In February, just a year after Lincoln made that first speech at Cooper Union, I had occasion to change my plans and return home at the end of the month rather than remain in the South past the date of Lincoln’s inauguration. March 1, I remember, was cold and clear, with a cobalt sky and snow still solidly on the ground. I lifted my valise from the station trap around noon and walked up the cleared drive to my front door. I had to let myself in with my key, which made me think that Dorrie was out somewhere with Shannon. Deirdre, of course, was in school. Sarah, our maid and cook, must be off on some errand, nor was there any sign of Rufus, the handyman. I felt a slight unease because I had never in all the time we had lived there been absolutely alone in the house, and the stillness disturbed me.
As I reached the top of the stairs, however, I heard what I thought was a voice in our bedroom. I was nearly to the door when I heard the last sound on earth I ever expected, Dorrie’s characteristic moan that meant she was reaching climax. Like an automaton I reached out and, turning the knob silently, opened the paneled door. I have often thought since that so very much might have been different had I only turned around and gone downstairs to slam the front door loudly and shout for Dorrie and the children.
Dorrie was there, all right, flat on her back and naked as I expected to see her. But in place of a male lover, crouched between her legs was Helen, also naked, using her mouth to caress her and at the same time fondling her heavy breasts even as I had done so many times. Dorrie’s head was thrown back, her eyes closed, or she would surely have seen me. She gave another sobbing cry then and arched her pelvis up against Helen’s mouth, her hands on either side of Helen’s head, pressing her down against her mound of silky black hair. I stood rooted by shock, outrage, and worst of all a sharp thrill of desire that brought me hard erect and started a flow of saliva in my mouth.
“For God’s sake, Dorrie!” I shouted.
They sprang apart, staring at me wide-eyed, Helen’s mouth still glistening with juices not her own. She covered her face with her hands then, but Dorrie remained staring at me defiantly, tears spilling from her eyes and running slowly down her face.
Chapter VI
“Get her out of here!” I snapped. “I’ll talk to you later.” I left, slamming the door behind me, feeling very self-righteous.
I must have walked for hours through the snow, my feet so wet and cold that at last they went completely numb. How could she? She whom I had rescued from starvation, she who had borne my child? How could she do this to the children? What if they, not I, had surprised her in so unnatural an act? Yet all the time, if I were to be honest, I was watching them in my mind’s eye with a furtive excitement completely different from the reaction a male lover would have elicited. Helen, who looked somewhat bony and gaunt when clothed seemed sleek and smooth and graceful naked. It has only occurred to me long since that she looked graceful because for once she was not self-conscious: conscious of her awkwardness; conscious of being in effect an old maid whom no man had ever loved or ever would; conscious of being an intellectual freak, a woman who read and had brains and ideas in a time when women were seriously considered genetically inferior to men in every way. Dorrie, on the other hand, had a strong body with heavy breasts that unclothed looked very fertile, earthy, sexual. There was no getting around it that the two of them together were striking, exciting. Yes, and beautiful, too, though at the time I would never have admitted it.
I never stopped to ask myself honestly why, since I didn’t love her, I was so upset that someone else did. I pushed that aside with the judgment that what they did was unnatural, perverted, evil. The possibility that they might genuinely love each other never occurred to me. Nor did the possibility that in a very real way I might love Dorrie in spite of myself. One didn’t love whores. One might use them, even own them, but one never loved them. They were shoddy goods; they sold their favors and therefore their souls. The thought of Arabella in this regard, who had done precisely that, never entered my mind. I had never been hungry nor had to see my child hungry, but it was my belief — as it was the belief of most of my contemporaries — that a good woman would rather die than take to the streets.
When I returned, dusk had fallen. Dorrie had lit a lamp and was waiting for me in the sitting room, her demeanor infuriatingly calm. I remember thinking that she had never looked so handsome. She met my eyes steadily.
“Well,” she said quietly, “have you decided what you’re going to do about me?”
I hadn’t the faintest idea, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “Whatever made you do such a — such a —” I sputtered to a halt.
“Such a wicked thing?” she finished for me. She pursed her lips as if considering what she should answer, or even if she should answer at all. “I have to assume, Christian, that for all of your affairs you’ve had very little experience with sporting houses. You pride yourself on not having to pay for your fun, am I right?”
I nodded uncomfortably, on the defensive now as I thought of the numerous willing young ladies I had frolicked with when away: from home.
“Then I think I should tell you a bit about them, and perhaps you’ll understand just a little of why I would do what I did. I owe you that much for having been so generous with your physical possessions.”
I winced at that. I knew she was referring to my prolonged absences, but damn it all, what did she think put food on the table, paid for Deirdre’s private school, allowed Dorrie to do as she liked all day because she had servants?
