Marcia Talley: Dark Passage

It took only ten minutes to stroll from the funeral home back to our hotel at the corner of Locust and Eighteenth, directly across from Rittenhouse Square where bicycles were chained by twos and threes at intervals along the iron fencing. The evening was balmy, and the sidewalk outside the Parc Brasserie was crowded with couples dining elbow-to-elbow with their neighbors, seated on cane chairs at small round tables under burgundy-colored awnings that were so relentlessly French that even the numéro de téléphone was printed French-style – 21 55 45 22 62 – on the awning.

As the hostess escorted us inside the restaurant to a table for four, not far from the enormous zinc-surfaced bar where a variety of Belgian beer seemed to be on tap, Daddy said, ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support.’

‘Are you kidding?’ From her chair, Ruth reached up and curiously fingered the white lace curtain that hung from a brass rail over her shoulder as if she were considering whether to buy it. ‘It’s no secret that Aunt Evelyn and I weren’t particularly close, but she was family, after all. I owe her something for that.’

‘Ruth’s lying to you, Daddy. She came to Philadelphia because of the molten chocolate cake with raspberry sauce you promised her.’ I picked up the oversized menu, encased in plastic, turned to the back and scanned the desserts. ‘As for me, I work cheap. After the moule frites , it’s crème brûlée pour moi, s’il vous plaît. ’

Two hours later, after desserts, cappuccinos and deeply warming glasses of Monbazillac, Daddy picked up the check and we wandered up to our rooms on the tenth floor. Daddy called it an early night, gave us each a hug, then disappeared into his own room just down the hall.

Georgina had to scan the key card three times before the light blinked green and the door decided to open but, once inside, she immediately kicked off her shoes and sprawled, spreadeagle, on the gray-green velvet sofa of the two-room suite the three of us were sharing. ‘So, what about that cruise we were talking about?’

‘Am I not allowed to catch my breath?’ I dropped my handbag on the floor and crossed to the mahogany desk where I’d left my laptop. I flipped it open and powered it on. A few minutes later I was hunched over the screen, clicking around the website Ruth’s customer had recommended. ‘Do we want to sail out of New York or Baltimore?’

‘Baltimore,’ Georgina said without hesitation. ‘Getting ourselves up to New York and back would add a couple of hundred dollars to the cost.’

‘Right,’ I said as I clicked on ‘Baltimore’ and waited for the screen to refresh. ‘And I understand that parking is dirt cheap at the Baltimore Cruise Terminal, not to mention convenient.’

‘How many days do you think we can afford to be away?’ I asked a few moments later while scrolling down through a long listing of ships and sailing dates. ‘Here’s a five-day cruise to Bermuda and back, seven days to the eastern Caribbean. Here’s one for nine days, twelve…’

‘Five hardly seems worth the effort.’ Ruth extracted a Diet Coke from the minibar in the vestibule near the door and pulled up the tab . ‘I’ll have to check with my assistant, but if she can put in a few extra hours, I should be able to clear seven days, or even nine. Lord, I haven’t had a proper vacation since Hutch and I went on our honeymoon. Georgina?’

Georgina shrugged. ‘Depends on the dates.’

‘There’s a nine-day cruise that leaves in three weeks for the Eastern Caribbean,’ I said. ‘San Juan, St Thomas, Dominican Republic, Haiti…’

‘Who on earth would want to go to Haiti?’ Georgina grumped.

‘Can we afford twelve days, maybe?’ I asked. ‘Here’s another one to San Juan, setting off on the twelfth of June, calling at St Thomas, St Maarten, Antiqua and Tortola, then back.’

‘Sounds divine, but no way I could talk Scott into covering for me at home for twelve whole days,’ Georgina said. ‘Seven, maybe. Ten, max. He hates to cook.’

I turned around in my chair and grinned. ‘That’s why God invented McDonalds, Georgina.’

She laughed.

I turned back to the laptop and leaned close to the screen. ‘Looks like June is the window of opportunity, then.’ I swiveled in the chair to face my sisters. ‘Are we all clear, date-wise, for sometime mid-June?’

I could hardly believe it when both women nodded.

‘OK. Why don’t we each go home, discuss the plan with our husbands and decide how much money we’re willing to spend. For planning purposes, the fares they’re quoting here work out to about a hundred dollars a day, but that includes food practically twenty-four/seven and everything except the booze, so to my way of thinking it’s quite a bargain.’

‘Gosh,’ said Georgina. ‘You can hardly stay at a Holiday Inn for a hundred dollars a day, and all you get for breakfast is a donut and a cup of weak coffee with powdered cream.’

‘I’ll talk to Paul, then tomorrow night I’ll set up a conference call and we can finalize things.’ I flapped a hand at the laptop where photos of cruise ships, quaint colonial ports, pink sand beaches and palm trees had begun to slide and fade across the screen. ‘If we’re going to do this, we should probably hurry, or the slots might be gone.’

Ruth drained her Coke and set the empty can down on the end table. ‘You don’t need to call me about dates, Hannah. Hutch has been working on a big libel case so I hardly see him anyway. Even if they settle, there’s no way he’ll wrap that up by June, so whatever dates you two decide on is fine with me.’

‘Will we share a cabin, like we’re doing here?’ Georgina asked.

I thought about the cabin that Paul and I had booked on the Queen Mary Two – twin beds squished together made up as a queen, with a pull-out sofa. Three people sharing would have been a tight squeeze. I was all for sisterly bonding, but crawling over a sibling in the middle of the night in order to go to the bathroom was taking sisterhood a bit too far. ‘We’ll definitely need two cabins,’ I said. ‘The rates are based on double occupancy, but we could…’

‘I’ll take the single,’ Ruth interrupted. ‘No worries there.’

I could have hugged her. I’d shared sleeping arrangements with Ruth before and, not to put too fine a point on it, the woman snored . ‘Well, it’s decided, then!’ I snapped my laptop shut and sprang to my feet. ‘C’mon, Georgina,’ I said from the door that led into the adjoining bedroom. ‘If we’re going to be roomies, we better start practicing. You and I get the king. Ruth, the sofa is all yours!’

‘There are approximately 200 overnight ocean-going cruise vessels worldwide. The average ocean-going cruise vessel carries 2,000 passengers with a crew of 950 people. In 2007 alone, approximately 12,000,000 passengers were projected to take a cruise worldwide.’

Cruise Vessel Safety & Security

Act of 2010 (H.R. 3660)

Paul slotted a platter into the dishwasher. ‘I think that’s a terrific idea.’

‘You do?’ I hadn’t expected Paul to disapprove of our plan, but I wasn’t expecting him to stand up and cheer for it, either. The man was practically waving pompoms.

Paul reached out a soapy hand and tapped the tip of my nose. ‘I’ll miss you terribly, of course, but what a wonderful opportunity, especially for Georgina. That girl doesn’t get out enough, in my humble opinion.’

‘That’s because, as Georgina is quick to remind me, she has four children.’ I scraped the leftover spaghetti sauce into a plastic container, snapped on the lid, then passed the dirty cooking pot to Paul. ‘I’m hoping that Scott doesn’t throw a monkey wrench into our plans. Georgina didn’t seem too worried, but you know and I know that Scott can sometimes be a spoiled brat.’