Outerbridge Reach Read Free

the foot of the stairs.
    â€œSo is the cold war, Teddy,” Browne said. “We’re all redundant.”
    Fedorov climbed like blind Oedipus, one hand on the banister, the other held out before him.
    â€œRubbish heap of history,” he said fervently.
    Ward went up behind him, ready for a fall.
    On the train the next day, Browne watched the streetlighted slums of Philadelphia swing by, passing like time. The notion of twenty years gone was beginning to oppress him. In the dingy light of his shabby evening train, he felt himself approaching a new dimension, one in which he would have to live out the life he had made.
    Ever since deciding to deliver the Forty-five, he had been looking forward to the sail and an evening with Ward and Fedorov. Riding home, he was discontent and disappointed. The anxiety that haunted him had to do with more than the design of Altan’s latest boat and the state of the market. Old rages and regrets beset him. He felt in rebellion against things, on his own behalf and on behalf of his old friends.
    As midshipmen, the three of them had been fellow stooges and musketeers. They had found each other, lost souls amid the monumental ugliness of Bancroft Hall. They had been wrongos and secret mockers, subversives, readers of Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway. They had appeared “grossly poetic,” as Fedorov liked to say, naively literary in a military engineering school where the only acceptable art forms were band music and the shoe shine. They had survived to be commissioned by pooling their talents. Ward was a natural officer, in spite of his bookishness. Browne was athletic and, as the son of a diligent servant, skillful at petty soldiering. Fedorov tutored his friends in mathematics; they discouraged his tormentors and turned him out for Saturday inspections.
    Their bohemian longings went equally unappreciated outside the main gate. However painfully Browne and his friends might aspire to stronger wine and madder music, young civilian America was having none of them in the year 1968. Midshipmen were cleaning spittle off their dress blues that year.
    They had all gone to Vietnam after graduation and watched America fail to win the war there. This insufficiency was often a more remote spectacle for the Navy than for the other services, but Browne, Ward and Fedorov had all worked close to the core. They had each done their jobs but only Ward had excelled, for a while.
    In the piss-yellow light of Penn Station, the hustlers and the homeless wandered into Browne’s path as he made his way from the track. What did they see, he wondered, when they looked at him? A tweedy, well-intentioned man. An enemy, but too big and still too young to be a mark. Checking the scene, he thought: Yet I also am an outsider. He had left for the Academy from Penn Station on a summer morning in 1964. It had been an occasion of joy.
    Riding the escalator to the upper level, he found himself wondering how, on that morning of departure, he might have imagined himself twenty years along. The image would have been a romantic one, but romantic in the postwar modernist style. Its heroic quality would have been salted in stoicism and ennobled by alienation. As an uncritical reader of Hemingway, he would have imagined his future self suitably disillusioned and world-weary. On the morning in question, he would not have had the remotest conception of what such attitudes entailed. He would have awaited world-weariness and disillusionment impatiently, as spurs to higher-class and more serious fun. Of course, not even Hemingway had enjoyed them very much in the end.
    At the top of the escalator, he encountered another tier of loiterers and, for security’s sake, put on his glasses. Confident and watchful, he passed unthreatened among the hovering poor. And combat, Browne thought. He would have imagined himself recalling combat. He would have expected combat to resemble
Victory at Sea.
    In the empty corridor that led