His sister was waiting; he had to say something. “By the time I realized the ship was in danger there was such a great roolya-boolya, Kathleen! People scarpering about, shouting…it was enough to shake the brains out of me head. Mama and Papa were still in their cabin, so I tried to go back down to them. But there was such a clatther of people coming up the stairs I couldn’t get through. I was pushed back to the boat deck, and then an Englishman called Mr. Otter caught hold of me and thrust a life jacket into my hands. ‘Take this, you young fool,’ he said.”
Ned paused and cleared his throat, blinking back tears. “That life jacket…He saved my life, I think.
“I put on the jacket anyway and then I went on looking for Mama and Papa again. I was shouting their names, but everyone was shouting. By that time I could feel the tilt in the ship and all sorts of things were sliding down the deck. She was going down at the bow. That beautiful ship…”
He paused again, balled his fists, and continued. “They were putting women and children in the lifeboats, but some men were getting in them, too. The first boats went away half empty, though.”
Kathleen gasped.
“Go on, lad,” urged Alexander Campbell.
“People didn’t want to leave the ship; they insisted it couldn’t sink. I had a bad feeling, though. I was that desperate to leave, so I was, but not without Mama and Papa. But I couldn’t find them. I kept searching and searching and couldn’t find so much as the dust from their clothes. I would have saved them if I could.
“Then everything began to happen very fast. There was a terrible crashing below as if the boilers were breaking loose, and a crowd from third-class came bursting through one of the barriers. They were wild with fright. Most all the boats were gone by then except the last collapsible. Some men were trying to get it free and launch it, but the water was coming up…” Ned closed his eyes for a moment as if he could still see the cold green water surging up the deck toward him.
“Men began jumping from the rail. An officer shouted that the suction of the ship would pull them down, but they jumped anyway. Most people were scrambling toward the stern, though, to stay out of the water as long as they could. You can’t imagine the sounds. The screams and cries, the roaring of the ship like an animal in pain, and…I know you won’t believe this, but the orchestra kept playing and playing…I wanted to shout at them to stop, it was madness, but…suddenly the whole ship reared up and broke, somehow. Buckled and broke. One of the smokestacks came crashing down almost on top of me and I just…I just jumped.
“The next thing I knew I was in the water. The ship seemed almost to stand on her head. The stern was like a huge black mountain towering over me. I just knew I would die then, so I did. She hung there for a terrible long time. Then she began to slide down into the sea with people still crowded into the stern, clinging to the rails and each other, screaming….
“The suction did not pull me down; they were wrong about that. All I felt was the terrible cold of the water. Mr. Otter’s life jacket kept me afloat, and then there was one of the collapsibles, overturned but close enough, with men climbing onto it. A man reached into the water and took my hand and pulled me up. I looked back, then. I saw her…saw her go…” Bowing his head, Ned let the tears come at last.
Chapter Four
NED knew no words for the experience he had endured. It was not only the death of his parents which tormented him but the size of the total loss.
The death of the ship was a tragedy encompassing all others. For Ned the Titanic had represented the heights man could aspire to: wealth and beauty, security and certainty.
And then she was gone.
Just like that. As if an arbitrary God had snapped His fingers and wiped away the best that man could do.
Nothing would ever be certain again.
But how could he explain these things to anyone else? How could he describe the impact on his young mind of an entire floating city vanishing, taking with it fifteen hundred souls? The loss of the Titanic had left a hole in Ned’s view of the world for which he had no language.
His shoulders heaved.
Kathleen flung her arms around the boy and drew him close, burying his face in the starched linen ruffles of her shirtwaist. Bending over him, she murmured repeatedly, “Ah Ned, what happened?” As if she had heard nothing he said—“What happened?”
It was a question he had already been asked time and again, and would be asked for years to come.
All Ned knew was that existence had treacherously shifted its borders. The solid surface he had taken for granted had been stripped away to reveal chaos beneath, an unguessed ocean of lightless water into which one could sink without a trace. How could he make anyone understand what he did not understand himself?
