This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (6 page)

A
flipper here, a bumper there, a kicker, a spinner, a rollover, and ding-dong-ding, we’re in the waning days of 1953.

Who is that striking young lady just left of the mistletoe, poised in the sapphire blue evening dress with the portrait collar, looking ladylike in her long white gloves—the one who looks like a slightly chubby Susan Hayward? Well, in the right light, anyway, at the right angle, after enough buttered rum. Why, it’s you, Harriet Nathan, at your father’s Christmas party. Teddy Ballgame is six months back from Korea (along with your future husband). They’ve got a chimp on television now. They say this H-bomb makes Little Boy look like a party favor. And it’s not just bombs—everything is getting bigger and louder.

Look at you, Harriet, hair expertly coiffed, hobnobbing with the partners like you were born to it. So composed, so effortlessly buoyant, as you play the part of a woman. At forty, you’ll wonder what became of all that finesse, all that poise. But for now, your father is grooming you. If he has his way, you’ll be a credit to your sex. Weekdays, you’ll trade evening dresses for a woman’s business attire. You’ll make a name for yourself. Or better yet, you’ll stick with the name you were given. The click of your heels down courthouse corridors will one day strike fear in the hearts of opposing counsel.

Your father’s ambition is contagious, and maybe not beyond your reach. Next year, you’ll graduate high school and pursue that law degree he’s picked out for you. From there, with enough elbow grease, a formidable network, and a little luck, it’s up up up, Ms. Nathan. The world is your oyster.

But let us not forget, you’re only a girl, Harriet. Only seven weeks removed from your seventeenth birthday. You still dream of horses, still slurp malted milks and play pinball down at Sully’s. You’ve only been past first base a few times, and God knows, they didn’t really count (how could they!). You’re still not sure what you want for yourself or to which pressures you might succumb. Yes, Harriet, behind that feminine mystique is a girl who just got her drivers’ license last summer.

Maybe Charlie Fitzsimmons didn’t get the memo. Maybe he ignored it. Wouldn’t be the first time. Charlie has a way of getting around rules. The man can smell a loophole ten miles
away. Yes, the whiz kid is fast becoming Old Charlie. After twenty years at the firm, he’s practically family. Like a trusted uncle, or an uncle, anyway. It’s complicated. Charlie confides in you, always has, ever since you were a kid.

Tonight is no exception. In the half-darkened hallway, where you’ve just emerged from straightening your hair in the washroom, and you’ve barely replaced your white gloves, Charlie all but corners you. Desperate for somebody’s confidence, he tells you—you, of all people, Harriet Nathan—of his plans to leave the firm and start his own shop. They keep adding names to the marble slab, but Nathan will always be first. Charlie wants his own shingle. Yes, Charlie’s ambitious, too. He gets what he wants. And he never forgets a friend. He’ll have a job waiting for you, he promises, but you mustn’t tell your father of his plans. Deal?

Smell his cologne, smell the rum on his breath, as he crowds in so close you can’t tell where one smell ends and the other begins. All but pinning you to the wall, he whispers. What surprises you about his groping hands is their boyish clumsiness.

In six months, Charlie Fitzsimmons will make good on his plans and leave the firm, opening his own shop less than two blocks away. Though there’s a few hard feelings with the Nathans, Charlie will remain a presence in your life, dropping you a line now and then as you pursue your degree, and each time he’ll remind you of that job that’s waiting for you.

You’ll never breathe a word of it to your father.

W
hen Caroline pulls into Departures, easing to a stop curbside behind a long line of yellow cabs, the reception area is swarming with humanity.

“They probably won’t let me go all the way, Mom. But let me at least park and help you as far as check-in.”

“No, dear. I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, of course.”

As they say their good-byes, Caroline eases back into traffic. Harriet stands in place, watching as the Mazda rounds the corner. As usual, she feels as though she’s missed an opportunity.

A voice from behind startles her. Harriet turns to find
herself facing an unfortunate young man with acne-scarred cheeks.

“May I check your bags?” he says.

“Oh, no,” Harriet says, gripping her wheelie bag tighter. “Thank you, dear, I’m keeping my bags with me.”

She’s heard too many horror stories about mischecked and mismanaged luggage. Why, Barbara Chatsworth’s trip to Omaha had been virtually ruined last Christmas when her bags ended up in Wichita. The poor dear had to wear her son’s old Mackinaw jacket to
The Nutcracker.
And if that weren’t enough, she couldn’t curl her hair for a week.

“But ma’am, if you let me check it, the baggage will be waiting for you in your cabin,” he says, reaching for the wheelie bag.

