Page 41 of Under the Stars

An Account of the Sinking of the Steamship Atlantic, by Providence Dare (excerpt)

Winthrop Island, New York

Starkweather set one hand on the edge of the bunk and struggled to his feet. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “That was the anchor, wasn’t it?”

“The main anchor, I think. The kedges will go next. Come on, we’ve got to—”

The ship shuddered again. Already I could feel the change in her, like a horse breaking free of its harness. Starkweather grabbed me by the waist and hauled me to my feet. My mind was still fogged, my limbs heavy.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He snatched my hand and dragged me from the cabin to the grand saloon. I felt a gust of wind and spray and turned in that direction just as a cataclysm shook the boat and sent us sprawling to the floor.

“We’ve hit!” I cried. But I couldn’t hear my own words. They were lost in the noise of splintering wood and crashing seas.

The bow swung round in a strange, disembodied surge, as if we were soaring through the air. Falling through some void. Then a wave caught her broadside, flinging us to starboard and onto the rocks.

Starkweather lay to my right where he had fallen.

He raised his head and saw me. Below us, the deck slanted to starboard.

Another wave crashed into the larboard side—not like before, when we rode the crest of the water, pitching and rolling but intact.

Now the sea broke us apart. I heard the smash of wood, the bloodcurdling screams of men.

Behind me, where we had stood an instant ago, the deck tore open.

A titanic metallic noise rang over the chaos—all the machinery of boilers and engine crashed through the bottom of the ship to the reef below.

Starkweather crawled across the floor and grabbed my hand. “On deck!” he shouted. “Now!”

He braced himself and rose. Our shoes had remained on the floor of Starkweather’s stateroom and my feet in their stockings kept slipping on the fine, slanting Axminster carpet that buckled beneath me.

Desperately I planted them and found a pillar with my hand.

Starkweather grabbed the other. Another wave smashed through the side and drenched us.

Starkweather pulled me upright and together we climbed, I don’t know how, sideways like crabs, toward the larboard gangway while the cold sea hurtled over us.

I caught hold of the guardrail and clung to the icy metal with all my strength, as another wave dashed me against the remains of the ship’s side, then the undertow shoved me back out.

In the instant of slack between sea and undertow, I looked to the stern and shouted in horror.

The ladies’ saloon and everyone in her—Mrs. Walton and her children, Mrs. Thompson and her boy—my berth where I should have been lying, had Starkweather not carried me to his stateroom—my carpetbag, my little everything—had slid into the sea.

—

I remember the moment I stood at the top of the back stairs and stared at Mr. Irving’s body where it lay below me.

His body was arranged at odd angles—a forearm this way, a foot that way; the bent neck and the leg snapped at midthigh, like a broken doll at the bottom of a chest. I was too far away to see the wound on the side of his head, but I watched the progress of the blood that spread before my eyes in a black puddle across the floor.

You’re in shock. I recall the words in my head and the gentle voice that echoed there.

You must do something, I thought. You must go to him.

But the arrangement of that body at the foot of the stairs could not have supported human existence.

Was not Mr. Irving. Mr. Irving was alive —such a man simply could not be otherwise than throbbing with life.

Not hours ago, he had walked and breathed and eaten and talked.

He had stood before his easel and painted the curve of my ankle.

He had plowed me with his usual vigor. He had engaged with relish in all the activities of a man in the prime of life.

The weather that day had been fine and mild for early November, and after working all morning in the studio, we had taken a long ramble along the river.

I still recall the line of his shoulders beneath his frock coat and the brisk rhythm of his stride and the tensile strength of the fingers that held mine.

We had returned home and I had made tea, which I brought on a tray to the studio.

To my surprise, he was not alone.

I had not seen my father in some years, yet here he stood, without invitation, boots planted in the middle of the rug, wearing a threadbare coat of plain black broadcloth and a stained neckcloth.

Mr. Irving had already removed his own coat to work in his snowy shirt and striped yellow waistcoat and trousers—a lion to my father’s mangy wolfhound.

