Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  The stunt coordinator is checking my harness, all business as he digs around my crotch, feeling for the straps and clips among bristly reindeer hair. True to type, he’s got a leathery face, a leathery wardrobe, and a stop-action way of walking from a few imperfect repair jobs.

  “Totally,” I say.

  When he’s done, the crane lifts us up, swings us out. There’s a scrim at the end of the tank that makes a kind of horizon with the water, and I’m her, Marian Graves, flying over the Southern Ocean with my fuel gauge on empty, and I know I can’t get anywhere other than where I am, which is nowhere. I wonder how cold the water will be, how long before I’m dead. I think through my options. I think about what I’ve promised myself. A gannet plunge.

  “Action,” says a voice in my earpiece, and I push on the fake plane’s yoke as though I’m going to fly us down into the center of the earth. The pulleys tip the nose, and we dive.

  The Josephina Eterna

  Glasgow, Scotland

  April 1909

  An unfinished ship. A hull without funnels, caged in her slipway by a steel gantry above and a timber cradle below. Beyond her stern, under the four impotent blossoms of her exposed propellers, the River Clyde flowed green in unexpected sunshine.

  From keel to waterline she was rust red, and above that, specially painted for the launch, she was white as a bride. (White made for better newspaper pictures.) After the flashbulbs have popped, after she has been moored lonely in the river for her fitting-out, men will stand on planks hung down her sides on thick ropes and paint the plates and rivets of her hull glossy black.

  Her two funnels will be hoisted up, bolted down, lashed in place. Her decks will be planked in teak, her corridors and salons paneled in mahogany and walnut and oak. There will be sofas and settees and chaises, beds and bathtubs, seascapes in gilded frames, gods and goddesses in bronze and alabaster. The first-class china will be gilt-edged, patterned with gold anchors (the emblem of L&O Lines). For second class: blue anchors, blue edging (blue, the line’s color). Third class will make do with plain white crockery and the crew with tin. Boxcars will arrive full of crystal and silver and porcelain, damask and velvet. Cranes will hoist aboard three pianos, dangling in nets like stiff-legged beasts. A grove of potted palms will be wheeled up the gangway. Chandeliers will be hung. Deck chairs hinged like alligator jaws will be stacked. Eventually the first load of coal will be poured in through apertures low in the hull, down into bunkers below the waterline, far from the finery. The first fire will be lit deep in her furnaces.

  But on the day of her launch she was still only a shell, a bare and comfortless wedge of steel. A crowd jostled in her shadow: ship workers in rowdy clumps, Glaswegian families out for the spectacle, urchin boys peddling newspapers and sandwiches. A brilliantly blue sky flew overhead like a pennant. In this city of fog and soot, such a sky could only be a good omen. A brass band played.

  Mrs. Lloyd Feiffer, Matilda, wife of the ship’s new American owner, stood on a platform edged with blue-and-white bunting, a bottle of Scotch tucked under her arm. “Shouldn’t it be champagne?” she had asked her husband.

  “Not in Glasgow,” he’d said.

  Matilda was to break the bottle against the ship, christening it with the name she could scarcely bear to think of. She was impatient for the cathartic shattering of glass, for her task to be done, but now she could only wait. There was some kind of delay. Lloyd fidgeted, making occasional comments to the naval architect, who appeared rigid with anxiety. A few unhappy Englishmen in bowler hats milled around the platform, and a pair of Scotsmen from the shipbuilding firm, and several other men she couldn’t identify.

  This ship had already been half built when L&O Lines, founded in New York by Lloyd’s father, Ernst, in 1857 and inherited by Lloyd in 1906, acquired the failing English line that had commissioned it. (Commissioned her, Lloyd was always correcting. But, to Matilda, ships would always be its.) The sheathing had been under way when money ran out and was resumed once Lloyd’s dollars were converted to sterling, then steel. The men in bowler hats, up from London, remarking morosely among themselves about the glorious weather, had conceived of the ship, argued over its blueprints, chosen a sensible name that Lloyd had disregarded. All that, only to have ended up obsolete: cuckolds in carefully brushed hats on a bunting-swagged platform, the brass band’s rousing march bubbling around their feet. Tallow had been smeared on the slipway to grease the ship’s path, and Matilda could feel its thick animal odor permeating her clothes, coating her skin.

