Tourmaline (3 page)

The group sat silently as a waiter cleared their plates. Teresa Fugle asked to see the dessert tray before choosing her main course. Walter Fugle suggested a game of rummy after dinner. Claire wondered aloud how many people were onboard the
Casparia.

“Nearly two thousand,” the engineer said.

“Are there enough lifeboats onboard for two thousand passengers?” Claire asked.

The engineer said yes indeed there were enough lifeboats on-board, and he reminded Claire that people were more likely to die in their own bedrooms at home than on a ship. “The most dangerous thing you can do…” The engineer paused to sip his water. “The most dangerous thing you can do in your life is to get out of bed in the morning.”

“All the more reason…” Murray began. But Claire’s attention had shifted. She started to rise from her chair and called to Nat, who had been skipping between the tables and right then slammed into a steward’s elastic belly. The steward stepped back, his full tray wobbled, the china clattered, the crystal chimed. Conversations stopped abruptly as everyone turned to watch. But the steward, an experienced seaman, nimbly steadied the tray and marched into the galley without a word. When the doors swung closed behind him, the room exploded in applause.

“What happened?” Nat asked, running up to the table. “You’re famous,” Murray said.

“You’re stupid,” Patrick said.

“What did I do?”

“Nothing at all, son,” Walter Fugle said. Nat took a few hop-skips and climbed onto Claire’s lap; but Mama’s lap belonged to me, and I began to cry because Mama was my mama, no one else’s mama, and Nat was a big fat —

“You have charming boys,” said Mrs. Fugle. Her husband squawked with laughter and Mrs. Fugle tilted her head and smiled at Claire, her expression conveying something close to pity for the poor woman who dared to pose as a first-class passenger.

Later, Claire imagined meeting Teresa Fugle’s ridicule with a cold stare. At the time she’d been flustered and could do no better than join Walter Fugle in weak laughter, but afterward she wished she’d been icy and dignified. A woman should always have an extra supply of dignity on hand, especially a woman in our mother’s position, lacking as she believed she was in
background.
She felt as if she’d come to an elegant party dressed in a cheap gingham sun-dress — a charming dress, and she was the mother of charming children.

In our cabin Nat and I fell asleep before Claire had finished reading us a story. While Harry and Patrick whispered in the top bunk, Claire cleaned her face with cold cream and lazily brushed her hair. She turned out the overhead light and shed her dress — not a gingham dress, not cheap, just an inappropriate light polka-dot rayon that would have been more suitable for a secretary heading off to work. She slid naked between the cool sheets.

Murray had stayed in the saloon to play cards with the Fugles. One more round, he’d said, though Claire expected he’d play for another hour or two. She wanted to be awake when he returned. Once she was certain all of us were asleep, she turned on her bedside lamp to read. She started the novel her sister had given her that morning — Hawthorne’s
The Marble Faun.
“Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader…” She read and reread the first page, pondering the images: the swooning marble Gladiator and the Lycian Apollo, women hanging out their wash in the sun, the Alban Mountains, the great sweep of the Colliseum. She let her mind wander and found herself picturing white sheets billowing on a clothesline strung over a street.

“Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.” Claire read on. She was half asleep when Murray lay down beside her, still fully dressed in his suit, the smell of cigarettes overpowering the lingering fragrance of Claire’s own perfume, signaling to her that he’d been among friends and had enjoyed himself. She liked the smell of his cigarettes. She liked the way his body on top of the bedspread tightened the covers around her. She yawned so he’d know she was still awake. He floated his hand lazily along her shoulder.

“I wish we didn’t have Teresa Fugle at our table,” she whispered. “I could tell she’d gotten your goat. He, on the other hand —” “He seems decent.”

“He’s a cheat. Took me for five dollars.”

“You placed bets?”

“It was his idea.”

He stroked her lips and dipped his fingertips into her mouth. She tasted brandy, salt, tobacco. He withdrew his hand, traced the curve of her chin. She tried to forget that Murray had lost at cards. She asked herself how much she was prepared to lose and for a moment felt only a surge of dejection, until she remembered the sum: five dollars. Maybe she didn’t mind if Murray lost a little money at cards now and then. He may not have had much winner’s luck, but he didn’t play often.

