The Brooklyn Rail

Jim Shepard is one of our finest living story writers—though it seems more like his stories are chiseled, carved, or engraved than they are ‘written.’ This story comes from his soon-to-be-released collection, The Queen of Bad Influences, published by Knopf next month.

Disaster, on a Wreck of the Deutschland scale, finds the Boston brahmin and those who connect them to the larger world via the shipping industry of 1898. Structurally, this story is Iliadic, both in its catalog of ships and its women waiting at the walls (teichoscopy) for news of their imperilled husbands. But it also has that thing which is most vital in Homer, energy, an energy that condenses in characters’ thoughts as packets of electrical charge and then shoots outward in a luminous arc.

Shepard’s characters ‘flash’ and ‘flash oddly’ with the same fidelity to consciousness that we find in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce’s “The Dead.” As teenaged Alice stands next to her father, about to depart into a looming storm, “[She] could imagine her father's pride in her stoicism at the prospect of his facing such possible peril…” That riddle of thought feels very Woolfian and elevates this story from impeccably-researched account of a catastrophe to a textured world that we can think within, inhabit at the precise moment of disaster.

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On her first day at the Harris School, seven-year-old Alice Elinor Hays told her seatmate Sadie at recess that she might as well begin by stating her situation, and laid out for her where she lived, her parents’ and housekeeper’s names, and that she intended to be class Monitor. After Sadie failed to respond, Alice conceded that that had been probably enough information for the time being, and that if Sadie or the boy beside her who was eavesdropping wanted more, they would each have to do without.

Eight years later when she was fifteen, she told Sadie she had long cherished their time together for the way it had helped her sift out her own insights from the general way of thinking and discover what there was of the real Alice. She added that she had by that point accepted that she was different physically and socially, unusually tall and sharp-featured, and perhaps too intense and judgmental for popularity, and Sadie concurred.

Alice’s mother had taken pride in the girls’ friendship, since Sadie’s family was one of Boston’s oldest, and on that day eight years earlier when the girls had first met, Sadie had weathered three of Alice’s attempts at self-presentation and then had encouraged her to be herself and not anyone else, and Alice had won her over by telling her not to worry, since she couldn’t be two people at once anyway.

Alice’s had been one of the thriftier families in the neighborhood, with only two live-in servants, but even within her household she amused everyone with her disdain for excess, pronouncing their new mansard roof hideous. When her mother countered that she found it splendid, Alice responded that perhaps splendid just didn’t agree with her. She was also proud of her sense of fairness, and on her most recent history examination in response to a question about the Holy See that she felt unfairly penalized classmates of another faith, she wrote Mr. Thorne, your 9^th question will rise up against you on the Day of Judgment! to which he responded, once he handed it back, I trust not! penciled in under the grade.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, on a pleasantly fair afternoon, Sadie had had to be harangued into accompanying Alice to the harbor to see Alice’s father, William Hays, off as a passenger on the Portland to Maine, since Alice couldn’t very well return from the harbor alone. Sadie had professed that to be the only reason she was going, even after Alice had pointed out that the Portland was one of the biggest paddlewheel steamers on the East Coast, and that her father was an old schoolmate of the Captain, Hollis Blanchard, and they would surely be able to tour the bridge, and that Sadie knew that Alice took a sharp interest in her father’s business. His work for the Boston Board of Trade was all about fairness in maritime commerce, and he enjoyed stoking her outrage with this or that tale of special privileges bestowed by cronyism.

The weather had turned ominously dark by late afternoon, and by the time Mr. Hays and the girls stepped down from their carriage at the docks they had to fight through a throng of passengers returning to Maine following the Thanksgiving holiday, and the sky to the west looked so sinister that they could hear a fair number discussing cancelling their accommodations.

Captain Blanchard was an Ichabod Crane type with side whiskers and a distracted smile, and apologized for having only a short time to show the girls around the bridge, his energies taken up as they were with pressing questions of the weather. Alice’s father asked if he was really considering cancelling the trip, and Captain Blanchard replied that the firm’s General Manager had allowed that if conditions worsened sufficiently the Captain could hold the Portland at the wharf until 9 pm and make a final decision then, but he further confided that Captains who too often displayed such caution found themselves piloting packet boats delivering the mail. Alice’s father noted that the skies were now worrisome enough that a number of passengers in his hearing had discussed obtaining refunds at the steamship’s offices and taking the train. Alice could imagine her father’s pride in her stoicism at the prospect of his facing such possible peril, and ran her hands over the brightwork while Sadie gazed glumly out over the bow and Captain Blanchard explained that the sizable Great Lakes storm about which he’d been cautioned was soon arriving from the west, but that the current sea conditions were still light. And then a final weather bulletin for which he seemed to have been waiting arrived, and he informed Alice’s father that New York was now reporting that the wind had backed around to the northwest, so they likely could outrun the storm to port. But he seemed not at all pleased, though he said he was, and Alice’s father asked again if he wanted to delay, before the Mate knocked and intruded to report that even with some last-minute cancellations the ship was now full up, and in a great flurry everything seemed to have been decided, and Alice’s father gave her a sturdy hug and Alice and Sadie found themselves hurried down the gangplank and waving goodbye with all of those others left ashore.

