The Memory of Eva Ryker

by Donald Stanwood

  I smiled at Jan. “My wife called Mrs. Carmichael, who’s now living in Philadelphia, to find out why she canceled their booking. According to her, she and her husband were staying at the Dorchester in London when they received a telegram on April 9, 1912, from the Munich police. Phillip, their son, had been killed in an automobile accident. Would they please come to make the necessary arrangements?

  “They dropped everything and rushed to Munich. The police, naturally, had never heard of Phillip Carmichael. No one had sent the telegram. The Telefunken wireless office was checked; no such message left Munich. The telegram, everyone concluded, must have been a forgery. Phillip was located on the Munich campus, in perfect health and thoroughly baffled.”

  I frowned sternly. “No harm done, of course, except for the near-breakdown it caused Mrs. Carmichael. The originator of the prank, if you’d like to call it that, was never found. But the net result was that the Carmichaels lost their booking on the Titanic, which was quickly taken by Jason and Lisa Eddington.”

  I handed a facsimile sheet to Mike. “These are duplicate passport photos of the Eddingtons; American passports—allegedly, anyway—which were photographed for the files of the British Foreign Office.”

  Mike carefully examined the pictures, then gave them to Ryker.

  Wrinkles around the old man’s mouth deepened as he stared at the handsome blond couple, losing himself in the faded black and white images.

  “Let me see, Father.”

  “No!” He snatched them away.

  “I’m all grown up. You don’t have to shelter me.”

  Ryker bent forward and thrust the pictures into my hands. “Some things you never outgrow.”

  Passing the pictures to Tom Bramel, I said, “Mr. Ryker, I understand your instincts. But Eva’s right. It’s unnecessary.”

  “That’s for me to judge!”

  I let the issue pass, not wanting to provoke him so early in the day. “Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Herricks …” I smiled apologetically, taking the photos from Geoffrey, “pardon me, ‘the Eddingtons,’ sent the phony telegram to the Carmichaels. The passport copies you saw were forgeries. If they had contacts who could fix that for them, then the forgery of a simple telegram was no problem. And the Carmichaels, being socially prominent, were sadly vulnerable.”

  Taking off my coat and rolling up my shirt sleeves, I faced the model of the Titanic. My hands grasped the bow and stern, pulling off the A Deck, Promenade, and Boat Decks. The bridge, the four smokestacks, and the entire superstructure came with them. I put the model section of the floor behind Tom Bramel’s chair. B Deck was exposed like the guts of a great dissected fish.

  “Now,” I huffed, standing up, “there’s B-76, the Eddingtons’ cabin. On portside, as you can see, Mr. Ryker. Across on the starboard side is cabin B-57, belonging to James Martin, the bodyguard of your wife and daughter. And right next door are cabins B-53 and B-55, forming the starboard promenade suite.” I glanced up at Eva. “That’s where you and your mother stayed.”

  Her feet stirred uneasily, as if poised for flight.

  “So, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Our stage is set.” Bending down by her chair, I held Eva’s hand. “I think it’s time to hear your tape.”

  23

  She walked to the window and watched the salvia and lobelia shivering in our front flower boxes.

  “It’ll be the first time, you know, without Dr. Sanford’s help.” She smiled feebly. “A triple somersault, with no safety net.”

  “Eva,” I said, “if you’re not ready …”

  Her head shook. “No, Norman. Don’t be ‘kind.’ I’ve had fifty years of understanding. What I need is a firm push.”

  Ryker snapped at me. “Perhaps you’d like to explain what the hell you’re talking about?”

  I stood by the second recorder and recounted our visit to Japan.

  “God damn you! You had no right without my permission!”

  “Your daughter’s not an infant. She asked for help and I took her to the person I thought would do the most good. The tape you’re about to hear was recorded during a session with Eva under deep hypnosis. You’ll hear both Dr. Sanford and myself on the recording. I should also mention that it was edited from seven hours down to one to cut out the chaff.”

  Silence as the leader hissed through the tape heads. Then a low undertone of three people breathing in a small room.

