Play This Right Kid and You’re the Hero

I

In the summer of 1955, at the tender age of fourteen, I ran away to sea. The vessel upon which I staked my escape was a fifty-two-foot yawl captained by an Episcopal bishop, Thomas Gulliver Mayhew, the descendant of missionaries, a wise and gentle man who was also, as is sometimes the case, a devout alcoholic. He nearly got us killed, the bishop did. But I don’t hold that against him all these years later because the fear I felt and what I found in it, that, too, is part of the story.

The life from which I sought to abscond was a peculiar one. I was living with a family called the Templetons in the village of Salter’s Point, along the southern coast of Massachusetts, having been stashed there by my parents for the summer while they vacationed in Maine. I was to serve as a companion to the Templeton boys in exchange for room and board.

It did not occur to me to question why my parents would broker such an arrangement. My father was a cultural theorist, little known in his field and ravenous for tenure. He spent the school year locked away in his study, enveloped in pipe smoke. Summers of kidless calm were the concession extracted by my mother. At six, I had shipped off to a sleep-away camp with my brother (age ten) as chaperone.

How my mother convinced the Templetons to hire me on that year, I cannot say. I knew only that she packed me two rattan suitcases full of shirts and underwear. My father described what lay ahead as a “fine opportunity.” I had wanted to attend the camp where my brother was a counselor in training, but it was deemed too extravagant, by virtue of its chlorinated swimming pool.

On the appointed day, we arrived to find the Templeton boys standing at attention on the porch, combed and smiling, as if they had been there since dawn. We got out of the car and stood awkwardly on the lawn. After a minute, the screen door swung open and Mrs. Templeton emerged, a little out of breath. She was a tall woman with glistening legs. A wave of blonde hair veiled one of her eyes, in the style of the starlet Veronica Lake. Her outfit—snug angora sweater, pencil skirt—had a flagrant quality, ill suited to the morning hours.

My parents endeavored not to gawk. Mrs. Templeton explained that her husband had been called away on business, where he would remain, more or less, for the rest of that summer. My mother spent a few minutes admiring the daylilies while my father scrutinized his hat. I was presented to the boys, Peter and Samuel, who gazed upon me with undisguised awe.

I was tall for fourteen and had what was called in those days “a well-developed physique.” I spent an hour each night lifting dumbbells in the precise manner prescribed by Charles Atlas. On waking, I puffed through two hundred push-ups and sit-ups. It was my fervent intention to replace Eddie Mathews at third base for the Milwaukee Braves.

With the benefit of age, I can see that these regimens functioned as a means of self-protection. Though we didn’t have a telltale last name or attend services, the fact of our Judaism was known in our town—my father was the first Jewish professor the college had hired—and was something that seemed to derive power from the silence around it, like a stain that goes unremarked upon and can therefore never be scrubbed. Two years earlier the Rosenbergs had been executed for espionage, and though I never heard anyone say so out loud, their trial had cast Jews as prime suspects in the flourishing hunt for Communists. It was for this reason, and this reason only, that my parents approved of my athletic aspirations.

In a few minutes, my folks were gone. Mrs. Templeton led me inside, then wheeled around. “Look at you,” she said, taking the balls of my shoulders into her hands and squaring them up. “You’re a man, aren’t you? It will be nice to have one around the house.” She turned to Peter and Sam, who were still staring at me. “Won’t that be nice, boys?”

It sounds rather stagy in the telling. Yet I was instantly captured: by Mrs. Templeton’s glamour, by her frank appraisal, by the adulation of her sons, perhaps most of all by my abrupt promotion to manhood.

Mornings I spent with the boys at the local ballfield, running them through the drills my coaches had run me through all spring, barking the same gruff platitudes. Play the ball. Step into your throw. Thattaboy. They were inexhaustible little towheads, six and seven probably. I felt bad for them. We were all orphans of a sort.

Afternoons were divided between the beach and the harbor, where the boys were learning to sail with the bored offspring of millionaires. After a few days, one of the instructors took pity on me—marooned as I was on the dock, squeezed miserably into a child’s life jacket—and let me come aboard his sloop.

From the first, I loved everything about sailing: the salted whip of the breeze, the squawk of ropes yanked through their clutches, the lift of a sail catching and coming full, the hull slicing a white seam into the sea. It astonished me how far we’d got from land, the ease with which, by rigging and guile, man could seize the wind.

Trips to the beach were more complicated because they usually meant Mrs. Templeton would come along, which agitated the lines of authority. The boys, cheerful and obedient with me, grew whiny and intractable. I myself found it difficult to be in the presence of a grown woman wearing a bathing suit.

Mrs. Templeton thumbed through magazines and smoked cigarettes and sipped from her Thermos while the boys and I built sandcastles and dug for clams. But always, at some point, she announced from beneath her umbrella that it was time to cool off a bit, and she would rise and unknot her robe and let it fall. There would be her body, wedged with curved precision into a bright pink one-piece. So began her languid migration to the sea, the lazy scissoring of her thighs, the sway of her behind. The boys danced and dove around her while she stood in the shallows splashing water onto her arms.

From time to time, another mother would pass by our camp and cast an ambiguous look upon the four of us, and in these moments I struggled to make sense of why I was there at all. Was I some kind of lifeguard or guard dog, a surrogate brother or husband?

Mrs. Templeton packed bologna sandwiches on white bread, Utz potato chips, celery-stick and carrot crudités with a glob of mayonnaise for dipping. The boys drank Cokes, though Peter made the mistake once of sneaking a swig from his mother’s Thermos, which he immediately spat onto the sand.

“What is that junk?”

Mrs. Templeton continued examining her magazine. “Don’t be impudent,” she said. “Nobody likes an impudent child.”

After an hour or two, Mrs. Templeton would tire of the sun and return home, where, I believe, she napped until dinnertime. The boys complained bitterly at her departure but were secretly relieved. There was a certain weight associated with her presence—her beauty, her boredom, the vague but palpable sense of her despair.

One afternoon, as we sat on the dock fishing for crabs with our bologna, Sammy announced, “Our mom won a beauty contest.”

“She came in second,” his older brother put in. “Runner-up.”

“There was a picture in the paper,” Sammy continued. “She was holding flowers. She’s the prettiest woman in the whole state.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know. Massachusetts is a pretty big state.”

Sammy looked at me gravely. “It’s a fact.”

I met Mr. Templeton only once. He visited for the Fourth of July. He was shorter than I’d expected, shorter than his wife in fact, a friendly, nervous southerner with thinning hair. “I appreciate your looking after the boys,” he told me, more than once. “I was supposed to get more time off, but we’re going gangbusters at work.” He sold real estate, “pristine beachfront property” as he put it, dredged from the swamps of Mississippi.

