By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (2 page)

Now it was Geoffrey's turn to gape.
"I'm
not sailing to the United States, Mother."

Her clear blue eyes held his troubled ones
in a look of bewitching reasonableness. Lady Seton never took no
for an answer. "Why not?" she asked.

"How would I know why not? It wasn't my
idea." He sounded idiotic, even to himself. His mother knew
precisely how to turn his aimlessness to her advantage.
She
had a plan; he had none. He felt like a petulant brat. Point and
set to Lady Seton.

And now his father had begun warming to the
idea. "Your mother may have something, Geoff. What you need is to
get out more with young ladies, that sort of thing."

"There are plenty of young ladies in
England," said Geoff sullenly.

"There certainly are," his mother agreed,
alarmed. "That nice Jane Marylsworth who was over to tea last
week—"

"She's poor as a churchmouse," said Sir
Walter abruptly. "So, apparently, is everyone else in this county.
What Geoff needs is something fresh, something new. There's always
London, of course, but that would mean taking a flat—and a job," he
added in a hopeful voice.

"We've gone over all that, Father. I need a
bit more time."

"Yes, yes, quite. More time. In that case,
it's settled. You'll book passage for next week to New York," he
said with stony resolve.

Flushed with anger, yet too paralyzed to
resist, Geoff said, "I know what your game is, Father, and I think
it's absurd. I refuse to shop for an heiress while I'm over there,
so you can nip those hopes in the bud."

"Shopping for a wife in America," said Lady
Seton faintly. "What a frightening idea."

"Oh come, Julia," said her husband
impatiently. "It's not as though they swing from trees over
there."

"But dear, we never can understand them,"
Lady Seton argued, distressed by the possibility of being made to
try. "The boys swallow their food whole and the girls charge
through one's drawing room like buffalo. And their parents' manners
are even worse."

"He's not marrying the blasted parents!"

"They'll have to be faced sometime."

"It was your idea to send Geoff over!"

"For a bit of amusement, that's all. To put
things in perspective." Lady Seton turned to her son, who had
slouched deep in his leather chair, put up his feet, plowed his
hands into his pockets, and was watching the match with grim
amusement. "Miss Marylsworth is a very fine young woman," she said.
"Much finer than you realize, Geoffrey."

After a pause Geoff said, "Let me see if I
have this right. Father wants me to cross the Atlantic to see what
a wonder crop of wives they grow there, and you want me to go so
that I can see what rotters they all are in comparison."

His mother smiled brilliantly. "Yes. We're
quite unanimous."

****

Ten days later Geoffrey Seton steamed out of
Southampton on a White Star liner, bound for New York, new
perspectives, and new money. Perversely, he did not expect to be
able to satisfy either one of his parents, but he thought that a
week at sea might let him sleep without dreams. That was all,
really, that he wanted from life these days. So he bundled up in
his heaviest country tweeds and began a ritual of pacing the
promenade, mercifully unaware that his aloof, military bearing was
creating a minor stir among some of the overly elegant first class
Americans on board. They knew the
who
of him—that he was the
elder son of a British baronet—but not the
why.

Was he traveling for pleasure? They took in
his absently mournful air and decided not. On business, then? No,
they decided; his clothes were too carelessly functional for a man
who needed to command respect. Could he be on a mission of mercy?
Perhaps. He did look a little as though he were on his way to pick
up the remains of a dead relative. A cousin, possibly; he did not
look broken up enough for it to be a parent or a sibling. Since
Geoffrey took his meals in his cabin or on deck and politely
declined to be drawn into conversation, it began to seem as if no
one would ever really know.

By the third day at sea Geoffrey had pretty
well decided that the trip was a flop. His nights were laced with
thoughts of war, and his days were filled with Anna. On the whole,
he decided that his thoughts of war were more useful. Maybe someday
he would write a book outlining its horrors for the idiots who
refused to see them. But thoughts of Anna were time wasted.
Voluntary torture. Self-destruction. Anna was not thinking of him,
and so he must not think of Anna. She was with her husband again,
and happy being a nurse in peacetime for a change, and would he
please not write. "Thank you very much and I'll never forget
you."

