Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  * * *

  —

  Lloyd’s chauffeur drove him down almost to the end of Broadway, not far from where Manhattan dipped its toe into the sea. After the birth of Robert, their third son, Lloyd and Matilda had sold their Gramercy Park house and joined the northward migration of fashionable souls to a new house at Fifty-Second Street, lengthening his commute. He’d thought about relocating L&O’s offices at least a bit uptown—some of their business was already being conducted at the Chelsea Piers—but the idea of separating himself from the entrenched and collusive downtown herd of shipping offices and ticketing halls made him uneasy.

  But then he worried he was becoming pigheaded like his father. Even as Ernst’s wealth had begun to accumulate, he had refused to move the family from their cramped apartment on Pearl Street. Having endured the upheaval of one child, he refused to give his wife another. He yielded from sail to steam power too slowly, without imagination. He only ever spoke German at home, took only German-language newspapers, seemed to have no interest in the country where he had settled beyond its capacity as an enormous machine that manufactured money.

  On the stroke of eight, the chauffeur stopped in front of a stately limestone building, and Lloyd let himself out. He ignored the doorman’s flourish of welcome, walked swiftly across the columned lobby to the elevators. The ninth floor was deserted at this early hour. On the walls hung immense maps, marked with routes and studded here and there with pushpins designating ships’ locations, adjusted daily. What little space was left was occupied by framed paintings of the L&O fleet, most prominently the Josephina Eterna and her newer sister ship the Maria Fortuna, named upon her launch for an aging soprano Lloyd had been enamored with at the time.

  In Lloyd’s office, the early editions had already been arrayed on his desk by his assistant, a marvelously unobtrusive young man. Ordinarily Lloyd would call for a cup of tea and page efficiently through the newspapers, but on this day he sat motionless, gazing at the war headlines. Germans marauding through Belgium. Trenches dug as graves for the living. The war sinking into the soil of the Continent.

  A sudden red burst of rage, as though from poked-at coals. He wished for Germany to lose the war, to be humiliated, for his father to return from the dead to see it happen. He wished for everyone to learn what it was to lose a son. He wished for a black slick of grief to spread across the planet.

  Thousands had left New York, eagerly returning to their birth countries to participate in the bloodshed. Immigration in reverse. The wave of enthusiasm had passed, though, and L&O’s ships were running eastbound at less than half capacity. Lloyd wondered if Ernst would have gone back to Germany, taken up a rifle in his bony old hands. Perhaps. Or he might have found some covert way of aiding the fatherland. By spying, maybe, or by smuggling supplies and munitions. Or he might have been too stubborn, too slow to do anything, even to profit.

  He swiveled to look out the window. To the west he had a slot view of the Hudson between the buildings. He hoped to glimpse the Josephina when she passed by later on her way to the Chelsea Piers. He thought he would like to have a drink with Addison Graves.

  It was a bother, Lloyd’s Germanness. His middle name, Wilhelm, now seemed incriminating, an act of corporate sabotage on the part of his father. But this war might offer new opportunities. There might be a role for him, a part to play. He was not his father.

  Here the memory of Henry quietly closing the study door behind him intruded and was pushed away.

  * * *

  —

  “How is your wife?” Lloyd asked Addison. He couldn’t bear to inquire about the new babies, who had arrived only a few weeks before Leander’s death, an unjust windfall of life.

  Addison studied his whiskey. “Only God knows, to tell the truth. She seems to spend all her time in bed. The day nurse told me she takes no interest at all in the babies, doesn’t wash or feed them. The nurse said sometimes new mothers have difficulties but none have ever frightened her like Annabel. She called it a ‘terrible gloom.’ ”

  “The gloom’s in our house, too. They should mark the doors, like for the plague.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you receive my condolences?”

  “Oh, probably. I don’t know.” Lloyd preferred gin to whiskey. He took a gulp. “None of that matters, I’m afraid, condolences and so on, but thanks all the same. What has Annabel got to be down about? Is something wrong with the twins?”

