by Richard Peck
“Will she come back to herself?” a lady’s voice asked him.
“Time will do what it can,” he answered. “She will not be the same as before.”
I wanted to agree. I wanted to meet the doctor’s gaze, but I didn’t dare. I, the helpless impostor, lay there pretending to sleep. I could find my voice, perhaps. But could I find the voice of Amanda Whitwell? I willed myself to sleep, withdrawing.
It was the evening of April 18 when we entered New York harbor. The tugboats lined us into land. And beyond was the sound of masses of people calling out, crying for the first word, calling out the names of the living and the dead. I couldn’t go on like this. I must tell someone the truth. I managed to move the hand that was not in the sling. The diamond flashed. But then I lost the thread of my thought.
When I awoke, stretcher bearers were in the room. Beside me, someone had taken my hand. His necktie was pulled loose. My hand and its ring were lost in his grasp. I turned toward him as toward the light. He bent his head over my hand. His hair was lustrous black. My heart turned over, and I passed a great barrier. It was Mr. Gregory Forrest, come to claim Miss Amanda Whitwell.
When next I awoke, I was in a hospital bed. New bandages throbbed at my cheek and at my temples, and stitches had been taken in my lip. But he was there, silent beside my bed. As the days dimmed and brightened in no particular order, I grew used to seeing him there.
Once, an elderly woman was in his place. Her hand covered mine, and she spoke to me as if I were her own child. I seemed to know that this was Gregory Forrest’s mother.
I heard a doctor say, “She should be clearing now. There is no reason why she shouldn’t begin to speak soon. And to understand.”
But there were reasons—enormous reasons. I was not who they thought me to be.
Gregory Forrest asked the doctor, “Is it possible that she will never be . . . well?”
“Time is the great healer,” the doctor said, easing away from an answer. “We do not foresee permanent damage to mind or body. But she may not be quite as she was before.”
I clung to those words, finding my future in them. “Not quite as she was before.” I was ready to follow the path that seemed to open before me.
He was sitting by my bed again. He had been there every day, keeping a morning watch before he went off to his work. I had loved him for so long that it didn’t seem strange. I remembered meeting him in the great hallway of Whitwell Hall, where I’d blundered in my maid’s uniform. He had asked me my name, and I remembered Lady Eleanor’s footfall on the stairs that had sent me scurrying down the servants’ steps. I remembered the throb beneath the heart that only he inspired.
“Amanda?” he said, and I dared not stir in the hospital bed.
“Yes?” I said through broken lips. “Yes.”
* * *
I was removed from the hospital to Gregory Forrest’s family home in Brooklyn, to a room more comforting than any I had ever known. It wasn’t as grand as Whitwell Hall, but it was spacious and more homelike than lavender silks.
There was also a saucy little flaxen-haired maid of all work named Ursula, who served me now with a breezy independence. Once I dared speak at all, I asked her to bring me a mirror.
Ursula hesitated. “Mrs. Forrest said you wasn’t supposed to see yourself. But Lord have mercy, you look so much better than you did. . . . Maybe just a peek. But you mustn’t start yellin’ and carryin’ on.”
I must have looked very startled and ladylike at that, for Ursula grinned and brought me a hand mirror. I put my uninjured hand out with some of the impatience of Amanda Whitwell. Ursula hovered, worrying, as I stared into a face that was neither mine nor Amanda Whitwell’s. I took more comfort in what I saw than Ursula could know.
It was the face of a battered stranger. My eyes were swollen. My cheek and my eyebrows were crisscrossed with lines that had recently been an angry red. I looked at a thin line of scar tissue that broke the arch of my right eyebrow, and I recalled that Miss Amanda’s eyebrow had been divided in just such a way from a long-ago fall from a horse. By now I had come past the time for telling the truth. I was becoming Amanda Whitwell. I looked into the violet eyes, shaded by pain and the vagueness of concussion. Those too could pass as Amanda’s. She seemed to be alive there within the mirror, behind the eyes. I saw the schemer that she had been in those eyes, and then I remembered they were mine.
