In 1963 I missed second grade entirely when my father decided to take his dream trip, on his dream ship, in what looked at first like our dream family vacation.
Around the time Ethan was born my father had purchased The Wild Goose with the money he earned from Paramount. It was not his first boat, but the first befitting my father’s own bigness. The Wild Goose was 136 feet of converted World War II minesweeper, with the finest engines and navigational equipment. Once my father remodeled, her accomodations included an oak-paneled master salon with a wet bar, a wood-burning fireplace, a motion picture projector and screen, and a teleprinter receiving UPI, AP, and weather bureau reports; a luxurious master suite and three guest staterooms, each with its own bath; a dining room that comfortably sat ten; a sixty-foot afterdeck for sunning and playing cards; a cast-iron barbecue; a washer-dryer; a liquor locker; and a wine cellar.
When my father wasn’t working, The Wild Goose had a strong psychic pull for him. In the winter, we took it to Acapulco; most summers we cruised to Alaska. For my father and other famous leading men, yachting was a venerable tradition. In many ways enslaved by their outlandish celebrity, stars like Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and Errol Flynn all found asylum on the sea. By the summer of 1963, my father had launched a love affair with The Wild Goose that would continue unabated until his final years. By then we’d already taken The Goose from Newport Beach to the Baja coast, but these trips had been leisurely. To challenge his brawny new ship, my father was eager to find a stiffer test. When Henry Hathaway asked him to star with Rita Hayworth in Circus World, a film he planned shooting in Spain, my father found his crucible. He told Hathaway yes, he would be in Madrid that September, delivered there by The Wild Goose.
As my father breathlessly explained it, leaning over the maps spread on the desk in his trophy room, we would start down for Acapulco, then steam around the Mexican coast and on through the Panama Canal. From there we’d traverse the Gulf of Mexico and dock in Bermuda, where Ethan, my mother, and I would disembark. Feeling this leg of the trip too jeopardous for his wife and young children, he and a crew of eight would strike out alone across the Atlantic. We’d rejoin them on the Portuguese coast, lingering at several ports up to and beyond the tip of Spain.
When the notion took hold of me, I was giddy with the prospect of flight and adventure. An entire year away from our compound, much of it in Spain, and no school except for a tutor! Spain sounded gay and sunny, and having a Latin mother and two Latin maids, I already spoke Spanish. I also sensed that my father needed this badly. In the final weeks before we set off, he’d started behaving erratically. One moment he’d be animated and loquacious, detailing the newest wrinkle in our itinerary or his latest renovation to The Goose, and the next moment he’d be somber and mute. On the queerest night of all, my father had entered my bedroom and pulled me to his chest without speaking.
“Aissa?” he’d finally said, a stiffness to his voice that told me something wasn’t right.
“Yes, Daddy?
“When you get older and you realize I’m not as strong as you think I am, will you still love me?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Always with my father it was “Yes, Daddy,” and I said it that moment by rote. In truth I was disconcerted. Why was he acting so unlike himself, the dynamic self I relied on so utterly—even more, it sometimes seemed, than water and air?
I knew he was hurting inside. Every day his smoker’s hack sounded uglier and more raw. And I’d seen the wadded tissues littering his side of their bed, the tissues at times streaked reddish-yellow, what I knew was his blood mixed with phlegm. At some subconscious level, I understood these things threatened me, but I didn’t add them together, and so did not yet know the sum of my fears. Hating when things were obscure to me, I felt increasingly eager to launch our trip.
And then we were off! From the day we left the dock at Newport my father was never easier to be around. Before we were joined in the noisy ports of call by his party-loving comrades, I spent long hours alone with him, and was pleased to glimpse new sides of him. Out at sea, my father never seemed mired in preoccupations, and minor concerns could not provoke him. When I asked about the moon’s hidden sway over the tides, why the sharks we spotted looked so essentially evil yet the dolphins spun and romped in the wake of our boat, why each sundown he searched for the evening star, and why he always called the ocean “she,” he not only heard my voice, my father heard my words, and he answered me eagerly and patiently.
But then, one early morning, when the sea was cobalt blue and the coast only a long green line, my ever-changing father discombobulated me.
“When I die,” he said, “I don’t want to miss the ocean. I want to stay here. That’s why I don’t want to be buried, I want to be cremated when I die. Then take me out and scatter me over the ocean, because that’s where my heart is.”
My father, like that night in my bedroom, was not making any sense. Seven years old, I understood that some people die, but I’d certainly never considered that death could come for my dad. Sure, I had noted that he was much older than the fathers of all my girlfriends, but the fact had no weight. My father was not a normal man, so he could not be measured in normal terms. He personified power, and even the thinnest possibility of his death was so preposterous as to not be worth a moment of my time. His words seemed so strictly out of place, on this fine clear day, and yet stranger still was my father’s expression. Though speaking of his death, he looked hopeful, even serene, wholly unlike a man who was daunted by life’s limitations. In fact, I was starting to see, when our ship was underway and my father was feeling the tang of brisk, cool, salted air, there was little or nothing of life that did not excite and intrigue him.
This meant he was at his very best, and I thought the trip would be good for him. I felt confident the trip would be good for us all. Never was a confidence less justified.