Aboard the Carpathia in the four days that elapsed between being plucked from the Atlantic and arriving in New York, Ned had struggled to come to terms with the tragedy. Strangers patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “You’re a lucky lad,” some said.
“How did you feel when the Titanic sank?” others wanted to know. But he could not answer. He struggled under a burden of unarticulated horror.
After he had searched through the survivors, peering with fading hope into every face, he had been forced to admit Mama and Papa were lost. A conversation with their steward from the Titanic had only confirmed what he already knew in his heart. No vacuum had pulled him under with the sinking ship, but a great vacuum existed now, a howling void within him where Mama and Papa had been. His polestars, his security. The people he loved most. Agonizing memories of Mama’s loving smile and Papa’s strong hands kept flashing through his brain. His belly was full of hot tears that felt like blood.
In a futile effort to distract himself he had searched the Carpathia again, for Dan Duffy. But he had already seen all the survivors—with the exception of Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line, who had secreted himself in the surgeon’s cabin with liquor and sedatives.
The bony redhead from Clare was somewhere two miles down, with the Titanic.
To his load of grief, Ned must add the loss of his newfound friend. How Dan had looked forward to a new life in America! “There’s gold in them streets,” he had said. For one so young and full of energy to end his life in an icy ocean far from home and loved ones…“There’s nothing like a merry wake,” Dan had said.
Those words tormented Ned.
Sleep proved to be his only escape. At first he feared sleeping, terrified he would have nightmares. But the nightmares were in the daytime. When exhaustion overcame him aboard the Carpathia he sank into a muffled darkness where no memory intruded and no voices rang out across the water, begging for rescue after the ship vanished, screaming in terror when the lifeboats refused to come back for them.
In New York he resorted to sleep again as an anodyne. He curled up in the hotel bed with the covers over his head and stayed there twelve, eighteen, twenty hours at a stretch. Mama’s Daly cousins came down from Boston, reporters gathered at the front desk and sent up their cards begging interviews, and still Ned slept. A worried Kathleen called the hotel doctor in to examine him, but the man assured her the boy was basically healthy. “It’s nervous prostration, my dear. Give him time; he’ll recover.”
Time, indeed. Kathleen was not so sure. This was Ned’s first great wound; he had no experience of the ability of time to blur the edges and soften the center. He thought the intensity of his pain would continue undiminished to the grave.
Alexander Campbell spent as much time with the boy as he could, his employers having suggested that he make an effort to gain Ned’s confidence and get him to talk about his experiences. Worried about the investigation to come, White Star was hoping to have as many survivors as possible testify on behalf of the shipping line.
When he finally dragged himself out of bed, sodden with too much sleep, Ned found it difficult to talk to anyone. Alexander Campbell was a man of calculated silences that waited, like deep pools, for words to be dropped into them. He was always
there, encouraging Ned to remember.
After a few days the boy began to open up to him. Campbell was a virtual stranger, which made it easier. Ned knew little about him and so far had no curiosity, had not even taken a close look at the man. He could not really see anyone or anything but the ship, and the night, and the sea.
In answer to Campbell’s quiet urging, he began recalling details that had lain buried beneath layers of shock. He spoke of the third-class passengers being held back by barriers and denied access to the boats. Most of the rich and privileged survived, but no one seemed to care about third-class. Irish steerage passengers like Dan Duffy were left to die.
“No room in the lifeboats—oh, no,” Ned said bitterly. “No room for our kind.”
He did not notice the look on Campbell’s face.
“The Titanic was an unlucky ship from the start,” Ned claimed the first time Campbell took him out of the hotel for a walk and a breath of air, “and divvil a thing anyone could do about it. On the Carpathia later, people were talking about a near collision that was after happening when the Titanic was still in harbor, before the voyage even began. Others said there was a coalfire smoldering belowdecks when we left Queenstown and the crew knew about it but kept it a secret from the passengers.”
