The Girl Who Came Home: A Novel of the Titanic

by Hazel Gaynor

  Grace waited for a moment before asking, “And did you ever write to him again? Your boyfriend? You know, afterward?”

  “Yes, I did. Once or twice. He only wrote back once, though.” A gentle smile crossed Maggie’s lips as she remembered him, but Grace sensed that she didn’t to want to dwell on this.

  “And did you never go back to Ireland?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Maggie spoke quietly, as though this were the hardest thing to say. “I never wanted to set foot on a ship again after that terrible night. And I felt so guilty, you know. Why had I survived when so many others, even tiny little babies, had died? I knew I could never go back home, knowing the sadness there would be there and knowing that I escaped with my life while I had watched so many others die.” She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “I was sailing to America to start a new life, and in a funny way, that was the only way I could carry on after Titanic, with a new life. The girl who had left Ireland was gone to the bottom of the ocean with the rest of them. I had to start over. Start again. Of course, the family knew about Titanic, but I never wanted to talk about it. I just wanted to forget.”

  The two sat then for a good while longer, Maggie leafing absentmindedly through the newspaper clippings and touching her belongings, Grace reading through the journal. There was no need for either of them to talk. Eventually, the clock on the mantelpiece chimed noon, the first chime startling them both and causing them to laugh.

  Grace got up and walked into the kitchen. “Are you ready for another cup of tea yet? I think we could both do with one.”

  Maggie looked up and smiled. “Yes, dear. That would be lovely. And, Grace . . .”

  “Yeah?” Grace popped her head back around the doorframe.

  “Have you called that newspaper editor of yours yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you should, y’know. I think he might just be interested in my little story. Do you?”

  She winked at her great-granddaughter and started to put everything back into her small case. She imagined, for a moment, a small packet of letters, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with a fraying piece of string, and wondered where they had gone that night. She thought about the man who had written them.

  “What day of the week is it, Grace?”

  “Wednesday,” Grace shouted back over the sound of the kettle boiling. “Why?”

  Maggie smiled to herself. “No reason. I just wondered.”

  CHAPTER 10

  New York

  April 11, 1912

  Frances Kenny placed her empty teacup carefully on the saucer and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, the rhythmic tick, tick, tick a comforting constant in her perfectly ordered, peaceful home. If she had the hours of time difference correct, Katie would be sailing by now. Frances wondered how her young sister was feeling, having never been on an ocean liner before.

  She looked into her teacup, a cursory glance over the scattered leaves, showing, she noted with relief, nothing remarkable. Reading the tea leaves was a tradition in their family. She remembered her grandmother pointing out the vague patterns and images to her. It had entranced Frances as an impressionable young child, although she was never quite sure whether her granny was pulling her leg or could actually foresee the things she claimed to see in the leaves. As she had grown up and witnessed various predictions come true, Frances had started to take reading the tea leaves more seriously, and she took pride in reading them herself now. She had yet to predict anything successfully and often wished she had paid more attention to her granny’s mutterings.

  She stood up to look in the large mirror over the fireplace while she fiddled with the tiny buttons on the high collar of her blouse. She found the tightness around her throat mildly uncomfortable, leaving the very last buttons until it was time to go. She considered her reflection in the mirror; she looked a little tired, older than her thirty-four years. She wondered how she would look to Katie and how Katie would look to her now, twenty-four years old and no doubt with an enviable lust for life and an even more enviable healthy complexion, both of which came from a life spent outdoors.

  Carrying her breakfast things into the small kitchen of her one-bedroom East Side apartment, Frances filled the sink to rinse them. As she swirled the soapy water around with the dishcloth, washing her teacup, saucer, bowl, plate, and spoon methodically, it occurred to her that Katie might not have boarded the ship at all. She’d sent money home to Ireland once before for Katie’s passage, but, by all accounts, their parents had decided to spend the money on a cow rather than on the intended ticket to America. The regular discussions about Katie coming to America to join her sister had lessened in the intervening months. It was only recently, when several others from Ballysheen, including her good friends Peggy and Maggie, had begun to purchase their tickets, that Katie’s interest had surfaced again.

  The two sisters had exchanged letters regularly over the years, Frances enjoying hearing the news from home and Katie enjoying Frances’s descriptions of her life in America. Tell me about the motorcars, she would ask, in her own letters, and the buildings that reach into the sky. And is it really true that the theaters on Broadway can seat thousands of people at a time?

  The latest letter from Katie had arrived just a few months ago, stating that she would like to be able to travel over with the others from Ballysheen, it seeming like a good opportunity to be among friends rather than make the long journey all on her own. Of course, Frances had sent the money immediately, including with it a note to Katie and their mother assuring them both that she would meet Katie at the docks in New York. I am, after all, quite keen to see this “Titanic” for myself, she’d written. As a postscript, and fearing that they might spend the money on another cow instead, she’d emphasized that Katie should buy the ticket from the local shipping agent in Castlebar as soon as possible.

