Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  “You’re right,” he’d said. “I am sorry.”

  He could not remember ever apologizing to her before. Her pregnancy had been a buoy to which they’d clung during the first shock of the Josephina, the horror brought by the ringing of the telephone before dawn, the telegrammed counts of the rescued and the lost, the lists of names, the painful revisions to the counts and the lists, the photographs from the crowded decks of the freighters that had picked up survivors, including one of Addison Graves, alive, with his two babies.

  Lloyd had known at once that Addison would absorb the worst of the public’s rage (“Captain Cowardice,” the press had dubbed him) and also that he would never tell anyone about the mysterious crates left off the manifest at Lloyd’s request. Again Addison would save him. He was sorry—so sorry—for his friend, but what could he do? Surely Addison would not want L&O to fail, would understand that Lloyd himself must not go to prison. Matilda didn’t know, of course, about the crates bound for Gerald de Redvers. She had forgiven Lloyd so much already. He could not expect her to forgive this.

  When the Lusitania sank five months after the Josephina, it had been a terrible tragedy, yes, but also, Lloyd could not deny, a help to his own situation. Who was to say the Germans hadn’t also torpedoed the Josephina, perhaps even by mistake in the fog, and not acknowledged it? (Lloyd had suggested this theory to a few reporters, added tempting incentives for those willing to write it up.) The Lusitania had also been rumored to be carrying munitions of some kind. People loved a conspiracy, and they weren’t wrong that the holds of ships were good places to store secrets.

  Since the wreck, Lloyd had avoided transporting weapons. There was no need, anyhow. The L&O fleet was being put to work carrying steel, lumber, rubber, wheat, beef, medical supplies, wool, horses, whatever was needed. He’d acquired a few tanker ships, which in turn had led him to develop enough of an interest in the petroleum industry that he’d quietly started up a little subsidiary in Texas, just a modest experimental outpost with a couple of geologists, a few wildcatters, an agent who negotiated leases on patches of wasteland. Liberty Oil, Lloyd was calling the venture.

  The Maria Fortuna had gone to work as a troopship for the Canadian Expeditionary Force after he’d offered the British government an exceptionally generous rate. (Not pure altruism, as he retained control of the cargo holds.) Her tidy paint job disappeared under a chaos of razzle-dazzle: wild stripes and checkers and false bow waves designed to confuse range finders. Quite possibly at some point the United States would enter the war, and when it did, more ships would be needed. Lloyd would be ready.

  Some of his vessels would be lost, but he had become less afraid of loss, inoculated against it. The dark spirit had left him, or perhaps he’d absorbed it into himself without noticing. Sadness still weighed on him, but his heart beat on; his lungs swelled and contracted. His collar was impeccably white; he walked at a clip. He had no time for mistresses, for soft afternoons playing at love. He required all his dignity. (Despite his best intentions, this bout of fidelity would last the duration of the war but no longer.) What appetite he had for variety, he channeled into business. He would be a titan. He was in the midst of a beginning. The sleeping baby, feeling his first night breeze, was the son of a new Lloyd Feiffer.

  Near Missoula, Montana

  May 1923

  Eight years and five months after the sinking of the Josephina

  Marian and Jamie Graves walked along a track above a creek, Marian in front, Jamie behind, tall for their age, nearly identical except for the girl’s braid. Blond, skinny children flickering through the trees, through slants of sunlight thick with dust and pollen. Both wore flannel shirts and bib overalls tucked into rubber boots bought for them by Berit, their uncle’s Norwegian housekeeper. The boots made a particular flapping sound against their shins. Gup gup gup.

  Downstream, their uncle Wallace sat with his watercolors and a pad of stiff, thick paper onto which he was transferring the creek, the trees, the mountains. Where the sun glinted off water and rocks, he left tiny voids of white. He was conscious of nothing but the movement of his eyes and brush. When he painted, he had no memory of ever having received two small wards, of having released them into the wilderness like a pair of dogs trusted to return eventually. If he worried about the children, he could not paint, and so he didn’t worry.