  Lloyd had wanted a new liner to reinvigorate L&O. When Ernst died, the fleet had been tired and outdated, mostly tramp steamers plying the coastwise trade, plus some passenger-cargo ships chugging across the Atlantic and a few tired windjammers still running the Pacific grain and guano routes. This ship would not be the largest or fastest or most opulent liner crossing from Europe—no threat to the White Star Line monsters being built in Belfast—but Lloyd had told Matilda it would be a respectable ante at the fat cats’ table.

  “What’s the news?” Lloyd barked, startling her. The question was addressed to Addison Graves, Captain Graves, who was standing nearby—looming, really, though his habitual hunch seemed intended as a preemptive apology for his height. He was thin, almost gaunt, but with bones as massive and heavy as cudgels.

  “It’s a problem with the trigger,” he told Lloyd. “Shouldn’t be much longer.”

  Lloyd frowned at the ship. “It’s like she’s in shackles. She’s meant to be at sea. Don’t you think, Graves?” He turned suddenly ebullient. “Don’t you think she’s absolutely magnificent?”

  The bow towered over them, sharp as a blade. “She’ll be a fine ship,” Graves said mildly.

  He was to be the ship’s first captain, had come across for the launch with Lloyd and Matilda and the four young Feiffer sons—Henry, the eldest at seven, and Leander, the baby not even a year old, with Clifford and Robert in between, all being cared for somewhere out of the way by their two nannies. Matilda had hoped to warm up to Graves on the voyage. He was not unkind, never impolite, but his reserve seemed unbreachable. Even her boldest attempts to discover something of his inner workings had yielded nothing. What drew you to the sea, Captain Graves? she’d asked one night at dinner. He’d said, Go far enough in any direction, and you’ll find the sea, Mrs. Feiffer, and she’d felt reproached. To her, he’d come to represent the basic impenetrability of male life. Lloyd loved him with a wholeheartedness he didn’t seem to lavish on anyone else, certainly not Matilda. I owe him my life, Lloyd had said many times. Your life can’t be a debt, she’d countered once, or then it’s not really yours, and nothing has been saved. But Lloyd had only laughed, asked if she had considered becoming a philosopher.

  They had crewed on a barque together as young men, Graves and Lloyd. Graves had been a working sailor and Lloyd, just graduated from Yale, was half pretending to be. Ernst, Lloyd’s father, had said he needed to learn the ropes (literally) if he was to inherit L&O. When hapless Lloyd fell overboard off Chile, Graves was quick and accurate enough to throw him a line and haul him back aboard. Since then, Lloyd had always venerated Graves as a savior. (But you’re the one who caught the line, Matilda said. You’re the one who hung on.) After Chile, as Lloyd ascended through the firm, so, too, did Graves.

  The platform was no longer in the shade. Sweat was making Matilda’s corset stick and chafe. Lloyd seemed to think she’d been born knowing how to christen a ship. “Just break the bottle on the bow, Tildy,” he’d said. “It’s very simple.”

  Would she know when the moment came? Would they remember to tell her? All she knew was that she’d apparently be signaled (by whom, she wasn’t sure) at the moment the ship began to slide, and she was to crack the whiskey against the bow, christening it Josephina Eterna, after her husband’s mistress.

  When, months before, at
the breakfast table, she’d asked Lloyd what the ship would be called, he had told her without lowering his newspaper.

  Matilda’s cup had not rattled when she returned it to its saucer. At least she could be proud of that.

  She had been young but not too young when Lloyd married her, twenty-one to his thirty-six, old enough to know she was being chosen for her fortune and breeding potential, not love. All she asked was that Lloyd behave with respectful discretion. She had explained this to him before their engagement, and he had listened kindly and agreed there was much to be said for individual privacy within marriage, especially since bachelor life had suited him so well for so long. “We understand each other, then,” she had said and offered him her hand. Solemnly, he had shaken her hand and then kissed her, full on the mouth, for quite some time, and she had begun, in spite of herself, to fall in love. Bad luck.

