CHAPTER 5
IT HAD BEEN only a casual comment at an everyday meal, a small thing, that had caused my life to change course. But any sailor knows that an alteration of a few degrees, uncorrected, is enough to put a ship on a wildly different trajectory.
The meal that night had also been fish, carp boiled in wine, a dish recently popular with the members of the Milwaukee Women’s Club. It had been prepared with more care than the ling cod.
“You see, girls,” my mother said, measuring herbs she’d dried the previous summer and dropping them into the pot of simmering, sweet-smelling liquid, “you must pay as much attention to the poaching broth as you do to the sauce.”
Gustina, our hired girl, nodded, but my attention had wandered to the window where the sky was alive with snow. It was two weeks before Christmas, 1897.
“All right, Trudy,” my mother said, misinterpreting my distraction. “I know you have your essay to finish. And I’ve got letters to answer. Gustina can watch over this. Don’t forget the potatoes,” she called over her shoulder as she accompanied me to the parlor.
From my little writing table some portion of an hour later, I watched the lamplighter mount his ladder beside the post outside. There! Thick snow appeared in the sudden circle of light when his pole touched the wick. With the tip of my pen, I pulled spider legs of ink from the rich black blot that had dripped onto my copybook page just after Napoleon had set off for Moscow. I sighed. So far to go. Two more rays, and the spider became a sun. I tapped the pen with my index finger, and a miniature storm of dark droplets splattered the little general.
“Trudy,” my mother said reproachfullly. She was seated at her own desk, covering pages with an irritating ease. “Don’t make it so hard, liebchen. It’s only a composition.” She rose with a rustle of apricot silk. “I need to check on Gustina.” On her way out of the room, she laid her hand on my shoulder. “You will finish before supper, yes?”
I sat up, sighed again, and pushed my fingers deep into my hair. Pins sprang from my coif, and I enjoyed the bit of drama and the little mess they made on her Turkish carpet. “Yes, yes, I’ll try.” I was too uncertain of myself and the source of my malaise to make any sort of stand; the best I could do was bend over the page in an exaggerated attitude of application. She deftly collected the pins without comment, gathered my hair, and twisted it neatly, resettling it like a sweet roll on top of my head.
When I could no longer hear the whisper of silk, I rose and went to her desk and slipped the unfinished letter from under the blotter. It was to her sister in Hamburg.
Trudy has lost her passion for her studies. It’s not that she doesn’t know her history and philosophy. The way she argues Kant with Felix! Papa would be pleased. They go until the candles gutter and the cloth is covered in nutshells. It’s like living among chattering squirrels. But when she must compose her thoughts on paper, the rattle of the coals in the stove, the pattern of the snowflakes dropping from the ashen sky, even such little nothings distract her. There, she frowns at me, offended by my own prodigious pen scratchings.
She practices her music but without conviction. To be sure, her talent is not so great as your Johann’s—I don’t expect ever to hear her études at the Pabst—but she used to play with profound expression. I would wish music to be a greater pleasure to her. What makes my heart weep most, however, is her poor, neglected drawing. Remember those droll cartoons? Pages of them! But she doesn’t prize her skill and hurries through the exercises her master sets for her. All slapdash, as they say here. Such a waste!
Latin and Greek she claims are useless. Her translations come back covered in red. She proceeds tolerably with mathematics and biology but complains that they, too, can have no place in her life. She taunts me. How have I put to use my knowledge of chemistry, my studies with Professor Von Rhein? “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “You have instructed the laundress not to put too much bleach in the bedsheets and told Gustina to add more vinegar to the kartoffelsalat. That is what you’ve done with your fine education.”
Be thankful you have only sons, Lilian. You cannot expect them to be like you. But a daughter, naturally so similar to her mother, can be a reproach in every way she is different. Of course, my liebchen is sorry when she is cruel. She throws her arms around my neck and cries. I know her hardness is only a fleeting expression of her own frustration; to absorb it is part of a mother’s role.
The poor thing is infected with the notion that all of her education is “bourgeois trappings,” as she puts it. “I must create my own destiny!” she insists. How foolish children are to believe themselves wise!