  “No, they’re perfectly healthy.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “She won’t see a doctor. She hates doctors. But I don’t think illness is the problem, at least not of the body. She seems to be almost mourning the birth, as though…well. I don’t understand it.”

  “Make her see a doctor.”

  “Yes, maybe I should.”

  “You’ve been at sea too much.”

  “On the ship I know what to do.”

  The bones in Addison’s face seemed more pronounced than ever, the skin hanging hollow between his cheekbones and jaw, his brow shadowing his eyes. The dark spirit stirred in Lloyd, spiteful toward Annabel, who lolled in bed, burdening her husband, neglecting her infants, surely unable to imagine the suffering endured by himself and Matilda. He yearned suddenly to be home, to feel Matilda stroking his hair. He had never told Addison, but, before they married, Lloyd had encountered Annabel a few times at society dinners, had heard rumors about her so seamy as to seem implausible.

  “You’re too patient,” he said to Addison. “Tell her to get up, make herself useful. Women like to be useful. Remind her how lucky she is. Give her a change of scene. Remind her she’s alive.” He felt himself going red in the face. His voice grew harsh. “Scrape her out of that bed with a shovel if you have to.”

  Addison looked up, something unreadable in his expression. Reproach? Concern? Quietly, he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

  North Atlantic

  December 1914

  Six weeks later

  The Josephina Eterna burned. A floating pyre, a raft of flames. It listed to starboard—slowly, slowly—as though easing over to douse itself in the sea.

  Smooth black water. A dense blue dawn fog, diffusing the fire’s glow.

  Under the surface: a frill of ragged steel and busted rivets, water in the boiler rooms, extinguishing the furnaces and drowning the stokers, flooding the forward holds, rising through the plumbing and pouring from sinks and tubs and toilets, running down passageways and up elevator shafts, water that—slowly, slowly—pulled the ship onto her side, tugged her bow down. Her engines were dead, her propellers still. Smoke billowed from the stairwells, and passengers in white nightclothes billowed with it, already ghosts.

  Addison intended to drown. He would stand stoically on deck, wait for the water to rise up the buttons of his coat, submerge his gold epaulettes, sweep him away. When he’d imagined such a moment, he had always known he would take the honorable course, but he’d never contemplated having a wife on board, certainly not two infants. He had been the one to insist Annabel come on the voyage. He’d almost needed to scrape her out of bed with the shovel Lloyd had suggested, but something had to be done. “You can’t be this miserable forever,” he’d told her.

  “I don’t see why not,” she’d replied.

  Fresh sea air would do her good, he’d said confidently, feeling no confidence. He’d issued his orders: the ship, the air. She had yielded. No nurses, he’d said. She must care for the children herself. She had yielded. She had come aboard like a piece of baggage, silent and passively unwieldy.

  On some level, the experiment had appeared successful. Before the voyage, Annabel had not taken care of the babies for even a single day, but, once forced, she had somehow known how to swaddle them and change their diapers and plug their small mouths with bottles of a warm mixture of cow’s milk, sugar, and cod liver oil made according to the night nurse’s written for
mula and brought at all hours from the ship’s kitchen. Addison might have felt vindicated if there hadn’t been something not quite right about how Annabel went about her maternal tasks: blank-faced, mechanical as a mill worker. One night, he had found her standing at the stern, looking down into the dark water.

  They were five days out when the explosion occurred, still a full day from Liverpool, slowed by the fog, entering a region of the sea bristling with periscopes and studded with mines.

  Only five hundred and twenty-three passengers were on board, with room for three times that. The crew outnumbered them.

  Addison had been awake when the blast came, before dawn. Driven mad by the wailing of one twin while Annabel fed the other, he had snatched up bottle and baby and brought both into bed with him.

