As the blue forms of land receded farther and farther into the distance, Christine wandered around the deck, picking more snacks off trays, until she found a small semiprivate nook on a balcony. She eased onto a wooden deck chair, leaned back, and gazed out at the open ocean, feeling like a character in an old movie. The Pacific was totally foreign to her. She was used to the Gulf of Maine’s heavy rocking chill, the steady winds constantly ruffling its blue-gray surface, water that never warmed up fully even on the hottest summer days, so when you plunged in, your skin burning from sunbathing, the shock of icy brine made you hold your breath and your skin tingle as if it had been mildly burned. This was a different ocean altogether, misty and amiable, a placid, pale green, gently rocking bath splashed by frank sunlight. Even the air smelled warm, with whiffs of blooming underwater algae that thrived in body-temperature shallows. She pictured the weather turning rough, hard winds sending high white-foamed waves cascading against the upper decks, the ship juddering and pitching, and shivered with happy imagined horror. The forecast for the next two weeks held nothing but sunshine and calm seas.
She picked up one of the cruise brochures lying on the side table next to an ashtray. The Isabella’s shape on the cover was reduced to a few lines: her bow was slender and high, pointed and aerodynamic, her stern curved like an Art Deco bar, half a flying saucer, out over the water. The ship had three cross-shaped masts interspersed with two funnels that slanted back like the much-larger Queen Mary’s. Her foredeck was clear, so her unencumbered nose cut through the water. The highest decks rose steeply from her middle, planted there like a building.
On the first page was a map of the ship. “C” and “B” decks were at the bottom, where most of the crew and staff worked and lived and where the stores and engine room were. Then came “A” deck with the restaurant, buffet, and galleys, and above that the main deck, then the sun, promenade, bridge, and pool decks above. The pool deck had a raised solarium at the stern, more suites and cabins in the middle with a catwalk on either side, and up front, a bar by the swimming pool. Christine resolved to spend the bulk of her waking hours there, drinking and reading and swimming and soaking up the sunlight. It was the least she could do, since Valerie had to work the entire time. She stretched and yawned.
On the next page she found a bullet-point list of facts about the Queen Isabella. The ship’s body was 674 feet long and 86 feet wide and 28,600 gross tons. Her record speed was 26 knots, and her cruising radius was 20,000 miles, whatever that meant. She had a passenger capacity of 976, although on this, her final voyage, the brochure said, the guest list had been cut down to 400 so that everyone could stay in upper-deck staterooms and suites, and to make “the cruising experience feel more intimate and exclusive.” Christine wondered uncharitably if this was because the lower passenger cabins were unfit for habitation, maybe beginning to mold and decay. Or else they just hadn’t been able to fill the ship with passengers.
She looked up from the brochure at the mild carpet of rippling water under the sky, two parallel planes through visible space of pure vanishing blue that appeared to meet at the soft gray horizon line that kept receding as the ship plowed on. Voices were amplified by the warm spray in the air, increasing in volume then fading out and replaced by others as people moved about the deck. To her relief, she heard no children’s shrieks or squeals or whines. The cutoff age, she had been told, was sixteen, but even teenagers seemed in short supply. There was one sullen-looking, slightly overweight college-aged girl in a blue sweatshirt sitting in a chair reading the same brochure, seemingly as engrossed as Christine in the Isabella’s facts and background. She looked up and met Christine’s eye and immediately looked away. She struck Christine as the kind of girl who would keep to herself for the duration of the voyage, watching the drunken, carefree adults around her with satirical sharpness, recording her observations in a journal. Christine had been the same way at that age.
The third and fourth pages of the brochure were taken up by a history of the Queen Isabella, written by Tye and James Blevins, whoever they were. Christine braced herself for the usual groan-worthy cheeseball prose of restaurant menus or cheap museum placards, but she was pleasantly surprised and even amused by the cheekily ironic, fairy tale–like tone.
“Once upon a time,” the story began, “in 1953, a ship named the Queen Isabella was born. This was a heady era, the golden age of capitalism and nuclear energy and a generally held, naively wide-eyed belief in human progress. In those days, it was considered romantic to smoke and glamorous to drink Coca-Cola and patriotic to support the automotive industry by driving cars that looked like bloated fish.”
Christine glanced up at the teenage girl. She was absorbed in her own brochure.
“The Isabella started out her life as the oldest of identical triplets: the (now-defunct) Queen Eleanor and the (oft-renamed, soon-to-be-scrapped) Queen Melisende. The three sisters had been commissioned five years earlier, in 1948, by Anne-Marie de Belloc, the reclusive, childless, and (filthy) rich widow of a French industrialist, and were built by Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde at Lormont near Bordeaux on the Gironde estuary. Unfortunately, due to some bad investments and even worse luck, the widow went broke, and by 1953, the year of the Queen Isabella’s completion, Mme de Belloc had sold her houses, her considerable stash of jewels, and other holdings to pay her debts. But, by dint of a sleight-of-hand false sale to her maid, she managed to keep her ships. The Isabella was put to work immediately, carrying paying passengers and plying the Mediterranean, to support not only Mme. de Belloc, but also her poor half-formed sisters, the Queens Melisende and Eleanor, stalled in a Marseille shipyard. They languished on the ways for the next two years and, when the former millionaire could no longer afford the rental of their berths, were almost abandoned forever and sold for scrap. Then, at the proverbial eleventh hour, de Belloc, forty-three but still seaworthy herself, managed to wed an elderly Greek shipping magnate, Stavros Chronis, whose fortunes allowed the two sister ships to be completed, outfitted with teak-decked balconies, beveled chrome vitrines, crystal chandeliers, and soaking tubs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.”
Christine envisioned Anne-Marie with a blond scalloped bouffant, dove-breasted, hard-faced, but with vulnerable brown eyes. She’d married the rich Greek to save her ships, a marriage that Christine pictured as polite, chilly, and entirely public except when Stavros demanded that his wife fulfill her sexual duties.
“Each ship’s accommodations ranged from the two super-luxurious multiroom double-balconied owner’s and presidential suites, bulging from the sides with views both fore and aft, all the way down to the inner windowless bunk-bed cells for the crew. During the early 1960s, the Chronis Corporation sailed the now extremely popular sisters under the Greek flag on a leisurely circuit around the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, Valencia, Lisbon, Naples, Cannes, Thessaloníki, Barcelona, Beirut, Athens, and Genoa.”
The names evoked in Christine a sunstruck, piney fantasia of olives, retsina, grilled sardines, and hot late nights in seaside cafés.
“Even though the three sisters were virtually identical, equally beautiful and luxurious, the Isabella was always the favorite. Maybe because of her status as the first to be launched and sailed, maybe because of the fortuitous historical connotations of her name, Americans in particular (some of whom were at least passingly familiar with Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine but not, generally, with Queen Melisende of Jerusalem) preferred her. The rich and famous of the era booked her suites and dined on filet mignon and oysters Rockefeller at the captain’s table, danced the cha-cha and the tango to hot bands in the ballroom, drank martinis and cognac in the Starlight Lounge, smoked cheroots in the casino. Natalie Wood posed for a spread in Life magazine aboard the Isabella. Buzz Aldrin and his wife enjoyed a luxurious week in one of her first-class suites, as did President Nixon. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were caught necking by paparazzi near the swimming pool. Gene Kelly made a splash in the ballroom for a dazzling night, squiring several starstruck matrons around the teak parquet floor, dipping one so low her diamond brooch fell off, then famously dipping her again at the end of the dance so he could pick it up again and hand it back to her.”