Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (11 page)

“But nothing does go with life,” echoed the Englishman.

“If you feel,” interrupted Lady Parsnips, “that we are now well
enough established in the eyes of our public, we might have some more champagne.”

“Oh, yes, it’s better to be well started on our dissolution before the storm begins.”

“I’ve never seen a storm at sea. I suppose it will be a fiasco after all they’ve led us to expect.”

“The theory is not to drown, I believe.”

“But, my dear, my husband says you’re safer on a boat than anywhere at all if you’re at sea when there’s a storm.”

“Oh, much better off.”

“Decidedly.”

It began very suddenly. A billiard table crashed a pillar in the salon. The sound of splintering subdued the ship like a presage of death. A quiet, desperate organization pervaded the boat. Stewards sped through the corridors, hastily lashing the trunks to the washbasins. By midnight the ropes were broken and fixtures loosened from the walls. Water flooded the ventilators and sogged the passage and word went round that the ship had lost her radio.

The stewards and stewardesses stood in formation at the foot of the stairway. The strained faces and roving, self-conscious eyes of people whose routed confidence would lead you to believe that they are contemptuous of the forces which dissipate their superficial disciplinary strength to a more direct egotism, surprised Alabama. She’d never thought of training as being superimposed on temperaments, but as temperaments being fit to carry the burden of selfless routines.

“Everybody can share the worst things,” she thought as she dashed along the soggy corridors to her cabin, “but there’s almost nobody at the top. I s’pose that’s why my father was always so alone.” A heave threw her across from one berth to another. Her back felt as if it must be broken. “Oh, God, can’t it stop rocking for a minute, before it goes down?”

Bonnie peered at her mother dubiously. “Don’t be ’fraid,” said the child.

Alabama was scared half to death.

“I’m not frightened, dear,” she said. “Bonnie, if you move from the berth you will be killed, so lie there and hold on to the sides while I look for Daddy.”

Rocking and whipping with the ship, she clung to the rails. The faces of the personnel stared at her blankly as she passed, as if she had lost her mind.

“Why don’t they signal for the lifeboats?” Alabama shrieked hysterically in the calm face of the radio officer.

“Go back to your cabin,” he said. “No boat could be launched in a sea like this.”

She found David in the bar with Lord Priestly-Parsnips. The tables were massed one on top of the other; heavy chairs were bolted to the floor and bound with ropes. They were drinking champagne, sloshing it over the place like tilted slop pails.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen since I came back from Algiers. Then I literally walked on my cabin walls,” milord was saying placidly, “and then, too, the transport during the war was pretty bad. I thought we should certainly lose her for ages.”

Alabama crawled across the bar, lunging from one post to another. “David, you’ve got to come down to the cabin.”

“But, dearest,” he protested—he was fairly sober, more so than the Englishman, anyway—“what on earth can
I
do?”

“I thought we’d better all go down together——”

“Rot!”

Launching herself along the room, she heard the Britisher’s voice trailing after her, “Isn’t it funny how danger makes people passionate? During the war——”

Frightened, she felt very second rate. The cabin seemed to grow smaller and smaller as if the reiterant shocks were mashing in the sides. After a while she grew accustomed to the suffocation and the intestinal ripping. Bonnie slept quietly by her side.

There was nothing but water outside the porthole, no sky at all. The motion made her whole body itch. She thought all night that they would be dead by morning.

By morning Alabama was too sick and nervous to bear the stateroom any longer. David helped her along the rail to the bar. Lord Parsnips slept in a corner. A low conversation issued from the backs of two deep leather chairs. She ordered a baked potato and listened, wishing something would prevent the two men from talking. “I’m very antisocial,” she tabulated. David said all women were. “I guess so,” she thought resignedly.

One of the voices resounded with the conviction of learning. It had the tone with which doctors of mediocre intelligence expound the medical theories of more brilliant colleagues to their patients. The other spoke with the querulous ponderousness of a voice which is dominant only in the subconscious.

