The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  Madeleine looked away again, gripping the railing. The vapor rolled by, devious and blank, devouring everything beyond her.

  He might still be out there right this moment, tossed by the waves, another gossamer soul surrendered to the sea.

  Or, he might have been saved. Another ship, another rescue, another wild reckless hope, and she’d see him soon again, walking toward her with his fast graceful stride, his hat tipped back. Kitty, too, and why not? Other dogs had survived the sinking; she’d seen them. Kitty never would have left Jack’s side.

  It was the not knowing, not knowing, that was slowly cleaving her heart in two.

  From somewhere below, above the perpetual swishing of the waves, rose a hollow, rhythmic note of metal striking metal, like a chain hitting a flagpole, an echoing ting ! ting! ting!

  Mrs. Hurd covered Madeleine’s hand with her own. “Dear child,” she said, in a much firmer tone than before. She sounded like a schoolteacher, like a headmistress, in charge even though she really was not. “You must take heart. All is not yet lost.”

  Very gently, Madeleine freed her hand. “I pray you’re right,” she said, and walked away.

  * * *

  Back inside the cabin, she found Eleanor on the settee, clutching a pillow to her face, silently weeping in the dark.

  Madeleine sat beside her without speaking, slowly stroking her friend’s hair.

  CHAPTER 28

  As headlines about Titanic’s sinking became splashed across every newspaper known to man, your half-brother’s grief was well-documented. Articles described him ricocheting from the White Star Line offices to the Marconi Company’s offices, tear-stained, desperate, offering any amount of money that could be named to the wireless operators in exchange for news of Jack’s survival.

  None of the wireless men could accept his offer.

  By the time Vincent found me aboard the Carpathia three days later, his grief had turned to rage.

  But then, we were all of us in a state. Tormented by the unknowns.

  Too often, I found my thoughts straying as I stared into that wall of gray mist, and in my imagination, the ship that sailed through it wasn’t Carpathia but Titanic: fog surrounding me, surrounding the steamer and the berg and the hundreds of corpses the berg had claimed, caught gelid in the boundary between the sea and the air. Just . . . bobbing along through all that nothingness.

  Blank fathoms vaulting above them.

  Blank fathoms stretching below.

  Thursday, April 18th, 5:25 p.m.

  Aboard Carpathia

  People began to line the decks, the rescued and the rescuers, spilling out of the fusty confines of the saloons and lounges and overcrowded staterooms. It was raining, but no one seemed to care. Everyone was eager to catch sight of New York.

  Mostly what they saw, however, were tugboats, dozens of them swarming the ship. The tugs held reporters, and the reporters held megaphones and money and hand-lettered signs, all of them bawling questions up to the passengers and crew. From inside the cabin, Madeleine could hear their shouts, if not their actual words, a dull sort of roar too close in her memory to the cries of the dying. She sat on the edge of the bed and twisted her hands in her lap.

  Carrie and Rosalie stood at the porthole windows, looking out. Madeleine didn’t even want to glance up at them.

  She was dressed and bejeweled and ready to flee. However that was going to happen.

  Marian entered the cabin; the clamor outside acutely amplified until she closed the door again.

  “Do not go out there,” she warned Madeleine. “We’re surrounded. All these beastly newsmen have flashlights and cameras and signs. Some are even offering cash to any of the crew willing to jump overboard and speak with them.”

  “Well, I never,” said Carrie, astonished.

  “I saw at least five different men holding up placards,” said Marian, “inquiring specifically about Mrs. Astor.”

  Someone knocked on the door. Marian turned back, opened it cautiously, then stood aside to let the ship’s second officer enter.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said, removing his cap. “Captain Rostron sent me to inform you that we should be docked by around nine this evening. He would have come himself, but—” The officer grimaced, gestured to the portholes. “After a brief stop at the White Star Line’s terminal to lower Titanic’s boats”—he paused, looking uncomfortable—“er, her lifeboats, we’ll head to Pier 54. That’s ours. We’ll be disembarking the injured first, but then you. The captain wants to reassure you all that the strictest measures are being employed to keep the press at bay, but, of course, our influence ends at the Cunard terminal.”

  Madeleine and Marian exchanged a look.

  “Mrs. Astor, your stepson has requested permission to come aboard after docking and customs to escort you off. The captain has granted his request.”

  “I see,” she said, confounded.

  The officer replaced his cap, gave a nod.

  “Wait, please,” said Marian, catching him by the arm. “Is there any news? Anything at all?”

  The man’s gaze slid from hers. “I really cannot say, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Night fell. The ship reached the Cunard pier amid bursts of white light that popped and burned beyond the portholes—not lightning now, but camera flashes.

  Marian Thayer left on the arm of her son.

  Eleanor Widener left sandwiched between two friends.

  Madeleine sat. She waited. The cabin grew cooler, and she used her sable as a blanket across her lap.

  “If only madame had a veil,” brooded Rosalie, seated in the swivel chair by the desk. “Hélas, I should have thought. I might have borrowed one.”

  “It’s fine. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

  There was absolutely no chance, Madeleine knew, of leaving the ship unrecognized, no matter how obscured her face.

