Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic: A Novel of the Titanic

by Suzanne Weyn

  Mimi and I joined Mother on the bench. “Have you finished thinking?” Mimi asked.

  “I have.” Mother took out the note Julia Tredwell had given to her and pressed it flat on her knee. “This is to be our future home.”

  “Spirit Vale,” Mimi read.

  I sometimes wonder how much my memory of that day is influenced by the things Mimi and I have talked about through the years and how much of it is purely my own remembering. Being a little older, she had greater understanding of what was going on around us.

  Let me promise you, though: I am absolutely sure about the events that happened next. Even now, so many years later, if I close my eyes, I can conjure the scene in every detail. And hardly a day has passed that I have not, for at least a fleeting moment, recalled it.

  We were on the wide boulevard called Houston Street. It was a sedate scene with only a few horse-drawn wagons passing by. My head was craned back, ogling the wide four—and five-story buildings. Coming from a New England village of clapboard wooden houses, this city seemed like something conjured from imagination, absolutely huge and wondrous.

  Mimi tapped me on the shoulder and hopped forward. It was a game we had begun to play since coming to the city. I would then try to jump farther than she without landing on a sidewalk crack.

  I took the challenge and sprang forward. But the moment that I landed, the sidewalk pushed me back with tremendous force, throwing me into Mimi.

  Stumbling, the two of us fell over, me on top of my sister.

  Looking around, I saw Mother leaning over the twins in the perambulator as though to shield them. She’d lifted one arm over her head and was searching around for Mimi and me. “Stay down. Cover your heads!” she shouted the moment she spotted us.

  In the next second, debris of rock, dirt, and plaster showered down on us. A brick crashed to my right. Mimi and I lunged to either side as a narrow opening crackled between us, traveling fast across the sidewalk. The pavement in front of me jutted forward, disconnecting the two slabs and thrusting them upward.

  I tucked myself into a ball, covering up as Mother had commanded.

  On every side, the buildings were shaking!

  Pow! Pow! Pow! followed by shrill crackling. Three upper windows in a row from the building next to me exploded, raining shards of shattered glass to the street.

  Gradually I realized that a terrible pain was burning in my head. It was as if my skull were vibrating at a tremendous speed. My teeth chattered so violently that my jaw ached. I became aware of a high, excruciating whine that seemed to be inside my head.

  When I checked on Mimi, she was also wincing in agony, her eyes shut tight, and clutching her forehead.

  My eyes pulsated like a heartbeat.

  It was horrible!

  Terror rocked me, for I imagined that I might literally explode if it didn’t all stop right away.

  An oncoming clang of an approaching fire wagon mixed with the high whine in my head. Then another set of fire bells from a different direction started up.

  I sensed a nearby presence and dared to open my clenched eyes. A man’s worn brown shoes were the first thing I saw.

  Gazing up the length of him, I took in a tall, gaunt man of about forty. His nearly black hair, parted down the middle, was windblown and askew. The dark mustache above his thin lips twitched anxiously as his onyx eyes darted in every direction, taking in the scene of destruction.

  He lifted me to my feet with a strong, firm grip. “Where are your parents?” he asked with a heavy Eastern European accent, his laboratory jacket flapping in the wind that the tumult had stirred up around us.

  I located Mother crouched low to the ground with her arms over Amelie and Emma, and pointed to her. The perambulator had fallen to its side. “Oh, no!” the man exclaimed.

  Mimi rose unsteadily to her feet. With arms outstretched to keep from falling, we followed the man over to Mother and the twins. “Come! Come inside!” he urged her as another slab of stone crashed in front of us. “You must come inside.”

  Mother carried one twin in each of her arms as we stumbled after him. The clanging of bells was now all around us. The horse-drawn fire wagons were pulling to rapid halts, mixed with police wagons. A fireman leaped down and was instantly knocked over by the swaying ground beneath him.

