Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  At that moment I felt a warm hand take mine, and Dorrie gasped, “Oh, Christian, I never dreamed there would be a sight like this!”

  The ocean as far as we could see was littered with luminous jagged pieces of ice sailing silently and majestically south. For all of his stuffiness, Captain Brinnin was a good seaman, I’ll give him that, for it took no little skill to thread a sailing ship through that field of ice, where one miscalculation could stove in our bow or tear out our bottom. Dorrie and I must have stood there for an hour at least watching with fascination the beautiful and deadly mountains of gleaming ice as they floated silently by on a calm, moonlit sea. At last we came to the end of them, and I turned to go back to my stateroom. As I turned, I found myself face to face with her, the moonlight glistening on her luxuriant black hair and making shadows of her eyes.

  There is something about danger that sharpens the senses while at the same time making one aware of all of the splendors of being, and especially that of the act of creating life. I looked at her as if I had never seen her before, and without will I put my hands up on either side of her head and drew her willing mouth to mine. I could feel the softnesses of her body against me and knew that under her dress and cloak there was no other garment. A great burst of physical want coursed through me, and it was all I could do not to take her, forcibly if necessary, right there on the deck.

  I drew back and saw her smile. “Come along, love,” she said. “There are better places for what you want than out here with the ice.”

  As if in a dream then I was led by the hand to my stateroom and found myself watching her undress with no trace of self-consciousness. As I saw her naked body emerge in the glow of moonlight coming through the porthole, I realized that I was tearing at my own clothes in a fever to get them off and join her. We didn’t even wait to lie down on the bed, but came together standing, my erect flesh fitting between her legs as if it knew where it belonged. I felt her full breasts against my chest as we sank down on the bed with our mouths still joined. She shifted her body expertly, tipping herself up for the entrance of my eager hardness, that mysterious piece of flesh that has made empires and toppled kings in the course of the world’s history. In a sweat of desire I thrust myself hard into her, seeking to reach the stars through that marvelous moist cave that took me in and caressed me with each stroke. With a shout on my part and a moan on hers we exploded together in a great rush of sweetness and release that left us both spent and breathless.

  I must have dozed momentarily then, my arm still under her head, but came awake already excited again to find that Dorrie was bringing me along with an expertise that both surprised and delighted me. Again and again, with her mouth and her hands and her breasts, she brought me to the point of orgasm so that when I finally let fly in shuddering spasms that I could feel clear down to my toes, I had ceased to wonder or even to think anymore about whys and wherefores.

  This time I wasn’t silly enough to fall asleep. As I got a second wind — or a third, really — I lazily teased a nipple that hardened under my tongue and teeth, and caressed her with hands and mouth until I had her in her turn arching and gasping and moaning. Then both of us were at it again, sometimes together, sometimes one and then the other, until the porthole shone gray with dawning light. Never have I been so tireless, and long after I would have said that I couldn’t do more, she would manage to urge me on to yet another peak. There were things that we did to each other that night joyously and openly that I had never experienced, not before and not since. The beauty and the peril of the ice had stimulated in us a bacchanal of the physical senses that only after hours passed finally left us sated.

  “Oh my God in heaven,” she exclaimed suddenly as she noticed the lightening porthole. “I’ve got to get back to Deirdre. She’ll think I’ve fallen overboard.”

  As I lay there watching her, still desiring her in my mind though my body was now incapable of so much as twitching, she took up her dress and wrapped herself hastily in her cloak. Opening the stateroom door carefully, she stuck her head out, looked both ways, and with a hasty blown kiss at me disappeared in her bare feet, her dress and shoes clutched in one hand. I had time only to shake my head once in wonder and disbelief before I fell asleep as if poleaxed, a silly smile pasted on my face.

  When I finally managed to get to lunch, sore in every muscle and joint, I found her already there. We grinned at each other conspiratorially, and to her delight, I winked.

  “Where have you been, Uncle Chris?” Deirdre asked.

  “To the Delectable Mountains, my sweet,” I told her, and Dorrie laughed.

  “Where are they?” she pursued.

  “They are in a book that I will read to you one day, a book whose hero is named Christian, too.”

  In the course of the meal, I happened to look across and down the table to find the man with the wandering eyes staring at us with a knowing grin. At that time mirrored walls were all the rage, and when I automatically looked at one nearby to discover what it was about us he found so amusing, I nearly laughed myself. Our bruised and swollen mouths, our heavy-lidded languorous look, our readiness to laugh at everything and anything, all proclaimed as if we had announced it the thorough satisfaction of lust. I winked again at Dorrie, who blushed and giggled.

  That night she told Deirdre she would be sleeping in my room because that was what husbands and wives did. Deirdre didn’t seem to mind, and kissed me goodnight just as she kissed her mother. She closed her eyes, sighed once, and fell asleep as we watched. Our coming together this night was gentle and loving, and though we could never have matched our performance of the previous night, we probably would have continued on with enthusiasm and ingenuity if it hadn’t been that we fell to talking.

