Anna Godbersen: Splendor

Though the word home had piqued his interest, Henry’s black gaze shifted from the mountainous clouds collecting over the gray-blue water, where vessels of all kinds drifted in the afternoon breeze, and across the length of the boat, where a few army men who far outranked him whispered to pretty local girls poorly disguising their boredom. The ivory sails bloomed overhead; the weather had not yet become anything to worry about, although there was less sun than before and a storm was coming, tonight or tomorrow. The boat, which had been commandeered from a fleeing Spanish naval officer, was as well appointed as some of those the Schoonmaker family maintained, and although Henry felt comfortable at its helm, he was having trouble deriving any pleasure from sailing that day. It had always been one of his diversions, but New York and the person he had been there seemed strange to him now.

“They’ll be sending us on to the Philippines, then?” he asked, keeping one hand on the polished oak tiller and the other on his drink. His old friend Teddy Cutting was stationed in the Pacific — they had enlisted at the same time, and yet their careers as soldiers could not have been more dissimilar. It was the place where Henry had once imagined he might die, and if not die, experience real danger and then discover what it was to be a man.

The colonel glanced up, and his drooping mustache rose with the corners of his smile. “Some troops will go, but don’t worry, you won’t be among them, my boy.” As he settled himself back against the pillows that lined the deck, the leather flask on his belt made a swishing noise; it was, like all the colonel’s affectations, suggestive of an expensive sportsman like masculinity. Henry had, on occasion, accused Teddy of being too serious, but he heartily wished he could be with him now and escape the idiot company in which he currently found himself. “You are too important to me here.”

This was not intended as a mockery, but Henry couldn’t hear it as anything else. His great importance was his ability to sail small boats in the bay for the little races that the colonel liked to entertain himself with, ever since the June elections and the peaceful period they had ushered in. He knew he was ridiculous for feeling disappointment at the colonel’s assurance, but he was having difficulty viewing the man, and life under his command, as anything but a joke. Henry brought his glass up to his lips and sipped before looking away across the seascape to the inlet where the ships came into harbor. The Morro glowered from atop the hill, fearsome and warlike, on the opposite side of the bay from the tiled roofs and arcade-lined squares of the old town.

“No, I wouldn’t let you leave Havana now. Not when the race against Lieutenant Colonel Harvey is in a few days!” Colonel Copper chuckled. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey responded in kind. Henry glanced at them, seeing only the popped red blood vessels on their broad noses, and then away. They said it was only ninety miles between Cuba and Florida, and sometimes in his dreams he swam it. He had been to Florida once, as a civilian, last winter. He had made a terrible mistake there and given into the desires of his duplicitous wife, but he could also remember those warm days before his error, when he still had a chance at something true. “You know, señoritas, Henry here comes from a very old, very prestigious family. The Schoonmakers are said to be one of the ten richest…”

Henry blinked into the breeze and almost pitied Colonel Copper. After all, he was only guilty of the same delusion that plagued most people: He believed that he wanted to be like the Schoonmakers, to own yachts and Fifth Avenue mansions and be written about in the papers, and he could not comprehend what Henry had only recently begun to understand, that all of that only meant that it was rather difficult to do what one actually wanted to do, or love the woman one was actually in love with. Henry hadn’t even been capable of enlisting right, for God’s sake. Colonel Copper had assessed Henry, determined that he was one of the Schoonmakers, and more or less relieved him of any kind of active duty. Thus had Henry’s vision of patriotic service and experience ended; that was back in April. Most of his days since then had begun with sailing and ended in the humid barracks whispering the name Diana Holland while he tried, in vain, to sleep.

For a brief moment, Diana Holland’s love had been a possibility for him, the shimmering, pure goal that would give all his shiftless years meaning. But then he’d behaved execrably, and brought a horrid cynicism into that sweet girl’s life. If he was lucky, his dreams about her were from the period when she still had cause to believe in him, but as often as not they were nightmares of the evening when he walked into a room and saw her caught up in the arms of his wife’s brother. There she had been, his girl, in the shadows, against a wall, in the grip of that inveterate gambler. It was a scene that still sickened Henry, but one he knew he well deserved. The memory of it made him want to die, but there was no chance of dying here, except by drink, which he went on downing at more or less the same rate as he had in New York. The only change in him was the color of his skin, which had grown brown in the sun.

“Aren’t the ladies here lovely and compliant?” he heard the colonel saying behind him, and though Henry did not turn to look, he felt it was safe to assume that he was making awful leering faces at the girls under his arms. “Don’t they wink and flirt as girls back home never let themselves do?”

Henry was overtaken by the sudden desire either to throw himself overboard or be very, very drunk already. The former seemed the more heroic choice, but upon reflection he realized that the fall would not kill him, it would only get him wet, and already he was sweating in irritation at all the colonel’s inane chatter.

“Come, Schoonmaker, stop staring out to sea! Let’s get you a girl.”

An angry light darted through Henry’s black eyes, and his fingers gripped at the tiller. He knew that the colonel was now standing up, because the balance of the hull shifted below him. Still he refused to look. All of a sudden he was furious, for reasons he could not begin to understand. He only knew he was tired of Cuba, and of himself, and of all the places he’d ever been and all the things he’d ever wanted, save one.

“Oh, Lord have mercy, Schoonmaker, your wife won’t find out! Live a little, while you can! She can’t be that lovely.”

“It’s not my wife I’m worried about.” Henry stood and spun around so that he was facing his commanding officer, unbalancing the hull again and causing the ladies closer to the bow to cry out in fright. He remembered one of them saying that she couldn’t swim as she’d stepped nervously from the pier, and though in some corner of his mind he worried for her safety, his thoughts were elsewhere. “But, yes — the woman I am faithful to is that lovely.”

“Henry,” Colonel Copper went on, growing faux-serious, “I am your superior, and I insist that you have a good time!”

The two men faced off by the stern. Soon a cloud would pass, and the situation would come to seem absurd. But the colonel was several drinks into his leisurely afternoon, and the righteousness was heady in Henry’s veins. He stared back at the older man with all the rage and confusion he felt toward a life that kept bringing him back, despite all his best efforts, to afternoons of cocktails and boats drifting in no particular direction. Neither said anything, and perhaps in a moment the silence would have reduced them both to laughter. But then a passing cargo ship caused a wave, which rocked their vessel, and the girl who couldn’t swim grabbed clumsily for a rope to hang on to. Her flailing set the mechanics of the boat in motion: The boom swung across the deck, narrowly missing Henry; he was relieved to find himself still safely on board. In the next moment he heard splashing and sputtering, and realized that while he’d been spared, the colonel had been knocked forward into the water.