  The door opened swiftly, without the courtesy of a knock. Vincent stood at the entrance, his hand still on the latch. An officer, not the same one as before, stood behind him, peering in.

  Madeleine came to her feet, clutching the coat. Vincent took a step forward, his gaze skittering past her, searching the cabin. His face looked chalky pale, his mouth a thin line.

  “He’s really not here,” he said.

  “No,” she answered, soft.

  He took another step forward, his movements jerky, his eyes full of a strange, savage light. He said to the room, “Excuse me. I wish a minute to speak with Mrs. Astor alone.”

  Both Carrie and Rosalie looked at Madeleine; she gave a small nod. They filed out.

  The door closed. Vincent only stared at her.

  She was about to ask him what he’d heard about survivors on other ships, if anything, even though she knew it must be nothing by the way he stood so terrible and still, when he said, his lips barely moving, “You killed him.”

  The air left her lungs. “What did you say?”

  “You. You killed him.” His voice was hushed, restrained, the opposite of the light behind his eyes. “You left him behind to die.”

  “I didn’t leave him behind! They wouldn’t let him on the lifeboat! They were only letting on women and children—”

  “There are men everywhere out there,” he roared. “Men from Titanic all over this ship!”

  Madeleine fought not to raise her voice in kind. “I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know who they are, or how they were saved. There were some who stole into the boats by the ropes at the last minute, but Jack would never do that. He would never take someone else’s place. He asked to come aboard, and they refused him. That’s all I know.”

  A quiet rapping at the door.

  “Mrs. Astor? Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” she called. “One moment.” She held Vincent’s gaze, dropped her arms to her sides to reveal her stomach. “Your father was protecting us, from start to finish. And if he has died, then he died still protecting us, and that was his choice.”


  She wore the white cardigan over her dress. The swell of her belly stretched the soft knit.

  “Because he’s a good man, Vincent. You know that. A good husband, and a good father.”

  Jack’s son took in the fact of her pregnancy without expression. The slope of his shoulders, the slant of his jaw, his long lashes: for the first time ever, with the camera lights flaring and fading behind him, gleaming along the pomade in his hair, she saw in him a suggestion of the man she loved.

  Then, horribly, he began to laugh.

  She brushed past him, opening the door to find Rosalie and Carrie nearby, clearly concerned. The ship’s officer who had arrived with Vincent stood opposite them, looking down, adjusting his cuffs.

  Madeleine cleared her throat. “Which is the way we should go, sir?”

  “This way, ma’am, if you please.” He tugged at his cap. “I’m to accompany you all down.”

  Amid the crush of people who still waited to disembark, Madeleine found a woman in a calico dress wrapped in a blanket, no coat. A young boy with a wet nose clutched at her skirts with both hands, his face pinched.

  She broke away from her group, walked up to the woman. She pressed the sable into her arms.

  “Here. This is for you.”

  Then she kept walking without looking back.

  * * *

  The gangway down to the pier was steep, so Carrie took her arm for safety. Vincent, on the other side of her, did not touch her, only stared straight out into the mob gathered below. There were powder flashes exploding all around and bright white lights glaring from above. After all her time secluded in the captain’s cabin, in the endless blanket of fog, she was a little blinded by it all, and so didn’t see her sister until they were nearly upon her.

  “Maddy!” Katherine cried, and pushed past the line of men keeping everyone back, sprinting up the last few steps to embrace her. “Oh, thank God, thank God! We didn’t know if you had really survived or not! There’ve been so many different reports in the papers, and some said you were fine, and some said you were injured, and then—just now, just now, people in the crowd were saying that you had died as the ship was docking! That you died!”

  Katherine’s tears smeared Madeleine’s cheeks. Her fingers dug into her back; her breath was coming in whistles.

  “It’s all right,” Madeleine said, her hand against the nape of Katherine’s neck. “I’m all right.”

  Mrs. Astor, came the murmur of recognition from the thousands of people below them, their faces upturned, their eyes shining and their mouths shaping her name. Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Astor, look who it is, Mrs. Astor.

  Carrie said mildly, “We should keep moving.”

  Vincent walked around them. “We don’t need the ambulance we brought for her. I’ll get the limousine.”

  * * *

  They had brought an ambulance, along with Mr. Dobbyn and two doctors and two more motorcars. Madeleine kept her group together in one auto, Katherine and Carrie and Rosalie, with Vincent driving. The other automobiles would split up, each taking a different route to meet them back at the Fifth Avenue mansion.

  Katherine had seized Madeleine’s hands as soon as they were seated and not released them since. The brick and marble façades of the city rushed by ambered with light, sparkling in the falling rain; from inside the plush comfort of the limousine, everything began to take on a hazy, unreal edge.

  Despite Vincent’s efforts to shake them off, a string of motorcars kept behind them, sleek gleaming sharks that matched their every turn.

  “We’re going home first,” Katherine was saying. “Our home, I mean—Mother and Father are so anxious to see you. They wanted to come, too, but Vincent and I convinced them not to—there were already so many of us, and Father’s been so ill—”

  Madeleine looked up.

