He spent the remainder of that day and most of the next three in his cabin, taking his meals there and venturing out early in the morning or late at night, avoiding others and hoping nobody recognized either him or the name he sailed under. He exhausted the hours inside his cabin in unsuccessful attempts to not think about the last few days. He tried reading Ulysses, the book that had been delivered to Gresham, but found it required more attention than he could muster. He played solitaire with a deck of cards found among the clothes in Gresham’s trunk, disassembled and cleaned the Smith & Wesson taken from the sheriff and the Lugar taken from Gresham’s home, twice read the Scribner’s magazine and a copy of Mencken’s Black Mask he had bought at the pier terminal before boarding, slept unsoundly for short periods of time.
In the middle of the third night at sea, he woke with the realization that he had become a fugitive from more than the police and the near past. His flight from prosecution formed something of a pattern. Since returning from the war, Joe had sensed that he had slipped to the leeward side of his life. Before the war he may have thought in terms of tomorrows and the molding of the possible. Since returning, however, he thought mostly in terms of the past and of what he no longer was.
In increments his world and then his future had been removed from him. Alice Bright’s letter had not been a complete surprise—too many men in his unit had received their own versions for it to be so—but, still, it had removed what he thought was his last tie to the land around Terceo, Colorado. With his family dead and his father’s ranchland foreclosed on, he had no place to return to. With Alice Bright married to another man, he had nobody to return to.
With nothing else, he stayed in the first place he woke up sober after leaving the Army in New York. It was not his past nor was it a future. It was barely a present. It was more like an escape.
Even so, like the rim of a turning wheel, the world was rolling forward. He felt that he was being dragged along as well, and that possibly he would find in Paris some purchase on firm ground and be able to chart a course for himself. Maybe, he thought, once he had extricated himself from the slough in which he had found himself, he would finally return to Southern Colorado.
He did not have a suite, but the cabin Gresham had reserved was spacious with bed, end tables, matching sitting chairs and round maple table, desk and high-back chair, and maple dresser in a deco style. The room held a tattered luxury that spoke to its magnificent past in the decades before the war when she was a grand lady of the sea. Like so much else that had entered the war’s crimson insanity, the Berengaria had finished the war almost a shell. The ship’s renovation returned only a degree of its previous stature, a façade of the past. Joe examined the contents of Gresham’s trunk. He could wear his own suits during the day and use Gresham’s dinner jackets and tuxedo coat in the evening. Joe had never worn knickers as a child and saw no reason why a man would ever willingly allow himself to don the clothes of a painted Willie, so he refolded the pairs of plus-fours Gresham had packed and returned them to the steamer trunk. The rest of the clothes he transferred from the trunk to the cabin’s dresser.
Joe felt certain that if he was not recognized or recognized as not being Wynton Gresham, that he would not stand out on the ship. The very last thing he needed was to be discovered as a stowaway, arrested, and detained in Europe for American authorities who would soon find a warrant for his arrest, so for those days he had become a dead man, Wynton Gresham, a prospect that did not disturb Joe nearly to the degree as the idea of being arrested as the murderer of that same dead man.
Inside the steamer trunk’s sock drawer, he found another envelope and whistled a long and low note when he opened it and found $800 in cash. That plus his own bank cash meant he could live quite well in Paris for at least a year. Long enough, he hoped, for Sheriff Jackson to discover who had actually killed Gresham or long enough, if need be, to establish a new identity in that old city.
When Joe took his lunch in his cabin on the voyage’s fourth day, the waiter mentioned that cabined meals were something of a custom. Many travelers needed a day or two in which to acclimate their legs as well as their stomachs to the gentle rolling of even a large ship like the Berengaria. Brought to him with his meal that afternoon was a simple note that was being sent to all passengers. A turbine had been damaged on the previous west-bound journey, “battling against high seas at a high rate of speed.” Thus, the note continued, the Berengaria would “omit calling at Plymouth and proceed directly to Cherbourg then Southampton for repairs.”