  “All right, Eva,” Margaret said. “Just relax on the couch and keep your eyes closed. I’m going to ask some questions. How old are you?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “For two days. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Both Norman and I are here. You don’t have to worry. I want you to go back. Think back to the past. It’s your fortieth birthday. What do you see?”

  “It was the first anniversary of my annulment. A year of total freedom!”

  “What are you doing, Eva?”

  “Drinking!” She giggled shrilly. “Drinking and drinking and drinking. A Gay Annulmentee. I ran off with a gardener. Daddy was very angry!”

  I watched Eva as the recorder spun between us. Her face was ancient and unreachable.

  Dr. Sanford broke in. “We’re going back a long way now. But don’t be afraid. I’ll be with you. You’re floating in a black void. No light. No sound. Nothing. Your body feels like gossamer. It’s dissolving, vanishing like dew on the morning grass. Floating, spinning. You’re ageless. A hundred. Five. Both and neither. You can rove back in time like skimming through back pages in a book. Do you understand?”

  Soft and languid, the reply came. “Yes.”

  “You’re flipping through those pages, Eva. A page at a time. You’re fifty-nine. Now fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. Let’s flip the pages faster, Eva. Fifty. Forty-two. Thirty-nine. Twenty-seven. Twenty-one …”

  Whimpers of protest.

  “What’s wrong, Eva?”

  “Don’t hurt me!” It was a young woman’s cry. “Tell them to go away! I want out of here! Talk to my father; he’ll get me out of this place! Tell the doctor! I tell you, I cut her by accident! She shouldn’t have scared me that way! Talk to my Daddy!”

  The look Ryker gave me was as dark and brooding as a black abscess.

  “Eva,” Margaret said, “no one’s going to hurt you. Forget about the hospital. We’re going back some more. Seventeen. Fifteen.”

  “No.” The voice was hesitant at first, then firm. “NO!”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I blurted out. “I’m with you.”

  Hysterical sobbing. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I want my Mommy!”

  “Your mother’s with you,” she said, gentle, yet insistent. “She’s standing next to you.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, Eva,” she whispered. “She’s standing next to you, holding your hand. You’re ten years old. It’s early in the morning and you and your mother are on a long platform. A railroad platform. You’re at a train station in London. You’re boarding the train. The boat train. People are all around you. Big locomotives are puffing. You’re holding very tight to your mother’s hand.”

  The little-girl voice was peevish. “Where’re we going, Mommy? I’m tired of waiting! Why can’t we go on the train? You promised we could see the train! You promised! You promised! You promised! You …”

  Clair Ryker sighed, leading her ten-year-old daughter by the hand. “I know I promised, dear.”

  Eva gazed curiously around London’s Waterloo Station, watching the train screeching to a stop on Platform eleven. Her nose wrinkled at the oil-coal-sour milk-horse chip smell of the place. All these stations looked alike, she thought glumly. She hadn’t really seen one new thing this spring.

  But, for the first time this year, she’d found some excitement in traveling. Curiosity, anyway. Not everyone got to sail on the first voyage of the biggest ship in the world!

  Eva peered down the platform. Porters wheeled troll
eys past the elegantly attired crowd loitering by the train. She turned up to her mother.

  “Where’s Georgia and J.H.?”

  Clair frowned wearily. “I don’t want to tell you again, Eva. Our maid’s name is Miss Ferrell. And it’s ‘Mr. Martin,’ not ‘J.H.?”

  “That’s what you call him!”

  “True enough. But a ten-year-old girl doesn’t call a forty-year-old man ‘J.H.’ Mr. Martin went ahead to the ship. Daddy had some business for him. Miss Ferrell went along to make sure our cabin is ready for …”

  Eva wasn’t listening. Walking behind a young man handling a Pathé movie camera, she watched him crank and pan across the expanse of the station.

  “Hey, mister!” She pulled his coattails. “You wanna take our picture?”

  “Eva!” Clair snapped. “Stop it, that’s …”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” The man bent down and flashed a toothy smile. “What’s your name, honey?”

  Eva raised her eyebrows and lowered her lids, imitating her mother’s expression at formal gatherings. “Miss Eva Clifton Ryker.”

  He solemnly offered his hand. “Mr. Jason Eddington. Pleased to meet you.”

