by Joanna Scott
Only minutes later, they were all laughing because Mrs. Fugle admitted that Mr. Fugle had poured salt into his jacket pocket at breakfast after he’d overheard a man at a nearby table saying that a pinch of salt was considered good luck onboard a ship.
“And when you sneeze,” said the engineer, “sneeze on the starboard side —”
“And not on the port side, or you make trouble,” finished the first officer, who’d come up quietly behind them while they were talking.
“Ah, sir, welcome,” offered the engineer.
“Officer, sir!” Mrs. Fugle snorted with laughter; she’d worked herself into a giddy mood and was finding everything and everyone ridiculous.
“Of course, you might have nailed a horseshoe to the mainmast for our protection, sir!” joked the engineer.
“All you need to do is cross your second finger over your first, ecco!”
“Or a hunchback. You should keep a hunchback onboard, sir.” “Or you can spit into your hat — that will bring good luck. Or strike your left palm with your right fist.”
“Or break a piece of wood, here” — the engineer took a pencil from his shirt pocket and snapped it in two — “and you’ll have a lucky break.”
“A lucky break!” echoed Mrs. Fugle with another burst of laughter.
The officer touched the peak of his cap and strolled on, leaving the engineer and Teresa Fugle and Claire to sigh and acknowledge one another with friendly smiles. Claire felt as if she were sitting outside on a summer evening with neighbors. The engineer and Teresa were her neighbors on the ship, and Claire was grateful to both of them, to the first officer as well, to the other passengers, the captain, the stewards, to everyone who was making this trip so safe and wonderful.
First there were petrels wheeling overhead. Then porpoises swam for a couple of hours alongside the Casparia. Then the barometer dropped, the birds and porpoises disappeared, rain balls gathered overhead, and the squall began, sheets of rain lashing the deck, waves colliding across the stern, the wind whistling, the ship’s bell clanging. At dinner the engineer told the others at the table about a North Atlantic storm so powerful it tore apart a breakwater on the coast of Scotland by ripping away an 800-ton slab and the 550-ton foundation to which it was bound. He said he knew the engineer who worked on the replacement section — a 2,600-ton block of concrete, which was promptly swept away by another storm.
Talk turned to tsunamis and tidal bores, gales and hurricanes. Mr. Fugle put a handful of marbles on the floor and sent us in pursuit when they rolled away. The vertical lights around the room flickered, making the bright walls look as if there were flames spreading behind the hammered glass. The motion made Mrs. Fugle queasy and she left early for bed. Claire drank too much wine. Murray did some card tricks for my brothers and me.
The storm passed without incident, and by the next morning the air was cool, the skies gray over the turbulent water. Shortly before breakfast, Claire took Nat and me out to get some fresh air, and we found the engineer on the sundeck. He was smoking a cigarette and watching passengers stroll by. When Claire saw that he hadn’t spotted her yet, for some reason she couldn’t have explained she started to move away in the opposite direction.
But just then Nat tugged loose from her hand and ran ahead, calling us to hurry up and come on. Claire carried me toward Nat, and a moment later the engineer joined us. Nat was already scrambling over the partition dividing the first-class terrace from the second-class promenade. Claire yelled at him to stop. The engineer climbed over the partition and grabbed Nat, who squirmed in his arms and tried to slip away. But when the engineer murmured something in Nat’s ear, Nat abruptly calmed, as if he’d just been promised an extravagant toy. The engineer carried Nat to the far rail at the stern, and they stood there, watching the wide white expanse of the wake disappear into the mist.
That’s when I felt my mother tense. She held me in the usual fashion, propped against her jutting hip, one of her arms supporting me, and I felt the hand resting flat against my belly tighten into a fist. I might be picturing what my mother has described to me, or maybe I do have some real memory of it: the salt spray, the wind, the rough sea, the knuckles of my mother’s hand, the broad white wake spreading out behind us like ribbons of taffy. And a man in white trousers and a black jacket standing with his back to us, my brother in his arms.
