The Lifeboat: A Novel (16 page)

DR. COLE IS
the doctor of psychiatry who was hired by my lawyers to assess my mental state, and I have continued to see him every week, though to what end I am not entirely sure. I do not take him anywhere near as seriously as he takes himself, but our visits give me an opportunity to leave my cell, so I look forward to them. It has occurred to me that the things I say are not held in strict confidence, as Dr. Cole would have me believe, and it has become a game with me to try to find the purpose behind his questions and to answer accordingly. Some of his stock replies seem to hold the response he is seeking within them. For instance, he likes to exclaim, “That must have been terrifying!” so of course I always agree that it was. It took me several weeks of this before I began to think that he was making the game too easy, that even a man with such a round face and thick eyeglasses must have some experience of women. At first I suspected he was playing dumb to beguile me, and then I was back to thinking he wasn’t particularly bright; but one day I hit on the answer. I realized he was trying to put me at my ease, hoping that at some point I would let a key detail slip and he would be able to use it to unlock the rest of my psyche. I told him what I thought, then added, “My psyche is not a locked fortress, Dr. Cole. It contains no buried treasure or deep, dark secrets. If you adopted a more traditional method of interview, I would do my best to answer your questions honestly, and I am sure you would find out everything you need to know.”

“An open book, are you!” he exclaimed. He seemed delighted by this idea and suggested we turn to the chapter on my parents. I told him about the family misfortune, hiding nothing at all. It took some time to give him the details of my father’s fall from grace and my mother’s slide into delusion. I had hardly started on my sister Miranda when he looked at his watch and said, “I am sorry to say that our time is up,” but his tone of voice betrayed not the slightest regret. It seemed that this development was only another of the many delightful events that composed his day. I wondered where he was going next and whom he was interviewing, but then stopped myself, thinking that arousing my curiosity was part of the trap and that I should stick to my plan of methodically presenting the events of my life.

At our next meeting, he started in with a bold claim: “So Mrs. Grant represented to you the ideal mother.”

“I am a married woman, Dr. Cole. I have no need of a mother.”

“But your own mother disappointed you.”

“I suppose she did, but life is full of disappointments, is it not? And by that time, I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“And how did you do that?”

I told him how I had found the rental house through our solicitor and how I had overseen the sale of our possessions and how eventually Henry had married me.

“Ah,” said Dr. Cole, and I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. Was his great insight that women found themselves better off when married? I will never know, because when he spoke again, he said, “Let’s turn to the chapter on your sister,” and we both mentally turned the page. “Did anyone in the boat remind you of her?”

I was amused by his attempt to identify the occupants of the lifeboat with family members, and I supposed that he was talking about Miranda, who seemed irrelevant, so that he could circle around to Mr. Hardie and suggest that he had reminded me of my father. I laughed inwardly at the absurdity of this, but saw no reason not to play along. And, in fact, I had seen long before Dr. Cole had suggested it that Miranda and Mary Ann were similar in many ways. Of course, Mary Ann was far more emotional than Miranda, but I had come to think that Mary Ann had the soul of a governess. I said, “I suppose if I had to choose someone who reminded me of my sister, I would choose Mary Ann. I loved her, but she also made me angry, just the way Miranda did. I wanted more for my sister than she wanted for herself. As for Mary Ann, she was not marrying Robert to become something grand, but to firmly fix herself as something small, just the way Miranda would rather have the sure, small thing than gamble for a bigger prize.”

“And you are a gambler?” asked Dr. Cole, which made me laugh outright.

We talked a little about Mary Ann and how, because she had reminded me of Miranda, I thought I knew how she would react to things. I thought I knew what she would say if I asked her if she liked children, if she liked them to sit on her lap and if she liked to read to them. I was not far off the mark: her eyes glowed with a distant, happy look, and she said, “Robert and I plan to have children…” But then her voice trailed off as she realized this might never come to be. Of course I knew she was worrying that she would die at sea, but I chose to misunderstand her and to interpret her remark as a worry that Robert wouldn’t wait for her or wouldn’t want her for some reason after our ordeal. I replied, “You could always be a governess. That way you could have lots of children, in a way,” and she looked at me oddly while a little tear made a track on her salty cheek. Later, she asked me if Henry and I didn’t want children, and I replied that of course we did. But I wanted a child the way a queen wants one, as an heir rather than a plaything.

