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

by Suzanne Weyn

  Tesla’s time machine, by throwing us forward in time, had changed Mimi’s future, Thad’s, Amelie-Em’s—and mine, as well. If they weren’t alive, my life would be very different; on the inside if not the outside. It wasn’t the big save he had wanted, but it was the world to me.

  I am here with Thad and Mimi. My heart is full with joy and gratitude at their return. This gift fate has unexpectedly given makes me feel I might explode with love for the whole world.

  Jiva is Shiva.

  Like the ocean, life is vast and mysterious.

  It makes me excited to travel forward into the future regardless of its uncertainties, knowing that what I do makes a difference.

  Yawning sleepily, I rest my head on Thad’s shoulder, ready for whatever is next as we roar on into tomorrow.

  Author’s Note:

  WHAT’S REAL IN DISTANT WAVES?

  This novel is a work of fiction. However, it is based on certain historical facts. Maude, Mimi, Jane, Emma, Amelie, and Blythe Oneida Taylor are fictional, as is Thad. Quite a few real-life characters appear here, although I have imagined their dialogue and actions. I began to compile a chapter-by-chapter article on what was true and what was imagined in this novel, and it soon began to rival the length of the story. With the need for brevity in mind, here is a quick overview of the true history used here.

  The home where Maude conducts her séance really existed and is open to the public. The Old Merchant’s House is known to some as “the most haunted house in New York.” It is located at 29 East Fourth Street in Manhattan. It became a museum in 1936.

  In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a wealthy merchant, moved into it with his family: a wife, two sons, and six daughters. The youngest member of the family, Gertrude Tredwell, lived in the house until she died in the upstairs bedroom in 1933 at the age of 93. Her older sister Julia Tredwell died in 1909, twenty-four years before Gertrude. Their sister Mary Adelaide Tredwell Richards, one of the only two daughters ever to marry, died in 1874.

  The Fox sisters, Kate, Leah, and Margaret Fox, whom the Tredwells and Maude talk about, really existed. The story Maude tells about them is true. In 1848, the sisters were living in Hydesville, New York, in a house that was already considered haunted. They heard unexplained sounds and attempted to contact the ghost making them. They claimed they did make contact, and later it was verified that a peddler named Charles Rosma had died in the house.

  The sisters were celebrities in their day. By 1850, they were giving public séances in New York City and are credited with starting the movement known as spiritualism. They were later discredited when it was discovered that some of the strange thumps and bumps the public heard were created by the sisters cracking their finger and toe joints.

  It is said that Abraham Lincoln always had a strong belief in the spirit world as well as a belief in visions and predictions. He saw an image of himself in a mirror once that led him to believe he would not live through his second term in office—which, of course, he did not.

  In 1862, Lincoln’s twelve-year-old son, William Wallace Lincoln (Willie), died. Historians say it was the greatest blow Lincoln ever suffered. He often talked about how his son’s spirit was always with him.

  Though Lincoln was not publicly associated with spiritualists, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, embraced them. There is a famous story about a spiritualist named Nettie Maynard who was purported to have caused a grand piano in the White House to levitate off the floor while trying to contact Willie Lincoln.

  It is documented by police and fire records of the time that an earthquake did occur outside the Manhattan laboratory of Nikola Tesla at 46 East Houston Street. Years later, in 1935, Tesla revealed to the New York World newspaper that he had accidentally caused it while experimenting with vibrating frequencies in his lab. Tesla told the reporter:

  “I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That’s all they ever knew about it.”

  Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Austria-Hungary. He was perhaps the greatest scientific genius of the last century, but he’s not as well-known as Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison because he was not very practical, nor was he a good businessman. At age twenty-eight, the six-foot-four Tesla arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket. With a letter of recommendation from home, he went to see Thomas Edison, the man who had introduced electricity to Manhattan in 1870. They soon fell into conflict over theories and business practices. Edison did offer Tesla money to refurbish his generators…and when the job was done, he claimed that he had been kidding. After Tesla quit, he had to dig ditches for the Edison Company for a while in order to support himself. Tesla had no respect for Edison’s methods, claiming he relied on guesswork and had no background in sound mathematical or scientific practice.

  The most famous argument between Tesla and Edison centered on a disagreement about whether alternating electric (AC) current was more efficient than direct current (DC). Tesla favored alternating current, while Edison believed in direct current. By 1887, Edison launched a propaganda war to convince the public that AC current was unsafe. He filmed a rogue elephant being electrocuted with AC current in order to horrify the public and have them associate their horror with AC current. Eventually, though, the public embraced AC current as more efficient, less expensive, and safer.