And now here she is, lying along her arm on the desk like a little girl. To have them little again, just for an hour or two now and then, what wouldn’t we give for it? I must wind her up to finish this composition or she will be wretched.
In so many ways, this assessment stung, though I couldn’t deny the truth of it. I had been hateful to her. Still, I couldn’t agree that my frustration was a childish emotion I’d outgrow. For three years, I’d been exhilarated by the classes Milwaukee College had offered me. The history, the science, the philosophy, all went far past what I’d learned in high school. Here, I’d believed, were complex but satisfying ways of making sense of events and nature and ideas. I’d felt I was being given a glimpse of the world beyond me and the tools I’d need to explore it further. But now that commencement approached, I’d begun to perceive graduation more as a finish than as a beginning. I’d ingested all the material I’d been fed, but I was a goose plumped for others’ consumption. My parents, Ernst, President McAdams, Miss Dodson, and even Lucy seemed to have a definite vision of how my life should proceed.
“But the goose will not have it!” I said aloud. And sighed. The trouble was that the goose, being a goose, had no idea what she would have.
Still, failing history would hardly help me. In any case, I’d been brought up to finish what I’d started. I sat myself straight in my chair again, resolved to push Napoleon smartly on.
I was fully engrossed in my essay at last when the bell rang. Absently, I capped my pen, wiped my inky fingers, and thinking of the troops pursuing the elusive Russian army and drawn inexorably toward Moscow, I wandered into the hallway and opened the door.
“Ernst!”
He had a cheerful, open face, neat white teeth, apple cheeks above his pale brown mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles that fogged the moment he stepped into the warm house.
“You’re surprised?” he asked, pulling off his gloves and pushing them into his pocket. He removed his glasses and handed them to me, and I polished them in a wifely manner while he slipped off his coat.
“Yes . . . I mean, no, of course not. Come in, Ernst. Here, let me take your coat and hat.” I had forgotten that my father had invited Ernst to supper, but no matter.
My mother hurried from the kitchen, shedding her apron onto a hall chair as she came. She glanced critically at me. “I’ll entertain Ernst while you run upstairs and make yourself presentable.”
“Oh, Mother, Ernst doesn’t mind a little ink.”
“No, I like to see the evidence of Trudy’s work. Especially here.” He touched the tip of my nose with a blunt index finger. “It’s very becoming. Like the nose of a little woodland animal.”
“All right, all right. I’ll wash my face.”
I ran up the stairs on my toes, eschewing the banister, conscious that I was making my mother sigh by not planting my whole foot on each step as she’d taught me.
As always in the winter, my room was icy, the porcelain doorknob a cold stone in my palm. Unless someone was ill, there was no cause to light the stoves upstairs. Once inside that private space, I was snagged almost immediately by a sort of inarticulated dream and drifted to the window. The light of the newly risen moon reflected faintly off the whitened yard below. A wooden bench and a patch of red currant bushes in the summertime were amorphous mounds now; the former might be a man reclining under a blanket, the latter a flock of quiet sheep. Even the iron supports for the clothesline were softened by a thick sheath of clinging snow. I clouded the pane with my breath and traced a meandering path with my fingertip.
Ernst’s laughter boomed up the stairs, recalling me to my purpose. “Say,” he announced when I came back into the parlor, “I noticed that Winn and Hewitt is selling some Sociables. I’d consider buying one if I could be sure of a partner. It’s not good for your health, you know, to read so long and neglect physical exercise.”
“Sociables?”
“You know, Mama,” I explained, “those bicycles that let you ride side by side, two people on the same machine. We saw one at Green Lake last summer.”
“Bicycles in the middle of winter?” my mother said. Distracted, she pulled back the edge of a drapery to look out the window. “What I can’t understand,” she said, “is why anyone should work only eight hours a day when your father works far more than that. Always he is late. If the fish is dry tonight, you will know whom to blame, Ernst.”
Just then the heavy outer door closed with a thump.
“Ah!” My mother nearly sprang for the door. “There he is.”
