The Girl Who Came Home

by Hazel Gaynor

  Frances watched Carpathia glide, as if in slow motion, toward the White Star Line Pier, 59, where she rested to unload the lifeboats belonging to Titanic. It was a somber moment, the S.S. Titanic sign on the white lifeboats the first sighting for all gathered there of the much-lauded ship, a simple, humble calling card of the greatest ocean liner ever to set sail.

  For many, the suspense and grief of the last few days was too great, and they collapsed into convulsions of tears at the sight of the rescue ship. For Frances, it was a moment she wished she could suspend in time, not sure whether she finally wanted to learn if the face she was waiting so desperately to see would come walking ashore or if her sister had lain at the bottom of the ocean for the last four days and would never be seen again.

  An eerie hush fell over the waiting crowds as the huge steamer approached the Cunard Pier, just the muffled tears of the women audible above the wind and splashes of rain on umbrellas and the corrugated iron containers on the wharf side.

  The dozens of doctors and nurses, the volunteers from the Women’s Relief Committee and all the officials from the city, the government, and White Star Line walked purposefully now among the crowd, the tension evident on their faces as they prepared to carry out their duties.

  Later in her life, Frances would find herself saying that the scenes she witnessed as the survivors were gradually brought ashore were too terrible to define. What her eyes and ears tried to comprehend during those moments was indescribable. Not in the farthest reaches of her imagination could she have believed such outpourings of emotion were possible in a public place. For every poignant reunion, it would seem that there was also a heartbreaking moment of finality at the realization that relatives or friends had not walked toward the waiting crowd.

  Husbands clutched wives who had returned without their children; children clung to grandparents, their parents lost at sea; sisters greeted sisters and wept for their lost brothers; brothers greeted sisters and cried for their lost mothers and fathers. There wasn’t a person who didn’t shed a tear for himself or for someone else.

  As Frances waited, she watched these scenes play out, involved and yet strangely detached. It was through tear-filled eyes that she observed a finely dressed young lady emerge from the gangplank, a small dog under her arm and barely a hair out of place. Frances would not have recognized her as Vivienne Walker-Brown had she not heard the shriek across the crowd.

  “Vivienne! Darling! My darling Vivienne,” Emily Walker-Brown cried hysterically as she pushed toward the gangplank.

  Frances watched, unnoticed, as the mother and daughter shared an emotional embrace, Emily weeping for the loss of her future son-in-law. But Vivienne Walker-Brown did not cry. Frances overheard her reassuring her mother that Robert did the honorable thing and ensured that the women and children took the seats in the lifeboats, as instructed, “unlike that dreadful Ismay fellow,” she added at the top of her voice. “Shameful behavior, saving himself without a care for the poor souls left to perish in the icy sea.”

  Frances watched then as the family walked toward a waiting taxicab. Vivienne and her dog would be back within the comfort of their Park Avenue home in thirty minutes. The steerage passengers hadn’t even started to emerge from Carpathia.

  For hours, Frances watched and waited as the remainder of the first- and second-class survivors made their way unsteadily along the gangplank and into the waiting crowds; the gathered press pack, corralled behind the fencing on West Street, shouted questions to the bewildered passengers, trying desperately to get a scoop for the first editions of the morning papers.

  It was nearly midnight when the steerage passengers began to disembark. It struck Frances how much they resembled the emigrants she had seen in pictures of the famine ships a generation ago. Most were wearing only their nightclothes, some had just blankets around their shoulders for warmth, and many walked without shoes. Numbly she watched the faces, staring as some survivors were taken straight to the waiting ambulances.

  She stood quietly, patiently, hopefully, barely noticing the crowds dispersing around her.

  “Please come, Katie my love,” she whispered. “Please be there.”

  It was only when the crew of Carpathia started to appear on the gangplank that her hopes began to fade.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  She turned. A White Star Line official stood by her side.

