The Lifeboat: A Novel (6 page)

IT WASN’T UNTIL
the deacon had said prayers over Mrs. Fleming and her body had been lowered into the water by Mr. Hardie and the Colonel that anyone noticed that only one of the lifeboats was still in sight. We had lost the other one during the night. I could tell people were dejected to have more bad news coming directly after Mrs. Fleming’s death, but Hardie was oddly jovial and announced to everyone that he was going to catch us a fish. He unsheathed the long knife he wore at his waist, leaned out over the side of the boat, and gazed into the water, the knife poised above his head. The clouds had lifted and the sun illuminated the ocean to a brilliant jewel-like translucence, and sure enough, barely an hour had passed before Hardie plunged his knife into the water and pulled a huge fish into the boat. It was about three feet long, rather flat in shape, and of a mottled brown color. It flipped about in the bottom of the boat until Hardie slit it from gills to anus, after which it flipped twice more and then lay still.

“Supper,” said Hardie, holding the fish up to gleam in the sun.

Isabelle asked, “Are we going to eat it raw?” and Hardie answered, “No, we’re going to sauté it in a garlic and butter sauce.” I found myself wondering how this was possible and believing for a moment that because Hardie had said it, it could be done. Even when he had passed out the pieces of dripping, uncooked fish, his hands still covered in reddish slime, the illusion held, and I was able to eat the raw flesh without retching, though Greta barely made it past Mrs. Grant to lean out over the side and vomit, and Mary Ann refused to eat it at all until I told her to imagine we were at her wedding banquet and were just starting the fish course.

I ate my morsel of fish slowly, savoring it and knowing that it was as valuable for its moisture as for the protein our wasting bodies so sorely needed. The taste was slightly salty, which might have been because Mr. Hardie had rinsed the fish in the ocean after gutting it, but it was the texture that surprised me the most. It wasn’t flaky the way cooked fish is flaky, but firm and muscular—almost living. I had of course visited farms and seen where cows and pigs came from, and even in the city it was possible to buy a live chicken or to see one slaughtered, so I wasn’t naïve about the realities of turning livestock into food. But with the fish, I felt we had come very close to the thin membrane separating the living from the dead and that no matter what pretty names we had for things—coq au vin or angels on horseback or lobster Newburg—the hard fact of the matter was that life depended on the ability to subjugate other creatures to our use.

The fish brought a kind of holiday mood upon us. When Anya Robeson told Charlie to imagine he was eating a seed cake, it gave us the idea to take turns naming our favorite foods and pretending we were eating those. The Colonel said something facetious about military rations, and Mrs. McCain had to be stopped from describing all the dishes at a typical Sunday supper in the McCain household. Mary Ann, of course, merely repeated what I had suggested about her wedding feast, but when it came to my turn, I said, “Right now I can’t think of anything much better than raw fish. I am developing quite a taste for it!”

“Good, because ye’ll get some more tomorrow,” said Mr. Hardie. As he said it, his eyes found mine and we shared a long look. He dipped his chin in a faint nod, as if I had pleased him in some way. I nodded back, and for the rest of the evening I savored that brief exchange. It was something I had been waiting for but had long since stopped expecting. Later, I tried to catch his eye again, but he either failed to notice me or pretended not to, and I wished I had been satisfied with that first small crumb of acknowledgment and hadn’t asked for more.

Catching the fish went a long way toward restoring the confidence we had lost during the episode with the lights. It seemed too easy—one minute Hardie was unsheathing his knife and peering over the side and the next he was drawing forth sustenance from the water; and when he repeated the performance later in the day, Maria and Lisette began to turn their worshipful eyes on him at regular intervals.

The deacon had uttered some kind of verbal incantation over the fish, and even though we had each eaten only a few small chunks of it, we felt a certain bodily satisfaction, because we were reminded of a merciful God and because we now knew Hardie had only to plunge his knife into the back of the sea for it to cough up the elements of our survival. But after those two, we caught no more fish. Every day we expected the ocean to yield more of its bounty, and when Hardie failed to make this happen, we saw it as a willful withholding on his part rather than bad luck or the fact that soon after, the wind came up and it became impossible to visually pierce the choppy cobalt surface of the sea. The idea of a flat ocean, which we had enjoyed for five full days, took its place with the future and the past beyond our myopic imaginations.

The fish became a symbol of what Hardie could do if he wanted, of what he might do if we would only behave and stop questioning his plan for us. His eventual failure to provide was not the only reason for a growing undercurrent of anger. He continued to predict a change in the weather. He said, “When it comes, ye’ll see for yerselves that there are too many people in the boat,” but we didn’t want to hear it. It made us angry because we didn’t know what we were supposed to do about it, even if what he said was true. Were we supposed to simply fade away like Mrs. Fleming? But these feelings of anger and doubt accumulated gradually. On the evening of the fifth day, we were still grateful to Hardie for the miracle of the fish.

