The Memory of Eva Ryker (42 page)

Martha Klein suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage on June 12, 1963, ten days before her first scheduled court appearance in London. She regained consciousness but could no longer speak or walk. The doctors couldn't be sure how much of her mind was intact. Tom Bramel arranged a quiet transfer from prison to a state home in Pimlico. She spent her days sitting by a window overlooking a serene garden of forsythia and poplars. I once went to see her, but she gave no sign of noticing I was alive.

Her only other visitor was the recently widowed Mima Heinley. Fred had left her a tidy sum of money, and she chose to spend a summer holiday in England. Mima held a gentle but unshakable faith in her old neighbor. No one person, she would say, could be responsible for so much evil. The Kleins had been her best friends and she wasn't about to forget it.

So Mima came on visiting days, piloting Martha's wheelchair in the garden and softly chortling over old times.

Martha just smiled. Endlessly.

William Ryker died the day after Thanksgiving, 1963. He chose an unfortunate date of passing. I was still numb from the days of vigil by the television, listening to the endless funeral roll of drums down Pennsylvania Avenue, heralding the fall of Camelot.

The cause of death was listed as “acute pulmonary failure.” Newspaper and television obituaries were halfhearted, perfunctory. For the moment, at least, people had lost their appetite for unhappy endings.

I was in Hollywood at the time, doing research on William Cameron Menzies for a forthcoming book about the making of
Gone With the Wind
. The telegram came to my room at the Beverly Wilshire.

“
NO DOUBT YOU HAVE HEARD THE NEWS
,” Eva said, “
PLEASE COME HALIFAX FAIRVIEW CEMETERY, NOVEMBER
30, 9
AM AND HELP ME COPE
.”

Ryker, I later learned, had purchased a plot untold years ago at the Fairview Cemetery, hoping that Clair was among the anonymous graves of
Titanic
victims. As time passed and he learned the truth in painful bits and snatches from Eva, his faith must have faded. But William Ryker did not easily cast aside an idea that had taken root.

I hate funerals. This isn't a recent conclusion. The Dallas shooting merely reenforced an old prejudice. A tribal rite cooked up to prolong human torment. I stood at the foot of the silver casket with snow in my socks and a white carnation in my lapel, feeling like a damn fool.

There weren't many others. The Old Man had been very specific on that point. No big fuss. An unmarked grave set in the middle of the cemetery, shoulder to shoulder with other faceless victims.

Mike Rogers, Fräulein Slote, and I were the pallbearers. Geoffrey Proctor had canceled at the last moment. Just we three, Eva, the Reverend Thomas Haggarty, and, oddly enough, Ruth and Harold Masterson.

The Reverend muttered his ritual words of consolation. I looked up at the sky. Slate gray, much the same as the first time I came to this place after my release from Victoria General nineteen months ago. A train moaned far down the neighboring tracks, threatening to compete with the Reverend for attention.

“… ashes to ashes, dust to dust … Amen.” It was finished. Mike Rogers pushed a foot treadle and the casket began to sink beneath the surrounding ring of lilies, delphiniums, and tropicana roses.

I felt a hand grasp mine and hold tight. Eva's face was obscured by a huge veiled hat which made her look like a beekeeper in mourning. We stood together and watched the gleaming coffin disappear. Elegant letters were inscribed on the lid:
WILLIAM ALFRED RYKER
1877–1963.

Our little group broke formation, leaving the funeral director and his men to finish their work.

“I'll get the car,” she whispered, hurrying away.

I caught up with Mike Rogers, threading his way through the maze of headstones.

“Well, Norm …” he said, stuffily shaking my hand, “I appreciate your help.” Mike kicked the snow into a little mound at his feet. “Even though I don't quite understand it. Why
did
you come?”

“A personal favor. Coupled with a little unwholesome curiosity.”

“Whatever your reasons, Mr. Ryker would've been pleased. I think.”

An awkward pause. His shoe added to the snow pile.

“So, Mike. What happens next?”

“How's that?”

“To you. And the big career.”

