Against the Day (98 page)

were traveling in fourth class, gathering regularly in the
saloon to smoke cigarettes and insult each other, and Kit found himself
preferring the environment here over his palatial accommodations a couplethree
decks up and forward of the stacks.

About the only other mathematician
was Root Tubsmith, who was headed for the University of Berlin to study with
Fuchs, Schwarz, and the legendary Frobenius, inventor of the formula for
symmetric group characters which bore his name, and known for delivering the
most perfect lectures in Germany. Root had decided to specialize in
FourDimensional Geometry, having studied under Professor Manning at Brown.
Unlike the Yale math department, the one at Brown taught Quaternions, but
despite the language difference, Kit found Root a cheerful fellow, if a little
too fond of the bottle, and planning, like Kit, to debark at Marseilles.

Root was his
guest
tonight in first
class, and the minute they were seated and Root was engaged with the wine list,
Kit found himself once again gazing across the saloon at a young woman with a
striking head of red hair, who had just come in with a large party of
performing Italians, the kids already beginning to juggle the silverware,
somehow avoiding injury from the glittering edges and tines, others to spin
plates on the ends of limber wands, East Indian fashion. Waiters, sommeliers
and other mealtime functionaries, far from disapproving, were actually
encouraging and presently applauding the various feats of skill, which it was
soon clear were being executed to a high professional standard. Nothing
spilled, dropped, or broken, flowers, birds, and silk scarves emerging from
empty air. The Captain got up from his own table to go and sit with the family,
whose patriarch genially reached behind his ear to produce a glass full of
Champagne with the foam still on it, while the dinner orchestra struck up a
species of tarantella. The young woman was at once there and somewhere else.
Kit knew he’d seen her someplace. It itched at the corners of his memory. No,
it was a little more supernatural than that. They knew each other, it’s almost
as if he had dreamed it once
. . . .

After dinner, as the gentlemen were
retiring to the Cigar Deck, Kit came sidling over through a screen of
varioussize Zombinis, and Erlys introduced him in a general way, which saved
Dally from some chitchat. She was just as happy not to have to start in
jabbering right away.

Unlike the usual Gibson Girl, who
liked to avert her eyes, not to mention her nose, as if it were not a fellow’s
appearance so much as his odor she

wished to appear indifferent to,
Dally never knew how to stop looking, even at somebody she had zero interest
in, though heaven knew that was not the case right now.

   
He
was watching her with his eyes narrowed appealingly.

“Seen you before,” she said, “at the
R. Wilshire Vibe residence down in Greenwich Village if I’m not mistaken, one
of those peculiar twilight socials of his?”

   
“I
knew it was someplace like that. You were there with a girl in a red dress.”

“Always nice to hear when you’ve made
an impression. My friend’s name was Katie, little late to be tellin you, though
I suppose you
could
jump
off
the fan tail, swim on back to New York, go look her up
. . . .
”

   
Kit
stood swaying a little to the dance music and blinking politely.

“Yes and now as for that Yale
University, if you don’t mind me asking—any other Traverses in your
class?”

   
“Think
I was the only one.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a
brother back in southwest Colorado, I suppose. Frank?”

The look she got was not so much
surprised as immediately on guard. “You’re
.
. .
from out there someplace?”

“Passin through, there a couple
months, seemed like a couple years, don’t miss it much, how about yourself?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t miss me.”
Neither was fooling the other. “How’s that old Frank?”

“Last I saw of him, he ’s headed out
of Telluride, not sure if it was all his own idea.”

   
An
amiable snort. “Sounds about right.”

   
“He
said I should look you up.”

Tipping an invisible hat, “Guess you
did.” Then fell into a silence which went on way too long.

Personable enough, when he wasn’t so
far inside his own head. “Um, Mr. Traverse? Sir? I could throw a fit or
somethin, would that help any?”

Which belatedly drew the cowboy
onceover she was at least used to, long enough for Dally to notice, along with
everything else, what an agreeable shade of blue his eyes were. Damn old
lobelias there.

He looked around. The Zombini family
had long finished supper and left the table. The orchestra was back to Victor
Herbert and WolfFerrari, and dancers began to occupy the space. “Come on.”

He led her out onto the promenade
deck of the starlit
Stupendica,
enough moon to pick out the towering
contours of clouds, couples all up and down the rail with nothing on their
minds but spooning, the electric spill through

the portholes dimming his face to a cryptic smudge of itself.
Another young man, somewhere else and with different sorrows in his luggage,
might’ve been working up to a declaration or at least a kiss. Dally felt like a
seltzer bottle about to be deployed in some vaudeville interlude. Sure as hell
couldn’t be what they meant by Love at First Sight. Second.

   
“Listen.
Did Frank tell you much of the family situation?”

“Some boys he was lookin for, him and
your brother, the other one, the faro dealer, he’d already been in Telluride
and gone, but nobody knew where, and Frank was worryin a lot ’cause somebody
was looking for him.”

“Well. Pretty talkative for Frank, guess he trusted you all
right.”

She ~smlled falsely. People in
trouble were not usually her first choice of afterdinner companion, though come
to think of it, what other kind of people did she know?

“I love those two knuckleheads,” his
whisper growing passionate, “they’re my brothers, they think they’re trying to
protect me, but they don’t know I’m deep in it, up to my ears, all this—”
his gesture taking in the boat, the orchestra, the night, “the suit on my back,
bought and paid for out of the same bank account that—”

“Should you be telling me this?” With
the allpurpose wideeyed gaze she had learned to use in New York, when trying to
think of something to say.

