Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [38]
“Oh,” Vivian says with some surprise.
“He travels a lot. He’s away now.”
“You don’t mind being alone?”
“I miss him,” Honora says with a slight flush. “But I keep myself busy. There’s so much to do to get ready for winter.”
“Where are you from?” Vivian asks.
“Taft. It’s inland. How about you?”
“Boston,” Vivian says.
“We went there once this summer,” Honora says. “We had dinner at the Parker House.”
“How nice,” Vivian says politely.
“Well, I’d better get back,” Honora says, looking at the fog.
“You’re sure you can do it? I can’t even see the water now,” Vivian says.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Honora says. “How lost can I get? The ocean is on one side, the seawall on the other. And if I walk too far, I’ll hit the rocks. I’m bound to find the house.”
“Well,” Vivian says. She wonders if she should invite the woman in. “I’m here until Thanksgiving,” she says. “If you’re ever at this end of the beach and feel the need for a cup of tea, just give a holler.”
The woman smiles. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll do that.”
Honora disappears into the fog. Vivian feels, unusually, a sharp pang of disappointment. Beside her, Sandy is wrestling with a crab.
“Sandy, stop,” she says.
The dog, sheepish and obedient, trots along with Vivian as she walks to the water’s edge, guided more by sound than by sight. The tide is low, and it seems she has walked farther than she ought to when suddenly her feet are covered by an incoming wave. The shock of the cold immediately clears Vivian’s head, and she laughs. And now even the hem of her dress is wet, but she doesn’t care at all.
Honora
When the munitions boat caught fire, Honora was just eight years old and living with her family in her uncle Harold’s house overlooking Halifax Harbor. Honora’s three older brothers — Charles and Phillip and Alan — had already left the house for classes at the McKenzie Boys’ School in Armsdale, some two miles away. Honora’s cousin Emma, still a baby, was in bed. Honora’s one remaining brother, Seth, who was four, rushed to the window with his uncle Harold to see the fire. Honora briefly went to the window herself, ignoring the calls of her mother in the basement to help carry up the laundry before she herself set off for school, the opening delayed because winter hours had already begun. The column of smoke rose higher and higher, and already Honora could see dozens of children, on their way to school, gathering in the streets to watch the aftermath of what Honora would later learn had been a collision between the Mont Blanc from France and the Imo out of Norway.
Uncle Harold knew, from the fiery smoke, that the Mont Blanc was burning fuel.
“Honora!” he bellowed sharply as he bent to pick up Seth. “Go help your mother.”
Reluctantly, Honora left the broad windows of the dining room of the house perched high above the harbor in a neighborhood known as Richmond. The windows had been built to Harold’s specifications so that he and his family might be able to watch the large ships come into port while eating breakfast. When his wife, Marguerite, died in childbirth, Harold had begged his sister — Honora’s mother, Alice — to come north to live with him and help him take care of his infant daughter.
“Tell William there’s plenty of work in the foundry,” Harold had written. “There’s a war on up here. Halifax is the busiest harbor in the British Empire.”
Honora’s mother had said to her husband, “It’s a way to save for a house of our own.”
Honora and her mother were still in the basement, holding wicker wash baskets of wet sheets and towels, when the Mont Blanc exploded with a force that blew apart her three thousand tons of steel. The shock was felt in Cape Breton, two hundred and seventy miles away.
A thick gravy smoke rose high above the city. The blast leveled three hundred and twenty-five acres, wounded nine thousand, and killed sixteen hundred, including Honora’s father, who’d gone to the foundry earlier that morning to catch up on paperwork. As for Harold, he was blinded by shards of glass that blew inward from the window. The