  But she would not go back on her word. As best she could, she made peace with Lloyd’s wanderings, directing her passions toward her children and the maintenance of her wardrobe and person. Lloyd regarded her affectionately, she knew, and was more tender in bed than she gathered some husbands were, though she also knew she was fundamentally not to his taste. He preferred temperamental, unappeasable women, usually older than Matilda, often older than even himself, older certainly than the ship’s namesake, this Jo, who was only nineteen, dark and flighty. But Matilda knew enough to know it was often the lover who went against type who undid people.

  The ship’s name had seemed a poor repayment of her tolerance and generosity, and as soon as she’d found a moment alone, away from rattling china and servants’ eyes, she had shed a few tears. Then she’d pulled herself together and soldiered on, as always.

  On the platform, Lloyd turned to her, wrought up. “It’s almost time.”

  She tried to ready herself. The bottle’s neck was too short for her to get a good grip, especially not through her silk gloves, and it slipped from her grasp, landed with a thud perilously close to the platform’s edge. As she picked it up, someone touched her shoulder. Addison Graves. Gently, he took the bottle. “You’d better remove your gloves,” he said. When she had, he wrapped one of her hands around the neck and set the other palm flat against the cork. “Like this,” he said, demonstrating a sideways arcing motion. “Don’t be afraid to take a good swing because it’s bad luck if the bottle doesn’t break.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  At the platform’s edge, she waited for her signal, but nothing happened. The bow stayed where it was, the immense upturned nose of a proud and haughty thing. The men were talking urgently among themselves. The naval architect went rushing off. She waited. The bottle grew heavier. Her fingers ached. Down in the crowd, two men were shoving each other, causing a commotion. As she watched, one struck the other in the face.

  “Tildy, for God’s sake!” Lloyd was tugging at her arm. The bow was sliding away. So quickly. She had not expected something so large would go so quickly.

  She leaned out and hurled the bottle after the retreating wall of steel. Awkwardly, overhand. It thudded against the hull but did not break, only bounced off and dropped to the slipway, shattering on the concrete in a splat of glass and amber liquid. The Josephina receded. The river rose up behind the stern in a green bulge, collapsed into foam.

  North Atlantic

  January 1914

  Four years and nine months later

  Josephina Eterna, eastbound in the night. A jeweled brooch on black satin. A solitary crystal on the wall of a dark cave. A stately comet in an empty sky.

  Below her lights and honeycombed cabins, below the men toiling in red heat and black dust, below her barnacled keel, a school of cod passed, a dense pack of flexing bodies in the darkness, eyes bulging wide though there was nothing to see. Below the fish: cold and pressure, empty black miles, a few strange, luminescent creatures drifting after flecks of food. Then the sandy bottom, blank except for faint trails left by hardy shrimp, blind worms, creatures who would never know such a thing as light existed.

  The night Addison Graves came to dinner and found Annabel seated beside him was the second out of New York. He had descended without enthusiasm from the masculine quiet of the bridge into the dining room’s trilling, sparkling cacophony. The air felt hot and moist, smelled of food and perfume. The ocean cold clinging to his wool uniform evaporated; immediately he prickled with sweat. At his table, he stooped in a bow, cap under his arm. The passengers’ faces radiated a predatory eagerness for his attention. “Good evening,” he said as he sat, shaking out his napkin. He rarely gleaned pleasure from conversation, certainly not from the self-congratulatory chitchat demanded by passengers wealthy or important enough to wrangle seats at the captain’s table. At first he registered nothing beyond the pale green of Annabel’s dress. On his other side sat an older woman in brown. The first of a long series of fussy dishes arrived, borne from the kitchen by tailcoated waiters.

