As had become normal, I went on ahead to the bathing pavilion sans Alice. I was quite capable of changing clothes myself. I hated to think this was the last day to wear my cherished bathing costume too, but it would have to be retired.
When I stepped out of the pavilion onto the sandy beach, I felt a wave of exhaustion ripple through my entire body, and my head throbbed. There was only one tonic for this: the bracing cold water of the Atlantic.
I crossed the sand with determination, trying to ignore the heaviness weighing down my arms and legs. My body, incredibly, craved a nap. I was certain the ocean would revive me, and thankfully it did. I moved out farther, until the water was almost waist high. Suddenly I was struck with dizziness and felt sick to my stomach.
Is this sun stroke? I wondered. I’d heard of people becoming ill, even feverish, from being in the sun too long.
But if I left the water for the hot beach and airless hotel, wouldn’t I feel even worse? I decided to go a little deeper, up to my shoulders, and see if cold water submersion helped. If not, I’d have no choice but to return to dry land.
Over the last several days, I’d become quite skillful at entering deeper water while minimizing the impact of the waves, most of them small but occasionally large and crushing if a ferry boat had just passed. In my present dazed and nauseous state, that ability fled. I watched dully as a large wave bore down on me, and I didn’t even have the sense to turn or brace myself, much less dive under the wave. With the force of a powerful slap across the face it stunned me, and then I was sucked underwater. I struggled feebly, my arms and legs flailing, until, gasping, I came up for air. Agonizing stomach cramps hit, and to my shock, I bent over and vomited in the ocean.
That’s when I knew I was in serious trouble. I looked at the other people around me for a familiar face, but my eyesight was too blurred, whether it was salt water or illness, I didn’t know. They were just distant pale blobs in the dark blue water.
“Help me,” I said. It was a hoarse croak after the vomiting.
I staggered back in the direction of the beach but found it excruciatingly difficult to push through the waist-high water. It was as if my brain were disconnected from my legs.
“Look at the wave – it’s a big one,” squealed a girl. With dread, I turned around to see a white-crested wave, even larger than the last, curling toward us all. A ferry must have just passed. Nothing could stop it. I had ten seconds at the most before it hit. I’d never get close enough to the shoreline to escape being upturned again. Sour clots of vomit burning in my throat, I didn’t want to suffer another vicious pummeling.
My only hope was to turn and force myself to swim under the wave right before it crested. I gathered every bit of my strength. At the back of my mind I thought, wildly, This will be quite the story to tell everyone later.
In those last few precious seconds, I went forward, into the sea, and as the wave rose and roared before me like an angry god, I lifted my arms and linked my thumbs to dive into the wall of blue, dazedly using the form my German nanny taught me over ten years ago.
I closed my eyes and mouth tight and threw myself under and into the back wall of the wave, knowing from experience that if it curved and then descended into its final crash while I was underwater, the impact would be minimal. Pushing every muscle, kicking my feet with desperation, I did it. I was well under the wave. With a flurry of kicking, I’d be able to pop up above the surface.
Like a fist to my stomach came another cramp, and the convulsing began. Not underwater, I thought in a panic and tried to stop the vomit from happening while still kicking my feet to get to the top. It was no use. My head felt as if it were bursting open when the sickness erupted. I was vomiting, choking, flailing, the salt water rushing down my throat. I’d never known pain like this in my life.
When the blackness came, it was an act of divine mercy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Everyone thinks that in a life-and-death situation, they’d fight to survive. I’d always assumed I would be a fighter par excellence. But the truth is this: When the black numbness was ripped away, and my lungs were on fire, my head was pounding, and the nausea was turning my stomach inside-out, I craved the darkness. I lay in the wet grainy sand, curled in the fetal position, feeling cold. I coughed up a string of vomit mixed with saltwater. A babble of voices surrounded me.
“Thank God, thank God,” said a strange voice nearest my ear. “She’s alive.”