She rolled over and locked her mouth against his and began unbuttoning his shirt. He peeled her free of the sheet, followed with his open hand the rise of her hip, moved in a smooth familiar spiral around her thigh.

Later that night Patrick was woken by the wind shushing against the thick glass of the porthole. He put on his glasses, which he’d left hanging on the headboard of his bunk, and peered into the night. A creamy brown halo surrounded the moon. The mist had thickened; stars were visible only as occasional glitter behind the haze. And as though in reflection, whitecaps sparked across the water and then disappeared, folded back into the darkness. Patrick says he remembers this like it was yesterday.

Harry says he remembers playing miniature golf and Ping-Pong. Nat says he remembers our parents tossing him between them in the pool. He remembers his shrieks echoing off the metal roof. Patrick remembers the sink in our cabin overflowing because Harry forgot to turn off the water. Harry insists that it was Nat who left the water running.

The voyage from New York to Genoa took a week. But somehow we became convinced that while the ship was surging forward, the ocean was flowing backward and we were going nowhere. We didn’t mind. If we’d been offered the choice, we would have stayed on the
Casparia
forever, and forever looked forward to reaching Elba.

After breakfast we’d go to the rec room. After lunch we’d go to the pool. After the pool our parents would take us to the nursery, and our father would play cards with the Fugles while our mother claimed a deck chair for herself and read until someone came by and engaged her in conversation.

Usually it was the engineer from Ohio who would pull up a chair. He was eager to talk, and when he learned that our mother had never before taken an ocean voyage, he was eager to tell her what he knew. It turned out he knew a lot. He explained the tug of the Gulf Stream and the constituents of salt. He explained how bromine could be extracted from the sea and used to make ethyl gasoline. Magnesium hydroxide could be filtered and used directly as milk of magnesia. Uranium could be extracted, and silver, and even gold. According to the engineer, a troy ounce of gold is found in every eight million tons of sea water.

Whenever the engineer sat down in the chair beside her, our mother would close her book and listen politely, because that’s what she’d have done with anyone. He seemed trustworthy. And he was more interesting than she’d expected him to be. She found herself intrigued by his mix of information and disclosure, and she looked forward to their conversations.

He said he planned to go first to Florence and spend a week there seeing the sights. Then on to Venice for another week, and then to Turin, where he would serve for three months as a site planner — a
field dog,
he was called — for an expanding textiles mill. He’d return to the States by December and spend Christmas with his brother’s family in Ashville.

He mentioned his ex-wife only once, when he spoke about selling his house in Cincinnati the previous spring. He didn’t mention any children, and Claire didn’t ask. He complained about his insomnia and confessed that late at night he’d sneak to the pool and swim alone in the dark. He said that sometimes, leaning against the rail, he’d feel close to overwhelmed by the desire to dive into the sea. He spoke about the responsibilities of his job and the inspirations of travel.

As the days passed, the afternoon meetings between our mother and the engineer became routine. She would arrive on deck first, and he’d appear within ten minutes. He was pleasant, she thought. Perhaps a bit pedantic. The knowledgeable engineer from Ohio. She listened to him. She looked at him. Each day she looked at him more closely — at the delicate curl of his nostrils, the slight peak of his upper lip, his long lashes, the pinhead pupils in his eyes, the spray of dandruff on his shirt. She noticed that his breath smelled of peppermint, and the thumbnail on his left hand was a bruised purple. She was about to interrupt him — he’d been talking about Darwin, Darwin and pigeons — and ask him what he’d done to his thumb. But just then Mrs. Fugle came up to complain about the breakfast, from the soupy eggs to the cardboard bacon.

Claire and the engineer murmured in agreement. Mrs. Fugle settled in a chair beside the engineer and tilted her hat to keep the sun out of her face. Claire let her thoughts drift away from the conversation for a few moments. She experienced the kind of peace she associated with waking up from a good dream.

She decided that she’d misjudged Teresa Fugle. And the engineer from Ohio — was there anything he didn’t know?