A few days after his visit, I was out back with the boys, helping them hone their baseball swings. I had my shirt off, as I did for most of that summer, and I was surprised to hear a soft whistle through the dusk. We all three turned, and there was Mrs. Templeton, gazing through the railing of the back porch steps. She laughed with a certain bashful brio and aimed her chin at me. “That’s why you should eat your spinach, boys. Muscles don’t grow themselves.”

I don’t remember what was said next. No doubt the boys were hustled inside to put on pajamas and brush teeth and watch Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, whose corny tales of genocide they consumed with occult devotion. I do remember the silver light that washed across the crabgrass and the breeze that prickled my sweated skin. It seemed to ratify whatever illicit transmission had passed between myself and Mrs. Templeton.

That night I heard the phone ring and Mrs. Templeton murmuring. Half an hour later, she descended to the basement grotto where I slept. The faint syncopated cooing of the Chordettes—Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream—drifted down from the radio on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Templeton lifted a cigarette to her mouth; her red lips plucked at it. She blew a blade of smoke over her shoulder and regarded me from behind her swooping blonde veil.

“Are you enjoying yourself here, Teddy?”

“I am,” I said. “Very much.”

“The boys are being good for you?”

“They’re terrific kids,” I said. “Top-notch.”

“You don’t miss your own family?”

“A little, I guess.”

Mrs. Templeton wore a sleeveless chi≠on nightgown the color of clarified butter. Her arms glowed in the light from the stairway. I was lying in my single bed, a sheet tugged over my body. For a long moment nothing was said. Then she raised a coffee cup to her mouth and had a long swallow. It seemed an odd thing for her to have carried from upstairs.

“I’ve just had a call from Paul. He won’t be back until August. It’s such a shame how hard he works.”

“That’s rotten luck.”

“Luck.” She pronounced the word with a shrug, as if it were some mystery she didn’t care to solve. “It’s sticky tonight. Do you need a fan?”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“We don’t have one anyway.” Mrs. Templeton laughed quietly. “I’m not much good for anything, am I, Teddy?” She finished off whatever was in her cup and dropped her cigarette in the bottom. “Let me at least open that window for you.”

The window was directly above me. Mrs. Templeton crossed the room and leaned over my bed, and the confused aroma of her washed down upon me, cigarettes and floral ointments, frankfurters and Scotch. The window was stuck, naturally, and she had to set one knee on the mattress to brace herself. Her body floated above mine. Her breasts swayed with each tug. I lay petrified, the evidence of my arousal outlined against the sheet.

I’ve thought about this episode hundreds of times, perhaps a thousand, in the years since. This will sound odd given what was to come that summer, in that very house. But we are never more alive than in those moments that bring us closest to our desires yet spare us their fulfillment. This is why we mourn the loss of childhood, which suspends us at the boundary of wonder, in the labor of our imaginations.

With a soft grunt, Mrs. Templeton completed her task. Through the window came the distant murmur of the sea, the scent of humus and charcoal from the hibachi where she’d charred hot dogs for the boys a few hours earlier. “That’s better,” she whispered. “Isn’t that better?”

She was still hovering over me in that sheer garment, her body at last unbound, revealed: belly, pale bosom, the scarlet secret of her nipples. Mrs. Templeton looked down at my body. I felt a small bird skittering about in my chest, a yellow finch perhaps. My limbs clenched. She must have observed the extremity of my desire, though what I remember now is the crimping of the flesh around her wet blue eyes, the revelation of her sorrow, which burst the hot silence between us.

“Life can get so lonely,” Mrs. Templeton said slowly. “You don’t know that yet, I’m afraid.” She swayed backward and dismounted the bed, into the graceful drunken reel of a woman raised in high heels. “I miss a man in my bed,” she said sharply from the doorway. And then, more gently, “I guess I have the boys, don’t I?”

She did something else that night, but I can’t tell you about it just yet.

II

I should remind you that I was fourteen years old, that the year was 1955. Ike was President. Elvis was still a rumor. Lolita had been extradited to Paris. The entire moral structure of my world—the repressive energies that powered the prosperity and paranoia of the fifties—kept me pinned to that bed, pinned and vibrating.

And so, the next morning, I resumed my duties as companion to the Templeton boys. But whatever poise I’d been able to summon to that task collapsed. I walked about in a daze, marbled with shame over what had happened, or almost happened, or what I hadn’t the courage to make happen, or what I’d merely imagined, in some boyish mania, might happen. Mrs. Templeton was curt toward me, even cold.

I did not see then, as I do now, the impossibility of my circumstance. I only knew that I felt somehow imprisoned. I was captive to a wish. We both were. That was how I preferred to think of it.

More than once, in the hours after her children were asleep, Mrs. Templeton paced the backyard with her cigarettes and her coffee cup, issuing faint imprecations under the scattered stars. I knew this because I spied on her from the window of my lair.

Saturdays were supposed to be my day off, but having no friends or relations in the area, I rarely took more than a morning, hours I spent milling about the harbor, looking to cadge a ride from one of the sailing instructors.

We were into August, and the launches were mostly empty, the higher castes of South Dartmouth anchored now along the Cape or among the glowing Gatsby docks of Long Island Sound. And then one day, like providence, a massive boat, a yawl, came gliding into the harbor. Presently a stout man appeared and clambered onto the dock. He peered in my direction and waved me over.

“I’m in search of an able seaman,” he said. “For we sail upon the hour, our destination being the isle of Martha’s Vineyard, where I must attend to some rather sordid business. Am I right in judging you a candidate for such a post?” His voice was baronial, but the strange formality of speech clashed with his appearance. He was what my mother would have called unkempt: stained shirt, wrinkled shorts, the gnarled and hairy toes of an ogre.

“How long would we be gone?”

“Four hours in fair weather. We shall return by nightfall, eight at the latest. If this compromises your interest in the position, I shall seek additional applicants posthaste.” The Captain—for he was clearly that— paused. He fixed me with a skeptical look. “How old are you, son?”

“Sixteen,” I said. “Almost seventeen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Theodore Waterson. Ted.”

“Are you new to South Dartmouth?”

“I’m staying with the Templetons for the summer.”

“The Templetons.” The Captain scratched at the whiskers on his cheek. “Have you sailed before? Run out a jib? Swabbed the decks?”

“Yessir.”

By now, two of his crew had appeared on deck. They had the bored, leathery look of men who despised harbors.

“Have we a compact then, son?”

I gazed at the yawl gleaming with teak, the soaring ivory mast. Mrs. Templeton would expect me back at noon, to feed upon her soggy sandwiches and tend her chirping boys.

