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“There are murmurs of unrest from Whitby,”—she read.—“Old man Calderwood is taking very unkindly to my prolonged version of the Grand Tour and even Joh
“I have many things to solve when I get back, which I am slowly turning over in my mind even as I look at a Titian in the Doges’ Palace or drink an espresso at a table in the Piazza San Marco. At the risk of sounding grandiose, what I have to decide is what to do with my life. I am thirty-five years old and I have enough money, both capital and yearly income, so that I can live extremely well for the rest of my life. Even if my tastes were wildly extravagant, which they’re not, and even if Jean were poor, which she isn’t, this would still be true. Once you are rich in America, it takes genius or overpowering greed to fall back into poverty. The idea of spending the rest of my life buying and selling, using my days to increase my wealth, which is already more than sufficient, is distasteful to me. My acquisitive instinct has been deadened by acquisition. The satisfaction I might get by opening new shopping centers throughout the country, under the Calderwood sign, and gaining control of still more companies, is minimum. A commercial empire, the prospects of which enchant men like Joh
“Of course, I could set myself up as a philanthropist and dole out sums to the deserving poor or deserving artists or deserving scientists and scholars, but although I give, I hope generously, to many causes, I can’t see putting myself into the position of arbiter in such matters. It certainly is not a full-time vocation, at least not for me.
“It must seem fu
“Another complication. I love the house in Whitby and I love Whitby itself. I do not, really, want to live anywhere else. Jean, too, sometime ago, confessed that she liked it there, and said that if we ever had children she would prefer bringing them up there than in the city. Well, I shall see to it that she’ll have children, or at least a child, to bring up. We can always keep a small apartment in New York for when we want a bit of worldly excitement or when she has work to do in the city. But there is nobody in Whitby who just does nothing. I would be immediately branded as a freak by my neighbors, which wouldn’t make the town as attractive to me as it now is. I don’t want to turn into a Teddy Boylan.
“Maybe when I get back to America, I’ll buy a copy of the Times and look through the want-ads.
“Jean has just come in, soaked and happy and a little drunk. The rain drove her into a cafe and two Venetian gentlemen plied her with wine. She sends her love.
“This has been a long egotistical letter. I expect one of equal length, equally egotistical, from you. Send it to the American Express in Paris. I don’t know just when we’ll be in Paris, but we’ll be there sometime in the next couple of weeks and they’ll hold the letter for me. Love to you and Billy, Rudolph. P.S. Have you heard from Tom? I haven’t had a word from him since the day of Mom’s funeral.”
Gretchen put down the flimsy sheets of air-mail stationery, covered densely with her brother’s firm, clearly formed handwriting. She finished her drink and decided against another one. She got up and went to the window and looked out. The rain was pouring down. The city below her was erased by water.
She mused over Rudolph’s letter. They were friendlier through the mails than when they saw each other. In writing, Rudolph showed a hesitant side, a lack of pride and confidence, that was endearing and that he somehow hid at other times. When they were together, at one moment or another, the urge to wound him swept over her. His letters showed a largeness of spirit, a willingness to forgive that was the sweeter because it was tacit and he never showed any signs that he knew that there was anything that needed forgiving. Billy had told her about his assault on Rudolph at the school and Rudolph had never even mentioned it to her and had been warm and thoughtful with the boy every time he saw him. And the letters were always signed “Love to you and Billy.”
I must learn generosity, she thought, staring out at the rain.
She didn’t know what to do about Tom. Tom didn’t write her often, but he kept her abreast of what he was doing. But as he had done with his mother, he made her promise to say nothing of his whereabouts to Rudolph.
Right now, right this day, Tom was in Italy, too. On the other side of the peninsula, it was true, and farther south, but in Italy. She had received a letter from him just a few days before, from a place called Porto Santo Stefano, on the Mediterranean, above Rome. Tom and a friend of his called Dwyer had finally found the boat they were looking for at a price they could manage and had been working on it in a shipyard there all autumn and winter, to get it ready for service by June first. “We do everything ourselves,”—Tom had written in his large, boyish handwriting, on ruled paper.—“We took the Diesels apart piece by piece and we put them together again, piece by piece and they’re as good as new. We’ve rewired the entire boat, calked and scraped the hull, trued the propellers, repaired the generator, put in a new galley, painted the hull, painted the cabins, bought a lot of second hand furniture and painted that. Dwyer turns out to be quite an interior decorator and I’d love you to see what he’s done with the saloon and the cabins. We’ve been putting in a fourteen-hour day seven days a week, but it’s worth it. We live on board, even though the boat is up on blocks on dry land, and save our money. Neither Dwyer or me can cook worth a damn, but we don’t starve. When we go out on charter we’ll have to find somebody who can cook to crew with us. I figure we can make do with three in crew. If Billy would like to come over for the summer we have room for him on board and plenty of work. When I saw him he looked as though a summer’s hard work out in the open might do him a lot of good.
“We plan to put the boat in the water in ten days. We haven’t decided on a name yet. When we bought it it was called the Penelope II, but that’s a little too fancy for an ex-pug like me. Talking about that—nobody hits anybody here. They argue a lot, or at least they talk loud, but everybody keeps his hands to himself. It’s restful to go into a bar and be sure you won’t have to fight your way out. They tell me it’s different south of Naples, but I wouldn’t know.
“The man who runs the shipyard here is a good guy and from what I gather, asking around, he is giving us a very good deal on everything. He even found us two charters already. One in June and one in July and he says more will be coming up. I had some run-ins with certain Italians in the U.S., but these Italians are altogether different. Nice people. I am learning a few words in Italian, but don’t ask me to make a speech.
“When we get into the water, my friend Dwyer will be the skipper, even though it was my money that bought the boat. He’s got third mate’s papers and he knows how to handle a boat. But he’s teaching me. The day I can get into a harbor on my own without busting into anything, I am going to be the skipper. After expenses, we’re splitting on everything, because he’s a pal and I couldn’t have done it without him.