The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  Kitty had decided to seat herself on Madeleine’s right foot. Madeleine leaned forward, careful not to dislodge the dog, and caught the matron’s eyes. There was a small smudge of black on her chin, likely from a cinder, but there didn’t seem a polite way to mention it.

  “How do you do? I’m Madeleine.”

  “Oh,” said the matron, still blinking; she looked as if she could barely hold back tears. “I know who you are, of course! Both of you. How do you do.”

  Margaret stirred. “Forgive me. Madeleine, Jack, this is Emma Bucknell, a friend from Philadelphia. Emma’s been touring Egypt, as well, it turns out.”

  “How nice,” said Madeleine warmly. “Didn’t you love it?”

  “It was exceptional,” the matron said. “But now—now we have this.”

  “It won’t be long until the liner comes,” Jack said, crossing his legs. “Martin assured me he means to load the tenders within the hour. We’ll be off soon.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Bucknell. She blotted her eyes with a handkerchief. “I just—oh, I just have the most frightful feeling about it all. I’m sorry! I’m not usually like this. But I have the most frightful feeling. Just the most foreboding feeling about getting on that ship.”

  Margaret shifted on the bench. “Emma, you’ve had too much coffee today and not enough food, that’s all it is. Once you see Titanic, you’ll realize everything is fine. We’re going to be there in time for supper, I’m sure, and then you’ll feel better.”

  “If it’s anything like dining on the Olympic,” Madeleine offered, “you’ll be quite satisfied.”

  “It will be better than the Olympic.” Jack came to his feet, brushing at his jacket, Kitty instantly springing up to follow. “All of it, from bow to stern. There’s no need to worry, madam. Titanic is the safest ocean liner in the world.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Margaret, but her eyes were distant once more. “Everyone says so.”

  * * *

  The minutes ticked by, the hour Jack had been promised turning into an hour and a quarter, and then an hour and a half, and still the steamship had not been sighted on the sea line, and the tenders did not launch.

  Madeleine grew uncomfortable; with her increasing size, it had become harder and harder to sit still in one place for too long. Kitty needed to be walked, in any case, so they left their group behind to take in the scenery, such as it was.

  A long, thin jetty stretched out over the chopped water, a stone tower crouched at its end. The two tenders, the Nomadic and the Traffic, pitched in the waves. They were already heavily loaded with luggage and mail; all they needed now were the paying passengers.

  Plus, Titanic.

  The clouds lowered, lifted, bunched and scattered. Sunlight waxed and waned, sending bright flashing coins across the harbor, and the wind gusted cooler.

  “How are you feeling?” Jack asked, as Kitty sniffed at a scruff of grass growing from the muck near the path.

  “Tired,” she admitted. “A little impatient, I guess. But it’s nice to escape that smoky waiting room. I was getting queasy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, for what? I wasn’t complaining, I assure you.”

  “I know. I just . . . I want things to go smoothly. I want you to be careful.”

  “I am careful,” she said, irritated.

  “And I want to get you a proper meal,” he went on with barely a pause, “because you’re so grumpy without one.”

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “All right. I pardon you.”

  She gazed at him, speechless, torn between wanting to be offended and wanting to laugh. Jack slanted a smile at her, lifted her hand in his to kiss her knuckles, one by one, over her kid glove.

  “Mrs. Astor. How beautiful you are when provoked.”

  “You are supposed to tell me I am beautiful all the time, not just when you needle me.”

  “You are the sole object of true beauty in all the world,” said her husband, “no matter your mood. And that is the honest truth.”

  * * *

  The White Star manager hustled them aboard the tenders in an optimism of hope, Madeleine thought, given that they were launching out into the harbor without any hint of the liner to meet them yet in view.

  The Nomadic, like Titanic, was essentially new, built especially to shuttle people and mail and supplies to and from White Star’s enormous new Olympic-class ships, which were far too large to dock near the quay. The tender was spacious enough inside, clean and refined, with tiled floors and carved plaster walls and a long, varnished bar lined with waiting stewards. She’d been on it once before, ten weeks ago when they’d disembarked from the Olympic. Back then, it hadn’t seemed quite so congested.

