The Passage

By Michael Hurley

DO YOU BELIEVE IN EVERLASTING LOVE?

Jay Danforth Fitzgerald, known as “Fitz” to his few remaining friends, has learned from long and painful experience that there is no such thing as love that lasts. A failed an aging stockbroker full of angst and self-loathing, he fritters away his nights in Tiddly’s Bar and his da

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ragbagger Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996190138

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

In the city of Charleston, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet the sea, where the first defiant shot of the Civil War was fired, Jay Danforth Fitz Fitzgerald had come to surrender. He had been trying to surrender, in fact, for three years. He stood solemnly on the railing of a small sailboat named Solitaire, anchored in the harbor, staring out across the water as if lost in a dream. The vessel was aptly named. Life for Fitz was a game played alone, with little hope of winning, but with certainty of the ending.

A seventy-five-yard ribbon of salt water that then flowed west with the tide at two knots separated him from the dock of City Marina, and a six-block ribbon of concrete separated the dock from Tiddlywinks Bar, or Tiddly’s for short. It was a ridiculous name for a bar—even among Irish Bars, many of which have quaintly ridiculous names. It was not a fashionable or refined establishment, and the name alone might have kept Fitz away, but the half-price special on Guinness drew him in. It ran every evening. Good stout mattered much more to Fitz than fashion and refinement. In fact, the older Fitz got, the less fashion and refinement mattered at all.

The wind was moving east over the harbor at ten knots and provoking an argument with the tide, but the tide was winning. Choppy waves sloshed about in general disagreement. An ensign waved frantically from the top of the main mast of Solitaire. Once bright blue, it had long ago been bleached by the sun to a brilliant whiteness—the universal signal of surrender. But the world no longer noticed Fitz and, for that reason, no longer cared whether he surrendered to anything. It hadn’t noticed him in quite a while. Yet the flag still waved eagerly, and Fitz stood beneath it stoically every day on his boat, in the same posture of submission. It didn’t feel good, but it felt honest. It was humility, not pride, that allowed him to draw breath from day to day.

His breaths and days had come and gone in this fashion ever since April Fool’s Day, in the year 2009, when he first buried his anchor deep in the black mud of that harbor. In the days since, he had floated around a ninety-foot circumference of chain, his small world ebbing and flowing on diurnal tides of self-love and self-loathing. There, in the heart of Dixie, he had held fast through the moist, cloying embrace of three hot summers, with nights so thick that breath came like spoonfuls of gravy, and through three remorseless, deceiving winters. This is the South, people would say boastfully of Charleston. The South my ass, he would answer when the winds of February flayed him to the marrow. But hot or cold, winter or summer, three years had come and gone, and he was still floating on that boat in that harbor. It was now August 2012. That anchor was never coming up again, and he knew it.

During his salad days in Manhattan he was known as Jaybird to those who knew him well, but there were fewer of them every year. They had retired with their wives and mistresses to comfortable time-shares in Miami, where they played golf and drank gin by the flagon until one after another they died of massive coronary failure or skin cancer or both. Christmas cards enclosed with self-portraits of surviving spouses tanned and flitting around South Beach like sandpipers would come each year, forwarded to him from some old address, inscribed to Jaybird and signed love and kisses from so-and-so. The message was clear and persistent. There was no mourning. The men decayed and died. The women flourished and thrived. Between them there no more existed such a thing as everlasting love as there existed such a thing as everlasting life. Of this Jay Fitzgerald was not just cynical, but certain. He lived his own life by the predestination of a slow, despairing fate, punctuated now and then by some small happiness: a good meal, a good drink, a dreamless sleep.

Jay Fitzgerald regarded himself as an aberration, a renegade among men. All men, he believed, were born to a noble heritage of independence and wanderlust, but the regular man of civilized society was beaten down until he saw nothing but the small tasks of a short life and felt nothing but the urge to remain and complete them. Regular men were happy to be furloughed to golf courses now and then on weekends to glimpse something of the sylvan lordship that was once their birthright, but that’s all. The renegade man, by contrast, was a feral animal and a truant of polite society. Strong families, strong nations, prosperous communities, and hoary institutions were built upon the shoulders of regular men. The renegade man was a furtive creature of the shadows, shrinking from responsibility and temperance. He was something like Fitz, and Fitz was something like him.

