The Lifeboat: A Novel

by Charlotte Rogan

  Mr. Reichmann then got her to testify that I had not voted to convict Mr. Hardie the way most of the women had. In response to further questioning, she said that I had returned to my seat next to Mary Ann after Mr. Hardie’s death and had had very little to do with Hannah and Mrs. Grant after that. She said she had been able to see both of us clearly and hear something of what we said to each other.

  “And what did they say?”

  “They had an argument, I think, for Mary Ann seemed very upset. But they must have made up their differences, for they were huddled together during most of the last few days except when Grace went to help Mr. Nilsson with the steering. In fact, Mary Ann was lying with her head in Grace’s lap when she died. Mary Ann must have told Grace to take her engagement ring as a keepsake for Robert—Robert was Mary Ann’s fiancé—for Grace slipped it onto her own finger before Mary Ann’s body was disposed of.”

  I listened to this part of the testimony with great interest, for I remembered very little about the days between Mr. Hardie’s death and our rescue nearly a week later, and I sometimes wondered what exactly had happened to Mary Ann. I vaguely remember thinking Robert would like to have Mary Ann’s ring, but if I took it off her finger, I must have lost it, for I certainly don’t have it now. After court had adjourned for the day, the full weight of the day’s developments descended, and I said to Mr. Reichmann, “We’re doomed. There’s no chance of an acquittal after that!” His eyes were glittering with unreasonable glee as he pulled me into a recess in the corridor and said, “What do you mean? That testimony about the voting was an incredible stroke of luck! And both Mrs. Robeson and Greta did an admirable job in distinguishing you from the other two defendants. But why didn’t you tell me about Mary Ann?”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “That she was lying in your lap when she died!”

  “Perhaps she was. That day is completely lost to me. You have my diary. It contains everything I can remember. If I could remember more, I would write it down, but I remember almost nothing at all about those last few days.”

  “It’s time you stopped acting so passive,” said Mr. Reichmann, pulling on his coat and preparing to go off to wherever he went at the end of the day.

  I drew myself up in a way I hadn’t done in a long time, and when he had finished with his coat buttons, I looked him in the eye as an equal might do. “Do you think I’m acting, Mr. Reichmann?” He looked at me sharply for a moment, but then he winked and said, “No, no, it couldn’t have gone better today.” He hadn’t answered my question, but his words filled me with irrational hope, so I wished him a warm good evening before I remembered that even if I had reason for optimism, I was not yet free. “I suppose you’re going home to a nice wife and a good dinner,” I said, trying to keep a tinge of bitterness out of my voice as I thought of all that Henry and I had lost.

  “Oh, heavens, no!” he exclaimed. “A wife would merely get in my way.”

  “Then you haven’t yet met the right person. Everyone knows that behind every successful man is a woman. It’s one of the reasons my Henry married me.”

  “Never mind about me, you just worry about yourself. It’s time you made some serious decisions regarding your future.”

  Despite the grave nature of the charges against me, I had to laugh. Mr. Reichmann was brilliant and very good at what he did, but he was still a man, and men rarely knew what decisions a woman had or hadn’t made.

  Decisions

  I DIDN’T MIND that throughout the trial I was characterized as indecisive. It is true that I did not come out strongly either for or against the plan to kill Hardie. For this, I have been criticized by both sides; but whether it was the toll taken by those days in the lifeboat or whether it is not in my nature to feel strongly about such things, I can’t really say. Even my marriage to Henry, which greatly pleased me for a variety of reasons, failed to provoke in me the continuous raptures of emotion that Mary Ann described whenever she spoke of Robert. Occasionally I felt something similar, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling—I likened it to hysteria, and I considered it something to be suppressed or controlled. Besides, look what happened to those who felt strongly and expressed it: the deacon threw himself overboard; Hardie and Mary Ann are dead; and Mrs. Grant and Hannah are in jail. Of course, I am too, but I don’t group myself with them now and never did.