 

When Judith Lee Merrill had been a little girl and asked by her minister to describe her fondest hope, she had responded that she wished to live alone in a private desert surrounded by tigers that would eat intruders, and now at twenty-five she still seemed, when first encountered, as slight as a girl, with that self-contained and scrutinizing expression that had so disconcerted her minister. She felt she knew nothing well, yet had acquired what she knew without much effort, and so periodically feared her mind to be as irregular as her wardrobe.

She had often as a young woman felt that the awakening powers of her attention once she had finished school had had little object on which to enlarge themselves, and when she had met her future husband through mutual acquaintances, she had registered that he had directed a liberal share of his dinner conversation toward her and that he had engaged the happy smattering of various types of information that she typically used socially in ways that seemed to her both resourceful and revelatory, as if she had hoped to only open a cubby-hole and been rewarded with a panorama.

She made no secret about her origins. Her family had only been able to educate one girl, so she had been continually oppressed by the knowledge that her opportunities had been secured through her sisters’ privations, and when she met Thomas at a dinner at her cousin’s, she was a salesgirl at Filene’s department store at two dollars a week. When she described for the table her supervisor’s regime of levying fines against her pay for offenses such as sitting down or chatting with co-workers, she seemed to be the only one not animated with indignation, and Thomas teased her for having no sentiment. She responded that she possessed in its place the airy grace of rationality. During their courtship he confided that as an engineer he had been charmed, and that he had further admired the way she had amused and startled the table with her remark that men claimed a woman’s cardinal virtues to be chastity and humility and then set out to destroy the first and exploit the second. And on their wedding night when during one of his romantic sallies she wondered aloud if he had misread her coolness to it as modesty, he revealed how much he enjoyed that he could never tell with perfect certainty when she might be teasing him.

Alonzo Ansel Crozier as a boy had quickly figured out that when it came to school for people like him, none of the adults had been expected to make much of an effort. He told his wife Corine that before he’d left the ninth grade for good, his classes had usually consisted of white teachers assigning a little something to read and then disappearing for the rest of the period. He’d only made the mistake of complaining about it once. Many before Corine had found him close-mouthed—his father’s harshness had taught him concealment—but he had learned that his infirmity could be forged into an advantage, and that pride and silence could become his most powerful weapons.

And the water had always been there for him. As a tot he had haunted the docks and gravitated towards anything that floated, and his mother was always pulling him from a wharf. She’d complained about his father that she should have married someone who could own more than he carried in a sea-bag, and Corine commiserated that her mother’s main hope had been that her daughter would marry a dull steady man with cash in his pockets and a solid brace of savings. But Alonzo was proud of being a part of the biggest community of nonwhite sailors north of Baltimore, and of his mates having built their lives out of whatever unpromising materials they had found around them. All but the Irish were locked out of the building trades and the streetcar jobs, and the steam-fitting and plumbing trades, but for those who considered themselves of bold and determined spirit, work at sea as a deckhand or steward or saloonman or cook had long been a way to improve one’s lot by honorable means.

Before he’d met Corine, he had taken his meals out and then returned to his cheerless solitary room, and a month into their courtship, having walked her home, through the front window he had watched her hang her wet coat in the dim hall and take stock of herself by pressing her palms to her cheeks in the mirror, and had acknowledged to himself that they were as well-paired as two blind mice, and that he was in that regard as lucky as any deckhand in the state of Maine. And he understood as well that as his future wife, Corine would depend upon him, though the profession in which he took such pride could implacably render him unreliable, and that would likely cause them pain.

