The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  * * *

  —

  Besides the girls and Mrs. Johns, there were a sprinkling of other passengers. A man called Johnny Ace, owner of a troupe of famous performing poodles, was taking his wife and brother home to Australia because he had not heard a kookaburra laugh for seven years. Mrs. Ace, a short woman with a beaming smile, was almost entirely silent; the younger Mr. Ace, they discovered, was not sullen but only cripplingly shy. Johnny Ace made the dogs perform on the hatches one day for Elsie and Julia to see; but most of the tricks required balancing, and that day the ship leaned to every wave, so it wasn’t a great success. The dogs were mostly kept penned, because they were too valuable to risk on deck. They were not very friendly, and seemed to regard themselves as professionals who had no need to slum by fawning like regular pets. They made Kay sad anyhow, missing her Pilot.

  There was a dark-haired, saturnine fellow called Cliffe who wrote scenarios for the movies. When he wasn’t whistle-snoring in a deck chair, he was forever trying to remember the name of a poem that sounded like a French patisserie. Elsie teased him at every meal with various possible names—“The Croissant Heart” or “Brisée, Brisée, Brisée, on thy cold grey stones, O Sea…”—and spent hours coming up with new ones, taking it as a challenge, but Mr. Cliffe seemed to be seriously disturbed by not being able to recall it. He felt it was a sign of the wilting of the brain tissues, and he worried that he would not be able to write any more scenarios. Kay found him incomprehensible and his self-dramatizing a little false.

  The last passenger, Mrs. Mannering, was a missionary going out to join her husband in India. Elsie called her the Early Victorian. “Not that she was born in the Victorian era, for she is young and pretty, look how those swooping braids tremble about her face. But she weeps and swoons and is afraid of mice—in this day and age, I ask you!”

  Kay could not imagine how Mrs. Mannering would manage in India, if a mere mouse upset her. Her conversation consisted of praise God and no thank you.

  All those passengers sat at the other long table, leaving Kay and the two American girls at the captain’s table with Mrs. Johns and whichever of his men were on table duty that evening. The captain quite often begged off and dined in his quarters, not being a naturally gregarious man. He reminded Kay of the woodchuck in the back garden of Francis’s house on Elm Street, who had staked out a certain territory by the creek and stalked it every evening, not fighting unless made to fight.

  After finishing her seafoam cake, Kay got up to leave the table, asking, as was correct, “May I be excused, Captain?”

  Mrs. Johns, recovered from her mal de mer, enlightened the American girls as to dining protocol aboard ship. “It is from the mess, you know,” she fluted. “You will be acknowledged by the senior officer present with a nod or a reply such as Very well, and you may then leave the mess, remembering to put your rolled napkin back in its place.”

  Behind her, Kay heard the captain get up noisily from his own chair and stomp off. There were no reused napkins on the Constellation, wherever else Mrs. Johns might have shipped.

  * * *

  —

  Many nights, they slept on deck. The passengers were allowed—encouraged—to do that once the ship got into the hot latitudes. The first time it was suggested, Kay joined the other passengers lining up at their deck chairs to be bundled into blankets by Mr. Handy and the other deck steward. Each one in turn stood waiting while extra padding was added to the chair, then was eased back and tucked in all round by swift, practised hands. It was a little mannequin factory, assembling sleeping Eaton Beauty dolls and lying them in their boxes.

  As the stewards worked their way toward her, Kay found herself tense and could not think why. But once she was wrapped and supine like the others, she realized that it was ominously reminiscent of the TB ward in New York, where she had only been allowed to visit Aren once. And possibly earlier wards, which she had not thought of for ages. After that first night, Kay did not sleep in her deck chair like the others; she waited until the coast was clear and went up to the lifeboat above, where Aren had arranged a nest for them, using cushions from the stewards’ secret trove. There they lay with the cover folded back, listening to the desultory conversation of the passengers on the deck below, and the Indian sailors at their prayers.

