Clay didn’t know whether to call a Board Meeting or not for the week after the Commodore’s funeral. He was the Secretary of the Club. Larry, the Vice-Commodore, was in Florida at his condo with his wife and their boat, a 44-foot Beneteau, new enough to be envied but not new enough for the slip fees at Port Imperial.
Clay would feel like a traitor to the Club having a boat that big. And besides, there should be something to retirement besides boats.
Like money.
Which Clay had enough of and intended to be right with, especially with Sandra having worked all her life for hers.
Clay and Sandra had visited Larry and Shelley down there. It was a regular condo they had, not a time share, full of casual but nice light-colored Florida furniture, pictures of their grandkids, a wardrobe of shorts, Bermuda shirts, and flip-flops pretty much all the time. Clay was campaigning with Sandra for a similar unit for winter use. Whether he took the boat down was not clear in his mind. What he needed was the sight of a row of masts, halyards clanging in the wind. He wanted to be one of the people standing by when a boat came in, waiting for the docking line to be thrown, the skipper to ease her in, the sailors to jump off, as they secured the vessel, lowered the main, rolled up the jib, buckled the cover onto the mast, and headed in for a shower and maybe a drink at the bar. The memory of vectors, of the rocking and heeling motion of the boat, the sound of birds, the sight of land, the buoyancy of the tack, the aggression of the jibe, all the while worrying about the kids. Don’t do that. We might not be able to get to you in time. All this was now Sandra’s as well, and she had taken to it like he had taken to her high school teaching routines, an endless demi-parenting whose end would bring a kind of death, in not being so perpetually and terribly needed.
Clay doubted that they had undone the docking lines all summer, preferring to be by the ocean than on it, so he was unnerved when a day and half went by before he got an answer to the e-mail with the news of the Commodore’s death. When the response finally came, it read, “I’m sorry,” and that was it.
There’s nothing you can do but show up for the funeral or not, and while they did show up, they didn’t stay long enough for a board meeting, so Clay was dumbstruck about what to do about the Club and the empty Commodore’s chair.
A dreary stuckness afflicted the Tiki Bar, with only scattered drinkers, subdued, rehashing the details of the Commodore’s death until it became the necessary prelude to further drinking.
There weren’t any orbs popping in. You couldn’t cause an orb to appear or form up from the ambient shadow energy of building structures — but they did happen a lot at the Club. Why they weren’t happening now, when most expected, he did not know, but he did know that it was a bad sign.
Or not. The ghost situation was not an exact science.
Clay hoped the Club was in the clear — he didn’t like thinking of the alternatives. No one wanted to consider this death to be anything more than natural causes. The bar had thoroughly discussed the whole situation of the ghosts and it was now not foremost in anyone’s mind. The gory details of the passing were actually quite normal. An overweight elderly gentleman had had a heart attack and died, despite triple bypass surgery, right here, where he usually was.
Not knowing what else to do, Clay went ahead and called the meeting. The Members of the Board assembled in the dingy conference room that was always being discussed as going to be painted, but first that pile of old records sitting by the wall needed something done with it. Like be tossed, but that was something that could be gotten around to by the Commodore. In some century. And the moldy carpet replaced. As if the Club had the funds for anything but an infinite series of postponements. Eventually the place would collapse and be condemned, the developers would come in, and who knows if this grand Victorian mansion for ghosts would even exist.
No one but the inner circle ever saw this room. It was by the spot where that long-ago thing happened, so it was used lightly, in a respectful way, and smoked in.
Though there weren’t orbs, there was a static electricity feel in the air, tiny pops at random times, and these seasoned portal dwellers knew to keep it down and behave normally. Any rise in emotion, particularly fear, could get the entire poltergeist mechanics going. And for Pete’s sake, no lust. What we need here is Meeting Minutes, repair estimates, membership applications, two hours at least, a gavel going down in the sense of it at the end, concluding with a drink at the bar — in other words, business as usual.
The meeting had excited the usual suspects in the ghost corps, who were used to the meta-reality of being here and simultaneously in the George Washington Era, complete in the tricorne hats, bills of lading handwritten with quill pens, on paper that was more parchment than copy paper bond, some of the gentlemen in the robes and regalia of the Masons, in which they had no doubt been buried, working away at their beloved jobs and service projects, secret handshakes at the ready; the occasional African altar invocation, usually on questions of love; Clipper ships in the distance with sailors working the rigging, ladies with parasols standing on the docks looking out to sea; the whole of it phasing in and out of Gilligan’s Island.
Not quite a fully functioning orb yet, the Commodore himself came to have a sense of surrender to the arm situation. It’s not that he had the arms or didn’t. It’s that it was a relative condition now superseded by a shifting palette of memory, imagination, diffidence, and the thirst for sailing, while still being entitled to command.