  Besides, when it appeared that Mrs. Grant would get her way, I easily decided to throw my lot in with her and the rest of them, and in the end, only Mr. Hoffman remained steadfast in his support of Hardie. Once I had decided, I did not waffle back and forth or regret my decision. I was not forced to do this, and despite the urgings of my lawyer, I could not testify to being compelled to join the women through explicit or implicit threat of bodily harm. He had to content himself with saying, “Imagine yourself in Grace’s predicament, confined with these powerful women in a twenty-three-foot boat, surrounded by nothing but open sea. You had just seen a man condemned to death by these very women. Wouldn’t you too, in fear for your life, do whatever it was they asked of you?”

  I would not testify that this is what went through my mind when I pushed Mr. Hardie out of the boat. I even contradicted Mr. Reichmann when it eventually came my turn to take the stand, but he turned to the jury box and said, “It’s obvious that she is still afraid of them.”

  This line of questioning came up several times during the trial. At one point the prosecutor asked me if any of the women were ever directly threatened by Mr. Hardie, and I had to reply in the negative. My own attorney then turned the question around and asked me if I had ever been threatened by Hannah or Mrs. Grant, clearly implying that if I had refused to go along with them, I might have suffered the same fate as Mr. Hardie. “Not directly threatened, no,” I answered. “Did you, at any time, fear for your life?” he then asked me. “Yes” was my answer, for of course I was filled with fear from the moment of the explosion on board the Empress Alexandra. Even after I had answered, Mr. Reichmann kept asking related questions in an increasingly hostile tone. “Mrs. Winter, I think you’re lying. Did you feel threatened?” he demanded again and again, startling me with his vehemence.

  “Yes!” I finally cried out, “I felt threatened every day!” and only later did I realize that the genius of Mr. Reichmann’s technique was to induce the jury to wrongly infer from the juxtaposition of the answers that I was afraid of Hannah and Mrs. Grant.

  During the next recess, Mr. Reichmann took me aside and told me, “You survived out there in the boat, now you have to survive in here. And don’t make the mistake of thinking the situation is any different now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. He gave me a very knowing look, the kind of look the lawyers gave each other during questionable testimony and the kind that continually passed between Hannah and Mrs. Grant, both in the courtroom and in the boat. He said, “If you have to sacrifice someone to save yourself, I guarantee you won’t be prosecuted for it this time.”

  In preparing me for my testimony, Mr. Reichmann had spent several days asking me a series of questions that Mr. Ligget and Mr. Glover had prepared. The two junior lawyers hovered in the background; then one or the other of them would play the role of the prosecutor and ask a different, more aggressive, sort of question. Throughout this process, even the wan Mr. Ligget would be transformed: his pale features would twist and his red lips would curl into a terrifying sneer. I sent an injured look toward Mr. Glover, who had always been kind and gone out of his way to reassure me, but he merely avoided my eyes, as if he did not notice me at all. When it came his turn to play the part of the prosecutor and ask me questions, I detected a barely suppressed delight that he was now the master in some way, as if our roles had undergone a reversal and he was punishing me for some perceived slight of which I had been entirely unaware. I could not help feeling that he was not as mild of personality as I had supposed, and it was a relief when Mr. Reichmann took over the questioning again, for he was unfailingly respectful and kind in
all of the practice sessions, always playing himself, always my unwavering advocate in the face of the prosecution, so ably represented by his associates. On several occasions he complimented me on my “diary,” saying it had been helpful in preparing our case, but it was everyone’s opinion that it should not be entered into evidence.

  Because of these rehearsals, I knew to expect that the prosecutors would ask me difficult questions, that they would try to get me to incriminate myself by blurting out some detail of my actions that I had not yet admitted to. But of course, there was nothing new to admit, and while I found the process upsetting, I came out of it fairly well. What I was not prepared for was to have Mr. Reichmann, who had been so unemotional and even placid during our rehearsals, turn on me with a vehemence that shook me to my core. His booming voice rattled the light fixtures, and at one point he slammed a book against the table so hard that the judge had to bang his gavel and remind him that I was not a hostile witness and that he should calm down.