  As soon as the rubber nipple was in its mouth, the child had quieted, its pale eyes intent on his face. Addison loosened the swaddling, and a pair of mottled pink hands emerged. “Which one is this?” he said.

  Where she sat, Annabel’s face was in shadow. “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The baby’s body pulsed in his lap. Its small fingers flared and curled.

  He felt the change of pressure in his ears before he heard the blast. The sound came from everywhere, permeating the air. The ship shuddered and seemed to twist. A whoosh, a second of suspended silence, then water raining down. Grinding vibration followed by quiet.

  “What was that?” Annabel said. Sharp, not fearful.

  He dressed hastily.

  A section of the starboard railing was mangled and twisted; smoke and steam drove him back when he went to look over. A fire alarm rang shrilly, maddeningly. On the bridge, he ordered the engine room be telegraphed STOP, though the engines had already gone dead. He sent the third officer below to investigate. Already, the list to starboard was noticeable. He stood motionless, looking at his boots, calculating. Fog pressed flat against the bridge windows like a blindfold. “Ready the boats,” he said. “Sound the general alarm.”

  In the radio room, the operators tapped out distress calls. Dots and dashes. The nearest ship, a merchant vessel, was thirty nautical miles away and COMING FULL SPEED. But it would not arrive for two hours.

  He considered the fire, the starboard list, the blue fog, the black water. “Abandon ship,” he said to the first mate, who shouted it to the other officers, who shouted it in return. A strange echo, growing louder instead of fading.

  The boat deck was in chaos. Crew members with megaphones yelled instructions over the passengers’ commotion, the cranking davits, the hiss of steam. Addison strode the length of the ship, trying to impose order. He told himself he would only duck away for a moment, only ensure that Annabel was on her way to the boats with the babies and bid them a brief, stoic farewell.

  He made his way through the smoke and clamor.

  The simple fact that Annabel was not in the cabin dawned on him with dreamlike slowness. The two swaddled infants screamed in their basket. Annabel was not in the armchair or in the bed. She was not in the bathroom, where seawater was pouring from the fixtures. The babies’ faces were purple and contorted with outrage, their spongy pink tongues curling in their shrieking mouths. He opened the wardrobe, but of course Annabel was not inside. He stepped out into the corridor, called her name, then shouted it.

  Long ago Addison had trained himself not to hesitate. If he had hesitated before throwing that line to Lloyd, his friend would have drowned, would never have been his friend. But now he hesitated, standing in the middle of the cabin, waiting for something to change, for some solution to emerge. Finally, still hesitantly, he went to the wardrobe and removed his pistol from its case, loaded it, and dropped it in the pocket of his greatcoat. He lifted the babies from their basket, one in each arm.

  Down the tilting stairs, out a heavy tilted steel door by pressing the latch with an elbow, pushing with a shoulder. He found the twins’ flopping heads alarming, their larval bodies cumbersome. On the boat deck, pressing aft through a panicked mob, he craned and swiveled, looking for Annabel. Where was she? The question rang in his mind, deafening and relentless. A quiet voice, speaking from some silent inner part of him, answered You won’t find her. If she had planned to return, she would not have left.

  Deep scrums had formed around the boats not yet launched or on fire or beached on the sloping portside hull. A dangerous gap was opening between the starboard boats and the ship’s edge.

  As Addison passed, a lowering boat wobbled on its ropes, tipped and overturned, dumping people into a sea already teeming with them. Addison felt little for them. People were dying, but soon he would die, too.

  At Boat 12, he stopped. The gap was widening. This boat would be among the last launched. With one arm, he clamped the babies against his body. With the other, he drew his pistol and shot into the air.

  The passengers screamed and fell away, half flattened, like tall grass in a gust of wind.

  He pushed through to the edge of the deck, brandishing the gun. Back, he told them, get back! He cleared a half-moon of space so those going in the boat would have room for a few steps’ running start before leaping over the gap, the strip of far-below black water. The crewmen at the davits, probably doomed themselves, tried to hold the boat steady with hooked poles. The babies cried, but Addison barely heard them.

