Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic: A Novel of the Titanic

by Suzanne Weyn

  “Do you really believe that’s true?”

  “I know it’s true!” he exploded. “I’ve seen inventions work perfectly; then he goes to demonstrate to a crowd and it’s all a bust!”

  “How do they get away with it?” I asked.

  “The police don’t bother them because they’re rich. Edison or his backers hire thugs who disappear into the back alleys they crawled out of. These rich guys have no ethics. They just love money and don’t care that Tesla’s the greatest genius of our time.”

  “But, before, you said he was a nut.”

  Thad nodded. “He’s also a nut…in some ways.”

  “What ways?”

  “He’s crazy about germs, always cleaning his silverware, even in restaurants, yet he loves pigeons, which are just flying rats, if you ask me. He loathes women’s jewelry, especially pearl earrings. Don’t wear any pearls around him or he won’t talk to you.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Good. You don’t need them.”

  I wondered what that meant—You don’t need them. Was it a compliment toward me…or just an insult to women who bothered with pearls?

  “What should I wear, then?” I asked.

  “What you have on,” he replied. “You look perfect just the way you are.”

  I felt heat at my temples and turned away. The last thing I wanted was for him to see me blush like some silly schoolgirl. Perfect? Did he really think so?

  When Mimi and Ninette returned to the living room, Mimi had put on a gorgeous deep purple dress with a hobble skirt. “How do you like it?” she asked me, turning with tiny steps required by the ankle-length, narrow skirt. “Ninette says everyone in Paris is wearing this.”

  “That skirt would drive me insane,” I remarked.

  Thad chuckled approvingly.

  “Why?” Mimi asked.

  “You’re completely hobbled by it.”

  “What do you mean?” Mimi asked.

  “It cripples you,” I offered. “It’s no accident that they call it a hobble skirt. Hobbled means crippled.”

  “I see you have not the love of fashion that Mimi and I share,” Ninette said lightly, as if my disapproval was unimportant. She draped her arm around Mimi’s shoulders as though they were old friends. A pang of possessive jealousy welled up in me. How dare she presume this kind of familiarity with my sister?

  “Are the lobsters here yet?” Ninette asked.

  “We haven’t ordered,” I admitted. “And I’ve never used a telephone before, so I’m not really sure how to do it.”

  “Never used a telephone!” Ninette cried incredulously. “How quaint! Here, I will show you.”

  She lifted the conelike receiver off its black metal pedestal, but before she could speak into it, Thad raised his hand to stop her. “Come to think of it, we’re not really hungry for this rich hotel food,” he said. “Jane and I are going to have lunch in a good little restaurant I know of in Chinatown.”

  I glanced at him in excited surprise. This was news to me.

  “Would you ladies care to join us?” he offered halfheartedly.

  “No. I have my heart set on the lovely lobsters,” Ninette declined.

  “Me, neither. I’ll stay here with Ninette,” Mimi said.

  Did she know what she was doing when she made this choice?

  Was she doing it for me…or for herself?

  Chapter 11

  That afternoon I had my first ride on a train, which ran up- and downtown on an elevated track. The train took us to a part of the city known as Chinatown because the vast majority of its citizens were from China.

  Before arriving at the restaurant, Thad and I got off at Fourteenth Street at a place called Union Square. “Come on,” Thad said. “There’s something here I want to show you.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ll see. You’ll like it.”

  I hurried behind him down the metal stairs to an open area dominated by a statue of George Washington on horseback. In front of it, a band of five scruffy boys, one with a homemade drum, another with an actual harp, played an off-beat song while the others danced and sang for the coins passersby threw in their rusted pot. I tossed in a few pennies of my own, not because their music was good but because they were so adorable.

  It wasn’t easy to keep up with Thad’s long strides as we crossed the bustling square, but we quickly came to a sort of theater on the side. A large sign over an arched doorway declared: AUTOMATIC ONE CENT VAUDEVILLE. “What is this?” I asked him.