Well, well, Anna, who's kidding whom?"

He took a last cigarette from its case, a
wonderfully tacky souvenir of Chicago that she'd given him. He used
to rub it for good luck during those last horrible weeks in the
trenches. He'd kept it in his left pocket, and when the shrapnel
tore through the right side of his body his first thought was that
the case had protected the region of his heart. He stared at the
cheap tin box as he dragged smoky consolation into his lungs. A
relief of the Chicago Tower, sole survivor of the great Chicago
Fire, was soldered to its cover, and the motto "Chicago, Heart of
America" inscribed below.
Anna, heart of my heart.
He sent
the case whizzing through the air over the rail of the promenade
deck—a bit of debris left over from the shambles of his life.

****

The last half of the trip went better than
the first, because instead of brooding about Anna, Geoff read
whatever he could get his hands on—the more trivial the subject
matter, the better. From the ship's library he'd got hold of a copy
of Lawson's
History of the America's Cup.
For two straight
days he immersed himself in tales of pettiness and recrimination,
stories of rich little boys taunting other rich little boys over
who was entitled to take possession of a rather homely silver
trophy. It was a wonderful narcotic; at night his brain simply shut
down, exhausted by the bickering, like a mother who cannot stand
listening to her children for another second. He slept more
soundly.

By the last evening aboard he felt refreshed
enough to drag out his dinner jacket and join the ship's company
for the evening meal. But it was premature; it was a mistake. He
was set upon by a group of Americans, most of them women dressed to
the nines in glittering ball gowns and topheavy with jewels. One
man in the group was actually wearing tails. All were drunk.
Prohibition, a concept he found amusing, was in effect in the
States. Soon the ship would be crossing the twelve-mile limit and
alcoholic stores would be locked away; apparently the time for a
party was now.

"It's an awful shame that you haven't been
with us all along," said one debutante aptly nicknamed Lotsy.
"We've been wearing the most scandalous gowns all week, every one
of them from Paris. They have such a great attitude toward scandal
in Paris. I shouldn't tell you this, but Mother and I are wearing
all this stuff now to avoid having to pay duty in New York," she
added, leaning toward him provocatively, tickling his nose with a
glass of champagne. "Daddy insists."

"Daddy sounds like a practical man."

"He's horrid. Look at him watching us."

Daddy was the one in tails. He didn't look
practical, but he did look protective. Geoffrey leaned away from
the debutante's décolletage.

She giggled. "Are you afraid of him?"

"Damned right I am," he answered with a
bored smile.

"Oh, he's a nice old dragon." She waved
prettily to her father and leaned back toward Geoffrey, her head
thrown back and her neck arched to lend her bosom maximum exposure.
"Are you afraid of
me?"

"Even more than of your father," he agreed.
Actually, shocked would have been a better description. He'd seen
this kind of blatancy behind the front lines, a kind of
tomorrow-we-die mentality, but on a genteel liner ...? His mother
would have been delighted by his reaction.

"I've been watching you all week," said
Lotsy. "I like the way you brood."

"Thank you. I do it for effect."

"It has a swell effect on me. How would you
like to invite me to your cabin for champagne?"

He glanced at her bosom, then at the dragon.
"Why not?"

They excused themselves—he heard something
about a walk on deck to clear her head—and in a few minutes they
were in his cabin. In a few minutes more they were naked and in one
another's arms, which astonished him. Since Anna, he had considered
other female flesh not so much undesirable as irrelevant. It had
ceased to interest him. But Lotsy he found quite interesting: big,
satisfying breasts, an agile tongue, and a steel-trap grip from
which he wasn't sure, for a while, that he could withdraw. And she
was insatiable. Or a terrific actress. By his count she came four
times in forty minutes. He wasn't doing too badly himself. It had
been a long time.

That night he got his best sleep yet.

The next day the liner docked in New York.
Lotsy, cloche-hatted and in furs, smiled and blew Geoff a kiss as
she allowed herself to be hauled away by the dragon, who turned out
to be sadly toothless after all. Something about the dragon's look,
bewildered and angry, reminded Geoff of his own father. He'd been
assuming that the look was related to war and financial straits;
now he saw that it went with the punishing role of fatherhood.

