by Diane Hoh
“Cruel of me?” Elizabeth’s voice rose another decibel or two. “I’m cruel?”
Nola’s flush deepened, but her defenses remained strong. “I never knew exactly what Fenton said to you. Remember, I wasn’t there. How was I to know he hadn’t followed my very precise instructions to the letter?”
“You knew I was worried about you. You knew that much. I didn’t try to hide it.” Elizabeth’s tone sharpened. She knew her voice was carrying far beyond the pantry. She didn’t care. “Worried enough to turn down my admission to Vassar, and my scholarship. Worried enough to give up any chance at leading my own life, and stay here with you. You knew I had to be very worried to give all that up, Mother. And Dr. Cooper didn’t disobey your instructions. But he also made it very clear that you were not to be agitated or upset. Was that part of your instruction to him? He made it sound as if something very dire might happen if I ignored his opinions. Was that part of your instruction? Did you order him to give me that impression? Because my leaving for Vassar would have done just that, wouldn’t it, Mother? It would have been very agitating and upsetting for you. Wonderful for me, mind you … but very, very bad for someone with a heart condition who didn’t want me to leave. Someone selfish and shallow and spoiled.”
Nola gasped. “How dare you speak to me in this manner! If your father were here…”
“He’d be disgusted with you. Just as I am.” But Elizabeth knew it was hopeless. Her mother was never going to admit she’d done wrong. She was never going to apologize or ask for forgiveness. She was too accustomed to doing as she pleased and too unaccustomed to facing the consequences. When there had been consequences in the past, when she’d done something silly or foolish or childish, Martin Fair had “handled” it. He had stepped in and assumed the responsibility for whatever it was, smoothing things over so that Nola’s life could go on as easily as it always had.
Elizabeth’s anger switched then from her mother to her absent father. You spoiled her so, Father, she shouted soundlessly. You spoiled her, and then you left her to me. That was almost as cruel as her deceit. I can’t, I won’t, pamper her as you did, not anymore, not ever again. And if that was what you wanted for her, then you should have climbed into a lifeboat like some other men on the Titanic, and stayed with her, instead of being so stupidly, foolishly brave. You shouldn’t have left her. You shouldn’t have left us.
The force of her fury toward her father shocked and horrified Elizabeth. She loved her father. How could she be thinking such terrible things? What was the matter with her? It washer mother she was angry with, not her father. Wasn’t that why she’d sought out Nola in the first place? Nola had done something so cruel….
But not as cruel as deserting both of you, the voice inside Elizabeth’s skull muttered.
He had no choice, she argued. She had to clutch the edges of the white wooden shelf beside her to maintain her balance, so shaken was she by her anger toward her father. Captain Smith had insisted on women and children only entering the lifeboats. And even if he hadn’t, Father knew that was the rule of the sea, and he had accepted that.
Other men got in, the obstinate voice continued. Other men were saved, and to this very day are with their wives, their sons, their daughters. Other men are taking care of their spoiled, pampered wives so their daughters can get married or get a job or march for the vote or go to college, whatever they choose.
Those men were cowards, Elizabeth argued.
Cowards? Yet you just called your father stupid and foolish for being brave.
She hadn’t meant it. “I didn’t mean it!” Elizabeth cried aloud in her pain.
Nola, misunderstanding, nodded. She put a consoling hand on her daughter’s arm. “Of course you didn’t. You would never speak to me so harshly if you weren’t overtired and over-stimulated. We’ll talk about it later, dear. I can’t imagine what everyone is thinking, what with all this unpleasant shouting going on in here. I’ll have to say Cook was being difficult, that’s all. They won’t believe it, but they’ll pretend to, and that’s enough for me. Come, let us get back to our guests.”
Elizabeth tore her arm from Nola’s touch as if she feared contamination. “Your guests, Mother, not mine. The only two people my age at this party are the singer and Claire.” She added icily, “I have already spent some time with Claire, in case you’re at all curious as to how I discovered your cruel deception.”
