The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “Henry.”

  “Henry. He probably won’t want to leave when you go to pick him up.”

  “Let’s hope so. Anyway …!”

  “Anyway. So. You’re all settled in at the Grand View?”

  “It’s a beautiful place. Thanks so much.”

  Caleb nodded. “They’ve done a great job on it. Nice couple.”

  “Very nice.”

  “I knew Mark from way back when. He’s younger than me, but he was around every summer. Though I was surprised when he took the old place on. I really was.”

  “How so?”

  “The house was a disaster, and not just cosmetically. The foundation was literally crumbling. A number of developers had scoped it out over the years, but they ended up walking away. It would have been cheaper to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch—in fact, that’s what a couple of them wanted to do—but the family wouldn’t agree to it.”

  “I’m glad they didn’t.”

  “Everybody’s glad. And they’ve really done it right, Mark and Lauren have.”

  “Have you been inside?”

  “They had an open house about a month ago.” Caleb shook his head. “Very impressive. You know, a lot of times people overdo it, take a simple, vernacular structure and gussy it up so much that it ends up looking like a Trump Tower.”

  I smiled.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “so here we are. I was thinking that you might want to spend today just reading and getting your head around all the materials we’re going to work with. Then we could meet first thing tomorrow and make a plan.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you have any ideas about how you want this done?”

  “One or two,” Caleb replied, “but I’d love to get your opinion. I was thinking it might be sort of interesting to formalize a timeline and bind the documents according to when they were important, to when they figured in the course of the week.”

  “That could work,” I said. “So you mean, instead of keeping all the similar items together, the—I don’t know, what?—telegrams, search-and-rescue records?”

  “Eyewitness statements, medical documents, all the reports from New Shoreham and Sandy Point—those were the lifesaving stations, at the two lighthouses. They were the centers of all the activity.”

  I nodded, though he was beginning to lose me.

  “So,” Caleb went on, “there would be two ways for a person to come at the material. The website, which a fellow up in Boston is putting together, will be very straightforward, with all the documents listed and catalogued, easily downloaded. But here in the building, we’d also have a narrative version, for someone who wanted to leaf through books and get a sense of how the events transpired in real time.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “Who actually comes in here?”

  “People here for the weekend, or on vacation. They wander in, especially on rainy days. They’re not writers or academics, they’re just curious. Most have never heard of the Larchmont.”

  “So this way,” I said, “they’d be able to sit down and read the documents like a book, or flip through.”

  “Precisely. We want the materials to be user-friendly, for the average person who just drops by. We get a lot of retirees coming through. It’s the nature of the island, really: you don’t visit Block Island if you want your vacation to be a thrill a minute. People who come here tend to appreciate the past and be interested in it.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ve brought some supplies, but I didn’t want to order any materials until I knew exactly what we’d need. I’ll go online and have some samples sent. We can see what looks and feels right with the documents. You get FedEx here, right?”

  Caleb laughed and nodded. “It only feels like the nineteenth century.”

  The stories I read would stay with me for days.

  At eleven o’clock at night in February 1907, as a fierce winter storm was whipping up the waters between Block Island and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, a schooner named the Harry Knowlton, packed with coal it was transporting from South Amboy, New Jersey, to Boston, rammed its bow deep into the side of a steamship called the Larchmont. Up to two hundred people were aboard the ferry. Nineteen survived. All of the children on the ship were lost.

  A massive steamer with three passenger decks, the Larchmont had left Providence that evening on an overnight journey to New York City. A bitter wind was blowing in from the northwest as the vessel made her way through Narragansett Bay, but the ferry didn’t encounter the full force of the icy gale until it rounded Point Judith and headed directly into Long Island Sound.

  The boat’s captain, who had spent the evening in the pilothouse and had just steered the vessel safely into open seas, was in his quarters, getting ready for bed. Startled to hear several sharp blasts of the steamer’s warning whistle, he raced back to the pilothouse. The three-masted schooner had been spotted. It was headed directly toward the Larchmont.

  The captain and his quartermaster blew the whistle again, and when the schooner failed to turn or slow down, they both grabbed the wheel and frantically tried to alter the Larchmont’s course, hoping to avert a catastrophe. Seemingly propelled by the storm’s powerful winds, the schooner rammed into the side of the steamer.

  The impact of the collision drove the sailboat’s bow nearly halfway through the Larchmont. For a few minutes, the schooner plugged the hole it had opened in the ship’s side. But soon, roiling seas separated the two vessels, and water rushed into the steamer.

  The flooding could not be contained in the area of the ship that had been damaged. Frigid water poured over the cargo and into the hold, and when it reached the boiler that powered the vessel, great clouds of steam exploded into the air, blocking many passageways and staircases. The steam stranded the captain in the pilothouse and disabled the ship’s communication equipment. The captain now had no way to communicate with the crew, to direct the response to the crisis.

  The steam also killed scores of passengers on the port side of the boat. Up to a third of the people aboard that night may never have been aware of the accident, so quickly were they burned to death in their beds.

