The Ocean Liner

by Marius Gabriel

  He drove the car he’d rented through the Midwestern cornfields of bronze and gold, now almost ready for the harvest. Along County Road Y, the strips on either side of the tarmac, which they called berms here in Wisconsin, were speckled with pale-blue forget-me-nots. He was remembering a time when he hadn’t needed to check in advance, because he had always found Rosemary alone, and St Coletta had been the middle of nowhere.

  He had been coming to St Coletta twice a year for half a century. This was his hundredth visit.

  It was eight months since he’d last seen Rosemary. He wasn’t able to travel as easily as he had done in the past. Everything was more effort, more of a challenge these days. The passing of the years was something he’d learned to accept; yet it struck him to the heart to see Rosemary huddled in her wheelchair now, in front of the porch. She had been robust through her middle age, retaining some of her physical vigour, though her movements had always been clumsy. She had loved to walk. But in recent years he had seen her shrinking, fading, becoming immobile. The nuns had told him she would inevitably be wheelchair-bound one day, and during the past eight months, that day had come.

  He got out of the car. She raised her head, and he saw her face light up. In her eighties, she still retained that magic, that ability to make your heart sing with a smile.

  ‘She’s not talking a lot any more,’ Sister Hedwig murmured to Cubby. ‘So don’t expect too much.’

  ‘Okay. She looks awfully frail.’

  ‘She’s quiet. At least her temper’s better lately.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘I’ll leave you two to get some privacy. The buzzer’s round her neck if you need me.’

  Cubby sat beside Rosemary in the chair the nun had vacated. He saw that the call button was indeed hanging around her neck, along with the rosary, which pretty much covered all spiritual and temporal emergencies.

  ‘Hello, Rosemary,’ he said.

  She didn’t reply, but held her hand out to him, still smiling her lopsided smile. He took it. They sat in silence for a while, holding hands, as in the old days.

  ‘Your garden’s very pretty,’ he said at last. He pretended to examine her fingers closely. ‘Aha. There it is. Your green thumb.’

  He saw a spark of amusement in her dark eyes. ‘Cubby,’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s me.’ It was warm in the sun. He felt his skin flushing, and unbuttoned his collar. ‘I didn’t think it would be so hot. I wouldn’t have worn a flannel shirt.’

  ‘Love – sun.’

  ‘Yeah, I know you do. You’re a sun-lizard, aren’t you?’

  ‘Tortoise.’

  Cubby laughed. She could still surprise you with the things she came out with. He stretched out his arms, with their patterns of discoloration. ‘The doctors say I have to watch my skin. I take medicine that – well, never mind.’

  ‘Medicine?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about. I brought you some stuff. Want to see?’

  Rosemary nodded. He disengaged his fingers gently from hers and went to the car, returning with the holdall he’d packed in California. ‘These are candies, fudge and whatnot. The stuff you like. I’d better put it in the house. It’ll spoil in the sun.’

  The cottage was spotless, almost clinically so. He stood at her little dining table in the cool interior, looking at the painting of Jesus on the wall, one finger indicating the thorns that bound his sacred heart. Seeing Rosemary always changed him. The even tenor of his life was disrupted, like a pond into which someone had heaved a rock. The ripples spread, squeezing and stretching his emotions until he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

  When he went back out again, she had picked the photograph album out of the holdall and was paging through it. ‘Children,’ she said. It was one of her favourite words.

  ‘Yet more photos of the grandchildren,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re okay. A pain in the ass sometimes. At least they go home when you’ve had enough of them.’

  ‘Love.’ He thought she meant the grandchildren, but she was smiling directly at him. ‘Cubby,’ she said again. ‘Love.’

  ‘I love you too.’ She nodded a few times. Her lips tried to frame some further words. He waited, but she didn’t manage to get them out. She didn’t seem able to string a complete sentence together any longer. ‘I brought you something else. A poem I came across a couple of weeks ago. I thought you might like it. Should I read it to you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He took the book out of the bag and opened it to the page he had marked.

  ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face—’

  Her hand touched his, stopping him. He saw that tears were spilling down her cheeks. He closed the book. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, honey.’

  She shook her head. ‘No more.’

  ‘Okay, no more. I’ll leave you the book if you want to go back to it. There’s a marker in the page. Maybe one of the nuns can read it to you.’ He didn’t know whether she’d understood the words, or whether just the cadence of the poetry had moved her. ‘He was an Irish poet.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She fumbled for a handkerchief and blew her nose.

  ‘I just loved that line, the sorrows of your changing face. It reminded me of the first time I saw you, in London. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. About your face. Of course, you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way your expressions changed, all the time, never staying the same from one moment to the next. Your face was so alive, compared to other girls. It was restless. It was luminous and dark at the same time. Once you saw that, you could never un-see it.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He wasn’t sure if she was listening to him. She was staring at the geraniums that nodded in the sun. They’d prettied her up for his visit, with some lipstick and eyeshadow, and her nails done nicely. They kept her hair dyed black, her original colour, but it was cropped short these days, easier to manage, he supposed. There was a safety-belt clipped round her waist to keep her in the chair.