“It’s the first time I ever started thinking about things like that—about
the people in Africa and all over the world. It made me think that men don’t know as much as they think they do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, hundreds of years ago those fellows knew nearly as much about saving life as we do. Nature certainly looks after itself. You can’t kill anything that’s going to live.”

“Yes, you can’t exterminate anything that’s got a will to live. You can’t kill ’em!”

The voice grew alarmingly accusative. The other voice changed the subject defensively.

“Did you go to many shows in New York?”

“Three or four, and of all the trivial indecent things! You never get a thing to take away with you. There’s nothing to it,” the second voice welled in accusation.

“They’ve got to give the public what it wants.”

“I was talking to a newspaperman the other day and he said just that, and I told him just look at
The Cincinnati Enquirer
. They never carry a word of all this scandal and stuff, and it’s one of the biggest papers in the country.”

“It’s not the public—they have to take what they get.”

“Of course, I just go myself to see what’s doing.”

“I don’t go much myself—not more than three or four times a month.”

Alabama staggered to her feet. “I can’t stand it!” she said. The bar smelled of olive brine and dead ashes. “Tell the man I want the potato outdoors.”

Clinging to the rail, she reached the back sun parlor. A gigantic swish and suction burst over the deck. She heard the chairs go overboard. The waves closed like marble tombstones over her vision and opened again and no water showed. The boat floated precariously in the sky.

“Everything in America is like its storms,” drawled the Englishman, “or would you say we were in Europe?”

“Englishmen are never frightened,” she remarked.

“Don’t worry about Bonnie, Alabama,” said David. “She’s, after all, a child. She doesn’t feel things very much, yet.”

“Then it would be more horrible if anything should happen to her!”

“No. If I had to choose between the saving of you two theoretically, I’d take the proven material.”

“I wouldn’t. I’d save her first. She may be some wonderful person.”

“Maybe, but none of us are, and we know
we’re
not absolutely terrible.”

“Seriously, David, do you think we’ll get through?”

“The purser says it’s a Florida tidal wave with a ninety-mile wind—seventy’s a hurricane. The ship’s listing thirty-seven degrees. It won’t go over till we hit forty. They think the wind may drop. Anyway, we can’t do anything about it.”

“No. What do you think about?”

“Nothing. I’m ashamed to confess, I’ve been having too many
fines
. It’s made me sort of sick.”

“I don’t think, either. The elements are splendid—I don’t really care if we sink. I’ve grown very savage.”

“Yes, when we find we have to dispense with so much of ourselves to function, we do—to save the rest.”

“Anyway, there’s nobody in this boat or in any other gathering I have examined at first hand that it would matter a damn if they were lost.”

“You mean geniuses?”

“No. Links in that intangible thread of evolution which we call first science, then civilization—instruments of purpose.”

“As denominators to sense the past?”

“More to imagine the future.”

“Like your father?”

“In a way. He’s done his job.”

“So have the others.”

“But they don’t know it. Consciousness is the goal, I feel.”

“Then the direction of education should be to teach us to dramatize ourselves, to realize to the fullest extent the human equipment?”

“That’s what I think.”

“Well, it’s hooey!”

After three days the salon opened its doors again. Bonnie clamored to see the ship’s movie.

“Do you think she ought to? I believe it’s full of sex appeal,” Alabama said.

“Most certainly,” replied Lady Sylvia. “If I had a daughter, I’d send her to every performance so she should learn something useful for when she grew up. After all, it’s the parents who pay.”

“I don’t know what I think about things.”

“Nor I—but sex appeal is in a class by itself, my dear.”

“Which would you rather have, Bonnie, sex appeal or a walk in the sun on the deck?”

Bonnie was two, priestess of obscure wisdoms and reverenced of her
parents as if she were two hundred. The Knight household having exhausted the baby interest during the long months of weaning, her standing was that of a voting member.

“Bonnie walks
afterwards
,” the child responded promptly.