Most people who saw Jay Fitzgerald around Charleston, and there were not many—the postman, the grocer, the cop, the librarian—knew him only as Fitz. There wasn’t a great deal more to know. He had a pleasing, approachable personality that made people feel comfortable shortening his name. He didn’t mind this. The truth was, everything in his life had come up a little short. He was smart but not remarkably so. He’d had an adequate career as a stock broker, but he never got rich. He had modest savings, but not enough on which to live long or well, which suited him, because he planned to do neither. He had gone to college but never finished. He was good looking but not especially handsome. He was not quite six feet tall—a fact he knew precisely from the navy ensign who had measured him meticulously thirty years ago in his recruitment physical and assigned him to submarines, the one place in the navy where shorter was better. Telling women he was a six footer, which he might easily have done, only made him feel grasping and short. But then, saying he was five-feet-eleven-and-a-half inches, which he was, exactly, made him sound like a child who insists on counting half-birthdays. So he rounded himself down to five-eleven. He had been rounding himself down his whole life.

But there was a number in Fitz’s world that needed no addition or subtraction, and that was the number three. It was the number of times he had been married, which equaled exactly the number of times he had been divorced. It was a prime number—divisible only by itself or the number one—and somehow this served perfectly as a metaphor for marriage, in Fitz’s opinion. Each of his marriages had begun with the promise of indivisibility—of not rendering asunder, which is just another word for division—and all had ended up becoming divisible by one. That one was Fitz.

He was not a philanderer, which some of his wives might have wished for as evidence of some modicum of normalcy. There had been no infidelity or violence or frequent drunkenness. Each marriage had run a course of three or five or seven years until one day Fitz arrived—suddenly, as if awakened in the trunk of a car driven off to Tijuana in the middle of the night—at the conclusion that the woman to whom he was married was not the same woman he had married, that love had died, that the bloom was off the rose, that the bush had rotted root and branch, and that the only sensible course was to dig it up and throw it all into the fire. In this way, he had made his life a pile of cinders upon which he now sat, quite alone. He doubted true love with a deep, fervent and abiding suspicion that had hardened to contempt. And true or not, he firmly disbelieved in nothing so fervently as everlasting love. There was no such rose, as far as he was concerned, for if there were, he was certain he would have seen it by now, if only to admire it from afar.

From where he stood on the deck of the Solitaire most days, Fitz could see a great many things. The one thing he stared at most often and the longest was the flag that flew above Fort Sumter. A lovely park stood there, now—a monument to the war and, Fitz believed, to the stupidity of men. He looked upon it with a kind of nostalgia bordering on affection. The men who fought there did so in service of a lost cause. Fitz considered life itself to be a lost cause, and for that reason he found the place strangely comforting. The city that overlooked the harbor, whose residents had once stood on rooftops to watch the fort burn during battle, was a tragedy of geology—a sinking place regularly overrun by rising tides. It drew its strength from its vulnerability and its honor from defeat. His lonely ship at anchor in that harbor fit the métier of defeat so perfectly that he expected on any given day to see a plaque erected on the hull as another emblem to the Confederacy. He felt at home there.

Fitz was fifty-four, which was old enough by any measure, but he felt more than merely old. He felt ancient in that ancient place. Unchanging to the casual onlooker but creeping with hidden moss and mold, its stone arches and limestone pedestals matched perfectly the image he kept of himself and what his life had become. The Holy City, Charleston was called somewhat facetiously. The great number and variety of churches and cathedrals erected there owed less to piety than to continual strife and schism among the faithful over small matters of doctrine. This duality, it seemed to Fitz, was entirely in step with the competing impulses of selfishness and holiness that had marked his own life in a lamentable, jarring rhythm.

But all of this forsakenness was kept at arm’s length from the small floating home in the harbor where he spent his days. Fitz had sailed since he was a boy on Kent Island, by the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Although he had never sailed very far from safety, he had always sailed alone, and this was by preference. He lacked the aptitude for mechanical things, but he knew his boat well, and he did his best to keep her in working order even as he felt himself going deeper to seed with each passing season.

Solitaire carried a proper tender, and for all that Fitz lacked, had forgotten, or never learned of life at sea, he had acquired notable skill as an oarsman from his regular sorties from ship to shore. On that balmy August evening, his silhouette cut a fine figure in smooth even strokes coming across the harbor until he was enshrouded by a curtain of water. The sky had opened up again without warning, as it so often did late on summer days, and was now pouring its deluge onto that sodden peninsula. By the time the tender was close abeam of the long dock at City Marina, Fitz was a sopping mess.