Ernst and I followed her into the hall, where she was tutting and brushing snow from my father’s collar. “You are a snowman,” she fussed affectionately.
“And you”—he kissed her lightly on the forehead—“are a hot cross bun.”
My father was a large man, tall and broad, with cheeks leathered from Lake Michigan’s winds. He’d worked his way up from mechanic in a shipyard to captain of a tug barge to owner of his own barge, which he continued most days to captain himself. He pulled off his fur-lined gloves and flexed his fingers.
“Your fingers are hurting you again, Papa?”
“It’s nothing. Only the cold.”
“You must allow Gerhart to do more of the work, Felix,” my mother scolded. “For what are you paying him?”
“Ach! You girls! Always fussing!” He winked at Ernst. “You see what you are in for, Ernst, don’t you? And double the trouble if you have a daughter. Did you say the supper was ready, my dear?” He put an arm around the waist of each of his “girls” and led the way down the hall to the dining room.
? ? ?
“So, I hear you have a new carpenter,” my father said, bending over his plate but raising his eyes to Ernst.
“Yes, my cousin Oskar.”
“Little O!”
Oskar had stayed with the Dettweilers years before. I’d gathered at the time, eavesdropping from behind the blue velvet drapes, that because a red flower had died, his mother found herself unable to look at him without weeping. Afraid of being banished myself, I vowed to be more careful around my own mother’s tulip beds. Oskar was a year or two older than Ernst, but a shorter and slighter boy with long girlish curls. He boasted a great deal about his father, who, he said, knew all there was to know about trains and kept beside his desk a big knife from Mexico for stabbing “like that!”—he’d thrust his arm suddenly forward like a fencer scoring a touch—“anyone who bothered him.” He also bragged about his older brother, who had skipped several grades in school. He refused to be amused by any of our games, declaring them “too childish,” but cried to Ernst’s mother when we hid the flannel duck with which he slept. I’m ashamed to admit that we’d meant to make him cry, because when he did, he said, “Oh, oh, oh!” which was odd and amusing and therefore to be provoked. During the scolding we endured afterward, I discovered that the flower had been a younger sister who succumbed to scarlet fever.
“He isn’t little any longer, but yes, that’s the one. From Cincinnati. You’ll like him now, Trudy. He’s like you, always with his nose in a book.”
“He’s working as a carpenter?” My mother was quick to spot the seams where the pattern didn’t quite match up.
Ernst understood her meaning. He shrugged. “He left college, you know. He says he wants to follow his own path, although it’s a dead end, as far as I can see.”
We laughed, and Ernst smiled shyly at his own cleverness.
My mother pushed on. “Peter must be beside himself.”
Ernst’s uncle Peter did something that required him to wear spats and travel to Washington a great deal.
“I think Uncle Peter resigned himself to Oskar’s ways long ago. He has Manfred, you know.” Oskar’s brother, Manfred, I’d been led to believe, controlled all the shipping on Lake Erie. Admittedly, my understanding of business and finance was vague. “Oskar’s the artistic personality, more Aunt Bertha’s boy.”
My mother sighed. “Poor Bertha.”
My mother had lost children, too. Two infant boys before my parents had come to America, hoping for better luck. I knew that she and Ernst’s mother—whom I called Aunt Martha, although we had no blood relation—often clucked over Martha’s sister, Bertha, who, after her little daughter’s death, had closed the kindergarten she’d founded and in many other ways allowed, as they saw it, despair to steer her life.
“Gustina!” My mother leaned back in her chair to direct her voice down the hallway.
“Coming!”
“I’m sure your papa will see that Oskar does very well as a shipbuilder,” my mother said, turning back to Ernst.
“As a matter or fact, he’s been talking a lot about steam engines,” Ernst said. “Says he might like to learn to run a tug.”
“Is that so?” my father said. “You bring him to the dock tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll take him out with me.”
“Papa!” I set my glass with such force upon the table that wine sloshed dark red onto the bleached white cloth.
My mother reached quickly for the salt and poured it over what was sure to be a stain. “Trudy! Was ist los?”
