The Lifeboat: A Novel (4 page)

“In any case,” said Mr. Hardie, “the ship isn’t as big as some, and the owners wanted to give it a grand name in order to make up for the size. Still, she was well fitted out and should have turned a handsome profit…” Here Hardie’s voice petered out and he lost the thread. He began to grumble about working for nothing and shipowners who thought fancy titles would do the work of sense, but then he must have caught himself being overly loquacious, for he abruptly told us that eventually the vessel was “sold to an American chappie who knew how to make the bleedin’ bucket pay.”

Mary Ann liked to hear about anything to do with marriage, so she asked Mr. Sinclair if Nicholas’s marriage to Alexandra had been grand. “I only know that it took place in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg,” Mr. Sinclair replied, “and the Winter Palace is grand enough.” On hearing this, Mary Ann nudged me, and whispered, “The ship was made for you, Grace. Your name is Winter, and you were just married!” Even though Henry had been in London on business and had only decided to take me with him at the last minute—because, he said, he couldn’t bear to leave me and because he wanted to get married beyond the clutches of a mother who sounded more and more to me like a giant hawk—it made me feel both chosen and doomed to think that the
Empress Alexandra
had been created especially for Henry and me. In the days to come, I would fabricate for myself a fantastic imaginary place called the Winter Palace, where Henry and I would live. It had cool rooms that led onto sunny verandas and arched windows that overlooked sweeping emerald lawns. It inhabited the architecture of my mind, and I spent hours exploring its corridors, changing the details of its malleable design as I went.

For the trip out, Henry had chosen a small packet steamer. We were as yet unmarried, and although we told the captain we were husband and wife, Henry wanted to avoid meeting anyone he knew until the knot had been tied, which we did not have time to do before we sailed. Henry thought it would be fun to pretend we were of modest means and said that we would replenish our wardrobes in London. I didn’t tell him that I had no wardrobe to replenish, and I laughed to think that I was now only pretending to be poor!

There were seven other passengers on the packet boat, but only one other woman. We all ate with the captain, family style, and served ourselves from big platters that were passed from one end of the table to the other. On one occasion, the talk turned to women’s suffrage, and the other woman was asked what she thought. “It’s not something I dwell on,” she said, flustered to be the center of the conversation, which usually excluded the two of us. I found myself saying, “Of course women should vote!” with an air of great conviction, not so much because I had any strongly held opinion on the matter as because I believed the other men were callously using the other woman to prove some point of their own. Later, Henry said proudly, “I guess you set them straight.” But for the most part, Henry and I said little, saving our voices for the times we were alone.

When Mr. Hardie had finished speaking, other people started telling their particular stories about the explosion and making guesses about what had caused it. There was a difference of opinion about whether the explosion had caused the boat to start sinking or whether it had been a secondary effect. “A secondary effect of what?” asked the Colonel, and no one could answer him.

Nearly everybody had a story to tell about the
Titanic,
which had sunk in a spectacular fashion just over two years before. Mrs. McCain’s younger sister had been one of the survivors, so we listened spellbound to everything she had to say on the subject and pestered her for details about her sister’s experience. In the case of the
Titanic,
the problem was the lack of lifeboats, but those who made it into a boat were rescued very quickly. “The ship sank at night, so many people were not properly dressed,” said Mrs. McCain. “Whenever my sister tells the story, she laughs and says that her biggest worry was the fact that she was wearing on her feet only a pair of jeweled Arabian slippers and that her ankles showed beneath her robe when she was getting in and out of the boat.” The other female passengers and I simultaneously looked down at our feet and blushed, which was a nice reminder that somewhere a world existed where this might be our primary concern. Mr. Nilsson drew on his knowledge of the shipping business to say that the sister ship of th
e
Titanic
was to have been named the
Gigantic,
but that after the disaster, the White Star Line renamed it the
Britannic.
“I suppose they didn’t want to tempt fate again by using such an arrogant name.”

“It wasn’t the name that sank the
Titanic,
” said Mrs. McCain. “It was an iceberg. Do you think the same thing happened to us?”

“We didn’t hit an iceberg,” said Mr. Hardie. “After the
Titanic
sank, the transatlantic routes were shifted to the southern track to prevent that very thing.”

Mr. Sinclair added that many of the
Titanic
lifeboats had been rescued within four hours, and it was these stories as much as anything Mr. Hardie had told us that encouraged us to believe that our rescue was imminent, even overdue.

Mr. Hardie assured us that the experience of the
Titanic
had translated into revised safety protocols, but clearly mistakes had been made putting those protocols into effect. Because of the fire and the listing of the
Empress Alexandra,
it became more and more difficult to operate the lifeboat-lowering mechanisms, and there was understandable confusion throughout the ship as people tried to make sense of what was happening and decide what to do.