  “It’s a nickelodeon, which is a kind of kinetoscope.”

  “A what?”

  “They show short films,” he explained. “This is the biggest one in the city.”

  My hands flew to my mouth with excitement. I’d read about these in the papers. They were like films, only shorter and less expensive.

  “Come on,” he said, and I followed him in. The place was gigantic, with row upon row of shoulder-high machines lined up along the walls and forming center aisles. Each one of them displayed a placard that told the name of the brief film it played.

  “I’ve never even seen a movie before,” I told him excitedly. This was true; although I read all about the movie actors in them and devoured the reviews, I had never actually seen a movie or a nickelodeon.

  “Well, now’s your chance,” he said with a smile. “Tesla believes that someday every home will have its own private nickelodeon.”

  I hurried off toward a bank of nickelodeon machines on the right but Thad grasped my shoulder firmly. “Not those,” he said. “They’re not suitable for a young lady.”

  A second glance made me realize that they were all being used by young men dressed in boater hats with their suit jackets slung over their shoulders. “Oh, I see,” I said, trying to sound worldly wise and knowing.

  “There are some good ones over here,” he said, directing me to the wall on my left. “This is my favorite,” he told me as he dropped a penny in a machine marked: BOATING DISASTER. “Take a look.”

  A funny little man was taking his rather large girlfriend for a canoe ride on a lake. He had trouble with the oars, turning the canoe in circles at first. Then his girlfriend readjusted her seat and the canoe tilted so that the little man was lifted up along with the canoe’s bow. He frantically rowed in the air. Finally, the two of them slid into the lake, looking none too happy.

  The film lasted no more than three minutes. “Funny, huh?” Thad said, wanting my reaction.

  “It is funny, but I felt sorry for them,” I replied, smiling despite my sympathy for the characters.

  “Don’t. They’re only actors,” Thad said. “Come on. I’ll show you some of my other favorites.”

  We spent the next half hour working our way down the line of nickelodeon machines, watching film after film. It was such fun!

  We came to a film called Dance of the Ghosts. Five women in white, hooded, flowing robes did a sort of ballet around a glowing ball in a darkened room.

  “Isn’t that one crazy?” Thad checked enthusiastically.

  “Crazy,” I agreed. I didn’t dare tell him how much it reminded me of home.

  Eventually we got back on the train and took it to Canal Street. It was the most amazing place! Every sign was in Chinese. Vendors sold all manner of exotic clothing, toys, and even baby turtles out on the street. We browsed in small shops that sold exotic carved knickknacks and porcelain curios. We passed a Chinese apothecary with bizarre items such as dried wings and powdered rhino horn displayed in the window. With a little imagination, I could easily believe I was really in China.

  We reached an electric neon sign that flashed the name Wo-Hop, and Thad took us down a flight of stairs to a belowground restaurant of plain chairs and tables set with white dishes on white paper tablecloths. Nearly everyone there was Chinese, many more men than women, dressed in traditional Chinese garb.

  A small man in a white shirt and black pants ran out to greet Thad. He clearly knew him and was deli
ghted at his arrival.

  “Jane, I’d like you to meet Mr. Wang, a friend of my family’s. Mr. Wang, meet Jane Oneida Taylor. She’s a journalist writing about Tesla.”

  Mr. Wang shook my hand enthusiastically. “Mr. Tesla a very great man. Very big brain. I am pleased to meet you.”

  Once we were seated, Thad ordered for us both, speaking Chinese to the waiter. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said to me when he’d finished. “I think you’ll like what I ordered. I never met anyone who didn’t.”

  “Where did you learn to speak Chinese?” I asked. Thad, it seemed, was full of secrets and surprises.

  “I was born in China. My parents were missionaries.”

  “My father was a missionary, too.”