With a whiskey in hand, he toasted the smiles of fortune, “Thank you, Neptune, you old man of the sea.”
He ate fully, for not docking at Plymouth meant one less customs agent he might have to encounter, and unlike the French, who were notorious for their laxity in such matters, the British were their stodgy and anal selves. While he felt claustrophobic in his cabin, he was pleased with the prospect of leaving Britain on the northern horizon as the ship continued on to France.
After his lunch, he studied what little he knew about the mystery that had landed him on the ship. He unfolded his papers and placed them side-by-side on the round table, turning the sheet with its written list next to the list of names he had copied from Gresham’s notepad. Above them, he set the photograph he had taken during his escape from Gresham’s house.
For hours and through the afternoon, with his fingers tracing the outline of his face, he studied the items. He knew a relationship existed between the notes and the photograph but did not know what that relationship might be nor its extent. He translated his thoughts to paper, in notes and outlines and complete sentences, then crossed each out as each proceeded blindly to a dead end. The associations extended no further than the obvious—Gresham had begun a manuscript exploring the disastrous Battle of the Champagne, a manuscript for which he had probably been murdered.
Bending over the table to examine the photograph more closely in the looseness of the cabin’s ceiling light, he searched the grainy images of six men staring back at the camera from the duck board of a muddy trench, one man standing and the other five kneeling or sitting against the thatched and reinforced side. All six had dressed against the weather, wearing long wool coats with collars turned up. Their helmet rims cast straight shadows across their foreheads. The man standing, Gresham, turned partially to the side, looked across his shoulder at the camera and stood compacted against a cold wind with only the side of his face fully available to the light. A mist of steam rose transiently from the cup he held in his right hand as the others ate from their mess kits. The men who offered a smile offered only beige smiles. Their expressions were distant, except one, a stoop-shouldered Englishman whose face was partially hidden inside the shadow of his helmet. Across the bottom of the photograph, in the loose, sprawling hand Joe associated with the French, a caption had been written in white ink: “Champagne, 20 September 1915.” Beneath that, in smaller script as though an afterthought another date and a quotation: “25 September 1915—The feast of vultures, and the waste of life.” The later date was the date of the destruction that was the Champagne.
“The feast of vultures,” Joe said aloud. “I know that banquet well.” His words did not echo in the empty cabin although they might as well have.
Down the trench from the six men pictured, Joe could make out the hunched figures of a mass of men standing behind short ladders with a hand raised to the withy sticks. Joe recognized, even in the grainy photograph that he held in his fingers, the repose of men readying themselves for sudden death. A photograph of men who had gone to war with the optimism of youth and courage and had met a force much larger than them. There, in the Champagne as in Ypres and Gallipoli and Belleau Wood, the abstracts of nationalism had been defeated by the gross realities of violence.
Joe assumed the five men in the foreground of the photograph with Gresham were those on the list, one of whom would be Paul Dillard, the name on the envelope he had found in the desk, but Joe could not tell w
hose face might belong to which name. The name, Dillard, sounded English, but that helped little. He felt as though he was putting together a puzzle without the benefit of a guiding picture on the pieces. The hours of studying the papers and the photograph left Joe with little more than the certainty of their importance, the same sense he had when he had first laid them out on the maple table. Finally he pushed himself from the table and dressed for dinner.
It was time to join the living.
He was not surprised but impressed at seeing the ship at sail in the open ocean as he walked along the promenade deck toward the dining room. The sea was calm and black, the weather mild. Joe stopped a moment to view the Atlantic, its blackness spreading out from the ship until reaching the equal blackness of the night sky. The only noises he could hear came from the ship’s steady movement through the water. He bent over the railing to view the wake but could not. He could only imagine its white-topped curl snaking into the night.
