Sudden Sea (7 page)
By ten
P.M.
, winds were humming past the glass-enclosed decks. Rain burst from above as if it had broken through a solid ceiling. As the ship lurched into the tumult, chandeliers swung like church bells and dangling crystal prisms clinked like glasses raised in a final toast. Fox-trotting couples careened across the dance floor and tumbled into the orchestra. Tables slid after them, and trays of cocktails crashed to the floor, the tinkle of breaking glass barely perceptible over the storm’s insistent voice.
Hurricane winds blew the tops off the tremendous sea. Waves rushed the ship from all sides, falling on her decks with crushing force. Clipped onto safety lines, their oilskins plastered against them like second skins, the crew cleared the decks, roped off promenades, covered portholes, lashed down lifeboats. In the first furious squall, the sea hissed like a thousand snakes.
The captain ordered the orchestra to play louder and faster, a frenzy of gaiety to drown out the din — “Atisket, atasket / A green and yellow basket.” And he ordered the champagne to flow, even when chilled silver buckets became receptacles for not-so-genteel heaving and chucking. Stewards slipped on steps slick with vomit. Passengers who had retired for an early sleep or to return to the sinister goings-on at Manderley were jarred into wakefulness by the ocean banging against the portholes and tossed out of their berths.
One of the Cunard Line’s magnificent new
Queens
might have been heavy enough to weather such an epic storm, but the
Carinthia
was a smaller ship. Her intimate size, opulent appointments, and gleaming white paint suggested an oversize yacht. When she and her sister ship, the
Franconia,
were launched in the twenties, they had inaugurated a new breed of sea vessels — the one-stackers, smaller, 20,000-ton ships (624 feet long by 73 feet wide) designed for luxury.
The
Carinthia
took the hurricane head-on. She plunged into the trough of the sea, slamming against it as if she were running into a cement wall, then staggered out, only to nose-dive again. Great swells rolled her down. The deck filled with white water as though heaped with snow. The ocean brawled, the wind bayed, and the old ship bowed to them, tumbling into the sea, struggling out, tumbling in again. She was helpless before the beating.
In the West Indies sailors divide a hurricane into two semi-circles, one navigable, the other deadly. Although the
Carinthia
was on the navigable western side on Tuesday night, alone in a hurling and horrible sea, the distinction seemed moot. Greig’s options were few and generally futile. If he lowered the lifeboats, they would be lost instantly. A Mayday message would be a cry in the wilderness. If there were other ships in the vicinity, they would be fighting for their own survival. Like sea captains from Noah to Ahab, Greig had to battle the devil alone. For the first time in his long years at sea, he thought of his ship as a casket.
The wind swept at him out of a vast obscurity. He felt the
Carinthia
shudder as if her very boards and bolts were aching; he heard the groan of metal against metal. The bottom fell out of the barometer. The
Carinthia
was taking aboard huge quantities of rain and seawater. The crew pumped continuously through the night to keep the holds from flooding. Bilge pumps strained to the breaking point. The ship’s lights flickered, dimmed, flickered again. Stokers fed the furnace like men possessed to keep her going. Muscles cramped with the effort. If power was lost, the
Carinthia
would be so much flotsam at the mercy of the merciless sea. If the steering gear held and the engines turned, if the decks did not splinter under the weight of the water, and the bow was not buried when the ship stumbled into a monster swell, then there was hope that she would ride out the storm.
About three o’clock Wednesday morning, the
Carinthia
staggered free of the hurricane zone. The stunned captain radioed to shore that the barometer had dropped almost an inch to 27.85 in less than an hour. It was one of the lowest readings ever recorded in the North Atlantic.
Today the National Hurricane Center (NHC) is a meteorological CIA, detecting and stalking nature’s terrorists. At its headquarters in Dade County, Florida, the NHC maintains a continuous watch on the waters of the Atlantic from May 15 through September 30. Weather satellites orbit the equator; others fly from pole to pole. A Doppler radar network extends from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Canada. “Hurricane hunters” — Air Force WC-130 Hercules planes — fly reconnaissance missions into and around tropical cyclones. During critical periods when a hurricane is building, round-the-clock shifts maintain a constant watch on the system. Fleets of Gulfstream IV jets and P-3 Orion turboprops also gather data. Man and machine interpret the torrent of meteorological intelligence. Mathematical computer models of the hurricane are used to analyze the information, relate it to prevailing weather patterns, and compare it with the documented hurricanes of history.
