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“Yes,” Gretchen said. That was one way of describing him.
“We’d’ve been in a stink of a mess without him.…”
Or no mess at all, Gretchen thought, if he’d kept his wife at home and stayed on the other continent.
“We’d’ve been stolen blind without him,” Dwyer said.
“By whom?”
“Lawyers,” Dwyer said vaguely. “Ships’ brokers, the law. Everybody.”
Here was a man, Gretchen thought, who had been caught at sea in hurricanes, had done his job at the extremity of physical endurance, when a failure would have sent him and those who depended upon him to the bottom, who had survived the company of violent and brutal men, but who felt reduced to helplessness by a slip of paper, a mention of land-based authority. Another race, thought Gretchen, who all her adult life had been surrounded by men who moved among paper, in and out of offices, as surefooted and confident as an Indian in the forest. Her dead brother had belonged to another race, perhaps from birth.
“The one I’m worried about,” Dwyer said, “is Wesley.”
Worried, not for himself, she thought, who saw no need for contracts, who just split up what was left over at the end of the year, who had no legal right, even, at this moment, to be standing on the scrubbed deck of the pretty boat on which he had earned his living for years. “Wesley will be all right,” she said. “Rudy’ll take care of him.”
“He won’t want that,” Dwyer said, drinking. “Wesley. He wanted to be like his father. Sometimes it was fu
“No,” Gretchen said, “he wasn’t a lovable man, our father. There wasn’t much love in him. If there was, he reserved it for Rudolph.”
Dwyer sighed. “Families,” he said.
“Families,” Gretchen repeated.
“I asked Tom what sort of questions Wesley asked him about him,” Dwyer went on. “‘The usual,’ Tom told me. ‘What I was like when I was a kid in school, what my brother and sister’—that’s you and Rudy—‘were like. How come I became a fighter, then a merchant seaman. When I had my first girl. What the other women I’d had were like, his goddamn mother.…’ I asked Tom if he told the kid the truth. ‘Nothing but,’ Tom said. ‘I’m a modern father. Tell the kids where babies come from, everything.’ He had his own kind of sense of humor, Tom.”
“Those must have been some conversations,” Gretchen said.
“‘Spare the truth and spoil the child,’ Tom said to me once. Every once in a while he sounded as though he’d picked up a little education here and there. Though he wasn’t big on education. Tom had a deep suspicion of education. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this to you,” Dwyer said earnestly, swishing the last of the ice around in his glass, “but he used your brother Rudy as an example. He’d say, ‘Look at Rudy, he had all the education a man’s brain could stand and look where he wound up, dry as an old raisin, a laughingstock after what his drunk wife did in his hometown, out on his ass, sitting there wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life.’”
“I believe I could use another drink, Bu
“Me, too,” Dwyer said. “I’m begi
Gretchen reflected on what Dwyer had said. It told more about Dwyer than it told about either Tom or Wesley. Tom had been the center of Dwyer’s life, she realized; he probably could reproduce word for word everything that Tom had said to him from begi
Dwyer came back with the whiskey. The first drink was begi
Dwyer looked different, somehow troubled as he stood there, leaning against the rail, in his clean white jersey and chino pants, the comical protruding teeth that had burdened him with his nickname, chewing on his lip. It was as though he had decided something, something difficult, while he was alone in the saloon pouring the drinks. “Maybe I oughtn’t to say this, Mrs. Burke …”
“Gretchen.”
“Thank you, ma’am. But I feel like I can talk to you. Rudy’s a fine man, I admire him, you couldn’t ask for a better man to have on your side in the kind of situation we’re in now—but he’s not the sort of man a guy like myself can talk to, I mean really talk to—you understand what I mean?”
“Yes,” she said, “I understand.”
“He’s a fine man, like I said,” Dwyer went on, uncomfortable, his mouth fidgeting, “but he’s not like Tom.”
“No, he’s not,” Gretchen said.
“Wesley’s talked to me. He don’t want to have nothing to do with Rudy. Or with his wife. That’s just natural human nature, wouldn’t you say, considering what’s happened?”
“I’d say,” Gretchen said. “Considering what’s happened.”
“If Rudy moves in on the kid—with the best intentions in the world, which I’m sure Rudy has—there’s going to be trouble. Awful trouble. There’s no telling what the kid will do.”
“I agree with you,” Gretchen said. She hadn’t thought about it before but the moment the words had passed Dwyer’s lips she had seen the truth of it. “But what’s to be done? Kate’s not his mother and she has her own problems. You?”
Dwyer laughed sadly. “Me? I don’t know where I’ll be twenty-four hours from now. The only thing I know is ships. Next week I may be sailing to Singapore. A month later to Valparaiso. Anyway, I ain’t made to be anybody’s father.”
“So?”
“I been watching you real careful,” Dwyer said. “Even though you didn’t take no more notice of me than a piece of furniture …”
“Oh, come on now, Bu
“I’m not sore about it and I’m not making any judgments, ma’am …”
“Gretchen,” she said automatically.
“Gretchen,” he repeated dutifully. “But since it happened—and now, staying here with me and letting me gab on—I see a real human being. I’m not saying Rudy ain’t a human being,” Dwyer added hastily, “only he’s not Wesley’s kind of human being. And his wife—” Dwyer stopped.
“Let’s not talk about his wife.”
“If you went up to Wesley and said, fair and square, right out in the open, ‘You come along with me …’ he’d recognize it. He’d see you’re the kind of woman he could take as a mother.”