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people, his people, quite literally
in many cases; personnel from his former ships swelled
the ranks of the merchant marines after war broke out.
The smirk—or his suspicion of it—disquiets him more
than he would have thought possible. It threatens even
the concept of atonement.
    Yet, he reminds himself at the lectern, the money is
real, and the sentiment is real. The donation represents
not only himself but family, in-laws, partners, staff,
investors, anyone who had ever benefited by mercantile
trade and now owes a debt of gratitude. Even if he were
to believe the worst said about him, why, he wonders,
would his sin subvert an act of such uprightness on behalf
of so many?
    The second memory is odder and hardly connected at
all. It’s a party somewhere in New York. He doesn’t
remember the venue or the host, only the grumble of
voices and the angular movements. Clumps of men in
evening dress shake hands, gesticulate, tell wild stories to
each other and guffaw, before returning to mixed
company and behaving quite differently with unexpected
poise and formality.
    Someone, a lanky fellow, speaks close to Ismay’s ear.
His voice is sharp, high-pitched, rapid, and Ismay doesn’t
catch the words. He’s aware too late of a white thin-boned
hand hovering before him like some exotic flower, and
then it disappears. He realizes the man was trying tointroduce himself, and half thinks of following and
tapping him on the back to make amends for his own
slowness, but it is too late; the lanky fellow has joined one
of the groups of men, and they receive him enthusiastically with simultaneous yells and two or three
outstretched hands.
    “Careful, Ismay, there’s a guy you don’t want to
offend.” The warning comes from a shipping-agent friend,
and is delivered as a joke, or so it seems at the time,
although the tone is low, smilingly ominous.
    “Who is he?” Ismay asks.
    “Hearst, William Randolph. He owns the San Francisco
Examiner and has just bought The New York Journal .”
    This part of America, despite the propaganda, is stiffer
than England, its rules more defined. A man does not
meet another man without a handshake and there is no
acceptable substitute. The slowness of modesty holds no
excuse. Ismay shrugs, knowing it’s too late, and supposing
the man has already forgotten the unintentional rebuff.

    HE STILL SUPPOSES IT now, more than three and
a half decades on, as he slices through the brown leg of
his hare. After all, that one near-meeting was all that ever
happened between them. But like a scattering of stones
before a comet hits the earth, the memory in retrospect
seems to hold the power of a portent—mystical and
strange and utterly disconnected from any real possibilityof cause and effect. What a small world, or extraordinary
coincidence, or both, that it should have been that very
same lanky fellow with the staccato voice and the hovering hand whose newspapers would carry such damning
indictments of his own actions, in prose so florid and
fantastic he might have enjoyed the sensation of reading
if only the subject were not himself. He re-imagines
Hearst’s narrow, youthful back as he merged into the
crowd of partygoers, and wonders if things might have
been different if he had obeyed his first instinct and
followed, tapped him on the back and tried to engage for
half an hour or more on the benefits of Anglo-American
trade and commerce.
    What an astonishing benefit an open, extroverted
personality is, he thinks, with a sullen glance around at
diners in nearby tables. To his right, a portly gentleman
with slicked back hair laughs at his own joke. The rest of
his table, mainly younger men, perhaps business associates, all follow suit. Extroversion, Ismay thinks, is the
currency of so much, of friendship, trade, romance, and
love. At times it almost seems the measure of virtue. It’s a
man’s calling card and his advertisement; it flows ahead
of him in all directions, cementing his reputation, spreading word