The Lifeboat: A Novel (15 page)

Hannah was standing tall and straight beside me, and Hardie seemed to shrink in her presence. I felt a surge of strength infuse my limbs. To this day, I can summon up the feeling without the attendant power. Somehow, we were able to keep our balance in the wildly pitching boat. I don’t know if it was the waves or the struggle that gave the boat such instability, but it seemed that the two things were only various aspects of the same life force that must play itself out as long as human beings draw breath. Mr. Hardie’s spectral face loomed closer as together Hannah and I pulled him to his feet. I could feel his beard scratching my face, smell his breath over the stench of the rotting birds, over my own putrid smell. The Italian women were still singing and shrieking behind us, and someone was bending over the prostrate form of Mary Ann, who had fainted, and was stroking her hair and kissing her cheek. I saw this, so I must have lost track of Hardie for a moment, and only when I heard Mrs. Grant shout my name did I turn, just in time to ward off a blow that would surely have sent me flying into the sea. “Kick his legs!” shouted Hannah, and as if we were one person, we kicked in unison. Hardie toppled forward onto us, his weight on our straining shoulders. He was surprisingly insubstantial, or I was stronger than I thought, though the source of my strength was discontinuous: it came in little bursts, it sputtered and caught, allowing me to reach inside his jacket for the box I thought he might be hiding, but, as I later swore to my attorneys, it wasn’t there. Then, with a great concerted heave, we threw the only person among us who knew anything about boats and currents into the boiling sea.

We watched him for several minutes. He flailed around. He sank and rose again more than once, spewing water and invective each time he breached the surface. He cursed us. I think his words were “Die like dogs,” and then he gurgled and went under, into the sucking sea. We stared at that hole in the ocean until a large wave rolled over it. Our little boat rose up onto the back of the same wave, up into the graying light of the premature dusk, but we kept staring, possessed of a common urge to know what it was we had done, or perhaps to justify or forget it; and we might have done so. We might have turned to check on Mary Ann, to join in with the Italian women, who were now singing some sort of aria or hymn, or we might have remarked to each other that the sky did seem to be getting a little brighter in the—was it east?—could it still be morning?—where the clouds were now billowing up and out of the gray in sun-gilt shapes, if Mr. Hardie had not reappeared, head and arms bobbing out of the water, close enough to the boat that we could see the water pouring from his mouth around the yellowing tombstones of his teeth. If he had long before stopped resembling anything human, he now resembled the hellish creatures depicted in ancient religious texts for the purpose of scaring children into being good.

Then, thank God, he was gone; and we did turn to face the others. As we did so, our personalities seemed to separate from the clot of our purpose. Mrs. Grant emerged into a businesslike rationality; Hannah made a show of busy concern for the other occupants of the boat—after all, we had just killed someone for them, and wasn’t that evidence of how much we cared? But I didn’t wish to talk to anyone or even to think about what we had done. Instead, I started to pick up the mess of old bird pieces and throw them over the side of the boat.

There is one other moment that stands out in my mind. It occurred after Hardie went under and before he reappeared. I was standing by the railing, filled with the exhilaration and horror of what we had done, watching the empty space where Hardie had been and where he would be again an instant later. Hannah was close by, on my left, and gradually I became aware of the sturdy presence of Mrs. Grant on my right, so that I was supported by those two staunch pillars in the same coveted position I had seen other women occupy over the preceding weeks but which I had never occupied myself. I dared to glance at Hannah, half-afraid that I was imagining her presence and that she would disappear when I looked at her and half-afraid I would be horrified by what I saw. But the cut side of her face was away from me. She had pushed her hair into a long and orderly twist, and the fire had gone out of her eyes, replaced by a cool and almost saintly glow. She gave me what I took to be a half smile, but which was more a pressing together of her lips than a smile. It seemed to signify approval or acceptance, and in that moment I felt the way a man might feel when he vanquishes an enemy for the good of his town. My senses were in a heightened state—almost the opposite of the senselessness I had felt as I approached Mr. Hardie only minutes before. Even as I was focused on Hannah, I was somehow also aware of Mrs. Grant’s matching nod of approval, but how I could have been looking to the right and left at the same time, I do not know. I felt their vibrant hands touch my shoulders and meet behind my back, and I knew I was about to be warmed and embraced the way most of the other women had at one time or another been warmed and embraced; and I understood then what it was that the others wanted from them, what Hannah and Mrs. Grant had to give, for I finally had it for myself. A flood of relief washed over me as the slight pressure of their hands increased, almost to the point of causing me to lose my balance and frightening me a little, but then Hardie’s head broke the surface for the last time and shocked us out of whatever shared state we were briefly in.

