Just as Henry and I were embarking for London, the archduke and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated by Serbian nationalists while visiting the Bosnian capital, and when Austria-Hungary threatened to declare war on Serbia in retaliation, we were advised to cut our visit short and return to New York as soon as possible. Most of the people traveling on the Empress Alexandra had booked their passage at the last minute in order to leave Europe quickly, which added to the sense that some global force had taken us in its grip and that we had been powerless to resist. Even before the shipwreck, the grand strategies that were playing themselves out on the Continent lent an urgency and gravity to our homeward journey that only served to heighten the stark contrast between the luxury and purpose of the ocean liner and my precarious circumstances of a few weeks before. Penelope Cumberland and I listened to the serious talk of the men with one ear, but the other ear we turned toward each other as we tried out opinions on things we knew nothing about. The captain was receiving regular wireless dispatches, which he reported on at dinner, prompting much discussion and posturing among the men, who liked to pontificate about the events of the previous month for the benefit of the ladies. When Penelope and I learned that the archduke’s wife Sophie had been shot, too, right through her pregnant belly, we felt entitled to proclaim our horror to the table at large, for we were women and this was a rare mention of a woman in political affairs. But the talk soon surged on to the invasions and declarations of war that were happening in quick succession.
“Imagine, all that fuss about one dead duke,” I whispered to Penelope.
“Archduke,” said Penelope, causing us both to laugh. But mostly we talked of our weddings, for she had been recently married as well, and while we both acknowledged that our small talk was far less significant than the conversations seething around us, we also agreed that the world would be a better place if all people had to worry about were weddings and stayed away from war.
After we had become friendly, Penelope leaned closer to my ear than usual and said, “You’ve probably wondered why Mr. Cumberland and I weren’t seated at the captain’s table at first, but we are now.” Of course I had wondered, but I didn’t admit to it. “My husband is an employee of a British bank,” she went on, “and he was appointed to accompany a large shipment of gold to New York.” She told me he wore a special key around his waist at all times, and since he needed to be in close contact with the captain and also with the other bankers on board, it seemed best for them to have a pretext for those relationships to prevent people from asking too many questions. “Of course, it has to do with the war,” she whispered. Later, Henry told me to take Penelope under my wing, saying his bank hoped to enter into a business relationship with the bank her husband worked for. He had once told me that his banking colleagues were watching the European situation with great interest, as there were always large profits to be made in war.
I think I liked Penelope all the better after that, but where I felt I had finally found my true place in the world, she was timid, and I had all I could do to convince her that she belonged at the captain’s table as much as anybody did. We practiced table manners. I lent her two of my new dresses, and I taught her to rustle her skirts and walk with her shoulders back and her eye on a distant goal. I told her to smile and laugh—but not too broadly—when she didn’t know what else to do, and the captain did his bit to encourage her by letting her walk in to dinner ahead of everyone else, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Even if you can’t feel it in your heart,” I told her, “you can surely pretend.”
The only time Henry and I ever argued was on the Empress Alexandra. He had led me to believe his parents knew the real reason he had broken off his engagement to Felicity Close, and whenever I asked him for details, he said, “They know everything” or “I can’t marry Felicity because I don’t love her. It wouldn’t be fair to her, and I told them as much,” but it finally became apparent he had left out the part about me. “But what will happen when we get to New York?” I wanted to know. “How will you explain me? Surely it would be best to inform your parents in advance!”
“It will take me a few days to arrange things, but I want to tell them face-to-face,” said Henry. “And of course I’ll need to find us somewhere to live, but don’t worry. You will be able to choose the curtains and furniture.” He was trying to distract me with furnishings the way a fisherman drops a glittering lure into the water in hopes of attracting a stupid fish, but I wasn’t biting. “But what will I do in the meantime? Where will I stay?”
“Can’t you stay with your mother? I had assumed you could stay there.”
“She’s gone to live with her sister in Philadelphia. Besides, I want to be with you!”
Henry put his hand on my shoulder and said “Darling” three or four times in succession, but I shrugged him off. “You want to hide me away!” I exclaimed as the full meaning of his words sank in. When he saw that I wasn’t going to give in, he reluctantly agreed to go to the ship’s radio room that very afternoon and arrange for a wireless message to be sent to his mother informing her that he would be coming home with a wife. Only in retrospect did I fully comprehend the import of this, for if Henry hadn’t sent that message—and I came to wonder if he had—it would have been as if we had never been married, for any proof of the event would have been lost with Henry in the sea. Of course, the London magistrate who married us must have a record of it, but he was far away, and his country was at war.
