De Potter's Grand Tour (12 page)

The weather improved by the third day. Mrs. McLaughlin roamed the ship, jotting down her observations. She noted that Judge Griswold won the shuffleboard tournament, Miss Morgan of Wellesley College was pleased to wake up every morning to a fresh box of roses, which her fiancé waiting for her in New York had entrusted with the stewardess, Miss Filer of Detroit played her banjo at night, and Professor de Potter took promenades with the young ladies and entertained them with animated descriptions of the places they'd soon be visiting.

They arrived on the moonlit night of the fifteenth at the entrance of the English Channel. By Wednesday afternoon the “gray, long-armed windmills” of Holland were in sight. The
Noordland
anchored at the mouth of the shallow river Scheldt, waiting for the tide to rise before continuing upriver to Antwerp. Though they were within a stone's throw of land, the travelers had to spend one more night in their staterooms, passing the time playing euchre or reading, or, in Mrs. McLaughlin's case, translating her notes into legible prose.

*   *   *

“Surely it must be a dream—this lovely panorama of quaint old cities, with their treasures of art and historical glories,” wrote Mrs. McLaughlin about their arrival in Holland, and then corrected herself: “IT IS NO DREAM,” she announced, but rather “a blessed reality that we look with our own eyes upon the country of William the Silent.”

From Amsterdam they traveled south by train to Italy and spent three weeks on a grueling tour from Milan to Naples. “The brain whirls before the accumulated treasures of the ages,” Mrs. McLaughlin wrote about Italy. It was all too much for the De Potter party to take in, and for an amateur journalist to recount in any detail. “Ears weary of the names of Roman emperors and even Michael Angelo,” she wrote in relief when they left Italy behind, “we move on to Switzerland, the land of the gods, where nobody has to burden his or her mind with information for two blessed weeks.”

They crossed the Brunig Pass in the Alps and rode in carriages along the Tête-Noire to a village in the shadow of Mont Blanc. “We will not attempt to describe the scenery,” Mrs. McLaughlin announced, then went on to describe the scenery: “snowy summits wreathed in clouds that are tinted early and late with the delicate rose and pearl of an opal tower.”

From Switzerland they went up to Cologne and traveled by boat up the Rhine to the village of Coblenz. They continued on to Frankfurt and from there took the night train to Paris.

They spent a week in Paris touring the parks and museums. On the last night, Armand hosted a banquet at the Hotel Chatham and presented each member of the party with a souvenir menu. Toasts were made, songs were sung, and Mrs. McLaughlin recited a ballad she'd written titled “Invasion of Europe by De Potter,” which began with the group's disembarkation from the
Noordland
(“The fifty umbrellas were spread in the breeze, / The fifty portmanteau courageously seized”) and moved through a lengthy catalog of her impressions of her fellow travelers. By the time she'd covered Mrs. de Long, “who always looked pleasant whatever went wrong,” Mr. McClure, who “once seated, could not bear to stir,” and Miss Sarah Potts from Glens Falls, New York, who “ran a whole temperance meeting at home / But whisper it not! Fell a victim at Rome, / To the humming decanter, and sad to relate, / Was observed to be slightly unstable in gait,” Mrs. McLaughlin had fortified herself with so much champagne that she, too, was slightly unstable in gait, and she slurred her words as she read her tribute to “our leader, that ablest of men / Long, long may he live, and with Madame de Potter, / Lead crowds of Americans over the water.”

The Americans stumbled drunkenly up to bed and slept so late the next morning that they missed the train to Calais. Armand had to pay extra to get them on the next train in time to catch the ferry to Dover. But they sailed through the night as planned and arrived in London in time for a performance of
Fidelio
at Covent Garden, which everyone in the party thought splendid.

The tour, in Mrs. McLaughlin's opinion, had gone smoothly. The party's general satisfaction was reflected in the reports she sent to her editor. A few members may have expressed annoyance that they had to finish a European tour with a five-day visit to the unremarkable country of Ireland, but the rest shared Mrs. McLaughlin's pleasure. She wrote about how they all “popped like corn on a shovel” as they rode in a jaunting car along a country road in Killarney. They admired Muckross Abbey, which Mrs. McLaughlin declared more lovely than any ruin along the Rhine. And after recrossing the Irish channel to Holyhead, they took a pleasant ride through Wales to Chester.

