by Diane Hoh
Elizabeth was looking for an available cot or mattress for her mother in one of the public rooms when she spotted the red-haired girl who had boarded at Queenstown. She was in the company of one of the two young men who had arrived in separate tenders that day. The younger brother, Elizabeth decided. Where was the older one? Remembering how the Irish girl had insisted the two young children be put into a lifeboat and how it was Max who had done that for her brought tears to Elizabeth’s eyes.
The two wore anxious expressions on their faces, and were moving from one survivor wrapped in blankets to another, bending down. Clearly, they were looking for someone.
I hope you find whoever it is, Elizabeth telegraphed silently to the pair as she sank gratefully into a vacant deck chair parked in front of a huge potted plant in the large, crowded public room. Perhaps they were looking for the boy’s older brother. So many families had been shattered when the Titanic floundered. Including the Farr family.
She laid her head back and closed her eyes again, thinking that all she could ask for now was that her mother would be all right. She didn’t even care if they fought constantly, without her father there to act as a buffer. What did it matter? They were alive. If there was one thing she had learned during the terrible night just passed, it was that life was too precarious to take for granted. She never would again. And it was too precarious for her to waste a moment doing what others expected of her, if what they expected was intolerable to her. Like marriage to a man she didn’t love.
Had this night changed her mother as well? Possibly not. Once Nola had recovered from the shock, she might very well be as she had always been. In which case, there would be battles. It didn’t matter. They would work something out, she and her mother. They were alive. That was all that counted.
At any rate, she couldn’t think about the future now. It was all she could do to deal with the terrible present.
Her mother returned, her face strained, her eyes sad. She settled gratefully on the cot that Elizabeth had found for her and when Elizabeth had covered her with a blanket, she closed her eyes. Before she fell into a deep sleep, she said in a voice husky with grief and fatigue, “You’ll be happy to know I thanked that Mrs. Brown. Heaven knows what would have become of us without her. Perhaps I judged her too harshly. And Madeleine Astor survived. That is good news, for her and for the baby she’s carrying. They have taken her to the hospital.” Nola fell silent then, and in only moments she seemed to be in a deep sleep.
She didn’t notice, then, that Elizabeth had sat bolt upright at the word “hospital.” Hospital? It hadn’t occurred to her that some of the survivors might be there. Of course they would. Frostbite alone would have sent some there, and there could be all kinds of injuries suffered by someone thrown from the deck of the Titanic into the open sea.
Don’t do this, Elizabeth, a cautious voice inside her warned. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re being foolish. You’re just setting yourself up for more heartbreak.
She didn’t even know if Max could swim.
She stopped a passing stewardess. “Excuse me, miss, but could you tell me where the hospital on board is located?”
“Of course, miss.” The directions were precise.
All the way there, Elizabeth argued with herself. Her head told her she was wasting time when she could have been sleeping off her exhaustion, while her heart told her that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, anyway, until she knew the awful truth for certain. Her head cautioned, Elizabeth, don’t you think that every other woman who survived the Titanic is feeling as you are? You don’t see them running all over the ship chasing false hope, do you? Her heart replied, You may be right. But I’m doing what I want from now on, and this is what I want.
She was almost there when she saw him. He appeared first as no more than a figure, unrecognizable at such a distance. He was walking unsteadily toward her in an empty corridor, the last she had to pass through to arrive at the hospital.
Even as the distance between them closed, she still didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t wearing his long black overcoat, but a heavy gray sweater and a pair of black steward’s pants. His hair was wet and slicked back, away from his finely chiseled face. And there was none of the usual jauntiness to his steps as he slowly, painfully, made his way up the corridor, his right palm trailing along the white-painted wall as if to help him maintain his balance.
Elizabeth, walking almost as shakily as he, paused in midstep. Seeing her approaching, he stopped, too. And what she recognized then, in spite of the way he looked, what made her catch her breath and raise a hand to her lips, was the way he regarded her steadily, his eyes on her face, just as he had that very first day when he boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg.
