A Commodore of Errors (43 page)

As for Sylvia, Mitzi was right. She was a hopeless student. She hadn't made herself up in days. She took anything the messman put in front of her—cold eggs, burnt toast, it didn't matter. The women in Great Neck would see right through her, that was for sure. Her sonny would have to pull off the Jewish thing all by himself. Of course, he always
did
have a
Yiddisha kop
, which is how he got
to be a captain. It just had to be drug out of him, and maybe Mitzi would do that.

Mrs. Tannenbaume eased herself down from the captain's chair, called the engine room, and asked them for a few more RPMs. The chief came on the phone. “We're low on fuel. If anything we need to take
off
a few RPMs.”

“You let me worry about that.”

“I intend to.” The chief hung up the phone without bothering to say goodbye.

From where the phone was located, Mrs. Tannenbaume was able to see directly into Sylvia's shampoo station. The second engineer was getting his hair shampooed for the second time that day.

“Yesterday he had his hair done three times. I think he has a thing for Sylvia,” Swifty remarked.

Mrs. Tannenbaume thought about what Mitzi had said about leverage. Well, her son wasn't the only one who understood leverage.

She hauled the unsuspecting engineer out of the chair by his precious hair. “Do you want another shampoo?”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“Well, I want at least ten more RPMs.”

“You want what? Sorry, I can't do that. The chief is the one who makes those decisions.”

“So? He has to know?”

“Oh, come on. As soon as he comes down into the engine room, he'll know.”

“You let me handle the chief. You just get me the extra RPMs.”

After the second left the bridge, Mrs. Tannenbaume called the steward and told him to come to the bridge. She had something she wanted him to do.

Captain Tannenbaume never would have guessed that that was what the stool was for.

Not that he needed it, of course, not with his long legs. But Mitzi wanted him to use it anyway, and he'd do anything to keep that woman happy. Anything. When Mitzi said she wanted breakfast delivered to her room by the steward,
Captain Tannenbaume made sure she got it. Her mother had told her she had to have breakfast in bed aboard ship, at least once, and Mitzi said the thing with the chief didn't count—she wanted the steward to bring her breakfast. When Captain Tannenbaume informed the steward, old Stew was not happy about it, but Captain Tannenbaume had been holding a few chits on the steward from years ago, when they were on a steady run to Monrovia in West Africa. The steward fell in love with a bar girl at the seaman's center, made her his steady girl, and let the rest of the ship know it. They had a thing together for years. But one voyage the steward could not make it ashore—on account of his own cooking, ironically. Captain Tannenbaume, who did go ashore, could not resist the unfaithful bar girl's advances. When he was alone with her he discovered she had a little
he
in her. Captain Tannenbaume kept the news to himself all these years, but when Mitzi said she wanted the steward to bring her breakfast in bed, Captain Tannenbaume paid the steward a visit.

“No way,” the steward said. “No way am I bringing that woman breakfast in bed. You can forget about it, with all due respect, sir.”

“You remember that bar girl in Monrovia, Stew?”

The steward was trying to watch Clint. He did not answer. His eyes remained glued to the TV.

“I was with her one night. The night you got sick on your own gumbo.”

Captain Tannenbaume saw the steward's eyes glaze over. Then the man's whole body went slack. Captain Tannenbaume clicked off Clint.

“He was really something. Wasn't she?”

It looked to Captain Tannenbaume like the steward was about to get sick.

“Mitzi wants breakfast delivered to her cabin, Stew.”

Captain Tannenbaume waited for his answer. The glow of the blank TV screen was the only light in the lounge, and the room was silent for a long time. Finally, the steward spoke.

“Motherfucker.”

“I guess I'll take that as a yes.”

TALKING BUSINESS

T
he steward told Mrs. Tannenbaume he was not exactly in the mood to do a favor for Captain Tannenbaume's mother, not after the humiliating experience of delivering breakfast in bed to Mitzi. But when he heard the favor, he felt better about it. He never much liked the chief anyway—the big Swede talked too damn much, and he was always sticking up for his little buddy, the electrician—so it was no big thing for the steward to mix a healthy dose of Benadryl in with the chief ‘s meals.

The chief blamed his tiredness on the long sea passage and told the engineers he was suffering from a bad case of sleep debt and that they'd have to go it alone for the remainder of the voyage. With the chief out of the way, Mrs. Tannenbaume got her extra RPMs. After she confirmed that the ship had indeed picked up a couple of knots, she let the second engineer back onto the bridge so he could get his shampoos from Sylvia. The second was now getting up to half-a-dozen shampoos a day and Mrs. Tannenbaume noticed that Sylvia
enjoyed giving them as much he enjoyed getting them. All the better. With Sylvia preoccupied, maybe she wouldn't notice that Mitzi was missing in action from the bridge, with no one quite sure of her whereabouts.