Nola nodded grimly. Elizabeth guessed from the expression on her face that her mother was recalling, too late, her conversation last spring with a friend’s young daughter, and deeply regretting how free she’d been with her information about Dr. Fenton Cooper. Still, rather than capitulate, she shifted the blame elsewhere. “I could strangle that girl! When I spoke with her last spring, I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about other women.” Reaching up to pat her hair into place, an unnecessary gesture, Nola added, “That girl talked too much even as a small child. I remember her mother receiving complaints from Claire’s school.”
“If you knew that,” Elizabeth pointed out, “perhaps you should have chosen someone else to confide in.”
“Perhaps I should.” Her voice was as calm as the sea on the night of that treacherous iceberg in the North Atlantic. As smooth and shiny as a mirror, that sea had been. But people had died in it, anyway. “Now fix your hair, dear, it’s trailing a bit on the left side, just behind your ear.”
Elizabeth reached up automatically to recapture the errant strands as instructed. Halfway there, her hand stopped. It will always be like this, she thought. She will tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. She’ll tell me what to wear, and I’ll wear it. She’ll tell me where to go and I’ll go there. She will give me instructions on what to do, who to see, how to fill my days and nights … I won’t have to decide any of those things. She’ll do that for me … as long as I let her.
Who is taking care of whom here, Father? Elizabeth asked silently.
“You’re right, Mother.” Elizabeth stood aside to let her mother pass. “Your guests are waiting. You go ahead. I have to do something with my hair.” She did not add, I’ll be right behind you. She would leave the lying to her mother, who was so very good at it.
Elizabeth stood in the pantry doorway, watching as Nola, confident the “family crisis” was over, hurried back to her guests, her party. Head high, every fair hair perfectly in place, her step youthful, the green gown accentuating her slim figure, she looked like exactly what she was: a beautiful, confident woman who had emerged some nineteen months earlier from a terrible tragedy relatively unchanged. Not unscathed, Elizabeth understood that. Occasionally, she still heard her mother crying in her bedroom late at night. Nola had suffered. But the experience had not changed her. Not in any significant way. In spite of that terrifying night in the lifeboat, in spite of her sudden and completely unexpected transition from beloved wife to widow, Nola Langston Farr was still basically the same woman who had boarded the great ship Titanic in Southampton on Wednesday, April 10, 1912.
Perhaps that was how she had survived. By not changing. Perhaps she believed that by acting as she always had, mimicking as closely as possible the life she’d led before that night, she could pretend the damage hadn’t been so devastating, after all. With her husband gone, she could never convince herself it hadn’t happened. Even someone as sheltered from reality as Nola couldn’t manage that feat. But clinging to every available shred of her old life might be the only way she could cling to life itself. Without that, perhaps she would simply have given up. Elizabeth wondered, of the seven hundred and five people who had survived the Titanic, how many different ways of dealing with their shock and grief had they found? Seven hundred and five? Probably. Nola’s way would only be one of many.
The minute the hem of her mother’s dress vanished from sight, Elizabeth was on her way out the front door. She scooped up her purse from the table in the foyer. Without a coat or cape, with no hat to protect her head from the heavily falling snow, without gloves fo
r her hands or boots for her feet, on a cold December night, Elizabeth Fan ran from her house and out into the street to hail a taxicab with no thought for the temperature. She didn’t feel the cold.
She was on her way to Max Whittaker’s apartment.
Chapter 18
MAX SEEMED SURPRISED BUT delighted to see Elizabeth. When he opened the door of his third-floor apartment to find her standing there, he took little notice of how inadequately she was dressed or the snow melting on her hair and dress. Nor did he ask her what she was doing there or how she’d managed it. Instead, he grabbed a hand and pulled her inside, saying excitedly, “I didn’t really think you’d come or I would have waited with the unveiling. But I just took the newspapers off a few minutes ago. That’s what I was using to cover my work. No one’s even said anything yet, they haven’t had time, so you haven’t missed much. Come on, I’m anxious to see what you think.”