  “They’re all off. It’s just Carpathia crew now, miss.”

  She looked desperately into the man’s eyes. “No,” she whispered. “No. They can’t all be off. I’m waiting for my sister. Katie Kenny is her name. From Ballysheen, Ireland.”

  “I’m very sorry, miss. All the survivors are ashore now.” He tipped his hat then and disappeared into the rain.

  Frances stood alone, drenched to the skin, staring at the looming, empty bulk of Carpathia. The remaining people around her on the wharf dissolved into the darkness that engulfed her.

  “No. No. Not Katie,” she gasped. “Not my darling Katie. Please, no.”

  She sank to her knees and wept with every part of her soul. Not even the relentless rain could compete with the flood of tears that fell in New York that night.

  CHAPTER 31

  Private Journal of Maggie Murphy

  St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York

  April 20, 1912

  I feel numb. Cold. Frightened. I cannot stop the tears falling. They tell me I am in a hospital somewhere in New York. I barely know how I got here. I barely know my own name. My hands are misshapen—swollen and purple from the cold and frostbite. My God, it was so cold on that lifeboat.

  I can barely hold the pen but the nurse says it is good for me to try and write; that it will help to get my circulation going again. I don’t know what to write, don’t know what to say. Part of me wishes I had died too.

  I want to go home.

  April 21, 1912

  We must have been at sea for some days on the Carpathia because the girl lying in the bed next to me says it is Sunday and it was a Sunday when I last wrote in this journal on Titanic. How can a whole week have passed?

  Sometimes when I wake from my sleep I forget where I am and what has happened. For a few minutes I feel quite peaceful. Then I see the bare hospital walls and the rows and rows of beds and I remember.

  I recognize some of the people in the beds near to me. It seems like a dream that we shared a song or danced a jig together on that mighty ship that is now at the bottom of the ocean. I have searched the faces again and again, desperately hoping that I’ll see Aunt Kathleen or Peggy or Katie or anyone from our group—but I know it’s hopeless to think that they somehow survived. I wonder what happened to Harry, the steward. He was in the lifeboat with me, but I didn’t see him again. Everything was so confusing on the Carpathia. I only added my name to the survivor list the day before we arrived in New York.

  I’m frightened. I don’t like being alone here.

  I do not know what will happen to me at all. I don’t even know if Aunt Mary in Chicago will know about the disaster—or anyone in Ireland. It is so terrible. So many people here have lost everyone and everything. I can barely imagine how I can live again. I sometimes wish I had gone down with the others. Why would God save me when thousands died—some of them rich millionaires? I saw babies in that water frozen blue with the cold. I think their faces will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

  I am too tired to write any more.

  I want to go home.

  April 21, 1912—evening

  My small black case has been left on my bed. I don’t even remember taking it with me into the lifeboat. But I do not have my coat. I think I gave it to a child in the lifeboat. A well-dressed lady with a dog on her lap gave me her coat. I seem to remember that she was wearing two coats—an everyday one and a fur one, she said. She handed me the everyday coat to keep me warm, and that was what I arrived here in. I still have it but I don’t know what became of my own coat, and there were some letters in the pocket, I�
��m sure of it. Letters from Séamus. Poor Séamus. What must he be thinking hearing about the ship being sunk and all and me in no fit state to contact him to tell him I’m alive. I wish I had his letters—they would comfort me. Now I’ll never know what those letters said. I know I shouldn’t feel sad about a few letters what with all those poor people dead, but I do.

  I want to go home.

  April 22, 1912

  The Salvation Army women came today. They gave us all parcels of clean clothes and some money to continue our journeys. There’s all sorts of relief efforts and money being raised for the survivors—thousands of dollars. A kind lady called Elizabeth told me that my aunt Mary had been in contact and it has been arranged that she will meet me off the Pennsylvania train at Union Station in Chicago in two days. I am writing those names down so as not to forget.