Claire set me down on the terrace and hoisted herself over the partition, her knees stretching the tight cap of her skirt hem. She ran toward the engineer. I started to howl, for it seemed clear that my mother had discarded me. Claire skidded to a stop a few yards short of the engineer, who pivoted slowly. His expression was somber. His arms were outstretched in front of him.
There he stood, palms turned inward, my brother no longer between his hands. That’s what my mother saw: a man in the pose of a priest who has just made an offering to the sea. Where my brother had been was the invisible outline of his form.
And then the engineer turned another degree and Nat was there again — my brother, Claire’s third son, a boy overjoyed at the thrill of flying high, effortlessly, over the open water.
Iron rings clanged against the flag mast. A dog barked on the deck below. The wind carried the sound of someone’s cough. I heard all this through the sound of my own crying. Something awful had happened, I thought, and something worse was about to happen.
The wind. The sea. Shifting bodies. Shifting moods. Accidental minglings. Pretend you’re a bird. Pretend you’re flying over the ocean. Like this! The infinite water. It’s a small world, my mother liked to say. Sometimes, she would add as an afterthought.
And then the man pivoted another notch, his arms like the gun of a tank, and lifted Nat back inside the boundary of the rail, setting him safely on deck.
Nat wanted to keep flying. He stomped his feet and beat his hands against Claire when she tried to pick him up. Nat wanted the mister to pick him up. But Nat must come with Mama. Wasn’t it time for breakfast? Claire flashed a weak smile, unwilling to stir up new trouble by telling the engineer what she really thought of him, murmuring inaudibly that he’d given her quite a scare, muttering a little louder, “I almost thought…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
And that was that. Nat forgot about the thrill of flying and remembered he was hungry, and I forgot that I was useless. We left for breakfast. The engineer stayed behind to smoke another cigarette.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully. After breakfast Claire felt a headache coming on, so she retreated to a cozy chair in a deserted salon. She skipped lunch, and though she made an appearance at dinner she only ate the soup. The engineer seemed as animated by his knowledge as ever, but Claire made a point of avoiding any direct exchange. She decided it would be best not to tell Murray about how reckless the engineer had been with Nat.
By the next morning Claire felt better. She was buttering a piece of toast when she noticed both the captain and the first officer moving from table to table. They’d pause to speak quietly to the passengers and then raise their hands in a calming gesture. The murmur in the dining room grew louder as the news spread ahead of him. One woman shrieked. Men echoed each other: Good God, good God. One elderly man led his distraught wife from the room.
A woman at a nearby table communicated the news to Claire and Murray. Apparently, a passenger had jumped overboard during the night. Who was it? Murray asked, though by then Claire had already guessed it was the engineer from Ohio. The first officer approached their table. When he spoke his voice seemed to come from behind him. A terrible tragedy, he was saying. Yes, it is, it is.
Claire’s face had drained of color. She could only shake her head stupidly as she imagined the engineer leaping off the rail of the first-class deck into the darkness, his heavy body gaining velocity and tumbling past the cigarette he’d tossed ahead of him. The most dangerous thing you can do …what had he said? The most dangerous thing…
Murray stared at the officer. Later he wou
ld confide to Claire that he couldn’t help but wonder if at the last conscious moment, when a man is breathing in a lungful of saltwater, he’d have the wherewithal to feel regret.
OLLIE, FORGIVE ME FOR SAYING SO, but I wonder why you haven’t learned from past mistakes. Your penchant for melodrama. I can tell you that no one shrieked that morning on the Casparia. No one was even visibly distraught. In fact, the concern passed quickly, and people sat and finished their breakfast. The stewards came around and refilled our cups with coffee. Newspapers were opened and read. I overheard two men arguing about Khrushchev. The news of the engineer had been noted. Those who had spent any time with him traded stories. Murray and the Fugles recounted conversations. Only six of us joined the chaplain for a memorial service that afternoon.