We set to our tasks in a sort of frenzied domesticity. We cleaned, we bailed, we straightened the chains of the oarlocks, we coiled the frayed ends of rope we had used with the sail and stowed the life ring as best we could. I don’t know if we would have had the stomach to repeat the struggle with Mr. Hoffman, but when it occurred to me to wonder where he was, he was gone. When I asked about it, pantomiming by pointing to the men and pretending to count, the Italian women wailed and looked fearfully at the water. Mr. Preston and the Colonel sat silent and stupefied and had nothing to say about anything after that. And Mr. Nilsson, who had been Hoffman’s friend, looked like a hunter caught in a trap he had set himself and then forgotten about.

While we were imposing order on the boat, Mrs. Grant set to work examining our provisions. Just as she was announcing that we had no water left, Hannah let out a happy cry and pulled a rolled oilskin from where it had been lodged behind the rear thwart, which is where Mr. Hardie had been sitting. She handed it at once to Mrs. Grant, who opened it to find several pieces of dried fish concealed in its folds. She sat in Hardie’s place and passed a portion to all of us, starting at the back of the boat and working up and down the thwarts, clockwise around the boat. Greta said, “He was hiding food after all!” and that was the prevailing opinion, but I wondered if he was hiding it for his personal use or if he was saving it for when we might need it most. Some of the women exhibited a weird hilarity, as if we had freed ourselves from a tyrant or come a step closer to being saved. I felt more quietly optimistic, but long before dark, our burst of inhuman strength had left us.

Hannah led us all in a little prayer, but without the deacon to make the words legitimate, the ritual seemed decidedly pagan, a prayer of appeasement to the sea to which we had just made a blood sacrifice. But the sleep of the saved is the same as the sleep of the damned. When dawn broke, the surface was calm, the horizon was clear, and after using the oilskin to patch the hole, we were able to get most of the remaining water out of the boat.

AT THIS MOMENT
I am sitting on my prison cot, surrounded by three gray walls. The fourth wall is barred and through the bars I can see across a corridor and into the cell of a woman named Florence, who suffocated her children rather than let them live with a father who beat them. “Why did you not simply take them to live with you?” I called out to her one day, by way of making conversation. “They were living with me, but how was I to feed them?” Florence called back in an angry voice, adding, “The judge was very happy to grant me custody, but not at all disposed to give me any of my husband’s money. ‘It’s the way the law is written,’ he declared in all his imperial majesty. ‘And who do you think writes the law?’ I asked him, but he merely banged his gavel and asked if I wanted the children or not.” She was filled with anger but not regret, and when I asked her if the children had been boys or girls, she convulsed with a chilling laugh and said: “Girls, of course! It’s just my luck to have had only girls!” Every time I’ve talked to her since, she asks, “And who do you think writes the law?” so I have begun to avoid her. Even when she stands at the bars and stares across at me, I pretend not to notice. My own mental state is fragile enough that I do not need to endanger it further by talking to the likes of her.

