Towing Jehovah (44 page)

For the first four years they lived like peasants in the cramped cottage Cassie had been renting in Irvington, but after they struck it rich they decided to indulge themselves and move into the city. Despite their newfound wealth, Cassie held onto her job, doggedly explicating natural selection and other unsettling ideas for the God-fearing students of Tarrytown Community College while Anthony stayed home and took care of little Stevie. Best to play it safe, they decided. Their money might run out sooner than expected.

Being a parent in Manhattan was a sobering and faintly absurd undertaking. Police sirens sabotaged naps. Air pollution aggravated colds. To make sure Stevie got home safely from Montessori each afternoon, Anthony and Cassie had to hire a Korean martial-arts instructor as his escort. Still, they would have had it no other way. The spacious fourth-floor walk-up they'd acquired on the Upper East Side included full roof rights, and after Stevie was asleep they would snuggle together on their beach recliners, stare at the grimy sky, and imagine they were lying on the fo'c'sle deck of the late
Valparaíso.
Their fortune traced to an unlikely source. Shortly after landing back in Manhattan, Anthony got the idea of showing his private papers to Father Ockham, who in turn delivered them to Joanne Margolis, the eccentric literary agent who handled the priest's cosmology books. Margolis forthwith pronounced Anthony's journal "the finest surrealistic sea adventure ever written," showed it to an editor at the Naval Institute Press, and secured a modest advance of three thousand dollars. No one ever imagined so strange a book becoming a
New York Times
best-seller, but within six months of publication
The
Gospel According to Popeye
had miraculously beaten the odds.

At first Anthony and Cassie feared the bulk of the royalties would go toward lawyers' fees and court costs, but then it became clear that neither the United States Attorney General nor the Norwegian government had any interest in prosecuting what appeared to be less a criminal case than an instance of fantasy role-playing gone horribly awry. The families of the three dead actors were infuriated by this inertia (Carny Otis's widow journeyed all the way to Oslo in an effort to move the wheels of justice), and their rage persisted until the Vatican Secretary of State intervened. Having hired the impetuous Christopher Van Horne in the first place, Eugenic Cardinal Orselli naturally regarded it as his moral duty to recompense the bereaved. Each next of kin received a tax-free gift of three and a half million dollars. By the summer of '99, the whole messy affair of Midway Redux no longer haunted the Van Horne-Fowler household.

Anthony couldn't decide whether his decision to leave the corpse in place was courageous or a cop-out. At least once a week he would travel uptown and join Thomas Ockham for a picnic lunch of Brie sandwiches and white wine in Fort Tryon Park, after which they would stroll through the Cloisters, puzzling out their obligations to
Homo sapiens sapiens.
Once Anthony thought he saw a robed angel swoop through the Fuentiduena Chapel, but it was only a beautiful Columbia grad student in a long white dress, applying for a job as a docent.

The deal they'd cut with Di Luca and Orselli was a paragon of symmetry. Anthony and Ockham would not reveal that
The Gospel According to Popeye
was factual, and Rome would not appropriate the corpse and burn it. While the notion of a grand tour continued to intrigue both the captain and the priest, they were coming to realize that such a spectacle might very well lead to something far sadder and bloodier than the brave new world Ockham had envisioned the day he'd explored the derelict
Regina
Marts.
Then, too, there was the appalling presumption of it all. Nobody, Anthony felt, had the right to take the illusion of God away—not even God had that right, despite His evidently having attempted to do so.

The party Anthony and Cassie threw when Stevie turned six served a dual purpose. It celebrated the boy's birthday, and it brought together seven alumni of the
Valparaíso's
last voyage. They came bearing gifts: stuffed whale, jigsaw puzzle, six-shooter and holster, electric train, first-baseman's mitt, toy tugboat, set of Fisher-Price homunculi. Sam Follingsbee baked the cake, Stevie's favorite, Swiss chocolate with cherry frosting.

As the moon rose, the confessions began, each sailor admitting to an intense private terror that his knowledge of what lay entombed above Svalbard might one day deprive him of his sanity. Marbles Rafferty disclosed that suicide figured in his fantasies with much greater frequency than before his trip to the Arctic. Crock O'Connor frankly discussed his impulse to call up
Larry King Live
and tell the world its prayers were falling on ruptured eardrums. And yet, so far, they'd all managed to become functional and even flourishing citizens of Anno Postdomini Seven.