The deacon liked to recount Bible stories, and he used this occasion to tell us about the fishes and the loaves. The moment he launched into a parable or psalm, Mary Ann and Isabelle stopped whatever they were doing, and Anya Robeson let little Charles sit on her lap without his ears covered whenever the deacon held forth. I have to admit that I, too, could be lulled by the familiarity of the stories, despite the fact that some of them were quite grim. People like repetition. They like to know how a story ends, even when it ends with everyone but Noah dying in the flood. The deacon would tell a story that was known to all of us and then find parallels between it and our situation on the boat, and certainly the story of the ark came in handy for that. But the deacon was creative, and he adapted the trials of Moses in the desert and the parting of the Red Sea to our situation, too. He taught us the “Song of the Sea”—which was all about how God would save the chosen ones even as he sank the enemy like a stone—so that we would be able to recite it when we were finally saved.

Mr. Sinclair told everyone that the story of Noah’s Ark had been adapted to the Christian tradition from something ancient and heathen. “Babylonian flood stories included not only the deluge, but other familiar elements as well—the raven and the dove, for instance. That can’t be a coincidence,” he said, but the deacon was quick to dismiss the idea as heresy. Mary Ann looked concerned—not so much about possible heresy as about whose side to take in the debate, the deacon’s or Mr. Sinclair’s, which I told her was also mine. Fortunately, Mr. Sinclair was not only a scholar but a peacemaker, and he assuaged everyone’s feelings by quoting Boccaccio, who apparently talked about how people like to believe the bad rather than the good and how there can be no poetry without myths.

As the days passed, I wondered if Hardie had really caught a fish at all or if we had suffered a mass hallucination. The present seemed fixed and immovable, the past compressed and distant, as subject to interpretation as a passage of dense theological text. It seemed just as likely that we had been born in the boat as that we all had histories and ancestors and a blood connection to the past. As for the future, it was impenetrable, even to thought. Where was the proof that it even existed? Or that it ever would? Like the fish, it had to be taken on faith.

IT WAS REMARKABLE
what a little food in our stomachs did for our frame of mind. While we huddled together against the evening chill, Mrs. Cook launched into another of her gossipy accounts, filled with personal details about the royal family that she couldn’t possibly have known. Still, she entertained us, and I found myself hanging on every word just the way all the other women in our section of the boat were doing. When she ran out of things to say on the subject, Mary Ann told us about the people in her social circle, but her stories lacked cohesion and were as full of sighs and exclamations as they were of words.

There was another sort of story that proliferated on the boat, particularly in the evenings, when we would seek to pass the time in any way we could. These were secret stories, stories that were told in whispers, shreds of stories that might consist of a mere impression or a snatch of dialogue or a look someone had caught in someone else’s eye. Isabelle was an expert at diagnosing expressions: “Did you see the look Mr. Hardie just gave me?” she might say with a shudder, and then she would add, “Only someone completely uncivilized would leer at a person like that.” A single look opened up whole biographies of speculation, and it was this sort of speculation that so interested the prosecutors and that they took as fact. Isabelle credited Hannah and Mrs. Grant with having invented a code of communication that didn’t include any words, only nods and glances, and these Isabelle would decipher for whoever was sitting near her. She told me once that a particularly dark scowl Hannah gave to Mr. Hoffman was a wordless witch’s curse; and later, when Hoffman stumbled and almost fell out of the boat, she looked meaningfully over at me and mouthed, “You see?”

Sometimes a person who had been given a story in confidence would appropriate it and pass it on as his or her own, and of course the stories changed as a result. A story I had told to Mary Ann about how I was planning to win over Henry’s mother came back to me as a story about how Henry’s mother had refused to receive me. There is nothing a person can do to combat false rumors without making the situation worse, so I did not try to set the record straight, only resolved to keep my own counsel regarding personal matters from then on.

I overheard Mrs. Cook telling Mrs. McCain that she had witnessed an altercation between Mr. Hardie and Captain Sutter on the day we set sail. She hadn’t then known who Mr. Hardie was and only put it together afterwards, she said, but Mr. Hardie seemed to be on the verge of being sacked. The incident ended with Mr. Hardie apparently agreeing to some condition the captain had laid down and the captain calling after him, “And if you don’t abide by that, I’ll throw you overboard myself.” The two women spent an entire afternoon speculating on the significance of the incident, as if it had some great meaning, as if it would explain anything about Hardie that could not be fully accounted for by the events we all witnessed in the boat. Days later, when I was resting on the blankets near Mrs. Cook, she told the same story to me, but by then she had added details to it. It was after Mr. Hardie had told us more about the man named Blake, and she now determined that Mr. Blake was the person Hardie and the captain were arguing about. She also added the usual retrospective judgment, saying, “There was no doubt in my mind even then that our paths would cross again.”