A letter lay on the bedside table one morning. The stamp was British and the spidery, perfect handwriting was Lady Eleanor Whitwell’s. Now I must take up another thread of a life that wasn’t mine:
My darling daughter,
Your father and I thank God that your life has been spared. The anguish of uncertainty is behind us now, and I only pray that you are all but restored to health. I place my trust in Gregory.
I think often of the many opportunities you and I have lost in the past to be truly mother and daughter. I can only hope that when you are a married woman, however far away, you and I will find a way to grow closer, if only in our thoughts.
In the midst of our rejoicing at your survival, the household has been saddened by the loss of your maid and good companion, Miranda. We pray for her soul. Your father has informed John Thorne of the death of his wife. . . .
I wept not as the daughter of such a loving mother, but as one who has never known such love. I wept too for the Miranda who was dead now, dead and remembered with kindness.
Ursula, who never knocked, found me crying. She ran to find Mrs. Forrest, who came and hovered at the door until I asked her to sit beside me. I couldn’t put her off. I could no longer keep those willing to love me at arm’s length.
“You are . . . moved, perhaps, by a vord from your home?”
I nodded and tried to smile.
“I understand such a thing.” Her eyes grew bright with the hint of tears. Gregory had her eyes. “I came from the Old Country, from Augsburg, ven I vas no more than a girl. And since, I have shed my share of tears over letters from home, though this has been my happy home for more years than you have lived. It is your mother who sends you vord?”
I nodded again.
“And there are others besides your mother and papa? A grandmother, perhaps?”
“No,” I said, struggling to turn my lies into a kind of truth. “There is a very old woman, though, with a heart full of love. She lives in a cottage on . . . our grounds. She has been like a . . . grandmother to me. She’s had many hardships, but she has made her memories happy, as I hope to make mine.”
Mrs. Forrest patted the back of my hand, and I turned it to hold hers. She began to talk, to reminisce. She spoke of her husband and his rise to prosperity; of the hopes and plans of her son. She told me about these men she loved, and I heard more of Gregory Forrest than Amanda Whitwell ever had.
In the evenings Gregory himself sat beside my bed. In those evenings the Amanda he had loved began to interweave with the Amanda before him. He had fallen in love with an image I could not hope to match. I could not stun him with my wit or raise a satirical eyebrow while I dangled him on a string. I could only hope to be more loving and more kind, a better wife to him than Amanda would have been.
At first I contented myself with being an eager listener. But there was so much I wanted to know. And one evening I spoke to him as soon as he was beside me. I gripped his hand to screw up my courage. “Gregory, I feel very foolish and very forgetful.” Yes, that was spoken in one of Miss Amanda’s more languid tones, though it lacked her utter boredom. “Your mother has been good enough to sit with me—”
“And talk you into a trance about her son’s boyhood?” he said.
“Well, she did just touch on the subject in passing.”
He squeezed my hand. “And what do you want to know that Mother didn’t get around to telling you?”
“It’s serious, Gregory. Your mother spoke of your father, and I don’t know if he is . . . living.”
“No, my dearest. My father died very suddenly not long aft
er I met you.”
I seemed to stand at the edge of quicksand. “Oh, Gregory, I must have known, mustn’t I?”
“No, my dear, you wouldn’t have known. It happened at one of those times when you had—well, you’d banished me. Then when we were together again, I didn’t want to trouble you.”
“Gregory, there is nothing now that I don’t want to know. Nothing that concerns you can fail to concern me. I’ve been very tiresome and childish in the past.”
I listened as he told me of his work, his family, his boyhood friend Sammy Bettendorf, who had died needlessly in a firetrap tenement. He told me what had given him the goals that directed his life, and I was scarcely able to hope that I could play my role at his side. I would have been drawn by his selfless ambitions even if I had not loved him.
He opened his heart through the evening that stretched almost till dawn. Then he drew me up short. “But you’ve heard all this before, Amanda. All my schemes to rebuild New York as a place fit for people to live in safety and dignity.”
“I could hear it many more times, Gregory.”