The tiny living room was crowded. People were seated on an ugly tweed davenport far too large for the space, and an old wicker rocking chair, which Bledsoe, with Anne sitting on his lap occupied. Other guests were seated or reclining on the threadbare brown rug, on the windowsills, on the small, wooden kitchen table, and two chairs crammed into a small nook. Elizabeth noticed immediately that the room was ominously silent. There were no voices raised in praise of Max’s new work. No one exclaimed in awe or delight. Although all eyes were focused on one or another of a dozen paintings encircling the room, leaning up against the wall, no one said a word.
Max didn’t seem to find the silence ominous. “Look who’s here everybody!” Max said into the silence. “Elizabeth finally made it!”
Heads swiveled. “Well, hello there, Betsy,” Anne said lazily from her spot on Bledsoe’s lap, and Norman waved an equally lazy hand. “Mumsy let you out again? My, my, perhaps she’s becoming a free-thinker like the rest of us.”
Elizabeth didn’t answer. No one laughed. And no one took their eyes off the paintings. They all seemed mesmerized.
Max scooped up a pile of sketches from a wooden table beside the couch and motioned to Elizabeth to perch there. Then, standing beside her, an arm around her shoulders, he said, “So? I can’t believe I have to beg for opinions from this crowd. I expected critiques to be pouring out of you, as they usually are. Go ahead, tell me what you honestly think. I can take it.”
No, you can’t, was Elizabeth’s unspoken response. You don’t want to hear what people are thinking, Max, not this time. She felt sick. Because she had noticed the eerie hush the very second she entered the apartment. Her eyes had flown to the paintings displayed around the room. It wasn’t hard to guess they were the reason for the lack of gaiety at what was supposed to be a holiday celebration. And what she had seen had sickened her.
They were truly awful. Not in technique. Max was a fine artist. It was the subject matter, and the way it was depicted, that was so horrible. Elizabeth’s eyes had darted around the room once, a quick look, then again, a more thorough look. Every painting, without exception, was appalling. An even dozen depictions of … her heart began pounding ferociously … the sinking of the Titanic.
Max was not an abstract artist. That was one of the things she had loved about his Paris street scenes. He painted what he saw exactly the way he saw it, with wonderful attention to detail. These paintings were no different. Artistically speaking, Elizabeth knew they were probably very good. But these were not pictures of the Eiffel Tower or outdoor cafes or gardens in full bloom or lovers strolling along the Seine. These paintings were of a terrible tragedy. Every grim detail of that long, shocking, frightening night stared back at Elizabeth as her eyes moved from one canvas to the next in disbelief. It was as if they were all taunting her, saying, You wanted to forget, but we’re not going to let you.
The first group of paintings were of the last moments on board the ship. In the first, Max had caught perfectly the fear in the eyes of passengers waiting on line to climb into a lifeboat. But in a bizarre, haunting contradiction, he had painted in the background people playing cards, smoking cigars, laughing, either unaware of what was happening or in denial.
And while Elizabeth recognized the painting as truth … it had been like that for some … it sickened her. Those people who had been unwilling to accept reality, who had insisted to the end that the ship was not about to sink, that they weren’t leaving a “warm, comfortable” ship to go out on the cold, dark sea in one of those “flimsy” lifeboats, those people had all perished. They had waited too long. What she and the rest of the world had later learned was, by the time they had accepted harsh reality and were ready to abandon the sinking ship, there were no lifeboats left. They would not be leaving … alive.
Max had captured their terror, too, in the second group of paintings. The faces in these works were more painful to look at than those in the first. These passengers left on board, clinging to the rail as the ship climbed ever higher in the water, nearly perpendicular to the deep, dark water waiting below, knew they were about to die a horrible death. The ocean temperature was below freezing. Even those who were expert swimmers had to know they had no chance of survival in such conditions. And those who had climbed up to cling to the rail at the very highest point of the ship knew that should they lose their grip, the resulting fall would either dash them to pieces when they struck some part of the ship on the way down, or kill them when they hit the water However they died, they knew that death was at hand.
