Remembering the Titanic

by Diane Hoh

  “We’d best leave now,” she told her aunt. “The speeches could go on for quite a while. I don’t want to be late to the agent.”

  As they departed the memorial ceremony, she glanced back once more over her shoulder. The young man from the ship was still sketching. And the girl, looking very much alone in spite of her mother standing alongside her, was still shivering.

  Chapter 2

  WHEN ELIZABETH AND HER mother had been chauffeured away to yet another appointment with the dressmaker, Max stayed behind to put the finishing touches on his sketch of the new memorial. He hadn’t planned to draw it. It was unnecessary. Every newspaper in the world would carry at least one picture of it in tomorrow’s issue. Why create yet another?

  But Elizabeth’s request had changed his mind. He had to draw something and if it wasn’t to be faces, it had to be the memorial. Besides, the drawing would fit in nicely with the new paintings scattered all over his apartment. Elizabeth hadn’t seen them yet. Her mother had strong opinions about a young woman visiting a young man’s apartment. He had invited Mrs. Farr, too, once or twice, knowing how difficult it was for Elizabeth to get away. But he hadn’t really expected the woman to appear on his doorstep. Though she was a born-and-raised New Yorker, he suspected that Greenwich Village was far more foreign to her than Paris and London, which she had visited many times.

  The avenue on which he lived wasn’t bad. Better than some. It was neat and clean, and boasted a few moderately sized trees here and there. His parents refused to support him financially until he “came to his senses” and joined the family’s business. But the death this past winter of his grandmother, whom he still missed, had provided him with a generous trust fund. He used the money sparingly, preferring to make his own way for the most part. Still, it had allowed him to rent a decent apartment in a fairly safe neighborhood, where no gangs of young thugs roamed, looking to pick a pocket or two.

  Max sighed as he stepped across a large puddle, a souvenir of the previous night’s spring rain. He saw so little of Elizabeth now. Things were not at all as they’d expected … as he’d expected … when they had first discovered their feelings for each other while crossing on the Titanic. Remembering their first encounter, he laughed softly to himself. While Elizabeth and her family had boarded the huge luxury ship in Southampton, he had not embarked until Cherbourg. He had fallen in love with France, but after spending a full year there, he knew it was time to go home and begin forging his own art career. When he boarded the ship, he had needed a haircut, had carried his own luggage on board, and his jacket, he had to admit, could have used the ministrations of a good tailor. So he shouldn’t have been surprised when Elizabeth mistook him for a steerage passenger and tried, kindly enough, to direct him to the third-class faculties. He hadn’t corrected her, hadn’t even spoken, not wanting to embarrass her. So she had assumed he was French and spoke no English.

  Remembering, Max laughed aloud, attracting curious looks from people passing on the street. She had looked so shocked later that day when she discovered him sitting in the first-class dining room. He’s not supposed to be here, said the expression on her face. She’d been even more shocked a moment later when her own father, Martin Farr, introduced Max as the son of family friends … in other words, belonging to the same social class as Elizabeth. Her cheeks had turned as red as an ocean sunset, and she’d clearly been furious. Max hadn’t been sure whom she was angrier with … him, her father … or herself, for making such an embarrassing mistake.

  Whatever her first impression had been, his had been of a lovely but spoiled, headstrong girl who seemed to be forever storming out of one of the ship’s many rooms at one point or another. When he learned how diligently she was fighting to escape a debut she didn’t want and a marriage she wanted even less, to a very proper but, she said, “dull as dishwater” banker, he changed his mind. She was, of course, spoiled. He hadn’t been wrong about that. Most young women in her situation were. But there was more to Elizabeth than he’d first thought. Her feelings were passionate, her opinions equally so, her ambition fierce. At least, it had seemed so then. She had wanted desperately to go to college, earn a degree, “do something with my life,” she had cried as she stood with Max at the Titanic’s rail, watching the flat, black satin sea glide by. Her parents, however, were insisting that she make the planned debut and then marry Alan Reed, who sounded to Max like an unsuitable mate for a young woman with Elizabeth’s fire. It was a stormy crossing for the Farr family.

