Sarah glanced into the rather barren souvenir shop that now occupied the space.
“Don’t worry,” he said, reading her thoughts. “Not all of her dignity has been lost.”
“Where does the tour begin?”
“The port side of this deck,” he said.
“I’m sure I can find it,” she said.
“Undoubtedly. But I’m going with you.”
“But you’ve been before…”
“Yes,” he said, “but much of the ship can only be seen on the tour. You don’t mind if I join you?”
“Of course not.”
The tour (she couldn’t prevent herself from counting the group-eighteen sightseers, including the two of them) was led by a retired naval officer. Parsons stayed at her side, but did not touch or crowd her. She soon relaxed and began to thoroughly enjoy the tour itself, fascinated by the grandeur and history of the ship.
When the tour group reached the cabin class swimming pool, she heard a woman say, “I’ve heard that it’s haunted.”
Sarah looked around the room of beige and blue-green terra cotta tiles, the etched wire-and-glass image of an ancient sailing ship behind her, the glimmering mother-of-pearl ceiling above, the empty, sloping bottom of the pool itself. There were no windows or portholes, but the room was large enough to prevent her from feeling claustrophobic. Nothing about any of it struck her as particularly scary, nothing sent a chill down her back. But when she turned to make a joke to Robert about ghosts who had turned green from chlorine, she saw that he was pale, and had a strange, intense look on his face.
The guide was making light of the woman’s remark. “Do you mean the woman in the mini-skirt or the one in the bathing suit? I’d settle for a glimpse of either one.”
“There’s more than one ghost?” the woman asked.
“Oh yes, the ship has long been reported to be haunted,” the guide said lightly. “If you believe in such reports, this ship is loaded with ghosts. Myself, if I see one, I hope it’s one of the young ladies who rove in here.”
The group laughed and began to move after the guide as he went on with the tour. Robert, however, remained motionless, and continued to stare into the pool.
“Robert?” Sarah asked. “Are you feeling ill?”
When he seemed not to hear her, she touched his sleeve. “Robert?”
He turned to her with a start. “Oh-I’m sorry, we’ve fallen behind. We’d better catch up with the others.” They were not far from the group, though, and once they reached it Sarah asked again if he was feeling ill.
“No,” he said, “I’m fine now, thank you.”
She did not believe him, and glanced back at him several times as they made their way to the next area, along a catwalk over one of the cavernous boiler rooms. He was still pale.
By the time the formal tour was finished, though, he seemed himself again, and Sarah happily allowed him to accompany her to the other shipboard exhibits. He seemed to enjoy her enthusiasm as she was able to see the anchor chains and lifeboats and all the other parts of the ship she had read about. She lost her self-consciousness over her study of the ship’s statistics and decided her knowledge gave her a better appreciation of what she was seeing now.
Not that her appreciation was limited to the ship’s physical power. There was nostalgia, pure and simple, to be relished. She lingered over photos of Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Spencer Tracy and other famous passengers. She tried to take in every detail of the displays of passenger accommodations and dining rooms.
Robert, cheerful through most of their exploration of the ship, grew solemn when they reached the wartime exhibits on the Sun Deck. The subject matter deserved solemnity, Sarah thought. His mood, however, seemed to remain grim even after they left the exhibit. She felt much more at ease with him by then, which gave her the courage to ask him what was troubling him.
He hesitated, then said, “Did you see how the soldiers were forced to live aboard this ship?”
Sarah, recalling the photos of thousands of soldiers crammed together on the decks of the ship, shuddered. “Yes, it was very crowded-”
“Crowded? You like numbers. The ship was designed to carry about two thousand passengers. On one of its wartime voyages, it carried over sixteen thousand men.”
“It carried sixteen thousand, six hundred-and-eighty-three,” Sarah said. “The largest number of people ever to sail on any ship-a record that still stands.”
“Sarah, think of what that meant to each of those sixteen thousand!”
She had seen some of this in the exhibit, of course. Tiers of standee berths-narrow metal frames with a single piece of canvas stretched over them-six and seven bunks high, each only eighteen inches apart. The men slept in three shifts; the beds were never empty. Soldiers were given colored badges to be worn at all times; the badges corresponded with a section of the ship where the soldiers were required to stay throughout the voyage.
But for Sarah, who had struggled for years with a fear of confined spaces, thinking about what it actually meant to each soldier was nearly unbearable to her. Suddenly, she felt dizzy, unable to breathe.
In the next moment she heard Robert Parsons saying, “My God, I’m so sorry! I forgot! Let’s go outside, onto the Sun Deck.”
She raised no objections, and found herself feeling a mixture of relief that she was once again in the open air and acute embarrassment that her grandmother had apparently informed Robert Parsons about her problem.
When he tried to apologize again, she said, “I do believe you’re much more upset about this than I am. I’ll be all right.”
“When did it start?” he asked.
“My claustrophobia? Didn’t Grandmother tell you that, too?”
“No. She’s never said anything about it. I’ve noticed it before-at her dinner parties. Too many people in the room and you have to go outside. On nights when it’s too cold to be outdoors in an evening gown, you step out for a breath of fresh air.”
She was quiet for a moment, not sure what to make of his observation of her. Then she said, “I don’t know why this memory has been so persistent, but when I was about four, at the orphanage, I was once punished for something by being shut up in a closet. I don’t remember what I had done wrong, or even who put me in the closet. I just remember the darkness, the sensation of being confined, the smell of the coats and mothballs. I was terrified. I remember counting, singing a song about numbers to stay calm.”
He put an arm around her shoulders, gave her a brief hug. But he seemed to know not to hold on to her-not when she was feeling so close to the memory of that closet. He let her be. As she felt herself grow calmer, she ventured a question of her own. “I’ve been thinking-the way you responded to the wartime exhibit-do you have problems with claustrophobia, too?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t.
“But it was personal for you somehow, wasn’t it? You’re too young to have fought in anything other than the Gulf War-”
“My grandfather went to war on this ship.”
“Oh! You have something in common with Grandmother then.”
He smiled slightly. “Yes. Ada and I have a great deal in common.”
Not wanting to pursue that subject, she said, “So your grandfather told you about traveling on this ship?”
“No,” Parsons said, looking out over the railing, toward the sea. “He died before I was born. Even before my father was born. My grandfather died aboard the ship.”
“Aboard the ship?” she repeated, stunned.
“Yes. He was a young soldier, newly married. His wife was pregnant with their first child, although he didn’t know that when he left for war. He was, by all accounts, a bright and talented man with a sense of humor; he used to draw cartoon sketches of his fellow soldiers and mail them home to my grandmother. He went off to war, not willingly parted from her, but willing to fight for his country.” He paused, then added bitterly, “He was murdered before he had a chance to reach his first battle.”
“Murdered?!”
“Yes.”