Working at the marina in Charleston was a plum job for smart young people, dashing about in matching uniforms, snapping to attention at the hail of passing yachts coming there to berth or refuel, and barking orders with command authority. The marina staff, Fitz observed, consisted entirely of the well-loved sons of leading southern families, all of whom had befriended Fitz with kindness and genuine concern that was not a habit of character he had come to associate with leading people in general. It was never clear whether they admired or pitied him, but for reasons made clearer on dismal afternoons like this one, they certainly didn’t envy him.

Life aboard a boat—much less a thirty footer chronically anchored in Charleston Harbor—was a struggle without the usual amenities of civilized existence. To their credit the marina boys tried to ease his burden. They allowed him greater latitude in the use of the facilities than the rules allowed for non-paying guests—notably hot showers, flushing toilets, laundry machines, and a place to tie up his tender. They were the closest thing to sons he had. They treated him with respect, and he always responded with gratitude.

As Fitz arrived at the dock, a boy in a red raincoat called him by name and caught his painter. A moment later the tender was made fast, and Fitz was standing again on nearly solid ground where he stood every day at that hour, getting ready to make his way to Tiddly’s for a hot meal, refreshment, and further rest.

Fitz had come down in the world since his first divorce at thirty-one. After that cataclysm there was for him, as there is for many, a ritual dividing of the spoils. A much smaller lump was spooned onto Fitz’s plate. This he accepted with grudging silence as a member of the gender against which he believed an unfair presumption of despicability prevailed in the courts of marital law. But he was always a keen observer and a careful learner, even if he was less keen and careful in applying what he learned. It was during this ordeal that he began to form the first outlines of his thesis that romance was a false prophet sent to snare the foolish and unwary, that true love was its greatest illusion, and that everlasting love was the holy grail on which a thousand crusades had come to grief.

Fitz distrusted not only the existence of true love but the whole idea of equanimity among the sexes. Equality in all things had been an article of dearest faith during his upbringing in the trendy years of the sixties and seventies, yet it seemed a jurisprudence utterly foreign to the judges of the lesser courts in which the wars between husbands and wives were waged. In those low chambers, he watched the confident, accomplished, beautiful, and educated women he had married—the specimens of the race he had been taught as a boy to desire—devolve into helpless, ingenuous victims of a harsh and confusing world, in dire need of subsidy. Alimony to him was a medieval form of indentured servitude. The threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of this debt had hung over him like the Sword of Damocles for most of his adult life.

It was not in his first wife’s temperament to compete in the cutthroat environment of business, she had told the court. The judge accepted that answer without inquiry as to what best suited Fitz’s temperament. Thankfully for him, his first wife had found gainful employment and remarried a few years later, after which the crushing burden of caring for her temperament had been lifted from Fitz’s shoulders.

By then the stock surge of the 1980s was in full throated roar, and mere mortals feasted royally on Wall Street. Fitz recovered, only to fall several notches lower after the next divorce and the next ritual winnowing of his fortunes. But it was the third divorce, coinciding with the stock market crash of 2008 in a perfect storm of penury, that had brought him at last to his present sorrow. Solitaire and what few articles of value he could fit in her lockers were all that he had left of a once comfortable if not carefree existence, but they were also, he would say frankly, all that he cared to have. There was a kind of freedom in poverty that he admired in principle even if in practice he found more to abhor in his simple way of life.

When he had finally extricated himself from the snatching beaks of the lawyers and judges and creditors who had collected like vultures around the carcass of his third marriage, he resolved to leave for good. He hastily set sail from New York Harbor aboard Solitaire in 2009 and bid goodbye to a few onlookers, friends and well-wishers with the promise to make his way in the world as a sort of sea gypsy. He would spend the rest of his days in carefree and deliberate adventure, he told them, casting his fate to the wind and finding work where it was needed according to the timeless tradition of nomads. He intended to become a Gentleman of Fortune. Yet for all his grand promises of derring-do, what followed was something not nearly so grand.

He had hung perilously close to shore all the way down the Eastern Seaboard, refusing to venture far out to sea, anchoring in the shallows or heaving-to within sight of the lights on land each night. When he came eventually to South Carolina, he entered through Charleston’s wide harbor and there abruptly stopped. Weeks passed without movement, then months, then years. He ignored the curious messages of friends wondering what had become of the postcard he promised from Barcelona or Casablanca until friends and messages dwindled alike.

