Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  There was no mention of the prince or Mrs. Simpson, not even the wispiest gossip or vague unfounded report.

  The “biggest goddamn sonofabitching scoop of the century,” as the Press-Bulletin’s managing editor, Charles F. Duffy, would doubtless gracefully proclaim it, belonged to no one—yet.

  Finishing and paying for his drink, Spencer folded the paper, knowing that Nora would read every word raptly, and stepped out onto 44th Street, humming to himself. He had not felt so gloriously happy in years. He could not think of when he had felt so much accomplishment, so much freedom, so much independence—so very much his own man.

  Alone at last late that night in Nora’s twelfth-floor suite, both flung themselves into their lovemaking with a furious passion—and more abandon than they had ever experienced on the ship. A long, sleepy, happy interval followed, but at length she sat up, trembling.

  “I’m scared, Jimmy. I can’t go to sleep. I keep remembering things.”

  “Come with me,” he said, extending his hand. “Come to the window.”

  He turned off the lamp nearest it and pulled her close. They leaned forward, the better to see through the darkened glass to the scene below.

  Central Park stretched from the few hansom cabs still lingering on 59th Street below past ponds and zoo and out in a vast expanse of blackness laced with necklaces of tiny street lights. Great and extraordinary buildings extended northward as boundaries, those along Fifth Avenue immediately to their right the most bright and colorful. A parade of automobile headlights, seeking destinations they could not imagine, moved along the boulevard, north and south.

  “This is your place, Nora,” he said, softly. “This is the most stylish, elegant, beautiful corner in this entire city. It represents everything that is classic and great about New York. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this place. John Dos Passos wrote about it. Henry James wrote about it endlessly. This is your place, Nora. You belong to it, and it belongs to you. Put everything else out of your mind. Forget what we’ve been through. You’re home now. You’re home—with me.”

  She leaned her head forward until it touched the cold glass of the window, still with an arm around him.

  “It is so beautiful,” she said. “So very, very different from what I saw out my window when I was a child.”

  “It’s yours, Nora.”

  “Are you mine, Jimmy?”

  “Of course. Here I am.”

  She took him back to the bed. They made love again, with much less ardor but with much more tenderness, and eventual contentment. Within the hour they were asleep.

  It was not much later—still well into the dead of night—that First Officer van Groot, now in command of the Wilhelmina and the skeleton crew remaining on board, acted to carry out the decision made by the Lage Lander Line that afternoon. With passengers, injured, dead, and cargo all removed—and special passenger Charles Lindbergh taken quietly across the river on a launch sent by the governor of New Jersey—with stores removed and trucked off to be sold to New York restaurants, the wounded ship was set loose from its moorings and pulled slowly out of the slip by tugboats nearly invisible in the darkness.

  The destination was Brooklyn’s Erie Basin and the shipyards there. If the Wilhelmina, which had performed so ably and nobly in the last dash to port, could be repaired and refitted without astronomical cost and losses to the company, the assessment would be made there. If it was decided that their only course was to scrap her, that could be accomplished in the same place.

  With all lights out except for those on the hauling tugs, and with considerable assistance from the Coast Guard and New York City police marine units, the new, magnificent, incomparably beautiful, and now much-mutilated ocean liner made its ghostly progress downriver and then across the southern tip of Manhattan. As the macabre waterborne procession, remindful of the medieval gangs who dragged away the dead during the Black Plague, approached the lights of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, there was a rending groan of collapsing metal along the waterline by boiler rooms 4 and 5. The great vessel began to sag and settle at the stern. Then, as water rushed into the rupture, she capsized fully and finally in shallow water. All hands were saved but two—Oriental crewmen whose names were not even mentioned in the morning newspapers, except for The New York Times.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The restaurant in Philadelphia’s Barclay Hotel was a gloomy, high-ceilinged room, hardly made more cheerful by this gray, drizzly January day. Spencer had arrived first and taken a table near one of the windows. She was late, which surprised him, as she had all of two blocks to come, from just across Rittenhouse Square.

  He had gone through most of his paper by the time she arrived, looking as striking as he had remembered, a beautiful dark-haired, brown-eyed woman with pale skin, that day wearing a black coat, hat, suit, and gloves, with a single strand of pearls around her throat. She appeared rather older than she had on the ship, but perhaps they all did.

  “I was afraid you weren’t coming,” he said, rising to greet her. She shook his hand somewhat gingerly, almost as if taken aback that he had offered his first. He’d not remembered that from the ship.

  “I almost didn’t,” she replied, as the maître d’ seated her. “I wasn’t certain what this was all about.”

  “Would you like a cocktail?” he asked.

  “No, thank you. I haven’t had much taste for them since Christopher died.”

  “Do you mind if I do?”

  “No. Not that it would make any difference.”

  “It would.” He ordered a very cold and dry martini, despite the clammy January weather.

  She pulled off her gloves, glancing at the headline on his newspaper.

  “Good God, there it is,” she said. “The old king finally died. Our pathetic little shipmate is king.”

