Distant Waves (22 page)

NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST
1914

I
worked at the paper for the next two years getting more and better assignments. By the time I was nineteen, I was reviewing theatrical events for the paper. This was a lot of fun, although I begged my editor ceaselessly to allow me to cover more substantial news stories.

One story I was dying to be assigned was a piece on the quarrel between Dr. Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. They had been friends at the time of the conference in London, and now they were the bitterest enemies. Dr. Conan Doyle was a leading champion of spiritualism, while Houdini remained its most vocal disbeliever. Conan Doyle publicly claimed that Houdini was in fact a psychic who did his amazing feats by means of metaphysics.

I pleaded to interview them both for the paper and was told that maybe, if they both came to New York at the same time, I could interview them.

The other topic I wanted to write about was the one on everyone's mind -- the war.

The conflict that Mr. Stead had been so worried about had erupted. In June there had been an assassination in the city of Sarajevo -- a twenty-year-old Yugoslavian shot the Austrian archduke and archduchess. Because of this, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in July. Then Russia got into it, siding with Serbia, and France joined them. Germany came to the aid of its ally, Austria-Hungary. Britain got into it to side with France and then Japan honored its alliance with England and came on board. It was just as Stead had predicted -- a world at war.

I read that Arthur Conan Doyle, although fifty-five, joined the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment and served as a private. I recalled Amelie-Em's prediction and wondered if he had signed up to be with his son, Kingsley Conan Doyle, who had joined the British Army.

The United States was still not involved in the war, though some political columnists at the paper said it was only a matter of time until we were. Germany had already accused the United States of sending England war supplies -- an accusation that was probably true. They threatened to torpedo any of our ships found in British waters. Sinking ships was something I didn't even want to think about.

"How can I cover entertainment when so much is going on?" I complained to my editor one evening after filing a particularly insipid article about a doggie fashion show at Madison Square Garden.

As I spoke, an assistant came in and dropped a paper on his desk. As I rambled on about how silly and boring such events were, my editor ignored me and read the paper. "Would you look at that, Jane?" he said, putting down the typed article so I could see it. "Those Germans are going to force us into this infernal war one way or the other. A naval ship just picked up a man and a woman floating off the coast of Nova Scotia -- right in the middle of the ocean without a boat or anything in sight. They think they're spies, and the Germans knew our guys would pick them up. How dumb do they think we are?"

He kept talking, but I was no longer listening. My eyes were glued to the photographs accompanying the story. Both the young man and the woman were wringing wet.

The woman had long, thick, jet-black hair. Someone had blackened both the eyes of the young man.

"What is it, Jane?" my editor asked, noticing my stunned expression. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Maybe," I said quietly, and then I exploded into action, nearly throwing myself across his large desk. "You have to let me go to Nova Scotia to cover this story. You
must!"

"Well," he considered tentatively, "I don't have anyone else I can spare right now and since you're so bent on --"

"Thank you!" I cried.

He handed me the sheet of paper. "All the information is here. See accounting for some expense money and you can leave in the morning."

"I'm leaving right now! Right now, tonight!"

Was it possible?

***

M
y train has pulled into the station and I am now writing in a motorcar on the way to the Halifax Police Station where the prisoners are being held. My heart is beating so hard I have to stop to take deep breaths to calm myself.

I think I know what might have happened. I hope so, at least.

Tesla's time-travel device threw him and me two hours and forty minutes into the future. For some reason, it sent Thad and Mimi two years and four months forward in time.

I hope I am right.

Am I just wishing, making up more stories in my head?

Please, let me be right.

***

I am now sitting on a bench at the police station waiting. The wait is endless. 

Footsteps approach,

I am shaking.

***

Mimi bursts into tears when she sees me. She is dressed in dry clothes but her wrinkled white wedding gown is draped over her arm. "I don't know what's happened, Jane. I'm so confused," she says. "What happened to the ship?"

I weep with joy. "Mimi! Mimi!" I gush as I hug her tight.

"Jane, you look different," Mimi observes, stepping out of my embrace, twirling a long strand of her loose, unbundled hair. "You look older, somehow. What's happened?"

"I'll tell you everything on the way home," I promise, throwing my arms around her again.

Thad steps into the room, his eyes still swollen purple, an expression of complete confusion on his face. But when he sees me, his face shines with joy.

"Jane, you're alive!" he shouts, taking me into his arms. He sweeps me into a passionate kiss. I am too happy to bother caring that we are in a very public place.

I am in his arms. He is back.

For me, years have passed. For Mimi and Thad, only minutes. It is too great to be true. Yet it
is
true. I turn to the policeman in the corner. "I'm not dreaming, am I?" I check.

"No, miss," he assures me.

Now we are on a train traveling back to New York. Mimi is very quiet, deeply sad to learn that Victor is dead. I have told her how Emma seems to be with us still, and that seems to console her in some way.

