The Last Marlin Read online

  The twenty-three-foot speedboat was narrow-beamed with a varnished mahogany finish like fine furniture. “A work of art, a sculpture,” Mother said when Abe showed it to her. It was fast—that’s what I liked. It had a big inboard that growled at idle speed, issuing a challenge. In the Long Island Sound we took on all comers and rarely lost. One time in the Babe Ruth boat, that’s what we called it, we cruised up the Hudson River past the building on the Upper West Side where my mother’s parents lived. My father pointed to a balcony on the seventeenth floor, two tiny people sitting in chairs. My father waved exuberantly. I can still see the smile on his face—he was on top. Mother sunned herself and appeared not to notice her parents.

  During the first winter my father sanded the boat down to raw wood and then, after filling little cracks with putty, brushed on a half-dozen coats of varnish. Sometimes I patted the smooth hull like a horse’s neck. I couldn’t believe that it was ours. I wanted to help with the work but Dad became impatient when I sanded against the grain or put too much varnish on the brush so that it dripped. Mostly I watched him work. It was a pleasure watching him stroke on the varnish or tinker with the big engine. My dad was a terrific craftsman and mechanic.

  When we went to work on the boat the following winter, Dad discovered dry rot. He pushed a screwdriver through the pretty hull to show me. It was like the boat had cancer. I kept insisting he could fix it, but he shook his head. “We’re gonna get rid of it,” he said. I couldn’t believe that he would get rid of it. I still dream about the Babe Ruth boat.

  Dad would often stay out until ten or eleven entertaining his customers. I waited impatiently until I heard the sound of his Buick turning onto the driveway. Then I would run to the hall so that I could give him a hug when he opened the door. Dad explained to me that his customers, his “contacts,” as he sometimes referred to them, were his true friends. Perhaps he noticed some flicker of incomprehension on my face for he insisted that I would understand this someday. By now Dad was known in the trade from Bangor to Miami, and whenever he arrived in his Buick for an appointment, he never had to wait. His chin quivered a little when he described how he was received. This made me feel very proud. Once or twice a year he returned to New England to make calls on his old customers and sold some boxes and troughs for his little Boston business, which was now run by his brother-in-law and his father. Although he was making big money in New York, Abe seemed to know that someday he would need these old contacts. This was a form of insurance.

  When I was eleven I once traveled with him from Boston to New Hampshire making calls for Lee Products. His customer would usually come into the outer office to greet my father, put a hand on his back, ask how he had been feeling. My father would receive these greetings with a devoted smile, would refer to a recent episode in the hospital as “a rough time.” One of them whispered to me that my old man was a great fighter, other men would have given up. I smiled but a shudder went through me. Many nights I had sat at the top of the stairs listening to his moaning. In our home there was often talk of Dad getting sick or doing better, going into the hospital or making a terrific recovery. I worried constantly that I would lose him. But with his customers Dad used his health as a lever—he opened hearts with his courage or his neediness, whatever it took.

  I waited in the outer office with a secretary while Dad went in and made his pitch. The longer the meeting took, the better. I wanted it to last forever. I could wait. My father was selling. In the car I would ask him, Did you make a killing? I was thirsty for every detail. As we drove to the next distributor he would tell me about how many troughs and boxes of various sizes and gauge metals he had sold. All of this was so important. After this trip I told my mother that I wanted to be a salesman. She became very upset and called the life of a salesman banal. We argued bitterly. I insisted that I wanted to do what my father did.

  Our next boat was a Richardson, a cabin cruiser. My mother actually urged my father to buy this twenty-seven-footer, entranced by the cerulean blue of its hull. On weekends my seven-year-old brother and I would fish for sea bass and porgies off the buoy in front of Sands Point. My brother held his rod with great seriousness, he wanted to catch more than I did. Usually we caught begals, a ratty little fish, flipped them back over. My father always looked so happy when we reeled them in. Occasionally a small boat would come around selling ice cream Popsicles, what a treat. My mother would sit on the bow sunbathing. She had no interest in fish.