“I’ve asked at least a dozen times to learn to run the Anna P.,” I said, ostentatiously addressing my father alone.
“Oh, well . . .” My father looked helplessly at my mother.
My mother closed her eyes and gave her head a little shake, as if to dislodge the whole scene from her consciousness. “You’re not going to become a tugboat captain, Trudy. For heaven’s sake.”
I couldn’t honestly argue otherwise, but this seemed to be beside the point. “You don’t object that my other studies have no practical consequence,” I said triumphantly.
“Perhaps in July it might be pleasant—” my father began.
I interrupted him. “I’m not asking for pleasant. I’m just asking to broaden my experience. My own papa refuses me but is more than willing to teach some boy he’s not laid eyes on for a dozen years.”
My father looked to my mother again. It was her job to stand firm.
“It’s not that I mean to become a sailor,” I went on, “only that I want to feel and see something other than my path to school and home again, something other than well-appointed rooms, if only for a little time. I want to see what it’s like to freeze in the open air and buck upon the wild water. I want a few hours in which I don’t know precisely what will happen next!” Frustratingly, I knew that my words were only dramatic gestures at a feeling I couldn’t articulate. “You came across an entire ocean to a new world,” I reminded my mother. “All I’m asking is an afternoon on a tugboat.”
“Trudy,” she said, giving me a look. “You will help me clear, please. Gustina must be having trouble with the dessert.”
While she lifted the platter with the fish carcass off the sideboard, I collected four wineglasses from the table, although I knew she preferred that those remain until last and that, to be safe, I carry only two at a time. The fragile material pinged with every step.
In the hallway, she stopped and leaned close to my ear. The platter and the near-empty glasses and even her breath carried the scent of sweet wine as she whispered, “You might try going to the dock tomorrow afternoon. You never know.”
“I know, Trudy.” Ernst’s voice followed us down the hall. “Let’s go and buy our bicycle tomorrow, what do you say?”
“All right,” I called, then walked with exquisite care to the kitchen.
? ? ?
The next day I learned to stuff a hen in Domestic Sciences.
“Now, girls,” Miss Emerson said, “you must take your twine, thus, and wrap it several times around the feet. Tie it off tightly but neatly. Even the operations that the diner will never see must be executed with care.”
The bones were slippery, and I had a harder time than I’d expected, tussling with the headless bird, its insides plumped with onions and tarragon. I was relieved when the midday class ended at last and I was free to take a streetcar from the college to the docks.
But the journey was long enough and interrupted with jarring stops and starts frequently enough to encourage doubt, and by the time I stepped off the car onto the icy bricked road, my conviction had begun to ebb along with the day’s pale light. My feet were numb in their thin boots and stockings, well suited to the college’s heated classrooms but impractical for much time in the out-of-doors. I flexed my toes as I climbed the stairs to my father’s office. For the first time it struck me that I’d likely missed the boat—after all, my father spent most of his time out on the lake—and I felt some relief at the thought.
No, I could hear Papa’s voice before I’d reached the top of the stairs. “. . . didn’t put all of my sweat and capital into this business to fork it over to men too lazy to make their own way.”
“Come now.” Ernst was there. “Gerhart Keffer can hardly be called lazy.”
“Oh, Gerhart would never ask me for an extra penny. He knows I pay a fair wage.”
“Of course you do.” Even with the closed door between us, I could see Ernst nodding. He and my father were in perfect agreement.
I was reaching for the doorknob when another male voice pushed its way forward. “But who decides what’s fair? The tug owners. What say do the workers have?”
I knocked, and the room behind the door fell silent. They were wondering. Well, they would be surprised, I thought stoutly.
“Trudy?” My father, one hand on the doorknob, had to use the other to take his meerschaum pipe from his mouth. He coughed a bit, startled to see me. “Trudy, come in. Come in.” He stepped back to let me through. “Are you all right? Is your mother all right?”
“Don’t worry. As far as I know, there’s nothing the matter with either of us.”
“Trudy,” Ernst said, coming to stand beside me. “It’s good of you to meet me here. Are you ready to pick out our bicycle?”
