Four Sentences

High water at the South Portland yard was at eighteen minutes to twelve. By eleven there were more than three hundred people along the Fore River, and Win had stopped trying to count them.

They stood on the fitting-out pier and along the seawall, and three deep on either side of the marine railway. Both shifts were there. The engineers had come across from the office building, and this time they had not stood by themselves. There were wives and children, and a row of retired men in Lathrop caps who had come to see whether the yard could still put a boat in the water. It was a bright, windy day, fifty-five degrees, and the river was the colour of slate.

The Petrel sat at the head of the railway on her cradle, with her two bows pointed at the water.

She had been painted in the last ten days. Her hulls were dark blue to the waterline and her house was white. The house was the new one. It had come down from Skerry Harbor on a flatbed two weeks ago and gone on in one lift, and Vera Nadeau had laid her straightedge across the forward face and found nothing to write down. On each bow, in white, were the draught marks, a ladder of figures climbing from the keel.

Win stood beside the small platform under the port bow with his hands in his overcoat pockets. He had nothing in them. Aggie had checked.

“No cards,” she had said in the car. “No pad. Not so much as a receipt.”

“I have four sentences. I know them.”

“Say them to me.”

“No.”

“Good,” Aggie had said. “Then they’re not for me.”

It had been Toby who settled the matter of the bottle. He had come up to the office on Tuesday with his hard hat in his hand, which he had never done before, and stood in front of the desk.

“Your grandmother broke every bottle in this yard from 1960 on,” he had said. “Nobody’s broken one since. The floor’s talked about it. They want Thibodeau.”

“That’s for her to say.”

“I know it is. I’m telling you so you can ask her.”

He had asked her that night, in the kitchen. She had put down her fork and said that her family did not break bottles, they screwed a piece of bronze to a bulkhead, and that she had no idea how it was done. Then she had asked whether the floor had really said that. Then she had gone very quiet, and said yes.

She was at the foot of the platform now, in clean coveralls and her hard hat, talking to the owner’s representative. Ursula Baptiste had driven up from New Bedford that morning. She was fifty, a square, weathered woman in a navy windbreaker with Nantucket Shoals Marine Services across the back, and she had spent an hour inside the boat with a flashlight before she would shake anyone’s hand. She had shaken Nell’s first.

“Mr. Lathrop.” She had shaken his second, briefly. “She’s a better boat than the one I saw in December. I’ve got turbines sixty miles offshore and technicians who need to get to them. You’re sixty-one days from my dock. I’d take a short speech and an early delivery.”

“The speech is four sentences.”

“Then I like you better already.”

At twenty-five to twelve, Toby raised his hand at the winch house, and the crowd went quiet. It was not the quiet he was used to hearing in the shed. There was a baby crying somewhere in it, and a gull.

Win climbed the three steps to the platform.

There was no microphone. He had asked for none. He looked out along the railway and saw the faces, row behind row, and felt his chest begin to tighten, as it had in a parking lot and in front of a screen. He knew every hire date in front of him.

He knew some other things now. Gus Theriault, by the port cradle, took his coffee light with three sugars and had a brother on the Portland fireboat. Walt Brackett had bought the propane fridge. Danny Arsenault, at the front, was holding his mother’s arm. She had come in her good coat.

He found Gus and spoke to him, loudly enough for the wall.

“Gus Theriault and the twelve men of the night shift have given this boat every Saturday since the fifteenth of February.”

Heads turned. Gus went red to the ears. Somebody near him started to clap, and Win went on over it, because if he stopped he might not start again.

“Toby Keegan put that shift on before I had the sense to ask him for it.”

There was a laugh at that, a short one, and it was with him. He had not known what that would feel like. At the winch house Toby stood with his arms folded and looked at his boots.

“Every frame under her deck and every seam in that wheelhouse was built to a drawing with one name in the corner, N. Thibodeau, and that name is the reason she’s going into the water today and not in August.”

He had meant to follow it at once with the fourth. He did not get the chance.

