Deep scrums had formed around the boats not yet launched or on fire or beached on the sloping portside hull. A dangerous gap was opening between the starboard boats and the ship’s edge.
As Addison passed, a lowering boat wobbled on its ropes, tipped and overturned, dumping people into a sea already teeming with them. Addison felt little for them. People were dying, but soon he would die, too.
At Boat 12, he stopped. The gap was widening. This boat would be among the last launched. With one arm, he clamped the babies against his body. With the other, he drew his pistol and shot into the air.
The passengers screamed and fell away, half flattened, like tall grass in a gust of wind.
He pushed through to the edge of the deck, brandishing the gun. Back, he told them, get back! He cleared a half-moon of space so those going in the boat would have room for a few steps’ running start before leaping over the gap, the strip of far-below black water. The crewmen at the davits, probably doomed themselves, tried to hold the boat steady with hooked poles. The babies cried, but Addison barely heard them.
One by one he selected those who would go in the boat, pulling them out of the crowd, signaling with a flick of the pistol when it was their turn to leap over the gap. Women and children. The women gathered their skirts and jumped. None fell. He began to look for which woman he would hand his children to, who could be trusted to survive.
* * *
—
When the boat was full, he still couldn’t see a face he liked. They were all just strangers, just women with fearful eyes and mouths that jabbered or trembled. In his arms were babies about to be orphaned. He stepped close to the edge, grasping the swaddling of one infant, preparing to hand it across. He didn’t know which twin it was. He was eager to shed his burden, to feel the rising water.
His mistake was to look at the baby’s face, a knot of helpless outrage. One glance dizzied him like an uppercut to the jaw. The water receded, spat him out. How could he entrust his children to unknown women in a small, tippy boat? How could he send them off across a sea full of drowning people who would reach up to grasp at the oars and gunwales like monsters from the deep? He saw the lifeboat capsizing, the babies’ white swaddling fading into the depths like the canvas shrouds he had, in his sailing days, helped wrap around the dead before sliding them overboard. No, he needed to know if they lived, to see them to land or to death himself.
He gathered both twins to his chest, took two long steps and leapt across into the boat. The close-packed women drew back, and he half fell, half stepped among them, his body curving to protect the babies. Regaining his balance, he drew himself up to his full height and roared into the crewmen’s astonished faces, “Lower away!”
Trained to obey, remembering the pistol, they worked the squeaking pulleys. Boat 12 with its cargo of women and children and one man dropped away from the crowd and the smoke, descended past flames poking around the edges of portholes like the fingers of trapped demons. Slowly, jerkily, it made its way down to the water, where it settled with a gentle splash.
New York City
July 1915
Seven months later
A new Feiffer son, born in the night after a short labor. The baby was severed from his mother, knotted off into his own selfhood, bathed and wrapped and fed from the breast. George, named after the king, a fifth son, though the five Feiffer boys would never be all together on this earth.
Lloyd collapsed beside Matilda, dressed but collar undone, tiny George between them. “How do you feel?” he said.
“Tired,” she said, with a note of incredulity that she must say so. “But happy. And relieved to be happy. That surge of feeling—I had it with the others, but I didn’t know if it was still possible.”
He rested a finger against the infant’s cheek. Since Matilda had discovered she was pregnant, not long before the loss of the Josephina, Lloyd had been, as a gesture of atonement and superstition, faithful. He’d found, these eight months, a monkish peacefulness in a life with only one woman. （Though there was nothing monkish about how his new fortune was accruing thanks to the war, raining merrily down on top of his old one.）
He had been sloppy with the Josephina, eager and amateurish, driven by anger at his father and grief for Leander, and he had paid a terrible price. Of course, the hundreds burned and drowned had paid a worse one. And Addison Graves had been sent to Sing Sing.
Lloyd had only wanted to contribute to the effort against the Germans, to do something, and when his friend Sir Gerald de Redvers had suggested he might smuggle armaments to England on his ships, he’d leapt at the idea. In his haste, he hadn’t sought enough advice, hadn’t taken enough precautions. He hadn’t even told Addison what was in the crates, only asked him—told him, really—to overlook their absence on the manifest.