  During the second summer we took the Richardson all the way to Montauk. There were big seas in the Long Island Sound, towering rollers. Mother watched Dad with admiration as he steered us through the waves. It was so unusual for her to look at him this way. We tied up at the Montauk Yacht Club alongside pricey Wheelers, Huckinses and Ryboviches, run by captains and mates for owners like Bob Maytag, the washing machine magnate, and Denny Phipps, who would soon become president of the New York Thoroughbred Racing Association. These were the kinds of boats my father yearned to own, stallions of the sea that could power through twelve-foot breakers searching for broadbill swordfish, makos and giant tuna off Block Island or No Mans Land, an island south of Martha’s Vineyard. “Someday,” he told me. I figured one or two more killings and we would have her.

  At the Montauk Yacht Club, everything was larger than life. In the late afternoon grand boats bristling with near unbendable rods and golden reels pulled up to the dock with eight- and nine-hundred-pound tuna and makos—fish that were stupefying, out of this world. I couldn’t imagine landing such giants. I peppered captains and mates with questions about where they’d trolled, what baits they’d used. They dismissed me as a pest. In the evening I wandered the endless winding wood-paneled halls of the hotel, which were studded with photographs of record game fish. Even the practical jokes had a mythic quality. One afternoon an enormous kid, known for his angling prowess with tuna, tied my brother by his feet and hung him from the tall scaffold where they weighed in fish. I found Bill hanging there like a forty-pound white marlin. When I lowered him down, he was furious but wouldn’t discuss it.

  In the evenings, in the crew bar, captains and mates ate thick steaks and traded stories of fierce battles with colossal fish on distant oceans. They fished off Panama for striped marlin, traveled to Chile hunting for thousand-pound broadbill. One story in particular stayed with me. An owner sent his forty-foot boat, manned by the Cosello brothers, an experienced, fearless crew, to Peru to fish for fifteen-hundred-pound black marlin in the Humboldt Current. One afternoon the brothers went out fishing and never returned. It was believed that the boat had been dragged under by a giant squid, a hundred-footer. One of the mates in the crew’s bar wore a large white shark tooth on a gold chain and spoke of mammoth blue marlin in the Gulf Stream off an island called Bimini. The past winter his boat had battled a world-record-sized blue marlin off Bimini, but before they could put it in the boat the fish was mutilated by sharks. I was determined to go to these distant places and battle giant fish.

  In the Richardson we fished off Montauk Point for bluefish. When one hit, it felt like it would pull your arms off. My mother always rooted for the blues to get off our lines, which infuriated me. I recall Dad cleaning them while they wiggled and the smell when Mom fried fish as we trolled our wire lines. Stella learned to brace herself against the seas and how to cook in a tiny galley, but all the while she knew she should be someplace else.

  By the time my dad bought the Richardson, my mother had started spending time painting in her studio, which they built onto the end of the Great Neck house. During our summer fishing trips to Montauk she drove to East Hampton to work with Willem de Kooning, who was borrowing Robert Motherwell’s studio. During the school year she traveled regularly to the city to study with the legendary teacher of abstract painting Hans Hofmann, and to attend the lectures of Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. When I came home from school the walls of the house were shaking with the irreverent solos of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker on the hi-fi. I hated this music b
ut she told me to keep listening, that I would come to love it. She read aloud passages from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I found them strange and stirring. Mother attended parties in the city where Negro drummers pounded out Afro-Cuban rhythms and smoked dope, homosexuals held hands and kissed. When she told me about these escapades I felt humiliated. My parents lived in different worlds.

  I fished despite my mother. How could she find it so distasteful? When my dad was away on business she brought painter friends such as Malcolm Morley and Louise Nevelson to the house. Mother and I would sometimes drive to Port Washington to visit her best friend, Betty Holiday, a painter and photographer. Betty lived sinfully with a young lover. Although she was a beautiful woman with blond hair below her waist, her huge self-portraits were haunted by madness. Life-sized sketches of nudes hung on her bright studio wall, the hips and thighs of Betty’s women dissolving into lusty abstract motion, tantalizing. While I tried to glance casually at the nudes, Mother and Betty spoke rapidly about art, how to get more deeply into the work. Painting was everything. My father didn’t approve of Betty. I felt that coming to visit her was an act of betrayal.

  On the way home I made my mother stop for lunch at Dad’s favorite seafood restaurant. The walls were covered with aged fish mounts and photographs of striped bass and bluefish. Then before driving back to Great Neck I insisted that we stop at the bait store to buy a box of sandworms; I always double-checked to make sure the box had a clump of seaweed to keep the worms fresh and moist.