I told Dr. Cole that I knew I was being unkind, but that Mary Ann provoked me and also that our nerves were frayed, which caused us to give voice to irritations that in normal circumstances we would have suppressed.

“What kind of irritations do you normally suppress?” he asked, which I, for some reason, found to be a highly irritating question.

“I suppose I am irritated right now,” I said, “and if you hadn’t asked, I would have suppressed the urge to say you remind me of my father, who was able to make a living for as long as his business partners supported him, but who was, ultimately, no match for their conniving schemes.”

I do not know what I was conveying by this banter, for half the things I said were motivated by the fact that I saw our encounters as a game, not as a means of delving into the mystery of the self. But my sessions with the doctor made the days go by more quickly, and I always returned to my cell refreshed, glad of the chance to talk to someone other than Florence, who had begun to think that the entire criminal justice system had been developed with the sole purpose of ensnaring her. She would whisper things like “I’m sorry you got caught up in it, but you can see what’s happening, can’t you? They’ll stop at nothing. You can see how they were after me from the start.”

Once she asked me if I had killed anyone, and I told her I supposed I had. Mostly I ignored her, but there were days when she pushed her face up against the bars of the cell for hours at a time, whispering things about her children or her husband or the judge in charge of her case; and occasionally something she said captured my interest. I had just returned to my cell from the bathhouse, and when the matron locked the door behind me, I thought I heard Florence say something about Dr. Cole. She instantly had my attention, and I wondered for a moment if I should respond, and, if so, what I should say. Finally I called out, “Excuse me? Did you say something?” but now she was on to something about an insanity defense and being transferred to an asylum, and I hesitated to ask anything more specific, which might have had the effect of telling her more about myself than I wanted her to know. A cold feeling came over me, and I began to suspect that Florence had been put in the cell across from mine to elicit information from me and pass it on to Dr. Cole. I had assumed that Dr. Cole had been hired solely for my benefit, but now I realized he might also be seeing others in the prison, and if he was seeing Florence, she might be telling him things about me.

This was a chilling thought, and I spent over an hour trying to think of anything I had said to Florence that might incriminate me, but I was not truly frightened until my mind progressed from the idea that Florence might be an informer to the corollary that Dr. Cole might be telling Florence to plant ideas in my head that would throw me off-balance and make me reveal more in our sessions than I wanted to. This was the thought that kept me awake all night and left my nightdress soaked through with sweat. At the same time as I was thinking these things, I was also realizing that it was mad to think them. But if it was mad to think them, was my mind becoming unstable? It was the sort of circular track where one thought led to another and so on until I was back at the beginning and starting the thought loop all over again.

As I lay awake listening to the hollow echoings of the prison, I made an effort to think rationally, and it was that effort that led me to consider how being in prison works on the mind of a person just the way being in the lifeboat did. Up until then, I had not been unhappy to bide my time until the day I was released, for I had never really imagined that the charges against me might lead to some permanent change in my circumstances, that I might be executed or locked away until the day I died. I remembered telling Miranda once that life was a game, and I remembered how I had thought it amusing to banter back and forth with Dr. Cole, but now I was severely shaken. Still, it is never a good idea to form any hard and fast opinions at nighttime, which is a lesson I had learned during my family’s ordeal and again on the lifeboat; and by the next morning much of my old equanimity had returned. After that, though, I had only to look at Florence to think about what might become of me if I didn’t win my case. For the first time I thought seriously of my mother and wondered if somewhere in my psyche I harbored a lurking, susceptible gene.

I also became much more careful about what I said to Dr. Cole. I decided I might find out more about Florence from him, and after telling him a little about her, I asked if such people had always been unbalanced or if they might be made that way by their circumstances.

“And what are this Florence person’s circumstances?” he asked, betraying not the slightest evidence of whether he knew her or not.

“She has been locked in prison and accused of killing her children!” I cried, perhaps too forcefully, for I had already explained this to him and I didn’t want to go over it all again.

“So they are much like yours,” he mused. His eyes were almost closed, giving the impression that he was pondering mightily and, really, talking to himself. While I didn’t like to betray emotion in front of him, I threw up my hands in exasperation. But that is the way it is with Dr. Cole. There is no subject that does not circle back to me.