“You’re right. Maybe a touch too
serious here for a youngster—”

“ ‘
Youngster’?” feigning polite
interest. “How old are
you,
Reuben, to be calling anybody that? I’m
surprised they even let you out of the yard.”

   
“Oh,
don’t let the face fool you, I’m wise beyond my years.”

   
“Wet
behind ’em anyhow.”

“Up till twenty minutes ago I guess I
was just sailing along on Moonlight Bay here, on vacation from the whole thing.
Then you show up, Frank and so forth, and if there’s some danger, maybe I don’t
want to see you in it.”

“You’d rather be all alone with it,
sure. Allbusiness hombre.”

“You don’t know, miss. One wrong
step’s all it would take.” He touched an imaginary hatbrim and was gone quick
as that.

“Might as well’ve been Luca waving
his wand,” she told Erlys. “Not exactly beau material, Mamma.”

   
“Inclined
to moodiness, you might say.”

“I don’t know what in blazes is going
on with these people any more than I did in Colorado. Except that it’s trouble,
and fairly deep.”

   
“Well.
You sure can pick them.”

   
“Me!
you
threw
me at him—”

But Erlys was laughing and taking the
girl’s long hair and pushing it back from her face, a little at a time, over
and over, a task to which there seemed

no end, as if she loved the simple act, the feeling of
Dally’s hair beneath her fingers, the repetition, like knitting
. . . .
Dally sat in a kind of daze,
listening, not listening, wanting it to go on forever, wanting to be someplace
else
. . . .

“You’re always a revelation, Dally,”
she said after a while. “Guess I have to thank Merle for something anyway.”

   
“How’s
that?”

“Seeing you this far.” Slowly,
reflectively, she surrounded the girl in an embrace.

   
“Reachin
for the spigot again, are we?”

   
“Guess
I could wait till later.”

   
“Sacrifices
o’ motherhood. Heard about ’em someplace.”

“
Well
you sure
went
gaga,” Bria remarked.

   
“Thought
I was covering it pretty well.”

   
“Little
young for college boys, don’t you think?”

Dally looked at her knees, out the
porthole, very quickly over at Bria’s amused small face. “I don’t know what’s
going on, Bri, I saw him just once at that party back in New York, you were
there too’s a matter of fact, throwin em knives around, and I couldn’t get him
out of my head then, and now here he is again. That has to mean something,
doesn’t it?”

   
“Sure.
Means you’ve seen him twice now.”

   
“Oh,
Bri, it’s hopeless.”

“Listen to me. Find out about his
friend, the sort of short blond guy who always drinks straight through
dinnertime but never passes out?”

   
“Root
Tubsmith, just got out of Brown.”

   
“What
was he in for?”

   
“Not
the pen, it’s a college, and he’s another math whiz.”

“Head for figures, good to have along
on a shopping trip, see—just my kind of fella.”

   
“Bria
Zombini. Shame.”

   
“Not
lately. You gonna fix me up?”

   
“Ha.
I get it. You’re supposed to be chaperoning me.”

   
“More
like the other way around, I’d say.”

It had begun
to seem as if she and Kit were on
separate vessels, distinct versions of the
Stupendica,
pulling away
slowly on separate courses, each bound to a different destiny.

   
“You’re
highhatting me again,” Dally greeted him. Not “us Zombinis”—by now it was
singular.

Kit regarded her a long while.
“Daydreaming.” There are many, perhaps most of us, for whom an ocean voyage,
particularly on a firstclass ticket, figures high on the list of human
delights. Kit, however, landlocked all his life till arriving at New Haven and
beholding the marvels of Long Island Sound, did not happen to share that regard
for the aquatic. The enclosure, the repetition of daily faces, small annoyances
anywhere else, here, intensified by the unavailability of dry land, achieved
with little effort the feeling of malevolence, conspiracy, pursuit
. . . .
The farther out into the ocean they
steamed, the more the horizon asserted itself, the less able or, come to that,
willing was Kit to resist accepting the irreversible theft from his life, the
great simple fact of Webb’s absence.

He lapsed into silence, torpor, for
scaleless moments seized by memories of desert plateau, mountain peaks, meadows
full of Indian paintbrush and wild primrose, some unexpected river two steps
off the trail—then released back into this twentyknot push into the
uncreated. He was not sure what it was he felt. If anyone had said desperation,
he’d’ve shrugged and rolled a cigarette, shaking his head. Not it. Not it
exactly.

Nor as it turned out was S.S.
Stupendica
all she seemed. She had another name, a secret name, which would be made
known to the world at the proper hour, a secret identity, latent in her present
conformation, though invisible to the average passenger. What she would turn
out to be, in fact, was a participant in the future European war at sea which
everyone was confident would come. Some liners, after 1914, would be converted
to troop carriers, others to hospital ships. The
Stupendica
’s
destiny was to reassume her
latent identity as the battleship S.M.S.
Emperor Maximilian
—one of
several 25,000ton dreadnoughts contemplated by Austrian naval planning but, so
far as official history goes, never built. The Slavonian steamship line that
currently owned and operated her seemed mysteriously to have sprung, overnight,
from nowhere. Even identifying its board of directors offered occasion for
lively dispute in ministries ~thoughout Europe. In shipping circles, nobody had
heard of any of them. British naval intelligence was flummoxed. Though her
boilers appeared to be of the SchultzThorneycroft design favored by
AustriaHungary, the engines were modified cousins of the same Parsons turbines
to be found these days among the more sizable British meno’war, capable of
twentyfive knots and more, should the occasion demand, for as long as the coal
supply lasted.