  “We are Seatons now,” Aren said, and she laughed and stuck one leg over the oarlock. “He was a man of many ways. I remember the day of meeting him, the day I came.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember that day too.”

  “That was a day.” He was sitting upright, staring out to the barely marked horizon.

  After a moment, she asked, “Do you remember other people, I mean, from—before us?” She knew he did not like to talk of that. But perhaps they must, now.

  “I remember. An old man, who taught me things. I do not have a name for him.”

  She waited, as quiet and still as she might be.

  “A man who was my…A man coming into the boat, holding my knee when I bled. And a woman.”

  Kay was so sorry she had asked. She turned her head away and buried it in the cushions. It was too much to make him say those things out loud.

  * * *

  —

  The next night, Kay brought oranges from the dining room and the chocolate from Colón. She was not sure Aren would come, but his hand appeared at the edge of the lifeboat, and then his dear cropped head, and all the rest of him unfolding over the edge and collapsing into the cushions, sighing with tiredness.

  She peeled the oranges, letting the orange oil spray up into the black tropical sky, and handed Aren segments one by one, alternating with chocolate. The moon had risen over the dark border of the water, its road just setting out toward them. No wind that night.

  Below, she heard Elsie say, “Look, look, Julia—the sea and the heavens, they are like two black bowls touching edge to edge.”

  Elsie really ought to be a travel writer, Kay decided. She ought to publish that article and then write many books, and make Julia go with her all over the world instead of letting her marry her stolid fiancé, to whose photo Kay had taken an instant dislike.

  It was very hot.

  The head chef came out on deck, a hulking, white, pasty man, like a great soft puppet made out of cake, a damp cigarette smouldering in his mouth. He walked across to the bridge with a tray for the duty officers. On his way back, he paused below the lifeboat and one beefy arm reached up, pale, frond-like fingers proffering a dish of ice cream with two spoons.

  “Thanks, Frans,” whispered Aren.

  The chef said, “No need to sank me.” He was a man who enjoyed procuring happiness.

  Kay had had ice cream at dinner, so she pushed the bowl back when Aren offered it, and he dug in willingly. Despite his claim to the freedom of the refrigerators, he was not eating enough.

  It was irritating that some people were naturally skinny and others plump. Kay’s own plumpness was a certain source of sorrow to her, mostly as it stood opposed to Thea’s slenderness. On the other hand, she did maintain a certain discipline. If I was not so very careful, she thought, I would weigh five hundred pounds—nobody ever takes into account how hard I’ve worked to be only this plump.

  On the deck below the lifeboat, the girls were laughing together. Elsie had a game going that Julia had a hopeless passion for Mr. Cliffe, and was giving her advice on how to attract the Older Man. It was not fitting, Kay thought. And then thought what a prude and a prig she had turned out to be.

  She hated everything. She hated most of all that she had a deck chair with her name on it and Aren had a face covered in engine grease. It was the way of the world, and there was no way she could see to get out of it, but that too made her despair; a person of some education, willing to think, should be able to find a way.

  Aren scraped his spoon around the edge of the bowl and lay back on the pillows.

&nb
sp; “What do you suppose it will cost to charter a boat in Fiji?” she asked him.

  He rolled his head away from her.

  “Will a hundred dollars do it, do you think?”

  He glanced back at her and away again, before saying, “I don’t know! Do you suppose I am an expert in boat charters?”

  “Well, there must be someone you could ask, someone who would know down below, or the mate, or someone?”

  “Stop talking,” he said. “Stop talking about things! Since we cannot do anything about it until Wellington at the earliest—and the only things to do are to charter or buy passage, and we don’t know and can’t find out yet which is going to be possible—could we just not talk?”

  So Kay stopped, even though the thinking would not ever stop inside her own head.