She smiled mirthlessly, Dorrie of the unflagging good humor, imitator of foibles. “The ladies of my profession,” she explained, “have been damaged before we ever took up walking the streets or earning our way in a crib. Would you believe it, some are sold by their families at age eleven or twelve or even younger. You’d be surprised how many of these have already been deflowered, as you men so delicately put it, by their own pas or uncles or brothers. Then there are the ones like me who’ve gotten into trouble and either run away from home or have been thrown out. Add a sprinkling of married women who’ve run away from husbands who brutalized them or been shoved out because they were caught with a lover or traded for someone the husband liked better. Most of the rest were gulled by some slick-talking pimp. Some, of course, are there because it’s easier work than breaking their backs and burning their hands with lye in a laundry or working fourteen hours a day in a factory. Few, only a few mind you, ever got into it simply because they are crazy about having a lot of men. With most of us, it’s just the opposite — we take the men only in order to live. God knows we have little enough reason to love them.
“Since you’re not awfully familiar with houses like the one I was in, perhaps you don’t know that a favorite with the customers is to watch two of the girls making love to each other. A show like that never hurt us physically, and many of us came to enjoy it more than we would have with a man.” She paused, and a sad look came over her face. “To be brief, I fell in love with a girl named Anne and she with me. Amy wasn’t stupid, and she knew that girls who were genuinely fond of each other made a better show than girls just going through the motions, and Anne and I were in demand for a long time. We would deliberately forget about the audience, pretend they didn’t exist. Dear Anne, if she’d still been there, I’d never have had the nerve to leave.”
“What happened to her? Did she run away?”
“No.” Dorrie looked at me without expression. “She was beaten to death.”
“I thought —”
“Oh yes, that Amy wouldn’t allow rough stuff. Only sometimes no one knew a man would be rough until he went bonkers. We supposed that with his first blow he must have broken her jaw and cut the inside of her mouth so that she couldn’t make much noise. By the time anyone came up to find out why she was still in her room, the bastard was long gone. There was nothing we could have done to him anyway — he owned an estate over near Bally and no magistrate would have put him down for beating up a whore.
“I cried for
a week and then got out. I’d been thinking anyhow as to how Anne and the child and I could somehow make our living outside. Deirdre was four, and though I paid for her to live with this old couple in a different neighborhood, my working as I did meant that I wouldn’t be able to see her at all once she started school. Eventually, too, she would be bound to find out what her mother was, and I couldn’t stand the idea of that. And I’d begun to be afraid. I was afraid of getting pregnant, afraid of getting the clap, afraid of being beaten up. So I took the little bit of money I’d been able to put aside and went to Queenstown.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t like men?” I demanded. “I’d have set you up somewhere and we wouldn’t have had to go through all this.”
“Now how could I go telling a strange man that I was not only a prostitute but didn’t like men either? It’s all I can do to tell you now, and I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t caught me out.”
“Didn’t you care that the children might see you?”
“They’re spending the night with your dad and mum. They love having them.”
“Tell me something, Dorrie. Have you just been pretending with me all these years?” That upset me more than her being a prostitute or cheating on me with a woman.
“Mostly, but not always. That night on the Cassiopeia I wasn’t pretending at all. I thought —” She broke off, biting her lip. “I thought you were someone else,” she said helplessly.
“Why did you take up with Helen?”
She turned defiant. “Why not? Women have wants and needs as well as men, you know, though most of you bastards won’t admit it You made it plain you didn’t care for me. You stayed away all you could, had your fun elsewhere, and used me casually when you happened to think about it. I’ve had customers put more feeling into it than you did. What was I supposed to do, stop living?”
The fact that she was right rankled me no little. “Well, it can’t go on. This is a small town, and I’ll not have Shannon and Deirdre branded as the children of a perverted woman the way I was branded the child of a madwoman.”
She looked tired then. “Christian, I want to go home,” she said.
“Home?”
“Belfast.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d ever want to see the place again.”
“It’s where I belong. If you could set me up with a small shop, I could make my own way.”
“You’d be taking the children?” I felt a wrench.
“Of course I’d be taking the children. You’ll be going to England from time to time. You could always see them — in fact, you’d be seeing them almost as much as you do now.” I thought about it. My instinct was to say she couldn’t have the children, but at least I was honest enough to know perfectly well that I wouldn’t be staying home to take care of them here.
“If you let me have them,” she said, “I’ll promise you that there will be no more women, no lovers at all, until they are grown and gone.”
I realized something of what it had cost her to say that. “All right. In return I’ll set you up with a house and income. It won’t be large right now, but it will increase.”
“Believe me, Christian, I don’t like taking any more of your money than I must.”
“Call it the price of my peace of mind. I’d want them for a month each summer.”
“That’s fine with me. You’re being generous, you know. There’s many a man would have thrown me out on the street. If only you were that generous with your feelings …”
“It isn’t in me, Dorrie. Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men …” I had never told her in any detail about Arabella.
“You must have loved her a great deal.”
“Too much, Dorrie, way too much. A mistake I’ll not make soon again.”
“I’m sorry for you, Christian. You’ve condemned yourself to a loveless life.” She looked at me steadily. “Helen really does love me, you know.”
“I’m better off loveless,” I snapped, stung by her mention of Helen. Was that why I ached so now for all of the might-have-beens?
So it was that we set sail in April, just before the fiasco at Fort Sumter, bound for Liverpool. I went with them because I wanted this last time with the children; God only knew how long it would be before I would see them again. Dorrie had begged to go on a sailing packet, and I was glad of the extra days with Deirdre and Shannon.
