Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  “We were—” Fitzhugh began.

  But Vida couldn’t stand to hear an explanation and began to drown out his speech with her own: “I know what you were doing. Please. I am a lady. I really oughtn’t hear such things.” Why had she said that? It was precisely her unladylike behavior that had gotten her into this mess in the first place. She had acted too free, and now look at her. She’d behaved like all the other girls foolishly chasing after men who were indifferent to their efforts. And hadn’t a little part of her been hoping that maybe Fitz would kiss her, in the dark of this map room, just as he had apparently done with Camilla? It felt better to act indignant than to appear hurt, however, so she went on frowning as though this scene really had offended her delicate sensibilities.

  “I have no idea what you are suggesting,” Camilla Farrar said. “Fitz is my brother.”

  “Brother-in-law,” Vida corrected for some reason.

  Camilla’s red-painted lips parted slightly in malice. Somehow the cruelty of that smile did nothing to diminish her beauty. “My,” she breathed. “Aren’t you well-informed?”

  Of all the facts that now stabbed at Vida, Camilla’s cool dominance cut the deepest. In the years of her social career in San Francisco, Vida had never overplayed her hand so badly as now, had never had to face an adversary of higher social standing and more self-possession in quite so obvious a way. “Isn’t he?” was the only reply she could muster, and she knew it was the sort of weak and witless response that would repeat and repeat in her thoughts all night and all tomorrow like a torturous melody.

  “We were only talking,” Camilla replied as she walked in a cloud of careless irritation past Vida and into the hallway. There she paused, revolved, and the way she gazed at Vida made Vida feel that all of her—her physical self, and also the high spirit she had believed herself to be—had been shrunk down to a pitiful nothing.

  A little fire sparked in Vida’s belly. In the next moment she was aflame with anger. She let the heat build inside her, let it become a kind of tower. Any moment now, an absolute dagger of a rejoinder would occur to her. She knew it would. She waited for it, smiling at Camilla, facing her down as though they were two soldiers at a duel. Camilla smiled back, and Vida opened her mouth to let this woman know what a dangerous adversary she truly was.

  Then Camilla was gone. Before Vida could manage to be astonished, she was struck by the sound—although it took several seconds for her to comprehend that what she was experiencing was a sound. It was so loud, for one thing, and also it was so many sounds at once. Somehow a scraping and a moaning and an echoing, and also the sound of a thousand wailing banshees, and also the wind, and also the complete absence of noise one might hear at the end of the Earth. She felt it deep in her belly and her skull as though she herself were a bell being tolled by whatever it was. She became aware that her feet were no longer on the ground, that she herself was almost floating. Then the wall (or the ceiling—she wasn’t sure which) smacked her left side, and for a moment her vision was a sparkling blur.

  “What was that, what was that?” she heard Camilla shrieking from what sounded like not so far away.

  “We’ve hit something.” That was Sal, and his voice was low and steady, which somehow made everything seem more frightening. “The ship hit something big.”

  “Are you all right?” Fitzhugh asked, and his voice was so close that she knew the arms lifting her up must be his. Though she struggled against him, it was no use. That liar Fitzhugh, who made bright girls stupid, had snared her in his arms when she was too weak to protest.

  Seven

  How calm everything seemed for a while, and then never again.

  Just after the world-ending sound and the shock of impact, Vida said she was all right, and would Fitzhugh please put her down, and he did. Camilla got up from wherever she had landed, and Sal approached the doorway, and they all stood there, very quiet, looking from one to the other with a hopeful question in their eyes—was it possible that they imagined it?

  Then they heard the pounding of feet above, the shouting, and they knew they hadn’t imagined anything, that something had indeed happened. Wordlessly they followed Fitzhugh toward the exit to the promenade.

  The oil paintings that had hung in the hall were now flung across the floor, and they could see, even before they arrived, that the door that had once led onto the promenade was gone. On the floor above them the shouting became more frenzied. They heard what sounded like a stampede of horses. They walked, as though compelled to do so, to what had once been the end of the hall. They stared out at what had once been the promenade—that wide, polished walkway that went all around the ship. A section of the promenade had been ripped away. They went to the edge, peered over into the abyss, and saw that it was not just a piece of the promenade that was gone, but a whole section of the ship’s outer wall. Below them an unearthly fog unfurled, and far below that was the splashing, churning sea—the sea that was even now pouring in through the gap that had been torn into the side of the ship. The vast red-and-black iron flank of what must have hit the Princess slid past them and into the vast darkness of the ocean at night.

  Vida’s heart was oddly still. Everything seemed not quite real. But she didn’t at all like the terrible expressions on everybody’s faces. “Say something,” she said in what she had meant to be an irreverent way. Instead it came out sort of soft and trembling. Nobody did say anything. Fitzhugh revolved and began walking and then running down the hall, and first Sal, and then Camilla, and then Vida followed.