New York City on a warm spring afternoon. Beams of buttery light streamed through the leaves of young trees planted along the curbs. High-stooped brownstone row houses—which would have been called “terraced houses” in Ireland—stood solid and secure. Small dogs trotted importantly along cement sidewalks. The streets were thronged with motorcars, a sight that would have amazed and delighted Ned only a few days before. Now he did not even notice them.
He saw only the night and the sea. “I’m thinking the Titanic had a curse on her,” he said in a haunted voice.
“Put that notion out of your mind, lad,” Alexander Campbell replied brusquely. “And you would be well advised not to tell others the foolish things you have said to me. They would only be taken as ignorant Irish superstition.”
“Are you not superstitious?” Ned turned and looked sharply at his sister’s fiancé for the first time. “With a name like Campbell—surely you’re a Scot.”
“I’m an American, born and bred here. My father was an Ulsterman from Belfast, though. Of Scottish descent.”
The first thoughts not directly connected to the sinking of the Titanic were beginning to float to the surface of Ned’s brain. “An…Oh. Does that mean you’re a…” He paused in confusion, uncertain how to phrase the question without causing offense.
“Protestant. Scots Presbyterian.”
Ned stared. “Did Kathleen know when she promised to marry you?”
“Of course she did.”
“And she agreed anyway?”
“Obviously.” Since forward progress seemed halted for the time being, Alexander took a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and went through the elaborate ritual of lighting it. He squinted at Ned through the smoke. “There is no prejudice against Protestantism in America, and Kathleen wants very much to be an American.”
Without replying, Ned continued to study him. In the bright sunlight, he realized Campbell was considerably older than Kathleen. A gray-haired, middle-aged man. And a Protestant.
Had Mama and Papa known? Surely not; that unwelcome surprise had been waiting for them once they arrived in America. Ned could imagine their shock and the scene that would have followed. Kathleen had been clever, putting them under obligation to her fiancé before they ever met him. But why had she agreed to marry Alexander Campbell in the first place?
As if reading Ned’s mind, the older man said, “Your sister’s an exceptionally beautiful young woman, but I have a lot to offer, too. I have an excellent position with White Star and mean to go much higher in the company. The firm will not sink with the Titanic, I assure you. As I told Kate, I can give her a very good life here, much better than she could have back in Ireland.”
“You don’t know what she could have in Ireland.”
“I’ve been to the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast more times than you’ve had hot dinners, Ned. I know Ireland. It’s a sad, poor country, and there’s no future there, as I’ve pointed out to Kate many times.”
Anger rose in a slow, hot wave through Ned’s being. This man—this smug, self-satisfied stranger—had lured Kathleen into staying in America by disparaging Ireland to her. But for that, Mama and Papa would be alive today and safe at home.
Home.
County Clare…green fields and gray limestone, the fiddle music and the cuckoo’s call, the black Cliffs of Moher rising sheer from the sea to defy the Atlantic itself.
“I want to go home,” he announced to his sister as soon as they returned to the hotel.
“Ah, surely not, Ned!” She had lost so much; the idea of his returning to Ireland seemed almost like another death to her. “Stay here with us. Alexander can get you work, or we could—”
Ned jutted his chin at a stubborn angle that reminded Kathleen of their father. “I want to go home.”
She threw a beseeching look to her fiancé. “Alexander? Convince him to stay.”
“Your parents are gone, lad,” Campbell responded dutifully. “You have a place here with us, but there’s nothing for you in Ireland now.”
“There’s the farm!” Ned cried, shocked that anyone could consider land to be nothing. “And my brother Frank and my two little sisters and I want to go back to them. Right now!” Ned knew they thought him unreasonable, but he did not care. He longed for the familiar green island in the uncertain sea, an image he clung to as a drowning man might cling to a lifeline.