Colonel Marsh whispered to various people that he had once seen Mr. Hardie give up a bottle of whiskey to one of the officers without so much as a snarl. Could it have been Blake? Did Blake hold some sort of power over Hardie? Were the two men in cahoots regarding some underhanded enterprise? Were they bitter rivals? The stories went round and round the boat, prompting others to come up with their own recollections, all of which, taken together, proved to them that Mr. Hardie had a black and mysterious past. The stories about Hardie were the most prized and worried-over stories of all, but they had to be treated carefully as it wouldn’t do for him to know he was being talked about. Each whispered revelation or fabrication was put together with the other story fragments and obsessively discussed and interpreted, as if the resulting narrative would finally explain why we found ourselves adrift on that vast and lonely sea.

On the very first day, Mr. Preston, who was a stickler for numerical details, told Mr. Sinclair that he had befriended the ship’s purser and found out that the owner of the ship had fallen deeply into debt. This caused Mr. Preston to wonder if the ship had been in ill repair as a result of the owner’s financial state and if the hasty departure had left some necessary item of maintenance undone. Eventually this story was transformed into one where the owner of the
Empress Alexandra
had arranged for the destruction of his ship in order to profit through insurance. After Mr. Hardie told the story of how the ship had been sold to someone who was able to turn a better profit, Mr. Preston brought up the purser’s remarks again. Of all the people on the boat, Mr. Preston was the least subtle. It never occurred to him that there were nuances and layers of discourse, and I never saw him bending his head discreetly or talking in low tones. If he wanted to say something, he said it straight out, and that night he remarked loudly to the Colonel, “I thought the
Empress Alexandra
had been sold to an owner who was able to turn a profit! Do you think Mr. Hardie might have made the part about a new owner up?” Mr. Hardie, who of course overheard him, threw the bailer he was using straight at Mr. Preston and snapped, “You wouldn’t find the likes o’ me workin’ for the tight-fisted weasel who used to own ’er. I gave that bastard enough o’ my blood!” If this were not proof enough for Mr. Preston, he didn’t dare say.

I can’t be too critical of the way others used stories to pass the time, regardless of the accuracy of what they were saying, for sometimes Mary Ann and I did the same thing. I would tell her about the day I had first seen Henry, and I would embellish the details for hours: what he had been wearing, how he had drawn up to the establishment where he worked in a sleek motorcar, how he had emerged one inch at a time, slowly revealing himself like a portrait taking shape on a canvas. I could make that part of the story take ten minutes—or longer if Mary Ann was in a mood to ask me questions about details I left out, which she often was. I had lost the heel of my shoe and was hobbling along the pavement, and Henry gallantly searched up and down the gutter and across the street; and when he couldn’t find it, he escorted me home in his motorcar. “Just like Cinderella!” cried Mary Ann. It was one of the few times I ever laughed in the lifeboat, for the image was more apt than she knew. I didn’t tell her that the day on the sidewalk beneath the marble steps of the bank was not really the first time I had ever seen Henry, any more than the ball was the first time Cinderella or her stepsisters had heard of the handsome prince, but I liked to think of it that way. For one thing, it was the first time Henry had set his blue eyes on me, and for another, it made a nicer story. I didn’t like to think about the week I had spent watching him and figuring out his daily itinerary or the day I had waited for him until evening, lopsided in my broken shoe, and he had failed to appear.

For her part, Mary Ann would tell me about shopping for her trousseau in Paris and about her fiancé Robert and how she had allowed him to take her virginity in a lovely wooded glade filled with singing birds and the scent of honeysuckle. It was the weekend before she and her mother had set sail for Europe, and Robert had come to their country house in order to say good-bye.

“He didn’t take your virginity!” I cried, only at the last second remembering to keep my voice low to protect her privacy. “You gave it to him as a gift.” After a bit of thought I added that in my experience, people who gave gifts were very likely to get something of equal or greater value in return, but Mary Ann was terrified she might be pregnant and also that she might not have a chance to make her sin right before God if she perished at sea, although maybe she deserved to die, she didn’t know. She asked my opinion about it, and I was surprised how fervent she was in her desire to know the exact boundaries between what constituted sin and what didn’t, as if there were some watertight membrane a person could step across and through which the sinfulness could not pass. She confessed that her worry was more of a practical nature than of a spiritual one, and in her mind, that fact compounded the original sin severalfold and sent her into a spiral of remorse. “Shouldn’t I be sorry for God’s sake alone?” she asked me. “But I think I am the most worried for my own account, for how it will look if I am pregnant at the wedding and unable to fit into my dress, or how it will look if Robert leaves me and then I give birth to an illegitimate child.”

