He was to be the ship’s first captain, had come across for the launch with Lloyd and Matilda and the four young Feiffer sons—Henry, the eldest at seven, and Leander, the baby not even a year old, with Clifford and Robert in between, all being cared for somewhere out of the way by their two nannies. Matilda had hoped to warm up to Graves on the voyage. He was not unkind, never impolite, but his reserve seemed unbreachable. Even her boldest attempts to discover something of his inner workings had yielded nothing. What drew you to the sea, Captain Graves? she’d asked one night at dinner. He’d said, Go far enough in any direction, and you’ll find the sea, Mrs. Feiffer, and she’d felt reproached. To her, he’d come to represent the basic impenetrability of male life. Lloyd loved him with a wholeheartedness he didn’t seem to lavish on anyone else, certainly not Matilda. I owe him my life, Lloyd had said many times. Your life can’t be a debt, she’d countered once, or then it’s not really yours, and nothing has been saved. But Lloyd had only laughed, asked if she had considered becoming a philosopher.
They had crewed on a barque together as young men, Graves and Lloyd. Graves had been a working sailor and Lloyd, just graduated from Yale, was half pretending to be. Ernst, Lloyd’s father, had said he needed to learn the ropes （literally） if he was to inherit L&O. When hapless Lloyd fell overboard off Chile, Graves was quick and accurate enough to throw him a line and haul him back aboard. Since then, Lloyd had always venerated Graves as a savior. （But you’re the one who caught the line, Matilda said. You’re the one who hung on.） After Chile, as Lloyd ascended through the firm, so, too, did Graves.
The platform was no longer in the shade. Sweat was making Matilda’s corset stick and chafe. Lloyd seemed to think she’d been born knowing how to christen a ship. “Just break the bottle on the bow, Tildy,” he’d said. “It’s very simple.”
Would she know when the moment came? Would they remember to tell her? All she knew was that she’d apparently be signaled （by whom, she wasn’t sure） at the moment the ship began to slide, and she was to crack the whiskey against the bow, christening it Josephina Eterna, after her husband’s mistress.
When, months before, at the breakfast table, she’d asked Lloyd what the ship would be called, he had told her without lowering his newspaper.
Matilda’s cup had not rattled when she returned it to its saucer. At least she could be proud of that.
She had been young but not too young when Lloyd married her, twenty-one to his thirty-six, old enough to know she was being chosen for her fortune and breeding potential, not love. All she asked was that Lloyd behave with respectful discretion. She had explained this to him before their engagement, and he had listened kindly and agreed there was much to be said for individual privacy within marriage, especially since bachelor life had suited him so well for so long. “We understand each other, then,” she had said and offered him her hand. Solemnly, he had shaken her hand and then kissed her, full on the mouth, for quite some time, and she had begun, in spite of herself, to fall in love. Bad luck.
But she would not go back on her word. As best she could, she made peace with Lloyd’s wanderings, directing her passions toward her children and the maintenance of her wardrobe and person. Lloyd regarded her affectionately, she knew, and was more tender in bed than she gathered some husbands were, though she also knew she was fundamentally not to his taste. He preferred temperamental, unappeasable women, usually older than Matilda, often older than even himself, older certainly than the ship’s namesake, this Jo, who was only nineteen, dark and flighty. But Matilda knew enough to know it was often the lover who went against type who undid people.
The ship’s name had seemed a poor repayment of her tolerance and generosity, and as soon as she’d found a moment alone, away from rattling china and servants’ eyes, she had shed a few tears. Then she’d pulled herself together and soldiered on, as always.
On the platform, Lloyd turned to her, wrought up. “It’s almost time.”
She tried to ready herself. The bottle’s neck was too short for her to get a good grip, especially not through her silk gloves, and it slipped from her grasp, landed with a thud perilously close to the platform’s edge. As she picked it up, someone touched her shoulder. Addison Graves. Gently, he took the bottle. “You’d better remove your gloves,” he said. When she had, he wrapped one of her hands around the neck and set the other palm flat against the cork. “Like this,” he said, demonstrating a sideways arcing motion. “Don’t be afraid to take a good swing because it’s bad luck if the bottle doesn’t break.”