  ‘You looked scared a lot of the time. But there was something dangerous about you.’

  This time he got a reaction. She seemed amused. ‘Still dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, I believe you. You’re still a bomb waiting to go off, aren’t you?’

  She tilted her head and glanced at him from under her eyelashes. For a fleeting moment, it was there again, the captivating mischief of long ago.

  ‘Yep,’ he said, ‘you’ll always be the best Kennedy Girl.’

  Slowly, the smile faded and the light went out of her eyes. Her eyelids drooped, and she was asleep. He picked up her hat, which was lying next to her chair, and laid it gently on her head to shade her face. Then he lay back in his chair and folded his hands on his chest. The air smelled sweet, of new-mown hay and the ripening fruit in the orchards. He closed his eyes.

  He was awoken by Sister Hedwig’s hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Sorry to wake you, Mr Hubbard, but I think you may be burning.’

  Cubby looked down at his arms, which had turned a dull red. ‘You’re right, Sister.’

  ‘We’ll have tea indoors.’

  Afternoon tea was one of the rituals Rosemary most loved. She’d picked up the habit in England, at Belmont House, during the happiest period of her life. It was a proper English tea, with dainty little cakes and finger sandwiches. The two nuns who looked after Rosemary set everything out in a cheerful display, with flowered china and Irish linen. Cubby accepted a cup of Oolong and a plate of petits fours, though he didn
’t touch the latter.

  ‘How’s your health, Mr Hubbard?’ Sister Gertrude asked, eyeing him keenly.

  ‘About what can be expected,’ he replied.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Sister Gertrude was always a bit sharp.

  ‘Means I can’t complain.’ He changed the subject. ‘Does Rosemary go everywhere in the wheelchair now?’

  ‘She had a couple of falls. Nothing too serious, thanks be to God. But we don’t want to take chances with her.’

  He looked at Rosemary, who was eating cake with great concentration. ‘You care for her wonderfully.’

  ‘And you, Mr Hubbard – you’ve been her most constant visitor. You’ve been coming to St Coletta as long as I can remember.’

  ‘Well, she means a lot to me.’

  ‘It’s a rare quality, fidelity. Devotion. We admire you for it.’

  ‘I can’t claim to have done anything special,’ he said wryly. ‘I never felt I had much choice.’

  ‘But you do have a choice,’ Sister Hedwig chimed in. ‘God always gives us a choice.’

  ‘I never felt that. I loved her from the moment I saw her. I couldn’t help it.’ The nuns said nothing. Rosemary was intent on her food, apparently not listening to the conversation. Then her lids drooped and she fell into one of her sudden dozes.

  ‘It was a terrible shame,’ Sister Gertrude said in her abrupt way. ‘What was done to her. It was cruel.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Sister Hedwig said. ‘Nobody expected the operation to go so terribly wrong.’

  ‘They knew what they were doing,’ Sister Gertrude said grimly. ‘They wanted her out of the way. No embarrassment, no breath of scandal. Well, they’ve paid for what they did. Four of her brothers and sisters dead, all violently. Her parents struck down—’

  ‘The family had the best intentions, Sister Gertrude. Rosemary was a danger to herself. Going with strange men. Who knows what might have happened.’

  Sister Gertrude sniffed. ‘Look at the girls today. Look how they carry on. They let their sex drives run free. They don’t get locked up or lobotomised.’

  ‘In the Thirties,’ Cubby said quietly, ‘a woman with a strong sex drive was in danger of being called insane. Especially if she didn’t try to hide it. And Rosie couldn’t hide her feelings. She didn’t know how. That’s why she was so vulnerable, and so terribly fragile. She loved life and fun, and didn’t care too much about the consequences. I loved her for her spontaneity. We never got a chance to see what she would have grown into. What they did to her didn’t change my feelings,’ he went on. ‘But it froze them. She vanished, but she was still there. It might have been easier if she’d—’ He didn’t finish the sentence. ‘I don’t think there was ever much chance that we could have had a life together, but after the operation, I had to give up whatever hope I still had left. I still love her. I always will. I’m a grandfather, and I have my own life at home, but deep inside, it’s always me and Rosemary. Frozen a lifetime ago. Just waiting for something that will never come.’

  Rosemary had woken up. Her eyes were on his, dark and warm. Her lips moved, framing words, but without a sound, as though only he could hear and understand.

  He took her hands as they were saying goodbye.

  ‘Rosie, I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again. They want to do an operation in a couple of weeks’ time, and after that – well, I don’t know how things will be. So if I don’t come for a while, I hope you’ll understand.’

  She nodded.

  He kissed her. ‘If I don’t see you through the week, I’ll see you through the window.’

  He left her sitting in front of her little house, huddled in the wheelchair, flanked by the nuns.