  Still farther downstream, in the ancient glacial lake bed where Missoula sat, near the lower reaches of this creek, the Rattlesnake, was a gabled Queen Anne house with a screened porch and a round turret. Its inhabitants were Wallace and the twins and, most days, Berit, doing her best to stave off squalor. Though the exterior was shabbily kept, with flaking paint and missing shingles, and the furniture was old and threadbare, she made sure everything was at least well dusted, well scoured, well polished. Out back, a gray gelding called Fiddler had a one-stall barn and small paddock, and there was a cottage Wallace offered to his friends when they fought with their wives or ran short of money.

  Past the house, the Rattlesnake flowed under the railway bridge to join the Clark Fork River as it swept through town and away to the northwest. By the time the Clark Fork ended in Lake Pend Oreille, the Blackfoot and Bitterroot and Thompson rivers had all joined, too, and from the lake they became the Columbia River, and from the Columbia, the Pacific.

  Water was always on its way somewhere bigger, according to Wallace.

  “Nothing’s bigger than the ocean, though,” Marian told him.

  “The sky is,” said Wallace.

  The twins knew if they kept going upstream they would find an old shack, then a stretch of white water, and then, best of all, a wrecked and rusted open-top Model T, which, depending on how high the creek was running, was sometimes on the shore and sometimes half submerged.

  How the car had come to be in the creek was a mystery. The track the children followed was narrow and rutted, suitable only for travel by foot or horseback. Wallace didn’t know. Berit didn’t know. Wallace’s bohemian friends from the university made fanciful guesses but, in the end, didn’t know.

  After Marian and Jamie passed the shack, they began to hurry, though both tried not to let on. Their hands stayed in their pockets, their postures suggested a leisurely stroll, but their legs moved faster. Each wanted to sit behind the Ford’s cracked wheel and pretend to drive. Whoever was not driving played at mechanic or bandit or servant, all fine roles but not as good as driver. Sometimes, for variety, the car was a ship, and they took turns pretending to be their father at the helm. Sometimes the ship sank, and they went with it.

  They knew what people said about their father, and they were angry at him for making them contend with life as children of a famous coward. Their mother never figured into their games.

  They rounded the last bend and took off running, swiping with skinny arms, shoving each other toward ruts and rocks (GUP GUP GUP). But when they burst out of the trees, instead of throwing themselves into the final sprint, both stopped.

  The creek was high with snowmelt, and the car had been pulled deeper into the water, submerging the wheels and what was left of the floorboards. The remains of its front wheels had caught in the rocks, though not very securely; the body was swaying with the creek’s flow.

  “It’ll be more like really driving the way it’s moving,” Marian said.

  “Don’t you think it might get loose?” said Jamie.

  “Scared?”

  “No, but I don’t want to drown, neither.”

  “You couldn’t drown. It’s just a creek.”

  Jamie studied the water doubtfully. The creek’s slick brown middle was lumpy and choppy and whitecapped from submerged rocks and cold whip ends of currents snapping up underneath.

  “We could go play in the shack instead,” he said.

  “You’re scared,” said Marian.

  For an answer, he splashed in. Water poured into his boots, bu
t he pressed ahead, straining like a man dragging a boulder behind him. Ordinarily they swam naked, but the car was unfriendly to skin, all jagged metal and flaking rust, stiff shreds of leather and wisps of dank wool clinging to rusty springs. So: swamped boots, wet overalls. He lifted one heavy leg to the running board and clambered into the driver’s seat. The brake lever stuck up from the water like a reed.

  Marian did not like the way the car shifted under Jamie’s slight weight, how white water was shouldering at the bumper the way Wallace did when his Cadillac got stuck in mud.

  “You don’t have to come in,” Jamie called. “I won’t say you’re yellow.”

  But Marian stepped into the creek. The current was fast, the creek bed uneven, and she held out her arms for balance. Icy water splashed into her boots.

  “Move over,” she told Jamie when she reached the car.

  “You always drive. Go around.”

  “It’s too deep over there.”

  “Climb over, then.”