He scratched his head. “Oh, I haven't thought about it much. There's enough unfinished business at the Ryker Corporation to tie me up for years.”

“… if you let yourself be snarled. A bright young man like you must have better things to do besides cleaning out the Old Man's stable.”

Mike smiled coldly. “Are you trying to be helpful, Norman? Or merely snotty?”

“A little of both. I have a natural writer's interest in hustlers. They're so much more colorful than the decent mediocre herd.”

“Your interest is flattering. Are you going to give me some hallowed advice?”

“Not really. But I was struck by something, standing by the coffin.” I pointed over his shoulder at the men with their flying shovels. “Sixty years ago he was just like you. Push and shove to the big time. You saw for yourself all the inner peace it brought him. And here he lies. All in all, not an enviable life.”

A double-toned horn blasted in my ear. Looking beyond the cemetery gates, I saw Eva's black-gloved hand waving from the front seat of a red Maserati Ghibli.

“Got to go, Mike. Best of luck.”

She was already at the wheel, revving as I slid in the seat. Burned rubber smoked behind us as we screeched around the indignant Cadillac hearse and limousine, speeding down Chishom Avenue.

Eva tore off her veil and tossed it in back. “I want to thank you for coming, Norman. I don't think I could have gotten through all the crap without you.”

I smiled as we wheeled onto Connaught Avenue. “I won't say ‘my pleasure' because I'd be lying. But I'm not sorry I came.” I frowned as we stopped at a signal. “You know, in the end, he seemed so … alone.”

“He wanted it that way, Norman. I'm not sure he'd approve of your gate-crashing.”

“Did he hate me that much?”

“He blamed you for a lot of misery in his life.”

“You expect an apology?”

“Hell no.” She floored the Maserati through a yellow light. “All his precious schemes. Daddy reveled in his role of puppet-master. Where did it get him?”

“No diamonds, anyway.”

“Well, at least there's some justice in the world.” Her eyes bleakly surveyed the ice-slick asphalt flashing beneath us. “Some things should be laid to rest. Like the
Titanic
. All the hate and grief because of that ship. Bringing it to light was like indecent exposure.”

I glanced at the scar above her right eye. “You kept it covered for fifty years, and it didn't do you much good.”

“You're right, of course. Like always. Jesus, your head must ache from being so right all of the time!”

We sat in silence until Eva turned onto Quippool Road. “How's Jan?” she asked.

“Bedridden with a cold. Otherwise she'd have come.”

“H'm.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does
what
mean?” she replied innocently.

“The grunt of skepticism.”

“Must you analyze every last twitch of the eyebrow?”

I didn't answer. She sighed lowly. “It's just that your wife puzzles me. After all, she must wonder about us.”

“Maybe. But then,
I
wonder about us. Occasionally.”

Eva neatly zipped around a double-parked Ford. “No angry confrontations? No bitchy tantrums of jealousy?”

“Hardly. I told her the truth.”

“With a capital T?”

My head nodded:

“And did it Set You Free?”

“More of a long-term parole.”

She laughed, spinning the wheel that turned us onto Robie Street.

“What about you, Eva?”

“What about me?”

“You still going to play games? The Rich Heiress dancing on Departed Daddy's grave? It'll get very stale very fast.”

“What's this?” She raised an eyebrow my way. “Sermonette?”

“That's about it.”

“God, what do you want? A Five Year Plan of my Golden Years?”

“No one's asking you to enter a convent, Eva. But you have to do something besides … drift.”

“Norman, you really are getting increasingly pompous as the months wear on. Why don't you mind your own business?”

I leaned against the console as the car hooked a left onto South Street, grumbling on its snow tires. “You are my business. You have been since that night on the beach.”

“How romantic! I'm swooning.”

“Goddamit, Eva! Can't we scrape away the bullshit just this once?”

We braked at a red light. She closed her eyes. “Shut up. Please.”

“You lived in a sewer and I threw it in your face. I acted selfishly and I try to shrug off any guilt. But how am I supposed to feel if nothing's changed for you?”

