The Lifeboat: A Novel (8 page)

Above us, clouds hurtled through the sky before the wind. The deacon had closed his eyes and clasped his hands under his chin and was murmuring, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” I shivered, and for the first time since the day of the shipwreck, I felt profoundly afraid. We were doomed. This I knew for a certainty, or close to certainty, but still I looked to Hardie, outlined there in the back of the boat, glaring unwaveringly at us all, waiting patiently for us to make sense of our situation and respond in some way to what he had said.

The deacon was the first to speak, but he was merely buying time by asking, “What do you mean? You need to explain everything clearly. Once we know what our options are, I’m sure that a rational decision can be made.”

“I think you know,” answered Hardie. “By tomorrow, if the weather continues to worsen, water will be pouring over the gunwale faster than we can get it out. I’d say she’ll take less than a minute to go under after the water reaches this point.” He tapped the wood just a few inches above the height the water had already reached. Of course, this was merely speculation, but whatever Hardie said, I took as fact.

As I write this, I realize that I make it sound as if we were having a conversation the way people converse in parlors over tea and biscuits, when in truth, my companions had to shout to make themselves heard over the sound of the wind and the crash of the water as it caved in on itself. Several people were shouting at once. Their words were jumbled about by the wind, and it was impossible to make complete sense of them.

“If we’re not rescued, that is,” said the deacon desperately. “You yourself said that they’d find us.”

“I know what I said, but they haven’t found us yet, have they?” Hardie went on to tell us his interpretation of the foghorns. “I’m convinced that was a foghorn from a large ship. If it collided with the other lifeboat, and I’m not saying it did, the people aboard would never have noticed, any more than we’d notice if we ran into a twig or a matchstick. And if, by some miracle or chance, the other boat was rescued and they tried to find us, the hard fact is that they didn’t.”

There was silence in the boat, followed by angry muttering. My heart sank with disappointment. I felt misled as much as anything, even though part of me realized that Hardie had agreed to put the sail up because his hope of rescue had dwindled and maybe died. At that point I hated Hardie, but I loved him too—I needed him anyway, and I wanted him to know it. In order to please him, or at least to get his attention, I cried out, “Let’s not blame Mr. Hardie for telling us the truth!” and to my relief, the grumbling in the boat subsided. I’m sure that Hardie gave me a look of approval, and my spirits soared briefly before settling down at a much higher level than they had been at only seconds before. I caught the poor little deacon’s eye and felt a crimson flower of triumph blossom in my breast. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” I said and was rewarded with a wan smile not only from the deacon, but also from Mrs. Cook, who briefly came out of her trance and reached across to pat my hand.

Hardie said, “Even if the wind dies down immediately and we succeed in clearing the boat of water, we have only a little bit of fish left and only a few drops of water. Without water, we won’t last six days.”

“Six days! Anything can happen in six days!” said the deacon with some of his old fire. “Why, the world was created in six days!”

“All I’m saying is to think about it,” shouted Hardie, and with that he called for a shift of duties. He directed Mr. Nilsson to use the rudder to keep our nose to the wind, while he himself set to work furiously scooping at the calm green water in the bottom of the boat and throwing it back out over the side to join with its turbulent black brethren. A change of shift was called seven more times. Seven hours passed, during which I was aware of each second, each bite of the wind against my face, each eternal moment of dread, each minute detail of that desolate scene, yet the time in retrospect passed in a heartbeat. Wave after wave crashed over the prow of the boat, undoing in an instant our hours of backbreaking labor, and still Hardie stuck with it, refusing to pass his bailer into less capable hands.

I fell into the grip of a great lassitude, a resignation so powerful that I felt I could meet any future calmly. I do not know if this is because I trusted Mr. Hardie with my life or because I knew that if I died, it would be with him. Whatever’s coming to me, let it come, I thought; but around me the others were not so willing to resign themselves. Mrs. Grant made her way into the center of the boat and delivered a speech about the human will, which inspired the deacon to remind us of divine will, and even little Mary Ann stopped whining long enough to direct an angry outburst at Mr. Hoffman, whom she accused of lacking faith, when faith was the thing we needed most.

At some point that evening I fell asleep, though I thought it would be impossible to do so. It seemed only minutes later that I was shaken awake by Mary Ann, who was shivering uncontrollably. “It’s Rebecca,” she said. I watched as one of the Italian women reached over to brush Rebecca’s tangled hair out of her eyes, which was when I saw how her mouth was open and her eyes were rolled up into her head.

The deacon said a prayer over her and the Colonel gave her life vest to one of the two sisters. Then the Colonel and Mr. Hardie lifted her over the side and let her go. Her dress, which had been put back on her once it was dry, billowed up around her like wings, keeping her afloat for a minute or two. Then she sank and with her went the last shred of hope I had for myself.