“Oh, Peggy, Peggy,” a girl sobbed. I realized as if from a great distance that it was my sister, Lydia.
I tried to respond to her, but all the voices spun. I was being sucked into the dizzying tunnel again, but this time I resisted. I feared the tunnel. Another flash of sunlight bored into my eyes. Too bright. I clamped my eyes shut. Someone tried to push my body so that I would lie flat on the sand, face up, but another pair of hands grabbed my shoulders, saying, “She should stay on her side.” Someone put a blanket over me, which made me feel a little better because I was so strangely cold.
“Where the hell is that doctor?” shouted my cousin Ben.
I reached for the sound of his voice, my hand groping in the sand past the blanket.
“Ben,” I said, though it sounded like the thick gargling of a monster. “Don’t be mad at me. Don’t. Ben… Ben?”
He gripped my hand, and said, “I’m here, Peggy.”
A new deep-pitched voice said with authority, “We need to keep her awake. Peggy – Peggy?”
It wasn’t a matter of fighting or resisting. In a blink, I lost all hold on consciousness. When next I woke I was lying on smooth sheets, but that same deep voice intoned: “There is little possibility of brain damage because she did gain consciousness on the beach. She was able to speak to her cousin. That means her loss of consciousness underwater did not last long enough to destroy significant brain function. But I’m concerned about her inability to wake up as well as the vomiting on the beach and disorientation. Those are serious after-effects of a near-drowning.”
“No,” I groaned, opening my eyes to a small white-walled room.
Immediately they swarmed over me, my brother Lawrence and Uncle David and Aunt Helen and Paul. Lydia took my hand and pressed it to her damp cheek. Looming above her, Henry Taul looked at me as if I were a ghost. A man in a long white doctor’s coat politely pushed his way through. “Hello, Peggy,” said the owner of the deep voice. “I’m Dr. Deitch.” He had a pale face, one from a storybook, composed of knobs and corners – a pointed chin and bulbous nose. When he asked for space to be created in which to examine me, my family stepped back.
The doctor examined my pupils with a small light, placed a cool stethoscope on my chest, and took my pulse at my wrist and my throat. He wrote in a notebook, then beckoned for a young nurse who pressed on my abdomen through the paper-thin gown they’d dressed me in, asking me if it hurt. The stomach pain was not as severe as before, and I tried to convey that with dazed nods or headshakes.
“What hospital is this?” I asked the doctor in the raspy voice that now belonged to me.
“You’re not in a hospital, you’re in the medical suite of the Oriental Hotel,” Dr. Deitch said smoothly. “I am on the staff of the hotel, as are my fine nurses.”
That struck me as a little strange, but I pushed myself to tell him what I’d been trying to get out. Speaking slowly because I was so short of breath, I said, “I didn’t vomit… afterward. I was sick to my stomach and dizzy and weak before I… went underwater.” I couldn’t say drown. Wasn’t that word reserved for those who died?
This revelation led to more examination and many more questions about what I ate for breakfast and lunch and the nurse taking my temperature, which she proclaimed normal. I still felt nauseous, but even worse, when I tried to sit up, I was struck by a crippling dizziness. The doctor frowned and wrote more on his clipboard. The nurse told me to lie still.
“Doctor, is there something we should know?” asked Uncle David impatiently, and the docto
r retreated to discuss my condition with Uncle David and Aunt Helen. They spoke in low voices. Lydia slipped onto the chair by my narrow bed. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks puffy. Henry remained on the other side of the room, talking to Paul.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What should you be sorry for? You didn’t do this on purpose. It sounds like you got sick all of a sudden while in the water, and then the waves overwhelmed you, and you passed out.”
I nodded but was already feeling guilty about the fact that I had felt sick before I walked into the ocean. I shouldn’t have gone in the water at all. It was foolish and reckless.