“Max?” she whispered.
He held out a hand to her.
She ran, her exhaustion gone, her feet flying along the carpeted hallway.
When she was within a foot of where he stood, she stopped short again. He stopped, too. He looked ghastly. His handsome face was gray and drawn, his eyes scarlet-rimmed, his body trembling with cold. Elizabeth, her own eyes brimming with tears, was afraid that if she threw herself at him as every fiber of her being willed her to, she might somehow injure him.
His voice when he spoke was so hoarse, she would never have recognized it as his. A fleeting image of the horrors he must have endured to arrive on this ship flew through her mind, and her tears spilled over, sliding quietly down her cheeks.
Tears appeared in his eyes, as well. “I wonder,” he said huskily, letting go of the wall, “if you would be kind enough to direct me to steerage?”
Elizabeth laughed and ran into his waiting arms.
Chapter 31
Monday, April 15, 1912
“I was just on my way to look for you,” Max said when he finally lifted his head. “I meant to as soon as I got on board. But I must have passed out when I hit the deck, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on a table in a big white room and a fellow in a white coat was telling me to open my mouth so he could look down my throat.”
She wasn’t surprised that he’d been taken immediately to the hospital, given the way he looked. And he must have looked much worse when they first brought him aboard.
She didn’t want to let go of him. It would hurt too much to let go, after finding him again. “I thought—” she began, but he interrupted her.
“I know what you thought. I thought it, too, when I was being pulled down into that water.” They separated then, and Max put an arm around her shoulders and a palm on the opposite wall again as they began walking. They went very slowly. “I knew I was a goner. Couldn’t quite face that, so I tried to come up with some other option. But when I kicked my way back to the surface, all of the lifeboats were out of range. I had a life vest on…that helped…but my coat was drenched and felt like it weighed a ton. I figured it wasn’t going to keep me warm anymore and it was dragging me down, so I thought about ditching it. But that meant getting the vest off first.” He shook his head. He was leaning heavily on Elizabeth, and his breathing as they walked seemed labored. “The thought of taking off the vest scared me to death, because even though the sea was pretty calm, I was afraid I’d lose hold of the straps and the thing would float away. Without it, I had no chance at all.” He smiled ruefully. “Didn’t have that much of a chance with it.”
“But you’re here,” Elizabeth said. She could scarcely believe it herself. But the weight of his arm on her shoulders was proof.
“Almost wasn’t. I was dragged down twice. Fought my way back up, but it was so cold, I knew I couldn’t keep doing that. I figured if I went down a third time, I’d never see blue sky again.”
Elizabeth could see that it pained Max to talk, but she needed to know how he had survived. “But you’re here,” she said for the second time.
He nodded. “I wouldn’t be, if it hadn’t been for my lifesaver. Came along just in time.”
“Lifesaver? What lifesaver?”
Max
grinned down at her. “A man so fortified by liquor that he was swimming like a fish, and said he was as warm as toast. Told me to grab onto his life vest and he’d get us to a boat. And that’s what he did. I think it was boat number three. Or it could have been five. Hardly anybody in it, so after arguing a bit about the dangers of being swamped by our weight, they pulled us in. I must have looked like a drowned rat. But the other guy, Ralph something, looked like he’d just taken a healthy dip in a pool. The guy was laughing when he landed in the bottom of the boat, like it was all a big joke. Said he knew he was going to have one heck of a hangover later, but it was worth it.”
He could barely make it up the stairs to the upper decks. Elizabeth had to help him, and he clung to the railing as they went as he must have clung to the man’s life vest straps. Picturing what he must have gone through, Elizabeth shuddered again. But he was alive. He was alive, and he was here, with her.
“Max,” she said as they reached the public room where Elizabeth’s mother still lay fast asleep, “I never did check in the hospital. My father…?”