I FIRST SAW
Henry when his photograph appeared in the society pages of the
New York Times
: “son of…employed by…betrothed to…,” et cetera, et cetera, nestled in among a host of details about a lavish engagement party and the bride’s impressive family tree. It was intriguing information, and it came at a time when a governess job like the one held by my sister seemed to be the target at which my narrowing expectations were aiming. I had been bred to believe in a fanning out of prospects as I made my way from the wellspring of my birth to join ever-greater rivulets and streams of possibility, until the day I was deposited at a fertile delta where the last of the widening rivers finally met an ocean of opportunity. This seems an ominous metaphor now, but it seemed apt to me then, and that sunny and shimmering destination I was conditioned to think of as the happily ever after of married life. At the time of our parents’ misfortune, Miranda was keeping company with a young physician, but their understanding did not survive the tumultuous year of our father’s death. Instead of being crushed by the doctor’s desertion, Miranda seemed only momentarily dismayed. She took stock of her options, gathered letters of recommendation, and told me never to put my fortunes in the hands of a man.

“But you’re going to be a working girl!” I cried, not believing for a minute that her chosen solution was a happy one for her.

“I will be my own master,” she declared.

“You will be little more than a servant,” I countered, but whether she was following a principle or whether the principle came along afterwards to help her accept the only solution she could think of, she never let on, and off she went to Chicago, leaving me to find affordable lodgings for myself and our mother in the top half of a house owned by someone our solicitor knew. We had sold most of the furniture and packed the rest of our possessions in boxes. I thought of it as a temporary arrangement and unpacked only what we needed for daily living, leaving the rest of the boxes stacked in a corner of a spare room.

That Henry was already engaged seemed only the mildest of impediments. I even viewed it as a good thing, for how would he have come to my notice without the write-up of his engagement party in the
Times
? In the same issue, which I had found when unwrapping a box of crystal goblets that had somehow escaped the sale, I found an article entitled
LONDON MARKET CHEERFUL
, which talked about gold and short-term bonds and mentioned the very firm I had just read about in the paragraph discussing Henry’s employment. The task of unpacking was forgotten as I hastened to scan the paper for a date and realized that the issue I was reading was over three months old.

It was only the third time we met when Henry suggested the theory that each person was destined for one great love and that if he was lucky enough to find it in his lifetime, he ignored it at his own risk. I told him I thought that only some people were fortunate enough to have been born in the same time and place as their one great love, but that others, maybe even most, had been born ahead of or behind their optimal era. I thought of my mother, who had missed the opportunity of being swept off her feet by a dashing horseman by several centuries and at least one continent. Not long after making this declaration, however, Henry failed to appear at a prearranged meeting place, and as much as I tried to concoct alternate explanations, I suspected he was with his fiancée. “I was worried about you!” I cried, throwing myself into his arms when he appeared the next day. “I knew it must have been important, or you would have come.”

“It was important,” he said grimly, but for the rest of the evening he was moody and silent, and no matter what sort of things I said to him, he seemed not to hear. He told me he was going out of town for a period and would come to fetch me when he returned, but a mere three days later, he appeared on my doorstep looking haggard and ill. I was overjoyed to see him. The governess job was beginning to have names and dates attached to it, and I saw the streams of possibility running backward toward a fetid swamp of menial employment.

“I wasn’t truthful with you!” Henry blurted out when I had fetched my shawl and we were outside, alone, or as alone as we could be in the squalid neighborhood where my mother and I now lived. Ragged children played in the yard and dared one another to ask Henry for money, but Henry, usually so cheerful and generous, didn’t notice them.

“You had your reasons,” I told him, but the fact that I gave myself over to him completely and didn’t care if he had been dishonest with me only made his face more gaunt and tortured. He sank to his knees in the dirt and said he wasn’t moving an inch until I promised to marry him. I tugged at his jacket and said, “Of course I’ll marry you!” but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted to hear either, and he stayed there, crouched in front of me, until I burst out, “Henry! What is it?” as forcefully as I could because now I was beginning to be frightened that something was wrong with him, that he was sick or even dying and that he was worried my promise to marry him had been obtained under false pretenses that he was committed to, yet fearful of, making right.

Finally, because I couldn’t think what else to do, I sank to my knees too, and we knelt there in the dust with the curious children, now emboldened by our diminished stature, circling round us and scuffing their shoes in the dirt, wanting desperately to pester Henry for the coins they knew he kept in his pocket but held back by the emotion that emanated from us both, strong as the magnetic field pulsing up from the earth’s core, and also by astonishment, for I am certain they had never seen adults act like that before.

Henry’s eyes had become dark—I’ll compare them to the color of the sea when the clouds pile high above it, but of course that comparison did not occur to me at the time. My mind was blank and terrified, unable to fathom what had brought my handsome and worldly lover to his knees in a patch of dirt that was not a rich and earthy loam built up through generations of natural processes, but a combination of horse dung and wash water and boot scrapings and kitchen scraps that were too spoiled for even the ragamuffins to eat. Then I realized with a shock that seemed to leap like primordial fire from Henry’s blazing eyes to my own that the thing that had brought Henry to his knees in that filthy courtyard was me.