By evening Geoff was comfortably settled in
rooms at the Plaza and had sent off letters to his parents, to Sir
Thomas Lipton, and to two or three acquaintances in New York. It
occurred to him that he wanted Lotsy. He missed the society tart
who—no matter what his mother might say about her vulgar
excesses—was a damn good piece. There was something exuberant,
something American about her mindless confidence. The girl had
never had to make a thoughtful decision in her life and, God
willing, never would. One thing about Lotsy: she drove away
thoughts of Anna the way Lawson's history of Cup squabbles had
driven away thoughts of war.

"Here's to lots more Lotsy's during my
stay," he prayed as he crept into bed alone that night.

But sleep had once again lost its charm, and
the next day, when he checked at the desk and found a friendly note
from Sir Thomas Lipton inviting him aboard his private yacht
Victoria,
Geoffrey considered declining. He seemed to have
used up his little burst of conviviality; the thought of listening
to an old man retell his favorite anecdotes about marketing jumbo
cheeses and special blends of tea left him bored. Still, it would
have been the worst possible form to turn down an invitation he
himself had angled for, so he dashed off a polite acceptance and
resigned himself to a wasted hour or two. Then he wandered around
Madison Avenue looking for a present for his mother, knowing full
well that anything she'd really like he could not afford.

****

Geoffrey Seton had not been in the States
long enough to begin to understand what an immensely popular figure
Sir Thomas Lipton was with the average man in the street. L.
Francis Herreshoff, an otherwise laconic New Englander, wrote years
later that the tea magnate was "an almost mythical figure" who'd
stolen the hearts of ordinary Americans. And why not? Sir Tom was a
totally self-made man, a school dropout who'd gone to work in his
Irish parents' tiny ham-and-cheese store in Glasgow, and shipped
out to the States at fifteen. He had a natural empathy for
"go-get-it" Americans, and even though he returned to Scotland to
make his fortune, he came back often to America on business and for
pleasure.

He bought a meat-packing plant in Chicago
and pioneered the same process in South Omaha. He made his fortune
not by selling moldy blankets or defective guns in wartime (as had
the founders of several of New York's great dynasties) but by
advertising everyday goods with great fanfare and good humor. Sir
Tom practically invented the advertising gimmick and in another age
would have been head of a Madison Avenue ad agency. Cartoon ads
were his idea, as well as free coupons and packaged tea. He sold
U.S. pork to Americans and Ceylon tea to Indians.

Where no market existed, he was a genius at
creating one. In the 1890's Sir Tom had decided that America ought
to drink tea, and he began to market it there. Not coincidentally,
by 1898 this genius in the art of attracting free publicity had
filed his first challenge to race for the America's Cup. For the
next two decades his sporting efforts to lift the "Auld Mug," as he
liked to call the trophy, were routinely given front-page coverage.
Meanwhile, tea sales rose and rose. Americans, either from a sense
of guilt because he hadn't yet won despite unfailing good
sportsmanship, or just because they liked the man, were making Sir
Tom richer than ever.

And they rooted shamelessly for him to win
their Cup besides. By 1920 Lipton had seen, from the deck of his
steam yacht, three different
Shamrocks
go down to defeat.
This year he had high hopes for
Shamrock IV.

To Geoffrey Seton, Lipton at seventy looked
much the same as he had before the war, when Geoff had stayed
aboard his yacht
Erin
during race week at Cowes: tall,
curly-haired, with a bushy mustache, a hint of a goatee, and very
possibly the same blue-spotted tie. He had twinkling eyes, the only
person Geoff had ever met who did.

"Come aboard, lad," said the Irishman,
greeting him with a firm handshake, "and take a look at
Victoria.
Not quite the same cut of ham as my darling
Erin,
I'm afraid."

"I was sorry to hear it when
Erin
was
torpedoed during the war, sir. At least you have the satisfaction
of knowing that she went down doing her noble best as a patrol boat
"