  After this, Tesla returned to his lab to work on high-frequency vibrations. He felt that this would have many practical applications, particularly the efficient and safe transmission of energy. He wanted to reproduce the vibrations of sunlight, which he believed would create virtually free electricity for humanity. Jumping off from this, he began work on the wireless transmission of energy and is credited with laying the groundwork for today’s wireless technology. All the inventions and theories mentioned in this novel, such as the Teslascope, Tesla coil, and Tesla turbine and the fact that Tesla believed viruses could be shattered with vibrations, are true. He did move to Colorado Springs, built a radio tower, and attempted to contact extraterrestrial life. He did this because he believed that his tower had picked up signals from outer space. This tower eventually burned to the ground. Some speculated that this was done by agents of Edison or his financial backers, though this has never been proven. Others believe it was either lightning or the high voltages of electricity Tesla was experimenting with that caused the fire.

  In 1900, he built another radio tower in Shoreham, Long Island, in New York. This tower, however, was a failure, and was foreclosed by the bank in 1908. He sold the scrap metal to George C. Boldt, manager of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, to pay back the rent he owed for staying at the hotel for almost twenty years.

  Many believe that he was experimenting with time travel as early as 1895. In the 1930s, Tesla was involved with a group at the University of Chicago investigating invisibility and the possibility of moving through the time-space continuum. For more on this work, research the Philadelphia Experiment.

  Tesla died in 1943 at the age of 86. He continued to feed all the pigeons in Bryant Park until his death. Tesla’s later years were spent working on such concepts as free energy, radar, electric cars, rocketry, and electric current therapy.

  Tesla was not on the Titanic—or, at least, not that we know of. Emil Christmann, Tesla’s alias, was the name of a real person on the passenger list. Also, Tesla was working on experiments to ligh
t shipping lanes in the Atlantic and to improve ship-to-ship communications. He did not propose a means to shatter icebergs with vibration, but given his extensive work in the area and his belief that the world itself could be split in half if the right frequency was found, such a device is certainly within the realm of possibility.

  On the train to Spirit Vale, Maude Taylor reads a book called Futility. It was a short novel published in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank. It is eerily prophetic. The author, Morgan Robertson, called his ship the Titan and described it as “the largest craft afloat.” In the novel, the ship has its first voyage in April and has a collision with an iceberg on that journey. Its publisher later renamed it The Wreck of the Titan: A Nineteenth-Century Prophecy. This novel can still be found and ordered online.

  Spirit Vale is a fictionalized version of Lily Dale, in the town of Pomfret, about an hour south of Buffalo, New York. This community of spirit mediums was founded in 1879. By the early 1900s, it was a thriving center of spiritualism, as well as a political meeting place for those supporting women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony was a frequent visitor, and Frederick Douglass came with his suffragist second wife. Many celebrities of stage and the early movies also came in search of a way to contact deceased loved ones. For more on Lily Dale, read Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859 and died in 1930. He first debuted his famous detective tales in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, and in 1890, Sherlock Holmes appeared in a story featured in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. The character became so popular that it became a regular series in the Strand magazine in 1891.

  Arthur Conan Doyle was interested in spiritualism. His novel The Land of Mist deals with the subject, and in 1926 he wrote a book titled The History of Spiritualism, in which he praised the work of two noted spiritualists. His son Kingsley Doyle did die as a result of wounds inflicted at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. And, as in the novel, he was also friends with the great magician Harry Houdini.

  Harry Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in 1874. At the point we meet him in the novel, he had not yet legally changed his name but was using it in his magic act. Unlike his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini never changed his mind about spiritualism, maintaining that it was no more than trickery and fraud. He even claimed to have learned some of his own magic tricks from spiritualists. In the 1920s, he turned much of his energy to proving that spiritualists were fakes. He was a member of a group called Scientific American that offered cash prizes to any medium who could prove true abilities. Houdini made sure this prize was never awarded by continually uncovering tricks that confounded everyone else. His friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was broken due to Houdini’s zeal in uncovering mediums. Conan Doyle came to believe that Houdini himself was a spiritual medium. The two men became public antagonists. After Houdini died, Conan Doyle dealt with this in his novel The Edge of the Unknown, published posthumously in 1931.