  “You must excuse her,” Clair moaned ruefully. “My daughter has all the makings of a perfect snob.”

  “That’s quite all right,” he laughed, running a hand through his straw-colored hair. “Maybe that’s what the world needs; a little class.”

  Eva frowned, watching Eddington give her mother that strange look. So many men looked at her that way. And, for the briefest second, she saw her mother return the glance. Eva’s grip on her mother’s hand tightened.

  “Jason! There you are!” Down the platform, a pretty young blonde rushed up to Eddington. Huge fawn eyes blinked curiously at Eva and Clair.

  “Mrs. Ryker,” said Jason, taking the girl by the arm, “may I present Lisa, my wife.”

  Introductions and explanations were duly exchanged. Jason and Lisa, it turned out, were taking the boat train to Southampton for a honeymoon journey on the Titanic. Under Eva’s prodding, they were persuaded to share the Rykers’ private pullman compartment.

  The minute hand of Waterloo Station’s big clock reached the hour mark and the guard waved his green flag. With a shrill whistle the locomotive hauled the White Star boat train away from Platform twelve.

  By eleven o’clock the train began its gradual downgrade from Basingstoke’s Plateau toward the coast of Eastleigh. Sticking her head out the window, Eva watched smoke from the locomotive settle in a black shroud over beeches and elms flitting past the train like shadowy figures painted on a rotating drum.

  “Eva! Get back inside.”

  She frowned and turned back to the window. Somehow she felt funny when Jason and her mother were together. She wasn’t sure why, but …

  Eva forgot the nagging feeling as she pointed at the sign marked TERMINUS STATION. “We’re there!”

  Jason’s camera exposed footage as the train glided over Canute Road and through the ugly tangle of telephone poles, cranes, rail tracks, boxcars, and low sheds fringing the Southampton dock.

  The boat train puffed to a final stop by a platform built alongside the quay. Eva ogled the four yellow and black smokestacks jutting head and shoulders above the clutter of the port.

  “That’s it! There’s the Titanic!” She bolted for the door, dashing from the train toward the dock.

  Suddenly Eva stopped, her head craned back. Her long black hair whipped in the cold wind as her mouth sagged open.

  A black, rivet-studded steel cliff rose seventy-five feet up to the bow, on which gold letters spelled TITANIC. High above, the Stars and Stripes fluttered on the foremast.

  She only half felt Jason’s hand on her shoulder. “Quite a sight,” he said quietly.

  Eva impatiently posed with her mother for Jason’s camera, then broke away. Running inside the White Star shed, she darted up a flight of steps, dodging startled couples on the first-class gangway, then dashed into the ship, past the purser’s office.

  She roved through the endless decks of the ship, marching down the grand staircase and snooping along the labyrinthine corridors surrounding the first-class staterooms.

  The random prowling eventually brought her up to the Boat Deck. She peeked under the railing, watching men load crates and trunks from the dock up to the forecastle hold by means of electric cranes.

  A burly man in an expensive Simpson Crawford suit shook his fists theatrically as a crate tottered on a crane high above his head.

  Jabbing a thumb and forefinger in her mouth, she emitted a window-shattering whistle. “Hey! J.H.!”

  He reconnoitered over his shoulder and caught sight of her waving hands. With an impatient wave at the rattling cranes he clambered up a ladder to join her.

  “Howdy, Eva! Does your mother know where you are?”

  She shrugged, her eyes lowered.

  “I thought so.” He took her hand, marching along the deck. “We’d better find her before she tans your ass. Not to mention mine.”

  Eva grinned at Martin’s language. “What’s in the box, J.H.?”

  “Huh?” He barely swallowed his surprise.

  “Back there on the dock.”

  “Oh, you mean the crate!” He pressed a finger to his lips in the gesture of a conspirator. “Hush, hush. Some things your father wants delivered to New York.” Martin sighed in mock weariness. “Your daddy’s a cruel taskmaster, Eva.”

  After considerable trial and error they reached their destination. Eva warmed up her innocent and woebegone expression as she spotted her mother standing by the purser’s door.

  “There you are! What have you to say for yourself?”

  “Sorry.” Eva strived for the proper combination. Contrite, yet winsome.