  Jack guided her to one of the wooden banquettes in the forward lounge, and Madeleine sat again, her maid on one side of her and her nurse on the other, Kitty ducking under the table at her feet, as the colonel and his valet went to see about procuring food from the buffet.

  “Waiting for a steward to come to us,” he said, looking around at the chattering, restless mob of people, “will leave us all old and gray.”

  They returned with sliced fruit and finger sandwiches, which Madeleine was desperate to eat, but by then, the tender was beginning to battle the rougher waves of the outer harbor, and her stomach rebelled. She tried a bite of apple, chewing as slowly as she could, but in no time, her nausea was worse, and her headache had returned.

  She fed a cheese and pickle sandwich to Kitty, who didn’t bother to chew at all.

  The pretty plaster trimwork decorating the walls began to spin. She shoved to her feet but had to bend over as spots took her vision, balancing herself with all ten fingertips pressed against the rim of the table.

  “Ma’am?” Carrie seized her by the arm at the same time Jack said urgently, “Madeleine,” taking her other arm.

  She wet her lips. “I think I must go above. I—I need to be outside.”

  Later on, when she tried to remember how she made it from the first-class lounge to the deck, all she would recall was a blur of colors, of voices, and that both of her elbows were caught in two very hard grips. The next clear memory was of sucking in cold, bracing breaths of sea air, half-collapsed against Jack with Carrie hovering nearby, a vial of smelling salts in her hand.

  “I’m all right,” she said, the words coming out without any actual evidence of truth. She said it again, more slowly. “I’m all right.”

  The wind scoured her skin, and it felt like waking up from a bad dream. She turned her face into it, blinking. The sun was low now, casting terra-cotta light against the darkening blue clouds, and the water splashed and hissed as it was sliced in two by Nomadic ’s bow.

  She was cold, but it felt good to be cold. It felt like she could take a deep breath again without gagging.

  “Come sit here.” Jack urged her toward a cushioned chair that a steward had produced from nowhere, and then a blanket, quickly whipped over her lap.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, holding a hand to her forehead. “I’m so sorry for the bother.”

  “Nonsense,” said her nurse. “It was no fit environment for even the heartiest of us in there, so stuffy and enclosed and choked with all the gentlemen’s smoke. I have no notion why they don’t bother to take themselves out of doors to enjoy their tobacco, I truly don’t. You’ll do better out here, ma’am, I promise. I’ll stay with you, to make certain you’re not too chilled.”

  “As will I,” said Jack. “We’ll watch for Titanic together. A dollar to the person who sights her first.”

  “All right,” said Madeleine, still savoring her long, deep breaths.

  “You have a deal, sir,” said Carrie, replacing the salts into her coat pocket.

  An hour or so later, Carrie Endres, with her sharp blue eyes and smiling ways, won the dollar.

  * * *

  It came at them as a fortress, as a castle, as a painted feverscape towering above the ocean. It was the tallest, scariest thin
g Madeleine had ever seen, bearing down on them in a crest of freshly slaughtered saltwater.

  Titanic arrived eating up the flat horizon.

  Titanic arrived swallowing the waves.

  * * *

  In the gray-foamed disturbance churned to life by the steamship, the gangway between the liner and the Nomadic would not cease its uneasy shifting. A group of sailors held it down at both ends, but it popped and bucked as much as it could, groaning with the pressure of the waves. Several other passengers had already defied it to board, Margaret Brown included, but Madeleine eyed the platform with trepidation. The tender’s repeated hard collisions against the side of Titanic did nothing to lessen her fears, or her nausea. Many of the ladies negotiating the gangway did so with stifled squeals and yelps.

  Madeleine made it across, though, with no squealing and her head high (because they were watching already; all those distinguished society people turning in place to watch her), her husband basically propelling her along, Kitty clipping at her heels. She could do no less.