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” the Captain declared, “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, when it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

I wouldn’t have named Melville as the author of these words (I favored dime-store sports biographies), but I recognized the mood at once. The Captain grinned; cunning lit his wide red face. He held out his hand for me to take. “Welcome aboard, son.”

His vessel was called The Intrepid Rhea. She flew two massive sails on the mainmast and a third at the stern, and carried a crew of five. The Captain sat aft, worrying the tiller, while his men, with quick efficient tugs and lashings, trimmed the sails to the right line.

I had to this point never sailed on a large boat, nor much beyond the harbor, a fact the crewmen recognized at once. “We’re lifting up,” one of them barked. I felt the deck angling under my feet and clamped myself to the gunwales. The ocean hurtled beneath us. The sails tore the wind in two. We had taken flight.

Within minutes, the water flattened out and all signs of land vanished. The Captain called for me to join him at the helm. “It always takes me a little time to make my peace with the open sea,” he said in his courtly manner. “For land holds us to certain orbits. When we release ourselves from their grip, there is no telling where a man might go. That’s what sailors believe. We’re all pagans at heart. Tell me a little about yourself, Teddy. You’re a handsome one, aren’t you, and an athlete if I’m betting. What brings you to these parts?”

I explained my situation.

“And where are your parents in all this?”

“Maine, sir,” I said.

The Captain squinted. “Why aren’t you with them?”

“They need time to themselves,” I explained, a tad defensively.

“Of course they do. Forgive my impertinence.” The Captain raised his chin to catch the breeze. “I have a task for you, Teddy, rather a vital one.”

I was to go belowdecks, locate the dainty bottles of Schweppes Tonic Water, empty each one to the line where the yellow Styrofoam sheaf began, then top them of with gin and a squeeze of lime. These I returned to the Captain, along with a bag of ice against which this precious cargo would rest for the duration.

The Captain unscrewed the cap and sipped. “Excellent work,” he said. “Now let’s subject you to the charms of Wilson. Good luck finding them.”

Wilson was the first mate. His sloped brow radiated the brooding of the eternally thwarted. Ancient tattoos mottled his forearms. He issued commands in a tone that relished failure. “Run a knittle through the reef band, and tie off at the cringle! No, you fool. The cringle!”

“He means that little hole there,” the Captain called out. “Stop being obscure, Wilson. Help the lad. He’s crew now.”

But I was captivated by the jargon, the names assigned every beam and rope and hem, the parade of verbs—swig, shiver, gripe—invoked to direct operations.

“We turn our ships into mothers,” is how the Captain put it, two bottles into his ration and feeling expansive. “How else might a sailor conquer fear upon such a vast, indifferent territory? We must endow these vessels with the power to protect us, the native ingenuity, the heart, the spirit, the will to live.”

Our route took us south and west past the Elizabeth Islands, then east again into the Vineyard Sound. There were more direct routes, I gathered, but the day called for languor. So steady was the breeze, so true our line, that the Captain’s passage into slumber went unnoticed until the wind shifted and sent our sails into a luff. Wilson and his mates exchanged a look. The Captain’s hand was gently loosed from the tiller, and Wilson assumed command.

“He’s a Mayhew,” Wilson said, as if that explained everything. “Of the famous Mayhews. Pilgrim pedigree and all like that. We call him Captain Mayhem.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s touched, you idgit. Crazy.”

It did not strike me that a crazy person would captain a ship of this sort. “What does he do?”

“Whatever he wants. He’s got special dispensation from above.” Wilson guzzled an entire bottle of Schweppes and belched. “If there’s any question about it, you drank that. Now reef the jib.”

We arrived at the Edgartown docks within the hour. Wilson ordered me belowdecks to alert the Captain, who stood in the galley in boxer shorts and an undershirt, shaving before a tiny mirror.

“I’ll need a bit of help, Teddy. Have you any experience in the realm of vestments?”

“The what?”

“Send Wilson down here, son. Tell him to bring me a tonic bottle. Not the one he already drank.”

Ten minutes later, the Captain emerged in a white pleated cassock overlaid in velvet burgundy and gleaming with mysterious insignia. The giant golden cross on his chest flashed in the sun; a miter sat somewhat askew on his silver hair, which had been pomaded into a pompadour.

“Ain’t you never seen a bishop before?” Wilson crowed. I offered an awkward kneeling bow.

“Oh, Christ. He ain’t the pope.”

“Pipe down,” said the Captain, who was now also, confusingly, the Bishop. “Fetch Teddy here his wages. I expect he spent as much time in the rigging as you did. How’d you do on the sails, son? I knew it. You’re a born seaman.” He glanced past me to the dock, where several gentlemen in tuxedoes and top hats had gathered.

“Welcome, Bishop Mayhew!” the most nervous of them called out. “We worried the tides had come against you.”

“Fear not, gentle Mr. Pratt. Fortune favors the bold!” As if to demonstrate, he hopped onto a gunwale and from there onto the dock, where he was enveloped and bustled into a waiting car, the largest I had ever seen.

“The Richie Riches always want a bishop,” Wilson muttered to his mate.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Who were those men?”

“The wedding party.”

“How nice,” I said, before I could stop myself. It was what my mother said at the mention of any wedding.

“Get yourself back here by four, pretty boy. We sail at five.” Wilson handed me a ten-dollar bill, which I stared at in considerable wonder.

III

And so I was set free to wander Martha’s Vineyard, a name I’d heard uttered with reverence by Mrs. Templeton. I’d imagined the place overrun by actual vineyards, dotted with gilded inns. But Edgartown was like any other seaside resort, full of sunstruck tourists and gift shops and roadside stands hawking homemade ice cream and burgers.

I found the closest one and ordered a cheeseburger and a greasy funnel of fries. I’d eaten nothing since breakfast. I can’t imagine what I must have looked like ravaging that humble meal. A group of girls sat nearby sucking at milkshakes and releasing rusty shrieks of laughter.

One of them stood and walked boldly toward me. I couldn’t make out her face because the sun was in my eyes.

“You’re a hungry one, aren’t you?” she said.

I smiled sheepishly.

“You sailed over with the Bishop.”

“How did you know that?”

“Everyone knows everything around here.”

The girl stepped into the path of the sun, and her face flashed into view. I thought of an Indian maiden, or what Hollywood in those days put forward as one: black hair pulled back in a braid, a white smile between bronze cheeks. We looked at one another. It was a magnetic event, that gaze. Her shoulders pressed at the straps of a blue sundress. Ribbons of fatty smoke swirled. A gull wheeled hungrily overhead. Everything went in dizzy circles.