You say you’ve lost the ability to make up stories. You’re done with novels, eh? I doubt it. You say you might as well write something that’s true. Go ahead. I don’t mind the disclosures. I have no use for embarrassment in my old age. But you don’t mind, do you, if I correct some of the inaccuracies? The description of me shaking my head stupidly, for instance. Stupidly, indeed! It was almost forty-five years ago, but I remember exactly what I was feeling. I was feeling the opposite of stupid. I saw everything too clearly. The man who had thrown himself off the ship had almost dropped your brother overboard. He’d wanted to drop him. He would have dropped him if he’d stood there another minute. That’s what I was thinking.
But I wonder, Oliver, if you really want to hear what I could tell you about this particular period in our lives. You are trying to understand what happened to our family on Elba, to sort out fantasy from fact. You say you remember the island as a place where your brothers and you had magical powers. But how much do you actually remember? What should I tell you, and what do you already know?
Here’s something: did you know that I didn’t learn to swim until I was a teenager? I was terrified of water. I had no reason to be terrified, no frightening experience behind me, yet for whatever reason, I had an intense fear of drowning. Then when I was fifteen my mother forced me to take swimming lessons, and I learned to stay afloat in deep water. But I didn’t learn to enjoy it.
From my window here at home the lawn slopes to the seawall, which blocks my view of the narrow beach. When the tide’s out the sand is full of driftwood and broken shells, seaweed and sponges — the yellow dead-men’s-fingers kind that smell like sulfur when they’re burned. The dock behind the Hunters’ house is stained with guano from the gulls. The terns are back, nesting in the hedge between our yards, and they dive at me when I go to pull weeds. From Cannon Point sometimes I see the fins of bluefish passing in schools offshore. Emily, the little Hunter girl, said her father saw a Portuguese man-of-war floating in the water last week.
Every morning from May to the end of September I still take my swim. When I’m swimming or just walking along the beach, breathing in the sharp smell of the water, I remember my gratitude. I’m in good health. You boys look out for me. You see to it that my bills are paid, my gutters cleaned, my car serviced. You’re fond of me, aren’t you, the way people are fond of an old pet? I am lucky. Some mothers must continually prove their merit. My sons don’t expect much from me. But you expect me to tell the truth, don’t you? Family history as it took shape on the Casparia.
I told you the story of the engineer a few weeks ago at dinner. How for a terrible instant I thought he’d dropped my son into the ocean. The mistake of my perception. What I didn’t admit was my own complicity. Not for spending time in conversation with the engineer, but for ignoring him. I was too self-absorbed to hear what that troubled man was trying to tell me. With each day on the Casparia, I felt happier, and pleasure made me complacent. I wanted to do nothing more than watch the color of the water change with the changing light and let the motion of the waves lull me into oblivion.
I’d been opposed to the trip. With Murray between jobs, it wasn’t the time for us to go away. But on that grand ship I shared with your father a new sense of possibility. I could fill the emptiness around me with thoughts of the kind of life I would have lived if I had no responsibilities. And when that man held Nathaniel over the rail, some demon in me saw it as my punishment. If I thought he’d dropped my child into the water, it was because that’s what I expected him to do.
I often dream of falling. Even if I wake without the memory of it, the ache in my bones tells me I’ve had the same dream again. When I push myself up out of bed, I’m still dizzy. I haven’t told you about the dizziness before now, Ollie, because I didn’t want you to drag me to the doctor for a checkup. I’m feeling fine enough to take a swim in the brisk cove water every summer morning, to go crabbing with my grandchildren off the Hunters’ dock, to build a bonfire of driftwood and seaweed at dusk. Did you know that I’m the local expert on the origin of the waves at Morrow Beach? Waves with steep choppy peaks are young waves churned by storms off Block Island. If the waves advance in stately intervals, the rear bulging in a crest, curling, plunging into the foam, then they come from the South Atlantic, born on a far-away fetch.
Superstitions are the riddles we make out of mystery. And the mystery of the sea has to do with death. A person dies on land, takes a bullet in his heart, has a stroke, chokes on food, and his body, whole or torn, remains behind long enough to prove that he was once alive. A person falls overboard — he’s there beside you, and then he’s gone. When death is disappearance, you can’t be sure there was life preceding it. One moment the emptiness in front of you offers any possibility you care to think of, and the next it is full of ghosts and monsters and angry gods.