The encounter with Florence disturbed me in another way. Her talk of money brought home to me certain realities of my own situation that will need to be solved if I succeed in proving my innocence before the magistrate. A week ago, my attorneys brought me a letter from my mother-in-law that has given me reason to hope, but has also given me no indication about how I would be received should I be acquitted of the charges before me. Neither did she explain her long delay in contacting me, and I can only surmise that she wanted to obtain independent proof of my marriage. I wondered again about the telegram Henry said he sent to her. Pretrial evidence has shown that the wireless telegraph equipment on the
Empress Alexandra
was in fact broken at the time of the shipwreck, but whether that had happened before or after Henry tried to send his communication, I could not ascertain. I also found out that the operator of the wireless was not an employee of the ship, but had worked directly for the Marconi Company, which led me to believe that Mr. Blake was not engaged in sending distress signals at the time of the explosion. I did not dwell on this. What I did think about was that if Henry had not been able to send the telegram, Mrs. Winter’s first inkling of her son’s marriage would have come when she read the list of survivors in the newspaper. In spite of the implications of the situation for me, I could only smile to think of the shock that must have disfigured what I imagined as her cold and haughty face.

My mother-in-law revealed little of her thinking in the letter, only suggesting that my attorneys might arrange for us to meet. I sent word to her through Mr. Reichmann that I would not feel right about troubling her as long as this prosecution casts a shadow over me, for I did not want that shadow to fall upon her or anyone in her family. I must admit that I was also thinking of myself to a degree, for I do not want to enter the presence of anyone in Henry’s family with my head bowed or with any expectation on their part that I should feel an ounce of guilt or shame. I feel neither, but I want our first meeting to be completely free of any doubt about my innocence. If she is paying for my defense, which I can only think she is, I am deeply grateful, but I do not want gratitude to be the sole foundation for any relationship we might develop. Of my own family, only Miranda seems aware of my circumstances. She wrote to say that due to our mother’s fragile state, informing her of my predicament was out of the question. At some point I will write her back, but for now it is a relief to be free of family obligations.

Mr. Reichmann came today and I gave him the notebooks containing my written account of our days in the lifeboat. He thanked me, and in exchange he handed me a new, blank notebook and a fresh supply of ink. I was surprised and pleased, for I find that I look forward to sitting and recollecting, as Aristotle would have called it. I don’t remember everything right off, but one idea will lead to another, and in this way, I have remembered far more than I thought possible when I set out to fulfill Mr. Reichmann’s request. When he passed the new notebook across the table where we were obliged to sit, our hands touched, which seemed to startle him so much that he drew back suddenly and sought to divert attention from the incident by telling me something of what I could expect as my case makes its way through the courts. “Justice can be slow,” he said, to which I replied, “If it exists at all.” I made my voice sound very stern and certain, which seemed to startle him again. Then I laughed to dispel the impression my seriousness had imparted and was rewarded to see a fleeting shadow cross his brow, which indicated that this supremely confident man was not completely sure of himself in every regard. The laughter drew a disapproving look from the matron, who had stationed herself in a far corner of the room, and the look caused us both to laugh quite merrily, which restored Mr. Reichmann’s features to their usual state. No doubt it is frowned upon to show any sort of humor in prison, but I couldn’t help but think how stupid it was to treat adults like children, to chastise and incarcerate them, and to try to construct a narrative that makes their actions fit neatly into either the virtuous column or the criminal one.

Of course, not a day goes by when I don’t think about the lifeboat and ask myself if I would rather be there than here, but it is not a harping or morbid obsession of mind, as would suit Dr. Cole’s purposes. I enter that blue-vaulted chamber of memory rather the way one would enter a church: reverently, with awe in my soul. The church is filled with light, too—not the usual gaudy sort filtered through lurid images of Christ on the cross, but sea light, murky and green and as cold as Satan’s heart.

Can you write about light without knowing what it is? Henry would have said no, and Mr. Sinclair would have proceeded to educate me, so I have asked Mr. Glover, Mr. Reichmann’s assistant, to bring me books on the subject. Does it help to know that light is only part of a continuous spectrum of wavelengths, as the scientists now say, or that light travels in both bullets and waves? Waves are something we knew about. They towered over us. We rode high on their crests and from there we could see, briefly, the majesty of the vast and desolate sea. We plunged into the troughs and immediately, great walls of water slammed up against the limits of our vision.