I reached out with both of my hands, no longer frightened but not yet sure what to do with my power, and declared, “I have found my one true love.” I grasped his two hot hands in my cool ones and told him that I didn’t mind in the least if he lied to me so long as he had a good reason, which I trusted he did. “I don’t think I could bear to be lied to lightly,” I said, trying to elicit a smile, but Henry was the picture of misery. He looked thin and endearing, not at all the worldly banker I had built him up in my mind to be.

“I lied to you twice,” confessed Henry. “I didn’t go out of town, but that’s the least of it. The bigger lie is that I am already engaged and I haven’t broken it off. I have meant to, but when I went…”

Of course I knew he was engaged, but the news, coming from his bloodless lips, struck me as if I were hearing it for the first time. “Then how can you ask me…,” I started to say. “Then how can I…” I was paralyzed by the conundrum of who should be the subject of the sentence and who the object. Had he done something awful to me or I to him? And now that he had confessed, should I own up to my own charade? I wanted to. I wanted to lie down in the grime and beg his forgiveness, for I realized with a start that whatever it was I had loved about Henry’s station in life, I loved Henry himself more, and I didn’t stop to consider whether Henry without his station would even be the same person, though the question fleetingly occurred to me—not out of any selfish reasons, but because the same could be asked about me: would I be the same Grace if some aspect of me Henry counted on were suddenly hacked off and discarded?

What I did think about was that Henry needed something from me, and what he needed was for me to be strong. I thought about what had happened to my family when my father and then my mother fell apart, when neither one of them decided to fight for themselves or their home or their children. We had all suffered for it. It had been selfishness on their part to succumb, and I wouldn’t do that to either Henry or myself.

I told Henry that I would always love him, that I would talk about marriage with him when he was stronger because I didn’t want to take advantage of his illness or whatever it was that explained his weakened state; and I sent him home with a kiss and a promise that I would stand by him in exactly the way I knew he would stand by me. “Any decision that confronts you is yours to make,” I told him. “I will help you, but I won’t try to influence you.” I was shaking with the effort of it, and while I knew I couldn’t afford to dispense with practicality, even in the blistering heat of that moment, I also knew I had no real idea what was going through Henry’s tormented mind.

After he left, I went up to my little attic room and drafted a response to my prospective employer saying I could be in Baltimore the following week. I had not yet researched train schedules or thought through other considerations, but where there was a will there was a way, I supposed, all the while thinking of my sister toiling away in Chicago and alternately being sure I could do it and sure that I couldn’t. Then I addressed the envelope and placed it with a vague prayer in the back pages of the big Bible that not even my mother cracked open anymore, and there I imagine the letter remains to this day.

Henry appeared the next afternoon looking more like his old self. I hesitated when I saw him, not wanting to assume too much, but neither wanting to let him completely off the hook of the promises he had made to me and I to him. At the same time, there went through my mind a tremor of fear that I had misread the situation and that Henry’s regard for me was the product of agitation or the jitters some men feel when approaching a critical crossroads in their lives. I also considered the possibility that he had been ill or had suffered a mental disturbance, so instead of giving voice to the questions that filled my head, I remained silent, for I knew that the only way to ascertain the truth was to let him speak.

I had worn a pale dress and outlined my eyes so they looked big in my ashen face. It wasn’t a costume or disguise, exactly, but a form of communication. I wanted Henry to see that I wasn’t strong enough to lose him. I wanted him to see that for all that I would be a valuable adjunct to his personal and professional lives, I wouldn’t be headstrong or difficult to contend with.

“I owe you an apology—several, in fact,” Henry started off in a formal manner and with only the barest glimmer of fever showing in his eyes. “I acted badly, and it won’t happen again.” He paused, and I was filled with terror that that was the end of it, that he would be off to be married on the date that was enshrined in my crumpled copy of the
Times.
The wedding date was less than four weeks away. He would return to his fiancée having sown his wild oats, and I would be on the train to Baltimore with only the memory of what might have been.… But Henry stared into my eyes and what I saw melted the chill that was clutching my heart, and I dared to imagine. I dared to hope. I wanted to run to him and shake the reluctant words out of him—one way or the other he needed to reveal my fate. I stood like a statue, and though I was a good three feet away from him, I was able to feel the heat radiating from his body as he said, “Even if I am damned to eternity for what I am doing to Felicity, I will have you as my wife.”

Henry told me he would have to plan his extrication carefully, as the families were old friends. I didn’t mind that he had to keep me secret for a while, for it made our time together feel stolen and sweet. I didn’t ask anything about the girl he was engaged to, but I might be forgiven—or perhaps not—for suggesting that she, too, might be a captive of expectations and would eventually appreciate freedom as much as he, whether or not she knew it at first. He looked childish and hopeful when I suggested it, as if I were a favorite auntie with a present tucked behind my back. Neither of us believed it for a minute, but it was a useful fiction that allowed Henry to question Felicity’s motives just enough to gird him for the task ahead.