconcile what you've found here today with what you thought you knew yesterday, and you'll be tempted to say to yourself that you never really knew me. I hope you prove me wrong. I've tried to warn these people here, my family, that you have a dangerous side, a callous side, but I've asked them not to judge you too quickly, or too harshly. I think you always wanted your father to be one thing, probably more like me, and you'd have liked it if I'd been more like your father. You've never been an accepting person, you've always seemed to me to be afraid of change, afraid of anything that might upset the order you established to control your world. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask something of you that will be terribly hard for you; I'm going to have to ask that today, right where you sit, that you need to take stock of your life. The time has come: you're going to have to grow up. Yes, grow up, William. Accept the world as it is, not as you'd like it to be. Accept my family, William, your new family, because beyond all your posturing and intellectual bullshit, you need them. You need them more than you can imagine, more than you'll ever know. And you just might find that they need you too. Spring Green Ch. 03 "We made a journey together, you and I, and I loved you as much as, I believe, I would have loved my own boy – because I was able to accept you as you were. You were an important part of my life, and watching you walk away from the marina in Paris last year was the hardest moment of my life. I wanted so much to tell you everything, but I don't think I could have gone through what I think you'd have put me through. So I've left you the boat and a few other things, but it is about the boat I need to talk about now. I didn't put this in the Will, and so will have to trust you to do this for me. I know you'll be tempted to put this letter away and not show anyone, but please William, don't do that. Don't end our journey together, not yet. "When the dust settles, I want you and Charles to get the boat ready, and I want Maddie along as much if that's possible, and I want you to take the boat down to the Mediterranean through the canals, then I'd like you to take her back to America. The three of you. I want you to close the circle, William, this circle of life that was our journey together. And I want you to accept my love, and my family's love, as a part of that journey." So, there you have it. The rest was about the disposition of his estate, some instructions about who to contact in the States for this and that. The sun was low in the afternoon sky and I think I might have been aware of it – but I doubt it. Had I really been such an asshole? So unaccepting, so apparently afraid of Change? Why had he thought I'd try to get out of making the trip he suggested? What did he know about me that I, apparently, did not? Or was he simply wrong? But Chuck had rarely been wrong, not about the important stuff, anyway. He had been presented with an impossible dilemma and in his indomitable way rather than submit to the inevitable he had fashioned a compromise, and he'd made it work. And in the process he did his level best to spare Ruth any pain. He'd fallen in love with his secretary somewhere along the way because he was a human being, because he had no illusions about human perfection, yet when what was done was done he picked up the pieces and made it as right as he could – and he spared the woman he loved – above all others – the pain of his humanity. Was he wrong? You best decide that for yourself, but be honest with yourself. I found it hard to do, too. +++++ Charles, Maddie and I sat in the cockpit as the moon rose, the town by our side. I read them Chuck's letter, the part about his wanting us to finish the circle. Maddie smiled at nothing in particular, Charles looked away, wiped a tear from his face. "I'm in!" Maddie said without hesitation. "What about Stephen?" Charles asked. "I think he left earlier this afternoon," she said. "We weren't his cup of tea, I think he said, or words to that effect." "Ah." He smiled. "William? You?" "What do you mean? What about you?" "I have always heard his stories of the sea, but we never had the opportunity. Of course I will go." "Oh." "Oh? You do not like this idea, then?" "No, Chuck, I do. I think it might be a grand idea... What? Why are you smiling at me like that?" "You called me Chuck, William. You called me Chuck." "So I did." Yes, so I did. I did because he was Chuck, just as I was Chuck, and Maddie was, too. The town was Chuck's, and so was this night. We lived in a world of his creation, and we were all the better for it. We went to dinner later, when the moon was high in the sky, at a little place in the shadows up a narrow alley alive with flickering gas light. It was quietly gay, alive with a sense of place, of purpose. There was a waitress there, a woman about my age, a widow. Very pretty, gorgeous, really. I looked at her, she looked at me. "Where is Marie-Claire?" I asked, and Chuck just shook his head. What else was there to say? I wish I'd met her. Chuck slapped me on the back when I asked about waitress. "She's just your type, too!" he said. "What? Moody? Pensive?" Maddie laughed. "Maybe a little, Bill, maybe." Then he looked at me with eyes I'd known all my life, and I knew him now. I knew who's blood ran through his veins. "But she has a good heart, this woman. She knows how to love." Chuck turned out to be right about her, too, and a lot of other things. I found out all about love in the weeks and months ahead, on the journey we continued together, but that's another story altogether. End/Spring Green 4/25/09 ©AL