THE GOLDEN SWAN by Edith Pearlman
“The Golden Swan is the grandchild of the Normandie,” said Dr. Hartmann in his frail but grating voice. What on earth was he talking about now? His slight accent was German, she guessed. “I mean, Bella, that cruise ships descend from the great transatlantic liners. There was a time, before airplanes, when if you wanted to cross the ocean you boarded a steamship.” His student–for Bella felt like his student, though she and Dr. Hartmann were in fact fellow passengers–fingered her limp hair. Dr. Hartmann was what you called professorial–yesterday he had delivered himself of a brief impromptu lecture on semiotics. She wished she’d understood it. “And there was a time before steamships when, if you wanted to cross the ocean, or even if you didn’t, you sailed on a three-masted schooner.”
“Even if you didn’t . . .” echoed Bella.
“If you happened to be a slave.”
Their small library–not theirs alone, but they were the sole occupants–was in the innermost portion of the lowest deck available to passengers. It was entirely devoid of natural light. It had a patterned rug, leather chairs, lamps with parchment shades, and four walls of shelves entirely filled with books . . . some stern hardbacks, some lively paperbacks.
“And now,” Dr. Hartmann wound up, “these ships are constructed solely for the joys of the cruise.” How joyless his voice was. “For swimming, dancing, sunbathing, eating, gambling. The ports-of-call, you will see for yourself, are incidental. And I have heard of ships which make no stops, giving up all pretense of purpose.” He produced an inadvertent shudder, and then affected to twinkle.
This cruise was a gift to Bella and to Robin from Grandpa, a gift to his dear girls, sweet as candy, pretty as pictures. He liked a little flesh on a female, Yes, Sir! And so, last June, when they were both about to graduate college, he offered them a trip. Anywhere within reason, he said. He didn’t mean Paris.
They didn’t want Paris. They didn’t want Europe at all; they didn’t want to exhaust themselves tramping from site to important site. They wanted bright places and good food, and they knew that a Caribbean cruise promised both. An off-season one would strain Grandpa less–and so, though they could have claimed their gift along with their diplomas, they decided to wait almost a year, until the low rates of March. Meanwhile they got themselves jobs, found apartments. “And now they’d better lose weight,” Bella’s mother told Robin’s mother over the telephone.
“They’ll do that in their own good time,” replied comfortable Aunt Dee.
Bella, listening in on the extension, stared bleakly into the receiver. Appetite had plagued her since childhood. In her teens she’d developed an awning of a bosom, though her waist remained relatively slender. Her abdomen bulged. Her large legs were shapely, though, and her ankles were narrow–again, relatively.
Bella was sallow. Robin was pale but blushed easily. She had the ready smile of a child and eyes as green as a cake of scented soap. Her body sloped downwards from narrow shoulders past jutting little breasts; it didn’t thicken until the tree-trunk waist; then came very wide hips.
The cousins had been close in high school and had gone to similar large universities. Robin studied Child Development and became a Child Life Specialist. Her manner with the hospitalized children she worked with was casual and reassuring. Bella majored in Business. She was already the valued Office Manager of a busy real estate firm whose customers craved vistas, and whirlpool baths, and kitchens with granite counters.
Robin had never had a serious boyfriend and Bella had never had a boyfriend at all. Both liked to read–Robin favored whatever was popular; Bella read newspapers and a business weekly and biographies and, somewhat surreptitiously, novels written for middle schoolers.
On the Golden Swan were two big dining rooms for evening meals. There were two small restaurants as well, one French and one Italian; but how spendthrift to patronize them when the rest of the food on the ship was free. All you could eat! There were four ports-of-call, one every other day in the middle of the twelve-day voyage. And swimming pools and a gym and a beauty parlor and a gift shop, and the library like a den in an old mansion. You could play shuffleboard and badminton. From a platform on the Pelican deck you could drive golf balls into the sea. A party swirled every night; some had themes like Costume Ball and Talent Show. At the first party, Meet the Captain, a gray-haired Scandinavian with limited English tirelessly shook everybody’s hand and posed for small group photographs displayed later in the central reception room. Robin bought one, and Bella, after some hesitation, also bought one, though she told Robin that the uniformed man must be an impersonator; shouldn’t a Captain be standing on the Bridge, his eye out for whales and warships?