  Max frowned. That fire he’d seen in Elizabeth … if it wasn’t gone, it had at least been dampened. She spent most of her time now being the devoted daughter, attending concerts and plays and dinners, always in her mother’s company. If he complained, as he had more than once, that he saw too little of her, she would put her hand on his arm, look into his eyes, and say, “But Max, I promised my father!”

  That promise, on board the ship … Max wished fervently Martin had never asked it of Elizabeth. Would he really want his daughter living the staid life of a society matron? She was only eighteen. On the ship, she had complained often about the banality of her mother’s life. She had spoken heatedly of how she would hate such a life, how she would never follow Nola’s example. How could she stand it now? And with so little complaint.

  Max understood why she was doing it. Her father’s last request before Elizabeth and her mother left the ship without him had been to “take care of your mother.” She had taken that request seriously and was doing everything in her power to fulfill it. She had loved her father very much. Small wonder that his death had changed her, perhaps forever.

  Elizabeth, too, had come close to dying. Had the rescue ship Carpathia not come along when it did, no one would have survived. Instead of fifteen hundred deaths, there would have been closer to twenty-five hundred.

  There were times when she tried to talk about that night. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. At least, he didn’t know how to talk about it in a way that would make Elizabeth feel better, restore her to her former self, and push her out of the Farr mansion and into a life of her own.

  A life which would, of course, include Max Whittaker, in a way that it now did not. With Nola monopolizing Elizabeth’s time, Max had been forced to create a social life of his own, make new friends, most aspiring artists like himself. For a while, he’d been incredibly busy. Coming so precariously close to death had given him a new taste for living. He slept very little those first few months after the rescue, intent on filling every minute with new and interesting things. He was studying with a well-known painter and when he wasn’t studying or working on his own paintings, he was exploring every inch of New York City, finding it even more fascinating than he had before. He sought out new restaurants, new plays, explored new buildings as they sprang up, hung out in Tin Pan Alley long enough to hear the latest songs … there never seemed to be enough time to gulp in as much life as he needed to. Elizabeth almost never came with him. She was too busy accompanying her mother, usually on shopping trips.

  Eventually, he had tired of such a hectic life. Now his goal was to fill the apartment with new canvasses. An idea had come to him, and his hands burned with the need to paint. So paint he did … morning, noon, or night, good light, bad light, it made no difference. Nothing else seemed as important.

  But he still missed Elizabeth and would rather have spent time with her than with anyone else. If she could find a way to free herself from the prison of her father’s promise ….

  “Hey, Max!” An elbow jabbed Max in the ribs. “What are you up to?”

  Max winced at the blow. Never heavy, he had lost weight recently from a combination of hard work and little attention to regular meals. “Watch it, Bledsoe. You don’t know your own strength.”

  Short, blond Norman Bledsoe shrugged. In an attempt to age his round, babyish face, he was striving to grow a beard. The fair hair barely covered his chin, and the effect, rather than maturing him, gave him a slight air of disrepute, thou
gh his gray pants and black overcoat were clean and neat enough. Without an invitation, he fell into step beside Max. “Are you ready to let us see your new work? We’re getting impatient, Max. Anne and Gregory are suspicious. They think you’re not working at all, that you’re just pretending to. You need to prove them wrong. Besides, you’re the only one with enough room in your place for a get-together, and we haven’t had one there in ages. I’m tired of having to fold myself up like an accordion just to fit in everyone else’s hovels.”

  Max shrugged. They rounded the corner into his avenue. As always, he felt a surge of satisfaction that this was his home he was returning to, not his parents’. Instead of the enormous four-story brick house in which he had been raised, he was advancing toward a trio of small, but perfectly adequate rooms of his own. He and Anne Morrison, Bledsoe’s girlfriend, were the only two in their group who possessed more than one tiny, dismal room. But Anne’s was in a terrible neighborhood, under the elevated trains.

  “So?” Norman pressed. “When can I tell the others you’re ready for the unveiling of your new work?”

