The Last Marlin --- By Fred Waitzkin
Note: the following is an excerpt of the novel. Click the book to read the rest, by ordering The Last Marlin.
As a boy I was confused that fishing was a source of tension in our home. I believed that if we kept trolling plentiful waters, Mom and Dad would get along while we made great catches, our family would prosper and endure; but Mother wasn’t interested in dropping a line or even coming on the boat. Dad was the fisherman. She considered it boorish and brutal, a big waste of time except when she could work themes and colors of the ocean into her strange art. I kept thinking that Mom would come around. Only today at seventy-eight, when she remembers my father Abe and my brother Bill, does Mother refer to the family sport with a trace of warmth. For Stella, decline has always conferred a measure of distinction. Mother says that I was conceived in a house across the road from Revere Beach at the north end of Boston, where my parents lived for two months during the first year of their marriage in a cozy, bright room with a view of the ocean. Stella was twenty and had plans to write a great novel. She wanted to be by the sea, to listen to the surf as she has summers with her family in Far Rockaway. As a teenage girl Stella had been romantic and rebellious and had bridled against the provincial outlook and materialism o f her immigrant parents. My mother’s father was the founder of Globe Lighting, a large fixture manufacturing plant in Brooklyn. It was important for him to show the neighbors his success. He drove a Cadillac and painted the wood in his home with gold leaf, put in taffeta drapes and Persian rugs trying to re
create Versailles. Stella was embarrassed to invite her friends over. Isadore Rosenblatt was a forceful business man and a patriarch with a master plan for all members of his family, including mother, who yearned to be an actress or a writer, something more exotic than the telephone operator job her father had in mind as her springboard into the lighting industry. Stella met Abe for the first time when the young manufacturers’ rep from Boston stopped by the Globe factory wearing his trench coat and felt hat. There was something mysterious and dashing about this young man. “I was struck by your father’s hypnotic eyes. I would talk to him about Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, and he would smile and nod. I believed that he loved these writers,” she says tartly. We are sitting on the raised deck of her small Cape Cod home with a view of the woods at dusk. I’ve been visiting her for a few days, pressing her to tell me about Abe and Bill, and she has grown tired of it. “ I don’t share your interest in nostalgia,” she declares, the past suddenly between us like an alien land. She is right. I am easily seduced by memories, comforted. Mother would prefer to begin each day with a fresh slate, like a new being. Speaking with her about our lives has been fitful; I ask her questions, she is moved to describe past events, then she becomes angry or emotional, and I resolve to leave her alone. But soon Mother can’t resist telling me something more. “Abe promised to take me away from New York, that we would make our own lives in New England. He could convince you of anything.” My father’s desire for the water was a quality Stella found attractive initially, because it played against his salesman lifestyle and materialist cravings. One day in Revere Beach Abe came across a dory in bad shape. He bought it for next to nothing. This first boat was a humble beginning for a passion that would be passed on in curious variations to his children and my children. That winter Abe worked on the little dory, sanded, painted,
reinforced the stern for a little engine. But most important, he cut a hole in the center of the open boat, built up a little throne to site on, a toilet. All my father’s relatives were amazed that no water came in the hold. Even as a young man Abe had terrible intestinal problems, cramps, diarrhea. His eyes would bulge from the pain, but he wouldn’t say a world about it. The summer before I was born, Abe and Stella rode up and down the Charles River in his dory. Abe loved the boat. It was medicine for his physical pain, a retreat from tension and his abiding anger. Stella cannot recall why he gave up the dory after one summer, and there is no photograph of the double ender, which saddens me. Abe didn’t own another boat for ten years. Mother realized that the marriage was a mistake from the start. She was humiliated and angry each time my father brandished her pedigree to impress his customers. Globe was one of the giants in the lighting industry, and the little New England distributors Abe cultivated from Bangor to Mancheseter danced on their toes in the presence of Izzy Rosenblatt’s daughter. One time Abe introduced Stella to a customer and the man inquired unctuously, “So how is your father?” Stella answered, “Fine, how is yours?” which made Abe furious. My mother has always been one to clobber her foes with words, to dazzle with hyperbole and fiction. They must have been something in the early years: my father, who believed in convention and connections, who charmed with his smile, intimidated with his big green eyes; Mother spinning tales, lashing out without regret, shocking his customers and the Boston relatives. “There was an atmosphere around his friends and family: what a coup, Abe has married the boss’s daughter. It was disgusting to me.” She believed that my father decided to give her a baby only to quell her restlessness and disappointment, to keep her trapped. One of his salesman buddies and counseled him, give her a handful of babies, she’ll stop complaining. None the less, Abe surprised her with his caring touch as father and she began to enjoy the life
