Her sense of life was a sense of motion and embroilments, and even if to move gave her a keen pain in the heart, she had no choice but to move. To be stretched out in a deck chair that early in the day made her feel idle, immoral, worthless and—what was most painful of all—like a ghost, neither living nor dead; like some bitterly unwilling bystander. To tramp around the decks might tire her, but to be stretched out under a blanket like a corpse was a hundred times worse. Life seemed like a chain of brilliant reflections on water, unrelated perhaps to the motion of the water itself but completely absorbing in their color and shine. Might she kill herself with her love of things? Were the forces of life and death identical? And would the thrill of rising on a fine day be the violence that ruptured the vessels of her heart? The need to move, to talk, to make friends and enemies, to involve herself was irresistible, and she struggled to get to her feet, but her lameness, her heaviness, the age of her body and the shape of the deck chair made this impossible. She was stuck. She grasped the armrests and struggled to raise herself, but she fell back helplessly. Again she struggled to get up. She fell back again. There was a sudden sharp pain in her heart, and her face was flushed. Then she thought that she would die in another few minutes—die on her first day at sea, be sewn into an American flag and dropped overboard, her soul descending into Hell.
But why should she go to Hell? She knew well enough. It was because she had been all her life a food thief. As a child, she had waited and watched until the kitchen was empty and had then opened the massive icebox doors, grabbed a drumstick off the cold chicken and dipped her fingers into the hard sauce. Left alone in the house, she had climbed to the top pantry shelf on an arrangement of chairs and stools and eaten all the lump sugar in the silver bowl. She had stolen candy from the highboy, where it was saved for Sunday. She had, when the cook’s back was turned, ripped a piece of skin off the Thanksgiving turkey before grace was said. She had stolen cold roast potatoes, doughnuts set out to cool, beef bones, lobster claws and wedges of pie. Her vice had not been cured by her maturity, and when, as a young woman, she invited the altar guild to tea, she ate half the sandwiches before they arrived. Even as an old woman leaning on a stick, she had gone down to the pantry in the middle of the night and stuffed herself with cheese and apples. Now the time had come to answer for her gluttony. She turned desperately to the man in the deck chair on her left. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I wonder if . . .” He seemed to be asleep. The deck chair on her right was empty. She shut her eyes and called on the angels. A second later, the moment after her prayers had gone up, a young officer stopped to wish her good morning and to extend an invitation from the captain to join him on the bridge. He pulled her out of her chair.
On the bridge she shot the sun with a hand sextant and reminisced. “When I was nine years old, my Uncle Lorenzo bought me a twelve-foot sloop,” she said, “and for the next three years there wasn’t a fisherman at Travertine I couldn’t outsail.” The captain asked her for cocktails. At lunch the steward seated her with a twelve-year-old Italian boy who spoke no English. They got along by smiling at one another and making signs. In the afternoon she played cards until it was time to go down and get ready for the captain’s cocktail party. She went to her stateroom and took out of her suitcase a rusty curling iron that had served her faithfully for thirty-five years or more. She plugged this into an outlet in the bathroom. All the lights in the cabin went off, and she yanked out the plug.
A moment later, there were sounds of running in the corridors, and people called confusedly to one another in Italian and English. She hid her curling iron in the bottom of her suitcase and drank a glass of port. She was an honest woman, but she was too stunned, at the moment, to confess to the captain that she had blown a fuse.
She seemed to have done much more. Opening the door to her stateroom, she found the corridor dark. A steward ran by, carrying a lamp. She closed the door again and looked out of her porthole. Slowly, slowly, the ship was losing way. The high white crest at the bow slacked off.
In the corridors and on the decks there were more calls and sounds of running. Honora sat miserably on the edge of her berth, having, through her own clumsiness, her own stupidity, halted this great ship in its passage across the sea. What would they do next? Take to the boats and row to some deserted island, rationing their biscuits and water? It was all her fault. The children would suffer. She would give them her water ration and share her biscuits, but she did not think she had the strength to confess. They might put her in the brig or drop her overboard.
