Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

And when it was done, days later, and László was standing in the doorway, his bags packed, it occurred to him that she had not prepared an alias for her own escape, and he quietly asked if she wasn’t coming along.

She stared at him.

“I’m going to Székesfehérvár,” he whispered, needing to say something, to cover up this moment, this need for an apology. “I’m going to stay there for a little while.” He rubbed his head. “There’s still someone … I might get help.”

Agi said nothing, only stood there in the doorway, as if she had no intention of ever leaving Tíbor Kálmán’s villa.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You think they’ll leave you alone when they come for me? You think you’ll be spared?”

“They …” she began. “ They have never left me alone.” And she stepped back inside and quietly closed the door.

László was still standing in front of the villa minutes later, still there, silent, unable to step off the threshold, almost as if he was waiting for her to invite him back in, as if, after all this time, all he really wanted was to be welcomed into the place-as if it had never been about an alias at all.

And even then, László lingered, unable to turn decisively toward Székesfehérvár, moving along the sidewalk and glancing back, retracing five or six steps, eyes resting on Tíbor Kálmán’s villa, long after Agi had opened the windows, brought the record player out onto the gallery, and poured herself what remained of the pálinka . He stood there, half hidden behind a willow, barely making out the melody of the sláger , watching her tilt the glass to her lips. She had the run of the place now, he realized, and he wondered if she’d known it would come to this, that for him the worst memory of all would be Agi accepted into the villa, as if his removal was all that Tíbor Kálmán’s home needed to be complete, all it had needed to be finally restored.

On board the Caledonia Star , sailing through the Beagle Channel and past the city of Ushuaia on the way to Antarctica, Maud’s husband says to her, “Those lights will probably be the last we’ll see for a while.”

Mountains rise stark and desolate on both sides of the channel; already there does not look to be room for people. Above, the evening sky, a sleety gray, shifts to show a little patch of the lightest blue. Standing on deck next to her husband, Maud takes it for a good omen-the ship will not founder, they will not get seasick, they will survive the journey, their marriage more or less still intact.

Also, Maud spots her first whale, another omen. She spots two.

In the morning, early, the ship’s siren sounds a fire drill. Maud and Peter quickly put on waterproof pants, boots, sweaters, parkas, hats, gloves-in the event of an emergency, they have been told to wear their warmest clothes. They strap on the life jackets that are hanging from a hook on the back of their cabin door and follow their fellow passengers up the stairs. The first officer directs them to the ship’s saloon; they are at Station 2, he tells them. On deck, Maud can see the lifeboats being lowered smoothly and efficiently and not, Maud can’t help but think, how it must have been on board the Andrea Doria -a woman, who survived the ship’s collision, once told Maud how undisciplined and negligent the Italian crew was. The first officer is French-the captain and most of the other officers are Norwegian-and he is darkly handsome. As he explains the drill, he looks steadily and impassively above the passengers’ heads as if, Maud thinks, the passengers are cattle; in vain, she tries to catch his eye. When one of the passengers tries to interrupt with a joke, the first officer rebukes him with a sharp shake of the head and continues speaking.

When the drill is over and still wearing his life jacket, Peter leaves the saloon, saying he is going up on deck to breathe some fresh air, and Maud goes back down to the cabin.

Of the eighty or so passengers on board the Caledonia Star , the majority are couples; a few single women travel together; one woman is in a wheelchair. The average age, Maud guesses, is mid to late sixties and, like them-Peter was a lawyer and Maud a speech therapist (she still works three days a week at a private school)-most are retired professionals. And although Maud and Peter learned about the cruise from their college alumni magazine, none of the passengers-some of whom they assume must have attended the same college-look familiar to them. “Maybe they all took correspondence courses,” Peter says. Since his retirement, Peter has been restless and morose. “No one,” he complains to Maud, “answers my phone calls anymore.” The trip to Antarctica was Maud’s idea.

When Maud steps out on deck to look for Peter, she does not see him right away. The ship rolls from side to side-they have started to cross the Drake Passage-and already they have lost sight of land. When Maud finally finds Peter, her relief is so intense she nearly shouts as she hurries over to him. Standing at the ship’s rail, looking down at the water, Peter does not appear to notice Maud. Finally, without moving his head, he says in a British-inflected, slightly nasal voice, “Did you know that the Drake Passage is a major component of the coupled ocean-atmosphere climate system and that it connects all the other major oceans and that it influences the water-mass characteristics of the deep water over a large portion of the world?”

“Of course, darling,” Maud answers in the same sort of voice and takes Peter’s arm. “Everyone knows that.”

Peter has an almost photographic memory and is, Maud likes to say, the smartest man she has ever met. Peter claims that he would have preferred being a mathematician to being a lawyer. He is an attractive man, tall and athletic looking, although he walks with a slight limp-he broke his leg as a child and the leg did not set properly-which gives him a certain vulnerability and adds to his appeal (secretly, Maud accuses him of exaggerating the limp to elicit sympathy). And he still has a full head of hair, notwithstanding that it has turned gray, which he wears surprisingly long. Maud, too, is good-looking: slim, tall, and blonde (the blonde is no longer natural but such a constant that Maud would be hard put to say what her natural color is); her blue eyes, she claims, are still her best feature. Together, they make a handsome couple; they have been married for over forty years.

Maud knows Peter so well that she also knows that when he adopts this bantering tone with her, he is either hiding something or he is feeling depressed. Or both. Instinctively, she tightens her grip on his arm.

“Let’s go in,” she says to him in her normal voice. “I’m cold.”

In their cabin, the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that had been neatly stacked on the nightstand is, on account of the ship’s motion, lying pell-mell on the floor.

Instead of a double bed, their cabin has two narrow bunks. The bunks are made up in an unusual way, a Norwegian way, Maud guesses-the sheet wrapped around the blanket as if it were a parcel and tucked in. In her bed, Maud feels as if she were lying inside a cocoon; also, she does not dislike sleeping alone for a change. As if Peter could read her mind-he has an uncanny ability to do this sometimes-he pats the side of his bunk and says, “Come here for a minute, Maud.” Maud hesitates, then decides not to answer. She does not feel like making love-too much trouble and often, recently, sex does not work out, which makes her anxious and Peter anxious and angry both. Over their heads, on the wall, the public-address speaker crackles and a voice says: “Long before the poet Samuel Coleridge penned his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ the albatross was a creature of reverence and superstition. The sailors believed that when their captain died, his soul took the form of an albatross. Of course I cannot speak for our excellent Captain Halvorsen, but I, for one, would not mind being reincarnated as an albatross.” In the bed next to Maud, Peter snorts and says again, “Maudie, come over here.” Maud pretends not to hear him. “By the way, my name is Michael,” the voice continues, “and in case you have not yet met me, I am your naturalist on board.” Peter says something that Maud does not quite catch although she can guess at the meaning. “The albatross has the largest wingspan-the record, I believe, is thirteen feet, three inches-and the oldest known albatross is seventy years old. When he is ten, the albatross goes back to where he was born to mate-” Maud tenses for a comment from Peter but this time he makes none. The public-address speaker crackles with static, “… feeds at night … eats luminous squid, fish, and krill.” Maud looks over at Peter’s bunk and sees that Peter’s eyes are closed. Relieved, she reaches up to turn down the volume on the speaker as Michael says, “The albatross will fly for miles without moving its wings, or setting foot on land. Soaring and gliding over the water, the albatross’s zigzag flight is determined by the wind.”