  * * *

  —

  In the steam room, where the passengers went when the bath was not sufficient to remove the grime of the steamer’s gritty smoke, steam bathers sat on benches in a series of white-tiled rooms, each warmer than the last. The final room was so hot it was simply wreaths of smoke. Alone in the far corner of the last room one afternoon, Kay saw the American girls come in, laughing with each other over some remembered joke and dancing with their towels like vaudeville girls. Between her lashes Kay saw a face appearing in the steam when Elsie’s towel unfastened, the face of Elsie’s body—the nipples dark pupils glancing from round white eyes, the tiny navel nose, the dark triangular mouth below.

  If I were a man, she thought, that is the form and shape I would choose for a wife. So it was a good thing she was not a man. Because Elsie would not be a good wife at all, she was too talkative and too fond of a joke.

  Thinking again, Kay thought as she had before that she would not be chosen for any man’s wife herself—she was too ornery, too fond of her own opinion, and she did not have that smiling loveliness of body that might make up for a general prickliness of disposition.

  She sat very still. The girls soon got too hot and left without noticing her, and she sat on a little longer, although she was by then so much steamed that her fingers were wrinkly.

  In the ladies’ change room, she stood by the mirror half-dressed (combinations on for modesty’s sake, and also to avoid looking at the undressed sofa cushion of her body in the glass). Her braids had matted in the steam and heat, it would take an hour to undo and brush and untangle and rebraid them, and they would still be dun-coloured and plain. Mrs. Mannering the Early Victorian had beautiful glossy braids, great ropes of bronze silk bound about her brow, more pre-Raphaelite than Victorian. She would be a great success with the older Krito-sophians. None of the girls in Yarmouth had bobbed hair, nor would for ages. Fashions from elsewhere always took years longer to filter through the shrouds.

  She pulled one braid out straight, away from her head. Two feet long. The manicure tools were on the counter there, and a larger pair of scissors in the sewing box. Without thinking much more than that, she took the big scissors and lopped off her braid, close to her head.

  That was one. Like Virginia Archibald when she burned her hair, should she leave the other side long for a week?

  She held out the other braid and set the scissors to it, as the door opened behind her and Elsie appeared in the glass.

  Afraid that she might try to stop her—but it would be no use anyway, since one braid was gone—Kay sawed at the braid from an angle and managed to cut it through. “There,” she said. She dropped the two braids into the wastebasket and turned to find her dress and stockings.

  Elsie stared at her, struck dumb.

  Kay slipped her white lawn dress over her head—how light and airy her head felt!—and shook out her hair again. She looked in the mirror. Well, it was not elegant, but she had her manicure scissors in her cabin. She would get Aren to straighten it out for her. Perhaps a little fringe would be nice. She gave Elsie a friendly smile, and left.

  All the way down the corridor she was smiling, she could not stop for joy. Now she could be herself. Not like them, but like herself. The air floated around her neck!

  She had no regrets. Her short hair felt lovely in the back, free and cool. It made a nice shape to change the roundness of her face; and, released from its braid, the hair began to curl, as it had not since she was a child.

  When she met him at the lifeboat in the evening, Aren liked it too. He fluffed it up at the nape of her neck and laughed at her pleasure.

  She realized that she was vain and foolish, but she did not even mind. She was better, lighter, now. “I am trying to be myself as well as I can,” she told him.

  “That’s a full-time job,” Aren said.

  * * *

  —

  Abruptly, the weather soured. The sea rose up on its tail and raged like a pig in a tantrum, drawing an unbearable squealing of metal and rope even from the sturdy Constellation. The first wild night, Elsie and Julia still slept on deck to avoid the close heat of their cabin, but during the night the wind tore the blankets from their cots, and at the breakfast table Elsie made a great tale of how they had waked up clutching, the blankets slipping and slithering across the decks like great water snakes.

  Kay did not know why the stewards had not bustled to gather them in; perhaps they had not believed the girls meant to stay out all night. But it was exciting, to be out in real weather. She heard Seaton sending her back inside from a storm in the forties below Australia, his cracked voice crying from his lifeboat, Lubber!