His Facebook page was a kind of funerarium, fixed in time by a five-year old photograph of him waving goodbye on the South Street pier in Manhattan above glib promises of frequent, exciting updates on his voyage. After that, in social media terms he was lost at sea. Saying nothing was preferable to explaining how he had lost his courage and holed up for good in a Charleston backwater. It had all once seemed so grand in the telling. It had become far less grand in the doing. And so, in his own estimation, had he.

So, with the tender secured to the dock of City Marina in the usual place, Fitz began to make his squishing, wet way to the laundry room. There he planned to wait out the rain, which was still being driven from the heavens with vengeful purpose. Standing upright on the dock, he uncoiled his frame from the compacted mold that is life aboard a small sailboat, then stretched his limbs slowly to walk upright once again upon the earth. He waited for thirty minutes while his shoes tumbled in the dryer. He needn’t have bothered. The walk to Tiddly’s was exactly a half hour long, and exactly fifteen minutes in, the skies opened up again, filling every pore and portal.

CHAPTER 2

Tiddly’s was a welcoming place. The owner never objected to Fitz being dripping wet as long as his money was dry. He had a little cash—enough for his needs, if only just, and if only for the time being. There was about eighty-nine thousand in a brokerage account when he started out, three years ago, and there was about fifteen thousand left, now. He made a little money picking stocks in some years and lost a little money in others. Cruising the yard sales in well-to-do neighborhoods in downtown Charleston for the last three summers, he would find things to sell for a small profit on eBay. His greatest conquest was a rare lithograph he picked up for a dollar and sold to a collector for nine hundred. But mostly there were just clothes and books and the odd watch cast off by an unsentimental widow that he could turn for a quick forty or fifty bucks. He didn’t need much, but he needed more than he had. With the occasional inflow, the steady outflow was depleting his savings at an average rate of twelve thousand a year. He figured he had one year left, by which time he needed either to be dead or a lot less hungry.

The one luxury he allowed himself was the half-price special on Guinness and steamed mussels at Tiddly’s, which he took for medicinal purposes on the grounds that he might die of depression if he had to open a can of soup night after night, then, after the six minutes it took him to eat it, sit staring at the walls of the cabin in the boat for the rest of the evening. Eating breakfast and lunch alone in daylight was one thing. Eating dinner alone in the stillness of night was, for Fitz, to teeter on the edge of madness. The bar in Tiddly’s, a pint of Guinness, and a bucket of clams wasn’t his idea of a gala celebration, but the bartender usually offered a little conversation, and the walk there and back got him two hours closer to dawn. It was well worth the eleven bucks it cost, including tip.

When Fitz arrived at the bar, he was still making little puddles with his feet where he walked. The girl at the server station looked at him with a mixture of fear and revulsion. He was a vagrant—albeit a nautical one and therefore imbued with a certain, dubious savois faire and the odor of mildew—but he usually managed to look better off than, in fact, he was. That night, however, he seemed to have receded into the corners of the small estate to which his life had fallen.

Tiddly’s was not busy. The bartender, whose name was Mike, knew not to wait for Fitz’s order. When he saw him coming he started a pint of stout, and when the foam had settled he set it in front of Fitz with a sympathetic smile.

Rough night, eh Fitz? Mike asked.

Rough enough, Fitz answered, always glad of Mike’s conversation, however banal. Stuff’s coming down in buckets.

You look like you forgot your umbrella.

It’s only water, Mikey. If it were four months from now, I’d be wet and freezing and pissed. Right now, I’m just wet and pissed. Two out of three—not so bad.

"You’re a better man than I am,’" Mike answered, saying what neither man believed was at all true.

Fitz took a long draw, licked the foam from his upper lip, and thought to elaborate on the point. If I’m a better man than you are, Mikey, you need to seriously reexamine your standards. That brought a laugh as Mike disappeared into the back to put in Fitz’s order: one bucket of mussels steamed in white wine, garlic and butter.

What Fitz really liked about Tiddly’s, aside from the cheap stout and overgenerous portions, was the ability it afforded him to be alone in company. That was true of most Irish bars he had been in, regardless of the town. On the odd weekend night at Tiddly’s there might be a fiddler or a lovely tenor, and with very little encouragement Fitz could be counted on for a chorus of Molly Malone. But for the most part he kept to himself, watched the game—indifferent to whatever sport or contest happened to be on offer—and exchanged a little banter with other old sots. Most of the patrons were men, most of them were alone, and all of them drank with a single-mindedness that discouraged female companionship.

That night, the rain had kept the usual Tiddly’s crew away. Fitz sat by himself at the end of the bar closest to the television on the last of eight empty stools. This was not the principal reason it seemed unusual that someone might choose to sit beside him. It was the fact it was a woman and, more to the point, a young woman.