Only minutes later, they were all laughing because Mrs. Fugle admitted that Mr. Fugle had poured salt into his jacket pocket at breakfast after he’d overheard a man at a nearby table saying that a pinch of salt was considered good luck onboard a ship.

“And when you sneeze,” said the engineer, “sneeze on the starboard side —”

“And not on the port side, or you make trouble,” finished the first officer, who’d come up quietly behind them while they were talking.

“Ah, sir, welcome,” offered the engineer.

“Officer, sir!” Mrs. Fugle snorted with laughter; she’d worked herself into a giddy mood and was finding everything and everyone ridiculous.

“Of course, you might have nailed a horseshoe to the mainmast for our protection, sir!” joked the engineer.

“All you need to do is cross your second finger over your first, ecco!”

“Or a hunchback. You should keep a hunchback onboard, sir.” “Or you can spit into your hat — that will bring good luck. Or strike your left palm with your right fist.”

“Or break a piece of wood, here” — the engineer took a pencil from his shirt pocket and snapped it in two — “and you’ll have a lucky break.”

“A lucky break!” echoed Mrs. Fugle with another burst of laughter.

The officer touched the peak of his cap and strolled on, leaving the engineer and Teresa Fugle and Claire to sigh and acknowledge one another with friendly smiles. Claire felt as if she were sitting outside on a summer evening with neighbors. The engineer and Teresa were her neighbors on the ship, and Claire was grateful to both of them, to the first officer as well, to the other passengers, the captain, the stewards, to everyone who was making this trip so safe and wonderful.

First there were petrels wheeling overhead. Then porpoises swam for a couple of hours alongside the
Casparia.
Then the barometer dropped, the birds and porpoises disappeared, rain balls gathered overhead, and the squall began, sheets of rain lashing the deck, waves colliding across the stern, the wind whistling, the ship’s bell clanging. At dinner the engineer told the others at the table about a North Atlantic storm so powerful it tore apart a breakwater on the coast of Scotland by ripping away an 800-ton slab and the 550-ton foundation to which it was bound. He said he knew the engineer who worked on the replacement section — a 2,600-ton block of concrete, which was promptly swept away by another storm.

Talk turned to tsunamis and tidal bores, gales and hurricanes. Mr. Fugle put a handful of marbles on the floor and sent us in pursuit when they rolled away. The vertical lights around the room flickered, making the bright walls look as if there were flames spreading behind the hammered glass. The motion made Mrs. Fugle queasy and she left early for bed. Claire drank too much wine. Murray did some card tricks for my brothers and me.

The storm passed without incident, and by the next morning the air was cool, the skies gray over the turbulent water. Shortly before breakfast, Claire took Nat and me out to get some fresh air, and we found the engineer on the sundeck. He was smoking a cigarette and watching passengers stroll by. When Claire saw that he hadn’t spotted her yet, for some reason she couldn’t have explained she started to move away in the opposite direction.

But just then Nat tugged loose from her hand and ran ahead, calling us to hurry up and come on. Claire carried me toward Nat, and a moment later the engineer joined us. Nat was already scrambling over the partition dividing the first-class terrace from the second-class promenade. Claire yelled at him to stop. The engineer climbed over the partition and grabbed Nat, who squirmed in his arms and tried to slip away. But when the engineer murmured something in Nat’s ear, Nat abruptly calmed, as if he’d just been promised an extravagant toy. The engineer carried Nat to the far rail at the stern, and they stood there, watching the wide white expanse of the wake disappear into the mist.

That’s when I felt my mother tense. She held me in the usual fashion, propped against her jutting hip, one of her arms supporting me, and I felt the hand resting flat against my belly tighten into a fist. I might be picturing what my mother has described to me, or maybe I do have some real memory of it: the salt spray, the wind, the rough sea, the knuckles of my mother’s hand, the broad white wake spreading out behind us like ribbons of taffy. And a man in white trousers and a black jacket standing with his back to us, my brother in his arms.

Claire set me down on the terrace and hoisted herself over the partition, her knees stretching the tight cap of her skirt hem. She ran toward the engineer. I started to howl, for it seemed clear that my mother had discarded me. Claire skidded to a stop a few yards short of the engineer, who pivoted slowly. His expression was somber. His arms were outstretched in front of him.