Penelope and I remarked to each other that the world seemed to be getting bigger and more dangerous, with countries we had never heard of dragging the rest of us into their affairs. As I write this, though, I can see that a world that collapses in on itself until it is a mere wooden speck is dangerous, too; and in the lifeboat, I spent many hours wondering if there were an optimal size to the world—some equilibrium set of dimensions where things wouldn’t boil over and where I would be safe. As a child, I had thought my family’s purchase on the world secure, and then my father lost his money and shot a hole in his head. My mother took one look at the blood congealing on the polished floor before dropping her parcel of newly embroidered linens and going almost instantly mad. I had also thought the Empress Alexandra was safe. For one naïve moment, I had all that I needed—more than I needed; but that, too, had been only a pleasant illusion. I wondered if all a person could hope for was illusion and luck, for I was forced to conclude that the world was fundamentally and appallingly dangerous. It is a lesson I will never forget.
Part II
Day Five
IT WASN’T UNTIL the deacon had said prayers over Mrs. Fleming and her body had been lowered into the water by Mr. Hardie and the Colonel that anyone noticed that only one of the lifeboats was still in sight. We had lost the other one during the night. I could tell people were dejected to have more bad news coming directly after Mrs. Fleming’s death, but Hardie was oddly jovial and announced to everyone that he was going to catch us a fish. He unsheathed the long knife he wore at his waist, leaned out over the side of the boat, and gazed into the water, the knife poised above his head. The clouds had lifted and the sun illuminated the ocean to a brilliant jewel-like translucence, and sure enough, barely an hour had passed before Hardie plunged his knife into the water and pulled a huge fish into the boat. It was about three feet long, rather flat in shape, and of a mottled brown color. It flipped about in the bottom of the boat until Hardie slit it from gills to anus, after which it flipped twice more and then lay still.
“Supper,” said Hardie, holding the fish up to gleam in the sun.
Isabelle asked, “Are we going to eat it raw?” and Hardie answered, “No, we’re going to sauté it in a garlic and butter sauce.” I found myself wondering how this was possible and believing for a moment that because Hardie had said it, it could be done. Even when he had passed out the pieces of dripping, uncooked fish, his hands still covered in reddish slime, the illusion held, and I was able to eat the raw flesh withou
t retching, though Greta barely made it past Mrs. Grant to lean out over the side and vomit, and Mary Ann refused to eat it at all until I told her to imagine we were at her wedding banquet and were just starting the fish course.
I ate my morsel of fish slowly, savoring it and knowing that it was as valuable for its moisture as for the protein our wasting bodies so sorely needed. The taste was slightly salty, which might have been because Mr. Hardie had rinsed the fish in the ocean after gutting it, but it was the texture that surprised me the most. It wasn’t flaky the way cooked fish is flaky, but firm and muscular—almost living. I had of course visited farms and seen where cows and pigs came from, and even in the city it was possible to buy a live chicken or to see one slaughtered, so I wasn’t naïve about the realities of turning livestock into food. But with the fish, I felt we had come very close to the thin membrane separating the living from the dead and that no matter what pretty names we had for things—coq au vin or angels on horseback or lobster Newburg—the hard fact of the matter was that life depended on the ability to subjugate other creatures to our use.
The fish brought a kind of holiday mood upon us. When Anya Robeson told Charlie to imagine he was eating a seed cake, it gave us the idea to take turns naming our favorite foods and pretending we were eating those. The Colonel said something facetious about military rations, and Mrs. McCain had to be stopped from describing all the dishes at a typical Sunday supper in the McCain household. Mary Ann, of course, merely repeated what I had suggested about her wedding feast, but when it came to my turn, I said, “Right now I can’t think of anything much better than raw fish. I am developing quite a taste for it!”
“Good, because ye’ll get some more tomorrow,” said Mr. Hardie. As he said it, his eyes found mine and we shared a long look. He dipped his chin in a faint nod, as if I had pleased him in some way. I nodded back, and for the rest of the evening I savored that brief exchange. It was something I had been waiting for but had long since stopped expecting. Later, I tried to catch his eye again, but he either failed to notice me or pretended not to, and I wished I had been satisfied with that first small crumb of acknowledgment and hadn’t asked for more.
Catching the fish went a long way toward restoring the confidence we had lost during the episode with the lights. It seemed too easy—one minute Hardie was unsheathing his knife and peering over the side and the next he was drawing forth sustenance from the water; and when he repeated the performance later in the day, Maria and Lisette began to turn their worshipful eyes on him at regular intervals.
The deacon had uttered some kind of verbal incantation over the fish, and even though we had each eaten only a few small chunks of it, we felt a certain bodily satisfaction, because we were reminded of a merciful God and because we now knew Hardie had only to plunge his knife into the back of the sea for it to cough up the elements of our survival. But after those two, we caught no more fish. Every day we expected the ocean to yield more of its bounty, and when Hardie failed to make this happen, we saw it as a willful withholding on his part rather than bad luck or the fact that soon after, the wind came up and it became impossible to visually pierce the choppy cobalt surface of the sea. The idea of a flat ocean, which we had enjoyed for five full days, took its place with the future and the past beyond our myopic imaginations.