“No thank you, dear.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, with a shrug. “But you’ll have to roll the bag through customs and the rest of it. It’s a hassle.” He looks down at her, doubtfully. “And it’s hot in there, ma’am.”

Though the young man is making good sense, Harriet can’t stop thinking about Barbara Chatsworth in that baggy Mackinaw, her hair hanging in straggles. How dull the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy must have sounded to poor Barbara that evening.

“All the same, I’ll just keep the bag with me. Now, could you kindly direct me to my vessel, dear?”

He waves vaguely down the corridor. “Just follow the signs.”

Hobbling into the fray, Harriet finds herself immediately disoriented by all the activity. The bright corridor is crammed wall-to-wall with people, every last one of them moving more purposefully than Harriet. Within thirty feet, she regrets not having checked the bag. By the time she reaches the dogleg, where the corridor empties into a giant terminal, the mass of people spreading out like liquid, Harriet is out of breath.

There are signs, all right. Too many. Some of them in foreign languages. There are arrows, hallways, monitors, glass doors, and kiosks—all of them beginning to look a little fuzzy around the edges. Weak in the knees, Harriet spins a slow half circle, scanning the terminal, looking desperately for a uniform—any uniform. But the longer Harriet searches, the closer her uneasiness noses toward anxiety.

Finally, like an angel, she appears: a smooth-faced Asian woman, whose age Harriet puts somewhere between thirteen and forty-five. An almond-eyed beauty, with no makeup and no wedding ring. She sets the daintiest of hands on Harriet’s back.

“You are lost?” she says.

“Yes, dear, I’m afraid I am.”

“Do you have boarding pass?”

Harriet digs her plastic pouch out of her purse and begins rummaging through it.

“May I?” the woman gently urges.

“Please,” says Harriet, handing over the pouch.

The woman flips through the papers efficiently until she locates the boarding pass, which she surveys expertly.

“Ah,” she says. “Follow me.”

“You’re a lifesaver, dear.”

“Call me Sinta.”

Not only does dear Sinta escort Harriet through the labyrinthine confusion of the central terminal to customs, all the while maintaining a manageable pace, she is kind enough to convey the wheelie bag for the duration of the journey. Sinta even offers to assist Harriet with her declaration forms.

“Oh, no, I’ll be fine, thank you,” she hears herself saying.

The twenty minutes it takes to fill out her declaration forms proves restful. Nerves settled, Harriet joins the customs line, which switches back and forth at least twenty times on its way across a giant receiving room. Line is a misnomer—it’s a throng, a veritable stockyard. The young man with the pitted cheeks had not been exaggerating the conditions: it’s hot in there, all right. Stifling. The air is oppressive, the odors too various to catalog—butter, sweat, the unmistakable boiled-egg offal of flatulence. And Harriet is certain she’s identified the culprit on the latter count: the morbidly obese fellow in a sleeveless T-shirt, the one with the dirty baseball cap that says
DAMN STRAIGHT
! A gentleman might have had the decency to step out of line and find a bathroom. At the very least, he might apologize. And certainly his shirt would have sleeves.

The longer Harriet lingers in the interminable line, creeping forward by the tiniest of increments, the lower her opinion of humanity sinks. Gads, but look at us. Like cattle. Sweating, stinking, overfed cattle. Surely, the species is devolving, even as culture accelerates, speeding headlong at an unstoppable
pace toward what was sure to be a brick wall. Values erode, as waistlines bulge, timeworn conventions like polite deference to elders and good citizenry go the way of the powdered wig. And eventually, sleeves disappear.

Oh, Harriet knows she’s simply exhausted, she knows if she could ever manage to locate her cabin and get off her feet for a few minutes, her attitude would improve. Finally, after forty-five minutes of glacial progress, Harriet reaches the front of the line and at some length proffers her passport and forms as the customs agent, his reading glasses roosting on the bridge of his nose, peers benignly down at her from his podium, subjecting the passport to a cursory once-over before passing it back.

“Not packing any fruits or vegetables?”

“No.”

“Not carrying in excess of ten thousand dollars in Canadian currency?”

“Heavens, no. Will I be needing Canadian currency on board?”

“No ma’am. Are you transporting anything on behalf of a second party, or were you approached or otherwise solicited to transport goods on anyone else’s behalf?”

“Pardon me? I don’t understand. Do you mean Sinta?”

The customs agent says something quietly over his shoulder to a security officer. The next thing Harriet knows, a second agent is at her elbow, asking her to step aside, even as the officer steps forward, taking possession of her wheelie bag.

“Is there some problem?” Harriet inquires.

But neither the officer or the second agent are willing to offer her an explanation. “This way, please,” says the agent.