“Our bicycle . . . ?”
“First here’s my cousin Oskar,” Ernst went on. “You see that he’s changed.”
“Yes, Ernst has produced the cousin, as promised.” My father gestured with the pipe’s stem toward the man in the far corner of the room. “He’s become a man of high ideals.”
Oskar had changed. He was still not tall, but he was no longer slight, and his girlish curls had become thick, wild waves, the sort that must often break the teeth of a comb. I could discern no family resemblance between him and Ernst; his features were molded of a heavier, darker clay, his forehead more massive, his nose sharper and wider, his lips fuller. It was almost unseemly, I thought, how much of his face there was. He dipped his large head in the gesture of a bow. When he raised his eyes to meet mine, his bright gaze, a blue unsoftened by gray or green, struck me as somehow rude, intrusive.
“Trudy is an agitator, too,” my father was saying. “She marched for the eight-hour day with her Miss Dodson.”
“Her Miss Dodson?” Oskar frowned and turned his eyes to me again.
To my consternation, I felt my cheeks grow hot under his intense regard. “One of my teachers,” I managed. “A woman of high ideals.”
“Who nearly lost her position, in consequence,” Ernst said, shaking his head. “A very foolish woman, really.”
“It doesn’t sound that way to me,” Oskar said.
My father swept a hand through the air. “Enough politics! We’ve got to catch a schooner before she goes right on to Kenosha.”
I said my piece then, firmly, knowing the condescending look with which Papa would answer me, a look I couldn’t fight the way I could my mother’s sharp words; knowing, too, that Ernst would add concern to that look, and that they would unite against me, tying my feet with their twine. “Papa, I hope you’ll take me along today.”
“Trudy, we’ve already discussed this,” my father said. “No papa would put his daughter in such discomfort, not to mention danger, and no captain would allow it.”
“What about our bicycle, Trudy?”
“No one buys a bicycle in the winter!”
Ernst looked hurt.
“I’m sorry, Ernst, but I don’t think you or my father are looking at this fairly. I’m not suggesting that I’ll be a help, but I’m not a child. I do know enough not to fall in, you know, and I can keep myself out of the way. Why can’t I see, just like Oskar here, how it works, what my own father does every day? Please, Papa.”
“Another time, Trudy. In the summer, perhaps,” my father said absently. He was studying a chart he’d drawn from his desk.
“I think you ought to let her go,” Oskar said.
My father and Ernst stared at him. I stared, too. I’d certainly not expected any help from Little O.
“Let her sit in the pilothouse,” he went on. “She’ll be cold and bored and miserable, and that will be that.”
As if I were a spoiled infant. I was so outraged that I didn’t know what to say.
“Keffer won’t like it,” Ernst said.
“I’m not entirely against annoying Gerhart,” my father said.
“You might come, too, Ernst,” Oskar said. “Keep her company.”
“No, thank you.” Ernst was angry with me, though because I’d been short about the bicycle or because I’d gotten my way, I couldn’t tell.
? ? ?
My father, rejecting my overcoat as too fitted about the arms for easy movement and too loose in the skirt for safety, had me dress in old clothing of his: a suit of gray woolen underwear, a wool shirt, and navy trousers that flapped ridiculously around my legs.
“And this.” He held out a mass of green so dark that it was almost black, the sweater his own mother had knit for him when he’d left Hamburg. He’d told me this story so many times that the garment, with its prickly fibers, its engulfing darkness, its soapy lanolin smell, had come to embody for me the grandmother Gertrude for whom I’d been named but had never met. When I pulled it over my head, I felt the weight of her sorrow at her son’s defection to a distant country dragging my shoulders down.
The sweater had caught in my combs. While I regathered my toppled hair in a girl’s braid down my back, my father stuffed a pair of his old boots with newspaper. He opened a large oilskin coat big enough to wrap around me twice, tied an oilskin hat on my head, and held out huge three-fingered leather mittens, lined with fleece, for me to push my hands into up to my elbows, dressing me as he had years ago when he’d taken me down toboggan runs.