By 1898 it was already well understood that the stupendous masses of air that combine to generate New England’s weather originated many thousands of miles away, in the north Pacific and Arctic Canada via the Great Lakes, and a comprehension had also begun to form about how high and low pressure areas interacted. The United States Weather Bureau, founded twenty-eight years earlier, had taken over from the Army’s Signal Corps the work of forecasting, and issued its bulletins twice a day by electric telegraph to each of its regional offices. The forecast for that Saturday had been for unsettled weather, with wind and snow advisories especially for all maritime interests, as well as the somewhat novel additional possibility of very heavy snow and northeasterly gales should a storm that was currently being tracked having left the Gulf of Mexico somehow combine with the one from the Great Lakes. What no one had registered was the way the latter had already pulled an enormous volume of frigid air southeast from central Canada to combine with that other low coming up the coast to create a staggeringly steep pressure gradient behind it, with the result being a colossally broad front of winds of hurricane force. The update from New York upon which Captain Blanchard had relied had suggested the storm was both of manageable size and diminishing, neither of which was accurate. The report that the winds had backed around to the northwest had in fact been based on a misunderstanding of the onset of the newly combined storms’ cyclonic spin. It was never afterwards established who had authorized that update.

A half an hour after the Portland’s departure from the dock, the ink line on the barometer’s paper roll at the Boston Weather Bureau waterfalled from the top of the sheet to its very bottom and then seemed determined to plunge further. By then the size of the coming storm was so evident from the horizon that nearly all ships were turning for the nearest port at all speed. And even so, the storm’s explosion of energy was so sudden that nearly all were caught at sea.

Alice and Sadie had noticed nothing during their carriage ride to the train, but in the fifteen minutes it had then taken to reach Dorchester, their passenger car had begun to buffet alarmingly, and they stepped onto the platform at Harrison Square into a blizzard of such fury that they immediately ducked into the shop beside the station. It was already crowded with travelers taking shelter and all seemed stupefied at the severity of the cold and force of the wind. The windows rattled with such violence that their exclamations were drowned out, and already the street was littered with roof tiles and what looked like bricks from chimneys. The intersection was a chaos of horse-cars, coaches and wagon teams trying to make headway, with two policemen, rimed in white like flailing snowmen, working to achieve what they could. Alice and Sadie both had long understood the attraction of storms and hadn’t gotten past the thrilled-by-deep-snow stage, but even they were sobered by what they now confronted.

A boy from their class trapped with them was tying his hat onto his head by knotting his scarf beneath his chin like Jacob Marley. He had spent the winter teasing Sadie, and Alice called him Monsieur Dirty-Nails. He offered to guide them home and to serve as their windbreak and was rewarded with such gratitude from Sadie that Alice wondered if her friend was a flirt. She reminded the two of them that Lorna, their live-in Scotch girl, would no doubt be sent with the trap to fetch them, but Sadie pointed out how hopeless the streets were and said it wasn’t far and wanted to take the boy’s offer, so Alice in a spasm of impatience relented. They bundled up as best they could and single file slipped out into the blast, clinging to one another’s coat tails. Both girls were blown to their knees and the trio quickly learned to huddle closer to the building fronts for shelter and orientation. They passed a young woman shielding a little girl in the lee of a wall. Alice kept her head down but could feel her cheeks freezing. After twenty awful minutes, she waved goodbye to her companions at her house’s cast-iron railings, and inside her front hall her mother was horrified at her heroism. She told Alice that had Lorna not endured such an impossible struggle with the trap’s shed doors in the wind, they might have missed one another, and that the thermometer outside their kitchen window read thirteen below zero, and Alice responded that even despite her hat she had frozen ears. Lorna helped her shed her boots and marveled to her that the windowpanes were already hard-frozen and the wind had blown the neighbor’s chimney down. Alice was found to be so soaked and chilled that she had to change everything and in lieu of an embrace was handed a newspaper to read while she dried by the fire. All that evening her mother carried on about the risk the girls had taken, and only every so often mentioned as well her fears about her husband’s passage. And that was the first Alice thought about her father out on the open seas on such a night. So that all the world was blowing snow when she crawled into her warm bed aghast at her own thoughtlessness.

Judith had not been at the wharf that evening to see Thomas off but had been within sight of the harbor, picking up her piecework. She got one and half cents per skirt for sewing the bottoms by hand and collected them every few days in batches of sixty so cumbersome they had to be divided into three large bundles to carry. A corner of the bedroom was set aside for her Singer Sewing Machine, which her husband called The Great Civilizer after its advertisements and for the way it brought in income. At least it was employment that didn’t soil the clothes or hands.

Earlier the water had been smooth as glass, but by around seven, the dark sky was starting to spit snow, and more oddly, out on the water, wavelets were running in all directions. She heard the wind pick up while she was dividing her load and emerged to a tempest that pulled her bundles skyward, and only attempted a few blocks homeward before she too was forced to duck into the nearest shop. From there she watched hats torn from heads and launched the length of streets like advance agents of calamity. Strong men were knocked down and rolled about. There was consternation among the assembled as to how they were expected to get home. And in just minutes she and her companions faced such a gale of sleet and snow that buildings across the street were lost to sight.

