Maiden Voyage (19 page)

One day, she picked us up from school and we didn't take the normal route home. The back of our old lime-green Volkswagen camper was loaded with luggage and she headed for New York City. I thought, “Yay, Daddy finally won us and she's taking us to him,” hoping our days of psychiatrists and Rorschach tests were over.

In New York, we drove to a shipping terminal and stopped in front of the
Queen Elizabeth II
. In late May of 1976, after a transatlantic journey of eight days, we arrived in Southampton, England, and settled into a home for old people in London that rented out rooms. One month later, on our way back from Kensington Gardens, my father was standing on the steps of our hotel. In my eyes, the Second Coming had occurred.

My father had tracked down the only person he had ever heard of from my mother's past. During my parents' first few months together in Paris, my mother had flown to London every three or four weeks. She said she was visiting her uncle, Charles, and always arrived back in Paris with enough money to keep her in luxuries until the next visit and unwilling to talk much about where she had been. Uncle Charles, she said, was the custodian of her trust fund, her benefactor and the only family she ever had. Upon her marriage, the money had stopped without explanation.

Ten years later, when my father contacted Uncle Charles to find out if he had any idea where my mother might be hiding us, he said that, yes, he had heard from her recently. His suggestions about our whereabouts not only led my father to our lodgings, but also to a new revelation.

Charles was not my mother's real uncle, nor did he know her as well as she had claimed. The only fragment of truth that my father
had held dear about my mother was shattered. Charles then said that he thought she was about to leave England that afternoon for the Continent. There was no time to waste. Questions about the friendship with my mother would have to wait for calmer moments, and my father rushed through London to head us off. When they met on the doorstep of that old hotel, he and my mother looked at each other for a long time without speaking. The next time my father tried to contact Charles, he received word that he was dead.

Because we were on the other side of the Atlantic, my father decided to take us to Switzerland to see his family. We spoke no German and played with our cousins who knew no English, while my mother fought with my grandparents, my father, and my aunt and uncle, lashing out at them like a wounded wolf. One day, we went for a ride to see a glacier on top of an alp. My father drove, Grossmutti sat in the passenger seat and my mother sat in the back seat with us. Continuous arguments shook the car until I finally began crying to my mother to please stop. She slapped me across the face and my nose began to bleed.

“Listen!”
she shouted back. “For Christ's sake, I'm fighting for our future!”

Grossmutti, seeing the blood, started yelling at her and also got smacked in the face. Like something from The Three Stooges, she turned around and hit my father, who had started hollering just as we rounded the bend on a hairpin curve. He slammed on the brakes and screamed at the top of his lungs, “This is
it
, Sabina!
I've had it!”
and headed straight for a sanitarium.

•   •   •

“Tania, may I come and be with you on
Varuna?
You know that Mommy is sick and that she will not get better.” Her pleading voice jarred me back to the present.

“Mommy, you can't. You know I'm doing this alone. And even if Daddy agreed to pay for you to come, you're too weak. You should stay where there is everything to keep you as healthy as possible. And if you talk this long with everybody, how do you expect me to convince him to let you keep the phone?” I immediately regretted saying that, as she burst into tears, and tried to console her, as I impatiently glanced toward the bistro where Luc and Jean Marie sat waiting.

“Mommy, now that I am on land, I promise I'll call you one week from today and we'll talk about it then, OK?” I could still hear her whimpering. Tears had become a regular ritual with her over the
years and my patience had developed narrow limits. I could imagine my father's face when he got the phone bill for a forty-five-minute call to the Marquesas, and tried to bring the conversation to a close.

“Tania, it is time that you knew the truth,” she continued, unfazed. “Time is growing short and there is much to do, much to say. Daddy denies me, Tania.” She began to cry again.

“Mommy,” I interrupted. “Mommy, I'm sorry, I really have to go now. I love you. OK? I have to hang up. Say goodbye. Please. I'll call you in seven days . . . I love you . . . Bye-bye, Mommy.”