  When I was changing my dress to put on a clean one from the donated clothes, I found twenty-five dollars in bills pinned to my old one. I hadn’t noticed it before, but then I vaguely remembered a man talking to me when I was first brought to the hospital from the Carpathia. He had a whiskery beard and plump fingers, and his breath smelt of tobacco. He spoke a lot of words to me, but I was too shocked to take it all in. I remember he asked me to sign a paper that he handed to me. I thought it was a train ticket to Chicago I was signing for, but the nurses now tell me that it was a “waiver for damages.” I’m not really sure what that means, but it seems that the White Star Line people wanted to make sure I didn’t come back and try to get money from them for the suffering I’ve experienced and for all my losses. They seem to think twenty-five dollars is compensation enough for my troubles. I remember the man had to hold my arm to help me write my own name because my hands were too numb to hold the pen properly. I am too sad and alone right now to be angry with them.

  The newspapermen are crawling all over the hospital. They want to talk to us about what really happened the night Titanic sank. I have said a few words to them about how I got to the lifeboats, but I really do not want to go through all the terrible moments again. I cannot get the faces of those poor people out of my head, standing against the railings, praying for their lives, and those terrifying sounds of the crunching, grating, screeching metal and the desperate screams of a thousand people. It will haunt my dreams forever, I am sure of it.

  I want to go home.

  There are some terrible tales being told about what happened to people when Titanic sank. We sit about and say a few words to each other now and again—normally talking about someone else’s experience rather than our own. I think we all just want to lock away our own memories and try to forget.

  One of the nurses who tends to me most of the time has told me about a young Finnish girl who doesn’t speak a word of English. She sits in the bed across the room from mine and looks to be in a constant daze. Her brother, her uncle, and the man she was to marry were all lost in the disaster. She is to sail back to Finland on Wednesday. I cannot imagine the fears she must have about sailing again. I wish I could help her in some way.

  The nurse also told me about the small Swedish woman at the end of the ward who refuses to leave her two little children. Her husband, their father, was lost. The children have the fairest hair I have ever seen, and the mother dotes on them day and night, so she does, stroking the little dresses that came in for them from the Women’s Relief Committee. Apparently she told the nurse that when she started to climb down the rope to the lifeboat, which was already being lowered, she realized she could only carry the youngest child and hold the rope at the same time. Her three-year-old daughter clung, terrified, to her skirt all the way down that rope, the black Atlantic sea heaving beneath them. Thank the Lord the little girl held on good and tight and they all three made it safely to the boat, although the father was lost.

  There is another woman here who has just married her sweetheart in the hospital. They were separated on the deck of Titanic, and she thought him lost until they discovered each other in different wards. She had been clinging to an upturned lifeboat for eight hours. The nurse tells me it’s important to try and be grateful for stories like this, despite our own terrible losses. I know she is right, but the faces of my friends and family still disturb my dreams at night.

  April 23, 1912

  Some of my words have been printed in the morning newspaper. My nurse showed it to me. She has given me a bundle of newspapers that she says I should take with me when I leave. She says that I should keep them somewhere safe because Titanic will be talked about in a hundred years’ time and people will be interested in seeing them. I cannot see why anyone would want to remember this terrible event, but I have folded the pages that mention Titanic and put them into my case anyway, along with the few other possessions I have somehow managed to keep with me through all of this: the silver hair comb and rosary beads that Séamus gave me on the morning we left Ballysheen, my Titanic ticket, my health inspection certificate, a bottle of holy water, and a few other items. Some people might want to talk about Titanic for the next hundred years—after I leave this hospital and get to Chicago, I never want to talk about it again.

  I will leave the hospital tomorrow. I have no idea what life has in store for me, but I know that I can never cross the ocean again. I will never step foot on a ship as long as I live, which means that I will have to try and forget about Ireland and those who we left behind. How could I ever look into the eyes of those poor mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers—knowing that I got off the ship when their loved ones did not and perished in the freezing seas? I can never see their faces—I can never explain what happened that night.