From her friends came a chorus of murmurs. The girl sat down across from me and, with a look of deliberate mischief, reached into my basket for a fry. “Never mind them,” she said. “They just think you’re cute. Like Rock Hudson. Because of the cleft in your chin.”

My response to this kindness is lost to me now. I was not an articulate boy. Perhaps my reticence registered as humility, though I doubt it.

We wound up walking a nearby beach, not quite holding hands, the careless mood of late summer having swept aside standard codes of caution and protocols. Her name was Camille Watts. She was eighteen and had grown up on the island. In a few weeks, she would head off to college while I entered ninth grade, a fact I did not mention.

There was a frantic quality to our banter. I issued smirking complaints about the life of a high-school senior, cribbed from my older brother. Camille surveyed the idiocies of those who vacationed on the island—lobsters, she called them—the lunkheads who dove from docks and cracked their skulls, the prom queens who surrendered their virtue to greasy lifeguards. She enumerated the tawdry relics left behind by the weekend infidels whose rooms she cleaned at a private inn: fouled lingerie, snuffboxes filled with mysterious powders.

Before long, a church bell struck five. I offered Camille a hasty apology, then sprinted back to the dock, where I found the Rhea at anchor, her sails neatly bound. Not a soul aboard. I went to see the harbor master. He snickered. “The Bishop don’t sail this late.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“The reception, I expect. He does enjoy his receptions.”

I turned and trudged up the dock, trying to tamp my nerves. Camille was sitting on one of the pilings in her blue dress, grinning madly. “I could have told you that was going to happen.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I like to see you run. You’ve got a good stride.”

“I need to get back to South Dartmouth tonight.”

“Why?” Camille teased. “Is your mother going to be waiting up on the porch?”

“My mom’s dead,” I said.

Camille’s lovely mouth hung open. “Oh God. I’m sorry.”

I had no idea why this monstrous lie came leaping out of me, but I understood at once that I would have to commit to it. “It happened a long time ago,” I mumbled. “I was just a little kid.”

The hour of long shadows had arrived, the golden dusk begun. Camille looked around awkwardly while the ocean flashed behind her.

“Are you old enough to drive yet?” she said finally.

“Sure.”

“We should go driving.”

“I don’t have a car,” I replied stupidly.

She laughed, a small husky bit of music. “I do.”

Camille drove a Volkswagen Beetle, pea green with a vinyl interior that smelled of burned oil and tanning lotion. We set off around the island, winding to the clay cliffs of Aquinnah and the lighthouse along the West Chop peninsula, where, on a dare, I stripped off my shirt and jumped from the foundation into the waters of the outer harbor. Later we got sandwiches and sodas and took them up onto the bluffs above Gay Head Beach, which were cloaked in sea grass.

We ate beneath the thickening stars and began to neck halfway through our root beers. Aside from the suffocating clinches staged by movie stars, my only knowledge of this art derived from a female cousin who stressed the importance of stroking hair. When I reached for Camille’s hair, though, she reared back and regarded me solemnly.

“What are you, Teddy?”

“What am I?”

“Where do your people come from?”

With a start, I realized what was going on: Camille had sussed out that I was Jewish. Something had given me away—the scent of my skin, the curly hair I buzzed into a flattop. “My dad’s family came from Poland originally. My mother’s family was German,” I said carefully. “Most of them died in the war.”

Camille took this in. “Your mother, too?”

“She got out,” I said. “Then she couldn’t go back.”

This was almost all I knew of my mother’s history. Only later would I learn that her family had been wealthy in Germany (highborn is the phrase that comes to mind) and that she had been raised primarily by servants.

“Do you miss her?” Camille said.

“Not as much as I used to.”

I don’t know how to explain this properly, but I had convinced myself by then that my mother actually was dead. I even managed a little pity on my own behalf.

“Thank you,” Camille said.

“For what?”

“For telling me the truth.” She reached back, freed her hair from its braid, and spread the dark plaits across her bare shoulders. They felt smooth but curiously stiff, like the hair on a doll. “I’m mixed,” she said. “Do you understand?”

I did not. I’d never touched the hair of a person of mixed race. I’m not sure I had any idea what “mixed race” was. Someone was either white or Negro. I’d heard my father praise the Supreme Court for banning segregation in schools, but my parents, like most white people then and now, were far more likely to employ a Negro than to socialize with one.

This left Camille with the unenviable task of outlining her lineage: three hundred years of energetic crossbreeding—a wayward missionary frolicking with the Wampanoag, an Irish whaler bedding down with a runaway slave—the human mess of desire that left her not quite one thing nor the other. Perhaps this explained her interest in me, a transient of unknown provenance.

We spent an hour rolling in those dunes, mauled by the chemistries of adolescence, though what we wanted most of all was distraction: Camille from the guardians of racial purity who awaited her, me from the consequences of having gone AWOL. We huddled close and feasted upon one another’s mouths. The tinny notes of pop songs leaked from the transistor radio beside us. Then came wind and the smell of rain, and clouds erased the stars one by one.

My next memory is of a massive hand clamping onto my shoulder. I blearily traced that hand up to the broad, uniformed chest of a cop, who was threatening to have me arrested for trespassing.

Camille had dropped me off in Edgartown a few hours earlier. After an ardent farewell, I had staggered in the general direction of the harbor, stopping to rest on a chaise longue on the front lawn of an inn, where I had promptly fallen asleep.

Now the cop, illuminated by the headlights of his Packard, was haranguing me. He had the hectoring manner characteristic of law officers in resort settings, as if he were auditioning for a much rougher beat. His face looked like a beef roast sliced open to reveal a scowl.

I sputtered out my affiliation with the Bishop.

“The Bishop,” he rumbled. “We’ll see about the Bishop.”

The cop muscled me into handcuffs and drove me down to the harbor, where we found Wilson sprawled on the aft deck.

“Fetch him, you drunk fool,” the cop barked.

The Bishop eventually appeared on deck, in a billowing nightshirt. “Constable Orton!” he sang out. “What a fine thing to receive a visit this early in the day. I see you’ve done me the kindness of escorting my second mate home. I’d wondered where I might have mislaid him. A fine young man, don’t you agree?”

“That’s not how I’d put it,” Constable Orton said. “He’s in violation of numerous laws, as your crewmen tend to be.” He cast a withering glance at Wilson. “I have every right to haul this nipper off to jail.”

The Bishop took note of my cuffs and set a hand to his chest. “Tell me, Orton, what was the precise nature of his transgressions?”

The constable swung his bullish head back and forth. “I found him sleeping on private property.”

“Sleeping?” the Bishop said brightly. “I see your dilemma. You can’t have sailors lying about like vagrants. Still, I wonder if it makes sense to exert the full force of your authority in this particular instance. Perhaps remanding him to my custody makes more sense. The young man is clearly contrite.”

