Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “All’s I was gonna say is how strange it is how much he keeps reminding me of Pa. Of Merle.”

  “You can say ‘Pa.’” Still a-blush and her eyes all lit up. “Maybe all I am’s just some old Glamorous Assistant—you think?—always cursed to be drifting into the arms of one magician or another?”

  It was drawing on to dinnertime. Detachments of dining-room staff came hurrying from the ship’s greenhouse with bushels of carnations, tea roses, and cosmos. Stewards crept along the decks striking miniature gongs with velvet-padded hammers. Cooking odors began to find their way out the galley ventilators. Mother and daughter stood by the aft rail, arms round each other’s waist. “Not a bad sunset there,” Erlys said.

  “Pretty fair. Maybe another volcano went off someplace.”

  Before dinner, as Dally was helping her with her hair, Erlys happened casually to inquire, “How about that young man who keeps looking at you in the dining salon?”

  “When was that?”

  “Miss Innocent Lamb.”

  “How would I know? You sure it isn’t Bria he’s gogglin at?”

  “Don’t you want to find out?”

  “Why? A week on this scow, then it’s all over.”

  “One way to figure, I suppose.”

  Dally pretended fascination with the steel edge of the horizon. Wouldn’t you know it, of course her mother had tumbled right away. How could she have forgotten him? When was she supposed to start forgetting him? Trick questions, because she might as well’ve been back in R. Wilshire Vibe’s ballroom and having that first momentous glance.

  Erlys said, “He’s a Yale man. Going over to Germany to study mathematics.”

  “Say, just my type.”

  “He thinks you’re snooting him.”

  “Oh them Elis, they’re fine ones to talk, they invented snooting—wait, wait, how do you know what he—Mamma? Have you been discussing me? With some . . .”

  “Eli.”

  “Just starting to think I could trust you, too.”

  This had to be more than intent to tease. Didn’t it? Erlys bent a beady eye upon the girl, wondering.

  The first-class dining saloon was full of palm trees, ferns, flowering quince. Cut-glass chandeliers. A twenty-piece orchestra played operetta songs. Each water glass was carefully tuned to a 440 A, Champagne glasses an octave higher. The orchestra, when tuning up, by tradition encouraged guests to strike the edges of their empty glasses, so that just before mealtimes a pleasant glittery chiming filled the space and scattered out into the passageways.

  FOURTH CLASS was separated from the weather decks by only the flimsiest of glass-and-sashwork partitions, a space long and narrow as a passenger coach in a train, rows and rows of bench seats and racks overhead for luggage. There were stewards just like in the other classes, who brought blankets with Stupendica insignia woven into them, Triestine coffee in mugs, newspapers in several languages, Viennese pastry, ice bags for hungover heads. A whole collection of American students bound for study in Europe were traveling in fourth class, gathering regularly in the saloon to smoke cigarettes and insult each other, and Kit found himself preferring the environment here over his palatial accommodations a couple-three decks up and forward of the stacks.

  About the only other mathematician was Root Tubsmith, who was headed for the University of Berlin to study with Fuchs, Schwarz, and the legendary Frobenius, inventor of the formula for symmetric group characters which bore his name, and known for delivering the most perfect lectures in Germany. Root had decided to specialize in Four-Dimensional Geometry, having studied under Professor Manning at Brown. Unlike the Yale math department, the one at Brown taught Quaternions, but despite the language difference, Kit found Root a cheerful fellow, if a little too fond of the bottle, and planning, like Kit, to debark at Marseilles.

  ROOT WAS HIS GUEST tonight in first class, and the minute they were seated and Root was engaged with the wine list, Kit found himself once again gazing across the saloon at a young woman with a striking head of red hair, who had just come in with a large party of performing Italians, the kids already beginning to juggle the silverware, somehow avoiding injury from the glittering edges and tines, others to spin plates on the ends of limber wands, East Indian fashion. Waiters, sommeliers and other mealtime functionaries, far from disapproving, were actually encouraging and presently applauding the various feats of skill, which it was soon clear were being executed to a high professional standard. Nothing spilled, dropped, or broken, flowers, birds, and silk scarves emerging from empty air. The Captain got up from his own table to go and sit with the family, whose patriarch genially reached behind his ear to produce a glass full of Champagne with the foam still on it, while the dinner orchestra struck up a species of tarantella. The young woman was at once there and somewhere else. Kit knew he’d seen her someplace. It itched at the corners of his memory. No, it was a little more supernatural than that. They knew each other, it’s almost as if he had dreamed it once. . . .