Without any arms, the others pointed out.
This is why they have a Tiki Bar, the older ones tittered. It helps.
“I wish we had a Tiki Bar,” said the Commodore. Suddenly they were in a Tiki Bar on an island beach and the Commodore once again had arms and a tropical-fruit-laden drink to make them worthwhile. An old witch seemed to wink at him. He snorted with disgust. It was wrong while being right, and he swore to himself that women didn’t grasp anything any more in death than they do in life.
Suddenly the bar phased into an old black and white television show of the American flag flying against a clear grey sky with the Ave Maria in Latin playing in the background.
“What’s this?”
“Vatican II did have an effect, but not a good one from our standpoint.”
“How do we get the Tiki Bar back?”
“Three Our Fathers and six Hail Marys.”
“Really?”
“That’s what it was all about.”
It wouldn’t be the last time old Mike wished he’d gone to church.
Suddenly the world went Technicolor again, an aqua ocean lapping up onto white sands, children shrieking in the surf, women in gigantic sunglasses and beach hats reading magazines in white sleeveless blouses and pastel beach culottes. The Commodore could tell they were in a scene that seemed to inhabit the 1950s. Some old lady with a rosary in the corner grinned. “I like to keep my boys happy.”
“Was that old Gretchen?” asked the Commodore.
“Her aunt.”
The Commodore did not like being in a strange Tiki bar with the usual Tiki Bar suspects. He had no coordinates. It made him long for oblivion to be thus annoyed with proximity to a life that was now lost. But, as in life, he made do with a weak umbrella drink, and went through the motions of a kind of disjointed small talk, waiting for the memory scheme to end.
A few feet down, in human existence, Clay knew that, in the normal order of things, the new Commodore would be him. He was already planning to be magnanimous about accepting the position, and was trying to be smart about things the way the old Commodore was. That guy knew his way around the Club and was always in control of the situation while just seeming to be fat.
He wanted the ghost situation to be Ghost Lite, in the same way you wish a middle-aged cancer to be a few rounds of radiation and wasn’t that a close call? But you don’t always get what you want, so here was Clay, aching for more normalcy when there had never been normalcy in the Club, not since 1906. This was not upscale Liberty Harbor, on the Hudson, the train taking commuters into Manhattan desk jobs, plush, and under control. This was Bayonne, where they’d all been forever, and they were lucky to have their run-down old yacht club at all.
Clay looked around the room and a tear almost came to his eye that his entire life was building to this moment.
“I say we make a resolution to honor the fallen Commodore.”
“Here, here.” They raised their glasses.
“Now, onto the question of who is to lead the Club,” started Clay, knowing it was awkward to nominate himself. But he weighed the circumstances, and struck.
“I say the Vice Commodore can handle it from here on out. We’ve only got three weeks left in the season,” offered Sherman.
“But Larry’s not even here. He’s on vacation in Florida.”
“A permanent vacation in Florida. Are they ever coming back?”
“I’m on Skype,” piped up a cell phone. Where do they get these damn things?
“They’ll be back. Their kids are in the area.”
“Okay,” said Clay, deflated now. He sensed that he might not get to be the Commodore. It might go to a younger man. He was starting to get some knocks about his age, and it was an annoyance that was growing into a reality.
“It’s not that involved. The contractors are in the system. We basically make sure the vessels are secured, dues are paid, and the Tiki Bar is closed down for the off season,” said Larry.
“We can handle it,” said Clay, though he knew there was always some kind of tangle, the Commodore had to raise hell a couple of times, and make things go right in the end. It was going to be a learning process, and he suspected they’d get skinned at something, just for good measure.
The Board members sat looking at each other. No one wanted to bring it up, so Clay did.
“Has anyone seen the Ship?” said Clay. They all shook their heads. Some made the sign of the Cross. The Club often had dreams of a shadowy Clipper ship, especially when they slept on their boats, and sometimes, out in the fog, they were sure the Ship was going to emerge and passengers and supplies need to be brought in by dinghy.
“I don’t really know what to do,” he said. “Can’t you come up, Larry? It’s always better when the Commodore is on site.”
“The ICW is down in a couple of places, and I will have to find another hand to get back. I am not doing Point Hatteras. We are going to have to take her out.”
“Widow maker. What’s the trouble?”
“You could just fly up.”
“I am not going to be there without a vessel.”
“I’ve never seen the Ship,” said Jim.
“Hope you never do. Something always leaves us when she comes in,” said Ron.
“I’ve seen her twice,” said Charlene.
“You’re a woman.”
“I wish I’d seen her that night. Mike might still be alive,” she concluded.
They left it at that.