“I was knocked clean out of my bed,” said Mrs. Forester, the silent older woman I recognized from the ship. “I had retired after lunch for a nap, while Collin had gone somewhere to play cards. My first thought was that he had come in drunk again and knocked into me. I do worry about him, but Collin is such a survivor.” Because we had all done so, surviving seemed an easy thing, though just beneath the surface of our own stories lurked the stories of the people we had seen throwing babies into the water to save them from the flames.

Isabelle said, “Why did they start to lower our boat and then raise it back up again?” Then she turned directly to Mr. Hardie and said, “You must know why they did it. Weren’t you helping with the boats?”

Mr. Hardie, who had been particularly talkative that day, suddenly became quiet and only replied, “Nay. I don’t.”

Then Isabelle asked, “Do you think the little girl who hit her head on the side of our boat when it was being raised back up got into the next one?”

“What little girl?” asked Mrs. Fleming, who was in deep despair over the unknown fate of her family and was untouched by the illusions that buoyed the rest of us.

“The one who was knocked out of the way when our boat was launched.”

“Was someone knocked out of the way? Was it Emmy? You’re not talking about Emmy, are you?” Mrs. Fleming added that her husband and daughter had fallen behind in the mad dash for the lifeboats and that she hadn’t noticed until it was too late. “They were right behind me! I had injured my wrist somehow, and Gordon pushed me ahead. I thought they were right behind me!”

Hannah gave Isabelle a stern look and said, “She’s completely mistaken. No one was hit in the head,” then launched into a fabricated story about seeing a nearly empty lifeboat rescuing people from the water. Mrs. Grant insisted that she had seen it too and wouldn’t let anyone say a thing to the contrary. She abruptly changed the subject to report that Mr. and Mrs. Worthington Smith were last seen sitting in deck chairs and smoking cigarettes: “He said, ‘Save the women and children first,’ and she replied, ‘I’ve never gone off in a boat without Worthy, and I’m certainly not about to start now.’” Later I heard a similar story about a couple from the
Titanic,
and I wondered if this had really happened or if Mrs. Grant had merely appropriated the story to distract Mrs. Fleming from her woes.

“That’s true love,” said Mary Ann dreamily. It made the death and horror of the wreck seem romantic and purposeful. Henry, after all, had done something similar for me, if without the noble words or the cigarette. I tried to forget the look of panic on his face as he hustled me into Mr. Hardie’s arms and implored him to put me on the boat. I wanted to kiss Henry’s cheek and make him promise to follow me, but he was intent on whatever he was saying to Mr. Hardie, some last instruction that I was too terrified to absorb, so I didn’t say good-bye to him. I preferred to envision him waving at me from a deck chair rather than floundering around in the cold black water and grasping at sticks from the wreckage. But most of all, I liked to picture him dressed in the suit he had worn at our wedding and waiting for me when I got to New York. Henry could always get a table in a crowded restaurant or tickets to the opera. It’s ironic to think that he worked the same sort of magic when he booked our passage on the
Empress Alexandra.
With war on the horizon, many people were eager to return to America, and first-class tickets were scarce; but when I asked Henry how he did it, he simply said, “It’s a little miracle. The same sort of miracle that brought you to me just when I thought I was going to have to marry Felicity Close.”

Now Mr. Hardie said, “There were more than enough lifeboats for everyone, twenty boats built for forty persons each,” but even with our untrained eyes we could see that the boats had not been designed for forty. Still, it was a useful fiction, enabling me to convince myself that Henry had survived, in spite of the fact that I had seen the chaos of the
Empress Alexandra
’s last minutes with my own eyes. Afterwards, we learned that most of the lifeboats on the starboard side of the ship had burned in the fire and that others had pushed away from the burning wreck half-full.

At four o’clock, we ate our crust of bread and cheese. Colonel Marsh possessed a large pocket watch and Mr. Hardie charged him with keeping track of the hour. Every so often he would call out, “Time, sir!” and the Colonel would pull his watch out of his pocket and announce the hour. He looked very important as he did it, but also as if he were modestly trying to downplay what he saw as a crucial role in the workings of the boat. Earlier, Mr. Hardie had said something about using the watch to gauge our longitude, and they had had a long discussion about how that might be done. Perhaps it was that interchange that gave the Colonel confidence to ask, “Don’t you think you could give us a little more to eat and drink than this? It seems that we have an awful lot, seeing as those ships in the trading route are bound to show up any minute,” and indeed, the biscuit tins and water casks were taking up their share of room in the back of the boat. But Mr. Hardie would not change his plan for rationing the food and water they contained. At first we laughed about it. “Hardie’s a tough master,” we said almost fondly. Though we hardly knew one another, a sense of ourselves in the lifeboat was beginning to form, with Hardie at the center the way a grain of rough sand lies at the very center of a pearl.

