The Last Marlin Read online

  At night, in bed, or to be precise, kneeling beside my bed, I prayed with my hands clasped like a Christian child I had seen in a movie. I was desperate and hedged my bets. Please, God, let me live, I would begin. After this opening there were innumerable variations over the years. Don’t let me die of polio like Mrs. Newman across the street. I used to say hello to her. I watched them take her away in an ambulance. She was gone a week later.... My groin hurts. I don’t know what it is.... Cure my stomach. I have tremendous gas. I am in the prime of my life. Please save me.

  With so much internal drama it is not surprising that school seemed flat and meaningless. On warm days I looked forward to the final bell when I could go fishing at the Great Neck Estates Park. When the weather turned bad, I focused more on drumming and religion. After my Bar Mitzvah I became an Orthodox Jew. Friends of mine attended services at the Reform and Conservative temples, but I regarded them as frauds. I went to the Orthodox synagogue on Saturdays and holidays, and sometimes before school I took my place in the minyan with ten or twelve men, the youngest of whom was fifty years older than me. I rocked and sang doleful melodies as they did. As my own religious education had been only a single year of intermittent study with an impatient tutor, I had no idea what any of the prayers meant, but I believed that if I kept singing them fervently, I would come to understand their meaning and Dad and I would stay healthy. One morning, when Dad was away, I pulled the tangled phylacteries he had not used for years from his sock drawer and began coiling them like dock lines, trying to teach myself how to wind the sacred little boxes and straps around my arms and forehead like the old men in the minyan. For weeks I practiced with the phylacteries. If I could master them, surely it would be proof of my pure devotion.

  Maintaining Orthodox Jewish traditions in our home was an uphill battle. Winnie the maid liked to prepare platters of pork chops for the family. I would urge her to use different plates and pots and pans to make my holy dishes, but I was never confident that she listened. During religious holidays I had Winnie order meat from the kosher butcher and then I coached her, reading aloud from a Jewish cookbook. But at the table there was little enthusiasm for this food. Bill simply refused to eat kosher. That was that. Mother was in despair, painting in her studio, and rarely joined us at the table whether it was a holy day or not. As I recited the prayers over bread and wine, Dad was curiously removed. He had given up the synagogue years before and I think that my fervor made him uneasy. One Passover, as Winnie and I laid out a lamb shank and hard-boiled eggs, Dad insisted that we go out for Chinese at Lee Wong in Manhasset. Bill was delighted.

  I decided that if I could save my brother, it would not go unnoticed. I urged Bill to come with me to Saturday services, promising him sweets and cakes afterward. Once or twice he came reluctantly. My brother giggled when the yarmulke fell off his frizzy hair. He hadn’t tried to keep it in place. He was a breaker of idols like his mom. At my Bar Mitzvah, two years before, while I was struggling miserably to sing my way through the Haftarah, my mother had sat in the roped-off women’s section, making faces at me so I would laugh.

  Bill’s audacity was infuriating. I knew that during the best prayers my brother’s mind was on marlin and dinosaurs. He was always drawing stout marlin on his school papers or in the margins of his favorite books. He spent afternoons at work on his Tyrannosaurus rex, a nine-footer he was making out of papier-mâché in the garage. It took him months to complete the flesh-gulping creature, which he eventually positioned on the front lawn, braced with ropes from trees. A few days later one of Bill’s Siamese cats, Trigger, ran away, and my brother fell into a funk and lost interest in the Tyrannosaurus. For a couple of weeks cars stopped to look at the fierce dinosaur looming over Locust Drive. After the first heavy rain the predator’s head fell off, and Bill left the rotting remains for weeks on the winter lawn.

  Saturday meant religious services and then rushing for the train into Manhattan for conga drumming lessons. The winter before turning sixteen I began studying bongos with Danny Berihanas, who for many years was the drummer for Harry Belafonte. I was good on the congas but I had limitations. My hands were fast, but I wasn’t strong enough to pound deeply into the center of the thick skins, and also the weight of the drums was a problem. Whenever I picked up one of these forty-pounders with my two legs and rocked back to get a deeper bass sound I felt a pulling in my groin that alarmed me. As a consequence my conga drumming was flashy but without resonance.