  After dinner, as the gentlemen were retiring to the Cigar Deck, Kit came sidling over through a screen of various-size Zombinis, and Erlys introduced him in a general way, which saved Dally from some chitchat. She was just as happy not to have to start in jabbering right away.

  Unlike the usual Gibson Girl, who liked to avert her eyes, not to mention her nose, as if it were not a fellow’s appearance so much as his odor she wished to appear indifferent to, Dally never knew how to stop looking, even at somebody she had zero interest in, though heaven knew that was not the case right now.

  He was watching her with his eyes narrowed appealingly.

  “Seen you before,” she said, “at the R. Wilshire Vibe residence down in Greenwich Village if I’m not mistaken, one of those peculiar twilight socials of his?”

  “I knew it was someplace like that. You were there with a girl in a red dress.”

  “Always nice to hear when you’ve made an impression. My friend’s name was Katie, little late to be tellin you, though I suppose you could jump off the fantail, swim on back to New York, go look her up. . . .”

  Kit stood swaying a little to the dance music and blinking politely.

  “Yes and now as for that Yale University, if you don’t mind me asking—any other Traverses in your class?”

  “Think I was the only one.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a brother back in southwest Colorado, I suppose. Frank?”

  The look she got was not so much surprised as immediately on guard. “You’re . . . from out there someplace?”

  “Passin through, there a couple months, seemed like a couple years, don’t miss it much, how about yourself?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t miss me.” Neither was fooling the other. “How’s that old Frank?”

  “Last I saw of him, he’s headed out of Telluride, not sure if it was all his own idea.”

  An amiable snort. “Sounds about right.”

  “He said I should look you up.”

  Tipping an invisible hat, “Guess you did.” Then fell into a silence which went on way too long.

  Personable enough, when he wasn’t so far inside his own head. “Um, Mr. Traverse? Sir? I could throw a fit or somethin, would that help any?”

  Which belatedly drew the cowboy once-over she was at least used to, long enough for Dally to notice, along with everything else, what an agreeable shade of blue his eyes were. Damn old lobelias there.

  He looked around. The Zombini family had long finished supper and left the table. The orchestra was back to Victor Herbert and Wolf-Ferrari, and dancers began to occupy the space. “Come on.”

  He led her out onto the promenade deck of the starlit Stupendica, enough moon to pick out the towering contours of clouds, couples all up and down the rail with nothing on their minds but spooning, the electric spill through the portholes dimming his face to a cryptic smudge of itself. Another young man, somewhere else and with different sorrows in his luggage, might’ve been working up to a declaration or at leas
t a kiss. Dally felt like a seltzer bottle about to be deployed in some vaudeville interlude. Sure as hell couldn’t be what they meant by Love at First Sight. Second.

  “Listen. Did Frank tell you much of the family situation?”

  “Some boys he was lookin for, him and your brother, the other one, the faro dealer, he’d already been in Telluride and gone, but nobody knew where, and Frank was worryin a lot ’cause somebody was looking for him.”

  “Well. Pretty talkative for Frank, guess he trusted you all right.”

  She smelled falsely. People in trouble were not usually her first choice of after-dinner companion, though come to think of it, what other kind of people did she know?

  “I love those two knuckleheads,” his whisper growing passionate, “they’re my brothers, they think they’re trying to protect me, but they don’t know I’m deep in it, up to my ears, all this—” his gesture taking in the boat, the orchestra, the night, “the suit on my back, bought and paid for out of the same bank account that—”

  “Should you be telling me this?” With the all-purpose wide-eyed gaze she had learned to use in New York, when trying to think of something to say.