  “I’ll have a get-together when I’m ready to show my work. At my place. Maybe I can even talk Elizabeth’s mother into letting her come. Just the one time. You’ll have to wait until then.”

  The need to return to his painting overtook him then. Impatient and anxious, he quickened his steps.

  Norman followed suit, but at the same time, he let out a grunt of disbelief. “Elizabeth’s mother won’t let her come, Max, you know that. Not with a bunch of down-and-out aspiring artists hanging out at your place. But the rest of us will be there. How soon, do you think?”

  “How do I know when I’ll be ready? You can’t put a timetable on art, Bledsoe.” They had reached Max’s building. His mind already back in his apartment with his canvasses, he waved, ran up the steps, and disappeared inside.

  Norman watched him go, shaking his head sadly. To a passing stranger in a tweed overcoat, he said, “You’d think a best friend would want to spend time with you, wouldn’t you?”

  The stranger, shaking his own head, hurried away.

  On the other side of the city, a tall, dark-haired, handsome young man awkwardly holding a delicate porcelain cup in one hand while shaking the hand of an older gentleman with the other, found himself wishing he had skipped this particular event. I should have spent the afternoon with Katie, Paddy Kelleher was thinking even as he gifted the older man, a well-known literary agent, with the smile that had broken so many female hearts back in County Cork, Ireland. He used the smile more often these days to charm the countless publishers, literary agents, established writers, and newspaper columnists paraded before him by Edmund Tyree.

  Paddy was grateful to Edmund. The publisher, a kind, warm-hearted man very much like Paddy’s own grandad back in Ballyford, had taken notice of the single article Paddy had sold to a magazine six months after his arrival in America. Paddy had titled it, “Surviving the Sea.” It was a first-person account of the sinking of the Titanic. The magazine’s editor had changed the title to “Surviving the Titanic,” saying that would catch the attention of more readers since the subject was still on everyone’s lips six months after the tragedy. Then he had bought and published the article.

  Paddy didn’t care about the title change. The editor probably knew best. Paddy hadn’t used the ship’s name because the subject wasn’t on his lips. He had a difficult time even saying the word “Titanic.” He couldn’t talk about it.

  He’d been able to at first. He’d talked about the sinking of the great ship like everyone else, mostly to Katie’s aunt and uncle, who had listened with wide, horrified eyes.

  But then somewhere along the way it came to him, that while he was walking the streets of Manhattan, New York, America, while he was being given the red carpet treatment by Edmund Tyree, who had read his article and now wanted Paddy to write a full-length book about the tragedy, while he was being chauffeured here and there in Edmund’s grand Pierce-Arrow automobile, his brother Brian was dead. While Paddy was attending parties and dinners and meetings, and resting as comfortable as a hen in a nest in the fine apartment Edmund had found for him and was paying the outlandish rent on, while Paddy Kelleher was doing these grand things … his older brother Brian was lying, stone-cold, at the bottom of the black Atlantic Ocean. Hadn’t even been found to be given a decent church funeral and burial.

  The very thought of it, when it hit him as if someone had socked him in the chest, made Paddy sick, sick as a dog. He shook. Nausea hit him in wave upon wave. His vision blurred, and icy chills passed up and down his spine. These things refused to pass until, with great effort, he banished all thought of Brian and the great ship Titanic and the North Atlantic Ocean from his mind. But he knew if he allowed the thoughts to return, the illness would as well.

  No one knew. Not even Katie.

  From that moment on, it was as if he’d been stricken mute about the tragedy. He was afraid to say a word about that long, terrible night, and that was the truth of it. After a while, he even became frightened of writing about it, though he had not yet shared this news with Edmund, or Belle, Edmund’s niece, who was tutoring Paddy in grammar and spelling. They still thought he was trying. In a way, he was. But it wasn’t doing any good.

  Katie knew none of this. And his silence about the horror they’d shared was coming between them, a solid stone wall building up higher and higher. She wanted to talk about that night. Needed to, he guessed. Knowing her as he did, he was certain she was fairly bursting with the need to talk about it. He was just as certain that the person she needed most to talk about it with was himself, him being the one who’d borne most of that long, terrible night right alongside her. Himself, the younger brother who, much of Ballyford and the surrounding countryside would agree, wasn’t fit to shine his older brother Brian’s shoes.

