Titanic

by Diane Hoh

  Still, when she passed the girl and her family on her way out of the dining room, Katie was struck by the fact that the pretty face didn’t seem untroubled. That was a bit of a surprise. There was a frown, there, on her forehead, and was there not a droop to the mouth? Didn’t the eyes seem a bit red-rimmed, as if there had been tears recently?

  Of course, that couldn’t possibly be the truth of it. Why would a girl like that be shedding tears?

  I’m imaginin’ things, she told herself. I don’t need to be thinkin’ that someone born into such good fortune could have troubles. She looks that way because she’s been concentrating on the service, that’s all, and I would have been better off doing the same.

  When they returned to steerage, she went straight to the general room in search of Eileen and the two children, to see if Bridey had suffered any ill effects from last night’s accident. The little girl seemed fine, which Katie regarded as a good thing since Eileen, dancing in the arms of the Norwegian, was paying no more attention to Bridey than she had before the fall.

  Katie took the children out on deck for a breath of fresh air later that afternoon. She was taken aback by how much colder the air had become. Her shawl was woefully inadequate, and Bridey had left her coat folded on a bench inside. They had only been on deck a few minutes when Kevin’s teeth began chattering with cold.

  “Fresh air ain’t goin’ to do you any good if you catch pneumonia,” Katie said, and took them back inside, thinking that it was a good thing the Atlantic Ocean was saltwater, or it would be frozen solid and then how would they sail on it?

  “Might be icebergs about,” a crewman commented as a shivering Katie returned to the general room. “Seems cold enough. Seen them around these parts before, on other trips. Big as houses, some o’ them.”

  Big as houses? Alarmed, Katie asked, “There’s no danger, is there?”

  The crewman laughed. “No, ma’am, I don’t guess so. It’d take a lot more than an old berg to do damage to the Titanic.”

  But Katie was picturing a chunk of ice the size of a house floating toward them on the open sea. The thought made her stomach begin to churn. Was it really true, as the crewman had said, that an object so large could collide with the Titanic and cause no harm?

  She would ask Paddy and Brian what they thought.

  But she had to wait all afternoon, as they didn’t return from their card games until just before supper. She didn’t want to ruin the meal, so she kept her worries to herself until afterward, when they were all back in the general room. A party had already begun, and Brian went off to dance with Marta, leaving Katie alone with Paddy.

  “There’s talk of ice,” she said abruptly over the sound of the accordion and the pipes. “Bergs as big as houses. Do you think that’s likely, Paddy?”

  He nodded. “Of course. I was out on deck a while ago. It’s turned cold as an icehouse out there. Could be bergs. Why? You’re not troublin’ yourself about it, are you? You don’t trust the captain to steer the ship through an ice field?”

  Katie thought about that for a minute. “I don’t even know the captain,” she answered then. “You haven’t seen him walkin’ around down here talkin’ to all us third-class passengers, have you, now? How would I be knowin’ whether or not I should trust him?”

  “Well, he’s got us this far. I guess he can take us the rest of the way. Anyways, the shipping line wouldn’t trust a ship as fine as this one to just any old captain, would they? Don’t you think they’d hire the best? The one with the most experience?” Then Paddy said the words Katie had been hoping to hear. “Quit troublin’ yourself about icebergs and come dance with me.”

  Whirling in his arms, Katie forgot about the crewman’s words and let the music lift her feet off the floor.

  Elizabeth had agreed to meet Max on the boat deck at nine o’clock. She almost changed her mind and went to bed instead, wanting nothing more than to huddle deep beneath the coverlet and wallow in her misery. Besides, he’d be disappointed again that she’d failed to talk herself out of a loveless marriage. She didn’t want to see the look on his face when she shared that depressing bit of news with him.

  She went, after all, only because she needed to see him. Not that seeing him would change anything. But it would make her feel better.

  She listened at the door of her parents’ cabin before she left her own. Silence. She hadn’t heard their door closing, but that was probably because she’d been lost in her own thoughts. They wouldn’t have gone to bed this early, so the silence meant they’d gone out.