  “Le roi est mort; vive le roi. Do you really feel that way about the prince?”

  “If he weren’t the prince, Mr. Spencer, who of us would have sought out his company?”

  “I don’t recall any of us going belowdecks to search for more charming company. On a ship, you take what you get. He’s nobody I’d pick to drink with in Harry’s Bar, but he wasn’t really a rotter.”

  “Except on the lifeboat.”

  “I’ll grant you that.”

  “Do you suppose Mrs. Simpson is still with him? I haven’t seen her name once in the papers.”

  “I’ve no doubt that she is. I’m told she’s written about all the time in the London society columns. She and Mr. Simpson are mentioned pointedly as guests at the prince’s parties.

  “How convenient for her and the prince. She must really have her clutches into him.”

  “As Edward has his into her.”

  “I’ve never understood social climbing like that. It’s always seemed to me that there are greater concerns in life than one’s social status.”

  “I used to think that, back when I had some.”

  She leaned back slightly and folded her hands in front of her, challenging him. “And now?”

  He realized how little he knew about this woman, despite all they’d been through, in such close proximity.

  “I still think that,” Spencer said. “Probably more than before. But grant that Mrs. Simpson has had a hard life. I didn’t tell anyone, but I encountered her once in China, back in the twenties, when she had left her rummy of a first husband and was supporting herself gambling and mooching. She had a rotten childhood. She must see all this splendor now as fitting compensation. Certainly revenge.”

  The elderly waiter came with Spencer’s drink. “Would you like to order now?”

  “Just tea for me,” she said. “And perhaps some biscuits. I’ve already had luncheon, with my mother.”

  “Nothing more for me,” Spencer said. He waited. “May I call you Chasey, Mrs. Parker?” he asked when the man had gone.

  “I don’t see why not. We’ve been about as intimate as two people can be, haven’t we?—without actually being intimate. You sav
ed my life.” She blushed, a faint coloration of her very white skin. “You hauled me out of the water with an arm around my chest. The toilet arrangements alone on that lifeboat qualify us for informal address.” The last sentence had some bitterness to it.

  “They also caused your husband’s death.”

  “Oh, let’s not bring that up, shall we? It’s bad enough that he’s gone, without going on about the wretched way he went.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All right. Forgiven.”

  They were silent a moment. Spencer noticed several ladies in the room watching them.

  “I chose the wrong place,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I knew where I was going.”

  “I daresay you were the best of us on that terrible little boat, Chasey. Certainly the bravest. They shouldn’t have treated you so shabbily.”

  “They?”

  “Some of those in the prince’s party. My dear old ‘friend’ Chips Channon.”

  “No one treated me shabbily. Everyone was under a lot of stress, that’s all.”

  He reached to touch her hand. “Well, I think you handled yourself wonderfully.”

  She gently removed her hand and leaned back even farther. “Are you staying in this hotel, Mr. Spencer? Jim.”

  “Yes. I’ve a room overlooking Rittenhouse Square.”

  “And is it your intention to get me up to it this afternoon?”

  She might as well have struck him in the face. He really did not know her. He had thought her more naive even than Nora. But then, Nora hadn’t proved so innocent herself.

  “Why, no. Of course not. Why would you think that?”

  “Because you went through practically every woman on that ship. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that you might be making a last stab at one you happened to miss.”

  “I’m not a womanizer, Chasey. I’m just … all right, I’ve been on the rebound.”

  “From someone you were really sweet on.”

  No one, not even his mother, would have described his relationship with Whitney Ransom de Mornay as being “sweet on.” He presumed Mrs. Parker was being sarcastic. She must really be bitter, even tormented. But why not?

  The waiter brought her tea and asked again if Spencer was interested in luncheon. He shook his head.

  “I didn’t go through every woman on the ship,” Spencer said. “I had a shipboard romance. They happen.”

  “And that crazy Nancy Cunard and Lady Mountbatten?”

  “Not romances. And Nancy Cunard’s not really crazy. She’s a militant leftist and an alcoholic. That’s all. I saw her later in New York. She’s sobered up a bit. She’s got a job and going back to Europe. To write for the Associated Negro Press. From Spain.”

  “The Associated Negro Press. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with it.” She glanced away, then turned her head back quickly. “Oh, dear. There’s my mother’s best friend, not four tables away.”

  “I don’t exactly look like an Apache dancer.”

  “No, you don’t, but I shall have to explain you to Mother anyway.”

  “Just tell her I was one of those with you on the Wilhelmina.”

  “Then I’ll have to explain you even more.” She fidgeted with her wedding ring.

  “Why did you come today?” he asked.

  “I suppose I’m still not thinking clearly. No, that’s not fair. I’m thinking very clearly. I’ve been thinking very clearly all winter. I came because I owe you something. Because you were one of those who was very kind to me after—after the accident. And because I actually do like you—in something other than an intimate way. Essentially I wanted to know what had happened to you, and to Miss Gwynne.”

  Outside, the drizzle became heavy rain, blurring the window glass. He was glad of it, for it would discourage her from leaving soon.