“If you’re up to it, you should talk to Mother,” said Lydia.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She collapsed, Peggy. She took it very badly when we told her you were pulled from the water, unconscious. She’s in the next room. They gave her smelling salts and she’s resting.”
After taking that in, I asked, “Who pulled me out of the water?”
“Ben! Don’t you know?”
I shook my head, my eyes darting around the room. Lydia said, “He hurt his arm somehow, so they are seeing to him in yet another little room.” She smiled. “Maybe we should have it named the Batternberg Wing.”
Not long after that they brought Mother to see me. She had to be helped through the door and across the floor, my brother on one side and my Aunt Helen on the other. Her face looked ghastly: eyes staring and black in a gaunt face. I must have made quite the picture myself, for she recoiled the closer she got. They helped her into the chair.
“Margaret, I was so worried,” she said. “I thought we’d lost you.” Her lower lip trembled. “And after your father… for you to go the same way as Jonathan…” She shuddered violently and then, to my astonishment, she collapsed on top of me, shaking and sobbing.
Lydia covered her face, Henry Taul enfolding her tightly in his arms. My brother looked away as he fought for control of himself. My aunt was teary, and my uncle ashen; even my least favorite relation, Paul, dropped his head. It was all so deeply upsetting, so painful, that my eyes filled as Mother pressed her head on my sheet-covered chest, everyone falling to pieces around us. It was a scene that did not seem real. Who would have believed it of the Batternbergs, that arrogant and aloof clan capable of leaving the other tough-as-nails New York families quaking? Yet here we were.
Dr. Deitch gently pulled my mother off me. He then suggested that I recover with only the nurse in the room. One didn’t need an advanced degree in medicine to perceive that this group breakdown wasn’t good for me.
The nurse switched on an electric fan and turned down the light after ushering everyone out. My body badly needed rest. Moreover, they needed to monitor me carefully through the rest of the day and the night, seeing if the dizziness passed and checking for fever and other mysterious complications. I’d be spending the night in the Medical Suite. Where this was located within the Oriental Hotel, I had no idea.
The nurse informed me that Dr. Deitch wanted me to be given a teaspoon of water, to see if I could hold it down. The nurse propped me up and lifted the spoon into my mouth as if I were a helpless baby. The water made my ravished throat ache, but I did not throw up, and after a little while I felt stronger and ready for another teaspoon. This pleased the nurse enormously.
“Would it be permissible for me to see one person from my family?” I asked her after a little more time passed. I had drunk more water, and the nurse’s repeated temperature checks showed no fever.
The door opened, and I got my first glimpse of Ben. His arm was in a sling, but other than that he looked the same. A tear-ravaged Ben I simply could not cope with.
“People may think I get up to trouble because I crave the attention, but this is the kind of attention I don’t want,” I said, attempting a joke.
“I would never think that,” he said quietly. His seriousness made it possible for me to say it:
“Thank you for saving me.”
He inclined his head and said, “Of course.”
“It wasn’t easy.” I gestured at his sling.
“You know, it wasn’t,” he said, relaxing into the chair by my side. “Someone should advertise that information – finding an unconscious woman underwater and carrying her out of the Atlantic is very tricky business. But I suppose if it were widely understood, rescue rates would plummet.”
“I didn’t even know that you were in the water too, that anyone in the family was out with me.”
“And miss catching a glimpse of your showgirl legs?”
I couldn’t be annoyed at his comment, I felt so grateful. Without Ben I’d be dead, there just wasn’t any way around it.
The nurse, who’d been busying herself at a table laid out with ominous medical instruments, told me she’d be back in ten minutes and slipped out to the main hallway.
Ben took a deep breath and said, “I hope that gives me enough time.”
“For what?”
“I have something to say to you, Peggy.”
Ben looked so somber that it made me bunch up the top of my sheet with my right hand.
“I’m sorry for what happened when we were younger,” he said haltingly. “It was wrong of me to lead you into it. I’ve told you that you make too much of it, that many cousins play such games, but that is my own guilty conscience coming up with excuses. The truth of the matter is I abused your trust. I lost your trust.”
