The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (31 page)

The next day was occupied in completing the guest list and writing the invitations. It was Violet’s practice to assist with the mail, and so she found herself inviting Bertha’s friends to a gathering to meet herself. As she addressed the envelopes, her patroness gave her a brief account of each guest. “Poor Dr. Macabee’s father died just a month ago, he was a surgeon in the war. Quite the tyrant, actually. He didn’t make Henry’s life any easier. Dora Winter, such a lovely woman. Her daughter is expecting a baby this month and Dora is anxious because she’s miscarried twice before.” Later, as Bertha fished the money for the postage from her bag, she remarked, “You’re looking pale, my dear. I hope you are perfectly well.” Their eyes met and Violet had the sensation that she was being scrutinized by a tigress, one who was in no hurry for her next meal, though she had identified it.

Surely Ned would write. Surely he wouldn’t allow himself to be silenced by his parents. It was as if they’d closed him up in a vault.

For five days Violet dithered between wild hope and despair. Each night she persuaded herself that a happy, ordinary life with a loving husband, perhaps even children, was within her grasp. She considered a trip to Boston, a surprise knock at his door, his delight when he opened it to find her there, laughing at her own daring. His silence, she told herself, was meaningful rather than meaningless, and he was searching for what he called “a way” for them to reunite. She pictured herself at the judge’s pretty little house in New Jersey, taking her vows in the new dress Bertha had provided.

But each morning she woke with the certainty that there had never been the slightest chance of such an outcome, and the proof was that Ned had fled the city without a word. Yet her nightly fantasies,
which persuaded her that he might write, combined with her morning clear-headedness, which suggested that Bertha would intercept such a letter if it came, resulted in a fierce determination to be at the door each morning before the mail arrived.

When the letter was finally handed in, buried in the usual stack of expensive envelopes addressed to Bertha, Violet carried it with trembling fingers and swiftly beating heart up the stairs to her bedroom, where she sat down at her writing table. For several moments she held the envelope before her, reading her own name as if there might be some doubt that it was actually written there, so much had she longed to see it. She took up the ivory knife from the tray, carefully slit the flap, and drew out the folded page within.

The letter was not long. It began and ended with the words “forgive me.” He had been in a pitched battle with his father for days; there was never anything like it; he had resisted with all his strength, but to no avail. She would perhaps be relieved to learn that he had wrestled from his stern progenitor the concession that he would henceforth change his course of study from law to theology. He had behaved shamefully, this he confessed. The only honor he could claim for himself, the one he would forever cherish, was that a woman of her magnificence had deigned to care for him.

Violet read the cowardly missive several times. The first two readings merely stunned her. She felt the blow physically, as if someone had slapped the back of her head with something dull and heavy, like a book. She folded the page, got up, and briefly paced the room. Then she sat down and read it three more times, searching for any evidence, however flimsy, that its author had given her feelings a moment’s serious consideration. But she could find nothing. It was, in fact, a model of unqualified duplicity. She rose again, this time to leave the room.

Stealthily she descended the stairs. In the kitchen, where the cook was already rolling out pie shells, she begged a cup of tea and carried it back to her room. As she sipped the restorative liquid, she read the letter three more times, committing it to memory. She noted that her lover’s defiance was a flexible instrument. Having
been deflected from an inappropriate marriage, it had evidently fixed on throwing off the tyranny of law studies. She doubted that theology would prove a liberating alternative, though it would have the virtue of vexing his father.

After all, Violet thought, Ned Bakersmith was a good and dutiful boy; there was nothing remarkable about him. His parents could be justly proud.

When high hopes and great expectations are dashed, the effects may well be a reinvigoration of the will, but if a skeptical view of future prospects is confirmed, the result is more often an enduring loss of vitality. As Violet sat drinking her tea, she realized that in spite of everything she knew about the world and her place in it, she had truly longed to be proven wrong. But she had been right. All the energy drained from her body; it was as if she had opened a vein. She was too weary for tears. She finished her tea, setting the cup and saucer aside. Then she refolded the letter, replaced it in its envelope, and tore it into four pieces.