  Clair stepped into the purser’s office, thanking Hugh McElroy and Martin, then led Eva to the elevator.

  “Where’re Jason and Lisa?” Eva asked, pushing the call button.

  She held her daughter’s hand as they stepped aboard. “We’re meeting them now.”

  Five minutes short of noon the deep, gut-shaking horn of the Titanic boomed through the corridors of the liner, echoed into the bright April air, and finally bounced into silence between the sheds of Southampton dock.

  Lifting her eyes from the Boat Deck up to the four thrusting smokestacks, Eva felt a tense flutter in her stomach.

  Crowds lined the port railing, blocking her view. She tugged Jason Eddington’s trouser leg.

  “Can’t see?” He smiled, bending down. “Hop on.”

  Sitting atop his shoulders, Eva was hoisted high above the crowd. She clung to his collar as he handled the Pathé.

  Suddenly a pack of men—crew members, to judge from their clothes and tattered baggage slung over their shoulders—ran along the quay, waving and yelling desperately as the last gangway was being lowered.

  Jason pointed them out to Eva, Clair, and his wife. “Poor devils! Look, the officer on shore’s not letting them on! Serves them right for being late.” He laughed grimly. “I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes.”

  As the last gangway was hauled ashore, Eva felt a tremor run up from the decks as the Titanic’s great engines turned over. Cheering floated up from the dock; a cheer returned by those on board.

  Inch by inch the chasm between the ship and the quay widened as tugs heaved at the hull.

  Two gigantic screws, with a combined weight of seventy-six tons, churned the water behind the Titanic into a swirling indigo whirlpool.

  The giant liner crept away with agonizing slowness, under the anxious attendance of the tugs, and crawled toward the entrance of the dock.

  The maiden voyage had begun.

  24

  As the Titanic swept across the Channel toward Cherbourg, Eva peeked through the windows of the Promenade Deck, watching St. Catherine’s Head sink behind the stern like a fallen soufflé.

  The long afternoon was whittled away playing shuffle-board with Jason and Lisa, fol
lowed by a visit with her mother to Maud Slocombe’s Turkish bath down on G Deck. As the orange sun lowered itself into the sea, Eva curled up in a wicker chair on the Ryker suite’s private promenade and studied the whitecaps floating lazily by.

  She thought of the Eddingtons and small lines of concern deepened in her brow. A memory darted through her mind, a vision from early in the day, when Martin was introduced to Jason and Lisa in the Cafe Parisien. J.H.’s smile was cordial as he shook Jason’s hand, but, for a fraction of a second, his face had gone slack and his eyes filmed over in an inward-looking glaze. The moment was gone in an instant, then everyone settled back to polite parlor chatter. But Eva still noticed a slight tightening around Martin’s eyes that wouldn’t go away.

  On Thursday afternoon, April eleventh, the Titanic anchored at Queenstown Harbor, two miles off the Irish coast.

  Along with the two tenders, Ireland and America, a fleet of bumboats nestled up against the liner’s hull, their owners propping up a jury-rigged market on the Promenade Decks, selling Irish linen and lace.

  Eva peered down at the steerage passengers coming into the ship from one of the tenders. Girls in rough dresses and young men in soiled shirts and heavy shoes gaped up at the liner. Some cast lingering glances back at the shore. They looked sad, she thought. And a little scared.

  She raised her head to watch sea gulls swoop over the stern. Galley scraps spit out of the ship’s waste pipes and the birds raucously squabbled among themselves over the floating potato peelings and wilted lettuce.

  Roaring over the water, the Titanic’s horn shooed away the tenders and bumboats. Propellers thrashing a white trail, she arched a graceful quarter circle, then steamed westward.

  The great liner proudly cruised between four to five miles off the coast of Ireland. Skirting the Sovereign Islets, laden with herons and terns. Passing the jagged cliffs of Court-macsherry Bay, the Stags, Toe Head and Kedge Island.

  Hunched in a deckchair on the Promenade Deck, Eva saw two familiar figures sit together about five chairs away. She was about to wave, but instead pulled her coat high over her face. Eva felt very smug in her role of eavesdropper. Jason and her mother would never spot her!