The Ocean Liner

Washington, D.C.

The room was cold and bare. It had whitewashed walls and a tile floor that smashed anything you dropped on it. There was a plain wooden cross hanging over the bed, but no Jesus nailed on it. Rosemary sometimes imagined that Jesus had quietly departed, taking the nails with him. It was hard to imagine that Jesus would have enjoyed this room, or indeed the gloomy convent chapel where mass was said every day and the long benches had no padding and were hard enough to make your backside ache and leave deep furrows in your knees.

Rosemary hated this place. She hated the Clorox smell of the nuns. She hated their hard hands and cold eyes. She had never been lonelier in her life. No matter how bad things had been before, there had always been smiling faces around her, the laughter of children, the sound of music. Not here.

Here there were no games. No children. There were endless lessons, stony tutors who told her she wasn’t working hard enough, didn’t apply herself enough, wasn’t devout enough. There were endless prayers, and a sharp tap on the shoulder if she fell asleep before they were done. And there was endless isolation.

She hadn’t been happy since coming back to the States, not one hour of one day. She missed Belmont House terribly. She missed the children she’d been in charge of, and her friends and the fun that had filled every day.

It was all so different here. The hours and the days were empty. And nothing came to fill the emptiness except bad things. Even when she was allowed to go home for a day, nothing worked out. Mother seemed to detest the sight of her. Her brothers and sisters were always busy. They had no time for her. Jack had his graduation and his book and all his classmates from Harvard. Eunice had her tennis and Kick had her English friends, and she wasn’t invited to their parties any more. They said she embarrassed them, even though she tried so hard not to.

Even Joe Junior was impatient with her. He didn’t want to wrestle with her or cuddle her any more, or listen to her read Winnie-the-Pooh. So she’d been pushed in with the younger ones, and that was no good because they made her angry, and then she would lose her temper, and she wouldn’t know what she was doing until there were screams and tears and being locked in her room. They’d said if she hurt her little brothers and sisters again, she wouldn’t be allowed to see them any more. And she hated to see them shrink away from her after she had been angry.

She missed Daddy terribly.

She had seen so little of him since they’d come back from England. He’d never really explained why they’d had to come back, right when everything was so fine for her. When she’d asked him, he’d got angry and said the damn British had shown their true colours, and blind people didn’t have eyes to see, and stupid people didn’t like to face facts. He’d said they would be going back to England when the Germans were in charge there, which would be pretty damn soon. In the meantime he was being replaced by someone who was happy to see young men die, which sounded just awful to Rosemary.

Then there had been the Democratic National Something in Chicago, and after that he was always on the phone, sometimes shouting, saying he was too old to start over again. He’d said his career was in ruins, and that old goat Roosevelt had stabbed him in the back at last, just as he’d always known he would.

Rosemary hated Roosevelt for hurting Daddy.

There were a lot of things she hated.

She lay straight in the bed, the way Sister Katherine had left her, with her arms out of the blankets and stretched straight on either side of her, despite the autumn chill in the room. Hands that wandered under the blankets were strictly forbidden. Because you would play with your you-know-what down there, and the chromo of Mother Mary was watching from the opposite wall, ready to snitch on you if you did. And that would earn you the cane on your wicked fingers until they swelled up red and tears spurted out of your eyes.

She was twenty-two, and she had never been so unhappy in her life.

The sounds of the convent slowly stilled. Doors banged, bells chimed. Voices faded. Even when there was complete silence, Rosemary didn’t put her hands under the blanket. She had a better plan.

She slipped out of her bed and went to her closet. The dark-red dress was one of her favourites. The nuns had tried to forbid it, but she’d got Daddy to explain that she needed at least some nice things to wear. She couldn’t go around in brown or grey all day. She put it on and peered at herself in the dim mirror. Of course there was no makeup allowed, not even face powder; but a friend in England had taught her to slap her own cheeks, which she did smartly, closing her eyes against the sting, and bite her own lips until they looked pink and fresh. That helped things a lot. She practised her smile a couple of times. It was her best feature, they always said, her brilliant smile. They said it lit up the room. It didn’t light up this sombre cell, but it did gleam back at her from the mirror. She brushed her hair and clipped on the pearls Mother had bought her in London. She pulled on a raincoat because it looked like being a drizzly night.

Then, with the silent skill of long practice, she climbed out of the window.

Her favourite place was a bar called The Shamrock, but there were only a handful of old men in it tonight. It was a Wednesday night and most of the bars were half-empty. But getting out of the convent on a Friday was almost impossible. So she walked around the corner to Mac’s. Mac’s was always busy, but it was also a little seedier. Still, sometimes that suited her.

The jukebox was playing Glen Miller at a nickel a shot and the air was blue with tobacco smoke. Rosemary took off her raincoat and hoisted herself on to a stool at the bar. There was a battered cigarette in the pocket of her raincoat. She straightened it as best she could and put it in her mouth. She waited. It never took very long.

A Zippo appeared in front of her eyes. A hand thumbed it open and flicked it alight. She half-turned to check the owner of the hand and the lighter. He was middle-aged but pleasant-looking, so she accepted the light, tasting the gasoline fumes of the Zippo as she sucked.

She expelled the smoke upward. ‘Why, thank you, kind sir.’ She’d learned to say that from a movie she’d seen.

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ the man offered.

‘Sure.’

‘What’ll it be?’

Rosemary looked at the rows and rows of bottles behind the bar. A tall, yellow one caught her eye. She pointed. ‘I’ll have that.’

‘Galliano? You Italian?’

‘Irish.’

‘Ah well, nobody’s perfect.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s just a joke.’

‘Oh.’ She laughed to show him she got the joke, though she didn’t.

His face changed. ‘You’re beautiful when you laugh. Say, have we met before?’

‘No,’ Rosemary said, ‘we haven’t.’

‘I could swear I know you from somewhere.’

‘Maybe,’ she replied with a wink, ‘I’m just the girl of your dreams.’

He moved closer to her. ‘Damn if you might just be the answer to a prayer.’

His name was Lou. He didn’t ask for her surname, which was good, because she knew she had to be careful about that, and he didn’t tell her his, though she saw the wedding ring on his hand.

The Galliano turned out to be a good choice. The stuff was delicious. It tasted of liquorice and vanilla and it made her feel floaty and gay. Lou was funny and knew lots of jokes. He kept starting them with, ‘Have you heard this one?’ And he kept buying her drinks.

At two a.m. the bar closed. They spilled out on to the sidewalk, where it was drizzling a bit, and the asphalt was shiny under the streetlamps. Lou suggested they go to his boarding house for a nightcap. Rosemary asked him why he’d taken so long to get around to suggesting that.

They had to creep up the stairs with their shoes in their hands, so as not to wake the landlady, but Rosemary was used to that. In his room, they said nothing to each other. Lou had run out of jokes.

He wasn’t rough, the way some men were, but his kisses were infinitely sad. There was no pleasure in this, and much sorrow; but it was better than the empty loneliness. For these moments, which were usually so soon over, she felt part of the world, desired by someone, needed by someone for something. Not a nobody offering empty prayers to a God who had long ago departed.

She tried to think of Cubby, of what it had been like with him. But she couldn’t really remember his face any more, only the way he had made her feel. And remembering a happy feeling when you were sad was the worst thing of all. After a while she stopped trying to see his face in her mind.

The nuns were waiting for her when she got back to the convent at dawn. At the sight of them, Rosemary was sick, spewing out the sour liquorice and curdled vanilla of all the Galliano she had drunk.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell Daddy. Please don’t.’

But she knew they would. The sick puddled around her feet and they had to step through it as they took her arms and led her to the shower.