The Ice Cradle (6 page)

The impact of the collision drove the sailboat’s bow nearly halfway through the
Larchmont
. For a few minutes, the schooner plugged the hole it had opened in the ship’s side. But soon, roiling seas separated the two vessels, and water rushed into the steamer.

The flooding could not be contained in the area of the ship that had been damaged. Frigid water poured over the cargo and into the hold, and when it reached the boiler that powered the vessel, great clouds of steam exploded into the air, blocking many passageways and staircases. The steam stranded the captain in the pilothouse and disabled the ship’s communication equipment. The captain now had no way to communicate with the crew, to direct the response to the crisis.

The steam also killed scores of passengers on the port side of the boat. Up to a third of the people aboard that night may never have been aware of the accident, so quickly were they burned to death in their beds.

Other passengers, thrown from their bunks by the force of the impact, rushed to the decks in panic, not taking the time to bundle themselves in warm clothing. At first, terror kept them from even feeling the cold. But within moments, standing on deck in the sleet, wind, and ice, they began to freeze. And they couldn’t return to their rooms, which had by then been flooded. With nearly a hundred people on deck and scores of men, women, and children trapped, dead, or dying below in their sleeping quarters, the
Larchmont
began to sink. All of this happened in about ten minutes.

Officers ordered the lowering of the lifeboats, while crew members attempted, for the most part successfully, to control the chaos and panic on deck. But already, the ears, noses, and fingers of passengers and crew members alike were turning
blue with frostbite. By the time the lifeboats were in the water, just minutes later, cold had so affected the victims that they were not able to walk—they could barely stumble to the bobbing vessels. Wails of agony rose up from the boats into the frigid night air.

Conditions deteriorated further in the lifeboats, which had oars, and the rafts, which did not and had to be towed. Stormy waves sent sprays of foam and mist over the passengers, most wearing only their nightclothes, encasing the victims in layers of ice. The lights of Fishers Island, roughly five miles away, were visible on the horizon, so every vessel headed that way. But the lifeboats were weighted down by too many passengers, and by the additional burden of towing the rafts. Cold sapped the strength of the men at the oars, who were coated in layers of ice. The rafts soon broke away from the lifeboats towing them. They slowly drifted away, carrying their doomed passengers with them.

One victim, driven insane by the agony he endured in one of the lifeboats, committed suicide by cutting his own throat. Other passengers in his lifeboat, too dazed or weak to interfere, looked on vacantly as though the act made perfect sense. Several of the dead were later found with their hands frozen to their ears.

The first lifeboat reached Block Island at daybreak. The feet of the survivors were so badly frozen that the victims had to be carried to the lifesaving station. News of the catastrophe quickly spread from house to house across the island, and islanders flocked to the waterfront to try to help. Fishermen went out in their boats, and islanders waded into the icy surf to drag the lifeboats and victims to shore. Later in the day, it was bodies that drifted, one by one, to the shore, carried by
tides that later turned and swept countless other victims out to sea.

Seventeen survivors were taken into the cottages and houses closest to where the boats had landed. Many of the victims seemed not even to realize that they had reached land, nor to care. Forty-five frozen bodies were recovered from the ocean and laid out in rows at the lifesaving stations at Sandy Point and New Shoreham. In the following days, two more survivors and ten more victims were brought to shore.

A week later, with her flag at half-mast, a sister ship of the
Larchmont
, the
Kentucky
, arrived at Block Island to transport eighteen of the nineteen survivors and forty-nine bodies back to Providence. One survivor refused to set foot on another ship. Over the following days and weeks, twenty-two more bodies were given up by the sea.

H
ENRY WAS PAINTING
a car when I arrived at the school. Not a picture of a car, an actual automobile.

It had been donated, I later learned, by a summer resident who hadn’t used it in thirty years and had recently sold his vacation cottage, necessitating the cleaning out of the barn on his property. An old Dodge Dart that didn’t strike me as anything Danny Zuko and his gang of slick hot-rodders would have gone anywhere near, it was nonetheless parked on drop cloths on the stage of the school theater. How they got it in there I wasn’t quite sure; there must have been loading doors in the back. Henry and a dozen other kids of various ages, wearing extra-large T-shirts to cover their clothes, were painting the beige body a brilliant crimson, attempting to avoid what looked like a flame pattern marked off near the wheels in masking tape.

Henry caught sight of me smiling and waving but redoubled his concentration on the painting. I was clearly meant to understand that he was awfully busy with important work and couldn’t drop his paintbrush this very second just because I happened to have arrived. Thinking of the note on which we
had parted that morning, I sighed with relief and sank down into one of the seats. I was more than overdue for a stretch like this, given how many times he’s had to wait for me to finish something to do with paper and glue.

The stage was abuzz. Another painting crew was working on a sign that read “Burger Palace.” A third set of kids was assembling an enormous sculpture at the back of the space. They seemed to be attaching balls of Styrofoam to a fixed dome about four feet wide, using spokes of various lengths. The overall effect was vaguely atomic, though I couldn’t imagine what the piece was going to be used for.

