The Myth of Us

       Popular mythology in our community would have it that one of the Ladies was ravaged one evening by a U-Boat commander who'd rowed ashore somewhere on the blacked-out coast of Cape Small for the purpose of engaging in a bit of sport and frolic. Precisely which of the handful of likely suspects succumbed to the dashing submariner's charm may be lost forever, but I'm thinking it had to be one of my Grandmother's bridge partners if not the matriarch herself. With all the men away and much of the finer things to which they'd grown accustomed rare and rationed, it's not perhaps too much of a stretch to imagine one of these comely thirty or forty-somethings letting things get just a bit out of hand upon finding a handsome stranger at the door. In uniform, clutching a couple of magnums of French champagne, some Belgian chocolates and a wheel of ripe Camembert, the offending officer may have been irresistible even if he'd climbed in through the bathroom window. With only a whisp of shaded candle light to illuminate the scene, it might have been difficult to make out insignia on that uniform, which was presumably hastily divested of in any case, and the accent may not have caused concern if the cad had confined his discourse to tender murmurings of the bill and the coo. On the other hand, it's entirely possible the commander in question was someone's cousin; we have so many of those.

   Nearly all the myths and legends of our extended family have already melted into apocrypha and my trying to reassemble them from fragments of fact, real and imagined, will do nothing to reveal the truth. Who on earth was Cousin Gerald and did he really squander his birthright to spend a lifetime in the Himalayas in pursuit of the Yeti? Could Uncle Walter really have spent his service in the War renting out double beds to horny GI's in an otherwise empty Flying Fortress on the Darwin to Burma loop? Exactly what was Uncle Sag up to posing beneath the Arc de Triomphe in the company of Petain, a couple of Japanese gentleman in top hats and tails and some puffy guy who looks an awful lot like Mussolini? Was it only economics and the fashions of the day or some dark and tawdry misstep in her past that rendered Miss Sophie Harvey a spinster and life-long companion to my Grandmother; a lifetime spent darning socks and stockings, baking shortbread and terrifying us with bedtime tales of The Sandman related in a thick and chewy Scottish burr? There may still be answers out there, filtered through the elaboration and invention of three or four survivors of my mother's generation together with a handful born just before the War. And what they can't remember they'll make up, never letting the truth interfere with a good dish of dirt on the departed.

   My cousin Camilla will be spending the summer once again at Camp Sabino, the sprawling cottage above the beach that would have been but a stone's throw from the high-water mark to which some thoughtful Reichsmariner might have dragged his dinghy. Comparatively young by today's standards, yet nearing a point on the cosmic chronometer beyond which few Sewalls have strayed, Camilla has bounced back from a multitude of strokes and stumbles that have left her pretty difficult to understand, if no less enthusiastic to embark on perforated renderings of the family lore. The house itself is a museum, the great-room lined with figureheads, the rafters coppered like spars with massive iron anchors flanking the vast, stone fireplace. Sepia prints of shipboard scenes from erstwhile passages around the Horn in the sugar trade, mementos of our maritime past, line the walls from floor to ceiling and often raise more questions than they answer. What, for instance, are those sailors doing defiling that tomb on the Galapagos?

  Most days I'll be stopping in to check on her and, if she's awake and feels like talking, I'll do my best to tease out answers -  perhaps with the aid of champagne and Camembert - in a stroke-broken language it may take time and patience to understand. When she's sleeping I can pass the time searching through the archive that is Sabino, pondering the illusive, fading cursive on the margins of the past two centuries.