So I said, “My mother was an actress.”
“And Kit Marlowe was her favorite playwright.”
“Close to. She was kind enough not to name me William Shakespeare Cobb.”
Selene nodded at this, but distractedly, since her brow had furrowed ever so slightly a moment earlier as she began to put my surname with the possibilities; not that my name would necessarily be part of my mother’s stage name, though it happened to be. Selene’s brow unfurrowed and she narrowed her eyes at me and I knew what she was about to ask.
“Yes,” I said. “Her.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Isabel Cobb?”
“I am her son.”
It was the right thing to tell her, as it turned out.
Selene thumped the back of her right wrist against her forehead and swayed to the side. She provided her own title card: “She swoons,” she said.
But instantly she straightened and reached out and touched my forearm. “How foolish of me,” she said. “To do a cheap, film-actress emotion at that news. I loved your mother. I wanted to be your mother when I was a girl.”
That came out wrong and instantly she heard it. She straightened abruptly as if she’d been startled by an unknown sound.
“Those aren’t the feelings I hoped to inspire,” I said.
I expected another film-actress gesture. Wide-eyed abashed, perhaps, or flutteringly flirtatious. But a dark something passed over her, leaving her face as I’d seen it across the table: subtle outwardly; unreadable without knowing the full context of her present life; perhaps numbingly bored, perhaps inexpressibly sad.
Her hand was still on my forearm. She removed it.
She seemed as if she wanted to say something from that darkness. I felt I’d done the wrong thing to try to sneak in a reference to possible feelings between us. It had only made her take her hand from me, after all.
But instead, she managed a smile. I felt her exertion. She said, “Your mother is a very great actress. I wish I’d been able to do what she has done.”
“Your films. .”
She cut me off, which was just as well, as I’d plunged into a comment I did not know how to complete; I had no idea how to intelligently compliment her on her films.
She said, “My films are melodrama at best. And there’s always the terrible silence. Not that I ever came close to doing what she did, in the time I spent striving for the stage, even with Shakespeare’s words in my mouth.”
“Many people love you,” I said.
She ignored the comment. “All I have is my life,” she said.
By which she seemed to suggest that making films was not part of her life. I thought to ask her if that’s what she meant, but I did not. It would sound as if I disagreed. I didn’t want to disagree with her about anything at the moment.
“The lamb,” she said.
I didn’t understand at first. Things had suddenly gotten serious enough that my first thought was that she was segueing into speaking of religion.
But it was simply dinner.
“They’re surely serving it by now,” she said.
“Ah, the lamb,” I said. “Yes.”
“Can you give me a moment?” she said.
I didn’t understand.
“I am always subject to instant and widespread gossip,” she said.
This seemed at first like a non sequitur. My puzzlement must have shown on my face.
“If we walk back into the dining room together,” she said. And she waited to see if she needed to explain further.
She did not.
“I understand,” I said.
She nodded faintly.
I finished her sentence: “They might think you’re my mother.”
She laughed at this. A low, sharp bark of a laugh, a laugh I was sure she never unleashed in public. It felt like a sudden kiss.
And she reached out and touched my forearm once more, and then she was gone.
5
The next day was cloudless and windless, and but for the sharp chill in the air, the North Atlantic could have been the Mediterranean in its azure brightness. I roamed the saloon promenades on decks A and B, trying to look casual, watching for Brauer and Cable, and watching for Selene as well. They weren’t showing themselves, any of them. I had time to eavesdrop among the other first-class passengers, and I was struck by how many of them were talking about U-boats, worrying about Thursday, when we would enter the War Zone. Midmorning, as I strolled past Lifeboat 11, amidships, on the upper, open A Deck, I turned my ear to a walrus-mustached Brit leaning to his wife — both of them swaddled in blankets on deck chairs — and he was saying, “My dear, we will simply outrun the blighters.”
Since this very notion was my own primary source of confidence in our safe passage, the Brit’s speaking it led me to reflect on my body’s sense of our speed, in my knees and inside my chest and in the press of the air on my face. He led me to remember from B Deck an hour ago, with a clear and open view of the ocean around us, the pace of our passing a great floating tangle of seaweed. And it struck me at last: we were not moving at full speed. No more than twenty knots, I would have guessed, when we should have been doing twenty-five.
I looked up to the smokestacks, which rose seven stories above me. I stepped toward the railing so I could scan them all at once. The funnels were painted their usual black in the upper quarter, but the orange-mellowed red that normally covered the rest of the stacks down to their base, emblematic of the Cunard Line, was now entirely replaced with dark gray — as if this would make a 787-foot steamship less conspicuous on the face of the sea — and my suspicion about our reduced speed found clear, confirming evidence: the first three funnels were pumping out heavy black billows of smoke, but funnel number four was empty, was coldly silent.
I had a twist in the chest at this. But it loosened instantly. The top speed of a U-boat was fifteen knots — and that was on the surface of the ocean, exposed for all to see. Submerged, our hunter could do about half that. Even if the Lusitania were running at twenty knots, we would be an utterly impossible target for a U-boat consciously to hunt down and a nearly impossible target to hit even if we got freakishly unlucky and happened into one’s sights, especially if we were executing a standard-procedure zigzag course through the War Zone. When I did my “Running the U-Boat Gauntlet” feature story, I could confirm my instant intuition about what was behind our silent funnel, but on the promenade deck I was certain I already knew. Bucks. Business. Passenger bookings were dwindling because of the war; coal was expensive; one of the four boiler rooms was shut down to save money.
I strolled on. But my three people of interest never appeared, not through the morning, not through the afternoon. At dinner that night, Brauer and Cable were at their corner table, sitting beside each other again, and my hope was that they’d go to the Smoking Room after the last course. But Selene was nowhere to be found in the grand dining room, and when that was finally clear to me, I had a twist in my chest that squeezed harder than the thought of our idle boiler room. I considered leaving the table before the imminent salambos à la crème—what the hell was I doing eating something called salambos à la crème anyway? — and going to her room and knocking and asking after her well-being, even if only through the closed door. But I didn’t. For now I didn’t. She wasn’t why I was on this ship.