Ice Brothers (3 page)

“Is the place furnished?”

“Yes,” Paul replied, though he wasn't dead sure. “Anyway, it will be easy to get everything together. The Hendersons are nice people.”

He didn't really know the Hendersons, but he figured they must be nice people if they were friends of Lucy and Erich.

“That's great,” Christiansen said. “Look, everything's so jammed up around here that it would be days before we got your forms in the mail. I'll stick them in my pocket and bring them to the Henderson house tonight. Drop in maybe at about seven and we can have a drink.”

And so that was the way Paul got a commission in the Coast Guard as quickly as he did. There were a few people who said he used pull and political pressure, but all he did was to get a guy an apartment and study like hell for six weeks to pass the twelve-hour examination.

The speed with which Paul made all these arrangements bewildered Sylvia. All her classmates, after all, were planning to finish their college year before entering the service. “You'd think you just can't wait to leave me,” she said reproachfully in their bedroom one night after they had made strangely unsatisfactory love.

“You know that isn't it at all.”

“Well, what
is
it then?”

He found it difficult to give an answer except to cite patriotism, which he knew would be mostly a lie. He wanted to help defend his country, all right, but he wasn't really in such a great rush to get out there where the shells were flying and the hurricanes were blowing. No, the truth was that naive though it might sound, there was a lot of joy involved in getting a commission. For one thing, he found that temporarily, at least, he would outrank his condescending older brother. While training to be an army air force pilot, Bill would be an enlisted man, while as an ensign Paul would be the equivalent of a second lieutenant. If they ever met in uniform, which Bill's assignment to flight instruction would probably make unlikely, tall Harvardman Bill would have to salute his miserable little Boston University brother. It was obviously wrong to feel glee about that, but Paul did anyway.

It was also true that the war, whatever horrors it might hold for him, was getting him away from a lot of things he hated. Most of all, his own confusion about his marriage, his career and everything else. This confusion, he realized, was by no means entirely Sylvia's fault. It had started, so far as he could understand, when he was fifteen years old and his family had moved from the big house in Boston to the cottage in Milton. The old yawl on which he had spent the happiest summers of his life had been left under cover in the shipyard and had not been sold only because his father was insulted by the only kind of price she could bring during those Depression years. Right before his eyes, his father changed from a big exuberant stockbroker and yachtsman to a hesitant old man who sat all day in his “studio” puttering with paint brushes or whittling chains out of wood. His business failure was never discussed by the family, and this silence increased its terror.

Paul and his brother, who was three years older, reacted to this debacle in different ways. Bill got a football scholarship at Harvard, earned his degree in only three years, and got a scholarship at the business school. Big, brash and self-confident, Bill never even gave the appearance of working hard to win his victories.

What Paul did at the age of fifteen was quite different. He hated athletics and his studies at Milton Academy and, when he could not get a scholarship, was the first to suggest that he go to the local high school. The only thing he really loved was boats, and he spent a lot of time helping his father to paint and varnish the old yawl to prepare her for a customer who would appreciate her already antique grace. He also loved girls—hopelessly. Almost as far back as he could remember he had been secretly infatuated with one or another of the girls at his school or at the Boston Yacht Club.

When he was sixteen Paul discovered something else he liked: money. Money was such a tortuous subject in his home that like failure and sex, it could never be discussed openly. The discovery that he could actually make money himself instead of asking his mother for quarters came to Paul as a revelation and a liberation.

He made his first dollar, ten dollars in fact, when he varnished the combing of a Wee Scot at the yacht club. He had simply been trying to make himself valuable as a crew, and he was astonished when the owner gave him a ten-dollar bill. The first thing he did after that was to put a notice up on the club bulletin board offering his services. During the summer he had all the work he could do, and that fall he got the idea of taking spars, oars, and rudders back to his garage and cellar for refinishing.

Soon he found that he could sell magazine subscriptions, wash cars, and sell magic tricks at school for more than he paid for them. Later he discovered that he could sell clothes from a local tailor to his classmates. There was no mystery about money—there was an infinite number of ways in which it could be made. He started a savings account.

“You take after my father,” his mother said proudly. “He was always a wonderful businessman.”

The trouble was that Paul wanted to make money without becoming a businessman, which seemed to him to be a very boring fate. When he was sixteen he came across a book by Warwick Tompkins, who took college boys on long ocean cruises aboard the
Wanderbird
, a stately old pilot boat, and at the Boston Yacht Club, he actually met Irving Johnson, who was doing the same thing with the clipper-bowed schooner
Yankee
. Here were men who were sailing the world and getting their crew to pay the expenses! They were adventurers who found ways to make money by doing exactly what they wanted during their best years instead of spending a lifetime at dull jobs with the hope of escape during their old age.

Because of these men Paul began to dream and his dreams seemed to him to be practical. Somehow he would earn enough money to fix up his father's old yawl, and would find college students to serve as a paying crew during short summer cruises. After he graduated from college, he would take such a crew around the world, just like Warwick Tompkins and Irving Johnson.

When Paul's older brother realized that it actually might be possible to make a little money running cruises to Gloucester, Nantucket, and Provincetown, and that the old yawl was a wonderful place for parties, he helped, and their father was also delighted to find a way to avoid selling the
Valkyrie
. They made the first stage of Paul's dream a family project, and he rarely discussed the later stages he had in mind with anyone.

Except Sylvia. When he first met her, she was sixteen and he was seventeen, and he had the old yawl moored off the end of the yacht club pier while he and his brother were readying her for their first cruise to Nantucket.

“Is that your boat out there?” she asked when he rowed the dinghy to the float.

“Yes,” he said with the deep pride which the old yawl always gave him. At sixteen, Sylvia was already a vividly pretty young woman who usually danced with the older boys and she never before had paid any attention to him. She was wearing a green bathing suit and he was afraid to look at her for more than a moment.