But to Robin and Bella the most extraordinary feature of the Golden Swan was the twenty-four-hour buffet. This occupied the entire aft section of the Promenade Deck. While eating, you could watch the golf balls from the deck below soar into the sky and fall into a sea that was Wedgwood here and navy there and, late in the day, the purple of clematis. If you chose to face the buffet tables, you saw colors more various. Pancakes were golden disks. Buckets of chowder sent up silvery steam. There were jeweled salads; hams as rosy as happy cheeks; mountains of tropical fruits. Mauve veal tongues lay on beds of lettuce. And ochre breads–there were glazed breads; grained breads; breads made with berries; breads made with olives; and the most delicious bread of all, a dense hard oblong cut into thin slices, tasting as if its flour had been ground from magic nuts and baked by gnomes in a forest hut. Two hollow-cheeked men spent all day carving roast beef. Another man continually dished out foamy scrambled eggs augmented with mushrooms, or tomatoes, or asparagus. There were cheeses of all varieties . . . runny, slippery, chewy, blue. Soufflés, one kiwi-colored, the other pale orange.
Their interior stateroom was just big enough for two narrow beds and two night-tables. Cupboards and closets were built into the wall. The bathroom was a clever little wedge. Their beds got made and their bathroom cleaned the minute they left for breakfast, or so it seemed; at any rate, whenever they returned, the beds were taut and the bathroom polished. A small person took care of their rooms and other rooms on the corridor. At first they had only fleeting glimpses of this genderless figure–a flash of mustard-colored trouser; a dark elbow, reflected in the mirror of someone’s open room. But on the third morning Bella was gripped in the bowels as she was on her way to tap dancing. All those pancakes! She puffed back to their room, and saw that the tiny bathroom was occupied, so to speak. The yellow uniform, its back to her, knelt before the toilet. Dense hair was wound into a thick bun–a woman, then. Her feet protruded into the room. “I’m sorry,” said Bella, but the devoted scrubber didn’t pause. “I’m sorry,” repeated Bella in a louder voice, and touched the yellow back. The woman sprang up. “I’m sorry,” said Bella for the third time. “I have to . . .”
The maid, standing now, bowed without smiling. She was square-faced and plain, and of an indeterminate age–sixty? She slid out of the compact john, and Bella squeezed into it and relieved herself of a pungent stool. She washed her hands, and left without looking again at the small woman. A half-hour later, studying her feet in the mirror as she practiced the shuffle, she suddenly recalled that she had failed to flush the toilet. Well, that could happen to anyone, couldn’t it, she said to the abdomen above the legs, the bosom . . . but her shame persisted, as if she had treated the servant like a robot.
This first port was the capital of a newly independent island nation. Its city hall had once been a governor’s palace, and public gardens exploded with hibiscus and jasmine. Citizens hissed in Spanish. Robin had more or less kept up her college Spanish because so many of her patients spoke it. She exchanged some sentences with the proprietor of a hammock store, who praised her mastery of the polite form. Guides and souvenir sellers were fluent in English.
But there was a third language, Bella noticed, probably some indigenous Indian dialect. The darker the person and the more menial his task, the more likely he was to use this tongue with co-workers. Some form of the same vernacular was common in other ports, too– all of which, by their fourth embarkation, had merged in their minds. The ports were not only incidental, as Dr. Hartmann had warned; they were interchangeable. Oh, there were some differences–the first was reminiscent of the conquistadores; the second had one cathedral and one thousand shops; the third, reputedly narco-friendly, featured trips into the jungle to listen to monkeys; the fourth was a South American coastal city famous for its university, its school for the deaf, its pre-Columbian fort. But they were all colorful, noisy, polyglot, and–Bella said, and Robin agreed–falsely friendly. They were places you would never want to live in and were rather glad to leave, to walk up a road leading to a brief gangplank leading to a man who checked you in. Home! The Golden Swan had become their town– a town with few laws and a loose cordiality. In the dining rooms people sat with other people at tables for ten; urged by the headwaiter, you joined a table with empty seats remaining, or began a new table which was quickly filled. Nobody dressed up. Children–there weren’t many, March not being school vacation month–couldn’t roam free; one of the blond officers who did roam free would take an unattended child by the hand and find its parents. Passengers were not allowed in the area where the staff and crew slept. But nothing else was prohibited.