  As Marian grabbed at the edge of the ruined backseat, the car tipped, and its right front wheel came loose from the rocks. She let go, dropping back down into the creek. The car’s body slewed around so the current hit it broadside, rushing up over the floor. Jamie gaped at her as his chariot swayed and then slid toward the deeper water, the freer current. Floating now, the Ford pivoted languidly and plowed forward, the radiator disappearing little by little under the water.

  It didn’t go far. Once the wheels caught in the rocks again, water poured in over Jamie. Marian, trotting along the bank, called to him. His pale head disappeared and resurfaced in the current, sleek and small, swept along. Stumbling on the rocky shore, Marian couldn’t keep up and for a moment lost sight of him entirely. Panting, ducking under branches, she rounded a bend. There he was, sitting on a sandbar. Drenched and breathing heavily, his overalls dark and heavy, his boots gone, Jamie got to his feet. Then he let out the kind of wild, exultant whoop she’d only heard grown men make. He stomped his feet, picked up a rock and hurled it into the creek, raised his knobby arms. She was filled with a terrible envy. She wanted to be the one who had survived.

  Ossining, New York

  August 1924

  One year and three months later

  When Addison emerged from the gates of Sing Sing, his lawyer, Chester Fine, was there waiting, his three-piece suit characteristically rumpled, engrossed in a book he held in one hand. Chester had taken the train up from the city, and he rode back down again with Addison, the two of them watching the passing Hudson in silence. For years, Chester had been Addison’s only visitor. Lloyd Feiffer had shown up one Sunday early on, but Addison had declined to see him. Later, the clerk in the canteen said Lloyd had added forty dollars to his account, but Addison was careful not to spend it. Lloyd had also sent a few letters that Addison threw away unopened, and he’d offered to buy Addison’s house for an inflated price that Chester relayed one Sunday.

  “Mr. Feiffer asked me to tell you it’s the least he can do,” Chester had said in the crowded visiting room. Both men were perched on wooden stools and separated by a waist-high divider, Chester in his wrinkled suit, Addison in his gray uniform. “He says he wants to do something for the twins.”

  “The twins don’t need his money.”

  “They might someday. And Feiffer’s never criticized you or scapegoated you, at least not publicly. That’s a loud silence.”

  “I hauled him out of the sea once when we were young. He took it to heart.” Addison rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “No, sell the house to someone who’s not Feiffer. Sell everything in the house that can be sold and throw the rest away.”

  “Everything? There’s nothing of sentimental value? Nothing of their mother’s to be kept for the twins?”

  “Nothing.”

  When Addison was released (six months early, thanks to Chester Fine’s persistent efforts), the forty-three dollars and sixty-six cents left in his canteen account was handed to him in an envelope that he slid into his inside pocket. Otherwise he carried only a slender cardboard portfolio, tied closed with string.

  In Grand Central, Chester Fine shook his hand, bid him good luck and goodbye, handed him a train ticket, and was gone with a doff of his hat. Addison looked around. Pale light descended from the high windows at a stately angle. Higher still, noble gold zodiac figures and a smattering of stars occupied a tranquil, blue-green heaven. It had been more than nine years since he’d stood under the real stars.

  All around, people scattered across the grand marble floor and rattled away down tunnels like dropped ball bearings. They were disorienting, even frightening in their numbers, their hurry, their prosperity, their freedom. He had grown accustomed to being watched at all times, and he had, without realizing, assumed that when he returned to the world, he would still be famous as the cowardly captain of the Josephina Eterna. He had foreseen jeering crowds at the gates of Sing Sing, recognition and revilement everywhere he went. Instead he found bustling, indifferent strangers. Under painted stars, with a dismal burst of pleasure, he understood he had been forgotten.

  He bought a ham sandwich, dropped Lloyd Feiffer’s forty dollars in a beggar’s cap, descended a tunnel, and boarded the 20th Century Limited to Chicago. After waiting around for most of a day, not venturing out of the station, he caught a train to Missoula.