He shook his head sorrowfully. “He’s not there, Elizabeth. I’m sorry. I don’t know about anyone else. Have you seen Arthur or Lily?”
“I found Lily. But not Arthur.”
Max sighed and sank into an empty deck chair. “They’ll be putting out a list of survivors soon. I hope Arthur is on it, but I’m not very optimistic.” He glanced up at Elizabeth with heavy-lidded eyes. “How many died?”
She told him, and his face went even grayer. “My god. That many!”
“Don’t think about it. I’m trying not to. I’m just so happy that you’re here.” She knelt beside his chair. “I still can’t believe it.”
“Believe it.” He took her hand. His was cold and clammy, but Elizabeth didn’t pull away. “Let’s just hope you remember the next time you feel like arguing with me, how glad you were to see me.”
A stewardess passed by with a tray of cups, and Elizabeth reached out and took one. It was hot, and she handed it to Max, who accepted it gratefully. He sipped silently, his eyelids drooping with fatigue. When the cup was empty, he lay back against the chair. Elizabeth covered him with a blanket, and kept her eyes on his face until he had fallen asleep. Then she sat down on the floor beside him, content to simply rest there, watching him sleep and trying to take in the fact that he was actually there beside her.
The young Irish couple Elizabeth had seen earlier hurried along the deck, their faces still filled with anxiety. Whoever it was they were looking for, it was clear they hadn’t found that person. They hadn’t been as lucky as Elizabeth. Her heart went out to them.
Unwilling to take her eyes off Max, it was a long time before she slept.
Katie and Paddy finally had no choice. They had to give up their search for Brian. They had looked everywhere on the Carpathia. Though they had come across more than one drenched, pallid-faced young man lying on a pallet, most of them had been crewmen, and none of them had been Paddy’s brother.
Paddy’s own face had lost its usual ruddy hue by the time their search ended. “What’ll I tell me ma and da?” he asked Katie as, tired and sad, they made their way to the Carpathia’s lounge. “Me da was partial to Bri, you know. This’ll break his heart.”
Katie knew Paddy’s father. If he was “partial” to any one of his children, it was his younger son, not the older one. “No, it won’t. Their hearts will be broken, you’re right about that. But they still have you. There was people on board the Titanic who lost everyone, Paddy, their whole families. If your ma and da hear the news before you get a message to them, they’ll think you’ve been lost, too. You must get word to them, and to mine, that we are alive. Spare them whatever heartache you can.”
When he had left her in the hands of a kind stewardess, he went to see about sending his parents and Katie’s a Marconigram. When he returned, Katie was lying on a steamer rug on the floor, her arms folded beneath her head, her eyes closed. She was sound asleep, her body limp with exhaustion, her face peaceful. The women surrounding her were either lost in sleep or in grief, and the public room was filled with a somber silence.
Paddy stood over Katie, gazing down at her. In spite of his sadness over his brother’s loss, he knew that he was luckier than most of the people around him, all in various stages of shock and grief. Brian was gone, gone forever, and that was something he could hardly bear. But he still had Katie, a girl whose heart and soul were as fair as her face. She would help him through the worst of it. He hadn’t lost everything. That was more than some who’d been on board the Titanic could say.
With one last glance at Katie, Paddy went to seek out a place to rest his own weary head.
Chapter 32
Tuesday-Thursday, April 16-18, 1912
Gradually over the next two days, Paddy and Katie located everyone on the Carpathia who had been in third class on the Titanic. The numbers were pathetically low. Whole families had been lost in the tragedy. Katie wept at the thought of the terrified children who had been swept into the black and icy Atlantic Ocean. Marta had survived. She, too, wept, when Paddy confirmed that Brian had not been as lucky.