I was, in fact, petrified. I had no idea that the Bishop held far more power than the constable. Nor that I was witnessing a ritual humiliation—the gentle extraction of a derelict crewman from the constable’s jurisdiction—familiar to both parties. I believed that I would be thrown in jail and kept there for weeks, perhaps even months, my life permanently tarnished by a criminal record.

“Let’s at least relieve him of those manacles,” the Bishop said.

The constable stepped behind me and yanked off the cuffs; his hand remained on my neck. “This here is a respectable island,” he seethed into my ear. “And I know what you are, Bishop or no. Your haircut don’t fool me. You’re a kike and probably a little Commie, too, and I saw what you were doing in those dunes with that high yellow of yours. This is my island. You understand?”

“That’s quite enough, Orton,” the Bishop called out.

The constable tightened his grip. “This country is going to hell because of punks like you. And do you know who I blame? Do you, boyo? I blame your mama. She’s the one who fell down on the job. If she’d raised you proper, you’d have known better than to chase after nigger girls. You’d have—”

My elbow slammed backward into his gut. It took me a moment to recognize what I’d done. The constable sat gasping on the dock, as if felled by some sort of seizure. Then he climbed to his feet wearing a grim smile, and I could see that he had hoped to sucker me into such an act. He pulled a black baton from his belt and charged.

I’d played enough football to know the constable would be undone only by his own brawn. I fled to the far side of the dock. When he was close enough to lunge, I feinted left, then cut right. This bit of misdirection—we called it a “stick move” on the gridiron—sent the constable tumbling past. He teetered for a moment on the wharf’s lip. I planted my forearm in his back, and he tumbled into the Atlantic. For a long second no one moved. Then Wilson whooped.

“Holy shit! It’s Crazylegs Hirsch!”

The Bishop stood on the prow, surveying the scene darkly. “Start the engine,” he snapped. “Throw off the lines. Come aboard, Teddy.”

“What?”

The constable surfaced. “You’re under arrest!” he bellowed.

Wilson had the motor idling. He was casting off the ropes with an antic fury.

“Hurry now,” the Bishop called. “You’re a free man on the high seas.”

“Don’t you dare, you dirty little kike! I’ll lock you up for a hundred years.”

I watched the Rhea gently buck, the mouth of the harbor lit by dawn, and the watery green disc of the sea beyond.

“It’s now or never,” the Bishop said. “Come on, son. It’s time to go home.”

The final word roused me from my shock. I sprinted and leaped the rail like a hurdler. Wilson cranked the motor. The Bishop let out a jolly blasphemy and steered toward open water.

I glanced back at the seawall where, a few hours earlier, I had walked on my hands to impress Camille. The harbor master had popped out of his hut to investigate. The constable clung to a piling. Wet hair hung over one eye so that he looked, in his thunderous and impotent wrath, like a tiny cyclops. The three of us began to laugh uncontrollably. With the desperate merriment of fugitives, we sailed into one of the fiercest storms ever to batter Buzzards Bay.

IV

What’s more, we set off without the benefit of our fourth and fifth crewmen, for they had anticipated a later start. The skies were lead gray, the sun a dull bulb above the vanishing point. I began to fret. I’d given my name to the constable. I’d told him where I was staying for the summer. “He can’t do nothing to you on the mainland,” Wilson insisted. “He’s just a toy copper with a big yap.”

“I’m on close terms with the police chief in South Dartmouth,” the Bishop added. “With his wife, actually. A woman of exceptional faith.”

“Did you hear what he said to me?”

The Bishop gestured for me to step down toward the helm. “The blood libel is a stubborn curse,” he said delicately. “My own ancestors taught the Wampanoag that the Jews murdered Jesus. And that poor Rosenberg woman—electrocuted in a chair. It’s like something Torquemada would have devised. But you mustn’t hate men like Orton. That is what they most desire: to draw others into their darkness. It might help to know that his mother passed recently.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, more out of habit than sympathy. “He despised her, actually. That’s why he’s turned so mean. A man can’t mourn properly if he fails at mercy.” The Bishop rubbed at his eyes. “Write that down somewhere, would you, Teddy? It has the trimmings of a benediction. Then fetch us something to eat. Do you know how to poach an egg?”

Whatever I made of this strange counsel, it has stayed with me all these years, as has the meal we shared a bit later, toast smattered with apricot preserves and jiggers of sweet tea, the Bishop’s spiked with something from his special cupboard. This must have been within an hour of our departure, because by seven the wind had taken on a sting. The next thing I remember is Wilson on the prow calling out, “Good Christ!” To the west, just south of our intended path, three massive clouds hung like anvils.

Wilson insisted we turn the Rhea around and return to the Vineyard. A boat of our size, with only two competent sailors, had no business on the open sea. But the Bishop felt a change of course would deliver us the distance to avoid the storm. His concern for me must have played a role; he knew my attack on the constable was, in the eyes of the law, a serious crime. Whatever his reasons, he turned us due north toward Buzzards Bay. Wilson was in a silent fury, to which he had every right. “The damn thing’s upon us,” he growled.

I should mention that the yawl was equipped with a shortwave, which had fallen into disrepair. Had we the benefit of that device, we would have never left Edgartown, or simply circled the island and hidden ourselves for a day. All up and down the Eastern Seaboard the talk was of Diane, a tropical system that had come aground in North Carolina and pummeled the mid-Atlantic states. A wall of smaller storms from the west had unexpectedly pushed her back to sea.

To say that we lay in her path would be an understatement. She was that breed of storm that proceeds not by route but by the disruption of entire nautical latitudes. Silvered squalls pulsed with lightning, spitting pearls of fog across the ocean between us. Then came skirling winds, which in ripping through the rigging produced a dull, staticky roar, like a stylus scraping the grooves at the end of a record. Glassy green wedges of wave rose up, loomed over us, then broke against the hull with startling force.

The Bishop ordered me below to secure what I could and fetch the foul-weather gear. I shouldn’t have been on deck in such conditions. Wilson, who’d spent thirty years on fishing vessels, was being tossed about like a scrap of paper. He called to the Bishop for what’s known as a preventer, a small length of rope meant to keep a sail or spar from snapping. The Bishop directed me to a cubby near his bunk where he kept such things. “Throw it here,” he yelled from above.

But I was still a boy, saddled with a boy’s foolish need to prove my mettle. All I had to do was carry a rope a dozen feet. I could do that. I climbed onto the deck and inched sideways toward Wilson, clinging to the bolted tackle.

“Get back down!” the Bishop roared.