When I mentioned light in a letter I wrote to Greta Witkoppen, the German girl who had taken to Mrs. Grant so early on and who had extended her stay in America in order to attend our trial, she wrote back: “Don’t write to me about such things! In fact, the lawyers say I shouldn’t write to you at all, for it might look as if we are conspiring. Tell Mrs. Grant not to worry, though. We all know exactly what to do! As for the light, I’m trying to forget it, but I doubt I ever will. Spooky, it was. Everyone thought it was a sign from God, but I can’t help thinking it was something conjured up by Hannah. Did it ever occur to you that she might be a witch?” She was referring, I knew, to those odd bands of light that appeared on about the sixteenth day, moving across the water in the dead of night. I’ll never forget it either, just as I’ll never forget Hardie’s head reappearing when we thought he had gone under for the last time. We were held spellbound, hardly trusting our eyes; but there was no disagreement among us. We all saw the bands of light, but we argued bitterly about what they meant. “That’s the sort of light you see before you die,” said Mary Ann.

“And how would you know that?” asked Isabelle, who had been the one to inform Mrs. Fleming that a young girl had been hit in the head when our lifeboat was launched. Isabelle had moved next to Anya Robeson, who now admonished, “Don’t talk about such things! It’s bad for the boy,” but we all ignored her, and Mary Ann went on to say, “My mother nearly drowned once, and she said it wasn’t at all like drowning in water; it was like drowning in light. If Mother wasn’t rescued after the shipwreck, I hope that is really what it was like for her.”

“Well, we’re not drowning,” said Mrs. McCain, “are we, Lisette?” And Lisette, who knew her duty, immediately agreed with her employer.

The waves of light were like puddles on the water—each self-contained, but moving in succession over the black emptiness. They swept over the water at high speeds, going eastward (according to Hannah); and then for no apparent reason, they swept back again, from east to west, moving very quickly so that they each illuminated the boat for only a blink of time. We had been amazed by manifestations of light before, but unlike the other occurrences, this one seemed completely inexplicable. The whole display lasted approximately thirty minutes. Then it abruptly stopped.

Mrs. Grant was silent throughout the entire episode, but Hannah spoke of the light as a metaphor for understanding, which reminded me of the deacon, who had mistrusted the concept of understanding altogether. He had said that it was not for us to understand and likened all earthly things to icebergs in that we could never fully know them. He once told me that faith should be offered up without requesting an explanation in return, for explanations presumed understanding, and understanding was reserved for God.

But the deacon was gone, and we had only Hannah, who looked like a high priestess as she stood up in the boat and raised her hands into the stripes of light and asked whatever she believed in to rain down blessings upon us. I did not like to say so in front of the others, but my first thought on seeing the bands of light was that we were in the middle of a flock of angels, indeed that a flock of angels had come down to escort us up to heaven and that Mary Ann was right to think we were dying; so when she started crying out “Over here! Over here!” I was sure she thought they were angels too, until someone said something about the sweeping floodlights of a search party. “We’re saved! We’re saved!” Mary Ann shouted over and over, screaming frantically and nearly jumping into the water in her hurry to climb aboard the ship she knew to be steaming toward us through the night.

I had grown tired of Mary Ann’s hysterics. No one could talk sense into her, and when she tore off her dress and threatened to dive headfirst into the sea and swim to the imaginary rescue boat herself, no one, not even Mrs. Grant, tried to stop her. She must have thought better of it, but that night she rolled in the wet bottom of the boat and moaned dreadfully. Her hair clung to her face like seaweed, her lips were blue with cold, her cheeks red with fever. Her cries were unbearable, and at long last Hannah had the good sense to knock her cold. No one else moved. We lacked the strength to do even useful things—why bother about those things that wouldn’t help at all?

A yellowish light filters into my cell from the hallway, and there is one tiny slit of a window set high up in the wall. It is too high for me to see out of, but I can tell it faces east, for in the morning I awaken to a bright and slanting shaft of silver light if it is sunny out and something more subdued if it is not. It is all predictable and reassuring, and at this point in my life, I am happy to be reassured. The light is fading now, and soon I will be unable to distinguish the letters on this page.