I ATTENDED A
hearing today in front of Judge Potter, during which the three sets of lawyers tried to get the charges against us dismissed. Mrs. Grant, Hannah, and I had been charged with first-degree murder, which required not only that we had killed someone, but that the killing was the result of a deliberate design. Each side had already submitted a hefty brief that argued either for or against prosecution, and it was these to which the judge referred as he asked the lawyers his questions. I sat with Hannah and Mrs. Grant on a pewlike bench from which we were allowed to observe the proceedings, but not to speak.

There followed a long discussion about whether or not it was murder for a man who clutched at a plank in order to keep his head above water to thrust away another who came after and would have taken it from him. Was it murder if the second man to arrive at the plank was successful in thrusting away the first? Does a charge of murder inevitably result from such a scenario, given that the men will naturally try to save themselves and that the plank can support only one man? Is the survivor doomed to spend the rest of his days in prison if he is caught and there are witnesses to his act?

“Surely not,” said Mr. Reichmann. “In this case no direct bodily harm has been done, and the loser has the chance of finding another plank.”

“I think prior claim is a relevant point,” said Hannah’s lawyer, a gaunt and pallid man who looked as if he never saw the sun.

“And what if bodily harm is done?” Mrs. Grant’s lawyer made a sharp contrast to Hannah’s. He was robust to the point of severely straining the buttons on his coat. He had a cheerful face and ruddy complexion, but he smiled far too often, given the serious nature of the charges against us.

“But we are not talking about a mere plank, are we?” interjected the prosecutor, who was far too young to have had many life experiences and too brash to know it. “A plank makes an entire boat look like a luxury. The two can hardly be equated. In the case of the plank, the men are in the water, making the life-and-death struggle far more immediate than it is for people in a boat. You say that the loser has the chance of finding another plank, but has the castaway from a lifeboat a chance of finding another boat? I think not.”

“In fact, there was another lifeboat in the area,” said Mr. Reichmann. “Lifeboat fourteen had nearly collided with it only hours before Mr. Hardie was thrown overboard.” I had not thought of this myself, and I have to credit Mr. Reichmann and his associates with the ability to dispassionately think through even the most oblique angle and most minute detail of the case. I tried to catch his eye to let him know the extent of my appreciation, but succeeded only in exchanging glances with Hannah’s lawyer, who kept turning the bloodless oval of his face in my direction, craning his long neck at such a bizarre angle that it looked like his head was attached by a hinge. The extent of his interest caused me to wonder what Hannah might have told him about me.

“Besides,” Mr. Reichmann continued, “we know that at least ten lifeboats were successfully launched. Mr. Hardie had a chance, albeit a small one, of finding his way into one of them. Is the chance of another plank in the first scenario any greater? And how are we to assess the chances of either scenario from this courtroom? What we are asking boils down to this question: Is the only way for a person who finds himself in an overcrowded lifeboat to avoid a guilty verdict to decide that all must sink or survive together? Is he permitted to make no move at all to save anyone, much less himself? And doesn’t such passivity fly directly in the face of human nature and the instinct to survive?”

“I can imagine there might be some people who are noble enough to leave the lifeboat voluntarily,” said the prosecutor with an aggressive thrust of his pointed chin.

“Could they ask for volunteers?” asked Mrs. Grant’s lawyer.

“They can ask, I think, but they cannot require it,” said the prosecutor. “There can be no pressure or coercion at all.”

The judge then asked if coercion arose merely in the asking and if there was a special duty assumed between a sailor and a passenger, and everybody agreed there was. “However, no such duty exists on the side of the passengers toward each other,” put in the lawyer for Mrs. Grant.

“Or on the part of the passengers toward the crew,” added Mr. Reichmann gravely. “But I keep coming back to the notion that the question is more properly asked ‘Shall some live?’ rather than ‘Shall some die?’ If you take for granted that some or all shall die if no action is taken, should an action be taken to save some? That, I think, is the proper question, and I don’t see how you can fault my client for answering yes to that question, whether or not some other person might reasonably answer no.”

The prosecutor said, “You assume there was some way of ascertaining whether the lives of some would actually be saved by any action the people in the boat might take. It was far more likely that life would only be prolonged than saved outright. Who could predict when the rescue might have occurred? Couldn’t it as easily have occurred one hour after the taking of some irrevocable decision as after a day or a week?”