She pictured her Thomas out on the sea in this and her hand flew to her mouth, startling the elderly gentleman beside her. Thomas had spent the week miserable with a cold and had raised the possibility of calling in sick on their neighbors’ telephone before she had reminded him how far behind they were in their saving for some kind of place of their own. She was tired of wishing to live in the House of Have and instead occupying the House of Want. She complained that however sheltered she felt, she still sensed the bitterness and lack of their circumstances peering in from all directions. Her husband’s expression in response had made her regret her honesty. She had a manner in contention that was abrupt and decided and she was always sorry to cause him distress. He had pulled on his coat.

Her mother had once apologized to him that her daughter had been brought up around freethinkers and was not used to the harness. Judith had responded that whatever her mother was, she wasn’t a freethinker.

He had been sneezing as he headed down the stairs. He had by then served aboard the Portland for three years as First Engineer, answering to the Pilot who answered to the Captain. She told the curious that her husband kept the boat running, and that he and his firemen maintained the boiler and engine. Those she told were usually impressed enough to believe him well-paid.

He had complained that morning in fact from his sickbed that for all his responsibilities aboard ship, they were still perpetually scrambling for rent while the shipowners made money as if shaking it from trees. She had asked once again why an association like the Knights of Labor hadn’t sought to organize maritime workers and he had waved her off and lamented once again that wherever you went, city and state governments deferred to money, and stayed hostile to workers’ rights.

He deserved better, she believed, from the world and from her. She counted herself lucky that she had encountered a man with a sense of humor who was also pleasant with women, and had had engraved on the obverse of the pocket watch she’d presented him on their first anniversary Engineer of Safe Havens. He had been steady in his affections for her in weather both fair and foul. In their early celebration of one another they had traversed much of that distance between domestic convenience and soul-companionship, and now she sensed them slipping back the other way. She had justified to herself a certain ruthlessness when it came to carving out her place in the world, and that sometimes entailed an impatience with his constancy as a given. She wanted him to know, in the midst of all of his other travails, that even in his sleep her hand was in his. And yet she watched him move through his days with a detachment that suggested that there would be infinite time to make that clear.

Alonzo aspired to the position of fireman – a twenty percent raise in pay from deckhand – and fancied that his industry had caught the First Engineer’s eye, Mr. Thomas Merrill for example having given the neatness of the starboard stowage of the deck furniture an approving nod at the end of the last Portland to Boston run. When they’d cast off this evening, the snow had just begun, but before they’d left the harbor, the clouds in the west formed a black wall, and the snowflakes seemed as big as birds. The Bangor boat ahead of them came right around and reentered the harbor, whistling a warning to them as it passed, as did the incoming Mount Desert, but they maintained their heading out into the darkness and snow. Bigger ships did better in rough seas, and the Portland was as long as a football field and forty-two feet across the beam, with another twenty-six for the shielded paddle wheels on each side. A few leagues past the Graves Lightship those western clouds overtook them, and they found themselves in a heavy NW gale with the wind blowing the wave tops into long white streamers. And when the tug Channing sounded its horn out of the night and hove into view also hurrying into Boston harbor, some of the young bloods on the steamship’s bow shouted to the tug’s Captain to get his old scow out of the way, and he shouted back that they wouldn’t be feeling so smart by the morning. And Captain Blanchard ended the conversation with a friendly blast of the Portland’s whistle.

Rough passages troubled Alonzo less than his fellow deckhands, since he had a sailor’s stomach and took pride in a coolness and presence of mind that he had seen First Mates and Captains appreciate. His friend Cornelius was also less intimidated by bad weather, having worked as a boy in a Florida turpentine camp before escaping to the docks, and Alonzo approved of his friend’s insistence that all sons of Neptune were entitled to respect wherever they might go. Storms had a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. When you made yourself useful, especially when a good hand was needed: that was how you rose to Mate. Alonzo would succeed, given half a chance, but half a chance was hard to come by. He knew how many claimed that his race needed to begin at life’s bottom, and deserved no favors, but he wanted to believe that any honorable profession had found some of its brightest lights in the tenement’s gloom. He had no intention of ending like his uncle, without two coins to rub together, and so palsied he could no longer spoon his soup.