“And you no longer think—let’s see, how did you put it once—that I ‘reek of idealism’?”
“I could never have said such a thing!” I replied, in absolute honesty.
Then Gregory was beside me on the bed. His arms moved gently but confidently around me and held me in his sheltering embrace. He didn’t yet attempt to kiss my bruised face, for that might have given me pain. But I felt pain, and doubt, at what I had set in motion. My lies had been only too successful. I sank out of my depth, tormented by fear. And there would be more deceit. More than even that other Amanda had ever needed. Was any love worth this eternity of lies?
I knew it was. I knew it was worth anything. I’d never demanded anything of life before. But I was not now what I had been. I forced myself to lie easily in his embrace, and I held him as tightly as one hand could manage.
“You are all I want,” he said. And all the world beyond us fell away.
* * *
Gregory Forrest and I were married in June 1912. My only attendant was Miss Rebecca Reed.
She had left her card at the Forrest home in Bushwick sometime before, and I’d been thrown into a panic. Here was a keen-eyed woman who had known both Amanda and me well enough to notice our similarities, and our differences. I would not see her, and she had to make the long trip back to Manhattan with only coffee and the apologies of Gregory’s mother.
But much as I wanted to, I could not hide from the world forever. My arm was out of the sling, so I wrote Rebecca Reed a note, pleading bad health and asking her back another afternoon.
Delighted with this evidence of my recovery, Mrs. Forrest ordered from Abraham & Straus a tea gown with all possible accessories. On the day of the visit, I dressed my hair precisely as I had dressed Amanda Whitwell’s. I spent the final moments moving through a ritual by rote that I had before practiced on another. Ursula opened the front door below, and I hung there on the long staircase a moment longer. My hand gripped a banister of black walnut, but there was nothing to be done about my pounding heart. I started down the stairs.
Mrs. Forrest had already burdened Miss Reed with coffee and a plate of cakes by the time I appeared in the parlor doorway. I forced myself to greet her by her first name and to move across the room in the posture of a lady. I had worried that my face and my speech would undo me. Now I feared that my carriage, and the mannerisms of a servant, would betray me first.
Miss Reed searched my face with a reporter’s professional intensity. “My dear Amanda, you’re very nearly perfection again! How lucky for you—and for us all.”
I was just able to meet her look, and I urged her to tell Mrs. Forrest the story of her musical pig, the sole story from the great horror that might be told over coffee to amuse. Miss Reed was a natural storyteller, and I sat, smiling and nodding, easing by degrees into the chair. If only I could let the rest of the world do the talking, perhaps it would save the moment, and my life.
At last, when I thought Miss Reed meant to rise and go, she turned to me and set her cup aside. “You know, Amanda, journalists are outrageously thick-skinned types. We have to be if we mean to make a living. What I’m trying to say is this: Would it be too painful for you to give me an interview about your experience on the Titanic? You see, the New York papers are still yearning for every inch of copy they can get. And frankly, I’d like to write an account from your viewpoint. I know, I know, you really shouldn’t have to relive the whole terrible business.” She waved a hand as if to dismiss herself. But then she fixed me with a very direct, perhaps calculating look.
I drew back from the idea of an interview. Every word I spoke of a life that was not mine might trip me up. But I knew I must grant her an interview, before she found the fear in my eyes. For the rest of my life, however I might live it, I would be recalled as a survivor of this famous disaster. That I would never escape. Perhaps a word now would forestall many later.
When Mrs. Forrest saw I was willing to be interviewed, she left us, only warning Miss Reed not to “question me to death.” When we were alone, Rebecca Reed drew her chair closer. If she knows, I thought, this will be her opportunity to accuse me. But no, she was merely flipping open her notepad, poising her pen. Oh how I yearned to rise up at this woman and scream, I AM NOT AMANDA WHITWELL. If you know it, don’t torture me anymore. And if you hadn’t known till now, keep my guilty secret, for I have no other life to live but hers. . . .
And yet I sat so silently, fingering my pearls. I appeared to be forcing myself to remember moments that were only painful and not damning.
