The Cruise of the "Fidget"

by LOUISE PIERSON

1

THE Fidget was our yacht. It wasn’t really a yacht, but that’s what Harold’s uncle called it. He said if he’d known we were going to be such fools as to buy a yacht he’d never have endorsed our note at the bank for $10,000. It was a thirty-seven-foot power boat with a six-foot beam and a self-bailing cockpit. It was painted black. The license numbers ran 16927 on one side of the bow and 72961 on the other. That was to fool the Coast Guard, because it had belonged to a bootlegger, and this was before Repeal.

My idea was that when we got to the Pause that Depresses about 4.00 P.M. Sunday we should be whirling merrily over the Sound and not notice it. It would be expensive but worth it.

First we rented the Wild Duck, a cabin cruiser. We saw the ad and went down to the boat yard at Stamford. The Wild Duck was all covered up with sailcloth. It didn’t look very wild to me. It looked tubby.

“Will it really do ten knots?” I asked the man at the boat yard.

“Hell, no. Lucky if it does five. Lucky if the motor don’t conk on you entirely,” he said.

We tried to lure him on to tell us more about the Wild Duck but he wouldn’t.

“When the Owner comes,” he said darkly, “he’ll tell you plenty.”

The Owner drove up in a battered old station wagon, wearing a wild rose in the buttonhole of his sixty-dollar white linen suit. He turned out to be pretty snooty.

“You will want a bilge pump, of course,” he said, wheeling like a cavalryman on my husband. Harold had a far-off look in his eyes that indicated he was off the Bahamas giving cards and spades to Lipton.

“Oh, no,” he said absently, “we won’t need one.”

“You will,” said the Owner, looking at him disgustedly, “and I will supply it.”

We thanked him.

“You will want awnings, of course,” he went on firmly. We knew the answer.

“Of course,” we chimed blithely.

“Then you,” said the Owner, “can supply them.”

“What is this, a game?” said my husband.

“I shall have to have references,” said the Owner. “I wouldn’t rent the Wild Duck to anyone.”

“You’ve got insurance, haven’t you?” asked my husband.

“It’s a feeling a man has for his boat,” said the Owner, beating his chest. “You wouldn’t understand it. Did you bring the check with you?”

Harold handed him the check.

“I see it’s not certified,” said the Owner, turning it over several times. “In that case I won’t have the charter party till Wednesday.”

“A party! That’s darned nice,” said Harold, coming to. He was raised on the Hudson.

“A charter party is the lease form,” said the Owner coldly.

When it arrived, we found we had the Wild Duck F.O.B. Luden’s, Stamford, and it cost plenty to launch it. We bribed the launchers to take it around and moor it in Greenwich.

The next, day was Sunday. We loaded the children into the car with baskets of lunch and bathing suits. When we got to Greenwich it was dead low tide. We oozed out to the Wild Duck, which was lying dispiritedly on its side. The sun beat down relentlessly.

“We can polish the brightwork till the tide comes in,” I suggested. I produced the polish and we polished and polished.

“For God’s sake, whose idea was this boat anyway?” said Harold at four precisely. We were burned bright red, and apparently Greenwich is the last place in the geography the tide comes into.

We oozed back through the mud and went home. Before we got home a terrific thunderstorm came up. About eleven that night we got a phone call from the Owner.

“The Wild Duck broke up on the rocks. You didn’t moor it properly,” he said. “I should never have let you have it anyway. I am returning the check.”

“Thank God,” said everybody.

2

BUT I wasn’t discouraged. I got Motor Boat and Yachting and I combed the ads in the New York Times and I found the Fidget. For $750 she was ours.

“The motor ain’t so hot,” said the man at the boat yard at Portchester; “could do with a little tinkering.”

It was a four-cylinder Palmer.

“Let’s let Ed put it in shape,” said Harold. Ed was our chauffeur.

I was horrified. “Half the fun,” I assured him, “is working on your boat yourself.”

“ If t he other half isn’t any better than that, count me out,” he said.

The motor took quite a lot of tinkering. When we finally got it going, the only original part left was the flywheel. There was a good deal of mahogany and copper to be polished.