  Safe in the coffee room, Elsie read from the draft of her article: “We rescued them, and later woke again as our cots raced each other into the scuppers, and our poor cold feet stuck out over the rail and caught an icy blast of wind and rain. We rolled and rolled, we pitched and tossed. One kept saying to oneself”—and here she sang—“ ‘When the ship goes wop with a wiggle between, When the steward falls into the soup tureen.’ ”

  Kay laughed. This storm was like that song. It was all comedy, slapstick: the wild whirl of the propeller leaping high out of the water, and the occasional crash of dishes sliding from the pantry shelves, always followed by a dismal moan from some responsible steward or other. It went on and on. She didn’t mind the storm at all.

  * * *

  —

  Even with the comic relief that Elsie provided (not from her writing, but from the infectious and understanding hilarity that welled up like a spring in her), Kay felt dislodged, disjointed. Perhaps it was only the remnant of the storm, the wild variations of pressure. Or maybe it was because the aftermath of the storm on an aging vessel meant that Aren was stuck below decks constantly, fighting breakdowns with the engineers, and Kay was lonely.

  She used to be good at being by herself. She’d lost the long view she had in childhood, sitting in the attic window or at the lip of the long coulee; she’d lost the solitude-in-company of life on the Morning Light and the companionable aloneness of being a child with Aren, the protective freedom of the enclosing ramparts of school books that opened into another, wider world. In Nova Scotia, in Yarmouth, everything was close, too close to breathe.

  She had not talked to Aren in three days. This had to be remedied.

  She brushed her cropped hair with both hands and went down into the hold, where she spent a frustrating hour winding through metal corridors and tapping on doors with gradually lessening strength of purpose, being directed and redirected through to successively lower decks, until finally one dark-greased oval door opened a crack to emit a great bellow of heat, and Aren’s face looked out, and hissed at her to go away, that he was fine, he would find her later.

  Of course he was. He was not in hell or Gogol’s lower depths but only helping a steamship run, after all, so she went up to her cabin and washed her hands and face and lay down on her bunk to have a short weep over her own useless stupidity.

  Then she found that she had got her period, and some of the interior turmoil an
d self-recrimination was explained. She was still a woman, subject to her body, even if her hair was short.

  * * *

  —

  One evening at sunset, when the wind had blown forever and there was no warm corner left to hide in, land appeared on the starboard bow, tumbled white blocks on the horizon. The mountains of New Zealand. Elsie waxed rhapsodic, addressing the “snow-capped mountains rising out of the sea, far, far off, but coming nearer.” And then scribbled that down too.

  The sun came up next morning, as suns have done for eons, making a spectacle of itself and of the sea. Kay pulled herself out of her bunk and dressed in a flash, and went up to see what all this shining was about.

  “It’s like the hymn—Rise, crowned with light,” Elsie sang, while Julia stood silent, transfixed, at the railing.

  They were going into Lyttelton Harbour, between cliffs, the sea and cliffs equally opulent, the sea plated in pearly gold from the early sun, the hills veiled with yellow gorse.

  Elsie sang on: “Exalt thy towering head and lift thine eyes! See heaven its sparkling portals wide display, and break upon thee in a flood of day.”

  Julia joined her, taking the tenor line. “See a long race thy spacious courts adorn: see future sons, and daughters yet unborn, in crowding ranks on every side arise, demanding life, impatient for the skies.”

  “I don’t suppose you would know that one,” Elsie said kindly to Kay. “It’s Lutheran—American, like me and Julia.”

  Unable to resist, Kay lifted her own chin and sang, “See barbarous nations at thy gates attend, walk in thy light and in thy temple bend.” It had been the anthem last Easter, when Virginia Archibald had for a few weeks persuaded her to join the choir. That had not been a success; Kay’s voice had volume but not beauty, and she could not bear to sing in company. But when Miss Coots the organist fell ill on Maundy Thursday, Kay took her place and saved the day, in a minor way.