Some people began to seem like neighbors. There was a family from Maine with a retarded ten-year-old son and a clever daughter of twelve who could convert knots to miles-per-hour and had read up on all the ports. Melinda was staying out of school in order to make this trip, to do her share of diverting her brother. There was a short, freckled pharmacology graduate student who had brought along the research paper he was working on. He explained it at boring length to Bella’s silence and Robin’s occasional “Fascinating, Paul!” There were three women in their fifties, happy to be together, as if celebrating a reunion. They weren’t from the same city, they weren’t cousins, they weren’t classmates–“not exactly,” the one who was a lawyer laughed. “Something like,” said the one who was a social worker. The one who seemed to be a pampered housewife merely smiled.
Some of the staff became recognizable–the thin-faced men serving at the buffet, the dance instructor, the lifeguards, and their corridor’s silent maid. They met another maid too–or at least saw her closely. They had taken a wrong turn after a fitness workout; wandering down a corridor they came to a door labeled Infirmary. A long-haired girl with Indian cheekbones was sweeping the floor nearby. “Hello,” said Bella. “How do we get to the swimming pool?”
No answer but a smile.
Robin repeated the question in Spanish.
The young woman leaned her broom against the wall and disappeared into the Infirmary. A starched redhead came out. “Yes?” she inquired, and gave brisk directions while the maid resumed sweeping. How beautiful she was.
Elderly Dr. Hartmann with his scrupulous goatee liked his own company. Bella had once spied him entering one of the restaurants; there, for the price of a dinner, he could sit at a table by himself. But he didn’t seem to mind her joining him in the library. In his cultivated presence she was ashamed to read her usual undemanding fare, so she was laboring through the stories of Thomas Mann, twenty pages or so, every afternoon.
Every afternoon . . . For, unlike Robin, Bella needed to withdraw from the stimulation of the ship. So much noise–splashing, laughter, piped music, the clang of coins in the little casino. Paul’s talk, full of Latinate polysyllables. And worse: the outdoor buffet, the only place to have breakfast and lunch, had begun to sicken her soon after her first sight of its art gallery brilliance. If only it were merely a picture, it would have continued to please. But it was actual, tangible; it did not signify, it was. Real people with real stomachs jostled each other, and piled food onto their plates, and consumed the stuff, and returned for more–Robin did it; young Melinda too; the three ill-assorted women. The underweight Paul listened to Robin’s assessment of various pastries and followed her advice and then had seconds of his own choosing. Dr. Hartmann inserted forksful of omelet into his old mouth. Perhaps he needed the moisture. Perhaps he was determined to get his money’s worth. Meanwhile Bella grew helplessly abstemious. Dry toast for breakfast became all she could manage, a piece of fruit for lunch. A bit of main dish chicken at night. “Bella!” said Robin one dinnertime. “Are you okay? This veal is scrumptious! Try some.”
“I’m fine.” Obediently she speared a cube of repellent meat from Robin’s plate. “Yummy,” she lied.
One night a figure crept into her dream–familiar, but uncharacteristically placating. “Eat, darling!” her mother cried. “You’re supposed to diet, not starve.” The next morning Bella created an edifice of waffles on her breakfast plate, and topped it with strawberries and whipped cream. But she couldn’t swallow more than a bite. “I have to . . .” she said, and left Robin and Melinda and Paul and managed to get to her room.
And there was the tiny woman, tightening the linen, smoothing the pillows. In another ten hours, during dinner, she or one of her mates would drop foiled candies onto these same pillows. Now she extended a hand towards the bathroom as if to say it was clean and ready.