  Elizabeth threw on the gray cloak, left her room, and hurried down the corridor and up the stairs to meet Max.

  He was very understanding at first. It was too cold to stay outside, so he led her into the warmer gymnasium, which was nearly empty. Many people were attending a concert being performed by the ship’s orchestra; others were playing cards or eating in the restaurant. Max and Elizabeth sat on side-by-side stationary bicycles to talk.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said sympathetically. “Maybe a sea voyage isn’t the place to discuss such serious matters. When you get home, it’ll be different.”

  “When I get home,” Elizabeth said bitterly, “my debut will begin immediately. There won’t be any time to talk. I was counting on this trip. It seemed to me the ideal time to talk to them, since the only way they could avoid me would be to jump overboard.”

  Max laughed.

  Elizabeth did not. “I didn’t realize they’d be so busy all the time, or that even when they weren’t, they wouldn’t really listen.” She would almost certainly have to endure the debut season, and it looked very much as if college was out of the question, at least for a while. It could take her years to wear them down. All of which meant life was going to be pretty dismal when she returned to New York in three days. The only bright spot she could think of was having Max Whittaker in that life. Without him…

  Elizabeth shuddered at the thought of life without Max.

  “Max, if you agree to take just one or two college courses, your parents will let you study painting at the same time. You won’t be disowned, and my parents won’t have any reason to keep me from seeing you.”

  “We’ve already had this discussion, Elizabeth,” Max said firmly. “I haven’t changed my mind. Pigheaded or not, it’s time for me to go out on my own. When you think about it, leaving home is the only way to grow up, right?”

  Every girl Elizabeth knew expected to go straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s home. Young women did not leave their parents until they married. Even Monica Beaumont, who was attending Vassar, still lived at home when she wasn’t attending classes. Young women did not live on their own.

  “Just because a person never lives in a garret somewhere in New York City,” she said indignantly, sliding off the bicycle seat to stand up, “doesn’t mean that person never grows up. Marrying and raising children is very maturing, I’m sure. My mother’s not a child.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Everything she had ever told Max about her mother had made Nola sound like a spoiled child. If he laughed now, she would never speak to him again.

  He laughed. Then, seeing the look of fury on Elizabeth’s face, he sobered and said seriously, “Well, my mother is very childlike. My father caters to her every whim, but he also treats her like she doesn’t have a brain in her head. She knows that’s not true, and I know it’s not true, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. But they pretend. When she gets unhappy or restless because she isn’t doing anything very interesting, he brings home a new fur from the store, and she pretends it’s what she wanted all along. They play this game, and it keeps peace in the family, so…” Completely serious now, he added, “I would never treat you like that, Elizabeth, whether or not you ever go to college. I know you have a brain, and I know you’re not a child. But you have to prove that to your parents by not acting like one. By insisting on having what you need.”

  Elizabeth stared at him. He was l
ecturing her! Talking to her as if she couldn’t figure that much out for herself. And saying at the same time that he knew she had a brain! He certainly wasn’t treating her as if he believed that.

  “Compromising is part of being grown-up, too,” she said coldly, turning away from him. “Since you’re not willing to do that, not even so we can see each other in New York, I guess you’re not any more mature than I am, even though you’re older and have lived in Paris. So why should I take advice from you?” She began walking away.

  Behind her, she heard, “Elizabeth, don’t storm off like this. Wait.”

  Elizabeth was becoming very weary of walking away from arguments. She seemed always to be storming out of a room: her parents’ stateroom, the dining room, the restaurant, and now the gymnasium. But what else was there to do when people refused to listen to her? To take her seriously?

  She kept walking. When she exited the gymnasium and the frigid air outside took her breath away, she remembered Max’s earlier remarks about ice in the area. Though she had wished then for an ice field, to slow down the Titanic and give her more time, now she wanted nothing more than to race straight to New York and put an end to this useless, disappointing voyage.