The high clouds turned pink and gold, like a painted ceiling that was pierced at intervals by bands of silver light. “Look!” called Mrs. Hewitt, who had been a hotel proprietress; and everyone became silent, for one of the sunbeams had sought out our boat and we floated, awestruck and illuminated, until Mary Ann raised up her voice with the strain of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Predictably, a French maid named Lisette began to cry, and not until the final note did the heavens shift and the lifeboat move into the shadow of a cloud.

There was much talk of what the meaning of that natural or supernatural occurrence had been. The deacon said, “I think we can draw a parallel between the ray of light and the fact that we have all been chosen to be rescued in this boat.”

“We’re hardly rescued yet,” said Hannah. I started to say, “God helps those who help themselves,” but I stopped after the first three words when I saw Mrs. Grant looking at me in an appraising and maybe calculating way. This time she had refrained from singing and seemed to retreat inside herself, aloof from the general feeling of camaraderie conferred upon us by the glorious evening and our sense of gratitude that so far we had been spared. Even after Mr. Hardie made a detailed inventory of supplies and amended his estimate of how long our food and water would last—three to four days, he said now—we did not despair, for it was plenty long enough.

THERE WERE MORE
songs as night fell. Hannah, who seemed to have made fast friends with Mrs. Grant or perhaps had known her from before, was gazing at me in an odd way, and I reflexively put my hand to my hair and started to worry about how I looked. Hannah had gray eyes and long hair that twisted into thick locks when it blew in the wind. She had put a filmy piece of cloth around her shoulders, and it flapped lightly in the breeze the way the wings of a bird might flap if it were really a goddess disguised as a bird. When it came Hannah’s turn to bail, she made a point of switching places with the person beside me, then put her arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear that even here, she found me very beautiful. I was as near to happy as I have ever been—happy in a profound way, I mean. Glad to be alive, but also glad to be the object of another being’s undivided attention. Her breath was warm on my cheek, and when she pulled away from me, our gaze held for a long moment. I reached across and lifted a strand of hair that had blown across her lips and placed it back over her shoulder. I meant to smile to convey to her something of what I felt, but I don’t think I did. Mr. Hardie had looked at me earlier in the day, and I had felt stone cold, both heavy and weightless at once, and while he seemed to see right through me as if I were no more substantial than air, he also seemed to comprehend my very essence, which filled me with the kind of terror the Virgin Mary must have felt when the angel Gabriel came down. Hannah intimidated me, but not nearly as much as Mr. Hardie did, and I was happy to think that she and I might be friends. A matronly woman named Mrs. Cook broke the silence by saying, “Wasn’t that Penelope Cumberland in the other lifeboat?” No one answered her, and after a moment I replied that I had recognized her, too.

“Do you remember how she and her husband wormed their way into places at the captain’s table? Now there was a high-and-mighty one for you. Mrs. Cumberland thought the rest of us were beneath her notice, but what people like that don’t think about is that the noticing goes both ways. I overheard the husband and wife quarreling one day, and it seems Mr. Cumberland’s fortune wasn’t quite as secure as the two of them liked us all to believe. The missus said to him, ‘But we can’t sit there—I won’t have the right sort of dresses!’ to which he replied, ‘No one will notice what you wear.’ ‘As if you would know a thing about what other people notice!’ she said sharply, and then she huffed off.”

A few minutes later, Mrs. Cook whispered to me, “Of course, she acted all charming whenever I came face-to-face with her, but I know what she was thinking. She was thinking that I wasn’t at the captain’s table. She was thinking that a companion is the same thing as a servant and that if it weren’t for Mrs. McCain, I wouldn’t have been in first class at all. She was thinking that Mrs. McCain needed a companion only because she wasn’t married and that a woman without a husband occupies a lower social level than a married woman like herself. And the way the captain looked at her! There was something unsavory going on there, you mark my words.”

It seemed hardly fair that all of Mrs. Cook’s hostility toward the Cumberlands was laid on the milky shoulders of Penelope Cumberland and that, for some reason, Mr. Cumberland got off scot-free. I had found Penelope quite delightful and her husband a bore, but I also knew that wives made easier targets. I tried to point out that people sat at the captain’s table by personal invitation only, and that, as I understood it, those invitations were predicated upon social standing, which contradicted both the notion that the Cumberlands had fallen on hard times and the idea that there was something underhanded about their actions.