  “You’re right. Maybe a touch too serious here for a youngster—”

  “‘Youngster’?” feigning polite interest. “How old are you, Reuben, to be calling anybody that? I’m surprised they even let you out of the yard.”

  “Oh, don’t let the face fool you, I’m wise beyond my years.”

  “Wet behind ’em anyhow.”

  “Up till twenty minutes ago I guess I was just sailing along on Moonlight Bay here, on vacation from the whole thing. Then you show up, Frank and so forth, and if there’s some danger, maybe I don’t want to see you in it.”

  “You’d rather be all alone with it, sure. All-business hombre.”

  “You don’t know, miss. One wrong step’s all it would take.” He touched an imaginary hatbrim and was gone quick as that.

  “Might as well’ve been Luca waving his wand,” she told Erlys. “Not exactly beau material, Mamma.”

  “Inclined to moodiness, you might say.”

  “I don’t know what in blazes is going on with these people any more than I did in Colorado. Except that it’s trouble, and fairly deep.”

  “Well. You sure can pick them.”

  “Me! you threw me at him—”

  But Erlys was laughing and taking the girl’s long hair and pushing it back from her face, a little at a time, over and over, a task to which there seemed no end, as if she loved the simple act, the feeling of Dally’s hair beneath her fingers, the repetition, like knitting. . . . Dally sat in a kind of daze, listening, not listening, wanting it to go on forever, wanting to be someplace else. . . .

  “You’re always a revelation, Dally,” she said after a while. “Guess I have to thank Merle for something anyway.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Seeing you this far.” Slowly, reflectively, she surrounded the girl in an embrace.

  “Reachin for the spigot again, are we?”

  “Guess I could wait till later.”

  “Sacrifices o’ motherhood. Heard about ’em someplace.”

  “WELL YOU SURE went gaga,” Bria remarked.

  “Thought I was covering it pretty well.”

  “Little young for college boys, don’t you think?”

  Dally looked at her knees, out the porthole, very quickly over at Bria’s amused small face. “I don’t know what’s going on, Brì, I saw him just once at that party back in New York, you were there too’s a matter of fact, throwin em knives around, and I couldn’t get him out of my head then, and now here he is again. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure. Means you’ve seen him twice now.”

  “Oh, Brì, it’s hopeless.”

  “Listen to me. Find out about his friend, the sort of short blond guy who always drinks straight through dinnertime but never passes out?”

  “Root Tubsmith, just got out of Brown.”

  “What was he in for?”

  “Not the pen, it’s a college, and he’s another math whiz.”

  “Head for figures, good to have along on a shopping trip, see—just my kind of fella.”

  “Bria Zombini. Shame.”

  “Not lately. You gonna fix me up?”

  “Ha. I get it. You’re supposed to be chaperoning me.”

  “More like the other way around, I’d say.”

  IT HAD BEGUN to seem as if she and Kit were on separate vessels, distinct versions of the Stupendica, pulling away slowly on separate courses, each bound to a different destiny.

  “You’re high-hatting me again,” Dally greeted him. Not “us Zombinis”—by now it was singular.

  Kit regarded her a long while. “Daydreaming.” There are many, perhaps most of us, for whom an ocean voyage, particularly on a first-class ticket, figures high on the list of human delights. Kit, however, landlocked all his life till arriving at New Haven and beholding the marvels of Long Island Sound, did not happen to share that regard for the aquatic. The enclosure, the repetition of daily faces, small annoyances anywhere else, here, intensified by the unavailability of dry land, achieved with little effort the feeling of malevolence, conspiracy, pursuit. . . . The farther out into the ocean they steamed, the more the horizon asserted itself, the less able or, come to that, willing was Kit to resist accepting the irreversible theft from his life, the great simple fact of Webb’s absence.

  He lapsed into silence, torpor, for scaleless moments seized by memories of desert plateau, mountain peaks, meadows full of Indian paintbrush and wild primrose, some unexpected river two steps off the trail—then released back into this twenty-knot push into the uncreated. He was not sure what it was he felt. If anyone had said desperation, he’d’ve shrugged and rolled a cigarette, shaking his head. Not it. Not it exactly.