“No,” Bella managed. “I just want to lie down.” She did lie down. The woman stood still, perhaps puzzled. They looked at each other, one horizontal, the other vertical. One oversized, the other diminutive. One running a real estate office in preparation for operating a complicated enterprise, maybe a cruise line . . . the other skilled at cleaning other people’s bathrooms. The maid was younger than she had seemed that first day. Her dulled face gave an initial impression of age, but she was no more than twenty. At last she resumed her work. She polished the knobs on the built-in drawers while Bella watched. She hung the cloth on a wheeled device that carried all her utensils, and pushed the thing out of the room. At the door she again looked impassively at Bella. She did not say anything: not good-bye, or adiós, or the Swedish ahyur, as some of the ship’s higher staff liked to do, imitating the yellow-haired officers and the rarely seen crew. Her language, whenever she did use it, would be one of those Indian ones, Chibchan, maybe, or Kuna. Yesterday afternoon in the library, Dr. Hartmann had spoken of the languages. He said that certain ones were making a comeback and others were extinct, like the dodo. “Dodo,” Bella giddily called; but the maid was gone.
After the library Bella usually went to the sparsely attended casino, and played roulette, and surrendered, as slowly as possible, the ten dollars she had allotted to this daily indulgence. But on the final afternoon of the cruise, she skipped the library in favor of the beauty shop, where she endured an overenthusiastic shearing that exposed her long neck. Her earlobes looked huge; she covered them with turquoise clips she’d bought for her mother in the Colonial port. Then she went to the Casino. There she won four hundred dollars. It was a gradual process, this change of luck–win a little, lose a little less, win a little more–and she realized after a while that she was being helped, now and again, by nearly invisible signs from the croupier: a frown, a nod, a tiny shake of the head.
She found Robin and Melinda and Melinda’s family at poolside. “Look!” and she showed the roll of bills.
Robin raised a merry face. “Did you rob somebody?”
“She made a killing,” corrected Melinda. Then, because her brother was fretful, she joined him on his chaise.
“Oh, Bella!” said Robin. “Get yourself something wonderful. In the gift shop Paul bought a darling mahogany box . . .”
“No . . . I’ll pay myself back the amounts I lost. But the rest of this is the house’s money–the ship’s. Let the Golden Swan buy us a farewell dinner. At the French restaurant, or the Italian. Which do you prefer?”
“French!”
They wore their best clothing, which had, until now, hung in their tiny closet. Robin’s outfit was a bright blue shift ending at mid-thigh. Its shoulder straps had little bows. She looked silly and very sweet, Bella thought. Bella’s outfit was a gauzy black skirt, long but not so long as to conceal her ankles, and a black jacket. She wore high heels, and again the turquoise earrings–they seemed to be hers, now. She looked fantastic, Robin told her. Certainly Dr. Hartmann seemed to think something similar–he stood up when they entered Le Deux Fleurs, and gave Bella an intent look. “This afternoon the library was bereft,” he informed her. Bella noted his tuxedo, and wondered if he had expected something different from this cruise–something other than his usual solitude. She wondered too if her malnourished state was making her fanciful, or maybe even acute. She had already guessed that the ship had taken on cocaine in the narco port. There had been some quick feverish activity on the dock, and the person wearing the Captain’s uniform was not the same man who had shaken her hand at the party.
There were familiar faces in the French restaurant. And while the cousins were sipping cocktails, the three women friends came in, the lawyer glamorously got up in red, the social worker in a silk pants suit. The housewife, in sequins, looked game, looked brave . . . looked done for. Bella saw that the poor woman was ill; ill again; and she knew all at once that what the three women shared was disease, the same disease probably, a rare and desperate one. They had met in a hospital for some bold treatment, in a special hospital, maybe in a city strange to all of them. “Classmates? Not exactly,” the lawyer had said. Bella confided this intuition to Robin, who said, admiringly, Of course!
Bella finished her onion soup. She left most of her lapin. She gave all of her crème brûlée to Robin. Afterwards–after Bella had paid and tipped with the lovely chance money–they walked out of the restaurant only slightly tipsy, passing the three women taking the last dinner of their last annual reunion, passing Dr. Hartmann’s empty chair. “What a wonderful trip,” sighed Robin.
She wanted to go to the final party. Bella would read in their room for a while–she’d finish that story about the magician–and then join her cousin.
Tagged suitcases stood in the corridor. All of the luggage would be collected at 2:00 am. Bella and Robin would put out their own suitcases at bedtime. Now she entered the stateroom, took off her shoes, removed the candy from her pillow and tossed it onto Robin’s, and lay down. She didn’t read, though. She thought instead about the three afflicted friends, about Dr. Hartmann, about the double life of the Golden Swan. She awarded a moment of compassion to the graceless Paul. She considered Melinda, experienced in solicitude at an early age, destined to enter one of the helping professions.