  One by one he selected those who would go in the boat, pulling them out of the crowd, signaling with a flick of the pistol when it was their turn to leap over the gap. Women and children. The women gathered their skirts and jumped. None fell. He began to look for which woman he would hand his children to, who could be trusted to survive.

  * * *

  —

  When the boat was full, he still couldn’t see a face he liked. They were all just strangers, just women with fearful eyes and mouths that jabbered or trembled. In his arms were babies about to be orphaned. He stepped close to the edge, grasping the swaddling of one infant, preparing to hand it across. He didn’t know which twin it was. He was eager to shed his burden, to feel the rising water.

  His mistake was to look at the baby’s face, a knot of helpless outrage. One glance dizzied him like an uppercut to the jaw. The water receded, spat him out. How could he entrust his children to unknown women in a small, tippy boat? How could he send them off across a sea full of drowning people who would reach up to grasp at the oars and gunwales like monsters from the deep? He saw the lifeboat capsizing, the babies’ white swaddling fading into the depths like the canvas shrouds he had, in his sailing days, helped wrap around the dead before sliding them overboard. No, he needed to know if they lived, to see them to land or to death himself.

  He gathered both twins to his chest, took two long steps and leapt across into the boat. The close-packed women drew back, and he half fell, half stepped among them, his body curving to protect the babies. Regaining his balance, he drew himself up to his full height and roared into the crewmen’s astonished faces, “Lower away!”

  Trained to obey, remembering the pistol, they worked the squeaking pulleys. Boat 12 with its cargo of women and children and one man dropped away from the crowd and the smoke, descended past flames poking around the edges of portholes like the fingers of trapped demons. Slowly, jerkily, it made its way down to the water, where it settled with a gentle splash.

  New York City

  July 1915

  Seven months later

  A new Feiffer son, born in the night after a short labor. The baby was severed from his mother, knotted off into his own selfhood, bathed and wrapped and fed from the breast. George, named after the king, a fifth son, though the five Feiffer boys would never be all together on this earth.

  Lloyd collapsed beside Matilda, dressed but collar undone, tiny George between them. “How do you feel?” he said.

  “Tired,” she said, with a note of incredulity that she must say so. “But happy
. And relieved to be happy. That surge of feeling—I had it with the others, but I didn’t know if it was still possible.”

  He rested a finger against the infant’s cheek. Since Matilda had discovered she was pregnant, not long before the loss of the Josephina, Lloyd had been, as a gesture of atonement and superstition, faithful. He’d found, these eight months, a monkish peacefulness in a life with only one woman. (Though there was nothing monkish about how his new fortune was accruing thanks to the war, raining merrily down on top of his old one.)

  He had been sloppy with the Josephina, eager and amateurish, driven by anger at his father and grief for Leander, and he had paid a terrible price. Of course, the hundreds burned and drowned had paid a worse one. And Addison Graves had been sent to Sing Sing.

  Lloyd had only wanted to contribute to the effort against the Germans, to do something, and when his friend Sir Gerald de Redvers had suggested he might smuggle armaments to England on his ships, he’d leapt at the idea. In his haste, he hadn’t sought enough advice, hadn’t taken enough precautions. He hadn’t even told Addison what was in the crates, only asked him—told him, really—to overlook their absence on the manifest.

  But, he now understood, you couldn’t put armaments on a ship as casually as if they were bolts of cotton, though he still didn’t know what had triggered the explosion. The crates should have been safe enough. He had been assured they were properly packed; he’d assumed they were properly stowed. Something else must have gone wrong, but there was no way to know what. Some freak thing. Something that could not quite have been his own fault, not directly.

  “It happened because I didn’t break the bottle,” Matilda had said in the days after. “I cursed the ship.”

  “It had nothing to do with you.”

  “You shouldn’t have named it after that girl.”