  Yet … he had lived. While Brian, someone trusted and loved and respected by all, had died.

  There were things in the world, Paddy knew, that made no sense at all. Plenty of them. But this one thing … this terrible truth … that Brian had died and Paddy had somehow lived, was the most nonsensical of them all.

  “I just loved your article, Mr. Kelleher,” an attractive middle-aged woman in a bright red cape gushed, holding out her hand. Paddy wasn’t sure if he was expected to shake it or kiss it. He had no intention of kissing anyone’s hand, so he shook it. She looked disappointed, but recovered quickly. “I understand you’re doing a book for Edmund. He’s my publisher, too, you know. I write poetry. For women.”

  “Men are not allowed to read it, then?” Paddy asked with a smile. “What, I wonder, might happen to them if they should sneak a peek at the pages?” A silly woman, this one, writer or not. As if poetry could be confined to only one segment of the population. Must not be very good verse, then.

  The woman, who introduced herself as Margaret Lindsay Anderson, laughed. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think we have to wonder about it. The covers of my little books are painted with flowers and pink ribbons. It’s not likely that a man would have the courage to so much as pick up a copy, let alone glance inside it.”

  Though Paddy was unresponsive to her obvious flirting, Mrs. Anderson gushed on, intermittently annoying him further by asking questions he couldn’t answer. When would the book he was writing for Edmund about that “tragic Titanic disaster” be in publication? Paddy had no idea. That depended upon how long it took him to write it, didn’t it? And since he’d barely started it (though Edmund seemed to have the clear impression that Paddy was much further along in the manuscript), he couldn’t even begin to guess how long that might be. He dreaded the moment when the publisher, who had such faith in him, might ask to see the completed pages. Belle, a college student, had been truly helpful with Paddy’s grammar and spelling. Trouble was, she couldn’t very well write the text for him. Trouble was, he couldn’t, either. Leastways, it didn’t seem to be happening. Every time he sat down with the big, lined table
t and the pile of sharpened pencils Belle had supplied him with, he was filled with dread. Stalling, he told Belle he didn’t know where to start.

  “Start at the beginning,” Belle instructed gently. But then she left to attend her college classes, and Paddy had to wonder where the “beginning” might be? Would it be the morning when he and Brian and Katie left Ballyford forever, to make their way to Cobh Harbor to board the great, new, “unsinkable” ship? Or would the beginning be during that difficult but exciting journey from home by jaunting cart and lorry and on foot until the harbor came at last came into view? Maybe the “beginning” should be when they boarded the boat and were directed to the steerage accommodations, so much finer than they had expected. Their journey had truly begun then.

  Or maybe all Edmund … all any reader was interested in, was the actual tragedy, from the moment on Sunday night when the iceberg, which must have been as big as a building, scraped the side of the Titanic and doomed everyone on it. Maybe, then, Sunday night should be the “beginning.”

  He wanted to ask Katie, so smart was she. But she would make him talk about it. If he was to concentrate on keeping the image of Brian out of his head, he maybe could write about it, as Edmund wanted him to. But he could not talk about it. If he did, something fierce-awful was bound to happen, Paddy knew it.

  “… And what sort of cover are you hoping for?” Mrs. Anderson babbled on.

  Paddy looked at her as if he wondered who exactly she was talking to. And though the woman couldn’t possibly have known it, he was wishing with all his heart that it was Katie Hanrahan’s lovely face he was looking at instead of the poet Anderson’s.

  Chapter 3

  WHEN KATIE, AS ALWAYS, had sung her heart out, belting out “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” just the way she’d heard it sung on John Donnelly’s phonograph, she was again quickly ushered to the door, this time by Pauly Chambers, a thin, balding agent in his sixties. He was kind enough about it, saying she had “a good set of pipes” and promising to give her a call. Nevertheless, the door was opened and Katie found herself on the other side of it as it swung shut.