Wilson looked furious under his rubber hood. He snatched the rope and waved me back to safety. But I hesitated, the sin of pride having risen within me, just as a gale sent the boom whistling across the deck.

It struck me flush along the back of my thighs and jackknifed me over the rail. My head swung down and slammed against a plank. For some unknown span of seconds, I hung upside down off the side of the boat. My only clear memory of this event—if “memory” qualifies as the right word—is of opening my eyes and seeing a woman within the waves. She was about my mother’s age, her face serene and ruddy, her eyes flecked with hazel. I recognized her at once as celestial.

It would later be explained to me that the only reason I hadn’t been cast into the sea is that one of my legs had become tangled in a wire rope known as a shroud, which held me fast to the hull like a hooked fish. But I remained secretly convinced that it was she—the woman in the waves—who had rescued me.

What next?

I felt one set of hands grasping my legs, another digging at the flesh under my arms. I heard my shipmates grunting. I saw their faces lit red with panic. They hustled me below and onto a small bunk, where a quick inspection revealed a lump on the back of my head and a bloody gash where the shroud had sliced into my calf. The Bishop set an ice pack on my head and wrapped a bandage around the wound, muttering soothingly all the while.

My mood was one of queer elation, endorphic relief, what sailors call Cheating the Deep. It didn’t last long. The whirling of that cabin brought on a muzzy vertigo. I lurched to the latrine and vomited with a quiet intensity. I must have slept for a few minutes because the next thing I remember, the Bishop’s face was above mine. Gin fumes rose from his tongue; tiny blue tributaries traced the ball of his nose. He flicked on a flashlight and stared hard into my eyes.

“No sleeping, Teddy.”

“What?”

“We need all hands pulling together.”

“Are we sinking?”

“No. But listen now, son. Listen. We’ve taken on water. You’re a strong young fellow, even with that knot on your noggin. I need you to man the bilge pump. You understand?” He eased me to a sitting position. The floor of the cabin sloshed with water. “How does that feel?”

“My head hurts.”

“Here’s something for that. Swallow it down. Good. Now I’m going to put this around your waist, Teddy. It’s to keep you from slipping again. I want you to let out the rope like this. Keep it taut.”

“Yessir,” I said.

The Bishop led me past the galley to a tiny compartment below the bow, where the chipped red paint of the bilge pump rose from gray water. “Up and down, Teddy, just as hard as you can. If you get dizzy or your vision gets blurry or anything like that, you tug on the rope three times. You understand?” Only later would I discover that the Bishop had tied me to the portion of the mainmast belowdecks.

The storm, which had come upon us like an ambush, now settled in like a siege. I pumped dizzily. Up above, Wilson lashed around the rigging. The Bishop clutched the radio to his chest and ransacked every drawer for the manual. Eventually, he retreated to the galley.

“Come eat, Teddy,” he said.

He handed me a plate with a poached egg in a nest of toast and a bottle of Schweppes, which I regarded with some trepidation.

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” He winked. “Don’t worry, son. Yours is just fizzy water. Eat up.”

“How long will this go on?” I said.

The Bishop gulped his drink and eyed the quivering yolk on his plate. “The Gods are being temperamental at the moment. Perhaps we should pray to them.”

“I’m not much good at praying,” I confessed.

“The ancients had it right, Teddy. They slapped a nice fat steak on the altar and sought triumph in battle. Quid pro quo. These days, we apply for mercy empty-handed. It turns us into beggars.” The Bishop laced his fingers in a pantomime of prayer. “Perhaps I don’t sound very pious.”

A wave concussed the cabin, as if in accord. The Bishop ducked back into the galley and emerged with a small canned ham, which he opened and sliced neatly in half. “I’ve been saving this for the proper occasion.” He mounted the cabin steps and threw aside the tarp. Spray exploded into bits of smoke above him. “Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord!” he cried out. “O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!” He picked up one half of the ham and heaved it like a softball into the storm, then returned. “You do know who Poseidon is, don’t you? Ruler of the seas. Maker of wind and wave.”

“You better hope he isn’t Jewish,” I said.

The Bishop liked that. His round belly quaked with laughter.

Wilson stuck his head down the stairs. “What the hell was that?”

“Have some ham,” the Bishop roared. “You’re not kosher, are you?”

“Sorry to interrupt your party,” Wilson said, “but you might want to know there’s a crack in the jibboom.”

“How bad?”

Wilson just stared at him.

The Bishop glanced at the remaining half ham on its chipped plate, perhaps a little hungrily, then hurried up the stairs to inspect the damage. He and Wilson shouted at each other, and I heard Wilson stomp to the stern. He didn’t trust his captain, but he held to the sailor’s creed: that action represented the only hope of salvation. Competence was the pillar of his faith.

“Please tell me what’s going on,” I said when the Bishop came below.

“We’re raising the mizzen sail. This might allow us to make a little progress toward land. It might also be a bit more . . . eventful.” The Bishop opened another Schweppes. “I never finished telling you about Poseidon, did I?”

I didn’t want to hear more, but the Bishop plunged on, one of the prerogatives of his position. “Now, Poseidon was the second son of the titan Kronos, whom most people call Saturn. He had a habit of eating his children, because a seer told him one of his o≠spring would kill him. Seers were always foretelling such things; it made family life quite trying. But Poseidon’s mother was clever. She concealed him among a flock of lambs and wrapped a colt in the birth blanket, and Saturn ate that. She saved her son from a gruesome and untimely death. Do you know what her name was, Teddy?”

I did not.

“Rhea! Blessed mother! Intrepid soul! They say she’s the one who watches over men betrayed by the sea.”

“I saw her,” I said suddenly. “When I was knocked overboard. There was a woman. In the waves. I saw her face.”

The Bishop cocked his head skeptically. “What did she look like?”

As I described her, the Bishop’s own face took on a peculiar animation. He grabbed my hand, rather too urgently. “Did she say anything, son?”

“No. But it was like you said, like she was watching over me. Wait. Have you seen her too?”

The Bishop’s eyes began to blur. “Not for many years, I’m afraid.”

I didn’t understand what this meant, but I felt I was intruding upon some private vigil. A few moments passed in silence.

“Are we going to sink?” I asked again.

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I have faith.” He puffed his cheeks to show me just how full of faith he was. “Let me go check on Wilson. He’ll sail us to Tahiti if we’re not careful.”

A few minutes later came a sound like giant bristles being ripped loose, then a crash from above that struck all into chaos. The Bishop, who had come below to replenish his drink, fell and struggled to raise himself.

“The mizzen’s come down!” Wilson yelled. He was joyous with vengeance.

