From keel to waterline she was rust red, and above that, specially painted for the launch, she was white as a bride. （White made for better newspaper pictures.） After the flashbulbs have popped, after she has been moored lonely in the river for her fitting-out, men will stand on planks hung down her sides on thick ropes and paint the plates and rivets of her hull glossy black.
Her two funnels will be hoisted up, bolted down, lashed in place. Her decks will be planked in teak, her corridors and salons paneled in mahogany and walnut and oak. There will be sofas and settees and chaises, beds and bathtubs, seascapes in gilded frames, gods and goddesses in bronze and alabaster. The first-class china will be gilt-edged, patterned with gold anchors （the emblem of L&O Lines）。 For second class: blue anchors, blue edging （blue, the line’s color）。 Third class will make do with plain white crockery and the crew with tin. Boxcars will arrive full of crystal and silver and porcelain, damask and velvet. Cranes will hoist aboard three pianos, dangling in nets like stiff-legged beasts. A grove of potted palms will be wheeled up the gangway. Chandeliers will be hung. Deck chairs hinged like alligator jaws will be stacked. Eventually the first load of coal will be poured in through apertures low in the hull, down into bunkers below the waterline, far from the finery. The first fire will be lit deep in her furnaces.
But on the day of her launch she was still only a shell, a bare and comfortless wedge of steel. A crowd jostled in her shadow: ship workers in rowdy clumps, Glaswegian families out for the spectacle, urchin boys peddling newspapers and sandwiches. A brilliantly blue sky flew overhead like a pennant. In this city of fog and soot, such a sky could only be a good omen. A brass band played.
Mrs. Lloyd Feiffer, Matilda, wife of the ship’s new American owner, stood on a platform edged with blue-and-white bunting, a bottle of Scotch tucked under her arm. “Shouldn’t it be champagne?” she had asked her husband.
“Not in Glasgow,” he’d said.
Matilda was to break the bottle against the ship, christening it with the name she could scarcely bear to think of. She was impatient for the cathartic shattering of glass, for her task to be done, but now she could only wait. There was some kind of delay. Lloyd fidgeted, making occasional comments to the naval architect, who appeared rigid with anxiety. A few unhappy Englishmen in bowler hats milled around the platform, and a pair of Scotsmen from the shipbuilding firm, and several other men she couldn’t identify.
This ship had already been half built when L&O Lines, founded in New York by Lloyd’s father, Ernst, in 1857 and inherited by Lloyd in 1906, acquired the failing English line that had commissioned it. （Commissioned her, Lloyd was always correcting. But, to Matilda, ships would always be its.） The sheathing had been under way when money ran out and was resumed once Lloyd’s dollars were converted to sterling, then steel. The men in bowler hats, up from London, remarking morosely among themselves about the glorious weather, had conceived of the ship, argued over its blueprints, chosen a sensible name that Lloyd had disregarded. All that, only to have ended up obsolete: cuckolds in carefully brushed hats on a bunting-swagged platform, the brass band’s rousing march bubbling around their feet. Tallow had been smeared on the slipway to grease the ship’s path, and Matilda could feel its thick animal odor permeating her clothes, coating her skin.
Lloyd had wanted a new liner to reinvigorate L&O. When Ernst died, the fleet had been tired and outdated, mostly tramp steamers plying the coastwise trade, plus some passenger-cargo ships chugging across the Atlantic and a few tired windjammers still running the Pacific grain and guano routes. This ship would not be the largest or fastest or most opulent liner crossing from Europe—no threat to the White Star Line monsters being built in Belfast—but Lloyd had told Matilda it would be a respectable ante at the fat cats’ table.
“What’s the news?” Lloyd barked, startling her. The question was addressed to Addison Graves, Captain Graves, who was standing nearby—looming, really, though his habitual hunch seemed intended as a preemptive apology for his height. He was thin, almost gaunt, but with bones as massive and heavy as cudgels.
“It’s a problem with the trigger,” he told Lloyd. “Shouldn’t be much longer.”
Lloyd frowned at the ship. “It’s like she’s in shackles. She’s meant to be at sea. Don’t you think, Graves?” He turned suddenly ebullient. “Don’t you think she’s absolutely magnificent?”
The bow towered over them, sharp as a blade. “She’ll be a fine ship,” Graves said mildly.