  “Deirdre’s father was a lucky man, whoever he was,” I observed thoughtlessly, my mind actually fixed at the moment on what part of her I was going to taste first when I began again to make love to her.

  “Deirdre’s father was a sniveling coward who ran off and left us.” Her voice was hard and bitter, and there was no more good humor in her expression.

  “I’m sorry,” I said uncomfortably, damning myself for a fool because now our sensual mood was thoroughly broken.

  “You might as well know,” she said. “You deserve to, since you not only married me but you’re the only man I’ve ever been like this with.”

  “Not even with him?”

  She laughed shortly. “Don’t make me sick. I was twenty-one and he was thirty — the Irish all marry old, you know. I let him because I thought he’d marry me and I wouldn’t have to wait all those years like the others I knew. I think he must have been a virgin, too, or next to it. We didn’t lie together more than twice, and he was more reluctant and frightened than I. Then he had all these excuses to put off posting the banns, and when I told him finally I was expecting a baby, he ran off even from his mother, which I didn’t ever think he’d do. He was a poor excuse.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Ran away from my own home, such as it was — a heatless room in a Belfast slum.”

  “But what could you do? How did you live?”

  By tacit consent we had left the oil lamp on, and I could see her looking at me, considering. “What do you think I did?” she asked bitterly. “It was only luck that Amy saw me one day and was taken by my coloring. If you think that women like me work only at night, you’ve never seen a hungry one. I wasn’t yet very big, and I was afraid I’d be thrown out on my ear when Amy found out, but I needn’t have worried. She’d known all along. I was that grateful, I’d have licked her feet if she’d asked me to, and she never had any trouble from me. In her turn she protected us and had Augustus G., as we called him, a big brute of a German who hardly spoke English, throw anyone out who was after queer stuff.”

  I thought of what we’d done the night before, and I wondered how much queer stuff was left. “Queer?” I remembered the children I had seen the night we had been searching for Wickham.

>   “You wouldn’t believe what some men want. They want to beat you or be whipped themselves. They want to burn you with lighted cigars. They even want to pee on you or worse, or have it done to them. I had one wanted me to walk on him with my high-heeled shoes. God, men are bestial.”

  As she talked, all too clear a picture of the life she’d led came to my mind. I’d been in a few whorehouses besides that wild chase through the London Dock district, but usually I was drunk and wanting only a quick meaningless fuck, not much better than going to the bathroom. It dawned on me suddenly that last night for the first time I had had not one thought of Arabella while sporting with a woman. Right then I should have realized that I was teetering on the brink of a new life, that no matter what Dorrie had been in the past she was a warm, loving woman who, if I would let her, could cure me of the sickness of yearning for what could never be. In that one moment I almost stepped out of the shadow, but we human beings cling tenaciously to habit, even habit that makes us miserable, and the moment passed. Instead of turning to Dorrie and giving myself into her hands, God help me I thought, I’ve gotten back at Arabella, all right. I’ve married a whore, a real live whore, and a whore was going to get all that money, more than Arabella would get out of that dried-up old man the longest day she lived.

  “Oh, not all of us are bestial,” I said smugly, answering her last observation. “After all, most men don’t do those things with their wives —” I stopped, but not soon enough.

  “I can see I should never have told you,” she said wearily. “Last night you treated me like a human being, and I thought you were different. I see now I was wrong.”

  “Surely there were nice men who patronized the house, especially since your madam ran such a clean operation.”

  “Yes, there were, but they were kind the way they’d have been to a dog or a cat. Ours was a high-class house, you see, and our clients were gentlemen, most of them English, not Irish.” So that was where she had learned to speak so well. “I wonder what their wives — women like the snoots on this ship — would have said if they could see their precious husbands wallowing in the dirt like pigs. Take off a man’s clothes and there’s precious little difference between a farmhand and a king, let me tell you.” Even in the softness of the lamplight she looked older and hard somehow.

  We made love once more, mainly because I was insistent on showing her that I didn’t care what she had been, but the heart was out of it for both of us. She thought I was doing it because she was a whore, and I saw her advances as practiced now. Without our even kissing goodnight, she dejectedly went to the other bed and curled up with her back to me. Once again I teetered on some unseen edge between obsession and life, for I almost went over to her to hold her and sleep next to her, but finally I decided foolishly that if she wanted to sleep with me she would have stayed. Thus I blew out the lamp and with it the last real warmth I would ever allow myself to know.

  The homecoming wasn’t nearly the trauma I had feared. I knew that Dorrie was nervous, as I was myself if the truth be known, but I had at least had the good sense to stay in New York long enough to write ahead. When we arrived, Elisabeth unhesitatingly gave Dorrie a warm embrace that made her burst into tears, and my father won Deirdre’s heart by bowing and kissing her hand. Neither of them ever treated Dorrie with the faintest trace of condescension, though Elisabeth gradually and tactfully saw to it that Dorrie’s flamboyant wardrobe was replaced by clothes that didn’t make other women bristle. My father never discussed my marriage with me except to say once early on, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Christian. She’s a nice lass and easy hurt.” I realized anew that he had probably seen more of the world, especially Dorrie’s kind of world, than I had, and that he had known all along what she had been.