It was Marta who convinced Paddy that he should accept Katie’s invitation to join her at her uncle Malachy’s in Brooklyn, at least for a while, until he felt at home in the great city. “Your brother would want that, ja?” she said, leaning forward to peer into Paddy’s face with huge blue eyes. “He talked much about you, you know. He was so proud, saying to me that you would one day be a fine writer. But he said that you would need help and he was worried that your Irish pride, that was what he called it, would keep you from accepting any help. If Katie’s uncle is willing to give you a hand, you should take it, Paddy. For Brian’s sake.”
He finally agreed, but he told Katie later that it was only because he would be able to “keep an eye on her” that much more easily. “You’ll be needin’ someone to look after you in America,” he said, “and if I’m livin’ in the city and you’re all the way out there in Brooklyn, how will I know that you’re bein’ taken care of?”
Katie nodded and smiled. She was thinking how amazing it would be, having Paddy right there in her uncle’s house while she struggled to make a home for herself on the New York stage and he worked at becoming a famous writer. They could help each other. He could cheer her up when the hard knocks came along, as they surely would, and she could do the same for him, when every word Paddy had ever known flew right out of his skull, leaving his mind as blank as a new slate.
Together, they could do anything.
After all, hadn’t they both survived the greatest of all sea tragedies? Wasn’t that what everyone on board was beginning to call the sinking of the Titanic?
If they could survive that, they could survive anything life tossed their way. Together.
Arthur’s name was not on the list of survivors from the Titanic. Elizabeth noticed sadly that much of the light had gone from Lily’s eyes when they first met up with her. But then, there were so many sad eyes on the Carpathia.
Elizabeth slept restlessly throughout the rest of the trip, half lying, half sitting in a deck chair next to her mother. Max had developed a serious cough, and she had persuaded him to spend his nights in the infirmary, away from the chill that filled the Carpathia, the result of a deep, damp fog surrounding the ship.
With the dawn of Tuesday came the full, painful awareness of all that had happened. As she made her way to the infirmary, Elizabeth saw dozens of women clustered together in the dining rooms, still wearing the bizarre assortment of clothing in which they’d left the Titanic. Most were weeping. Some were asking other women whose children were at their side, “How is it that you all managed to get to safety?” The question had a bitter edge to it.
As Elizabeth passed one room, she heard a woman wail, “Had I known there would be no lifeboat for my Andrew, I never would have left. We were married forty-seven years. I would rather have gone down with him than survived alone.”
Later, on deck with Max, who couldn’t seem to get enough fresh air, she heard some of the widows approaching men who had survived and asking them angrily, “How did you get into a boat when my husband did not?”
Those who had suffered most severely in the lifeboats, mainly on the collapsibles, had little patience with those who had arrived in lifeboats and were complaining of inconveniences as minor as the crewmen who’d been smoking, or blistered hands from rowing. One of the men who had undergone great hardships on a canvas boat whose sides had collapsed, leaving its passengers standing or kneeling in frigid seawater, finally cried out in exasperation, “Oh, stop your whining! You don’t realize how good you had it! And you’re alive, aren’t you?”
When Elizabeth and Max went into the dining room for breakfast, they came upon Quartermaster Hichens, from Elizabeth’s lifeboat. He was regaling an audience with complaints about how difficult it had been to maintain order on his boat, because the women had been so “uncooperative.” When he recognized Elizabeth, he interrupted his story and hurried from the room.
Throughout the next two days, which were made more difficult by a storm that arose on Tuesday night and continued through Wednesday, keeping everyone indoors, Elizabeth heard many rumors about what had taken place on the Titanic after she left. One that proved to be untrue was that the captain and the first officer had shot themselves rather than go down with the ship. Max was certain this was a lie, as he had himself seen Captain Smith in the water after the sinking. They also heard that some passengers had been shot rushing the lifeboats at the last moment. That, too, was later proved untrue. The most unsettling rumor spreading throughout the Carpathia was word that the Titanic had received countless messages warning about the onset of ice fields and icebergs long before the disaster, and had not only ignored the warnings, but had refused to slow its speed. This rumor persisted, and was never denied by anyone in authority.