“Almost six o’clock.” She hesitated. “I’ll lay out your clothes before I go; you don’t have much time.”
“My dear girl! That’s no part of your duties.”
“No, it’s my pleasure.” She opened a drawer, took out a dress shirt, placed it on my/Graham’s bunk. “And you know why.” With the quick efficiency of a person who knows exactly where everything is, she opened a small desk drawer that I had not touched, took out a leather case, from it laid out by the shirt a watch, a ring, and shirt studs, then inserted studs into the shirt, placed fresh underwear and black silk socks on the pillow, placed evening pumps by the chair with shoe horn tucked inside, took from the wardrobe that mess jacket, hung it and black dress trousers (braces attached) and dark red cummerbund on the front of the wardrobe. She glanced over the layout, added a wing collar, a black tie, and a fresh handkerchief to the stack on the pillow—cast her eye over it again, placed the room key and the wallet by the ring and the watch—glanced again, nodded. “I must run or I’ll miss dinner. I’ll be back for the tie.” And she was gone, not running but moving very fast.
Margrethe was so right. If she had not laid out everything, I would still be struggling to put myself together. That shirt alone would have stopped me; it was one of the dive-in-and-button-up-the-back sort. I had never worn one.
Thank heaven Graham used an ordinary brand of safety razor. By six-fifteen I had touched up my morning shave, showered (necessary!), and washed the smoke out of my hair.
His shoes fit me as if I had broken them in myself. His trousers were a bit tight in the waist—a Danish ship is no place to lose weight and I had been in the Motor Vessel Konge Knut for a fortnight. I was still struggling with that consarned backwards shirt when Margrethe let herself in with her pass key.
She came straight to me, said, “Hold still,” and quickly buttoned the buttons I could not reach. Then she fitted that fiendish collar over its collar buttons, laid the tie around my neck. “Turn around, please.”
Tying a bow tie properly involves magic. She knew the spell.
She helped me with the cummerbund, held my jacket for me, looked me over and announced, “You’ll do. And I’m proud of you; at dinner the girls were talking about you. I wish I had seen it. You are very brave.”
“Not brave. Foolish. I talked when I should have kept still.”
“Brave. I must go—I left Kristina guarding a cherry tart for me. But if I stay away too long someone will steal it.”
“You run along. And thank you loads! Hurry and save that tart.”
“Aren’t you going to pay me?”
“Oh. What payment would you like?”
“Don’t tease me!” She moved a few inches closer, turned her face up. I don’t know much about girls (who does?) but some signals are large print. I took her by her shoulders, kissed both her cheeks, hesitated just long enough to be certain that she was neither displeased nor surprised, then placed one right in the middle. Her lips were full and warm.
“Was that the payment you had in mind?”
“Yes, of course. But you can kiss better than that. You know you can.” She pouted her lower lip, then dropped her eyes.
“Brace yourself.”
Yes, I can kiss lots better than that. Or could by the time we had used up that kiss. By letting Margrethe lead it and heartily cooperating in whatever way she seemed to think a better kiss should go I learned more about kissing in the next two minutes than I had learned in my entire life up to then.
My ears roared.
For a moment after we broke she held still in my arms and looked up at me most soberly. “Alec,” she said softly, “that’s the best you’ve ever kissed me. Goodness. Now I’m going to run before I make you late for dinner.” She slipped out of my arms and left as she did everything, quickly.
I inspected myself in the mirror. No marks. A kiss that emphatic ought to leave marks.
What sort of person was this Graham? I could wear his clothes…but could I cope with his woman? Or was she his? Who knows?—I did not. Was he a lecher, a womanizer? Or was I butting in on a perfectly nice if somewhat indiscreet romance?
How do you walk back through a fire pit?
And did I want to?
Go aft to the main companionway, then down two decks and go aft again—that’s what the ship’s plans in the booklet showed.