  My skin color and kinky hair had made me a curiosity at the dance studio, but despite this, I could tell that Berihanas was impressed by my hand speed and feel for rhythm on the little drums. After a couple of weeks learning the basics, the snaps and flash rolls, other drummers, all of them black, would come into the back room to listen to my solos. Often we would jam, two conga drummers holding down an earthy rhythm while I snapped out variations, and little riffs behind or ahead of the beat. Then I changed gait, slowed to a crawl and played the bongos with the jungle thud of the conga—this became my signature. I held my breath waiting for an invitation to come into the front room to drum for a dance class directed by Alvin Ailey or Talley Beatty. Sometimes I would say no, had to get back to Great Neck, but I was bursting with desire, frightened by my desire. At the head of the class, thunderous drums and a rolling Herbie Hancock piano pulled ideas from inside me. Sweating women pushed the beat and sometimes my fingers surprised me tapping out seductive flirtations. The colored girls shook their chests at me and smiled as they bounded past in black leotards, their nipples like flattened strawberries. My groin ached as I beat the skins.

  I bought records and at home I matched myself against the best. I pounded against “Bongo Madness” as it blared from the hi-fi until Dad roared that I was driving him crazy. After a couple of months I knew that I played the bongos as well as Berihanas did. There was no need for more lessons. But now I had to face the troubling question of where Afro-Cuban drumming belonged in my Great Neck life.

  Mother and I continued to have our difficulties. Except for my drumming, she seemed to disapprove of nearly everything that I believed in. She taunted me for being bourgeois. She drew her boundaries with a knife. I am here. You are there. That’s the way it will be. Get it! If we happened to have a warm moment and I tried to hug her, she pushed me away or averted her face. I guessed that it had to do with being Dad’s boy, with preparing for my life as a salesman of lighting fixtures and panel boxes.

  Mother gave a weekly painting class to several Great Neck housewives. Although she only earned a few dollars Mother made a big deal about her classes, insisting that her money came from teaching rather than Globe. The students worshiped my mother. They called her a visionary. But I found their fawning pathetic. One of them was Helen Rutt, a tall, frail woman who did timid realistic sketches in charcoal. One evening, after the other women had left, Mother was offering criticism to Helen when I walked through the studio and paused to admire the drawing. When I sagely reflected that I preferred Helen’s work to my mother’s, Helen put her hand to her mouth, aghast. My mother nodded silently but her face had grown dark and forbidding. I knew that I had crossed a line.

  One evening the family drove to Montauk for a few days of blue-fishing. Dad and I were impatient to get to the Yacht Club. We had brought along jars of colorful double-hooked pork rinds, yellows, greens and reds, to troll off the point. We were ready for blues. Mother had arranged to spend the next day with Jackson Pollock. Near East Hampton we sat stuck in traffic. Eventually we inched up to an accident, a smashed car was being towed off the road. So that was the problem. The following afternoon, while Dad, Bill and I were jigging for blues, Mother found out that the wrecked car was Pollock’s. He was dead. The artist had been riding with his girlfriend, who had survived the accident. Mother was reeling. Pollock’s friendship had been a source of energy and confidence, like having a secret stash. After this loss, although Dad was sympathetic (Abe was always tender about illness and dying), she seemed to withdraw even furthe
r from the family.

  In the fifties a colostomy was an unusual and dangerous procedure. Before going into the hospital for this operation, my dad resolved to install an automatic door opener in the garage of the Great Neck house. Electric garage doors were almost unheard-of then. Dad stood outside in the cold looking at the wiring diagram. He wasn’t wearing gloves. I was freezing and wanted to go inside, but I held his tools and didn’t say anything. He couldn’t get the door to budge. Something must be wrong with the diagram, he decided, with his index finger touching his temple. In a few days he would go into the hospital. He wanted to see it work before he went in. This surgery was going to be a rough one. The doctors had warned Dad that he might not make it. Getting the garage door to open and close seemed crucial. From its leather case he removed the fancy ohmmeter that had been a gift from the head of the electrical union. He began testing wires. Nodded. The wiring diagram was incorrect, he explained. It was remarkable, one wire on the wrong terminal made all the difference. I would never have the ability to determine which wire. After Dad fixed the door, he called his secretary, Kate, on the phone, dictated a note to the company about the diagram. During the next two or three days we watched the door go up and down dozens of times.