  We followed the tall man into a nearby building marked forty-six East Houston. Once we were inside, he raced up a staircase ahead of us. “Follow me,” he called over his shoulder. “I cannot wait. There is something I must do at once.”

  Mother seemed unsure for a moment, but a piece of ornate trim from the building’s facade crashed down by the front door, and that was all the convincing she needed. The staircase quivered as we climbed, and by the time we reached the fourth-floor landing, we saw an open door that led into a spacious, one-room apartment with sparse furniture and a ceiling that rose about twelve feet high.

  In the middle of the room, a metal girder reached about halfway to the high ceiling. Strapped to the girder was a metal box with a gauge and dials, a machine of some sort about the size of an alarm clock.

  The man who had guided us into the building did not even notice our quiet, curious entry into the room. He was much too intent on his task.

  He held a sledgehammer over his head and violently—smash after repeated smash—destroyed the small, humming machine.

  Chapter 3

  I wandered to the wall of high, wide windows looking down onto Houston Street. The scene was pure pandemonium. Those who had been inside in restaurants and stores stumbled out wearing dazed expressions to see what had happened. Horses that had been pulling hansom cabs, fire wagons, and police wagons balked at riding down the broken ground, neighing their displeasure and refusing to move forward. This created a jam in the roadway which brought on great bouts of shouting and fighting.

  The terrible pain and whine that had tormented me had vanished. But a dull throb had taken their place and my bones ached awfully, especially my jawbone, even my teeth. The twins were draped across Mimi’s knees, looking spent by the experience. Glancing at Mimi, I wasn’t sure if her dark eyes brimmed with tears or if she was simply squinting against the harsh light that flooded the vast room. She was anxiously twisting one of her curls.

  “You made it stop, sir, didn’t you?” Mother surmised, standing in front of the man. Her voice was strong, almost accusatory. “By smashing that thing.”

  He slumped in a beat-up, brown leather armchair, a posture of complete dejection. “Made it stop?” he repeated with weary irony. He glanced at the flattened metal box still strapped to the girder. “Yes, I suppose I did.” Having said that, though, he lifted his head and seemed to brighten. “More to the point, my dear woman: I also made it start.”

  “It wasn’t a natural earthquake, then?” Mimi inquired in a voice much shakier and smaller than her usual tone.

  “Well…” He gazed at Mother, as if gauging if he could trust her with further information.

  “No need to hesitate, sir. Clearly it was caused by that contraption.” Mother broke the stalemate, a note of impatience creeping into her voice. “It’s too late to deny that!”

  The man threw his arms up and dropped them again on the sides of the chair. With this gesture, he gave up any reticence he may have felt, and from there on was completely forthcoming. “It is my latest experiment: an electromechanical oscillator, a vibratory mechanism. I was amplifying its output to see if it could align with the vibrational patterns of the outside buildings.”

  “Vibrational patterns? Buildings do not vibrate,” Mother objected. “At least, not usually.”

  The man rose and began to pace, warming to his subject. “That is where you are wrong, madam. Everything vibrates! Everything! Vibration is the key to the universe. The very Earth could be split in two given the right vibrations.”

  “Well, I sincerely hope things won’t get that far. Nonetheless, your demonstration was impressive. Everything out there was most certainly vibrating,” Moth
er said wryly. “But it would seem there are still a few problems left to be worked out in your mechanism. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  For the first time, the man’s mouth quirked into something like a smile. “Excellent point,” he allowed. “Nonetheless, it worked. It worked!”

  He clapped his hands together gustily, his face becoming radiant with a broad grin. Without intending to, Mimi and I both smiled, too, infected by his glee.

  “That was your idea of success?” Mother questioned incredulously, gesturing toward the street.

  “I am sorry for the destruction, of course. Looking out the window, I witnessed what was happening and was about to stop the machine when I saw your babes in distress. I had endangered you! So I ran down to retrieve you before destroying the machine. By letting the machine run, I caused further ruin, I’m afraid. Regrettably, these sorts of choices are sometimes not so simple.”