  The wind lashed her skirts hard against her ankles in just the eternity it took to hurry along the gangplank, but then it was over. She made it into the vestibule of the liner, her feet finding what felt like firm land, although it wasn’t.

  But the black-and-white floor of Titanic’s first-class entranceway did not shift, not even by a hair. It felt real and solid. She was nearly in tears at the relief.

  “Colonel Astor, Mrs. Astor,” greeted an officer in a frock coat, inclining his head and gesturing with his hand where they should go. “Welcome aboard. This is the way.”

  They entered the reception room, Madeleine clinging to Jack’s arm. It was an opulent, soaring hall of thick rugs, wicker chairs and tables, men and women dressed for dinner holding aperitifs and listening to a piano and string quartet discreetly playing against a background of potted palms.

  Madeleine felt, bizarrely, as if she had stepped back in time. She was back in some mansion in Newport or Manhattan, the same stony people, the same stony expressions. She had plunged right back into the world she had worked so hard to escape. She actually came to a complete halt, her right foot half-lifted, the toe of her shoe dragging against the floor, physically unable to finish her step.

  She wanted to turn around, retreat, fly back to the tender and hide ashore.

  The stony gazes descended, one by one, to the unmistakable bulge of her stomach beneath her coat and dress.

  She lowered her foot.

  Bruce Ismay, speaking with a steward against one of the arched windows, caught sight of them and hastened over. He and Jack shook hands, quick and hard.

  “So delightful to see you again, so delightful,” he was saying. He turned to Madeleine, bowing over her hand in a fluid swoop. “Mrs. Astor. You are as radiant as ever.”

  Ismay offered a smile from beneath his heavy moustache. Madeleine made herself smile in return, even though she had seldom seen anyone lie with less conviction.

  With only the barest undertone of impatience, Jack said, “If you don’t mind, Ismay, I’d like to get us settled in our rooms. The delay was rather unpleasant.”

  “Of course. My apologies. Latimer will show you to your suite; he’s our best man.” Ismay lifted a hand, and the steward he had been speaking with instantly approached. “The Astor party, C deck, as I recall. Check your manifest.” He turned back to Jack. “I trust you’ll find everything satisfactory from this point on.”

  “I trust we will.” He paused. “Perhaps later you might offer me a tour of your new ship.”

  “Colonel,” said the chairman of the White Star Line, as the music soothed and the other first-class passengers laughed and gossiped and angled edgewise to look them up and down, “it would be my pleasure.”

  * * *

  The comment she overheard time and again on their way to their rooms was always some variation of, It doesn’t seem like a ship at all!

  And it didn’t. Titanic’s interior (in contrast to her sinister dark and sharp exterior, at least what Madeleine had glimpsed of it in those minutes jolting along its base) was more like a fine hotel than anything else, as boldly sumptuous as any of Jack’s properties back in New York. The corridors were broad and freshly painted, pungent still, with extravagantly worked wood and plush, plush carpeting that muffled their every step.

  There was a wait for the electric elevators, so they climbed the grand staircase instead. It was wide and open and graciously curved all the way to the domed skylight decks above, an inverted cup of lustrous glass and geometric iron fretwork. The repeating curves of the balustrades reminded Madeleine of the math of a nautilus, neatly sliced into pieces.

  Their suite consisted of room after room of red-and-mauve silk-papered walls shot with silver, lacquered mahogany tables and chairs, Jacobean plasterwork unwinding in curls all along the ceilings and down the corners. The cushions and coverlets were shiny satin; the lights were either silk-hatted sconces or else ceiling fixtures of cut glass. There were so many chinoiserie vases stuffed with fresh flowers that Madeleine wondered who had thought it a good idea to put them all out. They perched, fragile and expensive, atop the tables and tall, spindly-legged stands.

  She stopped in the doorway to her bedroom, taking in the opulence. It was such a far cry from the cabin they’d shared aboard the dahabiya that once again she could not move, awash in a sensation of deep tugging loss.