The rest was mercifully brief. The day before the at-home, she came down to tea to find Bertha in languid conversation with a young woman of regal beauty, all golden curls and rose-petal skin, who inspected and dismissed Violet in one swift stroke of her avaricious dark eyes. “Here’s my friend, Miss Petra,” said Bertha. “Let me introduce you to Miss Irene Pendergast.”

Violet took a step closer, but as Miss Pendergast’s neatly folded hands didn’t move, she merely nodded her head in acknowledgment.

Bertha’s eyes bathed the blond princess in an oleaginous beam of maternal solicitude. “It’s not official,” she continued, “but Irene will soon be Mrs. Bakersmith. We’ll be announcing the engagement when Ned comes down at the end of the term.”

After an excruciating hour during which Miss Pendergast’s mental vista was revealed to be neither as wide nor as deep as her teacup, Violet escaped on some fabricated errand. She walked where they had walked, through the park and along the river, her mind ablaze with unfocused and unmanageable rage. It was a blustery, wet, inhospitable afternoon, and when she came to the little bluff
that looked over the swiftly moving river, where a forest of schooner masts bobbed at anchor, she had half a mind to jump in. Why not? she thought. Why ever not? She pressed out farther, allowing the toes of her boots to extend over the stone ledge. The void yawned before her and she could sense the pull it would exert if she simply took one more step. She felt Ned’s hands about her waist, his lips at the nape of her neck. She let herself sink into him. The heel of her left boot snagged in a fissure of the stone and she came down on her hands, twisting her ankle cruelly. For a moment she was still, half expecting some passerby to come to her rescue, mortified by that prospect. But no one came, no one saw her. She sat up, gazing at her boots. The ankle throbbed. She doubted she could bear much weight upon it. Gradually she rose, brushing the dirt from her coat, readjusting her hat, putting her weight on the good ankle, and easing the bad one alongside. She took a step, whimpering as a stab of pain shot across her instep. Carefully, slowly, she hobbled back toward the park gate, where she flagged a cab and with the aid of the driver collapsed upon the seat.

At the house, when she finally got the boot off, the ankle was revealed, swollen and bruised. Bertha, in consultation with the cook, packed it in ice, which brought the swelling down. The next day, miserable and feverish, she played her part in the drawing room, confounding the credulous. Afterward Jeremiah Babin waited half an hour to make her acquaintance.

And that, Violet thought, as she sat in her stateroom on the S.S.
Campania
, fondling the slim volume of poetry—the sole memento of her lost love—was the nearly comic end of it. She turned to the table of contents. Here was the poem “Echo,” which Ned had read so feelingly.
Come to me in the silence of the night, / Come in the speaking silence of a dream
. She turned to her own favorite and read it out to the empty cabin.
What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through, / Instead of this heart of stone ice-cold whatever I do! / Hard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all
. She nodded,
comforted by these lines. They made her feel less lonely. Then she closed the book and slipped it back into her bag.

She was conscious of the ship engine’s dull throb; how it must roar and fume at the stokers somewhere down in the dark hull, and how they must feel they were fueling the furnaces of hell. Yet in her narrow stateroom the air was cool, and as she stood at the basin unfastening her bodice, she had no sensation that this room was one of many, stacked chock-a-block in all directions—a small town’s worth of residents sealed in an iron-and-steel canister pushing through the bay to the open sea. It wasn’t really so bad, she thought, lowering her face close to the tap to splash the cool water onto her cheeks. No one knew anything about her; she was just another passenger, traveling to Bath to meet her sister. She patted her face with the towel, changed into her cotton gown, hung up her dress, and sat down on the bunk, fluffing up the pillow. When she lay with her ear against the pillow, she could hear the engines more clearly. If she turned flat on her back, she could feel the sway of the ship. It would probably get worse, she advised herself, but she was too tired to think about that. There was no going back now.