Bewildered, Harriet is escorted down a hallway to a nearby holding room, one of several small, less-than-cheery rooms on either side of the corridor.

“Sit, please,” says the officer as the second agent leaves the room. Harriet’s heart is racing as she lowers herself into a metal folding chair.

The officer, a younger man than either of the agents, with muscular arms and a slight underbite, pulls up a second folding chair and seats himself directly across from Harriet, whereupon he silently considers her for what feels like an eternity.

“Who is Sinta?”

“You mean the young lady who assisted me with my bag?”

He frowns. “Do you know Sinta? What’s her last name?”

“I have no idea. I assumed she worked here.”

“She approached you? Where? In the terminal?”

“Yes. She could see I was quite lost. I might have fallen to the floor and had a heart attack in there, and people would have stepped right over me. Sinta was the only one kind enough to help me with my bag.”

“So, she touched the bag?”

“She rolled the blasted thing clear across the terminal. If it weren’t for the dear woman, I might never have arrived here.”

“I see. Did she ask you to transport anything for her?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did she open your bag or your purse? Did she offer you anything?”

“Why, she only helped me with my papers.”

The officer looks down at her grimly. “What papers? She touched them?”

Even as he drills her, Harriet can see two dark-haired men through the glass, rummaging through her wheelie bag. All that meticulous packing, all that tucking and folding and consolidating for nothing.

“What is the meaning of this? Just what are you alluding to with all of these questions? And why are those men making a shambles of my toiletries?”

No sooner does Harriet lodge this complaint than she sees one of the dark-haired officials unearth the Greek yogurt container from the bottom of her suitcase. Subjecting the parcel to a wary visual inspection, he soon hands it off to the other man, who proceeds to shake the receptacle a number of times like a maraca. Much to Harriet’s discomfiture, he promptly removes the seal, peels back the lid, and peers down into the depths, which both men regard with suspicion, alternately sniffing and discussing the contents before the taller of the two men, a reedy fellow with dark circles beneath his eyes, inexplicably dips a tentative finger into Bernard’s remains and touches it to his tongue.

Harriet shoots up from her chair. “Good heavens, what are they doing?”

But before she can protest further, she watches through the glass as a rather skittish Doberman pinscher is escorted into the room and persuaded to sniff Bernard’s mortal remains.

“What on earth? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Do I look like a terrorist to you? For heaven’s sake, I’m Episcopalian!”

Before Harriet can finish dressing down the officer, the man with the dark circles pokes his head in.

“She’s clean,” he says.

The officer frowns. Resting his hands on his knees, he pushes himself out of his chair. “We’re sorry about the inconvenience, ma’am.”

Across the hall, Harriet is forced to produce her passport again and sign for her bags. She’s led down the hallway and delivered to an empty podium at the head of another receiving area, where instantly she’s relieved to spot a sign that says
MS ZUIDERDAM
. She can’t help but beam her approval at the young woman who greets her at the podium.

“May I see your boarding pass and your declaration form, please?”

Harriet nimbly produces the items from her pouch and passes them to the young woman, who inspects them both smilingly before passing them back.

“Perfect,” she says, turning her attention to her computer, where her fingers begin tap-dancing on the keyboard. “Hmm,” she says, after a lot of tapping. “It says here we don’t have your questionnaire.”

“Excuse me?”

“You were supposed to fill out a hospitality questionnaire online.”

“Dear, but I—”

“How did you book your reservation?”

“By telephone, of course.”

“So you never received the questionnaire?”

“No.”

The woman frowns. “Wait here.”

She confers in low tones with a bearded associate as a line begins to stack up behind Harriet. When the woman returns, she’s clutching a packet. Harriet’s heart sinks.

“Ma’am, can I ask you to step aside here? Just have a seat at that table, and someone will be right with you.”

She corrals Harriet briskly to a nearby fold-out table, where she pulls out a chair.

“Go ahead and fill this out,” she says, producing a pen from behind her ear.

Harriet looks dully down at the packet, weary beyond outrage. Mechanically, she picks up the pen and begins filling out the questionnaire.

Ten minutes after completing the packet, nobody has come for her. Her patience, already frayed at the edges, begins to unravel. She’s ready to stand up and begin yelling, ready to take somebody to task. My God, her hands are shaking by the time another young woman arrives to collect her packet. Harriet scarcely has time to begin complaining before she’s promptly presented to yet another agent and asked to
surrender her boarding pass again. The young man scans the paper with a red light, producing a beep, then smiles.

“Enjoy your cruise,” he says. “Watch your step.”

And just like that, the ordeal is over. Harriet passes through a sliding glass door and begins inching her way up the pier toward the gangway.