  “Why didn’t you just turn it off?” Mother inquired. “Did you forget to invent an off switch?”

  “It jammed. I had pushed it beyond its capacity.”

  “And you still consider the experiment a success?” Mother pressed.

  He became nearly giddy with excitement. “Yes! It was an astounding success! I merely intended to create an almost imperceptible quiver, but that’s just a matter of tinkering, of getting the calibrations correct. The point is that it works, just as it came to me in my dream.”

  “You dreamed that earthquake machine?” Mimi asked.

  “Earthquake machine! What a wonderful name. That is what I shall call it. Earthquake machine!” he exclaimed as if talking to himself. Then he spoke directly to Mimi, with none of the condescension adults often direct toward children. “Yes, little miss, I dreamed it. Many of my greatest inventions have come in dreams or meditations.”

  Tilting her head to one side curiously, Mimi studied the tall, highly animated man. “What have you invented?”

  “Many, many inventions,” he said. “Some of them are still in my mind. But…here is one! Three years ago I harnessed the power of Niagara Falls and lit entire cities with electric light running on alternating current! If they had done it Edison’s way, with direct current, it would have required a power plant for every mile. Those plants run on coal. Do you realize how that would have fouled the air? At Niagara Falls, through my deal with the Westinghouse Company, we powered Niagara to Chicago, Toronto, Boston, and New York.”

  Mother gasped sharply and her hand flew to her mouth. “That was you? You’re Tesla?”

  “I am, indeed, Tesla,” he confirmed, bowing gallantly.

  Though I later learned that his name was Nikola Tesla, he stayed forever in my mind not as Mr. Tesla or Dr. Tesla but simply as Tesla, in the same way one would say Socrates or Washington.

  “I’ve read of you,” Mother spoke excitedly, moving closer to him. “And about your rivalry with Edison.”

  Tesla scowled. “Edison invents, while I discover what is already there to be uncovered. He relies on blind chance. He guesses with no regard for theory or scientific formulation. He stumbles upon his inventions.”

  “I take it you don’t like Mr. Edison,” Mother observed.

  “Almost fifteen years ago, when I first came to America from Austria-Hungary, I worked for Edison. He offered me fifty thousand dollars to revamp his generators and machinery. Do you know what kind of laboratory I could have set up with fifty thousand dollars? So I did what he asked, working myself into a state of exhaustion. When I was done, the efficiency of all his machinery was many times what it had been. And do you know what he told me when I asked for my money?”

  “What?” Mother said.

  “He laughed and said: ‘Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.’ Later that year, I resigned.”

  “But surely you have recovered that money many times over in your work at Niagara Falls?” Mother remarked.

  “The electricity was derived from the power of Niagara Falls, not from me. I do not believe in making money from naturally occurring resources. It should be free, like water or air. For a few to claim it as theirs to sell is wrong.”

  “What a unique perspective,” Mother remarked. “Clearly you are not American.”

  “I am a citizen,” Tesla informed her. “I became a naturalized citizen in 1891 when I was thirty-five years of age.”

  “But your thinking is not American,” she clarified. “You are not a capitalist.”

  “So I have been told. Edison is the great American!”

  By now, we had almost recovered from the shock of what had happened on the street. And Mother was clearly intrigued by this encounter with Tesla, admiring his intelligence. Still, I was a little surprised by what she said next.

  “Mr. Tesla,” she said, walking around to the window so that she was standing directly in front of him, “I am not educated like yourself, so I would appreciate your thoughts on a subject that has been much on my mind lately.”

  I sat forward, as did Mimi, both of us fiercely interested to hear what she would ask.

  “I am at your service,” Tesla obliged.

  “What do you think of ghosts, Mr. Tesla?”

  He did not seem in the least surprised by her odd question. “Well, madam, as I have said previously, everything vibrates.”

  “I don’t follow,” she said.

  “Have you ever seen a hummingbird?”

  “I have.”

  “And do its wings seem to disappear as it hovers near a red, tubular flower?”