As I listened, I became convinced that Mary Ann didn’t know very much about how a person might become pregnant and how she would know if she were not, but I tried to reassure her. “The wedding dress is lost, isn’t it? So you can console yourself on the first concern right away. When you marry Robert, you will have to buy a new one. Alternatively, you can do what Henry and I did—a quick legality, no frills, no fuss. Not that I wouldn’t have liked a pretty dress and a big ceremony, but sometimes expediency prevails over romance. And as for your second concern, there are people who can help you with that sort of thing should the need arise.” I told her that she must cross that bridge when she came to it and not before. “There is nothing else to be done.” But Mary Ann would not let herself off the hook so easily and went on to suggest that the ordeal in the lifeboat was God’s way of punishing her.

“That makes no sense at all! Why would God be punishing the rest of us for something you have done?” She looked at me in a way that suggested that I would be able to answer that question better than she, while I tried to tell her it was my view that she hadn’t committed a sin at all, that I myself had had relations with Henry before our trip to the magistrate and that the idea of transgressing had added spice to the adventure; but my words were hardly a match for millennia of Christian teaching. The moon was bathing the boat in silver light when Mary Ann crept over to the little deacon and put her face next to his ear and poured out the entire wrenching story. I watched as the deacon put his hands on either side of her narrow face and used his thumb to make the sign of the cross on her forehead, first dipping his hand over the gunwale as if the ocean were only a basin of holy water, conveniently placed at his elbow for just this moment of need. After that, Mary Ann seemed more peaceful, and a day or two later she had physical proof that she wasn’t pregnant after all.

With so many women in the lifeboat, some of them must have had to deal with the problem of bleeding, but if so, they were quiet and said nothing about it. I wondered if the shock of our circumstances and the dehydration that was affecting our salivary glands might also be inhibiting the flow of blood. In any case, when Mary Ann tugged at my elbow and whispered to me that she was bleeding, I was not sure what to tell her. I used the occasion to attract Hannah’s attention, and she gave me several pieces of cloth, ripped from an old petticoat, that Mary Ann was able to adapt for her purposes. After Mary Ann was settled, I signaled my thanks to Hannah. For the second time on our journey, our eyes locked for longer than was necessary. Her half smile, which at first seemed to be a friendly welcome to my thanks, faded and turned into a different expression altogether, almost as if she had been startled by something she had seen in my face or over my shoulder, and my first instinct was to turn around and protect myself from whatever was behind me. But I didn’t want to break the contact, which was as thrilling as it was disturbing, so in the end, Hannah was the first one to look away when Mrs. Grant called her name and asked her to hand over the satchel she carried with her, which had contained the pieces of cloth.

That night, our fifth in the boat, the question the men kept coming back to was whether or not the owner of the
Empress Alexandra
had kept her in good repair. Mr. Preston insisted that this was a crucial fact. He couldn’t understand the views of a vocal minority that it mattered not at all. Not now. Not when there was nothing that could be done about it. In an attempt to prove this point, Mr. Sinclair asked us to engage in what he called a thought experiment. “Suppose we replace the word ‘ship’ in this discussion with the word ‘world.’ What if the world were kept in ill repair, but we could not know this? Furthermore, the idea would never even occur to us. Would it matter?” He paused to give us a chance to consider this before going on to say, “And now suppose we somehow find out that yes, the world has been shamelessly neglected by whoever is responsible for its upkeep. Does that change things? Does it change how we live our lives on earth? I contend that in the case of the world and also in the case of the
Empress Alexandra,
we are faced with the here and now of our situation and that the irreversible and unknowable events that brought us to this time and place not only cease to be important, they cease to matter at all.”

Isabelle asked who was responsible for the world—if Mr. Sinclair was talking about God, he should come right out and say so. But if people were responsible, then of course they could always recognize their mistakes and change their ways. I instinctively looked over at the deacon, certain that he would have something to say about this, but he was staring moodily over the gunwale, and whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself. Instead, it was Hardie who spoke up. “It all depends on whether or not ye’re to meet the bastard in the future. For my part, if I ever have a chance to meet my maker face-to-face, I’ll bloody well have a few things to say about the way things here on earth are run.”