The fish became a symbol of what Hardie could do if he wanted, of what he might do if we would only behave and stop questioning his plan for us. His eventual failure to provide was not the only reason for a growing undercurrent of anger. He continued to predict a change in the weather. He said, “When it comes, ye’ll see for yerselves that there are too many people in the boat,” but we didn’t want to hear it. It made us angry because we didn’t know what we were supposed to do about it, even if what he said was true. Were we supposed to simply fade away like Mrs. Fleming? But these feelings of anger and doubt accumulated gradually. On the evening of the fifth day, we were still grateful to Hardie for the miracle of the fish.
The deacon liked to recount Bible stories, and he used this occasion to tell us about the fishes and the loaves. The moment he launched into a parable or psalm, Mary Ann and Isabelle stopped whatever they were doing, and Anya Robeson let little Charles sit on her lap without his ears covered whenever the deacon held forth. I have to admit that I, too, could be lulled by the familiarity of the stories, despite the fact that some of them were quite grim. People like repetition. They like to know how a story ends, even when it ends with everyone but Noah dying in the flood. The deacon would tell a story that was known to all of us and then find parallels between it and our situation on the boat, and certainly the story of the ark came in handy for that. But the deacon was creative, and he adapted the trials of Moses in the desert and the parting of the Red Sea to our situation, too. He taught us the “Song of the Sea”—which was all about how God would save the chosen ones even as he sank the enemy like a stone—so that we would be able to recite it when we were finally saved.
Mr. Sinclair told everyone that the story of Noah’s Ark had been adapted to the Christian tradition from something ancient and heathen. “Babylonian flood stories included not only the deluge, but other familiar elements as well—the raven and the dove, for instance. That can’t be a coincidence,” he said, but the deacon was quick to dismiss the idea as heresy. Mary Ann looked concerned—not so much about possible heresy as about whose side to take in the debate, the deacon’s or Mr. Sinclair’s, which I told her was also mine. Fortunately, Mr. Sinclair was not only a scholar but a peacemaker, and he assuaged everyone’s feelings by quoting Boccaccio, who apparently talked about how people like to believe the bad rather than the good and how there can be no poetry without myths.
As the days passed, I wondered if Hardie had really caught a fish at all or if we had suffered a mass hallucination. The present seemed fixed and immovable, the past compressed and distant, as subject to interpretation as a passage of dense theological text. It seemed just as likely that we had been born in the boat as that we all had histories and ancestors and a blood connection to the past. As for the future, it was impenetrable, even to thought. Where was the proof that it even existed? Or that it ever would? Like the fish, it had to be taken on faith.
Night
IT WAS REMARKABLE what a little food in our stomachs did for our frame of mind. While we huddled together against the evening chill, Mrs. Cook launched into another of her gossipy accounts, filled with personal details about the royal family that she couldn’t possibly have known. Still, she entertained us, and I found myself hanging on every word just the way all the other women in our section of the boat were doing. When she ran out of things to say on the subject, Mary Ann told us about the people in her social circle, but her stories lacked cohesion and were as full of sighs and exclamations as they were of words.
There was another sort of story that proliferated on the boat, particularly in the evenings, when we would seek to pass the time in any way we could. These were secret stories, stories that were told in whispers, shreds of stories that might consist of a mere impression or a snatch of dialogue or a look someone had caught in someone else’s eye. Isabelle was an expert at diagnosing expressions: “Did you see the look Mr. Hardie just gave me?” she might say with a shudder, and then she would add, “Only someone completely uncivilized would leer at a person like that.” A single look opened up whole biographies of speculation, and it was this sort of speculation that so interested the prosecutors and that they took as fact. Isabelle credited Hannah and Mrs. Grant with having invented a code of communication that didn’t include any words, only nods and glances, and these Isabelle would decipher for whoever was sitting near her. She told me once that a particularly dark scowl Hannah gave to Mr. Hoffman was a wordless witch’s curse; and later, when Hoffman stumbled and almost fell out of the boat, she looked meaningfully over at me and mouthed, “You see?”
Sometimes a person who had been given a story in confidence would appropriate it and pass it on as his or her
own, and of course the stories changed as a result. A story I had told to Mary Ann about how I was planning to win over Henry’s mother came back to me as a story about how Henry’s mother had refused to receive me. There is nothing a person can do to combat false rumors without making the situation worse, so I did not try to set the record straight, only resolved to keep my own counsel regarding personal matters from then on.
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