Seat taken? she asked. He thought he heard something different in her voice. It made him pause in answering to the point of rudeness or deafness, she couldn’t have known which. He was about to assure her the seat was empty when she spoke again.

Name’s Gemma. She pronounced the G as a J.

Short for gem? Fitz asked.

Why yes, because I’m a pearl of a girl. Aren’t you the clever one! He accepted her flirting, wary of any hint of facetiousness and with an awkward smile that betrayed his insecurity with the skill. Then, flush with this small and unexpected success, he overplayed his hand. I suppose it could have been Gabby for Gabriella.

She paused, signaling a sense she had been too quick to encourage him. A single drop of sweat formed and plunged into the crevice underneath one of Fitz’s arms. He had only one idea what to say next, and it was not at all clever. He struggled to stop the lyrics of The Name Game running in his mind. She rescued him.

Gabriella yes, I suppose—if I were Latino. Gemma is Italian, actually, but quite a common name for girls in Ireland. You were right the first time. It actually means ‘gem’.

Then I shall refer to you by nothing but your proper name. Besides, Gabby sounds too much like Gidget or Bobbi or Billie, which would be fine names for a catcher on a girls’ softball team but not for an Irish beauty. She smiled. He felt safely back on base, having beat the throw by inches.

I don’t mean to barge in on your dinner, she said in an abrupt and depressing change of subject, but I wanted to get a better look at the game. She had an accent, faint as it was, which is partly what had first struck him as unusual about her. That this was an Irish bar was not of the least relevance. As uppity as Charleston had become (or wanted to be), this was still the Heart of the South. Apart from the fat, red-faced Irishman who owned the place, you were as likely to meet the Queen of England in Tiddly’s as a lovely Irish girl, much less one choosing to sit close to a man still dripping wet.

She gave him another smile. It was a gift of kindness, given in the way someone might offer a piece of chocolate to a stranger.

Should I call the Coast Guard, or do you have a name? she said, coyly. The woman was thirty seconds in and three questions ahead. Fitz was astonished to have been so rapidly outmaneuvered.

Name’s Jay Fitzgerald, he answered, and impolitely extended his hand. He was not an oaf. He knew by training not to reach out to demand a woman’s hand before it was offered. His second wife had taught him this through constant, grating correction. He might have remembered

Reviews for The Passage

[shetreadssoftly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Passage by Michael Hurley is a very highly recommended novel of self-discovery.Jay Danforth Fitzgerald, "Fitz," is a failed stockbroker in his early 60's who has also failed at three marriages. He doesn't believe in love, certainly not lasting love. After his third and last divorce, he moved onto his sailboat. His boat has been in Charleston Harbor for the last three years. Fitz is slowly running out of money, but he still goes to Tiddly's Bar every evening for dinner and a beer. When a young, 34 year old woman, Gemma, sits next to him at the bar and starts a conversation, his life changes. He decides to attempt to sail to Ireland (or die trying), but when Gemma secretly stows aboard, his plans change.I'm going to be honest and tell you that I did not like The Passage in the beginning. I was not in the mood for Fitz's self-loathing pity party. I was not prepared to accept that a young 34 year old woman was intrigued by this guy in his 60's who is soaking wet and dressed like a bum. And when Fitz lies to her and says he's 44, well, I was not too keen on a protagonist who was, by all appearances, going to be a huge jerk, lie, and hit on a young woman. Nope, not too keen on old guys thinking they deserve younger women and not interested in reading any novel along those lines. But that's not quite what happens, and I should have given Hurley more credit based on his previous to novels I read and loved.Yes, this is a novel about love, failed love, and redemptive love, but it's also a novel about longing for what might have been - and that is what makes it a much stronger novel than my first impression allowed. When the twists happen in the plot and everything falls into place, I was totally enamored with the underlying themes and symbolism Hurley tucked into the plot so perfectly and tenderly. I went from strongly disliking The Passage to adoring it, a tough transition to make and certainly a change of opinion that is rarely traversed.Hurley is an exceptional writer and that helped me stick with The Passage until I reached the transformative part. As I have said before, Hurley writes with a depth, intelligence, and thoughtfulness that make you crave more - and made me want to keep reading. The settings are clearly described. Obviously, Hurley knows his way around a sailboat and can describe it. The characters are also clearly well developed and there is personal growth and change in the end.Disclosure: I received a digital advanced reading copy of this book from the author for review purposes.