He and Corine had lived for four years by that point in a rental house on Belknap down the alley from the Abyssinian Church, and she took in washing. They had planned for a family, but the babies had not come, so she had redoubled her appetite for work, and at her lowest, believed their childlessness to have been for the best. She had had any number of serious illnesses as a girl and said that when she looked over the record of deaths in her family Bible, she often imagined her own name there. For company when he was at sea, she had the other wives -- most of his friends appeared on someone’s crew list – and a rescued Bluetick puppy named Major, whom she took walking without a string and who followed her nonetheless. But she had wanted to take on a cousin’s child, a little boy who’d had nowhere to go after the cousin had passed from tuberculosis, and Alonzo had refused to discuss it. And from that day forward the memory of his refusal and its shock to her complacency returned to her as a blow, during which her husband reminded her of those landlords who saw in every request for repair or improvement only diminished income. And at every encounter with a boy on the street, she had had to endure the sting of her cousin’s boy’s consignment to that legion for whom kicks and cuffs and privation were their daily bread.

Alice woke at five the next morning with the storm’s effects persevering. She had thrown off her covers and the chill had roused her, and lying there listening to the wind shake the house it felt as though the extravagance of her dreams had produced a strange seething in her brain. She had left her bedroom door open to better hear her mother’s conversations with Lorna down below, but had drifted off unable to make out any more in the voices than mutual anxiety.

With the dawn the room brightened without seeming warmer in the polar light. She had her eyes on the mantel-clock and tried to estimate how far from port her father’s ship must be. The night before he’d left, he had suggested reading to her in her room at bedtime, one of the rituals they had maintained from her childhood, and she had tried to seem interested but had heard almost nothing he had read. He had asked if she preferred a different book and she’d known he’d caught on her face that look she had while woolgathering. Now that she was older, she believed one of her tasks to be to stand beside him much as her mother did, occasionally questioning his proclivities when they slipped from the ideal but mostly providing him a haven in a heartless world. Since he did seem to find solace in the female realm.

His work for the Board of Trade required constant travel by sea and he was fond of claiming that when it came to rough crossings there was no such thing as courage, only impulse or necessity, and that he held by the old saying that those who were unafraid of the sea would soon be drowned, but those who were afraid would only be drowned now and again. He recounted to her stories of shipwrecks in such wonderful detail that her mother put a stop to it, claiming he would frighten Alice into convulsions. Alice asked now and again why he had to travel so often and he teased her that she and her mother had expensive tastes, and that when he grew old there would be time enough to haul his bark up into the wind.

The last time she had asked had been the occasion of her fifteenth birthday. He had taken her to lunch at the Hotel Vendome, with its great dining hall faced all around with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and afterward they had ridden the hotel’s mahogany-paneled elevator just to see the built-in seats. He had explained to the waiter who seemed to be waiting for his answer to Alice’s question that he had developed a charming disregard for his daughter’s anxieties, and she had informed the waiter in turn that she had never been sufficiently cautious in her choice of parents.

At breakfast she asked after news of her father’s ship, and asked again while helping Lorna with the dishes, and her mother complained that she was reminded of the days when she would offer Alice a penny as a prize for a day of peace. With the chores settled her mother seemed able to read but Alice was so restless with fear that she agitated after a few hours to be able to visit Sadie, who after all was only eight houses down, and her mother’s response was so extravagant that Alice retired to her room to sit on the floor and be miserable. Her mode following any criticism was a stony silence during which she inwardly boiled with wrath, though if anyone noticed they did not let on. When she finally returned downstairs, she and Annie bundled up like mummies and followed her mother out into the bedlam of the back yard and they had a wild windy time trying to tie down the canvas cover to the hen house. And once they were back inside, exclaiming about their pummeling while unwrapping one another, she could see the worry on her mother’s face, though Lorna was the only one, later by the fire, who acknowledged it.

Over the twenty-seven hours of the gale that began on November 26^th, 1898, 141 commercial vessels of some size sank, foundered or were driven aground from eastern Long Island to the northern coast of Maine, with a loss of an estimated 492 souls. Before the steamer Ohio ran aground on Spectacle Island off Boston Harbor, Captain William Abbott reported that he could not even see all the way across his open bridge from port to starboard. The pilot boat Columbia that had ferried Abbott out to his ship last reported in from the vicinity of the Boston Lightship and then was never seen again. The schooner Allerton was driven so far ashore in North Scituate it shattered one home beyond the seawall and drove its bowsprit through another. The Calvin F. Baker was driven into the rocks behind Little Brewster Island, and the crew made for the rigging to get above the breakers raking the decks, and those not swept off by the waves froze to death as they hung there. At the Brant Rock Seaside Boarding House the women and children were ordered upstairs, but when the surf drove through the front doors and blew out the dining room windows, the upper stories collapsed into the lower, and all were swept away. The storm by then was spinning with such velocity that pilots were confronting seas coming from one direction and winds from another. On Block Island the anemometer’s final reading was 110 miles per hour before it was torn from the top of the Weather Bureau office, and the island’s entire fishing fleet was destroyed. The freighter Butler off Cape Cod was shorn of its deckload of timber and its booms and gaffs and capsized. And the giant coal tender Babcock was late turning back for the Boston Light, and so was survived only by a section of hull that washed up days later on Windmill Point.