As a dangerous system moves into the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, the NHC makes hourly reconnaissance flights. Residents in potential danger zones are put on guard. Relief agencies are alerted. A twenty-four-hour weather channel provides regular updates of the advancing storm. But tropical storms remain so unpredictable that forecasts are only accurate within twenty-four hours of landfall.
In 1938 the U.S. Weather Bureau was a chain of relay bases located at key points along the coast. Each station monitored storms in its region. Jacksonville would track a hurricane as far north as Carolina’s Outer Banks. When the storm reached Cape Hatteras, the D.C. office took over and issued forecasts for the northern half of the Atlantic seaboard. Forecasting tools were equally primitive. Weather balloons and aerial reconnaissance were in the experimental stage, and radar was the stuff that Norton and Dunn must have dreamed about on allclear days when no storm front loomed.
“Whenever I have a difficult challenge in deciding and planning where and when to issue hurricane warnings,” Norton said, “I usually stroll out of the office onto the roof, put my foot on the parapet ledge, look out over the Everglades, and say a little prayer.”
About four
A.M.
on Wednesday, September 21, Norton’s prayer was answered. The storm had swept by Florida and was whistling up the coast. The hurricane watch in Jacksonville officially ended. As the storm headed for the Carolina capes, responsibility for tracking passed to the Washington station. Exhausted after monitoring the blow for more than one hundred hours, Grady Norton signed off with a final advisory to “ships in the path of this severe storm.”
His caution was heeded too well. Storm warnings were hoisted along the shore, all the way to Eastport, Maine, and ships that otherwise would have reported from the danger zone either stayed in port or headed for the open ocean.
On Wednesday, September 21, 1938, there would be few ship-to-shore observations, and the man in D.C. assigned to track the storm would be Charles Pierce, a junior forecaster who had never encountered a full-blown hurricane before. At the age of twenty-seven, Pierce would experience a singular baptism by fire — a sudden and complete immersion into one of the most intense and deadliest hurricanes ever to come ashore in the continental United States.
All Aboard
O
n Wednesday, September 21, 1938, Katharine Hepburn woke up with the sun at her family’s summer house in Fenwick, Connecticut. Located at the point where the mouth of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound meet, Fenwick was a company getaway for Aetna Life Insurance of Hartford, about forty-five miles north. Like Napatree–Watch Hill, just across the state border, it was exclusively a summer colony, and by mid-September almost everything in town was locked, shuttered, and stored away for another season. In the rambling Victorian houses with their broad verandas and clear ocean views, beds were stripped and furniture was covered with old sheets.
The Hepburns’ house was one of the few still open. Dick Hepburn, an aspiring playwright, had stayed on after Labor Day, trying to finish his new play, a caustic romantic comedy about a willful, uppity actress and her socially inept millionaire boyfriend. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, including his sister and Howard Hughes, he insisted, was purely coincidental. Kate stayed on, too, her life pretty much up in the air. She was waiting for the final word on Scarlett, waiting for the final draft of Philip Barry’s new play,
The Philadelphia Story,
waiting for a phone call from Howard. Their romance was on hold. Hughes’s picture had been showing up every other day in some magazine or newspaper, usually with Bette Davis or Ginger Rogers, Hollywood’s highest-paid stars, on his arm. It rankled, especially since their salaries were twice what she had ever made. Hepburn’s image as
the
independent woman was mostly myth, a Hollywood fantasy that she cultivated. Throughout her life, she was always dependent on a strong man.
But this Wednesday Kate woke up feeling as fine as the morning. She had finally called Howard the night before, not to give him an answer to his marriage proposal but to ask for advice. Their romance might be in limbo, complicated in no small part by her parents’ disapproval, but there was no one she trusted more. Hughes had bolstered her floundering career, buying the rights to
Bringing Up Baby
when RKO shelved it. He was releasing the film himself at the end of the year. Now, she told him,
The Philadelphia Story
was headed for Broadway, and she had agreed to play Tracy Lord, with one reservation — “provided I don’t play Scarlett O’Hara first.”
