And the Captain Said

Norma would tell stories, some her father had told her, and some about him.

Albert Edward Mackay, pronounced Mackai, was born in the Gorbals on the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow and sent to a farm to pull a plow in the rocky Highlands until he joined the British Army at fifteen. He spent the years before World War II in India, then the war years in Egypt and North Africa. Afterward, he was stationed in Germany, where he met Norma’s mother, Katherina.

They migrated to America and settled in White Plains with Carola, eight years older than Norma. Carola was born in Germany; Norma, three years old when they moved, was born in Glasgow a year or two after the death of her sister, Lorna.

Albert had a wicked sense of humor and a hair-trigger temper, but he could never stay angry at his daughter, Norma, for long.

The family, like any other, was filled with stories and contradictions. Norma loved a good thunderstorm and would open the windows, counting the seconds from the first flash of lightning to the roll of thunder to gauge the distance of the strike. She wasn’t reckless, she would sometimes unplug appliances before the days of surge protectors, just to be safe.

Her mother, Katherina, would hide in the hallway of their solid-brick apartment building, heart racing, hands over her ears. No one knew whether the panic came from a childhood fear of storms or from the memory of bombs falling on the village she’d lived in during the war. Albert made sure the children didn’t inherit that fear and would tease them with the beginning of this story.

Throughout the almost fifty years Norma and I spent together, one of us would begin the little circle of story at the first sign of a storm:

“And the Captain said, ‘Johnny, tell me a story.’
And Johnny began: ‘It was a cold and stormy night, and the Captain said, “Johnny, tell me a story.”
And Johnny began…’”

It always brought to mind his jet-black hair, bushy eyebrows, and the rugged Sean Connery good looks of the old man laughing at the rhythm of his own words as they tumbled out in a thick Scottish brogue.

April 1975

Norma and I had moved in together before I ever met her parents. The stories she told about her father made me think twice about showing up with a full beard and hair hanging over my shoulders. It was April of 1975, the month the Vietnam War, the first of several wars America would eventually abandon, came to an end, and the same month Norma turned twenty-two.

The war had divided the country. You were either for it or against it. I had escaped enlistment, first in 1969 with a 2-S deferment while enrolled at NYU’s School of Education, and later through sheer luck when President Nixon implemented the draft lottery. My birthday, the 26th of June, was drawn 308th, far enough down the list that I knew I would never be called since they only drafted into the 200s.

For me, that was the beginning of my spiral. I dropped out of college because the fear of the jungles of Vietnam was gone and pursued what began as a spiritual journey and ended up as entry into the maze of the chaos the 60’s that required months of healing before I could resurface, reborn with the shaky legs of a newborn deer.

I was finishing my last semester at the Manhattan School of Printing, a trade school at 88 West Broadway, right at the edge of SoHo and Tribeca, just below Chambers Street. I was planning on interviewing for a job, so the idea of cutting my hair and shaving my beard made sense.

The school was in the shadow of the newly completed World Trade Center. In August of the year before, I had watched Philippe Petit cross a tightrope almost 1,400 feet above the ground and 200 feet between the North and South Towers.

Back then, that area was still filled with the hum of presses, loading docks, and paper deliveries. The air carried the faint scent of ink and hot metal type—part industrial grit, part creative energy. The school’s brick façade had seen decades of apprentices come and go, most bound for printing houses along Hudson, Varick, or Canal.

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I remember meeting Albert and Kathy for the first time in their one-bedroom apartment at the Surrey Strathmore, a group of six buildings arranged in a horseshoe around a well-manicured courtyard with a huge pine in the center of the green lawn. The tree was strung with lights and lit for Christmas each year. Years later, after we married and after we’d moved away and back again into our own Surrey Strathmore apartment, our oldest son, Eric—at the ripe old age of six—threw the switch that lit the tree while his younger brother looked on.

I survived the first meeting with the “captain of the ship,” as Albert liked to think of himself. In the years that followed, he became a second father to me—I’d lost my own in my teens—and I, in turn, became the son he never expected. His attitudes were nineteenth-century at best, bound by class and custom—barriers fuzzier in America, where race and religion drew sharper lines.

He told his daughter, “A Jew will never marry a Christian”, only to have me prove him wrong.

At our wedding at the White Plains Women’s Club, as he left the room, he gave me a quick jab with his elbow and nodded toward the window. “Ach, Dunny,” he said, “I’ll be waiting outside that window with a shotgun, yah canna get away.”

I wasn’t thinking too clearly because I remember thinking, We’re on the second floor, how exactly would he do that?

Don’t get me wrong, they loved us dearly.

He and Kathy were there to support us when we lost our firstborn, Jessica. No words were necessary. Having lost a child of their own, we knew—even in silence—they understood.

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There are more stories to be told. Grandpa Albert taking Eric to witness his first bank robbery—in a perambulator. Yes, I mean a baby carriage. Me working for him on the banks of the Long Island Sound on my days off as a computer operator. Painting the rock wall at the estate he managed, over and over again, just to be close to the sound of the waves, until his boss finally remarked that he’d never seen the wall look so good.

There are memories of us moving back to White Plains after I’d conned Norma into a brief experiment in country living, away from the town she grew up in, because Albert had been diagnosed with cancer. We moved into an apartment in the Surrey Strathmore while Norma spent her days beside his bed at St. Agnes Hospital, where he grew thin and finally slipped away.

There are memories, too, of the next twenty-plus years: Norma and I taking Kathy shopping and to doctor’s appointments. The adventures she and I had when we would get lost on purpose on our drives through the wealthy neighborhoods of Westchester and Connecticut, ogling the mansions and estates of our betters. Finally, the holidays—Kathy feeding Max, him sneaking bits of food from her hand under the table at Christmas and the Jewish holidays, joined by Uncle Al and Stella.

But the one story that brings them all back to life is the one Norma and I would sometimes start without warning—the old refrain looping back again:

“And the Captain said, ‘Now Johnny, tell me a story.’
And Johnny began…”