  Other passengers, thrown from their bunks by the force of the impact, rushed to the decks in panic, not taking the time to bundle themselves in warm clothing. At first, terror kept them from even feeling the cold. But within moments, standing on deck in the sleet, wind, and ice, they began to freeze. And they couldn’t return to their rooms, which had by then been flooded. With nearly a hundred people on deck and scores of men, women, and children trapped, dead, or dying below in their sleeping quarters, the Larchmont began to sink. All of this happened in about ten minutes.

  Officers ordered the lowering of the lifeboats, while crew members attempted, for the most part successfully, to control the chaos and panic on deck. But already, the ears, noses, and fingers of passengers and crew members alike were turning blue with frostbite. By the time the lifeboats were in the water, just minutes later, cold had so affected the victims that they were not able to walk—they could barely stumble to the bobbing vessels. Wails of agony rose up from the boats into the frigid night air.

  Conditions deteriorated further in the lifeboats, which had oars, and the rafts, which did not and had to be towed. Stormy waves sent sprays of foam and mist over the passengers, most wearing only their nightclothes, encasing the victims in layers of ice. The lights of Fishers Island, roughly five miles away, were visible on the horizon, so every vessel headed that way. But the lifeboats were weighted down by too many passengers, and by the additional burden of towing the rafts. Cold sapped the strength of the men at the oars, who were coated in layers of ice. The rafts soon broke away from the lifeboats towing them. They slowly drifted away, carrying their doomed passengers with them.

  One victim, driven insane by the agony he endured in one of the lifeboats, committed suicide by cutting his own throat. Other passengers in his lifeboat, too dazed or weak to interfere, looked on vacantly as though
the act made perfect sense. Several of the dead were later found with their hands frozen to their ears.

  The first lifeboat reached Block Island at daybreak. The feet of the survivors were so badly frozen that the victims had to be carried to the lifesaving station. News of the catastrophe quickly spread from house to house across the island, and islanders flocked to the waterfront to try to help. Fishermen went out in their boats, and islanders waded into the icy surf to drag the lifeboats and victims to shore. Later in the day, it was bodies that drifted, one by one, to the shore, carried by tides that later turned and swept countless other victims out to sea.

  Seventeen survivors were taken into the cottages and houses closest to where the boats had landed. Many of the victims seemed not even to realize that they had reached land, nor to care. Forty-five frozen bodies were recovered from the ocean and laid out in rows at the lifesaving stations at Sandy Point and New Shoreham. In the following days, two more survivors and ten more victims were brought to shore.

  A week later, with her flag at half-mast, a sister ship of the Larchmont, the Kentucky, arrived at Block Island to transport eighteen of the nineteen survivors and forty-nine bodies back to Providence. One survivor refused to set foot on another ship. Over the following days and weeks, twenty-two more bodies were given up by the sea.

  Chapter Five

  HENRY WAS PAINTING a car when I arrived at the school. Not a picture of a car, an actual automobile.

  It had been donated, I later learned, by a summer resident who hadn’t used it in thirty years and had recently sold his vacation cottage, necessitating the cleaning out of the barn on his property. An old Dodge Dart that didn’t strike me as anything Danny Zuko and his gang of slick hot-rodders would have gone anywhere near, it was nonetheless parked on drop cloths on the stage of the school theater. How they got it in there I wasn’t quite sure; there must have been loading doors in the back. Henry and a dozen other kids of various ages, wearing extra-large T-shirts to cover their clothes, were painting the beige body a brilliant crimson, attempting to avoid what looked like a flame pattern marked off near the wheels in masking tape.

  Henry caught sight of me smiling and waving but redoubled his concentration on the painting. I was clearly meant to understand that he was awfully busy with important work and couldn’t drop his paintbrush this very second just because I happened to have arrived. Thinking of the note on which we had parted that morning, I sighed with relief and sank down into one of the seats. I was more than overdue for a stretch like this, given how many times he’s had to wait for me to finish something to do with paper and glue.

  The stage was abuzz. Another painting crew was working on a sign that read “Burger Palace.” A third set of kids was assembling an enormous sculpture at the back of the space. They seemed to be attaching balls of Styrofoam to a fixed dome about four feet wide, using spokes of various lengths. The overall effect was vaguely atomic, though I couldn’t imagine what the piece was going to be used for.

  There was only one ghost in the audience, which was odd. This probably had to do with the newness of the building, because theaters—especially the ornate old movie palaces and opera houses—are usually filled with ghosts. These are often the spirits of people for whom real life was a dim, pale shadow of what transpired onstage, actors and actresses whose most precious living moments occurred behind the footlights. Sometimes, they can’t bring themselves to bid good-bye to their stages and dressing rooms, where they were nightly transformed into Medea or King Lear, and where the evenings culminated in roses and applause.

  Out in the foyer and drifting through the aisles, I often see the ghosts of ushers. Elderly and alone in the city, many had lived in boardinghouses and taken their meals in communal dining rooms with other men going through life alone or working to earn money for their families, who were living elsewhere. Stage managers, ballet masters, musicians—the walls of old theaters enclose the ghosts of them all.