  Peggy is alive! I cannot believe it. She is ALIVE!

  She walked right into the ward where my bed is and woke me from my sleep. “Is it really you, Maggie Murphy?” she said. We took to crying and hugging each other—I am beyond words. I thought it was a ghost at my bedside for a few moments; I dared hardly believe it was really and truly her—alive and well and with her beautiful golden hair falling about her shoulders as usual. We sat and stared at each other for an age—laughing and crying—neither of us knowing what to say or do with ourselves.

  We caused such a commotion with all our shrieking and crying that the nurses came running—they thought someone was dying. We brought tears to their eyes when we told them we’d been sailing on Titanic together and thought each other dead along with everyone else we loved and cared for.

  When we finally calmed down a little and the nurses had brought us both a cup of hot, sweet tea, Peggy told me that after we were separated on the ladder, she’d seen Katie and Maria and Pat heading up toward the back of the ship to escape from the water. She told me one of the great funnels broke loose from its fixings then and smashed into everything underneath—she doesn’t even want to imagine that it was that funnel that killed them all, but she didn’t see anyone from the Ballysheen group again and ran, with a group of crewmen, to the starboard side of the ship and somehow managed to jump from the deck to a lifeboat that was being lowered some fifteen feet down. She said she was never more terrified in her life, but she knew that leap was her last chance to survive. Then, when the lifeboat reached the water, it was capsized by people who were already thrown overboard, trying desperately to clamber aboard.

  She wept when she described the fear of being in that icy water and the people all thrashing around her. Her face went under the water a dozen times, she told me, what with people trying to climb over her to reach the boat. But brave Peggy managed to somehow swim to an upturned collapsible lifeboat, which she clung to in her sodden clothes right through the night. She was rescued along with twelve others from that upturned boat—one of the Marconi radio boys was with her. Bride, she said his name was. Harold Bride. I remember Harry the steward telling me that was the name of one of the boys he knew. Maybe it was him who sent my telegram to Séamus. I am glad to know that he survived.

  Peggy had suffered terribly from being in that icy water for all that time and was unconsc
ious when they pulled her onto Carpathia. She has only just recovered her strength and her senses enough to come looking for me. Imagine, Peggy being on Carpathia with me and in the same hospital as me for all that time and we never found each other until now.

  When she had told me her frightening story, I told her all about how I got into the lifeboat and how Harry was charged with rowing it to safety. I wept as I explained that Maura and Eileen were unable to leave Jack Brennan and that the young lad, Michael Kelly, wasn’t allowed to climb aboard, what with it being women and children first. We held each other and wept for everyone and prayed to God for sparing us and vowed to live a long and happy life as thanks for being given this chance. Peggy is to travel on to St. Louis to meet her sister. We have exchanged addresses and promised that we will keep in contact.

  April 24, 1912

  I dreamed last night that the steward, Harry, was looking for me and Peggy. He was asking for us but the nurse told him we had already been discharged. He seemed to have something important that belonged to me and wanted to return it. I tried to shout out, “I am still here,” but no words would come and then I woke up and Harry was not there.

  Peggy left early this morning. We shared a pitiful, teary farewell and promised to keep in touch. I feel frightened now that she has gone—I feel alone again and wish she was traveling on with me to Chicago.

  I am on a train with the few pathetic possessions I own and wearing donated clothes that hang off me and make me look like an unloved rag doll. How Aunt Kathleen would flush with embarrassment if she were here to see me now.

  When it was time to leave the hospital, I cried. The nurses have looked after me so well. I told one of them I might like to be a nurse myself when I have properly recovered from all this. She said that nurses have to be incredibly brave and special people—so I would make a very good one. She hugged me tightly, and I never wanted that hug to end. It reminded me of how Mammy used to hug me when I was a little girl.