Just before the phone reached the receiver, I heard her frail voice calling, “Mommy loves you very much. Never say goodbye, Tania, always say
see you . . .”

Walking back toward the bistro in a daze, I imagined what was going on at home, and saw my mother's little studio apartment, one block up the street from my father's in Soho. Nina was off at school and Tony and Jade were living with my father, probably spending a lot of time helping my mother, visiting her, eating meals with her now and again. Except for their company, she was completely alone in the loneliest place in the world—the crowded island of Manhattan. She had left any friends she had in Switzerland four months before my departure and no one in New York cared about her except for my brother, my sisters and me. But she came back to the United States anyway, because she only lived for her children, she said, and her children were in New York.

I remembered begging my father to let her come, after spending a month with her in Switzerland. It was the month of my decision to sail around the world, when she had given me her blessing. She had been ill and hadn't seen her four children all together for two years. I wasn't able to let her life drain away in another country with only the occasional visit from one of us at a time. I wanted to help grant her greatest wish and bring her back to us in New York.

She had caused the family so much suffering that for a very long time my father was reluctant to help her in any way. Finally, he softened and allowed her back into our lives. He went to Switzerland, obtained a new passport for her, packed her belongings and brought her back. After setting her up in a studio apartment, he tried to have as little to do with her as possible. She had been too proud to ask him to bring her to New York and never knew that it was I who had begged him to let her come.

When it came to arguments with my father about my mother's welfare, I didn't always know what drove me to defend her so vehemently.
The devastation she had wreaked on him and on our childhoods certainly was not lost on me. Indeed, stealing us away to England had been child's play compared to what she did later that same year. I hadn't completely forgiven her for the things she had done, nor did I understand what motivated her. I only knew that she was my mother, and as I grew older, my instinct to protect her overshadowed any of the old instincts to escape from her.

Hearing her voice that morning made me feel low and helpless, and memories of the past continued to steal the thunder from the splendor of my landfall. I stopped walking and let my eye slowly trace the line of tall palms swaying in the warm breeze above the village. Hiva Oa was draped in the velvet greens of a rain forest and, underneath my feet, was the power of earth newly formed from South Seas volcanos.

•   •   •

A monthly freighter, the
Aranuui
, made the rounds of harbors in the Tuamotus and Marquesas, picking up the sacks of copra headed for factories in Tahiti, and carrying passengers along from island to island. When the
Aranuui
arrived in Hiva Oa, Jean Marie decided that it was time to leave
Thea
for new adventures and Luc and I were now alone.

While we lingered in Hiva Oa, Luc tried once again to fix my engine. He kicked me off
Varuna
while he wrestled with it, saying, “I have to be serious now. Go away and don't distract me with your chatter.”

“All right,” I answered. “Call if you need anything.”

A week later, as we prepared to leave, I went to get money for provisioning in my decoy can of WD40 lubricant; the bottom unscrewed and my money was in the hidden compartment. I couldn't find it, and after desperately searching the boat, finally asked Luc about it.

“Hmmm, a can of WD40?” he answered. “Oh yes. Now I remember. When I was playing with your engine, I threw an empty can overboard.”

“
What!
There was four hundred dollars in that can. That was all the money I had in the world. You threw
four hundred dollars overboard!”
We searched the shoreline in silence and came up empty-handed. I was flat broke and, as much as I hated to, had to borrow money from Luc to pay for provisioning.

Ever since we arrived, the atmosphere between us had been charged, and I missed the comfort of our old relationship. We now
avoided the touchy subject that stood like a fortress between us, and let pettier issues become the battleground where we released the tensions of our situation. As tenuous as things had become during our stay in Hiva Oa, our shared goal of reaching Tahiti remained the bond. One day, Luc called Fabienne and then told me that she and Tristan were going to meet him in Tahiti. I felt exhausted relief. The dread that something like this would be the final severing blow was behind me.

On November 18, I walked into town to place the weekly call to my mother. The phone rang twice and I was surprised to hear a West Indian voice accept the charges.

“Hello?” I said.

“I am Mrs. Aebi's nurse,” she answered, “may I help you?” A lump formed in my throat.