No problem. A man at the door of the dining saloon, dressed much as I was but with a menu under his arm, had to be the head waiter, the chief dining-room steward. He confirmed it with a big professional smile. “Good evening, Mr. Graham.”
I paused. “Good evening. What’s this about a change in seating arrangements? Where am I to sit tonight?” (If you grab the bull by the horns, you at least confuse him.)
“It’s not a permanent change, sir. Tomorrow you will be back at table fourteen. But tonight the Captain has asked that you sit at his table. If you will follow me, sir.”
He led me to an oversize table amidships, started to seat me on the Captain’s right—and the Captain stood up and started to clap, the others at his table followed suit, and shortly everyone in the dining room (it seemed) was standing and clapping and some were cheering.
I learned two things at that dinner. First, it was clear that Graham had pulled the same silly stunt I had (but it still was not clear whether there was one of us or two of us—I tabled that question).
Second, but of major importance: Do not drink ice-cold Aalborg akvavit on an empty stomach, especially if you were brought up White Ribbon as I was.
III
Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging
Proverbs 20:1
I am not blaming Captain Hansen. I have heard that Scandinavians put ethanol into their blood as antifreeze, against their long hard winters, and consequently cannot understand people who cannot take strong drink. Besides that, nobody held my arms, nobody held my nose, nobody forced spirits down my throat. I did it myself.
Our church doesn’t hold with the doctrine that the flesh is weak and therefore sin is humanly understandable and readily forgiven. Sin can be forgiven but just barely and you are surely going to catch it first. Sin should suffer.
I found out about some of that suffering. I’m told it is called a hangover.
That is what my drinking uncle called it. Uncle Ed maintained that no man can cope with temperance who has not had a full course of intemperance…otherwise when temptation came his way, he would not know how to handle it.
Maybe I proved Uncle Ed’s point. He was considered a bad influence around our house and, if he had not been Mother’s brother, Dad would not have allowed him in the house. As it was, he was never pressed to stay longer and was not urged to hurry back.
Before I even sat down at the table, the Captain offered me a glass of akvavit. The glasses used for this are not large; they are quite small—and that is the deceptive part of the danger.
The Captain had a glass like it in his hand. He looked me in the eye and said, “To our hero! Skaal!”—threw his head back and tossed it down.
There were echoes of “Skaal!” all around the table and everyone seemed to gulp it down just like the Captain.
So I did. I could say that being guest of honor laid certain obligations on me—“When in Rome” and all that. But the truth is I did not have the requisite strength of character to refuse. I told myself, “One tiny glass can’t hurt,” and gulped it down.
No trouble. It went down smoothly. One pleasant ice-cold swallow, then a spicy aftertaste with a hint of licorice. I did not know what I was drinking but I was not sure that it was alcoholic. It seemed not to be.
We sat down and somebody put food in front of me and the Captain’s steward poured another glass of schnapps for me. I was about to start nibbling the food, Danish hors d’oeuvres and delicious—smorgasbord tidbits—when someone put a hand on my shoulder.
I looked up. The Well-Traveled Man—
With him were the Authority and the Skeptic.
Not th
e same names. Whoever (Whatever?) was playing games with my life had not gone that far. “Gerald Fortescue” was now “Jeremy Forsyth,” for example. But despite slight differences I had no trouble recognizing each of them and their new names were close enough to show that someone, or something, was continuing the joke.
(Then why wasn’t my new name something like “Hergensheimer”? “Hergensheimer” has dignity about it, a rolling grandeur. Graham is a so-so name.)
“Alec,” Mr. Forsyth said, “we misjudged you. Duncan and I and Pete are happy to admit it. Here’s the three thousand we owe you, and—” He hauled his right hand out from behind his back, held up a large bottle. “—the best champagne in the ship as a mark of our esteem.”
“Steward!” said the Captain.