  “Miss Gwynne is in California.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her play folded. It proved to be a comedy without many laughs.”

  “The reviews here weren’t very good.”

  “In New York they were awful. The play lasted the full four-week tryout run here, but they killed it in less than two weeks in New York. Nora said she’d never go on Broadway again.”

  “I came to see it one night when it was here. I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. I just wanted to see Miss Gwynne, in another context than aboard that ship, alive and well and happy after what we’d been through. I thought it might help me as a sort of example. Perhaps it did in a way.”

  “I wish I had known. I’d been hoping to run into you, knowing you lived here. I thought of you often.”

  She lighted a cigarette. He’d not seen her smoke at all on the Wilhelmina.

  “Somehow I hear the sound of your room key turning again,” she said with an edge to her voice.

  Spencer ignored this. “Nora was devastated for a few days. But she got over it. She’s going to make another movie. A comedy with Roland Young and Billie Burke. I’m sure it will restore her reputation.”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?”

  “I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to do, Chasey. I quit my job as soon as we got to New York, my job with my father’s newspaper. I hung on with Nora afterward, probably for too long. But I couldn’t go to California with her.”

  “Why did you quit? Jobs are hard to get.”

  “Because I wouldn’t give them what they wanted from me if I was to keep it.”

  “The story about what happened on the voyage. You never wrote it, did you? I was sure you would. I looked through the Inquirer and Bulletin every day, but there was no reference to anything you might have written. I have to say I was quite surprised. I was betting you were going to let them have it good. A real sock in the nose.”

  He finished his martini.

  “Are you going to have another one of those?”

  He looked down at the empty glass and frowned. “No,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Why didn’t you write the story? You could have made quite a name for yourself. Those people had it coming. They still have it coming. You owe nothing to them. Why didn’t you?” She seemed almost angry with him, as if she had been looking to him as an instrument of vengeance.

  “I had a lot of reasons. Some lofty and noble. I wanted to protect some people, including you and Nora. And someone you don’t even know about. I didn’t want to ruin the reputation of that poor captain, who went out such a hero, and who I think was a hero, even if in the end he was probably responsible for the sinking of his ship. I had some ignoble and craven reasons, too. I didn’t want Edwina to think I was trying to get back at her that way. I was also afraid I might not be believed. And that I might get sued. That they’d find some way to get me.

  “But, honestly, really honestly, in the end I put all that aside. I would have done it anyway. It would have made my success, and I’ve needed some success. What stopped me was how worried they all were about me. If people as important in the world as they are supposed to be could be so concerned about what a beat-up, inconsequential man like me might do, then something was terribly wrong. It came down to the fact that I really didn’t want to interfere with, well, I suppose, history. The shape of things to come. The fate of the kings of England, the fate of Europe, it’s nothing a person like me should be deciding, especially with what’s happening, the way everything’s going to hell. A newspaperman shouldn’t go crashing around in matters that important. Long or short, Edward and Mrs. Simpson’s romance will run its course. I don’t want to see it aborted by a scandal worked up by some fellow like me, someone who’s probably just looking out for himself, looking to make a big personal score, certainly not now that Edward is to be king. To do something like that would scare the hell out of me. There have been newspapermen who’ve done things like that in the past and they’ve caused all kinds of terrible trouble. The thought of it scared the hell out of me the one time I sat down at a typewriter to see what I could write about them, about ever
ything.”

  “But it will get out about them, eventually, if they keep on the way they have been.”

  “That’s true, but that’s up to them. Not me. I was just an uninvited guest.”

  The waiter was hovering. Spencer motioned for the check. She stubbed out her cigarette.

  “May I see you home?” he asked.

  She laughed, a brittle sound, as Edwina might have laughed. “Certainly not.”

  “How about across the square?”

  She sighed. “To the center of the square.” She looked out at the rain. “But it’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t soak yourself just to go less than a block.”

  “I only need to get my hat and coat from my room. I won’t be but a moment. You can wait for me in the lobby.”

  She looked at him pointedly. “I’d rather avoid any more encounters with my mother’s friends. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Spencer. Jim. I’ll be bold and brazen and accompany you to your room. Just long enough for you to get your coat and hat. If that’s well understood.”

  He was confused, but tried not to look it. “Understood.”

  No one but the desk clerk and a bellman saw them go into the elevator and no one but a grumbling, distracted maid noticed their entering his room. Chasey Chatham Parker went directly to his window and stood looking down at the rainwet pavement below while he fetched his coat. She did not move when he shut the door to his closet.

  “This wasn’t the room you had with Nora Gwynne while you were here, was it?” she asked, still looking out the window.

  “No. As usual, she had a very spacious suite.”

  “You haven’t told me why you didn’t go on to California with her. It’s a lovely life out there, I’m told.”

  “It’s the land of buccaneers and barbarians. The dictators in Europe at least act out of some small degree of political motivation, some principle, however evil. Those sleazy tyrants who run Hollywood are only interested in greed and self-indulgence. I’d rather work for Marshal Pidulski or Mussolini, much as I despise them both.”