  They ran up and up, through the fine halls of the first-class quarters, until they reached the top deck. The chaos Vida saw there made her a little less embarrassed about what all that running had done to the arrangement of her hair, the loveliness of her gown. And she forgot, too, the hope of a reprieve from all these long faces. Every face she saw had a sickly pallor, every pair of eyes seemed not quite to see. Bodies charged, yelled, pushed, grabbed at anything to no obvious purpose. Some people had arrived in their nightclothes, others in their topcoats and carrying their suitcases. But what could be so wrong, she reasoned. The ship still floated.

  The lights were still on, illuminating the wide field that was the open-air part of the ship. The fog hung over them but there seemed to be no wind, no menace in the air, and Vida glanced at Fitzhugh, at Sal, at the awful, terrible, beautiful Camilla, for some sort of agreement that perhaps the worst was over.

  She found none.

  She knew by the way Fitzhugh was speaking to the captain, who had appeared suddenly in his crisp blue-and-white uniform, that the worst was yet to come. “I saw it,” Fitzhugh told him, his voice low, even as his eyes roved constantly, alert to all that was said or done around him.

  “A steamer?”

  Fitzhugh’s head jerked in swift agreement. “Hit us amidships on the port side.”

  “Must have ripped a damn big hole. There’s already flooding in the engine room.”

  Fitzhugh’s steady blue gaze rose up and met the captain’s eyes. “This ship is unsinkable.”

  The captain nodded. “Of course, sir.”

  “Practically speaking, she is unsinkable.”

  “It is a Farrar ship, sir,” he said dutifully.

  “The newest and most modern of our fleet.” Fitzhugh averted his eyes. “But as a precaution we should get the women and children into life vests.”

  “We’ll want to keep things calm.”

  “Yes.” Fitzhugh drew breath into his chest, as though trying to inflate his very stature. Incredibly, he did look a little taller. “Someone get me a bullhorn.”

  Vida watched him climb onto a deck chair and boom his voice across the night, and she felt her skin crawl with the strangeness of it all. Her mind couldn’t quite keep up. None of this was real, was it? She couldn’t seem to believe that any of this was real. That bizarre and pathetic scene, in which a hundred people milled around, and ceased their clamoring for answers, and listened to a handsome young man who wore a tux
edo with the logo of the Farrar Line embroidered at the lapels. He was telling them there was nothing to fear, it was only that every precaution must be taken after a collision in the open ocean. What nice words he chose, and how good he looked in command, his expression serious, his brows drawn together, his body, compact and strong, gesticulating in such a way that the crowd did quiet. They sighed, relaxed, nodded to each other in agreement that with someone very impressive in charge they could trust in things again, that they were safe.

  But the tiny little hairs on Vida’s arms, the coolness in her heart, told her otherwise. She had ever been the sort who made her own luck—as a little girl, she had wanted a pony, and so it had been. When she was grown enough to want finer things, she had decided that she would make herself the most talked-about young woman in San Francisco society, and so it had been. And she had wanted to do it her own way, and have more fun than all the debutantes hunting for husbands, and so it had been. She had voyaged out on the Princess of the Pacific, in the name of getting Fitzhugh Farrar, who everyone wanted for a husband, and so it should have been. But it wasn’t. Because besides everything else, the ship had been hit.

  And so while the passengers did as they had been told, and kept calm, and put on their life jackets, and as the crew did their orderly preparations so that the lifeboats could be loaded and lowered if necessary, Vida glanced about as though nothing at all was to be believed but this: the ship had been hit hard. Her own eyes had seen how much iron had been torn away by the passing ship. She could sink, and every utterance of the word “unsinkable” was an invitation to the fates and furies to have their destructive way with them. All of it seemed of a piece—that terrible moment of realization in the map room, which made her earlier humiliation at its door seem like a laughable nothing, and the fact that all her bravado was just delusion.

  A lot of time must have passed, but time seemed an alien concept in this strange, still place.

  Only when the ship began to list did Vida’s heart start beating again, a wild beating, though not because she was surprised. Because she knew finally that the worst was coming. She had been waiting for this moment, for the other passengers to understand what she understood: this had all been a mistake. They were land dwellers, and should not be where they now found themselves, far from shore, on a beautifully polished surface that was tilting, slowly but surely, as though to spill them into the infinite watery world below.

  All this time, for reasons she did not understand, she had stood close to Fitzhugh and Sal and Camilla, as though their togetherness at the moment the ship was hit could bind them together in misery forever.

  The crew began urging women and children into the lifeboats, and Fitzhugh looked at her—really looked at her, for the first time since he had picked her up and she had demanded to be put down—and said that she should go in the first boat. Then he touched Camilla’s elbow, and told her that she should go, too, that the two ladies ought to stay together, and they would be back onboard soon enough, once the ballast was corrected. What with everything, Vida should not have cared that he seemed to treat them the same, should not have wanted the pure blue of his gaze fixed upon her and her only. But she did, and she drew back from Camilla.

  “Not without my parents,” Vida said, and for the first time since everything got turned upside down she thought of her mother and father, and realized they must be in a state of high agitation.

  “All passengers will be roused and evacuated.” Fitzhugh cast a worried glance at Sal. “We are boarding several boats at once, so they may already be gone.”