“Now, don’t let the mermaids find you,” he said, chucking me under the chin.
In summer, we’d often gone to the beach under the low bluffs of Juneau Park to enjoy the sun and the water. Once, when I was a very little girl, I’d filled my pinafore pockets with stones, in the way of children, then climbed up on a pier and run to the end of it for no reason that I could remember. I’d been following a bird or the light on the waves or maybe only listening to the sound of my own feet thumping hollowly on the wood.
Suddenly, my father had stood huge over me, his face contorted, his fingers pinching my wrist. “Never!” he’d spat. “You must never run out on the pier alone!” He’d bent close and pointed at the waves shimmering—I did remember that, the sun bouncing off the facets of the water. “The mermaids live under there,” he’d said darkly in German, the language of anger as well as affection in our house. “They take little girls like you, especially little girls with heavy stones in their pockets. They will snatch you with their long, wet fingers and drag you to the bottom of the sea.”
“But you would save me,” I’d protested.
“Sometimes, liebchen,” he’d said, softening, “you must also do your best to save yourself.”
I’d been duly afraid, but as he walked me back toward safety, my hand in his, I’d peeked down at the spaces of shadowed water visible between the boards of the pier, trying to glimpse the world his warning promised.
? ? ?
While we’d been inside the building, the snow-swollen clouds had begun to leak. The flakes were heavy, clumping even in the air, and when they settled on the men’s dark coats, their intricate fretwork glowed in sharp relief. Swaddled like a doll in so many layers that I could barely move my limbs, I followed my father and Oskar over the railroad tracks and across the road. A layer of white had already covered the boards of the dock. Our footprints, the two men’s definite and mine slightly blurred from the shuffle of my too-large boots, were the first to mar it.
In the boiler room—which my father called the guts of the boat and which, with its shiny metal valves and pipes and cylinders, did indeed look like a mechanical version of what Miss Dodson had exposed when she lifted the flap of skin that covered a frog’s belly—the men examined joints and pressures and had some words with the boilerman while I stood waiting, absurd in my oversized trousers and sweater and coat. Then we climbed the ladder to the pilothouse, a crystal perch, the upper half of all four walls being windows that admitted a clear view of the endless green-gray water. The lower half of the walls was paneled in a glowing birch, and in the center, like a varnished wooden sun, stood the wheel. As we came in, Gerhart Keffer turned from the chart he’d been examining at a small table in the corner.
He acknowledged my father’s introductions with a curt nod. “Cold day for a boat ride.”
“They’re here to learn the trade,” my father joked.
Keffer removed a tin from his pocket and put a dip of tobacco under his lip as he looked at me. He said nothing. I blushed.
“Trudy could be on watch,” Oskar suggested. “Wouldn’t hurt to have an extra pair of eyes on a day like this.”
He and my father left me, their feet clanging down the metal rails of the ladder. In a minute or two, the engine began to thrum and the floor to vibrate.
“She’s free!” I heard my father shout.
Keffer, a small man whose head barely cleared the top of the wheel, seemed to be listening for a certain pitch in the sound of the engine. Apparently hearing it, he eased a long lever forward. The tug slid away from the dock.
For a long while I did nothing but stare at the sky, gauzy and gray as a dirty bandage and filled with frenzied flakes, which seemed to dive straight at me, bits of the sky made solid. The effect, together with the roll of the floor as the tug alternately crested the waves and sank between them, was mesmerizing and dizzying. When I was young, I’d wished that my father captained a schooner rather than a tug. Tugs were prosaic, workmanlike ducks; schooners, with their sharp sails aligned and their sleek prows, were gulls. At every moment, I half imagined I could see the wings of a birdlike schooner emerging from the snow.
A glob of Keffer’s spit clanged into the brass cuspidor at his feet, making me jump.
“It’s snug in here,” I said, partly to steady myself, partly to be polite.
“Huh,” Keffer grunted. He worked the tin of Red Indian from his pocket and dipped again.
“In all of this water,” I went on—my mother had trained me to be friendly, to draw people out—“how do you know which way to go to find the schooner?”