  While we waited for our food, we had a lively conversation. I told him that Father had passed and all about our life in Spirit Vale, even admitting that the Dance of the Ghosts nickelodeon made me think of home. In the hours since we’d first met, I’d grown increasingly at ease with him. “Does it sound insane?” I asked.

  “It sounds like a lot of fun,” he replied. “What a great place to grow up.”

  “It’s not meant to be fun,” I said. “They take it very seriously. Being a scientist, you must think it’s a lot of rubbish.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I believe in life after death but I don’t know how long a soul hangs around before it moves on.”

  Thad told me that he’d lived in China until the age of ten and then he’d returned with his parents. At seventeen his parents had wanted him to go to seminary college to become a minister, but he’d had other ideas.

  Thad was interested in science even though his parents were adamant that science was the enemy of religion. Thad thought that was absurd. “They’re so behind the times,” he said. “They don’t realize that we’re on the brink of a new, modern age. Everything will soon change. Everything!” He and his parents had fallen out bitterly over this. And so he’d come to New York to live on his own.

  “The greatest thing that happened to me was being hired as Tesla’s assistant,” he told me. “In the last three years I’ve learned more about science than I would have in Harvard and Yale put together.”

  I realized that made him twenty. I decided to make no mention of my own age. There were only four years’ difference between us—not really so much. We were getting on so well and I didn’t want anything to spoil it.

  “Do you want to be an inventor like Tesla?” I asked.

  “I could never be like him. I’m no genius. But I have invented a few things.”

  “What?” I asked eagerly.

  He pushed the white plates to the side and took out a pencil. He began to draw an airplane different in every way from the propeller planes I’d seen.

  “It’s a glider,” he told me. “Tesla is working on something he calls a flivver plane, which is a cross between a gyroscope and a plane, but it needs fuel. This is a glider that would ride the air currents like a hawk. I believe that we can’t be so reliant on fossil fuels. It’s going to run out someday.”

  Tearing off a piece of paper tablecloth, he began to fold it in intricate ways. “I learned origami in China,” he said with a grin as he folded. When he was done, he got up and opened a high window. “Have to let some air currents in here,” he explained. Then he shot his paper plane into the room.

  Everyone stopped eating and gasped as it sailed over their heads. Every second, I thought it would crash into someone’s food, but it kept going. I couldn’t believe it.

  Finally, the little paper plane glided in for a landing on the windowsill. The entire restaurant erupted in applause, and so did I. “That’s wonderful. How can you say you’re not a genius?” I praised him sincerely.

  “I’m not,” he said, retrieving his plane. “But I would like to take what I’m learning from Tesla about magnetic resonances and apply it to aeronautical design. Planes are going to be huge.”

  “Do you think so?” I asked. “They seem so clumsy right now.”

  “They won’t stay that way for long,” he said. “There are guys like me everywhere who are working on sleeker, better designs. You’ll see, Jane. It’s the future.”

  Our meals came, interrupting us. They were a sort of egg pancake with shrimp, onions, and vegetables cooked in and topped with gravy. “Shrimp Egg Fu Young,” he told me. “What do you think?”

  “I’m sure this is better than anything Mimi and Ninette are having back at the hotel,” I said. “I still can’t believe I met Benjamin Guggenheim.”

  “All those rich backers are like that Guggenheim guy,” he said as he ate with chopsticks. “They’re so full of their own importance. And it’s absurd that he has that young girlfriend, Ninette Aubart. She’s divorced or something. People gossip about them. She’s not his wife. She’s his side girlfriend. He’s forty-six and she’s about twenty-four or—five.”

  “I suppose it’s the trend with wealthy men,” I suggested. “I read that John Jacob Astor is marrying a woman twenty years younger than he is next month.”

  “Madeleine Force. Yeah. She’s twenty! He’s getting married next month if they can find a minister to marry them. Nobody will do it.”

  “Because of their age difference?” I asked.