But maybe it’s easier for you to return to the past, and I’m mis-remembering the details. I consider myself adequately lucid, though there are some people who have a different opinion. Emily Hunter informed me that her father believes I have Alzheimer’s. What is Alzheimer’s? she wanted to know. Alzheimer’s, I told her, is what happens when an old lady throws away her clocks and mirrors. Did I have Alzheimer’s? Not yet, I said. Do old men get Alzheimer’s? she asked. They do. Old men start seeing things that aren’t there and confusing one thing with another — for instance, they might see a clump of seaweed and think it’s a Portuguese man-of-war. Chew on that one, little Emily. She did, in contemplative silence. And then went home for the day.
There’s something else I’d like to point out, Ollie: while it’s true Murray wanted to take us to Elba because he remembered it as a place of great beauty, by the time we set out from New York on that muggy July day (the heat, Ollie, the stifling city heat — the white sun burning through the haze of clouds, a ventilator cowl nearby blowing hot air on us…ask your brothers if they remember the heat….), by then, the seventh of July, 1956, it hardly mattered where we were going, as long as we were going far away.
SAY THE NAMES. Hold them in your mouth like polished stones: Leviathan, Titanic, Queen Mary, Ile de France, Normandie, Mauretania, Conte di Savoia, Casparia. There was a time when three quarters of their space was reserved for the upper classes. “The English Lines,” wrote the travel writer Basil Woon, “perhaps have a more distinguishable air of disciplined smartness…. ‘efficiency’ is a word which fits United States Lines boats; Italian Lines err rather on the side of too much servility….”First-class passengers could swim in Pompeian pools or drink chamomile tea beside marble fountains. They could play boccie or shuffleboard or miniature golf. The women could take turns dancing with the captain while the men enjoyed their cognac in the saloon.
My father’s first experience on a luxury liner was as a soldier heading to Glasgow on the Queen Elizabeth in the early months of 1942. The six miles of carpeting had been stripped from the ship, along with the china, crystal, and silver, and in their place were twenty-millimeter Oerlikon antiaircraft cannons, rocket launchers, and range finders. The ship had been painted battleship gray and girdled in degaussing wire. The restaurant had been turned into a mess hall. Instead of stewards there were chow lines. Instead of brass beds i
n the staterooms there were bunks crammed on every wall. The ship had been built to carry 2,100 passengers. Lifeboats were provided for 8,000 men. Sixteen thousand troops were on-board. They sailed alone to the Firth of Forth, without convoy. Every man onboard knew that Hitler had offered the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars and an Iron Cross to any U-Boat commander who could sink the Queen Elizabeth.
The ship made the voyage without incident, and Murray spent most of the remainder of the war at a base in England overseeing the distribution of supplies, except for the one expedition in 1944 trailing the Fourth U.S. Corps up the west coast through the rubble of Grosseto and on to Piombino and then, after the island was liberated by the Ninth French Colonial Division, to Elba, where he stayed for over a month, not because there was work to do but because the army command simply forgot about Murray’s insignificant division.
Lasting peace came first to Elba — or so it seemed to Murray during that lost month in ’44, and when he needed a refuge ten years later, it made sense that he would return.
We were somewhere near the Azores when we almost lost Nat to the depths. Nat says that though he has no recollection of the engineer from Ohio, he remembers the sensation of being dangled high over the open sea. He remembers the tingling on the surface of his skin and another feeling more difficult to express, a feeling in his bones, he says, an impression that he was in danger, a sense of joy, a sense that he was experiencing a forbidden freedom. He remembers how the wind tugged at his earlobes as if to get his attention. And far below him he saw the churning, foaming, boiling water. He perceived the water to be deadly hot and had a passing impulse to escape the hands holding him and return to the safety of the deck. But somehow he knew that he should be still. For danger to be any fun at all, you have to trust the person in charge — he understood this instinctually and knew better than to try to squirm free.
I don’t remember passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, but my brother Patrick does. Or at least he remembers watching two identical steamers surging past us, the ships so minute they looked like toys from the heights of the Casparia, their plumes of smoke like the white feathers of cockatoos.