I continued to stare at him, wordless. Ben apologizing to me?
“I considered for a while that we should probably get married,” he said.
This was a joke, it had to be. “To make an honest woman of me?” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
“Hardly that. I didn’t completely seduce you, remember? We drew back.” He paused; an eyelid rose. “And you are still a virgin?”
“Ben!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He waved the hand not in a sling. “Shouldn’t have asked that. No, I wanted to marry you because out of all the women in this world, you never bore me.”
“Ah, and here I thought you had in mind us forming a dynastic scheme, like Queen Victoria’s descendants all marrying one another.”
“But that’s the problem. The European royals marrying their cousins, it’s fading away, or it should be fading. Not a very twentieth century thing to do. That’s the Old World. I have to make a New World marriage, choose a wife who will impress the public, hopefully present some qualities that I lack.”
“You want to impress the public?”
“I have a plan for each decade of my life, Peggy. In my forties, I intend to run for public office. Why do you think I’m taking a law degree?”
“You can’t be serious, Ben.”
“Now why do you say that? Because no one from the best families in New York fills a public office. It’s just not done. While in England, there are families that serve for generations – for centuries – at the pinnacle of power. Prime ministers. In America all a man is supposed to do with his life is make money. Or live an idle existence, spending his father’s – his grandfather’s – money. It breeds some pretty pathetic specimens.”
“Like Henry Taul?”
He winced. “Exactly. When someone from a good family, given the best education, does decide to serve his country, he can shoot right to the top. Look at Teddy Roosevelt.”
“All right, now you really must stop. Please. I can’t take it any longer. You despise Roosevelt.”
“I don’t despise him. He’s a worthy opponent.” Seeing my expression, he laughed and said, “Enough of my plans for the future. Ah, I wonder if I could have a cigarette here. Damn, left them in the other room.”
I rearranged my pillow and sat up higher, so we were closer to face to face. I was tired of everyone looming over me. “It’s just as well you abandoned your plan for me, Ben. It has a flaw. I’d never marry you.”
A slow smile spread across his face. “I could persuade you to marry me, Peg
gy. It wouldn’t be easy. But I could manage it.”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t matter what you did or said. Not with the way you are. I don’t want your kind of husband. I don’t want any Thelmas.”
Ben’s smile disappeared. And with that, some instinct I’d had all along clicked into place and I knew. “She’s not yours, is she?” I demanded. When he didn’t answer, I said, “Come on, Ben! I almost died today – and who knows, maybe I came close to taking you with me. You act like you’ve opened your heart and soul, but this – she – can’t be discussed?
“No, she can’t.”
“Tell me the truth. I won’t breathe a word to a living soul, I swear it. Does that make a difference?”
He ran his hand through his thick hair. “I would have to rely on your discretion, and you’re not a discreet person.”
“About this, I would be.”
“Very well then. If I have your word.” But he still hesitated, as if it were physically difficult to come out with it. He was a person who, from my earliest memory, had an arsenal of eloquence at his disposal, never fumbling for the right word. It was an ability he wore as easily as other men wear a hat.
“Thelma is my father’s mistress,” said Ben, watching me carefully. “She has been for four years, ever since she was eighteen and he found her dancing in a show.”
I had few happy touchpoints within my family, but one of them was my Uncle David, my father’s favorite brother, steadier and kinder than my father ever was. He did not miss birthdays or anniversaries, he had shoulders big enough for everyone to lean on. It hurt, very deeply, to lose this illusion.
“He’s always been like this? There’s always been a Thelma?” I managed to ask.
“Since before I was born, before he was ever married. This is… a way of life, Peggy. My mother had no choice but to endure it.” Ben withdrew into himself, slumped in the chair, no longer the sardonic older cousin but a little boy himself. I realized I’d not heard Ben speak of his mother for many years.
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