There was a general agreement among those trapped in the shop with Judith that they couldn’t mill about there forever, though it wasn’t entirely clear to Judith why. A murmured debate as to whether the storm was subsiding was settled for the time being when a strapping young man was flattened by a gust in the street. Judith settled into a chair and the store manager brought out kerosene lamps to augment the gas light and said he would brew some tea in the back. She found herself calmer than she expected to be. She thought she would fret about Thomas but found herself instead concerned for her sisters, both of whom worked a good distance from their parents’ home. Frieda, the youngest, had recently requested they have their pictures taken together, and after the photographic plates had dried, Judith had decided that she looked like a simp and Frieda that she called to mind a bulldog, and when Judith, as she impulsively did from time to time, had again expressed her gratitude for her sisters’ sacrifice, Frieda had responded that individual wrongs probably happened for the good of the whole. She had flashed a sad smile over the ice cream they were sharing – she tended to take her pleasures sorrowfully, after the manner of their family – and had joked that many a good sister did all that was required of her and then could be heard weeping when she thought the rest of the family was asleep. And then she said that if she had to have one more talk about this, she would have a shrieking fit.

After the first hour the time passed slowly and the group grew restive, and a middle-aged man who looked as rugged as a pine fence announced that he would see what Mother Nature had to offer and ducked out into the blast and returned some minutes later to claim that there was a bit of bowling about but people were getting through. He had seen some rescued from other storefronts by relatives or friends on skis or toboggans. Two or three hardy souls went out into the storm following his report, and Judith stood and rebuttoned her coat and pulled together her bundles and followed, thinking she could make the streetcar stop three blocks down. But once outside, the wind and sleet bit into her face so painfully she stopped in her tracks. Great drifts already appeared along her path, in some areas the snow up to the windowsills. She flashed oddly on the way when wishing to speed her up Thomas did this odd motion with his hand, as if turning a crank. The image followed her through the maelstrom. She made some progress and passed the Oriental Tea Company with its teakettle sign before she developed the uncanny sense that every step was taking her farther from where she sought to go. She strayed this way and that in the wind and passed some kind of fence buried to its top rail. She hunkered down for some minutes, absorbing the punishment, before she tipped onto her back, her face burning, and stared up into the whirling sky.

 

Alonzo had never seen seas pyramid as high or break as severely, and securing or unsecuring anything needed was a torment since all rope and canvas was frozen hard. On deck the sleet was icy needles and the roar numbed the ears. Mr. Merrill ordered the wipers freed on the pilothouse windows and for that work Alonzo and Cornelius had to remove their gloves and while Alonzo clung there blinded, his hand in its grip was coated in ice. He flashed grimly on his usual response to Corine’s complaint that the company asked too much of him: They throw down the load, and we lift it up. His father had circumnavigated the globe in the China trade, so Corine was lucky. Lately he resented home for the way after absences he seemed unwanted or in the way, and held with a surprising vehemence to the belief that his wife needed to look their future in the face.

Thomas Merrill found that whatever he shouted flew off into the wind, and the ship’s pitching meant that before any attempted task, care had to be taken to brace the body. The sleet turned to hail the size of capers and when he joined one of the deckhands just in from clearing the window wipers the man looked like he’d been drawn through a knothole. Thomas had chanced upon the man’s home some months earlier and remembered the ash barrels and wary wife out front with one frowsy chicken. The alarm sounded that one of the boilers had quit and he spent a hellish hour with his firemen bouncing from one bulkhead to the other clearing the fuel flues and listening to the shrieks from the passenger decks above.

William Hays had been pleased to discover aboard the school commissioner Ora Leighton and his family, as well as Warren Scott Proctor from the mayor’s office, but they’d hardly had time to catch up before the storm had overtaken them. From the main salon they could glimpse the horizon only in those moments when they tipped from each wave’s crest, and each tumbling seemed a shock from which they wouldn’t recover. They pitched into troughs too deep to spy their bottoms, and when they hit, the spray flew up, deafening, like a multitude of white birds. At each blow the ship’s cat, wedged behind the built-in grandfather clock, seemed to levitate. A family clutching a corner rail cried out together with each jolt, and he remembered ruefully his attempts to reassure his daughter about the coming weather during her goodbye, and to calm himself surveyed other memories as well, from the snow house they’d dug together the previous Christmas to the clanking duel they’d fought with the fireplace poker and shovel until her mother had put an end to it.