Water began pouring into the cabin from the spot where the mast had gashed the deck. For the first time the Bishop looked genuinely unnerved. Blood dripped onto his yellow slicker from a cut at his temple. He ordered Wilson to cover the hole with a tarp.

“We may need to rid ourselves of a few things,” he murmured. He meant ballast: the cast-iron skillet, soggy bedding, dozens of empties. These he flung up to Wilson, who hurled them overboard. The noises within that cabin were by now agonizing, the moans and whimpers of a dying thing.

Wilson came belowdecks to glower.

“I’ve got the dinghy ready,” he announced.

“She’d flip before you could strap the oars,” the Bishop said.

“I’ll take my chances before I stay here and get my skull stoved in,” Wilson replied. “At least let the boy come with me. For God’s sake.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You won’t do it, you mean.”

“She’ll ride this out, Jack. Give it another half hour.” This was a direct order, though it didn’t sound like one.

“Ten minutes, Captain. After that, it’s every man for himself.” Wilson climbed to the top step, then turned back. He was not a man given to pity, nor did he wear its pretense well. “I can’t guarantee you nothing, kid. But you’ll wind up feeding the sharks if you stay on this ship.”

This statement shattered whatever poise remained within me. I began to breathe in heaves. Then I couldn’t breathe at all.

“Easy, son,” the Bishop said.

I tried making some sounds, words maybe. I noticed the Bishop’s little pink half ham bobbing in the water around us. His sacrifice had failed. There was no mighty mother Goddess presiding over our fates. That was only a myth devised to keep a child from panic. Whether I chose to face it or not, death had arrived.

I threw myself at the Bishop and beat his chest. He was the one who had done this, lured me onto his ship, into this storm that would end me. I had viewed him as my protector when he was nothing more than a lush. I was furious at the constable for bullying me and Mrs. Templeton, too, for playing with my heart. I was furious most of all at my parents. And yet I also felt, strangely, that I was letting them down, that they would be disappointed in me for dying, and their imminent disappointment drove me further into rage.

I thought about the home I’d grown up in, the books, the endless ranks of books in my father’s library, the high cupboard my brother and I raided for cookies, the speckled blue crock that housed a tender pot roast each Sunday. I pressed against the Bishop and tried to make these things vanish. My parents had abandoned me, left me to make a life, as I have (as most of us do), with surrogates.

I didn’t want to die, but even thinking this contained the possibility that I would die. All that I had just begun to live for—love, adventure, glory—would constitute my losses. I struggled to imagine my mother holding me. Then I remembered the black lie I’d told Camille.

“I want my mother,” I told the Bishop.

But it was too late. I’d killed her off.

V

It would later emerge that the dispute between the Bishop and Wilson had focused on whether to hunker down and ride out the storm or set a course for its heart and thus hasten its passage. The latter was what the Bishop had ordered and why the wind had intensified around us and ripped down the mizzen. But it is also why we survived. Had we remained lying to, Diane would have torn the ship to bits. By aiming toward her center we wound up bisecting her.

Perhaps I’ve given the Bishop too much credit here. I can say for certain only that sometime in the midst of my convulsions, in the midst of his murmured oaths, the winds did relent, the seas calmed, the grinding of the planks gave way to a tinkling, and a soft light filtered into the cabin.

We scrambled to join Wilson on deck. He stood staring in puzzlement at the sun, which had edged from behind a cloud bank.

“We’re in the eye,” he told the Bishop.

“No, Jack. Don’t you see? We’re clear of it.” The Bishop swept his arm at the monstrous silver bands of the storm, which did appear to be slowly receding. The sea beneath us was pale green, still immense but reasonable again.

It came as no surprise that every boat harbored in Fall River had been dry-docked. Our appearance caused a considerable stir. A small congregation gathered as we drew closer. The harbor master was there, along with Coast Guard officials in trim uniforms and a number of the Bishop’s officiants.

I lingered belowdecks, afraid I would be arrested if I came ashore. It was Wilson who came to fetch me. He had stripped down to the blurry tattoos. “Nobody’s gonna bother you—unless you slug one of the Coasties. You’re not gonna slug a Coastie, are you?” Wilson showed me his ruined teeth. “They just want to contact your folks is all. Okay?” He, too, had saved my life. I wanted to tell him that I’d never forget him. “Calm down, kid. It’s over. You done good. Shit, play this right and you’re the hero.”

I took a last look around the cabin, and my eye fell on a small framed photo nailed above the Bishop’s bunk. I stepped closer and saw, to my astonishment, that the woman in the picture was the same one who had appeared to me when I was thrown overboard, the woman in the waves. “Who is this?”

Wilson glanced over my shoulder. “That’s the Bishop’s mother.”

“Rhea?”

“No. Her name was Estelle. They never got on too well. She didn’t like the sea.”

A local doctor had been summoned to the dock, and he led me to an empty room in the ferry station to examine me, administer a tetanus shot, and dress the wound on my calf. The doctor took his leave, and the Bishop slipped into the room. He was still in his rubber slickers, his silver hair in disarray, and was chewing spearmint gum, a whole pack of it, it seemed. “How do you feel, Teddy?”

“Good. Fine.”

He explained that he had arranged for me to be transported to South Dartmouth. A car was waiting. “Now listen, Teddy. Your parents will want a full accounting of what happened. You must be honest with them. This was my idea, wasn’t it? From the start. That’s what I’ve told the police.”

“But I wanted to go along. You didn’t kidnap me.”

“That depends on how you define the word.” The Bishop gazed at the harbor, where his battered yawl was being hoisted from the sea. “I put you through quite a time, anyway.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

The Bishop turned and stared at me. “I let exuberance get the better of my judgment. I put your life at risk. I’m asking your forgiveness.”

“You don’t have to apologize. We made it. We survived.”

The Bishop set his hand upon my cheek. His eyes had gone watery. “I would have been proud to have a son as fine as you, Teddy.”

I didn’t know what to say in return. I could feel myself getting upset. The Bishop was going to leave and I didn’t want him to. I had this crazy idea that we’d patch up the Rhea and take to sea again.

The Bishop walked me up to the road, where a gleaming Chevy Bel Air idled. The storm was still out there, dark threads of rain that danced in the scolding winds. Then the car door swung open, and I waved farewell to my boyhood.

The scene that greeted me in South Dartmouth was one of high drama. Samuel and Peter burst from the Templeton home, pausing for half a second to admire the Bel Air before leaping at me in panicked delight.

“You ran away!”

“You were in the storm!”

“You were in a shipwreck!”

“You could have drownded!”