“Could that boat cross an ocean?”

“You bet. I'm going to sail her around the world.”

Tossing up her chin, she laughed. “When?”

“As soon as I get out of college,” he said, although he had not yet graduated from high school.

She grinned, and there was that wildness in her eyes which seemed to make anything possible. “Will you take me with you?”

“It's a date,” he said. “Would you like to go out and take a look at her first?”

He was aware from the beginning that Sylvia did not know anything about boats and scorned the discomforts of the sea, but he sensed that she was an adventurer, a rebel like him. The first hour she was aboard the
Valkyrie
, she went scampering up the rigging and stood poised on the crosstrees, balancing with one hand on a shroud.

“Be careful!” he shouted.

“Come on up! I can see the whole harbor.”

Much as he loved boats, he had always been afraid of heights, but he mustered the courage to climb the rigging and stand on the other side of the crosstrees. The view was indeed grand up there fifty feet above the deck if he didn't look down.

“Have you ever dived from here?” she asked.

“No!”

“The top board on the club tower is almost this high.”

“But here you might fall before you got clear.”

She smiled and there was that look in her eyes again when she said, “I dare you!”

“Don't, I—”

Before he could say more she launched herself into the air and swooped toward the metallic surface of the water, her arms outstretched. His mixture of anger and admiration turned to fear when he realized that she was not really a very good diver. She hit much too flat, and when the explosion of foam fell around her, he saw her come slowly to the surface, looking wounded, out of breath and scared. Forgetting his own safety, he jumped, pushing himself off the rigging more effectively than he could in a dive. Plummeting into the water a dozen feet from her, he swam rapidly toward her. She had recovered her breath and was laughing.

“You looked so funny,” she said. “All the time you were falling, your arms and legs were moving as though you were trying to climb up!”

He had been angry at her and totally unable to resist her. That's the way he had stayed, year after year.

One of the confusing things about Sylvia was that despite her wild ways, she was in certain matters very conventional.

In public she played a teasing game, but in private she was scared and angry when he tried to go beyond a kiss. When at the age of seventeen he couldn't stop himself from telling her that he loved her, she said she loved him too, but her family would be furious if she paid too much attention to any one boy. They were, she pointed out with perfect logic, much too young even to dream about getting engaged. If he had any idea of getting married even in the distant future, he should start thinking of doing something more substantial with his life than sailing an old yawl around the world.

He realized that if he seriously wanted to pursue his dream, he should forget her, but that was impossible—when he came right down to it, he had to admit that even if he had to take a dull job, life with Sylvia offered more excitement than even a voyage around the world without her. When he failed to get into Harvard College he felt terrible, especially since he knew that she went to almost all the dances there. He enrolled in Boston University instead of Columbia, which had accepted him, because he couldn't stand the thought of leaving her.

Paul's brother, Bill, often made fun of his obsession with Sylvia.

“You're going to get nothing but trouble from her,” he said. “Right now she's a cockteaser, damn near the queen of that whole sorry tribe. In a year or two she'll start putting out, but not for a poor slob like you who's been running after her forever. She'll put out for some guy she thinks she can't get any other way, some smart bastard who won't fall for her line of crap.”

Paul hated his brother for saying that but was afraid that he was right. He also suspected that Bill might have some hope of being the smart bastard he'd described. Bill never asked Sylvia to go out, but he often cut in on her at dances, and prided himself on insulting her whenever possible.

“Sylvia, you're not as pretty as you think,” Bill said one night when Sylvia arrived at a yacht club dance, resplendent in a new silver evening gown.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she replied with a smile. “Good old Bill always has a surly word for everyone.”

“Ah, but my insults are sincere,” Bill said. “You can't accuse me of saying things I don't really mean.”

At this point Paul cut in on them.

“Take her, she's all yours,” Bill said, and strode away with a laugh.

“I apologize for him,” Paul began.

“Don't bother. Your brother thinks that insults are charming. He's doing his poor best to please.”

In her eighteenth year something seemed to happen to Sylvia. She lost much of her self-confidence. Perhaps she found that the precocious exuberance which had brought her so much attention in her early teens didn't work so well at the big coming-out parties to which she was invited because her parents had managed to get her on the proper lists, despite the fact that she had not made a formal debut. Boston society had a way of putting down the daughters of the newly rich, especially when they weren't so very rich, and Sylvia's manners were not calculated to impress the old guard. Instead of toning herself down, she became more flamboyant than ever. It was at this time that she began drinking so much at cocktail parties that Paul began to worry about her. Once she fell while trying to climb up on a marble coffee table to demonstrate some sort of dance, and the laughter was not entirely friendly as Paul helped her out to his car. She cried all the way home.

Maybe more important things happened to Sylvia during her eighteenth year than discovering that not all the doors in the world were open to her, Paul sensed. Perhaps she had her first real love affair and was severely hurt by it. She never mentioned such a thing, but there were weeks when she didn't see Paul, pleading that she was ill or had other engagements. His brother, Bill, as usual had something hurtful to say.

“I hear Ted Barrington is taking her out. He's a real cocksman. I bet he's breaking her in.”

Ted Barrington was a varsity football player at Harvard and the son of a famous Boston lawyer.

“Ted took me out just once and we didn't do anything but go to the movies,” Sylvia said when Paul asked her about him. “He's a bore and a snob. I hope I never see him again.”

Paul was already learning that one either believed Sylvia or one did not, but there was no point in questioning her. One either loved her or not, and he did, although he often wondered whether he really liked her. And there was one result of the mysterious loss of confidence she suffered which delighted him; more and more she began to depend on him and to spend more time with him.