The noise came up off the seawall like a sea breaking. Walt Brackett had his hard hat off and was beating it against his thigh. The night shift were shouting her last name as they would have shouted it across the shed. Somebody had got hold of the yard horn, and it went off twice. Danny was yelling something with both hands cupped around his mouth, and his mother was laughing at him.

It was for her. All of it was for her, and Win stood on the platform in the middle of it and was happier than he had been at any sound in his life.

Nell had not moved. She stood at the foot of the steps with the bottle in its net held against her chest, and her face had gone scarlet under the hard hat. She looked up at him. Her grey eyes were furious and brimming.

“You didn’t tell me you’d do that,” she said, under the roar.

“It’s on the drawings. Term five.”

“Don’t you quote me terms. I’ve got to break a bottle now, and I can’t see.”

He waited until the noise had dropped enough to carry over.

“Thank you. That’s all I have.”

He came down. Ursula Baptiste, at the foot of the steps, gave him one sharp nod, and went up with Nell.

The bottle was champagne, in a mesh bag, on a line from the bow rail. Nell had scored it herself the night before with a glass cutter, at the kitchen table, because she said a bottle that bounced off aluminium was bad luck and worse engineering. She took it in both hands. She looked up at the blue bow above her for a moment. She had told a shed full of strangers in January that it was a lovely boat with a bad rash.

“Go ahead,” Ursula said. “She’s the Petrel. You say it.”

“Petrel,” Nell said. Her voice shook, and then it steadied. “Go to work.”

She swung. The bottle burst on the stem in a white spray that the wind carried back over all three of them. The cheer went up again, and Toby put his hand to the winch.

The cradle began to move. It went slowly, with a low grinding of wheels on rail, and the boat went with it, stern first, down the slope. Water closed over the after end of the cradle and climbed the blue hulls. Win watched the white figures on the bow go under one at a time.

Nell had come down beside him. She was not watching the boat as the crowd was. She was watching the marks. Her lips were moving.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Whether she sits where I said. I moved weight when I changed the frames. If I’ve got it wrong, she’ll be down by one corner.”

The cradle sank away. The Petrel lifted off it, lightly, and was a boat. She swung a little on her lines. The river settled against her two bows and stopped.

“Port, one point one metres,” a man called from the workboat. “Starboard, one point one. Stern the same, both sides.”

“Level,” Nell said. She let out her breath. “She’s level, Win. She’s right on her marks.”

She grabbed his arm with both hands and shook it. There was champagne in her braid and down the front of her coveralls. He wanted to pick her up off the ground. He did not, with three hundred people looking on, but she saw it in his face, and she laughed up at him.

Then Walt and Danny and half the night shift were around her, and he stepped back and let them have her.
***
Toby found him twenty minutes later, at the end of the fitting-out pier. The workboat had brought the Petrel alongside, and men were already aboard her with shore power cables.

The superintendent leaned his forearms on the rail beside him. For a while he said nothing. He watched the boat.

“Thirty years,” he said at last. “I never had one float that level first time. There’s always a list you have to chase with ballast.”

“She’ll be glad to hear you said it.”

“I told her myself.” He rubbed his red jaw. “I’m going to tell you something else. I’m telling you because you asked Gus about his coffee, and you’ve kept turning up on Saturdays when there was nothing in it for you. The floor’s about half and half on that letter.”

Win turned his head.

“I don’t mean half for you. I mean half for the money and half against. Seven weeks ago it wasn’t half. Seven weeks ago I’d have said you had the night shift and a few of the old fellas and that was the lot.” Toby kept his eyes on the river. “Some of that’s the boat. A man who sees a hull pass survey thinks different about whether there’s another one behind her. Some of it’s her. And I’ve got forty-odd who’ll take the two hundred thousand whatever you do, and I don’t blame them. Dunphy’s got a boy with medical bills. I’m not going to tell Dunphy he’s wrong.”

“I wouldn’t either.”

“No. I don’t think you would, now.” He straightened up. “Half’s not a win. It’s three hundred of us here, and there’s eight hundred and forty on the Lines who’ve never seen you with a grinder. Your uncle knows every one of their kids. But half’s what it is, and you ought to have the number.”