  He had plenty of time to get to the airport for his flight, so he drove slowly, the windows down, enjoying the balmy evening air and the sunlight on the cornfields. He found it soothing. The ripples in his life were flattening out. He was returning to his customary calm. Or was it numbness?

  A long time had passed. A long, long time. And yet it had gone by in the blinking of an eye. How did you explain that, the way the years and the decades sped past so slow, so fast? It was a mystery.

  County Road Y was deserted. There was not so much as a car coming either way, just farmland and crops. The pain in his chest, which had been there all afternoon, was swelling so much that he found it difficult to drive any further. It seemed to occupy the whole of his body.

  He pulled over and stopped the car beside a field of grain that rolled down between clumps of trees and lost itself in the haze of twilight. He tried to breathe.

  The last verse of the poem came to him; the verse Rosemary wouldn’t let him read to her:

  And bending down beside the glowing bars,

  Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

  And paced upon the mountains overhead

  And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In September 1939, the United States Lines ship SS Manhattan left Europe for New York with a passenger list very much as I have described. However, this book is a work of the imagination, not a historical account, and should be regarded as fiction from start to finish. The thoughts, words and actions of all the characters in this book were invented by the author.

  Most readers will have no difficulty disentangling the historical passengers from the ones I put on the ship, but a few notes may help.

  Leaving Europe at the lowest ebb of his personal and professional life on the Manhattan, Igor Stravinsky made a new start on his arrival in the United States, immersing himself in American music, including a number of Hollywood projects. He and his second wife Vera took American citizenship in 1945. At the time of his death in 1971 he was among the most celebrated of composers, having left an indelible stamp on twentieth-century music.

  Carla Toscanini died in Milan in 1951. Her husband Arturo was left broken-hearted and in poor health. He died in 1957. More than any other conductor, he defined the interpretation of classical music in the twentieth century. His recordings bear testimony to his fiery genius.

  Fanny Ward, the Girl Who Wouldn’t Grow Old, did not return to London after the war, but remained a fixture on the East Coast high society scene until her death in 1952 at the age of eighty.

  Elektro the talking robot is still in existence, passing a peaceful retirement in a museum in Mansfield, Ohio.

  Commodore Albert ‘Rescue’ Randall received a citation from President Roosevelt on his retirement in September 1939, praising his service and heroism. He died in 1945.

  The encounter with the German submarine which I have described actually took place in 1940. The vessel involved was Manhattan’s sister-ship, SS Washington, commanded by Captain Harry Manning, whose cool-headedness helped to save the day.

  The character of Rudi Hufnagel is very loosely based on the U-boat ace Reinhard ‘Teddy’ Suhren (1916–1984).

  Joseph P. Kennedy was withdrawn as ambassador to Great Britain in October 1940. His political career ended shortly thereafter. He suffered a stroke in 1961 that left him unable to talk or walk. His wife Rose also suffered a stroke in 1984, which together with advancing dementia, placed her in care for the last eleven years of her life.

  Rosemary Kennedy died in a Wisconsin hospital in 2005 at the age of eighty-six, having outlived most of her siblings. Her lobotomy was one of over three thousand performed in the 1940s and 1950s by Doctors Freeman and Watts, who promised happier (and more docile) patients, but delivered irreparably damaged brains. The procedure, which destroyed so many lives, is now very rarely performed. While nobody could have foreseen the shocking results of the botched operation, it was clearly a last resort. Her adolescent ‘slowness’ had been an embarrassment; but her unrestrained adult sexuality presented much more serious problems to the Kennedys. She fell victim to a fatal combination of her family’s political ambitions, repressive attitudes towards sex and mental health, and her own tragic vulnerability as a young woman with educational disabiliti
es.

  Cubby is an imaginary character. The poem quoted by him is ‘When You Are Old’ by W. B. Yeats, which appeared in 1892.

  Racial attitudes underlay and partly caused the Second World War. Derogatory terms used in the novel reflect the language prevalent at the time and are not intended to offend any reader.

  In 1941, with America’s involvement in the war imminent, Manhattan, along with the Washington and the newly-built America, were all seized by the US Navy on the orders of President Roosevelt. They were fitted out as troop carriers, Manhattan being renamed USS Wakefield.

  Having served throughout the war, she was decommissioned in 1946. But she never re-entered passenger service. She was mothballed for over a decade. The glory days of ocean liners were coming to an end and the United States Lines was heading for bankruptcy. The Manhattan was eventually sold for scrap and broken up in 1964.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Marius Gabriel

  Marius Gabriel has been accused by Cosmopolitan magazine of ‘keeping you reading while your dinner burns’. He served his author apprenticeship as a student at Newcastle University, where, to finance his postgraduate research, he wrote thirty-three steamy romances under a pseudonym. Gabriel is the author of several historical novels, including the bestsellers The Seventh Moon, The Original Sin and the Redcliffe Sisters series, Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye, Take Me to Your Heart Again. His most recent novel is The Designer. Born in South Africa, he has lived and worked in many countries, and now divides his time between London and Cairo. He has three grown-up children.