He stopped for a moment to smoke a cigarette and taste the salt air. Three women, young enough not to have been affected by the war, stood nearby. They glanced at him and huddled for a talk, and Joe looked at them and felt nothing, no stirring of animal desire. They were children, not in age maybe but in experience. He envied their careless lives of innocence, of ignorance, but he wanted nothing to do with them. If he were to tell them what he had seen, they would run from him as they might run from a carnival freak show. His world was no longer the world they inhabited. Anymore, if he wanted a woman, he’d buy her. Just like in Paris when he was on leave during the war—he didn’t need to talk and he didn’t need to listen.
They walked past him as they left the railing like a line of dancing girls, and each looked the echo of the others—tall, thin, coquettish smile, cloche hat, oversized shoes that flapped noisily as they walked. Each carried a copy of Town Tattle, as if it were a real newspaper.
The first winked at Joe as she passed and said, “Wasn’t it nice?”
The second added, “Wasn’t it sweet?”
The third finished with “Wasn’t it good?”
Joe felt vaguely nauseated.
He walked along the empty deck with a continued feeling of unease at the luxurious and ostentatious beauty of the floating city. The floating mountain of light on which he walked seemed transitory in the night and in certain unformed ways he preferred the heavy-laden rocking and cramped quarters of the ships he had sailed in before and following the war. Like the world he knew, they had been stripped of their disguises. The Berengaria, however, had re-established its disguise as easily as having had its name changed from the German Imperator, which it had been for the first part of its life before the English had appropriated it as a war reparation.
He entered the dining room and stood implanted in its entry. A Louis XIV dining room spread out before him complete with an oak-beamed ceiling and paintings on the walls between floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the blackness. He looked upon this grand beauty but could not shake the feeling that all he saw was the façade of a past century, one that had been lost. The people seated at their tables wearing tuxedos and evening gowns were the last ghosts to be exorcised.
A steward stepped toward Joe and asked as though he did not necessarily care, “Your name, sir?”
“Joe—” Joe began without thinking, then added, “Gresham.”
“Joe Gresham?” The steward looked him up and down, surveying the loose fit of his tuxedo and passing judgment, mentally assigning Joe to an appropriate table, one far from the Captain’s table.
“Wynton, actually,” Joe said.
The steward huffed and consulted his list, taking his time, looking up twice to study a table and shaking his head, then looking back at his list then glancing again at Joe’s ill fit and again at a table and finally saying, with a wave of his hand, “This way, sir.”
They rounded the room until arriving at a table for six already serving five.
“Mr. Joe Winston,” the steward announced as he pulled out a chair, removed a white flag on the table marking the seat as vacant, and left.
“Gresham, actually,” Joe said to blank stares, forks of food held between open mouths and the table. “Wynton Gresham.”
Introductions at the table were made with difficulty as Joe found himself at a table of Swedes who spoke as much English as he did Swedish. They stumbled through the civilities, mirroring each other’s courtesy. The Swedes had eaten early and were finishing their entrées as Joe joined them. While Joe ordered his aperitif of Gendarme Herring, they began their ices. Debating for some time in their language that sounded like gargling to Joe, they finally decided to take their coffees elsewhere, maybe their stateroom, and left Joe alone at the table following apologies and bows and handshakes.
Joe watched them leave, as relieved as they obviously were at not having to fake niceties to someone they did not understand. When he looked around the room, he saw no suggestion of a ship at sea. The room, with miniature potted trees bordering the entrance and panels and paintings lining the walls, resembled more a large hotel’s dining area than that of a ship. The room could easily seat three hundred. Each table was covered with white linen. Lighting the room were honey-colored domes hung from the ceiling and brass torchieres along the walls. One entire wall of glass looked out over the water with tall windows veiled at the top in frostwork and curtained with patterned silk. Small tables for two lined those windows and in the interior of the room were tables of varying sizes, but none larger than for a seating of twenty. Joe felt in awe at what money could purchase—if not happiness then at least a big boat in which to cruise right up next to happiness.
He finished his aperitif and ordered Atlantic salmon for his entrée. Throughout his dinner, he listened in on the conversations at the tables near him, the games of circles each couple or group played. At the table behind his, an Englishman had been captured in conversation by an American couple from Oklahoma. The couple had taken a liking to a painting hanging in the bedroom of their suite and described it in some detail to the Englishman.