  The psychic conference conducted by William Stead is a fiction. But W. T. Stead was a respected journalist involved with spiritualism and was a passenger on the Titanic. Although he had predicted the sinking of the Titanic, and predicted his own death by ice, he boarded the ship to attend a peace congress at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan at the invitation of United States President William Taft. He died that night, just as he had predicted. He spent his last hours in dignified resignation to his fate, sitting in the first-class drawing room with his companion John Jacob Astor.

  The LaRoche family really existed. Joseph LaRoche went down with the Titanic. His wife and daughters survived. I imagined Mimi as Haitian and of mixed race, and then discovered the LaRoches’ story—one of the most exciting discoveries of many I made while writing this book.

  Colonel John Jacob Astor the Fourth also died that night on the Titanic. At the time, he was one of the richest men in America. He was returning to New York with his much younger, pregnant second wife, Madeleine Force. Along with his cousin, William Waldorf, he owned the Waldorf-Astoria, the world’s tallest hotel at that time. He let his good friend Nikola Tesla stay there for minimal rent. The two men had been friends since the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and later Astor, along with George Westinghouse and others, was a major backer of Tesla’s Niagara Falls Project. He was an amateur scientist who held a patent on a moving sidewalk and who had written a futuristic novel. At the time of his death, he and Tesla were talking about the commuter flivver plane that Tesla was developing, part helicopter and part plane. It is said that Astor, a dog lover, freed all the dogs from the kennels so they would have a chance to survive the sinking of the Titanic. Madeleine Force survived the sinking and went on to have his son.

  Mrs. Brown was never known as Molly Brown, but rather Maggie. She became known as Molly only after her death, because of a 1960 stage musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Born Margaret Tobin in 1867, she grew up impoverished and, at nineteen, married a poor man known as J.J. Brown. Although their early married life was lean, they had two children and Maggie was involved in the fight for women’s rights. In the early 1890s, J.J.’s work with the Ibex Mining Company turned profitable when he discovered an ore seam in a mine. Mrs. Brown was on the Titanic because she was returning early from a trip to Europe, having received word that her grandson was ill. She was traveling with her good friends the Astors. After the sinking of the ship, she was widely praised for her heroism.

  Millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim and his girlfriend Leontine “Ninette” Aubart really sailed on the Titanic. With them was their valet Victor Giglio. Mimi Taylor is a fictional character and was not engaged to him. Although Mimi was not really her companion, Ninette was rescued in lifeboat nine with the maid with whom she was traveling, and did not die until 1964 at the age of 77. Victor Giglio and Benjamin Guggenheim both went down with the Titanic.

  The center of this novel, of course, is the sinking of the Titanic, which occured at two thirty in the morning on April 15, 1912, although it had been considered unsinkable. It hit an iceberg on its starboard side and immediately began taking on water. Its rudder did not crack, as seen in the novel, but a panel convened afterward at the Waldorf-Astoria did find that the rudder was too small for the massive ship and was the reason it could not steer away from the iceberg quickly enough. Its sinking is considered one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters ever. One thousand, five hundred and seventeen people died.

  Acknowledgments

  To my sisters, Regina Weyn Arredondo, Anne Weyn Maloney, and Susan Palubinskas Weyn, women of spirit and compassion. What a blessing to have sisters like these.

  With thanks to David M. Young, Jonathan Valuckas, Colleen Salcius, and David Levithan for the generous sharing of their ideas, books, and enthusiasm in the creation of this Titanic tale. And thanks to Bill Gonzalez, Diana Weyn Gonzalez, and Rae Weyn Gonzalez—just because nothing would be worth writing without you.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Suzanne Weyn

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  E-ISBN: 978-0-545-23005-6

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data<
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  Weyn, Suzanne.

  Distant waves : a novel of the Titanic / Suzanne Weyn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the early twentieth century, five sisters and their widowed mother, a famed spiritualist, travel from New York to London, and as the Titanic conveys them and their acquaintances, journalist W. T. Stead, scientist Nikola Tesla, and industrialist John Jacob Astor, home, Tesla’s inventions will either doom or save them all.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-545-08572-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-545-08572-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  [1. Spiritualists—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Inventors—Fiction. 5. Titanic (Steamship)—Fiction. 6. Tesla, Nikola, 1856–1943—Fiction. 7. Astor, John Jacob, 1864–1912—Fiction. 8. Stead, W. T. (William Thomas), 1849–1912—Fiction. 9. New York (State)—History—20th century—Fiction. 10. London (England)—History—20th century—Fiction. 11. Great Britain—History—George V, 1910–1936—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W539Dis 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008040708

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 10 11 12 13

  First edition, April 2009