Mrs. McLaughlin described the last portion of the trip as “PERFECTLY MARVELOUS.” Not until the party set out from Liverpool on August 31, on a three-year-old steamer named
The City of Chicago
, did everything begin to go wrong.

*   *   *

In retrospect, Armand would note earlier signs that the trip was unraveling. The Shelbourne Hotel was crowded, and the staff treated the De Potter party as an inconvenience. The bread at dinner was stale, the chops were overcooked, and the waiters didn't come around to refill the water glasses. One of the ladies in Armand's group wondered too loudly if Dubliners were all suffering from a mental disorder. This same woman discovered the next morning that her purse was missing, and Armand spent half the day trying and failing to recover it.

Shortly after they set out from Liverpool, the ship called
The
City of Rome
passed them, running at the full steam generated by her huge boilers, which burned three hundred tons of coal per day and seemed to be traveling at nearly double the speed of the
Chicago
. The travelers were disappointed to hear that the rival ship would arrive in New York ahead of them and demanded to know why their conductor had booked them on such a slow steamer.

In the evening a dense fog overtook them, and shortly after 2:00 a.m. on the morning of the sixth, the
Chicago
sideswiped a fishing schooner. Many passengers slept through the crash. Others heard nothing more than a mild thud. But the rumor that they'd hit an iceberg began circulating, sleeping passengers were roused by panicked friends, and several members of the De Potter party rushed to board the lifeboats.

While the
Chicago
suffered no measurable damage, the schooner had a section of its rigging torn off. The schooner's captain and first mate met with Captain Watkins of the
Chicago
, and after they'd returned to their vessel, Captain Watkins announced that the damage was determined to be minimal and the schooner remained fully seaworthy.

They were still four days from Sandy Hook. As the ship sailed on through the darkness, the de Potters reassured the nervous ladies in their party that the
Chicago
wasn't taking on water. Aimée set the example by returning to her room. But by then, Armand had already given up on sleep, and he spent the rest of the night settled on deck in his chair, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, feeling the rise and dip of the deck as a lulling buoyancy, giving him the impression that he was weightless.

Toward 4:00 a.m., he became aware of a clanging sound that he thought was the familiar shipboard sound made by a metal ring blowing against the flagpole on the upper deck. But then he began to perceive that it had an unfamiliar rhythm, with a drawn-out, high-pitched ringing.

He realized that the steward's department was on the other side of the wall behind his head, and he was hearing the sound of one of the pneumatic bells being rung from a stateroom. While he couldn't hear the stewards responding, he sensed that deep inside the ship, the night's stillness was being disturbed for a second time.

He waited for some sign of the activity to emerge on deck. His intention was to get up and investigate the matter if no one appeared, but he waited too long and fell asleep. When he woke several hours later, his blankets were soaked through from the fog, and Judge Griswold of Catskill was standing over him, grumbling his name, with a stern, pitying look on his face, as though he were sentencing a prisoner to execution.

He informed Armand that Mrs. Lilian Martel, an elderly woman who had been accompanying her niece on the De Potter tour, was ill with fever, and Dr. Paine had been attending to her through the night. Shortly after 4:00 a.m., Dr. Paine had sent a steward to fetch Armand in his cabin. But Armand hadn't been in his cabin. He had spent the night in his steamer chair, and when he finally arrived at Mrs. Lilian Martel's bedside, he was too late.

Dr. Paine had already returned to his quarters, leaving behind two stewardesses, along with Mrs. Martel's niece. One of the stewardesses sloshed a wet mop over the floor while the other collected towels that had been scattered about in the room. The girl sat in pale, stunned silence beside the blanket-covered mound on the bed. She seemed unaware of Armand's presence at first, but when he cleared his throat, she looked up at him with a puzzled expression, as though she expected him to explain what had happened to her aunt.