There was only one ghost in the audience, which was odd. This probably had to do with the newness of the building, because theaters—especially the ornate old movie palaces and opera houses—are usually filled with ghosts. These are often the spirits of people for whom real life was a dim, pale shadow of what transpired onstage, actors and actresses whose most precious living moments occurred behind the footlights. Sometimes, they can’t bring themselves to bid good-bye to their stages and dressing rooms, where they were nightly transformed into Medea or King Lear, and where the evenings culminated in roses and applause.

Out in the foyer and drifting through the aisles, I often see the ghosts of ushers. Elderly and alone in the city, many had lived in boardinghouses and taken their meals in communal dining rooms with other men going through life alone or working to earn money for their families, who were living elsewhere. Stage managers, ballet masters, musicians—the walls of old theaters enclose the ghosts of them all.

The ghost at the back of this theater, though, had to be attached to one of the children. She must have been a grandmother
or a great-aunt, for she didn’t emanate disturbance or despair. Her long gray hair, pinned into a coil at the nape of her neck, and the worn wool cardigan held in place on her shoulders by a sweater chain gave her the appearance of a strict and spinsterish schoolmarm. But she smiled warmly and calmly, her attention engaged by the activity up front.

I loved seeing the kids all caught up in their tasks. Walking back to the Grand View a half hour later, I got the lowdown from Henry and began to understand how the week had been organized to accommodate kids of all ages.

Henry had opted to be a member of the “car crew.” This meant he spent half his day working on the transformation of the donated automobile into a
Grease
-worthy hot rod. First they were painting it red—two coats, he explained authoritatively. On Wednesday, when the second coat was dry, they would work on the flame pattern, and on Thursday they would attach the decorative details that were being built in the woodshop: hubcaps with spokes and an oversized hood ornament shaped like wings in flight. These would be spray-painted silver.

The second big chunk of his day was devoted to learning a dance number, a preview of which I was treated to on the sidewalk.
Oh dear
, I thought. I had witnessed Henry’s attempt to master some steps the previous month, for a Saint Patrick’s Day assembly at St. Enda’s, and I wasn’t optimistic about his future on the dance floor. Though his moves had been breathtakingly enthusiastic, they bore little relationship to the music, a fatal combination for anyone being danced with. Whoever was choreographing Henry’s dance was going to have their work cut out for them.

That left two recesses and lunch, all of which had apparently gone fine.

“What did you have for lunch?” I asked.

“Hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers!” Even at Henry’s school, a throwback to the kind I went to, parents pushing for local and organic sourcing of school lunches had made the weekly hamburger obsolete. While I knew this was all to the good, I thought back fondly on my own favorite grade school lunch: a bit of tuna swimming, unaccompanied by so much as a morsel of celery or onion, in a sea of mayonnaise and served in a white hot dog bun. For crunch, we packed potato chips in with the tuna.

“And Jell-O,” he added.

“Did you meet any nice kids?”

He shrugged.

“Do you have a partner for this dance?”

“Ellen.”

I held my tongue. Too many questions all at once usually caused him to shut down.

“Hmmm,” I said as he took aim at a stone on the sidewalk and sent it into the dune grass with a resounding kick. We walked for a bit in silence.

“She cut her hair,” he finally announced. “That’s why it’s kinda crooked.”

“I see.”

“Her mom was mad.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Would you be mad if I did that?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t like you pointing the scissors at your eyes, but hey, it’s your hair.”

“So would you or wouldn’t you?” He kicked another stone.

“It’s a little different with boys, honey.”

“How come?”

“Well, because boys usually wear their hair shorter, so if it looks sort of goofy, it doesn’t take long to grow out.”

“Ellen had pigtails,” Henry said, shooting me a sly glance.

“Ooh,” I said, suppressing an urge to laugh.

“Yup,” he said. “And now she doesn’t.”

He looked over at me, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“Oops,” I said.

He let out a tickled whoop.

Mark, Lauren’s husband, had taken to Henry as soon as he met him the previous evening. I’d figured this had to do with impending fatherhood, but it still had been sweet to see the way Mark had drawn Henry out with questions about the ferry and his life back in Cambridge.

We had no sooner reached the Grand View than Mark appeared on the front steps and announced that he was heading out in his truck. A buddy of his had caught a haul of striped bass off Ballard’s Beach and had offered us some for supper. “Would Henry like to come along for the ride?”

“Okay by me,” I said. Though I had only met Mark two days ago, I hadn’t a reservation in the world about sending Henry off with him. Mark was warm, funny, and, though I tried hard not to notice, cute. He had sandy brown hair as straight as hay and favored carpenter’s pants, plaid flannel shirts, and work boots.

“Just be back in time for supper,” I added.

“We’re
getting
the supper, Ma,” Henry said.

“Oh, right,” I responded, leading him on. “Duh!”

Henry grinned. “Duh!”

It was that beautiful time near dusk, when the sinking sun
throws horizontal beams onto the tops of trees and houses and everything seems bathed in a coral tint. They walked to Mark’s green pickup, parked in the driveway, and Mark helped Henry buckle himself in. Henry waved as Mark backed the truck out of the driveway, and they disappeared down Water Street.

I was glad for a bit of time to myself. I thought about sitting on the porch for a while, savoring the loveliness of the light, but the winds were chilly, and I had spent the entire day reading about people freezing to death. I wanted a hot bath.