  Assuming Katie was on board with the Ballysheen group, Frances imagined that she would be quite excited. With so many familiar faces from home around her, she was sure that any doubts and anxieties about the journey, or about leaving behind the three younger brothers whom Katie adored, would be soon forgotten. For her own part, Frances was very much looking forward to seeing her beloved sister again. It had been more than three years since she had seen her last, before she had made the trip across the Atlantic herself. Traveling on that occasion with her friend Maura Byrne, she had made a quiet, discreet departure from Ballysheen. Nobody even knew the name of the ship they were to sail on; it had never occurred to anyone to ask. How different Katie’s experience would have been, leaving amid such a fuss and flurry as so many homes waved off a loved one to sail on the most celebrated ship ever built, a ship whose name everyone knew.

  Frances pictured her sister now, sure that she would make the most of every minute on board. Unlike her own reserved, practical self, Katie was a confident, impulsive girl with all kinds of fanciful notions running around her head; a trip on the world’s largest and most luxurious ocean liner with some of the world’s most successful businessmen would no doubt have her planning her own wedding to a rich socialite before she had even disembarked!

  Frances glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall. It was only three days until Katie would celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. She always enjoyed a party, and a birthday aboard Titanic would be the perfect excuse for singing and merrymaking. Yes, Katie would enjoy America, Frances thought as she put on her coat and her hat; in fact, America would enjoy Katie.

  She left her apartment block and, crossing the road, walked the short distance to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line at South Ferry. Although the elevated line took longer, she preferred not to take the subway system, being slightly claustrophobic. The idea of speeding along in a small underground train made her feel dizzy, so she preferred to travel aboveground by the El for her day of work as a domestic at the Walker-Browns’ residence.

  As she took her familiar journey north that morning, along Greenwich Street and Battery Place to
Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and on to Ninth Avenue in midtown and finally on to Columbus Avenue and the leafy suburbs of the Upper West Side, it occurred to Frances that she might take a trip to Macy’s one evening after work that week. She thought it would be nice to pick up something special for Katie for her birthday, a hatpin maybe, or a nice pair of gloves, she wasn’t really sure. Perhaps I’ll ask Mrs. Walker-Brown, see what she would suggest, she thought. Mrs. Walker-Brown was very au fait with matters of style and taste, and with her daughter, Vivienne, being a well-known singer in the Ziegfeld shows, she always seemed to be aware of the latest fashions. By a strange turn of coincidence, Vivienne Walker-Brown was also sailing on Titanic, returning with her fiancé from a European vacation.

  Seated in her favorite position by the window, Frances watched the hustle and bustle of a normal New York workday taking place on the streets below, listening to the noise of the tramcars, to the crashing hooves of the horses as they pulled carts laden with crates of fruit and vegetables, to the honking of the horns of motorcars, and to the young newspaper vendors shouting the morning’s headlines from their stands. She remembered how strange and loud and unpleasant this had seemed to her when she had first arrived in the city, such a contrast to the peaceful hush of their quiet country village. Now these were pleasing sounds to her ears; they were noises which suggested excitement, industry, and prosperity.

  Frances smiled to herself as she took this all in, acknowledging how far she had come in a few short years and wondering what sounds Katie was hearing at that moment; what sights she and Vivienne Walker-Brown and the hundreds of other passengers would be seeing. With the Walker-Brown girl traveling on a first-class ticket and Katie traveling in third class—assuming her ticket had not been exchanged for another cow—Frances suspected that the views the two girls had from Titanic would be very different, defined not by the eye but by their social ranking.

  Arriving at her destination, Frances stepped onto the sidewalk, just as she had done yesterday and as she had been doing for the last three years, and walked down the tree-lined avenue to the Walker-Brown residence. She admired the smartly dressed ladies who passed her by and gazed wistfully at the elegant couples strolling casually along with their arms linked, laughing at something one or the other of them had said.

  Frances hadn’t married, had never been asked, and hers had sometimes felt like a lonely existence among the thousands of people who inhabited this city. But in just a few more days all that would change. In just a few more days, her darling sister would be with her, and from that point in their lives, any journeys they had to make, they would make together. To Frances Kenny, that was all that mattered. That fact alone gave her far more comfort than any of the fancy furs and soft silks draped about the bodies of the Upper West Side ladies ever could.

  Turning left at the side of the imposing residence of her employer, she walked down the stone steps of the domestics’ entrance. As she did, it occurred to Frances that although people like the Walker-Browns and those who occupied the other lavish houses on this street might live lives of opulence and wealth, with her beloved sister arriving on these shores in just six or seven days, she was the fortunate owner of riches far greater than any their money could buy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ballysheen, Ireland

  April 11, 1912

  Dusk was settling over the rugged landscape, casting long shadows and shrouding the mountains in a blanket of mute darkness as Molly d’Arcy and eight other women walked slowly toward the Holy Well on the edge of the village. They were a somber group, making their short pilgrimage to pray for the safe passage of the fourteen who had left their homes just a day ago. To these eight women—some of them mothers, some of them sisters, and some of them grandmothers of the departed—it already seemed as though their loved ones had been gone for many months, rather than a few short hours.