“That’s my point exactly!” said Mrs. Cook, either impervious to reason or unwilling to be talked out of her animosity. “They had no social standing, nor money either! I heard the mister talking to Captain Sutter one day. I can’t say I heard what was said exactly, but the gist of it was clear, and after that they didn’t miss a day, always sweeping into the dining room ahead of everyone and demanding to be seated first. You were at the captain’s table, weren’t you, Grace? Did the Cumberlands ever explain why they started sitting there?”

“Not to me, they didn’t, and I would never have asked. It’s my experience that we can come up with five reasons why something might have happened, and the truth will always be the sixth.” I did happen to know something about the Cumberlands, but I had been sworn to secrecy, and I didn’t see any reason to enlighten a busybody like Mrs. Cook.

Of course, trying to stop Mrs. Cook from speculating was like trying to stop an ocean wave mid-swell, and she went on with her usual categorizing and generalizations. She considered herself a grand storyteller, and the people sitting near her would listen with rapt attention. When they asked questions, she would make up details and theories to please them. Now she said, “People who are used to having money are mortified by the idea that someday their circumstances might change. You and Mr. Winter were very comfortable, weren’t you, Grace? Wasn’t the idea of not being so something you would be horrified to consider?”

I had been taught that money was not a fit subject for conversation, so I replied firmly that Henry handled the financial matters in our family and that I rarely thought about them, if I ever did.

Mrs. Cook’s stories were intimate, often told in a conspiratorial whisper to interested parties, who had to be sitting near her, and even then we sometimes had to lean toward her in order to hear. Mr. Sinclair, on the other hand, was something of a scholar and would tell us stories about things he had read. He had a booming voice and often claimed the entire boat as his audience, particularly at night, when sounds seemed to travel farther than they did during the day. I don’t know how the subject of memory arose, but Mr. Sinclair informed us that as far back as the fourth century
BC
, Aristotle was writing about it in a scientific way. “Aristotle determined that memory has only to do with the past, not with the present or the future,” he began, only to be interrupted by Mr. Hoffman, who scoffed, “I could have told you that!” But I asked Mr. Hoffman to be quiet, and Mr. Sinclair went on.

“Aristotle distinguished between ‘memory,’ which he said even slow people are good at, and ‘recollection,’ at which clever people excel.” I don’t remember what he said next, but I understood him to mean that there could be no memory of the present, which involves only the perception of our senses, and that memory is the recoverable impression of a past event. Recollecting, however, is the recovery itself—the investigation or mnemonic process that leads one to a memory that is not instantly retrievable. I think about this now, since writing this account has involved much recollecting. Sometimes I remember one occurrence, and only later does another thing that happened come to mind, which leads to yet another and so on, in a long chain.

Another time Mr. Sinclair told us about Sigmund Freud, who was revolutionizing the science of the mind and had written not so much about remembering as about forgetting and how forgetting always relates to the life drives, the greatest of which are to reproduce and to avoid death. In any case, I considered Mr. Sinclair the better storyteller, but most of the other women preferred Mrs. Cook.

The night was moonless, and the air became increasingly oppressive and damp. My good feelings of the evening were gradually extinguished, though nothing particularly bad had happened except that Mr. Hardie remarked to Mr. Hoffman that before morning it would rain. A kind of unhinged laughter rippled through the boat when we imagined what new wretchedness rain would bring.

After that, the talk stopped and we were left alone with our thoughts and the musical sound of the water against the bottom of the boat. Remarkably, we all slept those first nights, either taking our turn in the dormitory or leaning against each other or putting our heads in willing laps. We explained this by saying that we were exhausted, shocked—not knowing the depths our shock and exhaustion would eventually reach—but optimistic, practicing in our heads the language with which we would present our experiences when we got home.

Sometime around midnight I was awakened by shouts. A man’s voice called out that he had seen lights in the distance. The sighting was unconfirmed, and though my eyes strained to pierce the obscurity of the night, I could see nothing. I slept again, and when I awoke just before dawn, I rose, intending to make my way to the little lavatory Henry and I had used on the ship before I remembered where I was and stuck one of the bailers up under my dress and urinated into it, making fussy little adjustments to my clothing and trying not to attract attention to myself. I mildly resented the men, who made no bones about unbuttoning their trousers and sending frothy streams out over the side of the boat. As time went on, this became less of a problem, for we were taking in so little water that our need to relieve ourselves became more and more infrequent. Even so, our resentments didn’t disappear. They only found new differences on which to light.