“Norman,” she whispered, blinking furiously, “how do you manage to be so stupendously brilliant and idiotic at the same time?”

We looked at each other; it was one of those moments I'd rather not discuss.

The car in back of us honked in protest. Eva gulped at the green light and surged ahead.

We didn't speak until the Maserati turned into the driveway of the Lord Nelson Hotel. Shifting into neutral, Eva let the engine idle, both hands clamped on the wheel.

“Here's the place,” she chirped in ghastly brightness.

I got out, then bent down through my open window. “Eva …”

“Norman, I know what you'd like me to say. That I'll start off scrubbed and untarnished in a brave new life. But, you know, I turned sixty-two this last birthday. Every time I'm feeling especially courageous, I see that forest of candles on the cake.

“Never too late to grow up, Eva. Just think of the first sixty years as a long, protracted puberty.”

Against her will she returned my smile. “You're a bastard, Norman.” She kissed my lips. “Don't let the world mellow you.”

For a long time I stood and watched the red Maserati dwindle down Bell Road until it was lost in the confetti flurry of snowflakes.

I never saw her again.

Postscript 2

January 7, 1963

Twelve thousand four hundred eighty-two feet under the surface of the Atlantic Ocean the lights went out.

The quartz-halogen lamps stationed for ten months to illuminate the R.M.S.
Titanic
were uprooted by the
Marianas
and
Neptune
. Clenching onto the searchlights with their stainless steel claws, the two bathyscaphs began the slow ascent to the surface.

Their running lights twinkled above the wreckage; four red and green stars fading to blackness as the low vibrations from their propellers ceased to run through the water.

Thus the
Titanic
was left as it had been since the morning of April 15, 1912. Unwanted and abandoned.

The ship has new torch scars along its hull and superstructure, testifying to human meddling. Coins and cups and St. Christophers that had once rested below decks were now lying beneath plate glass in museums. But William Ryker began the exploration of the
Titanic
in search of one particular prize that after ten months remained elusive. The man and the machines at his command had at last given up. And the ship's previous tenants started returning home.

Some had never left. The prawns and lantern fish, among others, stayed with the wreckage during the long months of the salvage project. They scuttled among the passageways and broken funnels, snatching at plankton settling from the surface of the sea.

But many fish stayed away. Adapted to the blackness of the ocean floor, they were frightened by the glare of the lamps, which were, to them, brighter than the light of a thousand suns. Men had to leave before they returned and a normal pattern of life resumed aboard the
Titanic
.

It was in many ways a nightmare world. Generation upon generation hatched and grew and died in the dark bowels of the ship, where once huge men with great glistening torsos had stoked coal into the mouths of blazing boilers. Viper fish with luminescent tendrils for snaring prey prowled through the first-class corridors, only to be devoured by larger and craftier enemies.

One particularly successful predator was a six-year-old male of a type known to man as Melanocetus Johnsoni. His large belly was designed to expand upon swallowing an unusually large victim. The constant search for food had brought him to the
Titanic's
bow, where tiny remnants from the ship's cargo hold littered the silt below. Lurking among low rocks embedded in the sand, his belly scraped against sharp strands of baling wire.

The fish flailed in an instinctive evading maneuver and fled from the unexpected source of pain. He left behind a cloud of sand and silt which quickly resettled on the surface.

The baling wire now freshly covered from sight had once wrapped a crate labeled “Ryker Industries.” The original wood had of course dissolved many years earlier, but some of the contents remained intact.

Lying several inches beneath the sand was a glass apothecary jar. A gum label, long since gone, had once designated the jar as containing three dozen of Mrs. Mannfred's Miracle Capsules.

The capsules survived, although seeping seawater had eaten the sugar coating. Each of the three dozen capsules was an uncut diamond. The stones were unperturbed by the elements. By nature, diamonds play a cold and patient game of hide-and-seek.

Two miles above the
Savonarola
was firing its diesels for the trip to Halifax. Those aboard the
Titanic
neither knew nor cared.

The ship and the diamonds sat in the dark and waited.

Forever.

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