  “And he’s divorced,” Thad said, nodding. “Their problem might help Tesla, though. He’s trying to get in to see Astor before he sails off on his honeymoon. Ever since the last World’s Fair, they’ve been great friends. They have a lot in common because Astor is a sort of amateur scientist himself. He’s had articles published and even holds a patent on a moving sidewalk he invented. Astor was one of Tesla’s backers on the Niagara Falls project.”

  “If they’re such good friends, why is Tesla having so much trouble communicating with Astor?” I asked.

  “It’s this Madeleine Force romance. Astor and Madeleine are lying low in his mansion in Rhode Island to avoid the press. The papers are having a field day with the scandal.”

  I put down my fork and attempted to use the chopsticks by my plate. Studying Thad, I gave it my best attempt. I didn’t have much luck.

  He chuckled good-naturedly and took them from my hand. “Like this,” he instructed, arranging my fingers in the proper position. With his hand on mine, he worked the sticks, scooping up the food and lifting it to my lips.

  To tell the truth, I was so pleasantly unnerved that I forgot to open my mouth!

  “Oh! Sorry!” I said, laughing nervously when I realized the food was hovering in front of me.

  “Now you try,” he advised.

  My second attempt went more smoothly.

  “I guess the timing is bad for Tesla,” I remarked as soon as I was eating well enough with the sticks.

  “There are rumors that Astor is going to run off and get married,” he replied. “If Astor disappears on a prolonged honeymoon, it will be a disaster for Tesla. He won’t be able to catch up with Astor to persuade him to finance his next idea.”

  “What is his next idea?” I asked, finally spearing a piece of egg pancake with the end of my chopstick and getting it to my lips.

  Thad shook his head sadly. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I promised.

  “Oh, no?” He smiled. “Aren’t you writing a newspaper article?”

  “I guess so.” I smiled back.

  Electricity.

  Thad held it for a moment, just the two of us looking at each other, the air charged between us. Then, just before it went on a beat too long, he said, “When we go back, Tesla will probably be awake. I’ll ask if he’ll talk to you and see what he says. Then, if he wants to tell you, it will be up to him.”

  Chapter 12

  My long walk from Thirty-fourth Street to Central Park went quickly because I was so fascinated by the variety of people passing me. No doubt I was conspicuously the gaping rube, drinking in every face that passed. New York City seemed to me like a reflection of the entire world. I loved its excitement.
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br />   Thad had instructed me to meet Tesla at the entrance to the park at Columbus Circle. I was to walk with Tesla while he fed the pigeons in the park, a ritual he carried out every day, rain or shine.

  As I stood by the grand entrance to the park with my Tesla scrapbook tucked under my arm, my mind wandered…and I have to admit that it was Thad whom it veered toward. Our lunch together had been the first time I’d sat alone with a fellow and, honestly, I’d found it exciting. I liked everything about him: his sympathy for the common person; his interest in science; his independence in striking out for New York City on his own. And I couldn’t get those vivid blue eyes out of my mind. Or that white scar on his forehead, that handsome imperfection.

  I spied Tesla hurrying across the traffic circle carrying a brown paper bag. With a nervously pounding heart, I hurried toward him as he came near. “Sir, I’m Jane Oneida Taylor. You agreed to let me interview you?”

  He stopped and scrutinized me. “Is Oneida really your middle name?” he asked.

  “My mother adopted it in honor of the native people who lived near us,” I explained.

  “You are from northwestern New York, then,” he surmised.

  “Not far from Niagara Falls. I know you’re familiar with that,” I said.

  This brought a fond smile to him. “Indeed, I am. You have done your homework.”

  “Yes,” I replied. I had been doing it for the last twelve years. “I know everything that has been printed in the newspapers, at least.” I lifted my scrapbook to show him. “It’s all in here.”

  He took it from me and perused it briefly. “Then, no doubt, you know many things that are not true,” he commented. “Newspapers are not renowned for their accuracy.”