  Mother considered for a quick moment. “I suppose they do, yes.”

  “Yet the hummingbird’s wings are still there despite the fact that we cannot see them,” Tesla said. “The rate of the vibration of the hummingbird’s wings renders them invisible to our feeble human senses.”

  “So when a person’s spirit passes over, that person might begin to vibrate on a different level?” Mother said, struggling to follow.

  “Vibrate at a different frequency,” he corrected, “in the same way in which one can tune in different channels on a wireless communication, one may be able to tune in different spirit frequencies.”

  “Do you mean like in Marconi’s radio invention?” Mother asked.

  “I invented it first,” Tesla said sternly, looking out the window. “Marconi merely beat me to the patent and the credit. I’m fighting him in court.”

  “I’m so sorry for you,” Mother sympathized. “It’s a terrible injustice not to receive credit for one’s work.”

  “No matter,” Tesla said quietly, continuing to gaze out the window. “The point is that science bears out a belief in what cannot be seen. In physics there are many things we cannot see directly: the underwater transmittal of sound; power from above surging along wires and through the ground in waves of electricity.”

  “So then, you believe that the existence of ghosts—spirits who hover in this dimension after their physical incarnation has ended—is a possibility?” Mother asked.

  Tesla turned dramatically from the window and faced Mother. “Madam, I believe that everything is a possibility.”

  This was the last bit of convincing Mother had needed.

  For the first—but not the last—time, Tesla had changed our lives.

  Chapter 4

  That night, Mother commanded us to assemble our few belongings and pack them. While Mimi and I stuffed rag dolls and nightgowns into our carpetbags, I could hear my mother and grandmother downstairs engaging in a conversation that quickly escalated to a full-scale shouting match.

  “If you engage in this lunacy, you will disgrace the Taylor name!” Grandmother Taylor shouted, her voice barbed with indignation.

  “This is my life, and I shall live it as I see fit!” Mother shot back at her.

  With Grandmother Taylor irately barraging Mother with phrases that contained words such as unstable, unfit, disinherit, and disown, we scrambled down her front steps, our carpetbags thumping behind.

  At Grand Central Depot we boarded a train for Albany a
nd then changed at that city for a different train. I recall eating sandwiches and sleeping slumped against Mimi as we rumbled at great speed through the night. I remember being alert with excitement coupled with anxious worry over what lay ahead but also suffused with relief to be away from Grandmother Taylor’s disapproving eyes.

  My giddy, thrilled state slowly gave way to a deep exhaustion. What a day it had been! Yawning widely, I slumped in my seat next to Mimi and let the train lull me.

  Mother sat rocking the twins in their perambulator with one hand, engrossed in a slim novel she’d bought at the newsstand at Grand Central Depot in New York City.

  “What’s the story about?” Mimi asked as I stirred drowsily beside her. “Tell us.”

  Mother put down her book. “It’s an adventure tale titled Futility, by a man named Morgan Robertson,” she said. “It’s about a very, very large ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg and sinks on its very first voyage. It seems that most of its passengers are about to drown.”

  “I don’t like that story,” Mimi said. “Is it true?”

  “No, it’s not true. It’s just fiction that the writer made up from his imagination,” she answered.

  “It’s too sad,” Mimi declared.

  “You’re right. I don’t much like it, either.” Mother closed the book and set it aside on her seat. “It’s putting me in a melancholy frame of mind and I hadn’t even realized it. That’s not what I need right now. I must entertain only the most positive of thoughts if I am to move forward effectively.”

  Finally we reached the bustling city of Buffalo, New York. We spent a night in a rather shabby hotel there. It was newly morning, still almost dark, when Mother roused us and we hurried down to the street without even telling anyone we were leaving. There she hired a horse-drawn cab to carry us as close to Spirit Vale as the last of her money would allow.

  That wasn’t far enough, apparently, because I recall us walking for quite a long time along a dirt road—I pushed the twins, while Mother and Mimi dragged our bags.