"We're On Our Way Home Now, Duckie!"We anchored in Oyster Bay, in a narrow inlet where a number of other sailboats were bobbing, while behind the sheltering arm of land the sun disappeared, and the trees along the shore flailed the bay with shadow. The cook had prepared steaks, which Ben warmed for us somehow, and there were salad and baked potatoes, and then pie à la mode, all eaten on a table that folded down in the main cabin, in the middle of a wraparound couch. It could have passed for a dinner at a four-star restaurant, I thought at the time, though my experience of such establishments was limited … [and] my appreciation of the meal was also probably influenced by the vast on-boat bar … Buckley drank the most, but if it affected him, I never noticed, whereas Jaime and I fell into a drunkenness so deep I can barely remember our conversation. We talked about the Red Sox, I think—our host was writing a book set around 1946, the year that Pesky held the ball—and Ayn Rand, with Jaime asking Buckley if he had been there on the night when I.udwig von Mises had famously reduced her to tears by calling her a “little Jew girl.” (Buckley hadn’t, to everyone’s regret.) We talked about Hamden, where I had gone to high school, and where Buckley had lived as a young man after graduating from Yale. 1 wrote God and Man at Yale there, he told me, and I sloshed my wine and felt myself swell up, the suburban dullness … suddenly transformed by this historical coincidence. After dessert had been set aside and Ben had gone to clean up, Buckley gathered himself up from his seat and peered down at us. “I generally take a swim after eating,” he said. “You’re all welcome to swim as well, of course.” Now that he mentioned it, a swim seemed just the thing. (I imagine practically anything would have sounded like just the thing at that point in the evening.) But then I considered the matter more deeply and heaved a deep and regretful sigh. “I’d swim, sir,” I said. “I would swim, I really would like to. But I’m afraid I didn’t bring a bathing suit.” It had taken me so long to reach this conclusion that Buckley had already begun to climb the ladder, and now he regarded me with unconcealed amusement. “Well, neither did I. After all, it’s quite dark out there. And we’re all men here, you know.” When he was gone, Jaime and I sat for a moment in silence, the dinner settling in our stomachs and the wine rising to our eyes. “You aren’t actually going to go swimming, are you?” he asked me. “Aren’t you?” I demanded. “Well ...” “Well what?” “I don’t really like to swim very much in general.” “Well, Jaime,” I said grandly, “neither do I, honestly. But you know, I think there comes a time in a man’s life when he has a chance to say to his grandchildren, I once went skinny-dipping with William F. Buckley, Jr. And this, Jaime, this is that chance.” Somehow that settled it. We downed the dregs of our wine and went topside, where Buckley was just leaping from the bow, a flash of plummeting white flesh in the darkness. Jaime and I undressed quickly, then shouted and leaped in after him. In midflight, I saw Buckley already climbing the ladder, reaching for his towel—and then, as the cold water shocked me sober, I remembered how poor a swimmer I really was. “I’m drowning, Douthat!” someone shouted nearby, as I surfaced, spitting salt and floundering. It sounded vaguely like Jaime, but I had troubles of my own. “Swim for the ladder,” I managed to shout, pawing jellyfish aside, dog-paddling frantically, wondering if sharks frequented Oyster Bay. “For the ladder, Jaime!” Afterward, Buckley went below to his berth, apparently to retire for the night, and Jaime and I sat on the boat’s bow with Ben, watching the lights on shore dim and the stars brighten. “So how often do you do this?” I asked Ben after a while. “How often?” he said, “I only started in June, and I have to go home for a while in August, so basically every weekend for two months, I’d say. It’s a good deal: I get to be outside all the time on the weekends, and then I can work on my thesis research during the week.” “Is it usually just you and him?” “Oh no, no—I mean, once or twice, but he has guests out on the boat almost every weekend. Usually it’s old friends from Skull and Bones, ex-ambassadors, people like that ... I’ve heard sometimes you get European nobility, deposed Romanovs and stuff.” “He writes books about sailing,” Jaime said. “Some of them are down below, I think, in the cabin. My father used to read them.” “Yeah,” Ben said. “He had a bigger boat once, I think. He’d sail it to the Caribbean, to Europe, around the world, I don’t know where. Not anymore, or not the way he did once. But he isn’t close to quitting or anything. He still sails every weekend, March to September or October. He’ll still be taking the boat out when I’ve gone back to school, almost every Friday night.” I leaned back, feeling the craft sway, the ocean stir. “Who can blame him?” Just then there was a sound of clattering bottles from below. A moment later, Buckley emerged into the night air, dressed for sleep in boxers and a T-shirt, his hair a little tousled. He had a bottle and three plastic cups in his hands. “Just a nightcap,” he said cheerfully. “Would anyone fancy some brandy?” We slept on the cabin’s couch, Jaime and I, and woke with the dawn, having had very little sleep. The morning light felt refreshing nonetheless, and there were English muffins and jam for breakfast, and then we raised the anchor and turned north, for Stamford and home. It was a brilliant day, the Sound glittering, and we played Ghost, a word game—which Buckley won, naturally, with some high-vocabulary skulduggery at the end—and then he sent Ben to fish out his cell phone and dial up the number for his house. “We’re on our way home now, duckie!” he shouted into the phone when Pat came on the line, while the wind caught his white hair and the boat knifed the water. “Yes, we’ll be back for lunch!” And we were. We docked the boat, piled into the Land Cruiser, drove back, and cleaned up in the cottage’s grotto-like basement, which was complete with a changing room, a sunken bath, and a warm-water pool where Buckley swam laps while Jaime and I showered and changed. There was an hour or so that we spent sprawled on the lawn near the ocean, while bees droned in the gardens nearby, and then we ate lunch on the wraparound porch, with a portly priest whom Buckley called Padre, while Pat smoked beneath a vast black sun hat and talked about seeing The Producers, and about dinner with the Kissingers and the Limbaughs at Le Cirque. Afterward, Buckley took us into the carriage house to see his study, a vast space hung with endless bookshelves beneath which were scattered little easels and tables and piles of magazines. (One, I noticed, had a younger Pat Buckley gracing the cover, draped in designer clothes.) Some of the shelves were entirely filled with Buckley books—the political volumes, the sailing books, the Blackford Oakes spy novels. “Take any of my books you like,” he said, so we each grabbed a handful and he autographed them, then drove us back through the Saturday glare to the Stamford station, where we thanked him (maybe too profusely, but he was gracious anyway) and boarded the train back to New York. “So tell me, did that really all just happen?” I asked as we collapsed into our seats and the train began to move. “I still can’t believe you made us go swimming,” Jaime said, and then our giggles carried us off, and so did the train, running west toward the city, leaving Buckley and Pat, Ben the boat boy and Stamford behind. Ross Douthat is an Atlantic senior editor.
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