Hughes listened. Then he gave his girl the advice that would eventually bring her back to the West Coast and make her one of Hollywood’s biggest and wealthiest stars: “Buy the film rights before you open, kiddo.” His check to cover the cost was in the mail.
So Wednesday morning Hepburn greeted the appearance of the sun with more than her usual gusto. The tide was low, a light breeze was on the air, and her life was looking brighter than it had in weeks. She went for a bracing eight
A.M.
swim, then dashed off to the fairway to play nine holes of golf. A light sea breeze was stirring when she reached the Fenwick Golf Club.
Hepburn piled her red hair in a bun to keep it from flying in her eyes and teed off. The breeze quickened with each hole she played. On the par three ninth, she set herself and swung. The strong, high drive caught the wind. The ball sailed, sailed, sailed, and dropped into the ninth hole. Her first hole in one! It gave her a score of thirty-one on the nine holes, her best game ever. Pleased as punch, she decided to go for a second swim after lunch. The wind was sharpening across the Northeast Corridor, bringing with it the best surf of the summer.
That same morning at eleven o’clock in New York, City, the boarding call echoed in the cavernous halls of Grand Central Terminal, emptying the oak benches in the Forty-second Street waiting room. Passengers streamed across the station beneath the vaulted ceiling traced with the constellations, past the circular marble information booth where the stationmaster was writing “on time” on the black glass board beside the name
Bostonian,
onto the platform where the silver train was belching steam.
First-class passengers hurried down the platform to the Oriental, the posh parlor car at the end of the train. Each seat was a cushiony armchair with white linen antimacassars on the arms and back. The chairs swiveled 360 degrees, and beside each was a button to ring for the steward, who would bring drinks to the seats. The other passengers crowded onto the coaches. Many were students going back to prep schools and colleges in New England for the start of the new school year.
A redcap, his dolly piled with luggage, escorted seventeen-year-old Elvine Richard and her mother to a rear coach. Elvine was on her way to boarding school in Massachusetts. Roderick Hagenbuckle, a young teacher at the Fessenden School just outside Boston, was shepherding twenty-five boys, ages fourteen to seventeen, to Back Bay Station. Their new blue suits, from Brooks Brothers or Best & Co., looked stiff and a little too big, but the boys would grow into them, or out of them, by the end of the term. Lawrence Burwell was going to Providence for his senior year at Brown University. Ed Flanagan and his wife also had tickets to Providence. Flanagan was the chairman of the Democratic City Committee there.
The crack New York–Boston Shore Line Limited filled up quickly. Joe Richards, the conductor, checked his gold pocket watch, called a final “All aboard,” and swung onto the train. At eleven o’clock, exactly on schedule, the
Bostonian
departed from Grand Central, carrying 275 passengers and making stops at 125th Street; New Haven; Old Saybrook; New London; Mystic; Stonington; Westerly, Rhode Island; North Kingston; Providence; and Back Bay Station, Boston.
At approximately 11:30
A.M.
, out on the rocks at Weekapaug, Rhode Island, a couple of miles east of Watch Hill, Mrs. John McKesson Camp eyed the sky uncertainly. She was a woman who knew her own mind and had no compunctions about letting others know it, too. But now she was wavering: should she fold up the tablecloth and send her picnic guests home, or open the wicker hamper? The surf was breaking high on the rocks, showering spumes of spray on her picnic site. Very strange, indeed. The tide shouldn’t peak for hours, yet it seemed to be coming in rapidly. Highly peculiar, but then it had been a peculiar season.
On nearby Napatree, the postman was making his daily rounds. He knocked on the glassed-in front porch where Jessie Moore and her daughter, Havila (no relation to their neighbors, the Geoffrey Moores) had front-row seats to the weather spectacle. The Moores had been summering at Napatree for years. Havila, forty and crippled since birth, could float freely in the surf in front of their cottage. Although her husband was arriving for the weekend, Mrs. Moore gave the mailman a letter for him:
Watch Hill, Wednesday — 6:30
A.M.