“I remember how nice it was when they turned off the engines of the Cassiopeia and went only under sail,” she said sadly. I realized that she was already thinking about missing me, which confused me no end.
The Leda was a small packet but reputed to be fast and comfortable for her class. Even she could do nothing if the wind chose not to blow, however, and we lay becalmed for two solid weeks. One would think that being becalmed would hardly work a hardship, but such is certainly not the case. At first no one minds, and small, homey tasks are completed: sewing on buttons, mending of all kinds, writing letters, and the like. The men engage themselves in whist and shuffleboard and chess, pastimes that for a while seem a joy while the ship is not pitching and lurching about.
Soon, however, the sense of well-being deteriorates as boredom sets in. The staterooms are stuffy, the deck hot. There begin to be quarrels and accusations of cheating at cards or even at shuffleboard. The crew turns surly, the captain irritable, the very animals destined for the dining table snappish. On this voyage a sow actually consumed three of her young before the animal keeper could stop her.
When the wind did finally return, it was little more than a light breeze, barely enough to keep us under way, but welcome nonetheless. Now we began to be plagued by fog at night, and we slept to the lonely moan of the foghorn. Though we had seen none thus far, we were all thinking of icebergs, April being a prime month for them, and it was said that if you listened carefully enough you could hear the sound of the horn bounce and echo off the unseen floating islands of ice. The men laid wagers as to when the first ice would be sighted.
Dorrie, whose clothes were now impeccable, was thoroughly accepted on this voyage, in fact something of a social success. At night she and the children would return to the staterooms in the stern of the ship to prepare for bed while I stayed up on deck smoking a cigar or so. Whether she was really pretending or not, she always seemed to be asleep when I came down, for which I was very thankful. She and I slept in one stateroom, the children in another. Perversely, now that I was about to be separated from her permanently, I began to desire her, and the vision of her with Helen drove me wild.
As I was smoking my cigar on deck as usual one night and wondering idly if I could perhaps find a willing partner among the ladies, speculating also as to where I might hold a tryst, I heard a strange throbbing sound that at first I thought might be my imagination. But no, it became louder, though the fog was so thick that there was no hope of seeing its source. As we ghosted through the grayness, our foghorn moaned periodically, but the throbbing came ever nearer. I can’t tell you with what foreboding I listened to that ominous sound, always increasing as if drawn to us like iron to a magnet. Sound travels in strange ways over water, and the noise could have come from a few hundred yards or from a few miles, either one. It became steadily louder and louder, like the beating of a giant heart. Someone on deck shouted.
Our captain apparently began to get nervous, for all at once our foghorn, which had seemed so loud in the silence of the empty mist but now sounded so puny in comparison to that fateful pounding, began to bleat continuously. With what small breeze there was, we endeavored to avoid whatever it was bearing down on us, but the sound was so deceptive that it was impossible to ascertain the exact direction whence it came. Like some great Pleistocene beast of the sea, that dreadful pounding and thrashing came inexorably nearer until we were surrounded by a terrifying wall of clamor that seemed to be coming from all directions at once.
As I stared petrified, the cigar forgotten in my fingers, the mist swirled and there loomed up over our deck,
more awful than imagination could possibly have pictured, what proved to be a great black iron hull flanked on either side by huge thrashing sidewheels and topped by a black funnel pouring forth a steady river of live sparks that could only just be seen through the mist. For what seemed hours that great black hull menaced us, a leviathan as inexorable as fate, though there could not have been more than a minute or two between seeing it and feeling the collision.
Although it appeared to me that the great killing machine was heading right for me where I stood rooted amidships, it actually hit us close to the stern, and I remember reading the name Iroquois in white letters on that dreadful bow even as I was thrown off my feet and smashed against a bulwark, where I lay only half conscious. I could hear the terrible sound of splintering, tearing wood as the metal of the larger ship cut through our stern. Belatedly aware that she had hit something substantial, her captain wrenched her around to starboard, pulling away our severed stern before her paddlewheels could catch us amidships. Without so much as slowing, the great black ship went unheeding on her way into the night, lights glowing from every porthole, and the pounding and thrashing slowly faded into the mist out of which she had materialized.
As the throbbing diminished, it was possible to hear the chorus of wails and shrieks that arose from our listing, floundering vessel. If it hadn’t been that the empty steerage had been filled with a cargo of lumber, we would surely have sunk, for the stern had been pried open like a tin and then sliced completely off the ship, leaving our poor little packet open to the ocean and floating grossly down by the stern. My head still ringing from the blow of my fall, I staggered down to the passageway leading to the stern cabins. Below my feet I could both hear and feel the thumping of the floating lumber against the sides and ceiling of the steerage. I inched my way blindly down the black, steeply sloping corridor, hanging onto cabin doorsills as I went, ahead nothing but a strange grayness. Before long I found that I had come to an area of uncertain footing, the boards forming the floor of the corridor twisted and wrenched from their position. I realized belatedly that I was standing on what was now the jagged stern of the ship, looking out onto a dark, fogbound ocean where our cabins used to be.
Kings of the Sea Page 28