They were embarking Cabin Class. Several hundred had disappeared out the door to the dock on the Hudson. So many to carry over the icy deep. He wondered did the captain dream of sinking, as many nights he himself dreamt of fire trapping and engulfing his congregants while he said Mass.
He closed his eyes, waiting to be called, but his attention was again pulled by the screeching. All morning from above, from the lip of white where Queen Mary’s steel hull met her main deck, seamen’s voices, strange and high as gull cries, had come spilling down into the expectant gap between ship and terminal hall, and once, snatched by a gust, a lively rag that twirled in midair, like a dancer, before falling.
The woman sitting beside him had noticed him also watch that rag’s dance through the high clerestory windows, and said it reminded her of Gene Kelly.
‘In Cover Girl? His reflection in a store window steps out into the street and dances with him like a ghost.’ Both her index fingers pointed up, side-by-side, into a synchronised spin.
‘Haven’t seen it, I’m afraid.’
Getting only that, and a brief smiling shrug out of him, she lapsed into kneading the palm of her right hand, as if to confirm it was flesh. No ring on her left ring finger. Though she was, by his estimate, in her forties.
She sprung to her feet, seemingly offended by his failure to engage, and strode off. He felt responsible—it was terribly rude of him not to entertain her overture to conversation—and wished she would come back. But she was already taking a stool at the coffee bar across the concourse. Sighing, he tried to pass off his reticence as exhaustion. He’d had so much to do in the parish lately.
He had to admit though to bouts of insularity, verging on self-absorption. Not uncommon in spiritual seekers of mystical inclination. Usually the obligations of the cloth kept him from retreating into himself too long. Even when he didn’t feel like it, he had to attend to his parishioners. A weary shepherd couldn’t abandon his flock to the wolves.
But he was off duty now, if a priest ever could be. His clerical garb was packed away in his suitcase. For this voyage, he wished to be a nobody. On the PA loudspeakers, they announced they were boarding his sequence of passengers. He opened his eyes, and rose to join the shuffling procession.
Halfway across the elevated gangway, he paused to search for that rag on the oily dock below. Stevedores and porters thronged the dock, moving mounds of baggage and cargo. The thought of the rag stamped under their feet summoned regret, and—darker, warmer—longing. Tutting passengers pushed past him. It was no good. He crossed the rest of the gangway, and showed his ticket to another steward, who directed him along the liner’s flank.
Hurrying past open cabin doors, through which surprised faces looked up at him like he was intruding, he did not know why he hurried. He only knew he had to find his cabin. The urgency, ridiculous, agitated him. He slowed his step. He imagined the woman from the waiting room was staying in the cabin next to his. He would apologise, say of course he’d seen Cover Girl. It was just that it was released during the war years, as she knew, and he was a young medic on an RAF base in Kent when they screened it, and well—there was much about that period he didn’t like to recall.
He’d confess he was an odd sort of fellow who didn’t watch films anymore, or speak about them, but he would like again to be the sort who did. Perhaps wondering what he meant, she would invite him in for a drink.
(Continues below paywall)
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