“You forget the storm,” said Mrs. Grant’s lawyer, who spoke glibly and seemed less prepared than the others. “That brought the necessity down to a particular moment. For one thing, there was no likelihood of a rescue during the storm, for even if a ship were in the vicinity, there would have been no way for it to either see or approach the lifeboat in the violent weather. And for another, the storm itself made destruction of the overcrowded boat likely if not certain. The storm reduced the situation in the lifeboat to that of the men on the plank by making the life-and-death struggle as immediate as if the occupants were already flailing about in the water.”

“That may or may not be the case, but we are not now talking about the actions of Mr. Hardie,” said the prosecutor, pointing out a failure in the man’s logic that was obvious even to me. Until then, I had felt sorry for Hannah in her choice of the lawyer with the hinged neck, but now I felt sorry for Mrs. Grant, for her lawyer had forgotten that the storm was over by the time we killed Mr. Hardie, and indeed, the prosecutor went on to say, “Mr. Hardie was still in charge of things at the time of the storm. Whether or not his actions in arranging for the lottery were justifiable is open to question, but it is not a question this court has been convened to resolve.”

“Quite right,” said Hannah’s lawyer. His too-long fingers fumbled through a sheaf of papers and extracted a particular one from the bottom of the stack. He held it up to the light, and a calculating look passed across his pale, oblong face. “But if Mr. Hardie’s actions can be condoned, then there might be grounds to condone the actions of the women, who were merely continuing a precedent set by someone else. Don’t forget that the lifeboat had been damaged in the storm and that it was still taking on water at a rapid rate.”

“I don’t think the rate can be established,” said the prosecutor.

“My point is that if emergency conditions existed in the case of the storm and in the case of the hypothetical plank, thereby allowing extreme courses of action, then such conditions also existed after the storm because of the damage sustained by the boat and the changed relationship between Mr. Hardie and the rest of the group. By proving himself willing to sacrifice occupants of the boat, Mr. Hardie had become an immediate threat.”

By this time I had completely revised my opinion of Hannah’s lawyer, for he had taken the faulty logic of Mrs. Grant’s attorney and turned it to the advantage of us all. I could only admire his ability to see several steps ahead, when all I could do was to follow along behind the argument, hoping not to get lost in some byway of logic or law. Still, the man moved slowly and looked like he was made of putty, and I was glad that Mr. Reichmann, with his staunch bearing, alert features, and retinue of assistants, was representing me. The pale man was gaining steam as he spoke, so that despite his wan and, really, sickly appearance, his delivery became more and more impassioned. His washed-out face began to glow and the black pupils and pinkish whites of his eyes resembled the coals and embers of an inner fire. He concluded by saying: “And cannot the killing of Mr. Hardie be seen as the overthrow of a malevolent ruler—a despot, if you will—in that little principality, a tyrannical autocrat who was endangering the lives of the people in his charge?”

The prosecutor replied, “But didn’t Mr. Hardie express a reluctance, even an absolute unwillingness, to take the lives of women? If so, how did his actions regarding the lottery constitute an implied threat?” to which my very own Mr. Reichmann responded, “What about Mrs. Cook? Didn’t Mr. Hardie, with his comments or suggestions, cause her to take her own life? And wasn’t he slow to rescue Rebecca Frost? Didn’t he, by those actions, include women in the list of people who were in immediate mortal danger due to his very presence in the boat?”

The prosecutor was a nimble man who rushed his words together as if the wheels of justice were turning very quickly and he had to hurry to keep up. He was nearly breathless as he said, “We have contradictory statements regarding the events surrounding the death of Mrs. Cook, and as for Rebecca Frost, it is reckless to conjecture that Mr. Hardie purposely delayed in picking her up. In the telling of any story, it is possible to emphasize one particular aspect over another so that that aspect looms out of all proportion to the context.”

After perhaps an hour of such dialogue, Judge Potter said, “In this discussion we, perhaps necessarily, keep straying from the general to the particular, and I must conclude that there is no general principle that can be derived to guide us in deciding whether or not it is generally permissible to jettison some passengers in order to save others. We must content ourselves with trying to decide whether it was permissible in this particular case, for the strange and anomalous facts of the situation are unlikely ever to be repeated. Each case must be decided upon its unique facts and merits and not by the application of some universal rule.” Thus the judge pronounced his jurisdiction over us. The majesty of the law was proclaimed, and we were cast upon its waters.