Captain Blanchard had been upbraided more than once to remember that his passengers had the option of a perfectly acceptable and competitive route by rail, and wished that those who judged him overcautious had accompanied him to endure this. But of course those on top only ever prioritized their own prerogatives, and he supposed that the wonder was that they hadn’t all been corrupted. Business always excused its ruthlessness as necessity. His ship was now rolling so heavily that the weather racks at the mess tables had failed to contain the dishes, and with the ship’s doctor he’d already seen to two matrons who had been badly hurt, and after one wave nearly submerged the stern, he ordered the Portland brought about, but beam seas always rolled a ship even more sharply than following seas, so she pitched and squatted and pounded her way through each battering, and listed and dropped off the waves as off a bluff, so that every impact seemed a frightening premonition.

While they waited Alice’s mother made hot doughnuts and then mince pies. As a way of negotiating her dread, Alice persisted in her demand that she be allowed to visit Sadie, and her mother announced that they would carve onto her tombstone Died of Arguing With An Intractable Daughter. They all tried to nap, but in Alice’s room the air was chilly and her limbs were stiff. In her distress she had diarrhea, which again called her father to mind, since water pressure was one of his ongoing vexations with their house atop Dorchester’s highest hill. She remembered him catching her practicing ladylike behavior at table when she had thought the house empty and her swearing to him that if he said a word about it she would emigrate to Australia. She rose and turned the gaslight key to brighten the room and then, having gathered herself, sought the looking glass. She recalled the way the entire ship’s length seemed to throb with its moving machinery and the way those around her father at the rail waved hats and handkerchiefs. And the way it had occurred to her, standing there not waving, that her whole life had been a coming to terms with being a nuisance, and unseemly, and that her father’s acceptance had been her saving grace in that regard.

Judith stirred beneath the snow in a kind of twilight, registering while her mind roamed that she could not feel her legs. She considered as astonishing the ease with which many chose to get married. She had been nineteen when she’d married Thomas. She remembered Miss Stall, who taught her students kindness by being kind and optimism by showing cheer. She remembered the newspaper story of the boy the previous winter who had stopped on a stump to rest and had still been sitting there perished of the cold when searchers found him three days later. She remembered Frieda joking about a birthday party that she wondered just who those people were who were glad enough of their lot to celebrate the day they were born. And with that pang of a memory the wind seemed farther off, as well as the cold, and she wondered, with a final swell of curiosity, what caused people like her to act the way they did.

For nine hours the battering continued, with the waves looming up from all directions. All the passengers were gathered into the main salon as the highest point on the ship besides the pilothouse and bridge. Alonzo and the other deckhands and stewards had to physically carry those passengers who proved too numbed by fear to leave their staterooms. When the first mate directed Cornelius to see to the davits on the starboard side even with the ship rolling the way it was, Alonzo protested that those lifeboats were unusable in any event, but then said nothing more when ignored, and so lost his friend forever. Cornelius had gone without a backward look and Alonzo had checked and rechecked the starboard side davits once his friend failed to return until he was forced to retreat when the violence of the seas nearly threw him over the side as well. One impact rolled the ship so precipitately its port side paddlewheel left the water and the woman clutching her baby beside Thomas Merrill cracked her skull on the ceiling fixture. Ocean storms so spectacularly tightly wound can draw a moisture-free zone into the center of their circulation, a momentary calm like the eye of a hurricane, and around four that morning the Portland’s passengers and crew experienced that lull, the injured and uninjured alike gathering their wits like someone tumbled from a barrel amidst the wrack of furniture, dishware, rescue equipment, trunks, and the sounding board of a piano. Parents whimpered and called for missing family members. And at just about the moment the ship passed back into the storm’s fury, it was sighted by the schooner Grayling, which, dismasted, reported after it survived the night that the great steamship had immediately resumed rolling and pitching violently and that much of its superstructure looked stove in on one side. Aboard the Portland debris from the galley and pantry washed through the dining room and into the salon, cascading all before it, and those who managed to hang on watched Ora Leighton’s family swept through the starboard windows. William Hays was one of those blown into the sea by a following convulsion, where he survived for some minutes among bodies and cargo crates and framing timbers, on one of which clung, of all things, a cat, and he watched his stricken ship leave him behind until a great wall of debris swept over him and drove his body downward. And Alonzo in his despair found his way to Captain Blanchard, still at the wheel, and seized a part of it as well, as if determined not to die a deckhand, and together they steered down a wave as though using the surf to run themselves ashore until in the next awful moment the bow dipped further and they looked aft to see a mountain rising behind them, and the entire ship fell off to starboard and icy water submerged them, and when the Portland came level again, Alonzo registered he was still aboard but had been pitched through the pilothouse windows and that the starboard railing had saved him. And then another wave lifted the stern even higher so that he hung from the railing like clothes from a line, and in the rush down that wave’s face, he understood that even despite the ship’s great size it would be pitchpoling, and its agonies finally at an end.