He shrugged.
“And in weather like this, it must be nearly impossible. Won’t you tell me how it’s done?”
“What for?”
“Well,” I said, taken aback, “because I want to know.” My parents and my teachers had always applauded my curiosity. Even my friends professed to admire it.
“Waste of time,” he said, his eyes fixed on the water through which we were plowing. “Begging your pardon,” he added superciliously.
Chastened, I trained my eyes on the receding shoreline, which now slipped and slid beyond a film of tears. I was cold, bored, and miserable, as Oskar had predicted.
My father clanked up the ladder again. Fresh, freezing air surrounded his body like a halo. “So, Tru,” he said jovially, taking the wheel from Keffer and dismissing him with a nod, “maybe you’d like to drive?”
I saw Keffer frown, and I waited until he’d left the room before I moved to stand behind the wheel. It was a lovely thing, varnished so thickly it seemed to be encased in amber. Though I was nervous, it was easy enough steering in open water; all it required was resting my palms on the smooth pegs. Keffer needn’t think he’d been doing anything so remarkable.
We went on a long while, until I could no longer make out the shore. For all I knew, we might be about to run aground in Michigan. We were sheltered from the wind in the pilothouse, but it was cold enough that our breath rose in clouds around us. My father frowned and trained his telescope through each of the windows in turn.
“May I go out on the deck to watch? I think I could see more clearly,” I said.
“You’ll get too cold.”
“Papa. I’ll be all right.”
He sighed and opened a trunk that was built against one of the walls. “If you put this on first.” He held out a life jacket. Grudgingly, I let him settle yet another layer around me, but I didn’t stop to tie the vest closed before I hurried down the ladder to the deck.
I was too cold almost instantly. The bullying, frigid wind bored through all my layers of fabric, and a steady wash of biting spray stung my face. I tried to look into the storm, northeast, the direction from which the Maria Theresa should be running toward us, but the snow seemed to be driving with fixed purpose directly into my eyes. The flakes stuck to my lashes, blurring my view. I felt dizzy again, staring on and on so hard at nothing. I was beginning to feel sick, too, with the incessant rise and fall of the deck, the numbness in my fingers and toes, and the flakes rushing at me so relentlessly. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it, I wished the job were done and I safely home, drinking chocolate, even writing about Napoleon. Finally, I lost my breath, as if the wind had stolen the very air from my mouth, and I had to turn away and cover my face with my mitten.
“Get inside, why don’t ya?”
Oskar and Mr. Keffer had just emerged from the engine room. Keffer’s tone was more than dismissive; it was mean. I bridled at it, lifting my face from my hands defiantly. It was that movement that allowed my eye to catch a fillip of red where there should have been only gray. It disappeared, and I thought for a moment that it might have been a trick of my mind, like water in the desert, but there it was again. I hesitated, not wanting to excite Keffer’s impatience, but then I took myself firmly in hand. “Mr. Keffer!”
He paused, halfway up the ladder.
“What is that?” I asked. Now that my eyes knew where to focus, I could see it clearly. It looked like a red string dancing on the wind.
“There won’t be no schooner there, at any rate. That direction’s the shore. If you’re seeing anything at all, it’ll be the low sun catching on a roof. Waste of a man’s time,” he muttered, his feet ringing on the iron crossbars.
Oskar had broken from Keffer and came to stand beside me at the rail. He glanced at my face and turned toward the shore, following my gaze.
I couldn’t look away until I’d determined for myself what I was seeing, for it certainly was not the reflection of the sun. It had nothing to do with light. There was a denseness about it, several densenesses. Later, when I thought about how it had happened, I realized that it was my willingness to accept what should not be there that allowed me to make out what was. People were hanging in the air! From one of them waved the bit of red.
“Look, there!” I pointed, pinning the sight to the sky. “Papa!” I ran to the ladder. “Look at this! You must look at this!”