“Oh my God. This is Tania, her daughter. Is she OK?” I shouted through the static.

“Your mother needs a twenty-four-hour nurse. But you can still talk to her. She just needs help now.”

“OK, thank you.” I waited, imagining a faceless person carrying the phone across the gray carpet over to my mother. The slurred sounds that came over the phone frightened me.

“Mommy, it's Tania. I can't understand anything you are saying, but I'll come home as soon as I can.” I barely understood a feeble “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mommy. Hang in there. . . .” I hung up the phone and called to arrange a flight from Tahiti to the States, making a reservation for December 6, in two and a half weeks. It would take about ten days, depending on the vagaries of the weather, to sail
Varuna
750 miles through the coral heads of the Tuamotus to Tahiti and secure the boat before flying home. Although I had thought I would be prepared for this moment, my head was spinning. I wanted to get home before it was too late, and ran to tell Luc we had to leave as soon as possible.

This was the beginning of a Christmas season of goodbyes. Goodbye to Luc, a friend with whom I had shared some of the most memorable moments of my life. And, hardest of all, one month later in Manhattan, a final goodbye to my mother.

I
t was four days after Christmas, at one in the morning, in Tahiti's Faaa Airport, that I stepped off the UTA flight from San Francisco, feeling blue and disoriented. In twenty-four hours, my airplane had just covered the same distance that had taken
Varuna
six months, and I was not yet able to put the events of the previous two weeks at home into any kind of perspective. My only clearly identifiable emotion was an almost desperate longing to get back to
Varuna
.

As I stepped out of the recycled air of the plane, the familiar fragrance of the island embraced me as a group of young, flower-adorned Tahitians stood singing near the customs line. One girl, wearing a wraparound
pareu
, presented as a gesture of welcome to each of the tired tourists a lei of Tahiti tiare, the delicate white flower that drowns Tahiti in its sweet perfume. As she put one around my neck, I remembered the ones that I had brought home for my mother and had hung above her bed. Fighting back the tears that had been welling up out of control since the call from Hiva Oa, I stepped forward at my turn and handed my passport and papers to a man behind the desk. Everything was in order; he stamped the passport and smiled. “Welcome to Tahiti.”

Walking to the luggage carousel, I looked for my duffel bags and the box with a new jib, engine parts, spinnaker pole head, and self-steering gear pieces that Jeri had helped me pack. Passing through customs, I looked around for Luc, who had agreed to come and take me back to Papeete, where
Varuna
was anchored. I thought how nice it would be to see his familiar face.

“Taxi,
mademoiselle?”
asked a porter.

“No, thank you. I have a ride,” I answered, and walked toward an empty bench. Luc hadn't arrived yet, so I sat down to wait.

It had been almost exactly one and a half months since the dreaded phone call home to my mother, when I realized that fate was dealing out her final cards. Thinking about the beauty of the Marquesas, the pressure of the trip through the islands to Tahiti, and the overwhelming sadness of being with my mother, it was hard to believe I had already been to and returned from New York.

After the Marquesas, I remember anticipating equally beautiful places with every landfall, but always experienced a slight disappointment. Never again did
Varuna
sail into such a magnificent display of nature's handiwork. On November 21, Luc and I had left Hiva Oa and sailed to the two southernmost islands in the Marquesas group, Tahuata and Fatu Hiva, planning to spend a couple of days between the two.

Fatu Hiva rose into the clouds like a wide-shouldered behemoth cloaked in green, and its beauty could haunt the soul of the most avowed cynic. Everywhere could be traced the life of the volcanos that had created these islands. The paths of ancient lava flows were visible from the sea by the different colors of plants that had followed them. Everywhere was a chaos of excess. Superabundant jungle vegetation, freshwater pools and paths smothered in decaying mangos, the stone-walled remnants of the terrace homes of an ancient civilization, colossal coconut palms and jagged boulders strewn willy-nilly. There was no sense of order, no consistency. When God designed the Marquesas, I thought, he must have been high.