In the end it was Alexander, rather than Kathleen, who told him, “We have decided to postpone our wedding for a year out of respect for Kate’s parents. She’ll live with her cousins until we are married, then she’ll move into a new house here in New York with me. In the meantime, the White Star line is sending Titanic survivors home with all expenses paid, and I can arrange a berth for you on the next liner heading east if that’s what you want.”
Ned felt he owed it to his sister to make her understand. “Your life is here, but mine’s not, Kathleen. We were only coming for a visit; no one meant to stay.”
“Millions dream of emigrating to America,” she reminded him. “Don’t be throwing away your chance.”
An image rose in his mind of Dan Duffy, and of all those like Dan Duffy. If I had me choice, Dan had said in the April twilight, with the green land fading away astern, I would stay in Ireland.
Ned shook his head. “I choose Ireland,” he told his sister resolutely.
Kathleen gave him a long, thoughtful look. There was something in his eyes that spoke to her of little fields like patchwork, and lacy stone walls with bits of sky showing through. She threw her arms around him and held him close. Even his crisp black curls seemed, in her imagination, to smell of Clare earth.
The body in her arms was lanky and boyish but possessed a wiry strength. Deep in Ned Halloran was steel. His determination was proverbial in the family. Everyone knew that once he had set himself upon a course, there was no hope of changing him.
“I’ll write,” she promised, struggling to get the words past the lump in her throat. “And you write, too, Ned. Tell me how things are…at home.”
May 1, 1912
CANADA ANNOUNCES TITANIC DEAD TO BE
BURIED IN NOVA SCOTIA
May 28, 1912
WASHINGTON D.C. INQUIRY RETURNS
VERDICT OF NEGLIGENCE IN TITANIC DISASTER
Chapter Five
THE last thing Ned Halloran wanted was another ocean voyage, but it was the only way to get back to Ireland.
Realizing that survivors returning to Europe might have misgivings about setting foot on any ship, White Star tactfully arranged passage on vessels as unlike the Titanic as possible. No one would have to sail on her sister ship, the Olympic, for example. White Star had also chartered two cable ships to scour the site
of the sinking for bodies. Some three hundred had been found. Those that could be identified were embalmed and sent on for burial; the rest were buried at sea with full rites.
Theresa and Patrick Halloran would never be found. Nor would Dan Duffy.
When the day came for Ned to depart, Kathleen accompanied him to the pier. Forcing himself to walk up the gangplank was an effort. The steward who met him cast him a solicitous glance. “It will be all right, sir,” he assured Ned. “After all, you have survived the Titanic. Nothing else can harm you now.”
A few minutes later Ned stood at the railing, looking down at the crowd below. His eyes searched out his sister’s slender form. She looked very small and far away. He waved and she stood on tiptoe to wave back, but his gaze was already turning toward the horizon.
I have survived, Ned thought. He let the full meaning of the words sink in and repeated them to himself like a talisman. I have survived the Titanic.
Thus armed, he could survive anything.
HIS welcome was muted by mourning for his parents. Black crepe was hung on the door, but otherwise the house a few hundred yards from the Ennis road looked the same. Built of local stone, the original four rooms had been altered and added to over the years and now boasted two storeys with a steeply pitched slate roof, a cluster of outhouses, and a walled yard. No Irish person would have called it a cottage, which the English in Ireland had given a derogatory connotation. The Halloran home was a farmhouse, plainly if sturdily built, and sited to catch the sun.
When she had entered her new home as a bride twenty years earlier Theresa Daly Halloran had confided to her many sisters, “I’m going to make something of this place, so I will.” Although she would never say so aloud, her model for domestic perfection was the Big House, the country mansion of the Anglo-Irish gentry.
From that day forward she had swept and polished and garnished, but the rough bones of the Halloran house stubbornly resisted her attempts to turn it into anything grander than it was. Yet she persevered, and when she acquired a servant girl, Janey Devlin’s life was dedicated to the same cause.
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