He could explain, all right. Though it seemed not to have occurred to the girl, Armand knew that he alone was responsible for her aunt's death. He was the Pied Piper who had persuaded this innocent American woman to risk thieves and accidents and disease. He had led her across the ocean just so she could view in person scenery and cathedrals and works of art she could very well have admired in reproductions in a catalog, in the safety of her home. Yes, it was his fault that Mrs. Lilian Martel was dead, at the age of sixty-three. She'd been in good health up until the previous evening and should have lived at least another decade. But she had made the mistake of going on a De Potter European Tour. Armand had seduced her with his advertisements. Based on his claims about the benefits of travel, Mrs. Lilian Martel had decided that she wanted to give her niece a chance to see the Old World.

Throughout the journey she'd been a quiet, congenial traveler, easily pleased. She had eaten heartily and made a point of sampling all the available desserts. She had laughed at Dr. Paine's jokes. She kept track of her purse and never complained about her accommodations. She had listened attentively to Armand's lectures. Because she had no special needs, he kept forgetting she was there.

Dr. Paine had misjudged the seriousness of her condition. But how could he have known she was in danger when she gently complained that she felt “out of sorts” at dinner? He prescribed milk of magnesia and sent her to bed. She slept through the collision with the schooner and the panic that followed. Her niece couldn't rouse her. Dr. Paine was summoned, but his smelling salts had no effect. By sunrise, Mrs. Lilian Martel was barely breathing. By breakfast time, she was dead.

A coffin was constructed by the crew that afternoon. The chaplain scheduled the service for the dark hour of 5:00 a.m. the following morning. The plank was hung from the lower aft deck, as far away from the midship staterooms as possible so as not to disturb the passengers who wanted to sleep. Only the de Potters, Dr. Paine, Judge Griswold, and Mrs. Martel's niece were on hand.

Goodbye, goodbye. What else could be said when a coffin hastily built from disassembled pinewood crates was being pushed down a creaking plank into the dark sea? Stop! That's what Armand wanted to say, for he suddenly had a terrible thought: What if the old woman wasn't really dead? What if Dr. Paine, who was known to have a tin ear, hadn't registered the whisper of her heartbeat with his stethoscope? And was that knocking Armand heard as the crew prepared to tip the coffin overboard the sound of scrawny knuckles rapping against wood?

The head of the box hung out over the edge of the plank. The two crew members assigned to maneuver the plank had paused, looking to the captain for direction. The captain nodded, and the men both grunted from the exertion as they lifted the plank and sent the coffin sliding into the sea.

Poor Mrs. Martel. She had gone to the trouble of surviving for sixty-three years, and this was what she got as thanks: a handful of mourners and a watery grave. In a moment the coffin had been swallowed entirely. But those in attendance kept watching the water until the trace of foam left behind by the box had dispersed, and the only remaining proof that Mrs. Martel had ever existed was a family resemblance apparent in the features of her baffled niece.

*   *   *

“BURIAL AT SEA” was the heading Mrs. McLaughlin used for the last section of her final article. “At 5 o'clock in the morning of the 7th a woman was buried at sea. Those who witnessed the solemn service said the occasion was a sad and desolate one. The coffin was wrapped in the American flag and slipped down a plank into the great deep. The husband of the woman was said to be awaiting her arrival in New York.”

*   *   *

Aimée spent the rest of the morning with Mrs. Martel's niece, keeping her company, watching over her while she rested. Armand passed the time in his stateroom reading
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Though he had read it twice before, he'd brought it along on this tour for those few occasions when he wanted a distraction. Rather than rereading from cover to cover, he would page through the book and pause at his favorite passages.

For a few minutes, he was absorbed by the scene in which the imprisoned Dantès sews himself inside the sack that had contained the corpse of Faria. When Armand came to the end of the chapter, he looked up, caught sight of the gray sky outside his portal, and shuddered, overwhelmed by an awareness of finality that was paradoxically indisputable and yet would have been impossible to translate into words. But even if he couldn't describe the perception, it was strong enough to trigger one of the headaches he feared.

He put aside his book. He tried to ignore the pain and set out arranging his clothes in his trunk, though they weren't due to reach New York for three days.