Mrs. Templeton called them back to the house, but she was by now halfway to the car, walking unsteadily. “My gracious, look at you! Boys, stop jumping on him. Do you realize how worried we were? Boys! Do you have any idea? And your parents! I don’t need to tell you the state they’re in. You are to call them at five sharp. That’s when they can get to a phone.” Her tone was shrill with fury and relief. “How could you do such a thing, Teddy? I don’t understand.”

Inside, I related the story, leaving out the damning details. I repeated this account to my father, somewhat more contritely. He ordered me to come to Maine immediately.

The thought of further travel struck me as preposterous. I knew what awaited me. A drafty lodge off the coast, days of silent reproach. Whereas the Templeton home was full of pleasures I felt were my due: Salisbury steak and french fries; a color television; a pair of disciples who regarded me by now as a demigod, who held their breath at the mere prospect of inspecting my wounds; a warm bed; and, not least of all, the attentions of Mrs. Templeton, whose agitation had given way to a nervous solicitude.

I waited until after dinner to tell her I would head up to Maine the next morning. We were standing on the back porch. In the den, the boys lay stunned and happy within the glow of the Magnavox.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. My parents sounded pretty sore.”

The implication took a few seconds to settle in. Mrs. Templeton’s posture stiffened. She pulled a cigarette from her clutch and jabbed it between her lips. “Of course they are,” she said. “I can only imagine the worry you caused them.” She continued talking this way for a minute, then lit her cigarette and drew a little of that calm into herself. The storm had thinned to a mist, which hung like gauze over the black lawn. From the trees came the frantic glissando of a finch.

“What will I do about the boys?” Mrs. Templeton said absently.

I suppose she had somewhat forgotten that I had my own family. Or perhaps she’d expected the summer to drift on indefinitely.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said.

The bulb above the railing lit one side of her face and cast the other in shadow. Smoke curled out of her slender nostrils. She looked like a pale beautiful dragon. “‘Ain’t that a shame,’” she sang.

Some hours later, I woke into blue darkness. I was on the couch in the living room, where I had fallen asleep even before the boys. They’d left little drawings on my chest, thank-you notes that depicted me swinging a bat, throwing a football, standing on a boat beneath massive clawed waves.

The room smelled of hamburger and hair spray. A lamp clicked on, and Mrs. Templeton appeared, staring at me from the recliner. A jaundiced halo encircled her head. “Rise and shine and give God your glory. Did I frighten you, Teddy? I guess that makes us even. You just come and go as you please now, don’t you? Not a word to me or the boys. Not a thought about us. No, off into the world and everyone else be damned.” She had been waiting to deliver this speech evidently, smoking cigarettes, sipping steadily at whatever concoction was sanding down her words.

“We were supposed to sail back yesterday,” I told her again. “That’s what the captain said. I swear it.” I wanted to ask what time it was, whether I might have a couple of aspirin.

“Oh, do you swear it? You’re being Honest Abe now? Why don’t you tell the truth? You’ve been trying to get away from me for months, haven’t you? Because you hate me.”

“What? I don’t hate you.”

She stood abruptly and walked over to the couch, where she bent one knee, like a fashion model. She wore a sheer nightgown which, by the crude grace of some static force, clung the curves of her body. “You hate me because you can’t have me. Isn’t that right? Because you’re too afraid. You wouldn’t even know what to do, would you? You’re not a man at all.” She was leaning over me now, backlit by the lamp, her eyes slitted with mockery.

I kept hearing her say, What will I do about the boys? As if she deserved the world’s pity, as if her sons were some implacable burden she hoped to drown. My hand shot out and gripped the rail of her hip.

“You’re not a man yet,” she scoffed. “Go back to your mommy.”

I fell upon her, half predator and half supplicant. I had no idea what I was doing, where anything went, how to navigate a map of such size and scale. Mrs. Templeton flung herself against me. I shoved her backward onto the couch and began to rip at her nightgown. My hands found her breasts and paused a moment to marvel at their terrifying pliancy. Long white sheets of skin stretched over her ribs. Buttons of bone shone at the hinge of her hips.

“You see how it is?” she snarled. “You see how it is with a woman? Are you going to be a man now?”

I began burrowing blindly at the hair and dampness below. Mrs. Templeton threw her legs apart. The scent reached us instantly, the sweat and brine.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, holding me fast against her.

Then I felt myself enveloped by a slick warmth, into which I could not stop thrusting. Mrs. Templeton’s painted toes raked my calves. My hands dug down and slid themselves under her behind and squeezed, and we both grunted, like children in the grip of the same tantrum.

These events could not have lasted a minute, but my sense of time had gone haywire. I’d become more beast than boy. Mrs. Templeton threw her head back, and I sucked at the salty tendons of her neck.

Then the clenching began. It was completely without precedent or sensible context; a kind of ecstatic hemorrhage. When I returned to my body again, I felt sluggish. I raised myself off Mrs. Templeton, and she lay back on the couch. She was much older than I’d realized, the skin around her face gouged with sags and pouches. She could see that I was examining her more closely, and the shame of this appraisal caused her to release a tiny choked snuffle.

I wanted simply to get away, but my body, normally so agile and fleet, felt now like an anchor. I stepped backward and stumbled over the low coffee table where the boys and I had sorted a thousand baseball cards. Then I was on all fours, scuttling like a swine. The dressing on my calf had ripped open, and the wound bled in ribbons. Behind me, Mrs. Templeton sobbed, her enchantments gone dark.

I staggered, naked, toward the closet where my suitcases lay stashed. Outside, the blue edge of dawn pressed down upon the earth. No stars, no sense of wonder lit my path. And many hours later, when I reached the train station in Augusta, Maine, my father greeted me with a fierce kick in the pants, which I barely felt. Still later, my mother, in some warped gesture of contrition, took me to buy a pair of all-weather boots, the smell of which made me sick in the parking lot.

I never told them any of this. I never even told my brother.

There’s only one memory of that summer I can’t square with the rest. It’s what happened down in that basement room on the night Mrs. Templeton opened the window. She’s still there. She’s finished her drink and her cigarette. She’s lingering in the doorway, still radiant. I turn the bedside light off and lie in the dark and wait.

Mrs. Templeton tiptoes across the room and kneels beside my bed. Then her face comes into view. It is 1955, a sweltering summer night, the Chordettes are singing about Mr. Sandman. My parents are still alive, tucked away where they can’t be reached. In a few days, mad with boredom and longing, I’ll take to the sea and meet a girl and punch a constable and fall overboard in a storm. And later, frantic for love, I’ll make my woozy passage into adulthood. But none of that has happened yet. I’m still a kid. Mrs. Templeton is still a mother. She closes her eyes and sets her lips to my forehead, as if with this foolish blessing she might keep me young forever.

Read more from Issue 15.1.