“That,” the Englishman said, “is a reproduction of ‘Flower Girl,’ George Frederick Watts’s famous painting. I served with his great-grandson at Passchendaele, a topping man.”
“It’s famous then?” the woman said more than asked.
“Oh, yes, absolutely.”
“I told you it was famous.”
“Yes, I heard him,” the husband said, his voice fat and jowly. “A copy, you say? Tell me, Huntington, where is the original?”
Huntington, the Englishman, said with obvious pride in a voice that bordered on but did not fully slip over to arrogance, “It belongs to the Duke of Marlboro and hangs in Grosvenor House, London. I have seen it often on my visits there.”
“How much is it?”
“‘How much,’ sir?”
Joe closed his eyes and pictured the trio. Huntington in his sporting tweed and pencil-thin moustache, long and aquiline nose, dashing in the country gentleman way. The American husband, a pig packer from the Panhandle who had followed Hormel’s lead in creating a disassembly plant and had become rich from selling pounds of bacon and ham and roasts. The wife, a woman larger even than her fat husband. She had never been as thin as she thought she was and would never be anywhere near as urbane as she wanted. But, then again, Joe thought, in Oklahoma, who would notice?
“Yes. The price. How much?”
“I doubt that it is for sale . . . at any price.” His words carried the warmth of a London fog.
The husband huffed. “It’s a famous painting?”
“Very famous and a great work by one of England’s finest artists. I recall—” and he was cut off by the husband.
“We will be in London in January. Grosvenor House? Watts? Enough money should buy any painting, don’t you think?”
Joe quit listening. In the past few years he had too often heard the same exchange, not about a painting but about an ideal, a standard reduced. Another intrinsic eleme
nt lost. As when the newel post is removed from a staircase, the staircase loses strength and tumbles, the removal of what Joe and his generation had been taught were the cores of civilization had resulted in a generation destroyed by war.
The next afternoon, heavily bundled inside Gresham’s buffalo robe, Joe left his cabin for the men’s smoking room. A room with the rough, stretched leather elegance of a men’s club, it offered liquor and beer and conversation to those who wanted them, liquor and beer and privacy to those who wanted them. Joe considered the liquor, decided on the beer, and sought out the privacy.
Dozens of men loitered about the room, sitting together under the smoky lights, talking too loudly as men almost drunk often do. They fit into their booths, behind their whiskey and beers, surrounded by the haze of floating cigar smoke to debate the world’s problems.
“What about this upstart—Hitler?” one man asked another as they held their brandies in one hand, their cigars in the other. Neither really looked at the other, and they both spoke as though scripted. “Do you think he’s a communist?”
“No. Old Henry Ford wouldn’t be his best friend if he were.”
They nodded their heads and moved on to the next subject, pleased that they had at least settled that little bit.
Another table kept a livelier discussion running on how to approach Clemenceau’s call for America’s return to Europe to police the German stockpiling of weapons. Another table wagered on Dempsey’s wrestling match with “Strangler” Lewis to see whose sport was tougher, a debate that ended with two at the table taking things outside. A couple of other men talked like reporters on their way to the conference in Lausanne about the shipping problems along the Dardanelles. Joe kept away from them all. None of their words seemed to strike very deep for him, but the noise, the ambient buzz of all those conversations, settled around him, allowing him to relax for a few moments in his anonymity.
The room held a rustic comfort in its feel and smell of worn leather and rubbed wood, whiskey and cigar smoke. A few men had tipped their heads in Joe’s direction when he had entered, but neither they nor he offered to share a conversation. He sat in a large corner chair, leather and well worn, and eased himself behind a five-day-old copy of the New York Times, not the international edition but the New York morning edition from the day of the ship’s launch. He searched the paper for any mention of Gresham and found none. By the time his third stout arrived, he was rereading past news from before the departure, enjoying a comfortable detachment from the place and actions that he had left four days and a thousand miles behind him.
Death of a Century Page 7