Rafferty was now master of the
Exxon Bangor.
O'Connor, retired from the sea, currently spent his days and nights trying to invent a holographic tattoo. Follingsbee ran the Octopus's Garden in Bayonne, an atmospheric waterfront restaurant whose menu included not a single item of seafood. Lou Chickering was playing a chronically adulterous brain surgeon on
The Sands of Time
and had just been featured as Heartthrob of the Week in
Suds and Studs
magazine. Lianne Bliss was working as the technical director of a radical feminist radio station broadcasting from Queens. Ockham and Sister Miriam had recently coauthored
Out of Many, One,
a comprehensive history of humankind's ever-changing images of God, from the radical monotheism of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton to the Cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin. The introduction was by Neil Weisinger, presently a rabbi serving a thriving congregation of Reform Jews in Brooklyn.

After the party, while the grown-ups lingered downstairs, indulging in second helpings of cake and admiring the conches and birds' nests Cassie had collected on her honeymoon cruise to the Galapagos, father and son retired to the roof. The wind was crisp, the night miraculously clear. It was as if the island itself had set sail, flying beneath a cloudless sky.

"Who made them?" Stevie asked, pointing to the stars.

Anthony wanted to say "an old man at the North Pole," but he knew this would only confuse the boy.

"God did."

"Who's God?"

"Nobody knows."

"When did He do it?"

"A long time ago."

"Is He still around?"

The captain inhaled a lungful of gritty Manhattan air. "Of course He's still around."

"Good."

Together they picked out their favorites: Sirius, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran, Orion's belt. Stevie Van Horne was a sailor's boy. He knew the Milky Way like the back of his hand. As the child's eyes drooped, Anthony chanted the several names of the mariner's best friend: "North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris," he sang, over and over—"North Star, Lodestar, Polestar, Polaris"—and by this method brought his son to the brink of sleep.

"Happy birthday, Stevie," Anthony told the drowsy child, carrying him down the ladder. "I love you," he said, tucking the boy in bed.

"Daddy loves Stevie," squawked Pirate Jenny. "Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie." As it turned out, Tiffany hadn't wanted the bird. She didn't like animals, and she knew that Jenny would function less as a sweet memento of her late husband than as a remorseless reminder of his death. Anthony had spent over twenty hours teaching the macaw her new trick, but it'd been worth it. All the world's children, he felt, should fall asleep hearing some feathered and affectionate creature—a parrot, a mynah bird, an angel— whispering in their ears.

For a time he stood looking at Stevie, just looking. The boy had his mother's nose, his father's chin, his paternal grandmother's mouth. Moonlight poured into the room, bathing a plastic model of the starship
Enterprise
in a luminous haze. From the birdcage came the steady, clocklike tick of Pirate Jenny pecking at her mirror.

Occasionally—not this night, but occasionally—a dark mantle of pungent Texas crude would materialize on the parrot, rolling down her back and wings, flowing across the floor of the cage, and falling drip-drip-drip onto the carpet.

Whenever this happened, Anthony's response was always the same. He would press Raphael's feather against his chest and breathe deeply until the oil went away.

"Froggy loves Tiffany. Daddy loves Stevie."

Anthony loves Cassie, he thought.

The captain turned off the bedroom light, pulled the blue silk canopy over Jenny's cage, and stepped back into the dark hallway. Sea fever rose in his soul. The moon tugged at his blood. The Atlantic said, Come hither. North Star, Lodestar, Pole-star . . .

How long would he be able to hold out? Until Cassie got her next sabbatical? Until Stevie was tall enough to take the helm and steer? No, the voyage must come sooner than that. Anthony could see it all now. In a year or so he'd get on the phone and make the arrangements. Cargo, crew, ship: not a supertanker, something more romantic—a bulk carrier, a freighter. A month later the whole family would rise at dawn and drive to Bayonne. They'd eat a fantastic breakfast at Follingsbee's restaurant on Canal Street. Scrambled eggs slathered with catsup, crisp strips of real bacon, wet crescents of honeydew melon, bagel halves mortared together with Philadelphia cream cheese. Bellies full, all senses at peak, Anthony and Stevie would kiss Cassie goodbye. They'd get on board. Light the boilers. Pick a port. Plot a course. And then, like those canny Dutch traders who inhabited their blood, they'd set out toward the sun, steady as she goes: the captain and his cabin boy, off with the morning tide.