The food came out, served on elegant china plates. After a few drinks the doctor began to slur. A jazz note kicked out from the stage. A trumpet swayed. The piano wavered. Wolverine Blues. Muskrat Ramble. Stack O’ Lee Blues.
Emily scribbled a quick word in her notebook while Lottie returned to her room, searched for her new camera, a silver Leica. Emily hoped that her daughter would take pictures of the small galaxies of smoke through which the whole ship seemed to shimmer.
IT WAS THEIR first journey abroad. A six-month trip at least. Emily would send stories back for a magazine in Toronto, Lottie would take photographs. Europe was ablaze with ideas. Paintings in Barcelona. Bauhaus in Dessau. Freud in Vienna. The tenth anniversary of Alcock and Brown. Big Bill Tilden in the men’s tennis at Wimbledon.
They had packed as little as possible in their wooden trunk in the hope that they would be able to move easily from place to place. A few changes of clothes, some weather gear, two copies of the same Virginia Woolf novel, notebooks, photographic film, some medicine for Emily’s arthritis.
THE DAYS WERE lengthy. The hours drifted. The sea stretched a round majestic gray. In the distance the horizon curved. Mother and daughter sat on the deck and looked backwards as the evening sun flared red.
They read the Woolf novel in tandem, matched each other almost page for page. The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks — so it sounded. What Emily liked most of all was the appearance of ease that Woolf brought. The words slid so easily into one another. There was a sense of a full life being translated. It was, in Woolf’s hands, a display of humility.
Emily sometimes wondered if she, herself, lacked a true conviction. She had been writing articles for the best part of three decades. Two books of poems had appeared and faded, from a publisher in Nova Scotia. Her articles had created a good deal of interest, but she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface. That she swam on an elaborate piece of glass. She may have upset the petty canons of expectation — an unwed mother, a newspaper journalist — but it hardly seemed enough. She had spent many years trying to carve out a place for herself, but she was so much older now, tired enough to wonder why it mattered. A heaviness on her.
There was something she wanted, just out of reach, but she was never quite sure what it could possibly be. She had a sense of something more, the turn of a page, the end of a line, the push of a word, a break in the structure of her habits. She envied the young Woolf. The command and promise the Englishwoman showed. Her profusion of voices. The ability to live in several different bodies.
Perhaps the reason for her trip was to unhem herself from routine. To throw an added pulse into her days. She and Lottie had been side by side in the Cochrane Hotel for so many years. The room was tiny but they would have been perfectly able to move around each other blindfolded.
ON DECK, THE badminton matches unfolded. Emily noticed the arc of the shuttlecock from a distance, the way it caught in midnight and hovered as if arrested by some magnetism that lay inside the ship and then, when hit in the other direction, lazed for a moment, woke to the possibility of wind, shot forward once more.
Lottie came up from the cabin, wearing a long skirt, whisking a borrowed racquet through the air. A live wire. Always had been. No airs, no graces, but shot through with an electricity, a free-floating awe. She was not pretty, but it hardly mattered. She was the sort of young woman whose laughter could be heard around distant corners. She was quickly partnered up for mixed doubles.
A waiter patrolled the deck with a tray of drinks held high over his head. An old Serbian couple walked hand in hand: they were returning, they said, from their experiment of America. Two beautifully dressed Mexican men walked beneath the gloss of their hair. A marching band practiced at the bow. Emily watched the progress of the funnel shadow as it moved across the deck, slowly traveling from one side of the ship to the next.
It astounded her to think that her own mother had been on a coffin ship some eighty years before, a floating boat of fever and loss, and here she was, now, with her own daughter, traveling to Europe, first class, on a vessel where the ice was made by an electrical generator.
SHE LEFT THE dining room, her cane striking off the boards. Gradations of darkness over the water. No moon. Starlight skittered on the high waves. The lights seemed to rise from the ocean. In the distance the sea seemed so much blacker than the sky. The deck was wet with spray. Every now and then the engines calmed and the ship took on a running pace and the silence was immense.
She slowly negotiated the staircase towards the cabin. A steward accompanied her. She bid him good-bye, ached her way into bed. Later in the night she heard voices in the corridor. They drifted and merged, faded and reappeared. She could hear a smatter of laughter and then there was silence for a moment, the sound of closing doors, a distant thump that seemed to come from up on deck, like dancing, a smash of a glass, and voices drifting on the air. She turned the pillow, tried to find the cool side.
The lock on the door finally turned. The breathing slowed. Lottie had been drinking. Emily heard her dress fall exhausted to the floor. The opening of the trunk. A bare foot righting itself on the floor. A slight giggle.
Emily watched her daughter slip into bed.
SHE HAD NEVER been party to love herself. Not even a husband. Just a man who had come along and eventually disappeared. Vincent Driscoll. A newspaper editor in St. Louis. A sheen to his high forehead. Ink on his fingers. He was forty-two years old. He kept a picture of his wife in his wallet. Emily was a secretary in the advertising division. High-buttoned blouses and an amethyst brooch. Twenty-five. She harbored ambitions. She submitted an article about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She knocked on the editor’s door. Driscoll said she had a feminine style. Florid and overwrought. He himself spoke in hard, clean, clipped sentences. He put his hand on the low of her back. He seemed to take some cynical pride in the way she allowed the hand to remain.
He took her to the Planters House Hotel. He ordered fried oysters, saddle of antelope, a Gruaud Larose. Upstairs, straps fell lightly from her shoulder. The damp white loaf of his body shuddered.
She wrote another article and then another. He took a pencil to them. He said he was grooming her. The spring floods of the Mississippi. A boiler explosion on Franklin Avenue. The shooting of a bear in Forest Park Zoo. Tom Turpin and his Harlem Rag, the Negro music down on Targee Street. He edited the stories closely. She opened the paper one day in 1898 to see her first-ever article there: a meditation on the legacy of Frederick Douglass, dead three years. She had written every word herself. The byline read: V. Driscoll. She felt hollowed out. She swayed. In the hotel, Driscoll pushed against his expansive white suit. His jacket never buttoned without obvious strain. His bottom lip twitched. The appearance of the article in the paper should have thrilled her. How dare she. She should thank him. He was allowing her his name. Their collaboration alone should have been enough. She wandered along the riverfront under a red sky. She heard the newsboys shouting out the name of the paper. Her own words within. She walked to her rooming house on Locust Street. A tiny room with an enamel washbowl and a wooden towel railing. Her few clothes hung lifeless in a carved wardrobe. A small desk folded down from the wall. She made a table entirely from books. She struck the nib against the paper. She would bide her time.