  “It’s not one of the deluxe promenade suites, I realize,” Jack said, coming up behind her. He rested both hands atop her shoulders, pressed a kiss against her hair. “I tried to book either, but I was too late—or else Ismay was simply too greedy. He’s taken one for himself. Mrs. Cardeza is in the other.”

  Madeleine closed her eyes and groaned. “Charlotte Cardeza is here?”

  “She is, or will be tomorrow. I didn’t see her when we came in.”

  Mrs. Cardeza, with her cold eyes and cutting words and splendid air of a disapproving sheep, on board with them for the entire voyage.

  “It’s all right. I envision spending the next few days secluded in this stateroom, no matter what comes.” Without turning around, she lifted his left hand, held it against her cheek. His skin felt warm and dry, his wedding band cool. “Do you think they might bring us our dinner here tonight, instead of us having to change and go down to the dining saloon?”

  “They will,” Jack said comfortably, “if I say they will.”

  * * *

  Among its other amenities, the suite featured two four-poster beds, with two fat feather mattresses.

  They slept together in one, entwined in its plump middle.

  CHAPTER 22

  Beautiful boy, I have wrapped you in lace.

  Right now it rests lightly over you, an ivory cobweb of slender spun silk, outlining your precious body, folded against your perfect cheek.

  Light as a cloud, it was meant, perhaps, to adorn you in church for your christening. Or to be photographed in a formal portrait, for when you are presented to the world. But I decided not to wait that long.

  This blanket of Irish lace was purchased from a lace trader who’d slipped aboard Titanic in Queenstown, the ship’s third and final port of call. As they did with all the liners calling, even by tender, the local souvenir sellers had greased the palms of certain officers to steal aboard, trafficking their wares for a brief while along the boat deck while the captain turned a hard blind eye. In Ireland, it turns out, the lace and blackthorn cane sellers are especially popular.

  In that fleeting hour or so of that early Thursday afternoon, before Titanic weighed her anchor to sail onward again, Jack had walked among the traders, admiring this and that. By the time the vendors were all packed off again, he had found me a lace jacket and you this.

  This blanket was your father’s first gift to you.

  And it was the last thing I stuffed into my pocket before fleeing the ship.

  * * *

  A number of ill-mannered souls—reporters, of course—have dared, in thes
e latter weeks, to ask me the best thing I remember about Titanic. About the ship itself. As if by telling them that, everything that followed might be negated. Rendered less.

  My usual response is an incredulous stare, then to walk away. I have menservants now to accompany me whenever I go out, so the journalists and cameras do not hound me as easily as they used to do. I’ve learned, you see, since my days as a dewy débutante on your father’s arm.

  I have learned that you do not have to speak to the press at all. You owe them nothing.

  You don’t have to speak.

  * * *

  But I will answer that question for you, my son. Because you were there, and your father was there, and so was I. All three of us together, locked in love for that blink of a moment in time.

  The best memory I have about Titanic was that she was so large.

  So epic.

  I never felt any swaying or bobbing or turbulence to interfere with my meals, my sensitive appetite, or my slumber. I never felt any sort of vulnerability aboard that ocean liner, right up until the very end.

  I imagine that’s a blessing, don’t you? Whoever wants to know how it’s all going to end before it actually does?

  Only poets and madmen, I would think.

  Thursday, April 11, 1912

  Aboard Titanic

  The music wafting through the Café Parisien from the outer chamber nearby might have been chosen specifically to counterpoint the hum of conversation rising from the dining tables, everything tasteful and subtle and full of undercurrents neatly hidden beneath the brighter notes. Madeleine followed those notes even as she didn’t mean to, sipping her café au lait and pretending not to mind the looks aimed at her, the sound of her name spiking through the air, from mouths to ears and back again.

  She had secured a table near one of the windows, brilliant with the late morning sun. She kept her own focus distant, engrossed, gazing out at the ocean view as if sitting alone at this splendid chic table in this splendid ivy-trellised restaurant didn’t bother her at all. The wicker back of her chair bit into her shoulders; she had to keep reminding herself not to wrap both hands protectively around her middle.