  Max did not follow her.

  Hurt and angry, Elizabeth locked her cabin door and threw herself across her bed, too furious to cry, too despondent to sit up and close the porthole, which someone, probably her mother, had opened again. The air streaming in through the opening was so bitterly cold, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find frost on the coverlet.

  She buried herself in the bedding for warmth and as she fell asleep, she made up her mind to stay exactly where she was until they arrived in New York Harbor on Wednesday.

  Chapter 19

  Sunday, April 14, 1912

  At eleven-thirty on Sunday night, Elizabeth awoke suddenly. She couldn’t have said what had disturbed her sleep. The sound of her parents’ door slamming shut? A sudden, abrupt motion of the ship? Whatever it was, it yanked her out of a deep, disturbed sleep, and it took her several moments to clear her head.

  She lay in bed listening to the distant vibration of the engines far below. The sound was like the steady beating of a heart. Without the rhythmic vibrations, she would have forgotten she was at sea.

  It was icy cold in the cabin. Wrapping the coverlet around her shoulders, Elizabeth rose to a kneeling position to close the porthole over her bed.

  The bed moved.

  No, the bed couldn’t have moved. The bed was stationary, firmly affixed to the floor.

  But there had been something. She’d felt it. Nothing alarming. No sound of a collision, no warning whistles shrilling. The lights were still on. The brass antique lamp on her nightstand was still in place, and the crystal pitcher of water beside it had jiggled only slightly.

  Nothing in the cabin looked any different.

  To Elizabeth, lying in bed on C deck, it felt as if the great ship had briefly stumbled in its smooth, easy glide across the water, the way someone trips over a small stone in the path while strolling in the woods. The person doesn’t fall, quickly regains his balance, and is on his way again, no harm done.

  She expected the same thing to happen now. She expected the smooth glide to continue as before.

  But before it could, Elizabeth heard what sounded like a giant, sharp fingernail being slowly scraped along the side of the ship. It reminded her of the way that annoying girl, Nina Chevalier, had tormented them at summer camp during the lectures on hiking safety held in the dining hall. Nina had long, pointed, scarlet nails and loved to drag them along the menu blackboard as they were leaving. The noise Elizabeth heard now was like that.

  When that sound faded, there was a brief moment or two when Elizabeth listened and waited, with more curiosity than uneasiness.

  And then the throbbing heartbeat far below died. Completely.

  The porthole closed, Elizabeth sank back to a sitting position, the comforter still wrapped around her. Her first instinct was to rush into her parents’ room and ask them what had happened. But along with the sudden silence from the depths of the Titanic, there was also silence from her parents’ stateroom. She glanced at her locket-clock, lying on her bedside table. Not yet midnight. Her parents were still out, possibly having too much fun wherever they were to even notice that the engines had stopped.

  Elizabeth remembered then what Max had said about the possibility of running into an ice field in the North Atlantic. “We’d have to stop for the night,” he had told her. “Too hard to negotiate icebergs in the dark.”

  If the reason for the silent engines was an ice obstacle of some kind, Elizabeth wanted to see it. She was curious about what a field of ice large enough to halt a massive ship like the Titanic would look like.

  In her anger at Max she had gotten into bed without undressing. All she needed to do now was don her gray woolen hooded cape and slip into shoes. She didn’t bother to smooth her hair or put on a hat. She cared little who saw her.

  Thus attired, she left the cabin, her spirits rising. She was venturing out alone at night. The idea appealed to her.

  A stewardess in uniform was descending the staircase as Elizabeth approached. All she said as she passed was a cryptic, “Iceberg, miss,” as if Elizabeth had asked. Then she hurried on her way.

  Elizabeth turned to stare after her. Iceberg? What about an iceberg?

  Perhaps the stewardess was simply saying an iceberg was the reason they’d stopped.

  Wouldn’t it have to be an enormous berg to stop a ship this large? Were the icebergs of such a size in North Atlantic waters?