  Mother took a little room near the hospital in Boston, set up camp for a long vigil. Abe’s sister Celia recalls that following the surgery, my mother dressed in black and sat beside his bed for weeks while Abe barely hung on, drifting in and out. True, Abe was a disaster in Stella’s life, but the idea of losing him made her hysterical. What would become of the family? What would happen to his workshop in the basement? She obsessed about the workshop. Every time there was a slight change in Abe’s condition, Mother made life and death phone calls to his doctors. She sat by his bed and willed him to live. I will try to love you, she incanted. We will stay together. I will try to make your life easy. Sometimes she wailed like a lost soul.

  At night in her little room she ate rancid tuna sandwiches and worried about Bill. He never fared well when she was away. Bill had come down with a fever the day she had left for the Clinic in Boston. Whenever Alfred or Laurie came over to check him, my brother became furious and ordered them out of the house. When he was back in school he heaved rocks at the other children. Only Winnie the maid could calm him. Winnie knew about wounded children. On days off she cared for her son, who had returned shell-shocked from the Korean War. Bill and Winnie would sit in front of the TV watching soap operas while Winnie stroked his brow with her cool hand.

  Mother would call me at night to report how bad Dad was. It was always terrible news. For me, this was frozen time. There was no world without him. My school day was a haze. I could not taste my food.

  One night a nurse shaved my father’s body and a doctor told Mother that Dad would not last until morning. Mother pleaded with Abe, You must come back. I need you, Abe. Don’t die. Come back, Abe. Come back. After hours of pleading, she could feel him returning. Stella believed that she had saved him. She still does. Who knows? When Dad was conscious he said to her, “Stella, can you lift me? Can you carry me?”

  Dad came home from the hospital with a male nurse. For about a month he was weak as a kitten, and it was difficult to believe life would ever return to normal. Mother mentioned that the nurse was a homosexual. I worried he would try to take advantage of Dad while he was so weak. I was completely confused about what they had done to my father at the Clinic. I knew about the bag he wore but I wasn’t sure if he still had a rectum or if they had cut off his penis. I never asked and no one ever told me. Whenever the nurse changed my father’s bandages I turned away. Even now I cannot bear to think of my father’s seeping wounds.

  Dad’s courage and optimism were beyond my scope of understanding. It was as though his damaged, emaciated body had little importance to him. While the nurse rubbed his spindly calves with powder or changed his dressing, Dad was already on the phone talking expansively to his buddies about buildings on the drawing boards for L.A. and Chicago. He could just barely walk and didn’t weigh eighty pounds, but we were scouring the magazines for a boat that would power us through big seas on the way to gigantic marlin.

  As soon as Dad was back behind the wheel of the Buick, he bought me a fifteen-foot lapstreak with an electric starting thirty-five-horsepower Johnson outboard engine so I could go trolling for stripers off Sands Point and City Island. I was back to beating on the skins and Dad would walk past in his bathrobe and smirk. Time was rolling again.

  We were eating again in slick restaurants. I recall the first time we went back to Chez Something-or-other, a favorite among the union guys and contractors, and the maître d’ clumped Dad on the back for surviving and coming there to eat. Dad smiled and we ordered the best dishes from their real French chef, who came out to compliment Dad on his choices. Dad could only eat a few bites of the rich food, but he enjoyed watching me put it away.