  I often fished by myself off the floating dock at the Great Neck Estates Park. One time in the early spring I caught a three-foot eel, kept it squirming at my feet for an hour until my father came for me and I could show it off to him. Occasionally I would attempt to entice my brother Bill into fishing with me, but usually he would say no.

  Even as a child, Bill preferred his own company. He loved to walk along the water’s edge, skipping rocks into Manhasset Bay or kicking over horseshoe crabs and skates that were rotting in the slime. When I offered to come with him, he turned me down. I could never get him to play ball or to go bowling. He spent time alone with his dinosaur collection, studied books on sharks and sea turtles. He loved Mother’s rock garden in the backyard. When Mom blew up the engine in her old Morris Minor, they planted the rusty car in the garden, placed rocks and shrubs around it. Flowers were soon growing out of its windows and trunk. Bill was intrigued by his mother’s unusual sensibility; only she could really touch him. It annoyed Bill when her friend Betty visited in the afternoon and the two women sat for hours in the studio talking about painting, not noticing the darkening light. One evening when Betty left to drive home she discovered a big pile of rocks on the hood of her car.

  Bill’s only friend was a next-door neighbor, Ezra. Sometimes they would go off for hours, and more than once they were brought back by the police for breaking windows with arrows or shooting them into bags of cement piled in front of half-built homes. While the officer explained things to Mother, Bill’s expression was unrepentant, fierce. One afternoon four or five children stood on the street in front of our house pelting rocks at Bill, who stood his ground on the driveway flinging rocks back at them. When I rushed outside to help him the kids ran off and Bill became angry, lectured that he didn’t need my help. I would try to persuade Bill to sleep in my room. No thanks. Should we play together with your dinosaur collection? Not today. I loved Bill and kept trying. Bill’s taste always tended toward the extravagant and bizarre. And so it was not altogether surprising that months before his eighth birthday he showed genuine enthusiasm for my great fishing scheme. While I read fishing magazines and developed my plan, he faithfully kept the secret for an entire winter.

  My mother was planning to spend the next summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod painting with Hans Hofmann in his outdoor studio. I had learned that during July and August giant tuna, the most powerful of all game fish, proliferated off Race Point on the west end of Provincetown. I am talking about big tuna. During their annual spring migration up the coast, the bluefins grew huge dining on bluefish off Hatteras, North Carolina, and menhaden in New Jersey’s mudhole and the Nebraska shoals south of Rhode Island. When they arrived at Race Point to gorge themselves on mackerel and blues in the rip, many of them had reached eight or nine hundred pounds. Bill and I intended to catch one from a small boat. It would be like bringing down a rhino with a slingshot. We would be the talk of the crew bar at the Montauk Yacht Club.

  During the winter I collected gear, large hooks, three nylon hand-lines. I wanted to catch a bluefin the way the old man had fought the marlin in Hemingway’s book—I wanted to feel the fish in my hands. I liked the idea of suffering while the fish was suffering, one of my favorite parts of The Old Man and the Sea. When it died two hundred feet below, I wanted to pull my eight-hundred-pounder up with my arms without the leverage of a big rod braced in a fighting chair.

  Finally it was summer. We celebrated my twelfth birthday with Mother in Provincetown. It wasn’t hard to convince her to rent us a small outboard for an afternoon’s cruise in the shallow bay; she was thinking about her painting. That summer Hans Hofmann was in the habit of taking Mother’s paintings and ripping them in half, then putting the bottom on the top. I didn’t understand this. Maybe she was learning how to paint upside down. The man at the boat rental warned us, “Don’t take this skiff out into the ocean. She’s not fit for the ocean.” I nodded okay. Why would we want to go out there?

  I had purchased a half-dozen large squid at a fish market. Gunning the engine, I left the shallow bay and headed east, keeping the skiff about a hundred yards off the beach. The wind was in our faces, and there was a three-foot chop on the ocean. Bill looked into the seas with a resolute expression. After a few minutes he was soaked. Over the years, whenever I could get him to come with me, he was first-rate, a real fisherman, no complaining no matter how rough the sea or bad the fishing. That day it took us about an hour to get to Race Point. I hadn’t realized it was so far. The boat was an old fourteen-footer and each time we came off a wave the flimsy bottom shuddered and water seeped in along the seams. Bill bailed with a can.