She had neglected to close the door. The maid passed, carrying an empty basket–it must have contained the candies. Bella leaped up; and from the doorway she watched the narrow form slip along the corridor, avoiding the suitcases. At the end of the corridor were service stairs. The maid opened the door leading to those stairs. It swung closed behind her.
Curiosity . . . it was a new form of hunger. Bella, shoeless, closed her own door and ran to the service one, and paused–uno, dos, tres–and opened it.
The stairs were spiral, winding around a central post, enclosed within a rough yellow cylinder that matched the maid’s uniform. There was a groove at shoulder level for the hand to grasp. The dark head was one revolution below. Bella paused on the top stair as if it were a plank. Then, fingers within the groove, she plunged after the maid.
The funnel of stairs drew them silently downwards. The maid ignored doors indicating new levels. All at once, she disappeared. Bella saw that the stairs had ended. Then she herself was at the bottom, looking into a . . . place.
It was a large room with no portholes. Its light was the same reddish brown of the library, the casino, their stateroom–light that had been stored, rinsed in rusty water, and then released. Shades of blue were unknown here. Sky and ocean seemed miles away. There was a trestle table in the middle of the room, bolted to the floor, and two benches on either side of it. There was the smell of baking–that heavenly bread she’d grown to detest. From tiers of bunks attached to the walls came snores. Beneath the room, the ship’s engines–diesel these days, Dr. Hartmann had mentioned, not steam–throbbed. Otherwise, no sound at all.
A bowl of peaches stood at one end of the trestle table, and a pitcher of foaming liquid. Several people were playing a card game near the peaches. They did not speak, but made occasional motions with their free hands. At the other end of the table sat a woman and a man, rapidly signing. In one corner of the room, where bunks met bunks, there was a shipboard oddity–a rocking chair. In it sat a young long-haired Indian woman with a child in her arms . . . an infant of six months, maybe eight. Robin would have known its age.
Bella remained in the recess at the bottom of the stairs. She was grateful that she was wearing black. The maid paused to hang the basket on a hook. Then she rushed to the chair. With fluttering fingers she addressed the rocking young woman, who slid an arm from beneath the baby and answered in the same way. Then she stood, and handed the child to the maid, and the maid sank into the rocker, unbuttoning the top of her uniform and unhooking an undergarment as well. She put the baby to her breast. She bent her head to meet the baby’s eyes, but not before Bella saw that her face had finally attained expression–a kind of meager exaltation.
The girl who had been rocking the child was the same one who’d been sweeping in front of the Infirmary the day the cousins got lost. Now she crossed the room, skirting the trestle table and the card players and the animated couple. She entered Bella’s hiding place. This time she had no difficulty giving directions. Go away, commanded the beauty, her index finger pointing upwards.
Bella allowed herself a long final look at the deaf-mute servants, whose employment here was either a kindly move on the part of a paternalistic ship company or a sensible one on the part of a smuggling racket. She took an even longer look at the hungry child, the stowaway whose presence everyone in the room and now Bella too was bound to protect. After these informative looks, she climbed the helical stairs–a journey less difficult than it would have been five pounds ago.
Somewhat later she had finished her own packing and had placed Robin’s empty suitcase on Robin’s bed. Certainly she could pack Robin’s gifts, bathing suits . . . The key turned in the lock and her cousin entered, pale skin splotched, hair awry, one shoulder strap broken.
“Bella! You don’t have to,” she giggled. She rapidly laid clothing in the case, and also the hammock she’d bought, and a little mahogany box. Meanwhile she hummed, apparently not wanting to ask Bella what she’d been up to. And so Bella kept to herself the Golden Swan’s secrets, and its secret within those secrets. And her sudden distress–envy, wasn’t it–she kept that to herself, too.
The cousins stowed their suitcases in the hall and got undressed and went to bed, all without further speech, without gesture, though, from time to time, Bella glanced at Robin, and, she supposed, Robin glanced every so often at her.
Edith Pearlman is the author of three collections of stories: Vaquita (1997), Love Among The Greats (2002), and How To Fall (2005). Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Collection, Best Short Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.