they were making together. Babies – my dad’s salesman buddy had been right on target. Even as a young mother Stella was resolved to make her own career. Borrowing Abe’s assertiveness she went to Filene’s basement and sold them on the idea of a radio program. Beauty Is Yours. Her weekly show began with the song “A pretty girl is like a melody…” Stella disseminated beauty tips over the air: the best cream to use if your skin is oily, how to dress if you are underweight, choosing the perfect scarf for a pudgy face. She became the beauty sage of New England, each week answering scores of letters from adoring fans. But the show was a fiction. Stella knew next to nothing about women’s beauty products, she has never cared about such things. Over the years my mother has amused herself creating false personas, re-creating reality. She is impatient with prosaic distinctions between truths and lies. During the early years of the marriage my father began his own little manufacturing business, Lee Products, specializing in wiring troughs and electrical boxes. He sold his electrical enclosures throughout New England. But my father didn’t make a hit in Boston, didn’t earn any real money. Dad was not suited to be an inside guy. Abe knew that he could sell, but his little shop did not have the capability to manufacture big jobs and Dad lacked the patience to acquire more machines and hire more men, methodically to build his business. It was his style to stay out late wining and dining customers and to sleep late. Abe was frustrated, impatient to make a big success. And too often he was sick, doubled over in pain, as if fights with his dad, with whom he did not get along, and competition in the electrical business took a direct physical toll on his frail body. My first memory of my father was from the lawn of a hospital. I was two years old, standing beside my mother, who was pointing to a window two or three stories above. Dad was in the window wearing a bathrobe, waving. Soon after my brother was born my father moved the family to New York and took over the sales division of my grandfather’s
business. This was his dream, to test his selling prowess in the big leagues, to be in a position to sell thousands of costly recessed fluorescents instead of dozens of chunky panel boxes. By all accounts my father became a tremendous success, the top commercial lighting man in the New York area. He sold the lighting for the United Nations buildings, Aqueduct Race Track, the Seagram Building, the Socony Building, Time-life, many others. At dusk, when the Manhattan skyline began to sparkle with lights, it was my dad’s work – that’s how I saw it. For my mother the move the New York was a high treason and she suspected that for some time her father and mine had been plotting their business association behind her back. “Abe never discussed anything. He just did it,” she says. “I was in California when he bought the house in Great Neck. No discussion. Can you imagine just buying the house without me being there? I hated Great Neck. I hated the house. It was an insult. I hid in the closet when a busy-body neighbor came to visit with her husband. She came many times. I could hear her calling through the window, ‘You can’t keep hiding from us. We’re your neighbors.’” When I was ten or eleven my father purchased Babe Ruth’s boat from the slugger’s widow. I recall going to her apartment in the Bronx with my father to give her the check and to get the title. She was dressed in a bathrobe and stunk badly of alcohol. Garbage was piled in the kitchen. There was no cheering, no more home runs in her life. The Babe had been gone for many years. 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 is 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 she 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 contracts. 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, and ask how we 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.” Once of the 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 Man’s Land, and 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 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 and 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 the 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 irreverent solos of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker on the hi fi. I hated this music but 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. Click the book to read the rest, by ordering The Last Marlin.
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