The swell from the west that had rocked Mrs. Tannenbaume to sleep the day before was still there. Mrs. Tannenbaume had taken to sitting in the captain's chair more and more now that Mitzi was down below talking business with her sonny. It was the perfect place to think. She was thinking now about the long swell and she wondered why the ship's ride was not as comfortable as it was yesterday. It didn't seem any rougher to her. She asked Swifty.

“It's got to do with the period of the swell,” he said. “You know, the time between the swells. The time between the swells is getting shorter.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Uh . . . yeah, I think so.”

“Well does it mean good weather or bad?”

“Ah . . . good, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, definitely good.”

Sparks, who was enjoying his morning coffee, stared out to sea and said, “You'll want to batten the hatches, then.”

“Pardon me?” Mrs. Tannenbaume said.

“If Swifty thinks we're in for a spate of good weather, then prepare for the worst. And keep an eye on the barometer.”

“The barometer is . . . sort of broken,” Swifty said.

“How'd you break it?” Mrs. Tannenbaume asked.

“I didn't, I swear I didn't. It was the carpenter. When he needed a screw to hang the sign for Mitzi's salon, he stole one from the bracket that holds the barometer to the bulkhead. So later, when someone—”

“You,” Sparks said.

“Well, okay, yeah. When I bumped into the barometer, it fell from its bracket. But it wasn't me who broke the barometer, it was the carpenter.”

“Well there's always the barograph,” Sparks said.

Swifty turned away sheepishly.

“What?” Sparks said.

“We sort of used up all the ink cartridges.”

“Impossible,” Sparks said. “I requisitioned a box of them last voyage.”

“We needed the ink to color Sylvia's hair.”

When Sparks gave him a look of disdain, Swifty got defensive.

“We haven't gotten a weather report since leaving the canal, have we? Why don't you tell Mrs. Tannenbaume why that is?”

Sparks turned his back to Swifty and pulled out a cigarette.

“So what's the story there?” Mrs. Tannenbaume asked him.

“Sparks broke the telex machine out of spite. Broke it right in half. And that's why we don't have a proper weather report.”

“If you knew how to read the weather like a seafarer,” Sparks said, “we wouldn't need a weather report. What'd seafarers do before all of these new-fangled machines?”

Toward evening, Mitzi made an appearance on the bridge. She confided to Mrs. Tannenbaume that she needed a break.

“He's energetic, that son of yours.”

“You're complaining?”

“No, I guess not. So, when do we get back to New York?”

“We should be there tomorrow afternoon,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said.

Mitzi was sitting in the captain's chair now and had to hold on tight as the ship rolled from side to side. “What's with the rocking and rolling?”

“Don't know,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said. “Swifty seems to think the ride will improve.”

“Have we gotten a weather report?”

“Sparks broke the telex.”

“Want me to get him to fix it?” Mitzi whispered.

“I'm told it's broken in two. By the way,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said, coming over to the captain's chair and lowering her voice, “speaking of that, there's something I've been meaning to ask you.” She glanced over at Sparks to make sure he wasn't listening. “How'd you ever get Sparks to program the GPS?”

Mitzi looked over to where Sparks was. He was busy playing with his pack of cigarettes. “It didn't take much, to tell you the truth. I called him ‘Handsome Smooth,' is all.“

“Handsome Smooth?”

“It's what my mother used to call my father whenever she wanted something. She'd say, ‘How's my Handsome Smooth doing?' She'd stroke his hair a little bit, you know, nothing much. That's what I did with Sparks. The next thing you know, he's got the GPS all set up.” Mitzi looked over at Sparks. He was still looking out the window. “When he was finished, he handed me the GPS and said, ‘How's your Handsome Smooth now?'”

“Come on. That was it?”

“That was it.”

“What a kook,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said.

“Sparks is a kook? Look around, would ya?”

Mrs. Tannenbaume did. Swifty was busy getting his facecloths ready in the coffeepot, the second engineer was on his umpteenth shampoo of the day, and the electrician was fretting over the buildup of his nail polish.

“I gotta tell ya,” Mitzi admitted, “with the exception of your son, I think these merchant marines are all kooks.”

“Well, Eddie wasn't a kook.”

“Who's Eddie?”

“One of my sonny boy's fathers.”

“
One
of his fathers? How many fathers does he have?”

“Well, since we're not sure which one of my boyfriends—Eddie, Teddy, or Freddy—got me pregnant, we just pretend he has three.”

“Wow,” Mitzi said. “Three boyfriends at once. I thought I was bad.”

“I was a looker in my day.”

“I guess you were. So Eddie was a merchant marine?”

“Yeah. Eddie was a sailor, Teddy was a tailor, and Freddy was a jailor.”

“Eddie, Teddy, and Freddy,” Mitzi said. “A sailor, a tailor, and a jailor. Cute.”

“It was a situation, that's for sure.”

Mitzi slapped her hand on her thigh. “You're something else, you know that? You got personality. You sure you ain't Jewish?”