All of this was reflected in the ugly, twisted, faces Max had painted. The mouths were opened in screams, the eyes wide with terror. And in a touch of irony not lost on Elizabeth, Max had painted out on the sea surrounding the ship a trio of lifeboats which were, disgracefully, no more than half filled. This, too, was truth. But it was embittering to gaze upon. Her father could have been in one of those boats, as could many other people who had perished. She tried never to think about that, because it made her so angry. And now Max had painted it, forcing her to think about it, to remember.
The third group of paintings was almost impossible to look at for more than a second. It was, she guessed, from what little she had seen of the area, a depiction of steerage passengers trying in vain to break through the locked iron gate that kept them from the upper decks and safety. There were men, women, and children. Some of the faces expressed terror, others fury, while most of the younger faces were bewildered or frightened.
Elizabeth knew that most of the people in the painting had never made it through that locked gate.
But the last group was the most painful. The backgrounds were all somber tones of purple and brown and black, but the figures, the people, were done in brighter colors: reds, yellows, greens, as if by coloring them so vividly, Max meant to point out how alive they had once been. The scenes were grim. People falling to their death as the pull of gravity tore them from the rail. The ship breaking in two, the detail in this painting so graphic Elizabeth could almost hear the ripping, tearing sounds just as she’d heard them that night from the lifeboat. The worst of the lot were the scenes of the ocean after the Titanic had slid beneath the surface, disappearing from view. The now-smooth, flat, dark water was broken in Max’s last three paintings by the bodies of floating victims encircling the lifeboats, including one child, lifeless, its eyes closed, improbably clutching a glassy-eyed doll under one arm.
It wasn’t like that, Elizabeth cried silently. We weren’t that close to the victims, we didn’t ignore them in the water, not like that. At least, it hadn’t been like that around her lifeboat. If it had, she would never have forgotten it, never. Bad enough that she had heard the screaming. Still did hear it. Probably always would. But she had not seen what Max was depicting here.
He was clearly saying, “More people would have been saved if the survivors in the lifeboats had helped.” And that, too, was a truth. She knew that. Everyone knew it.
But only Max had painted it, which was the same as saying it aloud.
“No one’s going to buy these, Max,” Bled
soe finally said into the shocked silence. “As art work goes, they’re technically damn near perfect. The detail, the colors, they’re great. But no one’s going to buy them.”
Other people murmured agreement.
Max frowned. “I didn’t paint them to make money. I thought you’d understand that.” He glanced at Elizabeth. “You do, don’t you, Elizabeth?”
She didn’t. She had no idea why he’d painted them, couldn’t imagine a reason. There couldn’t be a reason. When the only response she could give him was a slow, sad shaking of her head, he looked hurt and confused.
Only Anne said, “I like them. They’re, well, they’re scary, but they’re good. I like them.”
You would, Elizabeth thought angrily. Anything to be different. But then, Anne, you weren’t there, were you? You have no idea how these paintings will twist the knife already imbedded in the heart of every survivor, in the heart of every relative of every victim. You don’t understand. How could you?
It was then she noticed something in the first painting that she’d missed, and it took her breath away. One of the faces waiting on the lifeboat line was her father’s face. There was no question about it. Max had captured his likeness perfectly. The face seemed incredibly sad but brave, the head up, the shoulders back. The eyes were gazing out at sea. She realized then that he was standing alone, that what he was looking at in the distance was a lifeboat already launched, in which sat, among other passengers, a young girl wearing a large red hat and an older woman in a similar hat of royal blue.
Their hats, hers and her mother’s, had been black. But Max had used brighter colors, just as he’d done in the other paintings.