She awoke in darkness to the sound of voices. Her first thought was that passengers had gathered in the corridor, and the next was that she was on a ship and it was sinking. But the voices were not raised or excited; they were just talking. She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the mattress. There were all manner of voices; men, women, children, some deep, others high-pitched, halting, low, all talking, though strangely she didn’t have the sense that they were talking to each other. She crossed the carpet to the curtained window, pulled back the cloth, and peered into the section of the corridor visible through the square of glass. Electric bulbs in copper rosettes studded the long passage, casting dim blobs of pink light upon the carpet. No one was directly outside her room. She unlatched the heavy door and pulled it open a few inches, then wide enough to see the length of the hall—no one was there. The voices were louder, but not clearer. She couldn’t make out a word. Were they coming from the gentlemen’s smoking room, or the dining
room? She closed the door and went back to the bed, switching on the light over the sofa on the way and glancing at the clock. It was two fifteen.

Where were these talking people? What were they saying? It sounded like a crowd at a sporting event, before the game began. Was it coming from the upper deck? Were passengers gathered there and their voices funneled through the ventilation system to her room?

There was nothing to be done about it but to try to ignore them and sleep. But when she rested her head on the pillow, the voices grew louder, as if they came from the pillow itself. She sat up, keeping still, listening. Though she couldn’t detach a word from the general racket, she determined that more than one language was being spoken. Several in fact.

It must be coming through the floor. It was doubtless the steerage mob, sleepless, restless, as she was now. Would they talk all night?

She slipped from the bed, dropping to her hands and knees and pressing one ear to the carpet. It wasn’t coming from there. She stood, then sat on the sofa and took up
The White Company
, but she read only a few sentences before the mumbling voices distracted her.

It must be coming from the deck. She stood up, paced back and forth the few steps between the sofa and the bed, pressing her palms over her ears, which muffled the sound. So the voices weren’t coming from inside her head: that was a relief. Perhaps it had something to do with the electricity in the cabin. She pressed her ear against the wall nearest the sink, then nearer the door. It wasn’t coming from the wall.

It must be the steerage. They were closed up down there with no light but a row of portholes. They had their own section of the deck where they washed their dishes, so they probably went up in shifts, like the sailors, some sleeping while others were awake. That must be it. She should just ignore it. They were only talking, not fighting or shouting or even singing.

She returned to the bed, lay flat on her back, and closed her
eyes. What were they saying? Her eyes flew open. She tried counting, got to a thousand, and started backward. Suppose this racket, this talking, went on for the entire trip? Eventually she slept a few hours. When she woke the voices were still talking. It was six a.m., two hours to breakfast.

She pressed one palm over her forehead, the other over her chest, breathing deeply, trying to calm the rising panic in her brain and heart. Her eyes rested on the bucolic scene in the painting over the sofa, a summer’s day, the cows in the distance, the green world, all serene. England, she thought. Will I have to stay there? Will I die there? Would that be preferable to going through this again?

She washed at the sink, not examining her pallid reflection in the mirror. She would dress, go out on the deck, and inquire into the source of the infernal noise. She laid her dress out on the bed and sat on the sofa in her chemise, pulling on her black stockings. The air in the stateroom was stuffy with a faint odor of fried fish. At least on the deck the air would be fresh.

When she opened her door and stepped into the corridor, the voices didn’t rise in volume, which meant they weren’t being piped into her stateroom through the ventilation system. At the end of the hall she could see the backs of two ladies ascending the stairs to the deck. She followed them, feeling an eagerness to be under the sky, to have the company of her fellow passengers, who must surely know something she didn’t about the incessant clamor of human voices. At the top of the steps, a steward, waiting to descend, smiled down upon her, but he didn’t speak. He moved aside as she reached the open door and stepped out into the lively atmosphere on the deck. The voices swelled excitedly, expectantly, like a swarm of hornets disturbed by an intruder in their nest.

On the inner deck the passengers, bundled in blankets and shawls like hospital patients, reclined in deck chairs, dozing or reading books. Outside the rail they promenaded, arm in arm, two or three abreast. Here and there small groups gathered for intense conversations. There were a few children, eyeing each other hopefully from behind their mothers’ skirts. Beyond them all, dazzling
and undulating, neatly framed by the ship rail and the floor of the upper deck and occupying the recommended two-thirds of the composition, was the sea.