*

For most of eastern New England, sunrise that Sunday morning of the 27^th was a gray calamity. Rescuers from the Peaked Hill Life-saving Station watched the fishing schooner Mertis Perry, already run aground, swung about by the waves and rolled, so that the hull was driven over those survivors who had jumped into the surf, with one stoker steamrolled so deep into the sand he was only discovered the following spring. Everything along the water took on a wild and woebegone appearance, and every vista was a line of wreck and ruin. In New London, barges and tenders clogged the streets. On Martha’s Vineyard, forty-six of the fifty vessels that had sought shelter at Vineyard Haven had been sunk or driven aground. In Provincetown the bow of a fishing boat was found two hundred feet above the high-water mark, and near Portsmouth, thousand-pound granite boulders had been left high on the hillsides of Appledore Island.

Most lines of communication had been destroyed so it was two days before any real news emerged and the steamship line issued a statement Monday morning that there was not yet cause for alarm, since it was possible the Portland had sheltered somewhere still out of touch. But by that evening searches were being conducted by sea, and surfman John Johnson of the Race Point Lifesaving Station north of Provincetown spied something white in the surf and retrieved a lifebelt emblazoned STMR PORTLAND, and encountered as well doors and pieces of tables and chairs. And by high tide, wreckage was coming ashore over a mile-long stretch, within which, a few hours later, was discovered the first body. And all that next day that stretch of beach offered a terrible harvest from the breakers, though less than a third of the Portland’s 192 bodies aboard were recovered, and those were so savaged by having been rolled along the bottom over rocks and shells that relatives had to identify them by their wedding rings or tattoos. And the pocket watches on those washed ashore were found to have been stopped a little after five, including one in which the remaining inscription read only eer of Safe Havens.

 

No one from the steamship company contacted Corine, and she learned of her husband’s fate from the Boston Herald’s Wednesday headline over a photograph of his ship: HER DEATH ROLL FOREVER A SECRET. She spent the next three nights on her knees in the dark praying for help, and all of that pleading came to nothing. She spent the days doing chores. And for a full week she slept on the living room floor, with Major beside her, because she found unendurable the dish of seashells her husband had collected for his bed-side table.

Alice’s family did receive a call from the steamship company, and when she heard her mother’s cries she was lying on the sofa in their sitting room, alone. And well into her middle age, those cries resounded for her, and she was periodically undone by any sizable wind, the way a scalded child afterwards fears even cold water.

Judith was discovered that Wednesday under the blade of a horse-drawn plow. She was still clutching two of her three bundles of piecework, and the bundles were what caught on the plow. Two days before that, once the storm had finally blown itself out, her sister Frieda had headed home, the factory girls combining their strength to shove open their half-buried door. After taking leave of her friends, with relief all around at all being safe, she made slow progress in the quiet and the deep snow, the drifts in places up to the horses’ bellies. The clock’s hands on the church she passed pointed to twelve, and at its tolling, other belfries rang out, and soon all of Boston seemed to be responding. The various spires ascended to the State House in the distance, and as she continued to slog, very little seemed to be stirring.

She wondered if Judith’s husband’s ship had encountered difficulties. The year Frieda had had to leave school, the girls had swept the scholastic honors so thoroughly that separate awards for the boys had been instituted to save them from embarrassment. She had imagined enrolling in Simmons Female College to teach something manageable like history, but her father had informed her that only her sister Judith would be continuing, and that the family couldn’t spare the others when each could earn twenty cents a day. Frieda hoped that she turned a frank and fearless countenance to the world in such moments but knew it more likely that she gave herself away. Not that it had been a revelation. Some were granted their wishes and some were not. And the fortunate only every so often glanced back to consider those left behind. But she also remembered the way, however late she returned from work, her sister Judith would be waiting on their stoop, to inquire about her day and to accompany her inside. And as her house hove into sight, she chose to believe that for those who loved, all sacrifices made were eventually repaid a hundredfold.