In the summer of 1964, at the age of twenty-two, I boarded the RMS Queen Mary in Southampton, England, bound for New York.
I was returning home after spending two years in New Zealand as a Mormon missionary.
In those days, the LDS Church paid for a missionary’s transportation to the mission field and back home again. Through some miracle involving Pan Am, church accounting, and what I suspect was divine confusion, I ended up crossing the Atlantic aboard one of the most famous ships in the world.
I could never have afforded it otherwise.
The Queen Mary was already legendary.
During World War II she became “The Grey Ghost,” carrying thousands of Allied troops across the Atlantic. On one wartime voyage she carried more than 16,000 people — one of the largest numbers ever transported on a single ship.
By 1964 she still possessed the faded glamour of another age.
A floating kingdom.
In peacetime the wealthy occupied magnificent first-class luxury while the rest of us lived several decks lower in quarters apparently designed by people who disliked oxygen.
I was traveling below economy.
My cabin sat below the waterline and was shared with five or six young men. The room smelled of socks, shaving lotion, and economic disappointment.
But before leaving Hong Kong, I had purchased several excellent suits.
At twenty-two, a good suit can create the illusion that you belong almost anywhere.
Including places where you absolutely do not belong.
Officially, passengers from our section were forbidden from entering first class.
Unofficially, after a day or two, several of us figured out how to sneak in.
The food was better.
The entertainment was spectacular.
There were magicians, singers, dancers, orchestras, and people who appeared to have wandered out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald hallucination.
I somehow blended in.
At least until I started talking.
I fell in with several Ivy League students whose fathers appeared to own corporations, senators, or perhaps small countries.
They drank constantly.
I did not drink.
I was still trying to be a good Mormon, although somewhere during those two years in New Zealand my certainty about religion had begun developing stress fractures.
Not just Mormonism.
All religion.
One wealthy older woman took an interest in me. Elegant, confident, and perhaps fifty, she occupied a stateroom worth more than my future.
This was my first cougar encounter, although the term had not yet been invented.
She explained that she and her husband had become wealthy supplying portable toilets to construction sites.
I told her I hoped to become a writer.
She informed me this was a terrible decision and that portable toilets represented the true future of civilization.
She may have been right.
There was also a rich girl about my age.
Beautiful. Sophisticated. Entirely beyond my experience.
One evening we ate together.
At one point she touched my hand lightly and smiled.
I walked her back toward her cabin feeling as though every romantic movie ever made had suddenly become instructional material.
Outside her door she smiled again.
I had spent two years as a Mormon missionary keeping a respectful distance from women roughly equivalent to avoiding unexploded artillery shells.
So I asked:
“May I kiss you?”
She looked amused.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
To this day I am still not entirely certain whether that meant yes or no.
Two nights later, somewhere in the North Atlantic, a young man vanished into the storm.
And I still see his face almost every day of my life.
The storm had worsened.
Huge waves rolled behind the ship and the wind became violent enough that several drunken Ivy League boys began playing a dangerous game on the rear deck.
They would leap upward and let the wind throw them toward the railing while the girls screamed and laughed.
I remember thinking something horrible was going to happen.
One of the boys jumped especially high.
At that exact instant the Queen Mary dropped into a massive trough.
Suddenly the railing was no longer where he expected it to be.
He missed it by perhaps a foot.
I can still see the expression on his face.
Not fear at first.
Surprise.
Then horror.
Then he was gone.
Swallowed by the Atlantic.
The laughter ended instantly.
Everyone sobered up at once.
Nobody moved.
I found an emergency phone and yelled into it that a man had gone overboard and the captain needed to turn the ship around immediately.
A calm voice asked my location and told me to remain there.
Several minutes later an officer dressed in immaculate white linen appeared, looking less like a sailor than an admiral from a war movie.
He took statements.
The next morning he questioned me.
I asked whether they were searching for the young man.
The officer looked at me calmly.
“Young man,” he said, “your friend was dead before he hit the water.”
No report appeared in the ship’s newspapers.
Nothing appeared in New York.
I checked.
Nothing.
It was as though the Atlantic had swallowed not merely a person, but the memory of him.
Everyone seemed to move on.
Except me.
And sixty years later, I still remember the look on the face of the young man the Atlantic took.