“Thank you, Toby. That’s the first forecast anyone’s given me that I didn’t have to build.”

“Well.” Toby put his hard hat back on. He seemed to be deciding whether to say the next thing. “That up there on the platform. The four sentences.”

“Yes?”

“That was an improvement.”

He walked away down the pier, and shouted at a man about a fender before he had gone ten yards.

Win stayed at the rail. Half of three hundred and ten. He began, from habit, to work out what it meant against the whole plan, and how many of the Lines he would need, and he made himself stop. He looked at the boat. Nell was on the foredeck with Ursula Baptiste, pointing at something on the cabin top, and the wind had pulled her braid loose.

“She floats very prettily,” Prescott said.

He had come up on the other side without a sound. He wore the camel coat, with a visitor’s hard hat held in his hand, and the wind had not disturbed his hair. He set his free hand on the rail and looked at the Petrel with every appearance of pleasure.

“I mean it,” his uncle said. “I’ve launched thirty-one hulls, and I know a good one. Mother would have been on that platform in her fur, taking the credit. And you were very good, Winslow. Short. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Thank you.”

“I heard them cheer her. I was glad. She’s earned that floor.” Prescott’s eyes followed Nell along the foredeck. “It would be a pity to take it away from her.”

Win said nothing.

“I’ve had a note from Gordon Pike. He tells me the audit committee is reviewing two transactions at your request, and that outside counsel has been asked for an opinion. That’s proper. I’d have advised it.” He turned his head, and his face was kind. “It doesn’t change the dates on three sheets of paper. I think you’ve worked that out, or you wouldn’t look as you do.”

He had worked it out. Pike’s committee could find the freeze was a fair fee for services, and counsel could write nine pages saying so. The Courier would still print that a lender had married a borrower’s daughter on the morning of the twenty-ninth of January and frozen the note that afternoon. A committee could not ratify a town’s opinion of a woman.

Prescott patted the rail, lightly, as he had once patted Win’s shoulder.

“June first,” he said.

He went back along the pier toward the cars. He stopped to shake hands with two of the retired men in Lathrop caps, and asked one of them about his wife.

Thirty-two days. Win counted them, and looked down at the foredeck. Nell had seen who was beside him. She lifted a hand to Prescott’s back, politely, and then looked at Win and tipped her head. It was a question. He shook his own, and made himself smile, and she went back to the cabin top.

A fortnight ago a man with half his speech had looked at him across a cribbage board and seen all of it. Tell her. Win had answered that there was nothing to tell. It had been a second lie, and to Leon Thibodeau, and term seven had a clause for that as well.
***
Dorothea Quimby’s office was on Exchange Street, up two flights, in a room that had held the same partners’ desk since 1961. She received him at three o’clock. She did not offer him tea.

“I watched from the seawall,” she said. “I don’t care for platforms. That was well done, and the young woman has a good arm. What do you want?”

“A point of law. It’s a hypothetical.”

“I charge the same for those.”

He sat down across the desk. He had arranged the question on the stairs so that it contained no names.

“Suppose a borrower owes a sum on a note to a lender. Suppose a third person, with no obligation of his own, wishes to pay the note off in full from his private funds. Can he simply do it?”

Dorothea took off her half-glasses.

“He can. Money has no memory. A lender who is tendered the full balance of a debt, in good funds, on the borrower’s account, takes it and marks the note paid. He isn’t entitled to ask whose pocket it came out of. The lien is discharged. If your third person wants the money back from the borrower, he had better have a fresh piece of paper saying so, or the law will call it a gift.”

“And if the lender is a company, and the third person is an officer of it?”

“Then the company has been paid in full, in cash, by someone other than itself, and has lost nothing. That is a different entry from interest forgone. An auditor would see the difference at once.” She let that sit. “So would a newspaper, I dare say. Husband pays wife’s family’s debt out of his own money is not much of a headline. Husbands do.”

He kept his face still. He did not think it helped.

“I have not asked you why you want to know,” Dorothea said. “I am not going to. I’m the trustee, and there are things it’s better for me to learn on the day. But I’ll give you one piece of advice, and it isn’t legal, so there’s no charge for it.”

