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off with a bunch of callow college boys when I show up. I'd better take off some flab." We rode almost every day, or hiked—we didn't swim; there were no swimming pools in Sagrado; water was too precious—and once we made a two-week camp in the Cola de Vaca Peaks in the Cordillera, carrying all the gear on our backs.
    For an old man (he was forty-one) he did pretty well. I still didn't understand why he'd insisted on joining the Navy at his age. Mother didn't understand, and neither did Paolo Bertucci. The War Production Board didn't think it was a good idea; they had told him his patriotic duty was to stay in Mobile to build landing craft and small, fast tankers with shallow drafts; but he had scurried around and snapped at people, threatened bureaucrats and finally called the Secretary of the Navy in Washington—a man named Knox—and got his commission at the same time as the Normandy invasion, an operation which employed more than a hundred of his landing craft. "You see," he told Paolo one evening in Mobile, when he'd dropped by to argue, "they're fighting the rest of the war on land. They won't be needing Arnold-made craft any more. The yard can go back to making shrimp trawlers and garbage scows. You can handle that sort of thing yourself."
    "I think you're just like a little boy playing sailor," Paolo told him.
    "You're right," Dad said. "I am. And don't try to stop me, or I'll put a six-pounder into your poop deck. You swab."
    In August, after running me around the mountains until my nose bled every afternoon, he declared he was fit to wear the uniform. On his last day with us, my mother forewent her bridge game at La Posta and stayed home. Excilda roasted a kid, we each had a glass of Harvey's Bristol Cream before dinner, and Dad cracked a bottle of Chambertin 1934, which had probably never been drunk with goat meat before. We toasted the President, John Paul Jones and Lord Nelson. My mother refused to toast David Farragut, but I went along with it. After dinner, he telephoned Paolo Bertucci in Mobile.
    "Papa's off to the seven seas," he said. "Everything going all right down there, you loathsome wop?"
    "I think so," Paolo said. "We're squirting boats like a machine gun. I'd say as many as twenty-five per cent of them stay afloat when they hit the water, although they don't all float right side up."
    "That's a pretty good average for a Genoese landlubber."
    "I do have one question, though," Paolo said. "Some of the men asked me, and I thought I ought to check with you. When you're standing at the back part of the boat, facing toward the front of the boat, what do you call the right-hand side? Is it starboard or larboard?"
    "The right-hand side is called the mizzenmast," Dad said. "You call the left-hand side the fo'c'sle. I knew we'd have a language problem if we let a dago run the yard. Maybe I ought to resign my commission and get back there."
    "We'll make do without you, Frank," Paolo said. "Hell, all you ever did was get in the way. I'm already saving twenty thousand a month by using oakum instead of rivets."
    "The paper said some landing craft sank halfway across the Channel on D-Day. Any idea who made them?"
    "Couldn't have been us," Paolo said. "Ours don't sink; they capsize. Well, keep your powder dry, Olaf. My respects to your family. Tell Josh we always have a job for him as ship's cat."
    "I wish you wouldn't let him talk to you that way, Frank," my mother said, when he reported the conversation. "It wasn't too many years ago that he was a carpenter or something."
    "I'll work on the dignity angle when I get back," he said. "Right now Paolo's building boats and keeping five hundred men occupied. If I want deferential language I'll hire a butler to run the yard."
    He left the next morning, wearing his new suntans. "Practice your Spanish, you ape, and be nice to people," he said. "Make new friends. Get a haircut once in a while. Don't suck your thumb. And don't get cute with your mother. A little flippancy