Passage (71 page)

“It’s not there,” Kit said disgustedly.

“What isn’t?” Joanna said.

“Mazes and Mirrors,”
Kit said. She knelt down in front of Mr. Briarley. “Uncle Pat, did you take the book?”

He didn’t answer, or even give any indication he’d heard her, or knew she was there. He stared dully at the opposite side of the room.

“Where did you put it, Uncle Pat?” Kit asked, and when there was no answer, she straightened. “He’s hidden it again. He can’t have been awake more than five minutes. He was still asleep when I brought the books about the
Titanic
down.”

“Where did you leave it?” Joanna asked.

“Right
here,”
Kit said, pointing to an empty space at the end of a bookshelf. “I thought he wouldn’t notice it in the bookcase. I should never have left it in here. I should have put it upstairs with the
Titanic
books.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Joanna said, worried that Kit seemed so upset. “The book was an excuse. I really came to ask you about the
Carpathia
, to find out why Greg Menotti saw the
Titanic
when he was dying—”

“It
does
matter,” Kit said, nearly in tears. “I should have
known not to leave it in here. Yesterday, I found him hiding my boots in the clothes hamper—wait a minute! I just had an idea!” She ran up the stairs.

“Can I help?” Joanna called after her.

“No, you’d better stay there with him,” she said. “There’s no telling what he’ll hide next!”

Joanna went back in the library, though Mr. Briarley didn’t look like he would move from his chair, let alone sneak out of the room to hide things. He looked as still, as senseless, as Coma Carl, and Joanna felt suddenly embarrassed to be looking at him, as if she had broken into a house when no one was home. She turned and stared at the bookcases.

If he had taken the book out of one bookcase, he might have put it in another. She scanned the books lying along the tops of the shelves first and then along the ranks of shelved volumes, looking for something thick, with a textbook binding. And here it was, sandwiched in between
Bleak House
and
Spoon River Anthology.
She called up to Kit, “I’ve foun—” then stopped, looking at it.

“You found it?” Kit said from the top of the stairs.

“No,” Joanna shouted up to her. “Sorry, it’s the other one, the one that wasn’t right.”

The one that wasn’t right, she thought, looking down at the clipper ship and the blue background and the orange lettering. It wasn’t right, even though it fit all the criteria.

And neither was Kit’s theory. It was logical, it fit all the circumstances, but even if they found
Mazes and Mirrors
and it had a poem about the
Carpathia
, a poem with an introduction that explained in italics, “On the night the
Titanic
sank, the steamer
Carpathia
was fifty-eight miles away, too far away for her to come to the liner’s rescue . . . ” it still wouldn’t make it the right one.

I didn’t see the
Titanic
because of Greg’s dying words, she thought. It was because of something Mr. Briarley said in class. And she would know it when she heard it, the way Kit had known when she found the right book, the way she had known that the sound she’d heard was the stopping of the engines.

Joanna went over to Mr. Briarley’s chair. “Mr. Briarley,” she
said, kneeling next to the arm of the chair. “You said something in class about the
Titanic
, about what it meant. What was it? Can you remember?”

Mr. Briarley continued to stare dully at the opposite wall.

“I know it’s hard for you to remember,” Joanna said gently, “but this is really important. It was something about the
Titanic.
You shut the book, and you said,” she hit the leather arm of the chair, trying to make the memory come,
“something.
About the
Titanic.
It was foggy out, and you were holding a book . . . ”

Joanna shut her eyes, trying to remember if he had been holding
Mazes and Mirrors
or the tattered paperback of
A Night to Remember.
“Please try to remember what you said, Mr. Briarley,” she whispered. “Please. It’s important.”

There was no response at all.

He’s too far away to hear me, Joanna thought. Where are you, Mr. Briarley? Standing in the mail room, ankle-deep in water, asking the clerk for the key? Or in the library, trying to scrawl Kit a message?

Or nowhere, the brain cells that held awareness and comprehension and identity destroyed by the plaque of Alzheimer’s, the synapses that held the memory of that foggy afternoon sunk without a trace? “You don’t remember,” she said hopelessly and stood up. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”

She put
Voyages and Voices
back on the shelf and searched carefully along the rest of the shelves, even though it was useless. Because
Mazes and Mirrors
didn’t have anything about the
Titanic
in it. She had remembered it not because of a poem or an essay, but because Mr. Briarley had been holding it when he made the speech that was the trigger. And that was why, when Betty had told her the title, she had felt that shock of recognition. Because it was the cover she remembered, the cover she was looking at when he said the critical words.

She finished the bookshelves and started through the books piled in the window seat. She wondered if the window seat lifted up, if Mr. Briarley could have put the textbook inside.

“What else would he see?” Mr. Briarley said from his chair.

“What?” Joanna said, startled into answering. He had sat
up and was looking at the side of the chair where she had knelt.

“Who can tell me what a metaphor is?” he asked, scanning the room. His class, she thought. He’s seeing his English class.

“Ms. Lander?” he said, his gaze coming back to the space next to his chair. “Can you define a metaphor?”

Joanna glanced toward the stairs, wondering if she should call Kit.

“A metaphor is an implied or direct comparison of two things that are alike in some way,” he said. “Death is a journey, a voyage, a passage. And yes, I know, Mr. Inman, you never saw fog with feet. That is because most things are only alike in one or two ways. Like a cat, the fog is silent, mysterious. On the other hand, it does not eat fish or, as you have pointed out, Mr. Inman, have feet.” Mr. Briarley stood up and walked over to the library table, sat down on the edge of it.

Joanna held her breath.