  “He broke his leg a few weeks back. I didn’t write to tell you, because I didn’t want you to stew over it, as there was nothing to be done that wasn’t already being done. And it was your honeymoon, after all. But as soon as we heard about Titanic—oh, Maddy. We’ve just been . . .”

  Katherine lost her voice. The rain spattered against the windows, clinging to the glass in fiery jeweled dots.

  “So worried,” finished Vincent, his tone even.

  “Father was up all last night, Mother told me. He’s hardly slept since the news broke. And Maddy—Madeleine . . .”

  Katherine released her hands, lightly touched her sister’s stomach.

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God,” said Katherine, and started to cry. She stuffed her hands against her mouth. Madeleine leaned against her and Katherine instantly wrapped both arms tight around her, but the tears didn’t stop.

  CHAPTER 29

  The nature of hope is curious to me. It can sustain us through the darkest of times. It can buoy us above every reasonable expectation of despair. Yet hope can shatter us just as readily as the darkness can. People refer to it as false hope, but I think that’s misleading, because the feeling itself is painfully true.

  It is a treacherous hope, more precisely. A dangerous one.

  Your brother would not abandon his hope, even as it tore him to pieces. I watched it happen, day by day. In these private pages, I will admit to you that Vincent and I were never friends. We will never be friends. But witnessing him unravel by degrees stirred nothing but pity in my heart.

  Even Captain Roberts, whom I sent in the Noma up to Halifax to claim your father’s body, told anyone who would listen that it might not be John Jacob Astor in the pine coffin they were returning to us. It might have been someone else in his monogrammed clothing. Poor Mr. Robins, perhaps, wearing castoffs.

  Because in all of our fantasies, the indomitable J. J. Astor had not succumbed to the sea. He was out there somewhere still, on some mythical ship, miraculously alive and breathing and on his way home to us.

  The difference between everyone else and me, I suppose, was that I knew in my heart that it was a fantasy. I had already relinquished any hope for his survival.

  I think even before Carpathia, I had relinquished it. I’d seen firsthand those scattered, terrible human dolls in the North Atlantic. The glistening mountains of ice lit pink by the dawn.

  I understood how barbaric hope could be.

  For your sake, Jakey, I could not allow myself to be destroyed by it.

  * * *

  The Californian searched the ice fields where Titanic went down. The Virginian, the Birma, the Parisian, the Frankfurt. Even more steamships offered to come.

  But it was a gravesite. The only thing left to do was send in the funeral ships to retrieve the dead.

  April 18, 1912

  Manhattan

  That hazy sense of moving through the unreal stayed with Madeleine even as she walked up the steps of the brownstone. There were reporters already waiting there, naturally, and more poured out of the automobiles that had followed them, but she didn’t stop to look at them or say anything, even as they surged close with their pencils and questions and damp pads of paper.

  The door to the house flung open. She was inside, back in the old familiar hallway, the solitary appliqué chair, the arched nook holding the telephone. She was in her mother’s arms, inhaling her familiar sweet vanilla scent.

  Mother was crying and attempting not to, delicate little tears that fell and fell. Everyone stayed bunched in a knot against the front door until Katherine herded them all into the drawing room.

  “I’m all right,” Madeleine kept saying. It was becoming like a chant; she knew the words were correct, but in this unreal world, they were beginning to lose their meaning. “I’m here. I’m all right.”

  “Matthews,” said Mother, “bring the soup and sandwiches.” She faced Madeleine again, dabbing the moisture from beneath her eyes. “We have your bedroom ready.”

  “No, I’m not staying. I need to go back to—” Jack’s house, she almost said. “To go back home,” she finished.r />
  “My dear! Are you sure? To be in that enormous place all alone . . .”

  “I won’t be alone. There are dozens of servants, plus I have a nurse now, Miss Endres—she’s waiting in the motorcar. Jack hired her. I’ll need to see her settled in.”

  “A nurse?”

  Madeleine tilted her head, framed her hands around her middle. Mother gasped.

  “You never said! Not once in your letters, you never mentioned—”

  “We wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “Oh, my darling!”

  She was pulled into another embrace. Madeleine closed her eyes, yielding momentarily to the solace of it, relaxing against her as she used to do as a child. But then behind her eyelids the fog came, and the white faces against the water, and she eased away.

  “I’ll stay with her tonight,” Katherine volunteered. “And Vincent will be there, too, won’t you?”

  Vincent Astor, his arms crossed over his chest, only nodded.

  “I must go home,” Madeleine said. “I’ve only stopped by for a moment, so that you and Father could see for yourselves that I’m okay.”

  “He’s in the sitting room,” Mother said. “Waiting for you.”

  * * *

  The sitting room had been transformed into a makeshift bedroom, complete with a brass bed, a chest of drawers, and a night table where the secrétaire and a bronze bust of Antigone used to be. Her father lay propped against a mound of pillows, one leg atop the covers, a plaster cast reaching from his toes to just above his knee.

  His beard had started to grow in, more of an iron gray than the silver of his hair, rough and glinting along his cheeks and jowls. His eyes were reddened, but when she walked in, he lifted his head and smiled, and he was suddenly exactly the same as he had always been, the exact same, and so was she.

  “Madeleine, my little one.”