  Camilla’s face had a stone fury in it, and she turned away from their little party, and extended her arms to the waiting crewmembers, who gently lifted her over the railing and lowered her into the waiting lifeboat. The tail of her gown trailed over the rail and she was gone.

  “Please,” Fitzhugh implored Vida.

  An orderly line had formed behind them, and Vida stared at these strangers, at their odd complacency in the face of calamity. Her heart refused to go ahead of these poor souls. Not out of altruism. Altruism had never been and was not now Vida’s chief characteristic. It was that very little of her wanted to be safe. She wanted only to see her mother and father and know they were all right and face whatever the night held with them.

  “I must insist,” Fitzhugh said. He did the same trick he’d done before—he took a breath and seemed somehow bigger afterward—and Vida felt sorry for the part of herself that still admired this ability of his.

  “Must,” she muttered, chewing and spitting the ridiculous word, and charged down the line to see if her parents were among those who had queued up in a vain pretense of normalcy. She did glance back, but Fitzhugh had already given up insisting. He was holding a lady’s hand as she went over the rail into the lifeboat, and only Sal, who held the lady’s other hand, glanced back at her with that dark and impenetrable gaze.

  Vida stalked the deck, shouting her mother’s and father’s names. The crowd was so dense by then, and she knew she was upsetting the others with her frantic searching. They did not want her to disturb their sense that this was all very normal, that this was all just fine. Their numbers dwindled, and the ship slowly, slowly angled to the port side. Soon empty lifeboats were brought up, along with the happy news that the ship that had hit them was nearby. The other ship—called the Artemis—was a bit bashed in at the stern, but she had taken on no water, and so passengers from the Princess were being brought on deck.

  A cheer went up when that news arrived, and people began joking that they should make a quick run back to the dining room for a bottle of champagne to lighten the mood on the way over. But the news did nothing to soothe Vida’s agitation. When she had been back and forth across the deck a thousand times she tried to force her way belowdecks, to search the cabin where her mother and father had intended to spend a peaceful evening. A sailor was blocking the door that led below.

  “You can’t go that way, miss,” he said.

  “Well, why not?” she fumed. “I bought my ticket just like anybody, and it’s my life to risk if I so choose.”

  “There’s nobody down there,” the sailor insisted. He had pink cheeks and fair stubble and Vida wondered if he were even younger than she was.

  “How do you know?” she demanded, confident she could bend him to her will.

  “We have knocked on all doors, miss. Now, please. I must insist you get to safety.”

  “Oh must you?” Vida shot back with bitter irony. “Captain’s orders, is it?”

  “No—his,” replied the young man, and she saw Fitzhugh striding in her direction.

  “Don’t you dare!” she shouted as he charged forward to pick her up.

  She resisted, her legs bicycled wildly, but it was no use. He was much stronger than she was. All her delicate walking, all her careful eating, all that whittling of her already petite person made her the perfect target to be lifted from around the waist, hauled across the deck. A crewmember who stood at the edge of the deck picked up her feet and together they lifted her over the rail and deposited her in the lifeboat fastened to the Princess’s side. Then Fitz signaled, and other crewmen began to slacken the ropes to lower the lifeboat down.

  “Wait!” Vida screamed, and stood up as though she might actually grab the Princess by the railing and haul herself back on deck.

  One of the other women in the vessel gasped, and Vida realized that she had risen so suddenly, and with such fury, that she had no control of her own body’s trajectory. She might have thrown herself clear out of the boat. Fear spread its icy fingers over her breastbone. Yes, she might have fallen a long distance to the ocean below, where she could see other boats being rowed away into the dense fog. Someone had reached out and grabbed her by the wrist, though. He was holding her steady. She had a final view of the deck of the Princess cleared of all passengers. Only the crew, in their neat navy-and-brass uniforms, remained. Fitzhugh saluted them, gave a final order, then leapt over the edge and landed b
eside Vida in the lifeboat.

  “You bastard,” she said through tight teeth.

  She thought he would respond with equal fury, but he enraged her further by smiling amiably, like the hero of newspaper columns. He smoothed the surface of his hair. “Maybe—but one who keeps you safe, my lady.”

  Only then did she glance at the person who held her wrist, and saw Sal. She jerked back her hand, and he did not try to hold on. The little boat lowered along the wall of the ship. As they descended she had glimpses into a dining room where all the plates had spilled off the table, into abandoned cabins, into the white-painted halls. The great ship went on tilting, so that at last it loomed over them. She could hardly breathe staring back up its monstrous, looming side, which went on winking at them from its many illuminated portholes.

  Meanwhile the water lapped gently and when at last they touched the surface of the ocean she allowed herself a little guilty burst of relief. She hadn’t wanted Fitzhugh’s help, or his empty assurances, but as they rowed away from the Princess she understood again what a massive, wounded beast the ship was. Soon enough the crew began to lower themselves in the last of the lifeboats, and Vida watched, numb and refusing blankets or reassuring words from the twenty or so others who huddled on the wooden benches around her.

  A lifeboat! She shuddered as the real meaning of the phrase occurred to her.