  Nor as it turned out was S.S. Stupendica all she seemed. She had another name, a secret name, which would be made known to the world at the proper hour, a secret identity, latent in her present conformation, though invisible to the average passenger. What she would turn out to be, in fact, was a participant in the future European war at sea which everyone was confident would come. Some liners, after 1914, would be converted to troop carriers, others to hospital ships. The Stupendica’s destiny was to reassume her latent identity as the battleship S.M.S. Emperor Maximilian—one of several 25,000-ton dreadnoughts contemplated by Austrian naval planning but, so far as official history goes, never built. The Slavonian steamship line that currently owned and operated her seemed mysteriously to have sprung, overnight, from nowhere. Even identifying its board of directors offered occasion for lively dispute in ministries throughout Europe. In shipping circles, nobody had heard of any of them. British naval intelligence was flummoxed. Though her boilers appeared to be of the Schultz-Thorneycroft design favored by Austria-Hungary, the engines were modified cousins of the same Parsons turbines to be found these days among the more sizable British men-o’-war, capable of twenty-five knots and more, should the occasion demand, for as long as the coal supply lasted.

  Root Tubsmith had discovered this much from nosing around in the lower spaces of the vessel, despite signs posted in all major tongues warning of the dire fate awaiting any who trespassed. He found shell-rooms-to-be and giant powder magazines fore and aft, not to mention, several decks up, located symmetrically about the ship, some very curious circular cabins, which seemed intended for gun-turrets—kept retracted to just below the main deck for the moment but ready, if needed, to be raised hydraulically to operating height, and their twelve-inch barrels, stored far below, brought up by hoist and fitted in a matter of minutes.

  The shelter deck proved to be concealing a magazine full of torpedoes. Lighter decks topside were designed to fold upward and in other intricately hinged directions, to become armor-plating and casemates for the smaller-caliber guns. At the same time, the Stupendica was also able somehow to collapse, as she lost her upper dec
ks, into classic battleship profile, till she was crouching upon the sea with no more freeboard than necessary, wide and low and looking for a fight. Deckhands were intensively drilled in the rapid rigging of stages, over the lifelines and onto which they were to leap, when ordered, nimbly as aerial artistes, and begin swiftly to paint the ship’s sides in “dazzle” camouflage the colors of sea, sky, and storm cloud, in two-shaded false dihedrals to look like ships’ prows, or running at angles close to the slopes of the waves, eventually to fade into and out of invisibility as the patterns tangled with and untangled from the clutter of whitecaps. “Something out there, Fangsley, I can feel it.” “Can’t make much out, sir. . . .” “Oh? Well what the bloody hell’s that then?” “Ah. Appears to be a torpedo, actually, and headed straight for midships too.” “I can see that, you idiot, I know what a torpedo looks like—” at which point the interesting exchange is abruptly curtailed.

  AS KIT AND ROOT descended ladder by ladder into the engine spaces of the Stupendica, they found the ship deeper than they had imagined, and much less horizontally disposed. Faces turned to watch them. Eyes bright as the flames inside the furnaces blinked open and shut. The boys were sweating torrents before they got below the waterline. Down at the bottom of the ship, men worked skids full of coal across the deck to be dumped in piles in front of the boilers. Pulses of Hell-colored light lit up the blackened bodies of the stokers each time the firedoors were opened.

  From what Root had been able to learn earlier, the passenger liner Stupendica, this peaceful expression of high-bourgeois luxury, had been constructed in Trieste, at the Austrian Lloyd Arsenale. At the same time, in parallel, also in Trieste at the neighboring Stabilimento Tecnico, the Austrian navy had apparently been building their dreadnought Emperor Maximilian. At some point in the construction schedule, the two projects . . . it was difficult for any of Root’s sources to convey . . . merged. How? At whose behest? No one was quite sure of much, except that one day there was only the single ship. But in which shipyard? Different witnesses recalled different yards, others swore she was no longer “in” either, simply appearing unforeseen one morning off the Promontorio, fresh from some dead-of-night christening, not a soul visible on deck, silent, tall, surrounded by a haze of somehow defective light.