But it was her Why’s that changed my cruising plans. She kept it up over dinner — iced tea and crab cakes at a dry establishment across the street, a self-administered test to stay off the juice till her tale got told. Why couldn’t she make a go of it with any of her husbands and lovers? she wanted to know. Why had Prinz dumped her for Mel Bernstein’s slack-assed kid? Why had she ever imagined she had any talent except for drinking and fucking? (I shushed her: family restaurant.) Why couldn’t she control herself? Why was she born? Why go on living?

I sang the next line for her, to turn the edge; the one after we harmonized together, laughing around our backfin crab cakes—

What do I get?

What am I giving?

— and then I reminded her (she knew the story) that a series of Why’s from her on June 21 or 22, 1937, when she was going on four years old, had led me, age 37, aboard Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, to a clarification of my resolve to end my life. Thence, not long after, to the recognition that, sub specie aeternitatis, there was no more reason to commit suicide than not to.

She was, Jeannine sensibly replied, not me. And she wasn’t really talking about suicide, just wishing she were dead.

Nor was I, I told her (as it here began coming clear to me), really talking about 13 L, which I now explained: that summer day I’d lived programmatically like any other because I meant it to be my last. I was,” I said, really working out for myself a detail of 13 R — which never mind, my dear. Christ, Toddy, she wondered, who’s been on the sauce? And whose crisis was this? And what in the (family restaurant) world was she going to do with her useless self?

She was coming out to Todds Point with me for the weekend, I informed her. To talk things over like, well, uncle and niece. Swap despair stories. Knock back a moderate volume of London gin. Maybe net a few soft crabs and try to swim between the pesky sea nettles. My vacation cruise — and her return to Fort Erie, where they were wondering — could wait till the Monday.

She was delighted; so was I. No great mystery: a relief for her not to have to think in sexual terms, which had become anxious ones; a pleasure for me to be, no doubt for the last time, host to a pretty houseguest for an innocent weekend, uncomplicated by any emotion save mere benevolence and fitly echoing, in this leisurely wrap-up of my life, our father-daughterly excursion back in 13 L.

She was also curious, all the way to the cottage. What was I in despair about? Could it have to do with her mother, by any chance, or was it just Getting Old? Where did I mean to cruise to, and with whom? She really could use a drink now, if I didn’t mind; wasn’t the old country club somewhere along the way to Todds Point? How many girls did I suppose had like herself been laid on all nine greens of that flat little golf course in a single summer, between their junior and senior years of high school?

Never mind, I said, and it’s about as quick to keep on toward home, as an old regatta sailor like herself should know: just two points farther downriver. Oh wow, said she, she hadn’t done that in years and years — sailing, she meant. Did I think we could slip out just for a day sail before she left? But she answered herself with tears: Left for where? Not back to that (etc.) Farm: Joe Morgan was too far gone these days in his own hang-ups to do her any good, and all the others were either nuts or feebs. Her brother rightly despised her; her mother didn’t give a damn. Did I know that she didn’t even have an apartment to call her own? She’d made the mistake of letting hers go, a dandy one on the Upper West Side, when she’d moved in with Prinz; her stuff was still there.

Et cetera. All this over Beefeaters and tonic now, here. It excited Jeannine (as it had not Jane) to be back in the cottage she remembered happily from her girlhood. She kept the alcohol intake reasonably controlled; we sat for some hours in the dark on the screened front porch, listening to crickets and owls and ice cubes and each other’s stories, watching the moon track out on the still river where Osborn Jones lay half provisioned. I was pleased with her, that she hadn’t got drunk or hysterical; that she assessed herself and the others fairly; that she tucked her legs under her on the old porch glider and made herself unaffectedly at home with me; that she had the presence of heart to wonder again what was on my mind. I advised her, unless she was broke, to find another apartment, in New York or Los Angeles or wherever; to look very carefully for a serious, conservative, happily married, physically unattractive psychiatrist, preferably female, to help her with the booze and the rescaling of her ambitions; to consider applying some of her energies to something impersonal and citizenly — why not her father’s Tidewater Foundation, for example, which certainly needed its philanthropies reviewed? — et cetera.

I did not mention the will case; seemed inappropriate. Or her chain-smoking, which stank up the sultry air. Of my own situation, not to be unfairly reticent and because it was agreeable to have that auditor in that ambience, I volunteered the vague half-truth that my health was uncertain and the truth that a 69-year-old bachelor whose accomplishments have been modest and whose relations with women have been more or less transient and without issue has sufficient cause both for occasional despair and for looking unmorbidly to last things. Handling that big boat alone, for example, was getting to be a bit much, but I’d never enjoyed vacationing in male company, had run out of companionable and willing female crew, and was no longer interested enough in the sport to swap O.J. for a smaller and more manageable craft. Thus my decision to make a final solo circuit of my favorite Chesapeake anchorages and then pack it in.

I said nothing about suicide, of course. But I realized at once I’d said too much about female crew. Jeannine became her-mother-back-in-May all over again, when I’d first felt my life’s odd recycling. O Jesus, how she’d love to see Dun Cove again, and Queenstown Creek, and What’s-its-name Cove off Gibson Island Harbor — Red House! Red House Cove! And I shouldn’t forget how she’d raked in the silverware back in her dinghy-racing days against the best Hampton One-Design skippers on the circuit; and she remembered how to read charts and take bearings and play the currents and handle lines. Couldn’t she for Christ’s sake pretty please go along with me, if I hadn’t a full company lined up? At least for a few days? She’d cook, she’d crew, she’d drink no more than I, she’d smoke downwind of me and the sails, she’d stay out of my way, she didn’t mind mosquitoes, she loved foul weather, she’d never been seasick in her life, she even had shorts and sneakers in her bag, though alas no jeans or swimsuit, but who cared, she’d use Off in the evenings and swim in her shorts and T-shirt when there were People around. I could put her ashore whenever I tired of her company. Please say yes, Toddy! Unless you’ve got something else going?

It was no time to lay another rejection on her. The notion even sounded agreeable. To’ve had a son to sail with is a thing I’ve often wished; to’ve had a daughter, even more so. But I didn’t trust Jeannine’s sobriety — alcoholics don’t reef down that readily — and had no use for a drunk on board. And I did (this much I told her) want not only privacy but some solitude on my Last Go-‘Round. I felt her tensing for my no: the stab of her cigarette, the swish of her drink. Let’s take a shakedown sail tomorrow, I proposed. Dun Cove for the night; Gibson Island on Sunday if we still like each other. You can get a cab to the airport from the yacht club there, and I’ll go my solitary way.

It took her a hurt half-second to remuster her enthusiasm; then she was all aye-aye sir and asking like a kid could she go to bed now so the morning would come sooner, or was there work she ought to do first?