Everybody got to dreading Sunday.

“Keep your courage up. We’ll have it in the water before long,” I assured them. I described our trips across the sound with the salt breeze blowing through our hair, the cool salt spray arching from our bows, and egged them on to paint it. “The Fidget can do sixteen knots. We’ll zip over the Sound,” I told them.

It looked pretty when we got it in the water at Portchester. It was long and slim and sinister. We bought three hundred feet of anchor rope and a new anchor.

“For God’s sake, are you going to anchor in the middle of the Atlantic?” asked the man at the boat yard. But my husband said he thought we should have plenty. We bought a little gasoline stove and lots of cans of things. The children got quite pepped up about it.

The next Sunday, we left Millwood with sweaters and coats and blankets and supplies enough for Peary. The tide was high and when we got near the shore the children shouted. It was going to be wonderful. We rowed out to the Fidget and stowed our duffel. Then we rowed back and forth for two hours with can after can of gasoline. Finally I pulled up the anchor, and the children helped me coil the rope.

Then Harold turned over the engine. Not a peep. He turned it over again. After the first hour, I look turns with him. The tide slowly went out. The sun rose higher and higher in the heavens. At last we slogged through the mud back to shore.

“Now,” said my husband, “are you willing to have Ed fix it?”

“Well, it wouldn’t do any harm to have him look at it,” I admitted weakly.

Ed allowed as how it was the damnedest bunch of junk he ever saw but he’d do what he could with it.

Ed fixed the Fidget and the Fidget fixed Sundays. The children went right out after breakfast Sundays and disappeared for fear they would have to go out in it. They didn’t play the radio or fight or whimper. Sundays were fine.

“What I want to do with the Fidget now,” I said to Harold, “is take a trip in it. I see that Eugene O’Neill is reviving The Emperor Jones at Provincetown. Maybe we could actually see him and congratulate him.”

“If we get to Provincetown in the Fidget,” said my husband, “he should do the congratulating.”

The children said count them out.

“I think you must have taken leave of your senses,” my mother wrote, “to take a trip in that boat when you have five little children.”

“Let’s take Ed,” said my husband.

But I didn’t want to take Ed. I wanted it to be romantic.

“I’m surprised you want to take Ed,” I said to my husband, “when to hear you tell it, you practically took Peronne singlehanded.” We didn’t take Ed.

3

WE SET out from Portchester about five o’clock in the afternoon of August 1. There was a brisk east wind blowing, and the Sound was choppy. Off Stamford, the motor went dead. The Fidget settled comfortably into the trough of the waves, slapping back and forth sideways. Harold started spinning the flywheel. The motor was located right at the entrance to the cabin, with no headroom. Harold cranked. The Fidget threw him against one side of the cabin. He cranked again and it threw him against the other. Large welts rose on his forehead and his cars looked as if he’d been in a prize fight.

Suddenly there was the comforting roar of a motor. But it wasn’t ours. It was Vincent Aster’s. A long racy craft with Vincent Astor at the wheel, in a double-breasted blue jacket, flew by us. As we watched, a jet-black cloud of smoke issued from her exhaust. Harold sprang angrily to his feet.

“He’s giving us the razzberry,” he said, “and I don’t blame him. If I had an axe I’d chop this bunch of junk to pieces.”

He started cranking again, but it was dark when we got started.

I was pilot.

“What are those lights?” I kept asking. There seemed to be lights in every direction. The mailorder map described the lighthouses and their signals, but cars on shore can do the same thing. I was afraid we’d end up on the Post Road.

“I think we ought to anchor pretty soon,” I said. We cruised along awhile, and I saw several small boats outlined in the lights from the houses.

“We must be just off Milford. That’s thirty miles on our way. Drop anchor,” I said. Harold dropped it.

I decided to sleep on deck. It was a lovely evening.

“How different everything feels just a few miles out on the water,” I said dreamily. I had a sense of the great open spaces. It was just as I thought it would be.

When I awoke I was surprised. We had anchored right outside the boathouse at Portchester.

“Let’s go ashore and get a good breakfast at the lunch wagon,” said Harold hopefully. But I wouldn’t. I cooked it all on the gasoline stove and we set out again.