Through his glass, it was obvious. The schooner, probably trying to stay within sight of land, had caught on the rocks just north of Whitefish Bay and was sinking there. Already the foredeck was underwater, the masts pitched at an angle. The crew was clinging to the rigging, six men and a woman. “The cook, probably,” my father said. It was the woman who’d been waving the red muffler that had attracted my attention.
We steamed toward the wreck with the engine at full throttle. I clanged back down the ladder and stood at the rail, watching my strange vision become more and more distinct and real. Now, although the cold was intensified by our speed, I didn’t feel it.
Through the telescope, we’d seen the people shouting, but when the tug was near enough that their voices could be heard, they were quiet, watching, waiting to see how they might be saved. One man was slumped sideways, his eyes closed. Though one of his arms was hooked through the rigging, he seemed to be held aloft mostly by means of a rope wrapped around his waist. The rest of the men were alert but grim, their beards rimed with snow and ice. The woman’s long hair swirled above her head in the wild currents of air. She’d let loose her red scarf; I’d seen it fly out and disappear when it settled on the water.
When they were a good way off, collecting these people from the schooner had seemed to me to be a simple task: the tug would sidle in close under the rigging, and the crew would climb down onto our deck. When we drew near, I could see that would be impossible. First of all, the rocks that the Maria Theresa had foundered on would wreck the Anna P., too, given half a chance. Because of the rocks, and also because of the half-submerged Maria Theresa, large waves were continually springing up and dashing themselves down again in unpredictable directions. There was no way the tug could steam in close enough without swamping or worse.
To my right, the lifeboat hit the water with a smack. Oskar leaped into it just as my father came crashing out of the pilothouse.
“Oskar!” my father bawled into the wind.
Oskar was half standing in the boat, digging furiously with his oars to keep from capsizing, steering more than propelling the lifeboat toward the schooner. He didn’t spare a moment’s attention for the tug.
“Dammit! Now we’ll have to rescue him, too!” my father roared. “Watch him, Trudy! Don’t take your eyes off him!”
Even had staring threatened to blind me, I could not have looked away.
Over and over, a wave would lift Oskar to its crown and carry him forward while he pulled on the oars, trying to stay abreast of it, to ride it as long as possible. When the wave subsided, he would spill forward, the bow of the lifeboat plowing dangerously down, sometimes so far that it scooped below the surface and water poured in over the gunwales. Then he would hurl his weight back and dig again with the oars, resisting the lake’s efforts to turn him sideways and tumble him over, to pick him up and pound him against the rocks.
I couldn’t tell whether he was exceptionally skilled or foolhardy and lucky, but he managed to stay upright long enough for the waves to hurl him against the schooner with a force that might have cracked his boat in two but did not. Two of the crew of the Maria Theresa had eased themselves down the rigging in anticipation, and they somehow made the lifeboat fast to the wreck.
The tug itself was coming close to the rocks, and I could feel its engines protesting beneath me. I sensed that Gerhart Keffer and perhaps my father were turning away to see to our own safety, but I kept my eyes on Oskar, as if my steady and fervid gaze could form filaments that would pull the lifeboat out of danger. Already the crew was lowering the man who’d been tied to the rigging, and the woman, who’d scrambled up the highest, had picked her way halfway down.
When all were packed into the lifeboat, it sat far too low among the heaving waves, but it drifted well enough away so that at last the tug could do its work. My father ran neatly up alongside the little boat so that Keffer and the boilerman could snag its gunwales with their boat hooks. I was the one who made fast the bow line when Oskar threw it to me. Although the rope was frozen, I managed to bend it into the knot my father had taught me years before by pretending the rope was a rabbit.
My father helped Oskar climb last of all out of the lifeboat and embraced him roughly when he stood on the deck again. “My boy, I thought you were a goner. You can ask Trudy here. I was swearing to high heaven when I saw you jump into that boat.”
“I guess I didn’t think,” Oskar admitted. “I just wanted to get there.”
“Well, you got lucky. We all got lucky.” My father drew his hand over his face to wipe his eyes and the ice from his mustache. “Trudy, was ist los?”
I’d burst into tears, overwhelmed by the strain and the cold and the idea that the man who had once been Little O might have been lost forever in the icy water.