Shortly the wine steward was going around, filling glasses at our table. But before that, I found myself again standing up, making Skaal! in akvavit three times, once to each of the losers, while clutching three thousand dollars (United States of North America dollars). I did not have time then to wonder why three hundred had changed to three thousand—besides, it was not as odd as what had happened to the Konge Knut. Both of her. And my wonder circuits were overloaded anyhow.
Captain Hansen told his waitress to place chairs at the table for Forsyth and company, but all three insisted that their wives and table mates expected them to return. Nor was there room. Not that it would have mattered to Captain Hansen. He is a Viking, half again as big as a house; hand him a hammer and he would be mistaken for Thor—he has muscles where other men don’t even have places. It is very hard to argue with him.
But he jovially agreed to compromise. They could go back to their tables and finish their dinners but first they must join him and me in pledging Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, guardian angels of our shipmate Alec. In fact the whole table must join in. “Steward!”
So we said “Skaal!” three more times, while bouncing Danish antifreeze off our tonsils.
Have you kept count? That’s seven, I think. You can stop counting, as that is where I lost track. I was beginning to feel a return of the numbness I had felt halfway through the fire pit.
The wine steward had completed pouring champagne, having renewed his supply at a gesture from the Captain. Then it was time to toast me again, and I returned the compliment to the three losers, then we all toasted Captain Hansen, and then we toasted the good ship Konge Knut.
The Captain toasted the United States and the whole room stood and drank with him, so I felt it incumbent to answer by toasting the Danish Queen, and that got me toasted again and the Captain demanded a speech from me. “Tell us how it feels to be in the fiery furnace!”
I tried to refuse and there were shouts of “Speech! Speech!” from all around me.
I stood up with some difficulty, tried to remember the speech I had made at the last foreign missions fund-raising dinner. It evaded me. Finally I said, “Aw, shucks, it wasn’t anything. Just put your ear to the ground and your shoulder to the wheel and your eyes on the stars and you can do it too. Thank you, thank you all and next time you must come to my house.”
They cheered and we skaaled again, I forget why, and the lady on the Captain’s left got up and came around and kissed me, whereupon all the ladies at the Captain’s table clustered around and kissed me. That seemed to inspire the other ladies in the room, for there was a steady procession coming up to claim a buss from me, and usually kissing the Captain while they were about it, or perhaps the other way around.
During this parade someone removed a steak from in front of me, one I had had plans for. I didn’t miss it too much, because that endless orgy of osculation had me bewildered, plus bemusement much like that caused by the female villagers of the fire walk.
Much of this bemusement started when I first walked into the dining room. Let me put it this way: My fellow passengers, female, really should have been in the National Geographic.
Yes. Like that. Well, maybe not quite, but what they did wear made them look nakeder than those friendly villagers. I’m not going to describe those “formal evening dresses” because I’m not sure I could—and I am sure I shouldn’t. But none of them covered more than twenty percent of what ladies usually keep covered at fancy evening affairs in the world I grew up in. Above the waist I mean. Their skirts, long, some clear to the floor, were nevertheless cut or slit in most startling ways.
Some of the ladies had tops to their dresses that covered everything…but the material was transparent as glass. Or almost.
And some of the youngest ladies, girls really, actually did belong in the National Geographic, just like my villagers. Somehow, these younger ladies did not seem quite as immodest as their elders.
I had noticed this display almost the instant I walked in. But I tried not to stare and the Captain and others kept me so busy at first that I really did not have time to sneak glances at the incredible exposure. But, look—when a lady comes up and puts her arms around you and insists on kissing you, it is difficult not to notice that she isn’t wearing enough to ward off pneumonia. Or other chest complaints.
But I kept a tight rein on myself despite increasing dizziness and numbness.
Even bare skin did not startle me as much as bare words—language I had never heard in public in my life and extremely seldom even in private among men only. “Men,” I said, as gentlemen don’t talk that way even with no ladies present—in the world I knew.