“Usually there are only a few points of comparison, but sometimes, sometimes, the two things are mirror images. Have you never wondered why I would spend valuable class time on a shipwreck?” Mr. Briarley said. “Have you never wondered why, after all these years, all those books and movies and plays, people are still fascinated?”

He’s talking about the
Titanic
, Joanna thought. He remembers. She sank down on the window seat, waiting.

“They know it when they see it,” he said. “They recognize it instantly, though they have never seen it before. And cannot take their eyes off it.”

He was talking in riddles, in tangles of memory and metaphor, and it might mean no more than his asking her why she didn’t have a hall pass, but she sat silently on the window seat, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe.

“They tell themselves that isn’t what it is, that it’s a morality play or a comedy of errors,” Mr. Briarley said.” They say it looks like class warfare or technological arrogance or the vengeance of a wrathful God, but they’re lying to themselves. They know, they know what it looks like. And so did he.

“That’s why he saw it,” Mr. Briarley said, and Joanna realized what he was talking about. He hadn’t heard her when she
knelt next to his chair and asked him to remember. He had heard her before, talking to Kit, asking her why Greg Menotti had seen the
Titanic
, and he had spent the past fifteen minutes searching patiently through the passages of his blocked and damaged brain, trying to find the answer.

“ ‘I shall never forget it,’ ” he murmured. “Edith said that,” and, as if she had asked, “Edith Haisman. She said, ‘I shall never forget it, the darkness and the cold,’ but she wasn’t talking about the
Titanic.
And the forward lookout, who saw it first—who gave the warning—hanged himself from a lamppost. Because he knew what it really was. He knew it as soon as he saw it, knew—”

“I can’t find it anywhere,” Kit said, and Joanna could hear her pattering down the stairs.

No, Joanna thought, pressing herself against the back of the window seat as she had against the stairwell wall that day she and Richard had hidden from Mr. Mandrake.

“It wasn’t in the clothes hamper or under the mattress or behind the radiator,” Kit said, halfway down, two-thirds.

Don’t, Joanna prayed. Not now—

“Wait!” Kit said, only a few steps from the bottom. “I just thought of something. I know someplace else,” and ran back up.

Mr. Briarley looked after her, his head cocked as if listening for her voice, and then slumped back into his chair again. Joanna waited, but Kit’s voice, all unintending, had broken the spell, and he had sunk back into unawareness.

What does it look like, Mr. Briarley? Joanna nearly asked, but she was afraid of breaking the connection that might still be there in his mind. Wait, she thought, listening anxiously for Kit. Don’t lead. Wait.

“I kept losing my grade book,” Mr. Briarley said, and his voice had changed. It was introspective, even gentle. “And I couldn’t remember the names of Lear’s daughters. Ice warnings. But I didn’t listen to them. ‘Getting old,’ I told myself. ‘Typical absentminded professor.’ Very few of the passengers even heard the collision, you know. It was the engines stopping that woke them up.”

Joanna’s heart beat painfully. Wait.

“I told myself there was nothing to worry about,” he said. “Modern medicine had made the ship unsinkable, and the lights were still on, the decks were still comparatively level. But inside . . . ”

He stared ahead blindly for a moment and then went on. “The perfect metaphor,” he said, “looming up suddenly out of nowhere in the middle of your maiden voyage, unseen until it is nearly upon you, unavoidable even when you try to swerve, unexpected even though there have been warnings all along. Literature, literature is a warning,” he said, and then waveringly, “ ‘No, no, my dream was lengthened after life.’ Shakespeare wrote that, trying to warn us of what’s coming. ‘I passed, methought, the melancholy flood, With that sour ferryman which poets write of, Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.’ ” He looked out over the library as if it were a classroom. “Can anyone tell me what that means?”

Above them, Kit slammed a drawer shut, and Mr. Briarley said, as if the sound had been a question, “Nothing can save you, not youth or beauty or wealth, not intelligence or power or courage. You are all alone, in the middle of an ocean, with the lights going out.”

Above, Kit shut a door, pattered into the hall. She would be down any minute. There was no time to wait.

“Why did he see the
Titanic
when he was dying?” Joanna asked, and Mr. Briarley turned and looked at her in surprise.

“He didn’t,” he said. “He saw death.”

Death. “And it looked like the
Titanic
,” Joanna said.

“And it looked like the
Titanic.”

Kit appeared in the door. “I heard you talking,” she said. “Did you find it?”

J
OANNA WASN’T EVEN SURE
of how she got back to the hospital. She had wanted only to get away, to escape what Mr. Briarley had told her, and what she might tell Kit.

“What’s wrong?” Kit had said after one look at her face. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Joanna had said, trying to keep the knowledge out of her face. “I didn’t find the textbook.” Kit had come into the library and was standing in front of the banked pictures, so that the photo of Kevin smiled over her shoulder. I can’t tell her, Joanna had thought. I can’t let her find out. “I have to go,” she’d said and gone out into the hall.

“Uncle Pat didn’t say something, did he?” Kit had said anxiously, following her to the door. “He sometimes says terrible things, but he doesn’t mean them. They’re part of his illness. He doesn’t even know he says them.”

“No,” she’d said, trying to smile reassuringly. “He didn’t say anything terrible.” Only the truth. The terrible, terrible truth.

There was no question of its being true, even though, listening to him, she had felt no sudden “Eureka!,” no epiphany, only a feeling of dread. A sinking feeling, she thought, and her lips twisted. How appropriate. What had Mr. Briarley called it? The very mirror image of death.

Which was why it had resonated down through the years. All disasters—Maisie’s
Hindenburg
and Pompeii and the Hartford circus fire—had some of the attributes of death, its suddenness or its panic or its horror, but the
Titanic
had them all: courage and destruction and casualness and a dreadful confluence of coincidence and culpability, terror and gallantry and despair.