The Palmer did all right after it got its second wind. Only it shook the boat from stem to stern, and the gasoline fumes were so strong even gulls flew away from us.

“I wish we had bought a yawl,” I said, “with an auxiliary motor. ”

I didn’t want to tell Harold, but I didn’t know whether I could stand a week of it.

In the middle of the morning, we really reached Milford and put in for gasoline. We’d used twentytwo gallons. About the middle of the afternoon we saw a city.

“What is it?” asked Harold. I consulted the map for all kinds of signs, but the map seemed pretty sketchy.

“It’s New Haven,” I said finally.

“O.K.,” said Harold. “We’ll spend the night there. I could do with a little shut-eye.”

I thought it was New Haven, but I had never approached New Haven any way but along Route 1, and it looked kind of funny. We zinged into the harbor hell-bent for election.

“Which side of this red buoy?” asked Harold suddenly.

I looked at the map of New Haven Harbor. There wasn’t any red buoy. I turned desperately to the index.

“Which side?” he yelled.

“Right,” I said. I had to say something.

There was a grinding crash and our propeller dangled listlessly.

“There,” said Harold, “now you’ve done it.”

A trim little motorboat whizzed out from shore and threw us a rope. It was a marine ambulance chaser.

“You hit the only rock in New London Harbor,” the skipper said. He towed us over to the New London Ship and Engine Company. Our crankshaft was bent. It would take them three days to fix it and it would be seventy-five dollars.

“We’d better run up the Thames a little and see how the motor is acting,” said Harold when we got under way again. It was breezy and he didn’t want it to quit outside. He said we’d stop and start a few times.

It would have been all right if I hadn’t kept getting mixed up with reverse.

“If you’re going to put it in reverse,” said Harold, “haul up on the dink rope. Otherwise it slacks and winds around the propeller.”

I kept thinking I wasn’t putting it in reverse. When the rope wound around the propeller, Harold had to dive over with the potato knife in his teeth and cut it loose. Then we had to rig up a new rope. It was cold, and after it happened three times he got pretty mad.

“Let’s get out of here even if I do get my head bashed in cranking the Palmer. It’s better than drowning with a knife in your teeth,” he said.

Off Point Judith we ran into a storm. Seventyfive-foot tugs were laying to. We went right through it, though, because we had a self-bailing cockpit. That night we anchored in Buzzards Bay.

The wind and tide were with us in the morning, and we went through the Canal like a bat out of hell. But about halfway to Provincetown the motor quit and it was almost dark when we got it going again.

“Now, for Pete’s sake, take the flashlight and read up on Provincetown Light and get us inside it,” said my husband. “If we miss Provincetown, the next stop’s Portugal.”

As we neared Provincetown a terrific wind came up. I kept thinking I saw Provincetown Light and then I didn’t. But I didn’t tell Harold. I was afraid he would get discouraged. Fortunately, outside Provincetown we picked up a Portuguese quahog dragger homeward bound.

“Follow the dragger,” I screamed to Harold above the wind. The dragger was making about twelve knots and we were making sixteen. We would shoot up on her starboard bow and she would veer away from us. Then we would dart back and shoot up on her leeward side. The Portuguese got pretty mad.

“ What are you trying to do, sink us?” they yelled. But something had gone funny with the Palmer, and we couldn’t cut our speed.

Suddenly the water got quiet and lights from shore shot out at us.

“God Almighty,” shouted the men on the dragger, “look out what you’re doing! ”

“Shut her off,” I yelled to Harold. We were shooting through the whole Provincetown fishing fleet lying at anchor dark as pitch.

We dropped anchor right where we were and, without taking off our clothes, fell into a deep sleep. When we woke up, the sun was setting and the Fidget was lying about half a mile out from shore on her side. The tide had gone out.

“Get up,” I said to Harold, “or we’ll miss Eugene O’Neill and The Emperor Jones.”

I put on my knickerbockers and slung my sneakers and stockings around my neck. My feet were bleeding from mussel shells when we got to shore. I got my sneakers on so that we could enter the theater respectably, but during the performance I took them off and couldn’t get them on again.