The most shocking thing that ever happened to me in my boyhood was one day crossing the town square, noticing a crowd on the penance side of the courthouse, joining it to see who was catching it and why…and finding my Scoutmaster in the stocks. I almost fainted.
His offense was profane language, so the sign on his chest told us. The accuser was his own wife; he did not dispute it and had thrown himself on the mercy of the court—the judge was Deacon Brumby, who didn’t know the word.
Mr. Kirk, my Scoutmaster, left town two weeks later and nobody ever saw him again—being exposed in the stocks was likely to have that effect on a man. I don’t know what the bad language was that Mr. Kirk had used, but it couldn’t have been too bad, as all Deacon Brumby could give him was one dawn-to-dusk.
That night at the Captain’s table in the Konge Knut I heard a sweet lady of the favorite-grandmother sort address her husband in a pattern of forbidden words involving blasphemy and certain criminal sensual acts. Had she spoken that way in public in my home town she would have received maximum exposure in stocks followed by being ridden out of town. (Our town did not use tar and feathers; that was regarded as brutal.)
Yet this dear lady in the ship was not even chided. Her husband simply smiled and told her that she worried too much.
Between shocking speech, incredible immodest exposure, and effects of two sorts of strange and deceptive potions lavishly administered, I was utterly confused. A stranger in a strange land, I was overcome by customs new and shocking. But through it all I clung to the conviction that I must appear to be sophisticated, at home, unsurprised. I must not let anyone suspect that I was not Alec Graham, shipmate, but instead Alexander Hergensheimer, total stranger…or something terrible might happen.
Of course I was wrong; something terrible had already happened. I was indeed a total stranger in an utterly strange and confusing land…but I do not think, in retrospect, that I would have made my condition worse had I simply blurted out my predicament.
I would not have been believed.
How else? I had trouble believing it myself.
Captain Hansen, a hearty no-nonsense man, would have bellowed with laughter at my “joke” and insisted on another toast. Had I persisted in my “delusion” he would have had the ship’s doctor talk to me.
Still, I got through that amazing evening easier by holding tight to the notion that I must concentrate on acting the part of Alec Graham while never letting anyone suspect that I was a changeling, a cuckoo’s egg.
There had just been placed in front of me a slice of princ
ess cake, a beautiful multilayered confection I recalled from the other Konge Knut, and a small cup of coffee, when the Captain stood up. “Come, Alec! We go to the lounge now; the show is ready to start—but they can’t start till I get there. So come on! You don’t want all that sweet stuff; it’s not good for you. You can have coffee in the lounge. But before that we have some man’s drinks, henh? Not these joke drinks. You like Russian vodka?”
He linked his arm in mine. I discovered that I was going to the lounge. Volition did not enter into it.
That lounge show was much the mixture I had found earlier in M.V. Konge Knut—a magician who did improbable things but not as improbable as what I had done (or been done to?), a standup comedian who should have sat down, a pretty girl who sang, and dancers. The major differences were two I had already been exposed to: bare skin and bare words, and by then I was so numb from earlier shock and akvavit that these additional proofs of a different world had minimal effect.
The girl who sang just barely had clothes on and the lyrics of her songs would have caused her trouble even in the underworld of Newark, New Jersey. Or so I think; I have no direct experience with that notorious sink of iniquity. I paid more attention to her appearance, since here I need not avert my eyes; one is expected to stare at performers.
If one admits for the sake of argument that customs in dress can be wildly different without destroying the fabric of society (a possibility I do not concede but will stipulate), then it helps, I think, if the person exhibiting this difference is young and healthy and comely.
The singer was young and healthy and comely. I felt a twinge of regret when she left the spotlight.
The major event was a troupe of Tahitian dancers, and I was truly not surprised that they were costumed bare to the waist save for flowers or shell beads—by then I would have been surprised had they been otherwise. What was still surprising (although I suppose it should not have been) was the subsequent behavior of my fellow passengers.