  Lloyd Feiffer had promoted Addison to captain as soon as he’d inherited L&O, when the turned earth was still fresh on his father’s grave. Over a steak dinner at Delmonico’s, Lloyd had given him charge of a ship, and Addison had only nodded, not wanting to betray his elation. Captain Graves! The miserable boy he’d been long ago on that farm in Illinois would finally be gone forever, ground to nothing under the heel of his polished boot, tossed overboard.

  But Lloyd had raised one small concern. “You’ll have to be genial, Graves. You’ll have to converse. It’s part of what they pay for. Don’t look like that. It won’t be so bad.” He paused, looking anxious. “Do you think you can manage?”

  “Yes,” Addison had said, his ambition outweighing the dread in his heart. “Of course.”

  Waiters swirled around delivering bowls of consommé. On Addison’s right, Mrs. Somebody-or-Other in the brown dress was relating her sons’ life histories in great detail and with such slow and deliberate enunciation that she might have been reading out the terms of a treaty. Lamb with mint jelly appeared and was eaten. Then roast chicken. Over the salad, during a brief intermission in his neighbor’s recitation, Addison turned, finally, to the woman in the pale green dress. Annabel, she’d said her name was. She appeared quite young. He asked if it would be her first time in Britain.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been several times.”

  “Then you enjoy it?”

  At first she did not reply. Then, when she spoke, her tone was matter-of-fact. “Not particularly, but my father and I decided it would be best if I left New York for a while.”

  A curious admission. He studied her more closely. Her head was lowered; she seemed intent on her meal. She was older than he had initially thought, in her late twenties, and extremely fair, though the careless application of her rouge and lipstick gave her a blurred, feverish appearance. She had cream-colored hair like the mane of a palomino horse and eyelashes and eyebrows so pale as to be almost invisible. Abruptly, she looked up and met his gaze.

  Her irises were light blue, filigreed with bright, pale interlocking rings like sun dapples. In them he recognized a proposition, brazen and unmistakable. He knew the look from women in the South Pacific lounging bare-breasted in the shade, from whores half hidden in the gloom of port city alleys, from karayuki-san ushering him into lantern-lit rooms. He glanced at her father across the table, a florid, wiry man talking boisterously, seemingly oblivious to his daughter.

  “You despise this,” Annabel said in a low voice. “Talking to these people. I can tell because I do, too.”

  * * *

  —

  Addison begged off dessert. Something needed his attention, do forgive him. He made his way out of the dining room and up two flights of stairs, clanged out through a door—CREW ONLY—onto a patch of open deck behind the bridge.

  He rested his elbows on the railing. No one was around. The sea was lightly chopped. The marbled seam of the Milky Way arced throu
gh the clear, moonless sky.

  He had politely denied despising anything, had turned away from the young woman and asked his other neighbor if she had any more amusing stories about her children. But Annabel had continued to burn at his periphery. Green dress, pale eyelashes. That look. So unexpected. A blue flame, unwavering and alien.

  There was some relief in the workmanlike atmosphere of the bridge and, later, in the midnight pot of coffee brought to his cabin, but still she burned. In his bath, his bony knees poking out of the water, he had let his hand drift to his groin, thinking of her flushed cheeks, the loose wisps of pale hair at her nape.

  It was well past midnight when she knocked at his door. She was still in the green dress, an apparition. He didn’t know how she had found his cabin, but she stepped briskly inside as though she had been to see him many times before. She was smaller than he’d thought, her head only reaching the middle of his chest, and she was shivering violently. Her skin was bluish and very cold, and for the first few minutes he could barely stand to touch her for the chill.

  New York City

  September 1914

  Nine months later

  The babies were crying.

  Annabel did not move. She was standing at her bedroom window in Addison’s redbrick townhouse (black trim, black door with a brass knocker, near the river) and looking across the street at a black cat sleeping in a third-floor window. Often it was there. Sometimes, tail flicking, it watched pigeons pecking in the gutters below. When the cat flicked its tail, Annabel was compelled to wag one finger. When the cat stopped, she stopped. At night, lying sleepless, she would wag her finger until the digit was painfully tight and sore. A scold’s gesture. Tick-tock.