“Come on,” said Harold, as we emerged from the theater, “let’s get back to the boat.”

“Let’s stop in this little ice-cream place and have some ice cream,” I said.

There was only one other customer in the store. He had on old dirty white ducks and no necktie. He was sitting at a little oilcloth-topped table attacking a double scoop of vanilla. It was Eugene O’Neill.

“Look,” I said to Harold. He took me by the arm and dragged me out of the store.

“You cannot congratulate Eugene O’Neill, ‘ said Harold, “in knickerbockers and bare feet.”

When we got to the beach, we saw the Fidget bobbing gayly at anchor half a mile away. We stripped and tied our clothes around our necks and swam and swam and swam. The tide had come in.

Next morning we set out for Boston. I thought I knew Boston Harbor, but it had changed.

“I thought you were born and brought up in this backwash of civilization,” said Harold bitterly as we narrowly missed two ledges of rock.

He got so mad he wouldn’t get out of the way of ocean liners and big freighters. He said it said in the book we had the right of way. I said we knew we did, but the liners didn’t. What good would it do if we were right when all people found were a few floating fragments? When we crossed right under a freighter’s nose I went down into the cabin and shut my eyes and stopped my ears so that I couldn’t hear the terrific blast from the boat whistle.

Harold got quite cheerful. “Ifyou’vehad enough,” he said, “we might as well start for the Cape Cod Canal.”

4

IT was almost dusk when we got to the Canal, and I never saw so many lights in my life. We cruised up and down trying to get our bearings. Then a fog came up.

“We’d better make a run for it before it gets so foggy we can’t see where we’re going,” I said. “That must be the entrance between the red and green light.”

We shot for the center full speed and came within a hairbreadth of crashing into a high stone wall.

“We’ll anchor, and you and I will take turns blowing our little foghorn,” Harold said.

He began paying out rope.

“Seems to take all we’ve got,” he said. “I never realized the shore of Plymouth Bay went off so deep.”

The fog was pea soup by now. We couldn’t see our hands before our face. All around us, on every side, boats were whistling, horns were blowing. I blew the foghorn for a while. Then Harold blew it. Then we fell asleep.

When I waked up I saw a black wall in front of me. The wall was moving. It was a freighter brushing by. We had anchored spang in the channel of the Cape Cod Canal.

We stopped in at Wickford to see my sister, and nobody ever forgot our visit. Something happened to the motor right off the bathing beach and it let go with seven quarts of coal-black oil. Nobody in Wickford could go in bathing for two weeks.

When we ran into New Haven Harbor we could hardly find a place to anchor. The New York Yacht Club was there. As our sinister black craft slithered swiftly in and out among the naval “ four hundred ” it attracted a good deal of earnest attention.

“The Fidget looks pretty crummy alongside the Corsair,” said Harold. “But why the binoculars? Do they think we’re pirates?”

I had no sooner started cooking dinner than people from the big yachts started shouting to us.

“Hi, how’s everything?” they yelled.

“Fine,” we yelled back.

“Imagine. Those guys are human,” said Harold.

Two slick mahogany launches from two of the finest yachts shot out and circled around us. One of them pulled up alongside.

“How about two cases of Golden Wedding?” said the skipper. “Money no object.”

“Listen,” said Harold to me. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

It was when we got off Stratford that we noticed the awful calm. The sea was translucent and great schools of fish drifted by. The sky was black. Overhead white clouds of gulls circled, darting at the schools of fish. It had been hot, but now a sharp coolness pierced the air. We ran like a hare to get in shelter of the breakwater, but before we got there the storm broke. The rain came down in sheets, and the wind blew so we couldn’t stand up against it. The water poured into the cockpit from every direction, but the little Palmer chugged along. Finally, a rainbow came out.

When we made Portchester it was almost midnight. We were dirty and soaked to the skin. We telephoned for Ed to drive over for us.

“I hope you won’t hold this trip against me,” I said to Harold, as we sank back luxuriously against the cushions. “After all, you always said you liked roughing it.”

He put his arm around me. “I had a wonderful time, honest,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” I almost believed him.