  By the end of the day, I was limp with fatigue, and when Mr. Reichmann smiled exultantly at me and mouthed the words “I’m sorry,” I wasn’t sure what to think.

  I was the first of the defendants to testify, and I felt a vast relief when it was finished. If I had made a positive impression on the jury, it was impossible to tell from their faces. Exhausted and perilously close to tears, I lowered my eyes. My hands shook, and I realized that my strength, so depleted by the weeks in the lifeboat, had not fully returned and that, in comparison to my codefendants, I must seem miserable and weak.

  When I look back on it, I see that Mr. Reichmann had sought from the very beginning to distinguish me from the other two women, and it is true that Mrs. Grant presents a fearful sight. She dresses in nothing but black. Her hair, which in the boat had been pulled back into a tight knot, is now nearly shorn, and though the ordeal left her twenty pounds lighter, she is still robust, and it is easy to see why the others clung to her as if she were the earth itself. There was no talk of Mr. Grant or any little Grants—she existed alone. She alone did not cry for what was lost. Neither did she cry at the trial, and, of course, this went against her. Hannah is tall and gaunt and has an angry, dangerous look about her. She confided in me that her attorneys tried to get her to soften her appearance for the trial and wear the sort of dresses I wear to court, but she would hear none of it and continues to wear trousers. I was only too happy to listen to advice on this score: I alternate between a dove-gray suit and a dark blue dress with a high collar and lace at the cuffs that were purchased for me by my attorneys, with what money I do not know. Hannah told me she possesses several dresses in gray and green that her husband had brought to her all the way from Chicago, but she wouldn’t wear them. It was a shock to me to find out she is married, for never once had she mentioned it. There was a rumor that she wouldn’t meet with her husband and intended to divorce him, but she never said this to me. Neither did she try to disguise the scar that makes a red line down her cheek. Instead of inspiring sympathy, it makes her look like a pirate, but when I suggested this to her, she replied, “A pirate, am I? Then the way I look on the outside matches the sentiments of my heart.”

  Before I entered the lifeboat, I never thought much about the sea, not even when I was crossing it on the Empress Alexandra. Then it was merely a picturesque backdrop for my life with Henry, at most a wash of changing blue or a choppy inconvenience, the cause of nausea, perhaps, but not real sickness; and I sometimes believe I was forced—or chosen—to endure twenty-one days in a lifeboat so that I would never again think of nature as a garden for man and so that I would never again think of power as the thing Henry possessed when he pocketed the keys to the vault or the authority wielded by Judge Potter, who was the magistrate in charge of our case.

  As the event recedes in time, and as theories, stories, rumors, and testimony accrete to it, it becomes less clear, less a matter of any objective reality—ocean or sky or hunger or cold—and more a stew of armchair commentary by newspapermen and moralists. There is no one who has not had his say about it, which causes Hannah to wonder why the casual observations of others carry any weight at all. I don’t know. I can’t help but wonder what Henry would have thought. Henry was as decisive as they come. We could have used him in the boat, and I often think about how things would have turned out if he had been with me. Surely, with my husband at my side, I would not have been accused of anything, certainly not of being, in the words of the newspapers, “anti-man.”

  I miss Henry. With him, I felt that character was less of a requirement in me, as his character was so well defined and unyielding. Above all, with Henry I felt safe, which is ironic because if we had not met, I would never have had occasion to board the Empress Alexandra. Without him I feel exposed and completely subject to the judgments of others. There has probably been much written about this—I wouldn’t know, for it is not the kind of reading I do—but I can’t help but think that people were meant to pair off, to face things together, to be married. The benefits can even be seen in the example of Hannah and Mrs. Grant, in the strength they have found in each other, though of course they aren’t married and never could be. In any case, of all of us, they formed the strongest bond, and it is they who were hurt least by the experience. Of course, they are in jail, which is bound to make up for any hurt they failed to suffer at sea, but I mean they seemed the ones least hurt by the ordeal in the lifeboat itself. Sometimes I wonder if they would have been incarcerated if Mrs. Grant had been a man.