  * * *

  —

  A clear, warm night with a bright, nearly full moon. Wallace Graves waited at the depot. He had brought one of the household dogs, a leggy black-and-white thing, and they looked down the tracks together as the train’s headlight grew larger and its huffing louder. The locomotive passed in a burst of heat and screeching brakes. Framed by sliding, slowing yellow rectangles of light, people were standing, putting on hats, gathering possessions. Doors opened and figures descended; porters heaved trunks from the baggage car. Wallace picked out Addison’s stooped and looming silhouette on the platform. He held up a hand, and Addison nodded as though greeting an acquaintance and not a brother, not ending a separation of nearly two decades. When Wallace embraced him, he felt as though he were clutching an oversize skeleton to his bosom.

  “Where’s your luggage?” he said.

  Addison bent to greet the dog. “I don’t have any.”

  “You have that.” Wallace indicated the slim cardboard parcel under Addison’s arm. “What’s in it?”

  Addison cleared his throat. “Your letters and the photographs you sent. And your drawings of the children.”

  Addison had never acknowledged any of the dozens of portraits Wallace had sent, and for years Wallace had imagined them vanishing into the prison garbage. They were only little jots, sketches in ink and watercolor, easily done, but still the thought of any of his work being destroyed gave him a helpless, horrified feeling. Now the slender cardboard portfolio, carefully tied, brought a tightness to his throat.

  When Addison left home for the sea, Wallace had been a small boy, separated from his brother by ten years and a little crop of nameless gravestones out under a walnut tree. Stillbirths. When, eleven years later, he’d made his own escape from their silent parents and the hardscrabble family farm, he’d set his course for the address scrawled in the upper left corner of Addison’s brief annual letters.

  A redbrick house near the Hudson. Even as a young man, Addison had been taciturn and inscrutable, but he let Wallace live with him, among his paltry furnishings and bewildering souvenirs from far-flung places. He had even paid for Wallace to go to art school.

  Wallace gestured toward the depot. “Come. This way.”

  His long gray Cadillac touring car, his special joy, was parked out front. It had originally come to him in a card game during his Great Winning Streak of 1913, a month when he’d gambled his way through a succession of mining towns and won not only the car but enough gold dust to visit every brothel he happened past and then to buy
himself a house, too. (A wise decision, it turned out, to sink his assets into the house before the Great Losing Streak of 1915.) He had taken care to park the car under a streetlamp so Addison would be better able to admire it—the black trim still gleaming, the top folded back, the thick, deep-treaded tires helpful for getting out en plein air, the front and rear seats in black leather, extravagantly scratched by dog nails.

  “Marian is enamored with it,” he told Addison. “She’s a funny one. I’m always finding her outside polishing it or poking around the engine. When I take it to a mechanic I drop her off, too, so she can watch.”

  “You said so in a letter.”

  “It’s just that you never reply.” Wallace opened the passenger door with a flourish, gesturing his brother inside. The dog snaked in first and bounced into the backseat. “You must be desperate to see the twins. They wanted to come along, but I told them we shouldn’t mob you. It’s late anyway. They’ll be asleep, but you can peek in at them. They sleep out on the porch when it’s not cold. Well, when it’s not dangerously cold.”

  “I know,” Addison said, pulling the door shut. “I read the letters.”

  “But you don’t reply.” Wallace went around, settled in the driver’s seat. “Thank you, though, for the, ah, the financial support. It’s been very welcome.” He started the engine. “Home’s not far.” Pulling away from the curb, he went on, “I’ve put the fear of god into Jamie and Marian not to wake you in the morning. They get up horribly early. They’re practiced at entertaining themselves until a decent hour. They go up the creek, up the mountains. I don’t know where they go. I hope that doesn’t sound neglectful—I couldn’t stop them if I tried. They take the horse, usually. Do you know how to drive?”

  “No.”

  “Not much call to at sea.”

  “Nor in prison.”

  “I suppose not, no. You’ll pick it up right away. I’ll teach you. Marian can already do everything except reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel at the same time. It’s still one or the other. Jamie is less interested in learning—less insistent about learning, I should say. Generally he gives Marian’s passions a wide berth. He’s not one to jostle. He’s…well, he’s quite tender. You’ll see. Driving, though—once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll be able to get around on your own. We might even think about finding you a car. I think you’d like—”