  There was something of a tentative silence hanging over the women who, on any other day, could be heard exchanging friendly banter as they went about their daily chores in the village or laughing at a shared joke and snippet of juicy gossip as they enjoyed a drop of porter in the alehouses. Theirs was not normally a quiet existence, but at that moment it was very much so. Only the haunting sound of a barn owl’s screech broke the silence around them. Approaching the well, they attended to their familiar rituals and said their own private prayers before kneeling on the hard, stony ground and, taking their rosary beads in their hands, began, as one, to recite their Hail Marys.

  To a distant observer such as Séamus Doyle, who watched now from the window of his father’s small farmhouse, this was a particularly moving sight, serene in its setting and mesmerizing in its solemnity. How touched Maggie and the others in the group would be, he thought, to know how deeply their departure was felt in this small community; how heartened they would be to see this declaration of absolute faith being made in their honor. But they could not know, would not see.

  Like those of most people in the parish, Séamus’s thoughts had returned often to the fourteen people who had left the previous morning, but most particularly to his beloved Maggie.

  After giving her the packet of letters he had written and saying a final farewell, he had stood silently to watch the travelers depart. He’d thought them an oddly colorful group considering the solemnity of the occasion, with the bright woolen blankets draped about their shoulders and knees to keep them warm against the chilly April morning and the vivid green of Peggy’s new hat bobbing along. He’d watched the traps as they made their way like a funeral procession down the village, the wheels sounding like distant rolls of thunder as they rumbled along the stone road.

  He was familiar with the route they were taking, having traveled it himself on a few occasions to help the men buy grain or new farm tools and supplies from the town of Castlebar. They would pass out of Ballysheen, through the small, familiar towns of Knockfarnaght, Tobernaveen, Levally, Bofeenaun, Curraghmore, and Cuilmullagh and on to the top of the Windy Gap. The terrain was rough up there, and he imagined the traps jostling their passengers around like rag dolls as the wheels struggled over bumps and rolled in and out of the many potholes.

  They would then follow the winding road down to the Burren and Sion Hill before clattering into the town of Castlebar itself. Séamus knew that some of the women would also have made this journey before to sell their eggs, but he didn’t recall Maggie ever having gone. To her, it would be unfamiliar territory; beyond the train station at Castlebar, it would be unfamiliar territory to them all.

  He wondered what thoughts were crossing Maggie’s mind as the group trundled past the familiar sights of the local schoolhouse, the water pump, the broken fence, the hopscotch squares etched with chalk onto the flagstones outside O’Donoghue’s shop, the gorse bushes with their bright, fragrant yellow flowers, the stone walls she had sat idly on, swinging her legs, and the fields where she had taken lunch up to the men at harvesttime. He wondered whether she would notice, with particular interest, the smell of ale as they passed O’Carroll’s bar or the smell of the turf fires burning in the homes of her family and friends, homes that she had spent almost as much time in as her own. He wondered what it must feel like to see all of this and wonder whether you might ever see it again. He wondered whether he might ever see Maggie again.

  Theirs had been an unexpected, simple romance of snatched embraces and brief kisses on the banks of the lake whenever they could escape from their chores. They’d looked for opportunities for their hands to touch as they reached water from the well and for their paths to collide when one or the other of them ran an errand. Séamus was pleased to have suggested the arrangement of meeting every Wednesday after market under the sixth cherry blossom tree, it being slightly set back from the others and offering a little privacy as it was near neither house nor store. If either one of them wasn’t there, the other would know that some circumstance had kept them away. More often than not, they both made the agreed-on rendezvous and would spend at lea
st a short while together, strolling casually down to the lake in the summertime to catch fish, or seeking comfort by the fire in Maggie’s cottage in the winter, before it was time for him to walk the three miles home. It was a happy arrangement that suited them both. And then Maggie’s mam had died, her aunt Kathleen had arrived from Chicago, and Maggie had told him that she was to return, with Kathleen, to America that spring. Now he knew nothing of what the future held for them.

  As he watched the women pray by the Holy Well, Séamus wondered whether Maggie had opened his packet of letters. He’d written one for each of the fourteen months they had been courting and to represent each of the fourteen cherry blossom trees she loved so much that lined the road from her cottage into the village. He had ended each letter with fourteen simple words—I will wait for you under our tree until the day you come back—and was quite pleased with the symmetry of it all. And then he had written one final letter, for the day she had departed.

  He wondered whether she was thinking of him at that moment and, if so, what scene she was observing as her thoughts traveled back over the miles already between them. He hadn’t really understood the notion of love before he met Maggie, mainly considering it a foolish thing for fellas who’d taken too much of the poitín and didn’t fully possess their own minds. But he didn’t drink, and something had certainly affected his mind when he walked up to her and asked her to dance at Jack and Maura Brennan’s wedding. From that moment, he understood a little more about the notion of love, and over the months since that night, as he’d grown fonder and fonder of Maggie, he’d come to understand what it truly meant to be in love.