  One night, while I was looking out over the black water under the endless canopy of stars and admiring the tiny luminescences of marine life, too tiny to describe accurately except in the cumulative effect large masses of them had, I stopped being terrified. I had always envisioned God as hovering somewhere above us, smiling or frowning down from above the clouds depending on his mood and whether he was pleased with us or not, perhaps inhabiting the sun or blowing storms violently out of his cheeks to wake us up from our torpor and deter us from deceit. Now, however, I knew he was in the sea, lurking there, hand in hand with Hardie, rising up in those big waves and splashing down random pieces of himself on our boat.

  I planned to say nothing of this at the trial, for I have witnessed enough to know that personal revelation is alternately seen as heretical and insane, but I mentioned it during one of my conversations with Mr. Reichmann, who said belief in God was a good strategy, that I should go ahead and use it if I liked as long as I kept out some of the specifics, for faith was something the jury understood. “They understand nothing,” I started to say, but instead I held my tongue.

  Without the deacon to point out the spiritual way—if somewhat somberly for my taste—I was constrained to try to see it for myself. I tried to remember snippets of the Bible, of sermons that made an impression on me, but hardly any had as I was not a particularly attentive listener, being more of a visual person or, really, more of a person who does things than one who endlessly contemplates them. I remembered the light streaming through the stained glass, the shiny, just-washed hair of the girls in the choir, the children fidgeting in their seats until they were finally released to the Sunday Bible class, the sudden hush when they were gone and how I longed to be gone with them even after I was grown. I remembered the purple and white costume worn by the minister and the fancy hats worn by the ladies of the parish more than I remember anything that was said.

  After three weeks in the lifeboat and two more in a courtroom on trial for my life, I listen more attentively now. I heard, for instance, when Mrs. Grant told Hannah to make her way forward to look inside the barrel for a wooden box, even though I pretended not to hear. I heard it when the judge refused to allow Hannah to testify about what Mary Ann had told her about some jewels she thought to be in Mr. Hardie’s possession, calling it hearsay and uncorroborated evidence. I heard Dr. Cole call me weak of will and suggestible, and I heard Mr. Reichmann when he said he supposed not all wives were alike. And when the jury pronounced me not guilty, I he
ard it as clearly as I had heard the foghorn on the seventh day.

  Hannah and Mrs. Grant were found guilty of premeditated murder, and it wasn’t until they were being led away by the matron that I felt as if some last chain were being stretched until it could no longer stand the strain and finally snapped. I watched after them, but only Hannah looked back. There was something in her eyes of the old fire, and I was sorry to think I was probably seeing her for the last time. The judge said, “Mrs. Winter, you are free to go,” but I stood fixed to a spot near the defense table, watching the court stenographer pack up his things while the benches of the court emptied around me. This took some time, for the court was bursting with people who had gathered to hear the verdict. Eventually, only my lawyers and I were left in the cavernous and echoing room. Mr. Glover seemed eager to take me to a celebratory lunch. I started to turn toward Mr. Reichmann, wondering if he would accompany us, but his solid presence was no longer by my elbow, and I had a strange and unsettling intuition of what my new freedom might really mean.

  Some of my emotions must have shown on my face, for Mr. Glover was just reaching out his arm to support me—and I was on the verge of taking it—when Mr. Reichmann materialized in a dim corner of the room, talking to an elegant woman who was rising from her seat. For all that I had tried to picture her face, I had never imagined her to be smiling, but she was smiling now. “Thank you, Mr. Glover,” I said, withdrawing my arm and rewarding his worried look with a smile. “I am quite all right now.” I drew myself up and did my best to ignore the beating of my heart. While I had always imagined a different sort of entrance into society, I reminded myself that I was Mrs. Henry Winter and that this was not the time or place to let my husband down.