  The ghost at the back of this theater, though, had to be attached to one of the children. She must have been a grandmother or a great-aunt, for she didn’t emanate disturbance or despair. Her long gray hair, pinned into a coil at the nape of her neck, and the worn wool cardigan held in place on her shoulders by a sweater chain gave her the appearance of a strict and spinsterish schoolmarm. But she smiled warmly and calmly, her attention engaged by the activity up front.

  I loved seeing the kids all caught up in their tasks. Walking back to the Grand View a half hour later, I got the lowdown from Henry and began to understand how the week had been organized to accommodate kids of all ages.

  Henry had opted to be a member of the “car crew.” This meant he spent half his day working on the transformation of the donated automobile into a Grease-worthy hot rod. First they were painting it red—two coats, he explained authoritatively. On Wednesday, when the second coat was dry, they would work on the flame pattern, and on Thursday they would attach the decorative details that were being built in the woodshop: hubcaps with spokes and an oversized hood ornament shaped like wings in flight. These would be spray-painted silver.

  The second big chunk of his day was devoted to learning a dance number, a preview of which I was treated to on the sidewalk. Oh dear, I thought. I had witnessed Henry’s attempt to master some steps the previous month, for a Saint Patrick’s Day assembly at St. Enda’s, and I wasn’t optimistic about his future on the dance floor. Though his moves had been breathtakingly enthusiastic, they bore little relationship to the music, a fatal combination for anyone being danced with. Whoever was choreographing Henry’s dance was going to have their work cut out for them.

  That left two recesses and lunch, all of which had apparently gone fine.

  “What did you have for lunch?” I asked.

  “Hamburgers.”

  “Hamburgers!” Even at Henry’s school, a throwback to the kind I went to, parents pushing for local and organic sourcing of school lunches had made the weekly hamburger obsolete. While I knew this was all to the good, I thought back fondly on my own favorite grade school lunch: a bit of tuna swimming, unaccompanied by so much as a morsel of celery or onion, in a sea of mayonnaise and served in a white hot dog bun. For crunch, we packed potato chips in with the tuna.

  “And Jell-O,” he added.

  “Did you meet any nice kids?”

  He shrugged.

  “Do you have a partner for this dance?”

  “Ellen.”

  I held my tongue. Too many questions all at once usually caused him to shut down.

  “Hmmm,” I said as he took aim at a stone on the sidewalk and sent it into the dune grass with a resounding kick. We walked for a bit in silence.

  “She cut her hair,” he finally announced. “That’s why it’s kinda crooked.”

  “I see.”

  “Her mom was mad.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Would you be mad if I did that?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t like you pointing the scissors at your eyes, but hey, it’s your hair.”

  “So would you or wouldn’t you?” He kicked another stone.

  “It’s a little different with boys, honey.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, because boys usually wear their hair shorter, so if it looks sort of goofy, it doesn’t take long to grow out.”

  “Ellen had pigtails,” Henry said, shooting me a sly glance.

  “Ooh,” I said, suppressing an urge to laugh.

  “Yup,” he said. “And now she doesn’t.”

  He looked over at me, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Oops,” I said.

  He let out a tickled whoop.

  Mark, Lauren’s husband, had taken to Henry as soon as he met him the previous evening. I’d figured this had to do with impending fatherhood, but it still had been sweet to see the way Mark had drawn Henry out with questions about the ferry and his life back in Cambridge.

  We had no sooner reached the Grand View than Mark appeared on t
he front steps and announced that he was heading out in his truck. A buddy of his had caught a haul of striped bass off Ballard’s Beach and had offered us some for supper. “Would Henry like to come along for the ride?”

  “Okay by me,” I said. Though I had only met Mark two days ago, I hadn’t a reservation in the world about sending Henry off with him. Mark was warm, funny, and, though I tried hard not to notice, cute. He had sandy brown hair as straight as hay and favored carpenter’s pants, plaid flannel shirts, and work boots.

  “Just be back in time for supper,” I added.

  “We’re getting the supper, Ma,” Henry said.

  “Oh, right,” I responded, leading him on. “Duh!”

  Henry grinned. “Duh!”

  It was that beautiful time near dusk, when the sinking sun throws horizontal beams onto the tops of trees and houses and everything seems bathed in a coral tint. They walked to Mark’s green pickup, parked in the driveway, and Mark helped Henry buckle himself in. Henry waved as Mark backed the truck out of the driveway, and they disappeared down Water Street.

  I was glad for a bit of time to myself. I thought about sitting on the porch for a while, savoring the loveliness of the light, but the winds were chilly, and I had spent the entire day reading about people freezing to death. I wanted a hot bath.

  Unfortunately, I never got one.

  As I climbed the stairs and headed down the hallway, I heard odd creaking sounds coming from the back bedroom. My first thoughts were of Lauren—was she in there? If so, was she all right? I tiptoed down the hall and listened. The creaking was regular and rhythmic in nature.

  My next thoughts were of the ghosts described in Inn of Phantoms: the one that looked like Abraham Lincoln and the one with her hands pressed to her ears. If they were here now, maybe I could move them along before the ghost detectives arrived with their quasi-bogus ghost sensors. Before I could stop myself in the interests of the hot bath I so longed for, I had grasped the glass doorknob and eased open the door.