The painting on the easel was only partly finished—the background had yet to be realized in full—but I imagine it would have been a shock to any father to see his daughter so described, as I rose from a woodland pool and the water coursed down my breasts and my legs and the swell of my gravid belly.

Mr. Irving had begun and abandoned it last summer, and only returned to the image in recent weeks, when our child began to transform the contours of the body he had so intimately known.

Each detail absorbed him. He would position me so the light from the windows washed over my skin and then with his eyes and fingers and mouth would examine the qualities of each section of flesh, each angle of my cheek and breast and hair and foot and belly, so that when he picked up his paints and brush, he might transmit the vital force into the canvas.

I remember how Mr. Irving stood between my father and the painting when I entered the room in the sack gown I had taken to wearing about the house, bearing the tea tray in my hands.

My father turned and called me a filthy whore.

Mr. Irving said he was a dog and struck him such a blow that he stumbled to the rug, swearing.

When I cried out and knelt to render him comfort, he swore and pushed me away.

I remember he smelled of spirits, but then my father had always smelled of spirits.

I fell backward and Mr. Irving roared with an almost insensate rage. He drew up my father by the collar and dragged him out of the house.

When Mr. Irving returned, I asked him what my father had wanted. He said that my father had heard some rumor of my disgrace, had seen his suspicions confirmed in the portrait now standing upon Mr. Irving’s easel, and approached him for money—in exchange, more or less, for my virtue.

Did you give it to him? I asked, and Mr. Irving replied, shocked, Of course not.

Then he gathered me tenderly in his arms and said that perhaps we should move elsewhere, perhaps we should marry. I told him I would rather bear him a dozen bastards than submit to some conventional arrangement that would quench the newbuilt fire of his invention.

For the rest of the day, he seemed subdued.

He made me rest on the couch and served me tea while he assured me, again and again, of his devotion—so total, he said, as to outstrip the boundaries of reason.

He put away the damning portrait in the locked cabinet where he kept the others.

He had wanted to bring them all to public notice in a single exhibition, he told me.

This new portrait as its fertile centerpiece. He thought to name it Rebirth .

I don’t remember what we did the rest of the day—I suppose we read to each other and ate our supper, damped the fires and went to bed, where—as was his habit since I shared my first suspicion of our happy expectation—he shaped his hands in a fever of rapture around my belly before he removed his own clothes and united us in carnal intercourse.

I remember how, as I neared the culmination, he withdrew from between my legs, yet short of his own crisis, and rose to study the flush of my skin—so he said—the temperature of my bosom as the storm broke over me.

Those were the exact words he used; I can yet hear his voice as he said them.

He stood by the bed and traced the slopes of my flesh with his finger as if the tip were his paintbrush, and I his canvas.

At last, when he had satisfied the thirst of his eyes, he indulged himself inside me for the thousandth time, for the final time.

I relate these details not to titillate but rather to communicate his titanic vigor in those final hours, the force of life that throttled in his veins—so incompatible with the broken figure at the bottom of the stairs that, weeks later, I refused to believe it was him.

—

Now, as I beheld the remains of the cabin I had so lately occupied and heard the screams of the women and children crushed among the splintered ruins and the thundering surf, that disbelief returned to me.

This wreck could not be the proud Atlantic . Could not possibly be the same ship that had ridden this hurricane without a leak, not a single parting of its splendid wood.

I heard Starkweather shout my name. The last syllable drowned in the sea that engulfed me, in the undertow that washed me the other way.

I wrapped my left arm and the fingers of my right hand around the guardrail.

My legs and my skirt caught in some debris that tumbled from the saloon.

Pain blinded me. I thought of the child inside me—imagined the tiny head, the arms and legs and fingers and toes, all fighting for life.

I tried to move, but the ship held me fast.

Then Starkweather’s arm came around my waist. His hands worked to free the tangle around my legs—the remains of somebody’s life preserver, the broken arm of a chair.

My skirt tore. Another sea crashed over us.

He brought me to my feet. Together we clambered forward on top of the guardrail, which was now turned upward by the hard list of the ship to starboard.

The bow, he kept shouting. The bow.