  Nights were still bad for Dad. Dr. Nelson was again making late visits, but they seemed less ominous. I guessed that he was doing some minor postoperative adjustments. He just has to learn to relax, I heard Dr. Nelson tell my mother. By now the faithful doctor knew that I waited on the top stairs and casually turned to give me a cheerful wave on his way out. But why was Dad so tense at night? In the morning he seemed peaceful enough over hot cereal. He had decided to take his time going back to work. What was the rush? he said. The Globe factory was glutted with his orders. I.R. owed him commissions for a dozen jobs, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  While Dad was still healing we looked at a thirty-five-foot Chris Craft that was up for sale in a marina in Port Washington. She slept six and had a lot of fancy varnish work. But the cockpit was small and her transom was too high above the water to easily reach a fish with a gaff. We glanced at one another and knew this wasn’t the fishing boat we had dreamed about.

  A few weeks later we heard from someone that there was a boat in Florida we should look at. Dad and I flew to Miami, rented a convertible at the airport and drove to Pompano Beach. The first time I saw the Ebb Tide she was drenched in blistering light. The expansive teak cockpit was white from the midday sun. She had a tuna tower and three fighting chairs in the stern. There was a hinged door cut into the transom for pulling aboard huge fish. For maybe ten minutes it was hard to look at her. When my eyes adjusted to the light I saw that she was beamy and high-bowed, built to devour the ocean. She took my breath away.

  The forty-footer was owned by a woman named Billy, who talked to Dad with a pained expression. The Broward shipyard had built the boat to Billy’s specifications one year before and the Ebb Tide had been showcased on the cover of Motor Boating and Sailing magazine as the world’s finest fishing boat. The woman told Dad all the custom details of the Broward as though she were relishing them for herself. We had heard that she had fallen on bad times and couldn’t afford to fill the four-hundred-gallon gas tanks or to pay the monthly dockage. But Billy talked about the sale as though it might not be final, maybe she could buy the Ebb Tide back in a year. What do you think? she asked my father. Yeah, of course. Anything. We could talk about it in a year. He was making a deal. Billy tried to appear jaunty but her body English told of a string of big defeats.

  Dad came back to New York looking forward to telling Mom about the boat. Somehow he believed the forty-footer would save the marriage. For Dad there was always a way around defeat.

  “Abe kept me pinned down for years,” says my mother. “He would have an intuition that I was plotting to leave him and then his eyes would open like pools of fear. They were pleading with me. ‘Stella, I need you to stay alive.’ He submerged me in those eyes. I was paralyzed. Every time I prepared to go, Abe went into the hospital again. I would say to my father and sister, I can’t leave Abe because he needs me.”

  By now I.R. was appalled by his son-in-law, who he believed would do anything to close a deal, even dangle Stella as bait. My grandfather must have felt burdened by his own role in Stella’s un-happiness. He had urged her t
o make this marriage and then had brought Abe back to New York and put him into the business against Stella’s wishes.

  Mother continued to warn me that she was going to divorce my father. One time she and I argued bitterly. I said to her that she was just being difficult. Ruining things. She was playing a game. I reasoned with her as if she were a child. You are messing things up. It is the same thing you do in your painting. Our fight escalated. You wouldn’t dare leave him, I sneered at her. Mother ran into the kitchen and came back with a butcher knife. She held it over my head. I dared her to use it.

  Afterward I reflected on my power—that I could provoke such a scene. Then I began to worry that she might actually leave him, just to prove to me that she was capable. At night I would tell Bill about my fears. I believed that if he were my ally, then she could never leave Dad. In his room, while he played with his dinosaurs, I explained how terrible it would be for us. All the fishing would stop, all the great catches. Dad would get rid of the Ebb Tide before we ever had a chance to put over our lines. What a preposterous idea. Who would take us to restaurants? What would happen to us? My brother would silently pit his Tyrannosaurus rex against his Stegosaurus, set his jaw. I could not reach him with my logic. To him, my father was a tyrant who ranted and raved. Bill wanted to live in the Great Neck house with Mother and his cats, spend afternoons in the rock garden. Dad and I could live on a different planet. I sensed it was Bill who could sway the balance. His silence made me feel more desperate than Mother’s fury.