O Captain, my captain

I once mentioned to Bill Buckley how much I enjoyed the job of mate on his boat.

“First mate,” he corrected me. “I have a mate. Her name is Pat.”

For two summers -- 1998 and 1999 -- I took care of Buckley’s 36-foot sloop, Patito. Every Friday from May to Thanksgiving, he sailed with one crew member and two guests from his home in Stamford, Conn., across Long Island Sound. When the anchor dropped, he ritually mixed white wine martinis for his guests while I grilled steaks. I gave him a martini shaker once, as a present. It confused him, and he displayed it on board more as a trophy than an appliance. We ate dinner, drank port and found our berths. In the morning, we made instant coffee, listened to Don Imus on the radio and sailed home.

Buckley told me that I could take the boat out whenever I wanted. He told me to drink as I pleased from his liquor cabinet, warning me not to touch his Bordeaux. It was the best job in the world.

Sailing is an unapologetically patrician occupation. It’s like golf, only more expensive and less flexible. Buckley, in fact, referred to it as “my golf,” as if the two were obviously mutually exclusive.

He was unapologetically patrician. It was one of the most charming things about him. It’s hard, in America, to have money and not be defensive about it. One is either proudly self-made or learns not to talk about money. Buckley drove a Ford Escort and husbanded his father’s wine cellar. When he bought a minivan, he showed me, with glee, how he could open both bay doors with a button in the dash. He told anecdotes about learning French from Vladimir Nabokov. To admit that wealth exists requires a kind of innocence, a sincere wonder that anyone might be offended by it.

We played poker with 19th century Spanish doubloons.

One might hope to be able to write, in a eulogy of an intellectual titan, that the departed was just like one of us. Buckley was not like one of us. He answered every letter. He wrote a book every year. A thousand other people whom he knew briefly but affected profoundly might write as I do now.

But his particular brand of innocence, as I knew it, came with an almost overwhelming curiosity. He told me that almost everyone has something fascinating to say, and it’s your job to find it out. The few who have nothing fascinating to say are fascinating themselves. Their very nullity makes them fascinating. These are not the words of a pundit, an ideologue or a partisan fencer. They are the words of an anthropologist.

Buckley was certainly lucky in the world. I realized once, cleaning up his boat, that he had most likely never in his life picked up his own towel. But he found the world, which had given him so much, a source of endless wonder. We had a 10-minute conversation once about how cool it was that my wristwatch lit up at night.

I didn’t know Buckley as a fellow traveler. I didn’t know him as a Catholic or a worthy intellectual opponent. I knew him as the captain of a small boat, as a man who instructed me to stock clam juice in the locker behind the mast so I could make a Bloody Mary from scratch.

In 2000, when I was 24, Buckley lent me $10,000 for 10 years with no interest. He wanted me to buy my own boat. He made me promise that I wouldn’t tell his wife. I worked hard to pay him back, and did three years later. When I gave him the money, he was disappointed. He had urged me to take it with the words, “When it’s time to pay me back, you’ll be rich. Or I’ll be dead.”

I am not. He is. We are much the poorer for it. And I try to think now -- every time I meet someone -- of Buckley’s faith in almost everyone’s fascinating story.