Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Cabin fever

Bea Muller found a home of her own in retirement: her own cabin aboard the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth 2.

By MIM SWARTZ. Special to the Times
Published October 31, 2006

ON BOARD THE QE2 IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC -- A voice booms suddenly over the loudspeaker, interrupting our conversation.

"Code 2 in Laundry Room. Code 2 in Laundry Room."

"That means there is water in the Laundry Room," Beatrice DuMont Muller tells me.

She should know. For the past 61/2 years, Muller has lived in Stateroom 4062 aboard Cunard Line's venerable Queen Elizabeth 2. She knows "ship speak."

Wearing a strawberry blond wig - ("I wear a hat in the daytime and a wig at night") - Muller looks about a decade younger than her 87 years.

"When you live on the ship," she says, "you get a year younger every year."

No matter how appealing cruising might be, most people would have a difficult time envisioning themselves living year after year onboard. But Muller can't imagine living anywhere else.

Does she ever tire of life aboard the QE2 after all these years?

"Oh no," she says. "Every time I get annoyed at something I go back into my cabin and realize how bored I would be with no eyesight to drive any longer, no grandchildren - all my grandchildren are the kids who work here.

"My two boys come and sail with me. I don't have to cook and shop and clean any longer.

"It's been a fantastic life for me here."

Indeed.

A steward makes her bed every morning and turns it down at night. He tidies her cabin twice a day. Chefs prepare her meals. Entertainers perform nightly on the main stage and the ship's orchestra plays music for ballroom dancing.

And, in addition to all the other amenities of shipboard living, Muller has seen every place in the world to which the QE2 sails - more than once.

Many of the ports are part of the ocean liner's annual 108-day world cruise. January will mark the 25th year the 39-year-old QE2 has been circling the globe. On the upcoming voyage, the ship will call at 41 cities in 25 countries on five continents.

Before calling the QE2 home, Muller lived in Bound Brook, N.J., with her husband of 57 years, Robert Arthur Muller. He was a retired engineer.

They were on their fifth world cruise in March 1999 when Bob Muller died at age 85, just after the QE2 left India. He had contracted a particularly difficult virus, which couldn't be treated because of his severe emphysema.

He could have been taken off the ship and sent to a hospital. "But he said, 'No, I don't want to get off. It's my time,' " Muller recalls.

"Dr. Carroll (the QE2's physician, Martin Carroll) made his passing easy, and the priest on board and the captain and his wife were with him in his last days.

"His faith was very deep. He just ran off with my Lord, that's all."

The Mullers' eldest son, Allan, now 56, left his New Jersey home and flew to Israel, coming aboard the QE2 in Haifa shortly after his father's death. The body was kept in the ship's morgue until the liner arrived in Southampton, England. There, Allan had his father's remains cremated and he brought the ashes home.

Bea Muller remained on the QE2 until it completed the world cruise several weeks later.

"When I got home, the boys said, 'Well, Mother, that's where your friends are (on the QE2). Why don't you stay?'

"So I spent the next 10 months selling everything I owned and came here to live in January 2000."

Allan Muller and his brother, Geoffrey, 50, of Winchester, Mass., joined their mother on the QE2 then for a dawn memorial service, just as the ship was leaving Los Angeles. Bob Muller's ashes were tossed over the side of the ship.

"It was a lovely service and beautifully handled," Bea Muller says. "My husband always wanted to be buried at sea."

Muller says she hasn't decided if her ashes will also be thrown off the QE2 when she dies. "We'll have to see."

Meanwhile, Muller is still dancing with the ship's "gentleman hosts," the men who sail on various cruise ships to provide dancing partners for single women.

"I went home and had a new hip put in because I didn't have any cartilage, so I keep on dancing," she says. "Dancing, duplicate bridge and trying not to eat are my priorities - not necessarily in that order."

Muller must buy cruise tickets like other passengers.

"You can buy a ticket as far ahead as they publish itineraries, so I keep booking so that they won't take my cabin away," she says. "The only thing they've given me is an agreement that if I want to go home for a couple of months, give them 60 days' notice and I can have my cabin back when I get back."

Each January she meets with a Cunard Line vice president and gets a price for itineraries as far ahead as the company can determine. "I get a spread sheet and I pay them through the purser's office here every 60 days in advance."

Yet Muller doesn't have a luxurious suite. Her cabin is an interior - meaning it has no porthole to see the outside world. The cabin is a double, with about 120 square feet of space.

She has a table for two in the Mauretania restaurant, considered the QE2's least-plush dining experience. "If I'm going to be here forever, I must be frugal," she says.

Muller says it costs her "less than $100,000" a year to live as a permanent resident onboard, including trips on shore and for the traveling she does at other times.

"I'm lucky enough to have enough income that if I'm careful I can manage," she says.

But why this vessel?

"This ship is the end of an exquisite era of grace and charm. The Queen Mary 2 (launched less than three years ago) will be a wonderful lady some day - when she gets personality," Muller says of the QE2's younger sister and Cunard Line's new flagship.

"That's a possibility. Or, I will go back to Myrtle Beach (S.C.), where I still have a house, because I'm trying to write a book and I've got an agent down there who is trying to push it."

For now, she's booked through the QE2's 2008 world cruise.

"Why should I go home to my vacuum cleaner?" she asks. "If I run out of money, my sons will keep me here to keep me out of their hair. They're delighted I'm safe and happy."

Mim Swartz, retired travel editor of the Denver Post, lives in Golden, Colo.

[Last modified October 30, 2006, 19:39:09]