“Go on.”

“A hypothetical with a wife in it is best put to the wife. They tend to have views. I’m told this one has hers in writing.”

“She does.”

“Then you don’t need a lawyer, Winslow. You need to go home.” She put her glasses back on and pulled a file toward her. “Shut the door on your way out. The draught gets at my ankles.”

He did not go home. He went back to the wharf, where the outer office was empty because Aggie had taken herself to Barlow’s with the yard. He sat at his desk with the door closed. The brass key was in his waistcoat pocket. He did not take it out.

He telephoned Casco Trust and asked for Simon Farrar. Farrar had looked after his private account for nine years, and in that time Win had asked him for nothing more unusual than a cashier’s cheque.

“I have a question. I’m not instructing you.”

“Understood.”

“If I wanted to send one million eight hundred seventy-six thousand dollars by wire to a single payee, on one day, what would it take?”

There was the sound of a keyboard. Farrar did not exclaim. Win paid him not to.

“You’ve a little over six hundred thousand in cash and Treasury bills. They can go the same day. For the balance I’d draw on the credit line against your portfolio. I can’t touch the Lathrop shares, as you know, but your father’s holdings will carry it comfortably. It’s two signatures and three business days from your word. The interest would be noticeable. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

“Three business days.”

“From your word. Shall I draw the papers, so they’re ready?”

Win looked at the pad on his desk. The list from the fifth of April was still on the top sheet. 4. The floor. He had finally put something after that one, from a platform, at twenty-five to twelve. There was no fifth line.

He knew what a fifth line would be. He had signed his name under it in a cold loft. No gifts and no forgiveness. Thibodeau Boat Works pays its own note. Two weeks ago she had sat on a launch-way rail in the sun with a registered envelope in her hand. She had told him what she got to keep, and she had been as happy as he had ever seen her.

Against that he set a wire rack by a store door on a Thursday morning, with her name in the newspaper.

“Not yet,” he said. “It was only a question.”

“Of course. You have my direct line.”

He put the receiver down. He sat until the tug berths outside his window had their deck lights on, and he could not make the two things balance.
***
It was past ten when he let himself in on the Western Promenade. Her truck was under the streetlamp. She had said at the pier that she was too tired for Route 1 and would drive up in the morning. The hall light was on. She had left it on for him.

He went up the narrow flight quietly. The sewing room door stood open, with the lamp out and the nine ducks in their row. His own door was ajar.

She was asleep in his bed. She was on his side of it, the left, with her face pushed into his pillow and one arm flung across the place where she usually lay. She had on one of his shirts. Her hair was still damp from the bath, loose, and it smelled faintly of champagne even so. Her coveralls were on the chair, folded, with the neck of the broken bottle set on top of them. Somebody had sawn it off clean and given it to her.

Her left hand lay open on the sheet. The bronze band was dull and warm in the light from the landing.

Win stood in the doorway with his coat on.

He could wake her. Dorothea had told him to, and so had Leon. Her own handwriting told him every time he passed the chest of drawers across the landing. He could sit on the edge of the bed and say all of it, the three papers and the first of June and the Courier, and the question he had put to a banker at five o’clock. She would be up in a moment, wide awake, and she would know what to do. She usually did.

She had broken a bottle that morning in front of three hundred people who were shouting her name. She had watched a boat settle level on marks she had worked out herself, and had laughed up at him with champagne on her face. He would be taking that from her in the dark, on the same day. He told himself that tomorrow would be kinder. He told himself that a decision of this size ought to be brought to her whole, with the figures done.

He recognised both of those sentences. He had written the first of them once before, on a page and a half, in a parked car.

He hung up his coat. He undressed without turning on the lamp, took off his glasses and lay down on her side of the bed, since she had his. She stirred and found him without waking. Her hand came to rest on his chest.

“Level,” Nell mumbled into the pillow.

“Yes. Go back to sleep.”

She did. He lay on his back with her hand over his heart and his eyes open, and he did not tell her.
***