Free Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Page A

much and still be coherent. The drinks arrived, and Olaf twirled his slowly. Tea candles flickered in small bowls of water beside ramekins of cashews on the mahogany bar. Through the curtained windows they looked onto a harbor with sailboats still in their slips.
    “Natalie’s a nice gal,” Olaf said. “How she came out of that brood I can’t imagine.”
    “I told you they’re decent people.”
    “That is what you said.”
    A piano concerto that both men knew filtered through the faint conversations taking place around them. Occasionally Noah could hear the halyard lines ringing on the masts of the boats in the harbor. Olaf finished the last of his drink and signaled for another.
    After it arrived Olaf said, “Marriage, it humiliates a man.”
    “What?” Noah said. He had not been expecting this.
    “Makes a man less of what he is.”
    Noah shook his head in complete awe of the old man’s audacity. He looked at the jigger of bourbon set before his father and said, “It’s not marriage that makes him less of what he is.”
    “I’ve got firsthand proof, boy. I know what a lifetime of marriage can do to a man.”
    “What do you know about a lifetime of anything but coming and going, huh? You were always gone. I’m really supposed to sit here and listen to life lessons from you?”
    “I’m doing you the favor my old man should’ve done me.”
    Noah faced him. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Can you not see how insulting this is? To Mom. To me. To Natalie.”
    “I don’t mean to insult anyone.”
    The calm in his father’s voice only made Noah more upset. “What bullshit. It’s exactly what you mean to do.”
    Olaf didn’t waver. “Someday you’ll—”
    “For god’s sake, spare me the rest of the lesson. I won’t hear it,” Noah interrupted.
    “You will hear it, goddamnit,” Olaf boomed, loud enough thatpeople turned to look. “Marriage dogs a man his whole life. Your mother dogged me. Natalie will dog you. Mark it down.”
    Noah took a minute to memorize his disdain. When it was burned in his mind, he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and stood to face his father. “What happened to you?” he said. He wanted to continue, but his loss of words overwhelmed him, and he left without saying another.
    The next afternoon Olaf showed up in his rented tuxedo. He had trimmed his beard and combed his rim of white hair. He sat there easily during the ceremony, kissed Natalie on the cheek while they danced at the reception, even offered Noah a wink from across the ballroom.
    That had been the last time they’d seen each other.
    O LAF WAS SITTING in the great room with a cup of coffee when Noah woke the next morning. Noah was still smarting from their talk on the beach the night before, but he said good-morning and poured himself a cup and sat down.
    Without pleasantries Olaf said, “You mind running into town for me?”
    “Not at all.”
    “I need a length of chain. Forty feet. Polyurethane coated. Go to the hardware store. Knut will help you.”
    “I’ll go after this.” He held up the coffee. “You mind if I take your truck?” Noah wanted to see what it felt like to be behind the wheel of that thing.
    “The keys are hanging by the door.”
    “Anything else you need?”
    Olaf shook his head. An awkward moment passed while Noah sipped his coffee. Before it was a quarter gone, he got up to leave.
    By the time he got to Misquah he’d made a short list of things to do himself, and as he dialed his sister’s number on the pay phone outside the Landing, snow flurries began to blow across the parking lot. Solveig answered on the first ring, singing hello and asking how he was. They exchanged pleasantries, but the conversation became as dismal as the weather the moment he announced his whereabouts. She had managed, through her own adult years and despite the fact that her childhood had been just as fatherless as Noah’s, to forgive the old man most of his disgraces. Perhaps this