  Elizabeth didn’t know. She had never studied such things. Maybe I would know, she thought as she climbed the deserted staircase, if I were better educated.

  When she emerged from the glass-enclosed promenade on A deck, the icy cold took her breath away. Wishing she had borrowed one of her mother’s furs, she climbed to the boat deck and moved swiftly to the starboard rail, where a handful of people had already gathered. Some were wearing nightwear under their coats. One woman, Elizabeth noticed, had the silliest white satin mules on her feet, leaving her bare toes exposed to the cold. The ship’s lights turned her toes a garish green-yellow.

  “What is it?” Elizabeth asked as she joined the small group at the rail. “What’s happened?”

  “I heard we hit an iceberg,” a woman answered. A man’s voice corrected, “I heard it hit us.”

  No one seemed anxious or frightened. Everyone’s eyes were focused on the third-class recreation deck below, where a makeshift, gleeful game of “catch” was being conducted, with ungloved hands tossing varying sizes of ice chunks back and forth.

  There seemed to be fragments and shavings and chunks of ice everywhere.

  “How big was it?” Elizabeth wanted to know. “The iceberg.” Judging from the considerable amount of ice sliced from it as it passed, it must have been enormous.

  No one at the railing had seen it. One man, reading in an easy chair in his B-deck cabin, had heard the scraping noise. He had glanced up, he said, to see a large, dark object passing his open porthole. “Looked like a building was passing by,” he joked. But by the time he reached the opening, the object was gone, leaving a pile of ice shavings on his carpet.

  “You had the porthole open on such a cold night?” the woman wearing mules asked him incredulously.

  “I came on this voyage for the sea air, and the sea air is what I’m going to get.”

  Elizabeth thought the woman was a fine one to talk about the cold, with her own feet practically bare. “Is there any damage to the ship?” she asked, thinking it a silly question even as she asked it. Surely even a very large iceberg could do no real harm to the unsinkable Titanic.

  “There wouldn’t be any damage to this ship,” one of the men answered her. “The captain probably just stopped for a minute to check things out. We’ll be on our way again in no time.”

  Elizabeth had spotted on the deck below the two young m
en from third class whom she had seen boarding in two different tenders at Queenstown, along with that lovely red-haired girl. There was no sign of the girl. But it was late, nearly midnight, and their tour guide had said single women in third class were berthed in the ship’s stern, young men in the bow. The girl addressed as “Katie” by one of the boys would have had a long trek, the length of the ship, just to toss a few chunks of ice.

  They are brothers, Elizabeth thought with certainty, continuing to watch the two laughing young men. They’re brothers, and that “Katie” is trying to make up her mind which one she likes best, which one would be the better choice.

  She’s like me, she told herself, feeling a sudden strong kinship with the red-haired girl. Her head knows the older brother, the one with the quiet smile, is a better choice for her…as Alan might be for me. But her feelings are pulling her toward the younger one, the one with the heart-tugging grin, just as I’m being pulled toward Max.

  One of the women at the rail mused aloud. “I wonder if I shouldn’t see the purser about my jewelry? If anything were to go wrong, my husband would never forgive me if I lost his aunt Winifred’s ruby brooch.”

  Elizabeth fought the urge to laugh. Ruby brooch? If anything did go wrong, which of course it wouldn’t because the Titanic was impervious to disaster, it seemed to her a piece of jewelry would hardly be of great concern. Of much greater concern would be the freezing cold water and the utter isolation of the area.

  Not that there really was anything to worry about. How could there be?

  Nevertheless, Elizabeth decided to go in search of her parents. They might know how soon the engines would start up again. If her mother or father were speaking to her. She shouldn’t have said the things she had.

  The ruby brooch’s owner left to seek out the purser’s office. The woman in mules declared she was “freezing to death” and left, too, presumably in search of more sensible footgear. Elizabeth, hoping her parents would be in their stateroom so she wouldn’t have to go looking for them, followed the two women down the stairs.