The air felt already very un-American. The sky was less energetic. The luxuriance of Europe had blown up with the storm.

Clamp—clamp—clamp—clamp, their feet fell on the resounding deck. She and Bonnie stopped against the rail.

“A ship must be very pretty passing in the night,” said Alabama.

“See the dipper?” pointed Bonnie.

“I see Time and Space wedded in painted static. I have seen it in a little glass case in a planetarium, the way it was years ago.”

“Did it change?”

“No, people just saw it differently. It was something different from what they were thinking all along.”

The air was salty, such beautiful air, from the ship’s rail.

“It’s the quantity makes it so beautiful,” thought Alabama. “Immensity is the most beautiful of all things.”

A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebular hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.

“It’s pretty,” said Bonnie.

“This will be in a case for your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren.”

“Child’en’s child’en in a case,” commented Bonnie profoundly.

“No, dear, the stars! Perhaps they will use the same case—externals seem to be all that survive.”

Clamp—clamp! Clamp—clamp! round the deck they went. The night air felt so good.

“You must go to bed, my baby.”

“There won’t be any stars when I wake up.”

“There will be others.”

David and Alabama climbed together to the prow of the boat. Phosphorescent, their faces gleamed in the moonlight. They sat on a coil of rope and looked back on the netted silhouette.

“Your picture of a boat was wrong; those funnels are ladies doing a very courteous minuet,” she commented.

“Maybe. The moon makes things different. I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“It spoils the darkness.”

“Oh, but it’s so unhallowed!” Alabama rose to her feet. Contracting her neck, she pulled herself high on her toes.

“David, I’ll fly for you, if you’ll love me!”

“Fly, then.”

“I can’t fly, but love me anyway.”

“Poor wingless child!”

“Is it so hard to love me?”

“Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?”

“I did so want to be paid, somehow, for my soul.”

“Collect from the moon—you’ll find the address under Brooklyn and Queens.”

“David! I love you even when you are attractive.”

“Which isn’t very often.”

“Yes, often and most impersonal.”

Alabama lay in his arms feeling him older than herself. She did not move. The boat’s engine chugged out a deep lullaby.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a passage like this.”

“Ages. Let’s have one every night.”

“I’ve composed a poem for you.”

“Go on.”

Why am I this way, why am I that?

Why do myself and I constantly spat?

Which is the reasonable, logical me?

Which is the one who must will it to be?

David laughed. “Am I expected to answer that?”

“No.”

“We’ve reached the age of caution when everything, even our most personal reactions, must pass the test of our intellects.”

“It’s very fatiguing.”

“Bernard Shaw says all people over forty are scoundrels.”

“And if we do not achieve that desirable state by then?”

“Arrested development.”

“We’re spoiling our evening.”

“Let’s go in.”

“Let’s stay—maybe the magic will come back.”

“It will. Another time.”

On the way down they passed Lady Sylvia rapturously kissing a shadow behind a lifeboat.

“Was that her husband? It must have been true—that about their being in love.”

“A sailor—sometimes I’d like to go to a Marseilles dance hall,” said Alabama vaguely.

“What for?”

“I don’t know—like eating rump steak, I suppose.”

“I would be furious.”

“You would be kissing Lady Sylvia behind the lifeboat.”

“Never.”

The orchestra blared out the flower duet from
Madame Butterfly
in the ship’s salon.

There’s David for Mignonette

And somebody else for the violette
,

hummed Alabama.

“Are you artistic?” asked the Englishman.

“No.”

“But you were singing.”

“Because I am happy to find that I am a very self-sufficient person.”

“Oh, but are you? How narcissistic!”

“Very. I am very pleased with the way I walk and talk and do almost everything. Shall I show you how nicely I can?”

“Please.”

“Then treat me to a drink.”

“Come along to the bar.”

Alabama swung off in imitation of some walk she had once admired. “But I warn you,” she said, “I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.”