“There are things,” I said in a thoughtful, distant voice, “that I don’t recall at all. The shock perhaps. And it had been such an ordinary evening. Dinner and coffee, and afterwards a turn on the deck. Yes, I’m quite sure of that much. I wore my pink. And the silver slippers.”
“You weren’t alone, surely,” Miss Reed said, watching.
“No, I strolled the deck with Mr. Sawyer.”
That was true enough. I’d seen them. But had they dined together, taken their coffee together in the Palm Court? Had Miss Reed seen them?
But she only said, “And then?”
“I went to . . . my stateroom and went to bed rather early.”
Rebecca Reed’s pen hovered above the page. Discretion and the dictates of journalism battled within her.
“Rebecca,” I said, “I realize that some of the passengers misunderstood my friendship with Mr. Sawyer. I had flirted outrageously with him. Yet, as shipboard romances go, ours was an innocent flirtation. But it did occur to me that perhaps Mr. Sawyer’s reputation as a . . . lady-killer had preceded him. I sent him away early on that Sunday night, and I never saw him again.”
There. I couldn’t avoid mentioning Clem Sawyer. He hung heavily in Rebecca Reed’s mind. Ironically, I was being more careful of Miss Amanda’s reputation than she herself had ever been. But the interview was far from over.
“You were awakened by the sound of the ship striking the iceberg?”
“No. My . . . maid awakened me.”
“Oh!” Miss Reed cried. “I’m so glad to know you don’t claim to have heard the first impact of ship against iceberg! Half the people interviewed said it sounded like a thunderclap. What rot! It was quite a small sound.”
“I sent Miranda to the purser for my jewelry. Then I simply went back to sleep. It seems very foolish now.
“I awoke again some while later. The stateroom stood at an alarming angle. Miranda and I threw on life preservers. I reached for my jewelry, and we went out to see what was happening.” I stopped, fearful of the sound of my own voice, wondering how I could continue this awful mingling of truth and falsehood.
Miss Reed busied herself with her notes, saying, “Surely there was still time to get yourselves into a lifeboat?”
“The deck was a . . . terrific muddle. I was frightened, and I’m sorry to say I gave way to an unreasonable instin
ct. I rushed back to my stateroom to get a book, a diary that I kept. Perhaps it seemed a memento—rather like your pig. I . . . never saw Miranda again.”
“Yes,” Miss Reed said thoughtfully. “People did go back for the most extraordinary things. And of course you weren’t able to keep your diary with you. You must feel robbed of your past without it.”
“I suppose I do,” I said. And then I told her of my own salvation just as it had happened. I hoped the truth of this last part of my story would carry the falsehood of the first. I’d done my best and my worst.
When Miss Reed rose to go, I saw her to the door. “I hope,” she said uncertainly, “that we can be friends. I feel I didn’t know you before. I had quite the wrong impression of you.”
All her crisp, professional manner fell away, and I wondered if I should take her hand. I said, “Everything is very strange in this new country. I shall depend upon my friends.”
She hesitated. “You’re feeling . . . well now?” How carefully she asked, more carefully than she needed to. I nodded, and as if she had said too much, she left quickly.
I stood for a long time behind the closed door. I could not decide if I had passed the test or failed it. Or if it had been a test at all. Surely it had gone well. But in that last moment. . . .
Perhaps she knew that Amanda Whitwell had been expecting a child. Could she think I might have lost the child in the sea? Perhaps she suspected the truth. Perhaps she knew I was an insignificant maid pathetically got up to impersonate a lady. Or did she, after all, see only that lady? I was never to know. The mercy of a stranger may well be the most valuable of all gifts and the least understood. Perhaps I posed such a great problem to Rebecca Reed’s determined open-mindedness that she could not solve me.
* * *
I stood before the looking glass in my bedroom on the night before I was to marry Gregory Forrest. The floor around me was awash in tissue paper and open boxes. My trousseau had arrived, sent by Lady Eleanor, from all the smartest shops in London. She had replaced the lost original trousseau down to the last detail. What pleasure it must have given her, this celebration of her daughter’s survival.