  Finally, ahead of us, I saw the rip, a breaker six or eight feet tall that stretched down the beach for half a mile. From that little boat it looked like a tidal wave. The idea was to keep the bait beneath the curl of the wave, at the edge of the white water. That was what they said in the magazine. The giants would be milling there, feeding on mackerel and blues. There were probably hundreds of them right beneath the white water, some over a thousand pounds. My heart was beating in my ears. The big moment was here. I rigged one of the squid onto a hook and played out the handline. And then I began to worry. What would happen if we got a strike? The beast would hit like a truck. How would I stop it? What if I couldn’t? Just holding the handline with the pull of the trolled squid through the ocean was tiring my arm. What if a tuna hit and the line got twisted on my hand? But now, looking astern, preparing myself for the strike, I had lost track of the towering rip. Too late to turn off, we were right into it. Before I could shout to Bill we were clobbered by a ton of wave, sputtering, flooded, the gas can was floating in my lap, life preservers over the side. Somehow, Bill had stayed in the boat and was crouched in the bow holding the gunwale with two hands. But we were sinking. All my planning. I never imagined this. Nothing else to do. I turned the bow to the beach and gunned the engine. Bill couldn’t swim. What would happen to my brother if we went down? The motor screamed but the logy boat barely inched ahead. We were mostly underwater when I felt the bow plow into the sand.

  Bill and I sat on the beach, some distance apart, and watched the boat turning over and over in the big surf, her flimsy bottom coming apart from the sides. Eventually a Coast Guard officer came up to us on the beach. “What were you kids doing out there?” the man asked me incredulously. My mother was about fifty yards behind him, climbing down a sand dune. She was waving a white handkerchief in the breeze as though we were all playing a scene
in a Fellini movie.

  Grimly I went back to flounder and eel fishing off the dock in Great Neck. Mostly I fished alone. I was biding my time. All my friends were studying hard for their Bar Mitzvahs. I tried to study but each week I lost my books. Rabbi Guttman got red in the face fighting back his anger with me. I was thinking incessantly about fish. The water in the Long Island Sound was turgid and rank, nothing like what Hemingway described off Cuba, but still there were working birds, and occasionally small fish broke the surface. Each little flounder was a victory. I fished to spite my mother, couldn’t stand the way she painted, nothing was recognizable or lyrical. Thick lines of dark colors obscured traces of warmth and form. She was patronizing about my taste in art, which made me furious. She showed me the work of Jackson Pollock, which she greatly admired. I didn’t like his painting either.

  Occasionally I trolled lures for striped bass in Manhasset Bay. The water was polluted; there were signs posted that swimming was dangerous. Old-timers used to say that they once caught thirty-pound bass here, but the fish had disappeared from this end of the Sound years ago when the water became rank. But one afternoon I caught a five-pounder. My fingers trembled as I tried to take the treble hooks out without breaking its delicate lips. It was a lovely-looking fish, black stripes with a greenish cast in between, wonderfully white flesh when it was cleaned. We broiled my bass that night for dinner. It tasted of diesel fuel. I have never enjoyed eating striped bass since.

  When I was thirteen we flew to Miami and went out on a party boat for kingfish. When these forty-pounders hit and made their runs in the green water, they left a bubbly wake like a torpedo. I decided that kingfish were my favorites. That same winter my mother dragged me kicking and screaming to the Philip-Fort Dance Studio on West 44th Street in Manhattan, a seedy-looking place that smelled of sweat. But there was a funky piano paced by the wild rhythms of three black drummers. I had never heard such music. It was seductive and pulled me in. I couldn’t get this place out of my mind. Soon I became a regular at the dance studio. I would leave Saturday services in synagogue filled with the strains of mourning—though he was alive, I believed that the Kaddish was for my father—and take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan for my weekly conga drumming lesson that was held in a tiny back room crammed with a half-dozen of us pounding away. I was good at drumming, the best in my class. Occasionally I was invited to drum in the front room overlooking the China Bowl restaurant. Black girls in leotards would curl and leap to my white Jewish-boy rhythms. One night one of them kissed me on the lips, held her body against mine. I ran back down Seventh Avenue to Penn Station, rushed home to Great Neck in a sweat, tried not to think about it. I fished for Olatunji and for my father and for Ernest Hemingway. I dreamed of catching kingfish off Miami and of the black girl, though I avoided her at the studio. What a fool I was. She was so beautiful.