  For a year we lived with my father and Elisabeth before my money brought in enough to build a modest house. I had it built in such a way that it could be added on to as time went on. I figured that by 1860 I would have a respectable enough amount of cash to be able to raise the money necessary for my first ship. I had even already named her in my mind the Circe when the crash of 1857 all but wiped me out. I had gone on working in my father’s shipyard, but now I spent most of my time traveling to obtain commissions for ships. There weren’t many being built in those years of depression, but though we had to take in our belts, at least we didn’t go under as did so many others.

  Dorrie? Dorrie got along all right. Just about nine months to the day from what I always thought of as the Iceberg Night, she produced a healthy boy who like Deirdre looked almost entirely like his mother. Dorrie wanted to call him Shannon after her grandfather, the only one of her family she had any use for, so he became Shannon Enoch Hand. Looking back, I have to suppose that I gave the children all of the love I was frightened to give to an adult.

  For hours sometimes I would watch Shannon as he gurgled and waved his arms and legs in the air in that mindless way that babies have, as if they were swimming in some unseen fluid. Later on I would hold him and ache with tenderness at the feel of his warm smallness. Deirdre I had long thought of as my own child anyway, and when I would return from one of my trips, she would fling herself at me with complete abandon and shriek happily as I tossed her up in the air.

  Without even realizing it, I came to view Dorrie almost as I would have a kind of nursemaid; she had reality to me only as the one who cared for the children when I was gone. Oh, I went to bed with her all right, and I was genuinely fond of her, but I went to bed with and was fond of several other women in New York and Boston as well. Whether through design or accident I shall never know, but she did not again become pregnant.

  After the ’57 depression hit, I was home less and less. I missed the children, but I was so fastened on making a reality of the Circe while at the same time keeping the shipyard in work that the time disappeared like a flash of the light on Deer Island. In time things became desperate enough that my father beat the bushes in New England and the nearby parts of Canada while I covered New York and the South as far down as Georgia. What I heard there made me uneasy, for I had never before had reason to interest myself in the slave question. Instinctively I knew that if pressed the South would fight, and just as instinctively I knew that should a war in fact break out, our business would suffer. Men with money would be none too happy risking it on ships that might be sunk long before they paid for themselves.

  For the first year we were married, Dorrie was almost completely dependent upon Elisabeth for friendship. She didn’t make women friends easily, and what with helping with the housework and preparing for little Shannon, she apparently didn’t feel the need. Once we were in our own house, however, and I began to be gone for longer and longer periods of time, she made a stab at trying to meet other people. I had to think that she wasn’t too successful, for the only result was the entrance into our lives of Helen Ames. Helen was tall and willowy — a polite word for thin to my mind — and very well read. It was too bad that she and Elisabeth didn’t take to each other, because they both loved books. I think Helen was a bit too dogmatic for Elisabeth’s taste; she didn’t discuss subjects with you so much as tell you about them.

  For Dorrie, Helen was a revelation. She had always felt inferior because she could only just barely read when I married her. I had neither the time nor the inclination to take her in hand, for I spent what time I had at home with the children. I think that in the beginning Helen saw Dorrie as an irresistible vacuum that she must fill, someone who would accept her opinions and pronouncements with neither resentment nor reservation. It helped that Dorrie wanted to learn, and in a startlingly short time she and Helen were galloping through the Brontës, Mrs. Radcliffe, Scott, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Dickens, Swift, and Hawthorne. By the third year of their friendship they were into drama and poetry, including Chaucer and Boccaccio. I sometimes had the feeling that if I hadn’t come home at all, I would never have been missed except briefly by the children, who called her Aunt Helen.

  Helen an
d I got on well enough. I admired her mind and was glad that Dorrie had company when I was away so much. Actually the two women complemented each other: Helen the dreamer was dominating and cultured, while Dorrie the practical was dependent and humorous. If there was one thing Helen wasn’t, it was humorous, but she enjoyed Dorrie’s humor and would encourage her in the most outrageous imitations of people they both knew. I can still see Helen turning that fine-boned head on its long neck and saying laughingly, “That’s exactly like him, Dorrie — however do you do it?”

  In February of 1860 I broke off a selling trip in New York after hearing Lincoln speak at the Cooper Union. He wasn’t a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about his bearing and his delivery that made me think he would give Seward a run for his money in the Republican convention in May. The Democrats were hopelessly split, and whomever the Republicans nominated would be president. I thought it high time that my father and Dick Poulson and I had a serious discussion about the future. If Seward was nominated, there might still be a war, but if Lincoln was nominated there would surely be one. It was time now to set up some alternatives to shipbuilding that would tide the yard over until such time as orders were plentiful once more.

  By the end of the year we were solidly in business providing several small factories with rifle stocks. With the transportation our margin of profit wasn’t very large, but the business paid its way and left enough to buy more lathes. My father and Dick Poulson couldn’t be bothered with it all and obviously thought I was being a jackass, but they went along with it so long as I wasn’t costing them anything and wasn’t in the way of the few ships they were still building.