Henry, who was twelve, had come to him in his study one night and politely asked to be sent away to school. Lloyd had demurred, saying his mother needed him close.
“But she doesn’t even want to see me,” Henry had said. “She never answers when I knock.”
“Women,” Lloyd had said, “resort to theater when they wish to demonstrate the depth and superiority of their emotions. Indulgence will only prolong the spectacle. She’ll emerge when she perceives no advantage to continuing.”
The boy had gone away, stung and downcast. In the small hours, tired of lying awake, Lloyd had thrown off his blankets and gone striding through the intervening rooms and into Matilda’s bedroom intending to scold her for her torpor, to command her to rouse herself. But Tildy, in her bed, had wordlessly lifted her arms before he could speak, and he had fallen into them and wept onto her chest. This was the first time he had cried for Leander except for the day the boy died, when he had curled forward to submerge his face in his bath and wailed into the water. Nor had he embraced Tildy since…he could not remember. She smoothed his hair while he cried, and he cried until he slept.
In the morning, he left her room without a word. But the next night he returned to her, and the warmth of her thawed him. The night after that he had pushed up her nightgown and made love to her.
Since then, a week had passed, the days and nights taking on an inverted quality. The dark spirit ruled in the day, and at night his wife’s body exorcised it. What Tildy thought about his visits he didn’t know, but on this morning, as he left the house, she had been sitting at the breakfast table with the boys, wan and silent but upright, among the living.
* * *
—
Lloyd’s chauffeur drove him down almost to the end of Broadway, not far from where Manhattan dipped its toe into the sea. After the birth of Robert, their third son, Lloyd and Matilda had sold their Gramercy Park house and joined the northward migration of fashionable souls to a new house at Fifty-Second Street, lengthening his commute. He’d thought about relocating L&O’s offices at least a bit uptown—some of their business was already being conducted at the Chelsea Piers—but the idea of separating himself from the entrenched and collusive downtown herd of shipping offices and ticketing halls made him uneasy.
But then he worried he was becoming pigheaded like his father. Even as Ernst’s wealth had begun to accumulate, he had refused to move the family from their cramped apartment on Pearl Street. Having endured the upheaval of one child, he refused to give his wife another. He yielded from sail to steam power too slowly, without imagination. He only ever spoke German at home, took only German-language newspapers, seemed to have no interest in the country where he had settled beyond its capacity as an enormous machine that manufactured money.
On the stroke of eight, the chauffeur stopped in front of a stately limestone building, and Lloyd let himself out. He ignored the doorman’s flourish of welcome, walked swiftly across the columned lobby to the elevators. The ninth floor was deserted at this early hour. On the walls hung immense maps, marked with routes and studded here and there with pushpins designating ships’ locations, adjusted daily. What little space was left was occupied by framed paintings of the L&O fleet, most prominently the Josephina Eterna and her newer sister ship the Maria Fortuna, named upon her launch for an aging soprano Lloyd had been enamored with at the time.
In Lloyd’s office, the early editions had already been arrayed on his desk by his assistant, a marvelously unobtrusive young man. Ordinarily Lloyd would call for a cup of tea and page efficiently through the newspapers, but on this day he sat motionless, gazing at the war headlines. Germans marauding through Belgium. Trenches dug as graves for the living. The war sinking into the soil of the Continent.
A sudden red burst of rage, as though from poked-at coals. He wished for Germany to lose the war, to be humiliated, for his father to return from the dead to see it happen. He wished for everyone to learn what it was to lose a son. He wished for a black slick of grief to spread across the planet.
Thousands had left New York, eagerly returning to their birth countries to participate in the bloodshed. Immigration in reverse. The wave of enthusiasm had passed, though, and L&O’s ships were running eastbound at less than half capacity. Lloyd wondered if Ernst would have gone back to Germany, taken up a rifle in his bony old hands. Perhaps. Or he might have found some covert way of aiding the fatherland. By spying, maybe, or by smuggling supplies and munitions. Or he might have been too stubborn, too slow to do anything, even to profit.