They are not a day older than that terrible night in 1912. Their time in the water was brief, so their health is good. The authorities have grilled them with questions and have decided that they are not spies, after all. Though, when asked, I could offer no plausible explanation of how they came to be there, the fact that I knew them and could vouch for them as Americans facilitated their release.

"Victor said he would take me to Haiti," Mimi mentions. "Maybe I'll plan a trip there myself. Would you come with me, Jane?"

"Yes, of course, I will," I assure her.

Thad holds my hand and I point out to him that we are now nearly the same age, and he smiles. He puts his arm around me as I snuggle close.

As the train rumbles on, I think of Tesla saying that we are all inevitably traveling into the future -- a future full of doubt and uncertainty. I remember also what Mr. Stead said that morning in the study -- that the things we do can change the future.

Tesla's time machine, by throwing us forward in time, had changed Mimi's future, Thad's, Amelie-Em's -- and mine, as well. If they weren't alive, my life would be very different; on the inside if not the outside. It wasn't the big save he had wanted, but it was the world to me.

I am here with Thad and Mimi. My heart is full with joy and gratitude at their return. This gift fate has unexpectedly given makes me feel I might explode with love for the whole world.

Jiva is Shiva.

Like the ocean, life is vast and mysterious.

It makes me excited to travel forward into the future regardless of its uncertainties, knowing that what I do makes a difference.

Yawning sleepily, I rest my head on Thad's shoulder, ready for whatever is next as we roar on into tomorrow.

WHAT'S REAL IN
DISTANT
WAVES?

T
his novel is a work of fiction. However, it is based on certain historical facts. Maude, Mimi, Jane, Emma, Amelie, and Blythe Oneida Taylor are fictional, as is Thad. Quite a few real-life characters appear here, although I have imagined their dialogue and actions. I began to compile a chapter-by-chapter article on what was true and what was imagined in this novel, and it soon began to rival the length of the story. With the need for brevity in mind, here is a quick overview of the true history used here.

The home where Maude conducts her séance really existed and is open to the public. The Old Merchant's House is known to some as "the most haunted house in New York." It is located at 29 East Fourth Street in Manhattan. It became a museum in 1936.

In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a wealthy merchant, moved into it with his family: a wife, two sons, and six daughters. The youngest member of the family, Gertrude Tredwell, lived in the house until she died in the upstairs bedroom in 
1933 at the age of 93. Her older sister Julia Tredwell died in 1909, twenty-four years before Gertrude. Their sister Mary Adelaide Tredwell Richards, one of the only two daughters ever to marry, died in 1874.

The Fox sisters
, Kate, Leah, and Margaret Fox, whom the Tredwells and Maude talk about, really existed. The story Maude tells about them is true. In 1848, the sisters were living in Hydesville, New York, in a house that was already considered haunted. They heard unexplained sounds and attempted to contact the ghost making them. They claimed they did make contact, and later it was verified that a peddler named Charles Rosma had died in the house.

The sisters were celebrities in their day. By 1850, they were giving public séances in New York City and are credited with starting the movement known as spiritualism. They were later discredited when it was discovered that some of the strange thumps and bumps the public heard were created by the sisters cracking their finger and toe joints.

It is said that
Abraham Lincoln
always had a strong belief in the spirit world as well as a belief in visions and predictions. He saw an image of himself in a mirror once that led him to believe he would not live through his second term in office -- which, of course, he did not.

In 1862, Lincoln's twelve-year-old son, William Wallace Lincoln (Willie), died. Historians say it was the greatest 
blow Lincoln ever suffered. He often talked about how his son's spirit was always with him.

Though Lincoln was not publicly associated with spiritualists, his wife,
Mary Todd Lincoln
, embraced them. There is a famous story about a spiritualist named Nettie Maynard who was purported to have caused a grand piano in the White House to levitate off the floor while trying to contact Willie Lincoln.

It is documented by police and fire records of the time that an
earthquake did occur outside the Manhattan laboratory of Nikola Tesla
at 46 East Houston Street. Years later, in 1935, Tesla revealed to the
New York World
newspaper that he had accidentally caused it while experimenting with vibrating frequencies in his lab. Tesla told the reporter:

"I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was 
pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it."

Nikola Tesla
was born in 1856 in Austria-Hungary. He was perhaps the greatest scientific genius of the last century, but he's not as well-known as
Albert Einstein
or
Thomas Edison
because he was not very practical, nor was he a good businessman. At age twenty-eight, the six-foot-four Tesla arrived in New York with four cents in his pocket. With a letter of recommendation from home, he went to see Thomas Edison, the man who had introduced electricity to Manhattan in 1870. They soon fell into conflict over theories and business practices. Edison did offer Tesla money to refurbish his generators ... and when the job was done, he claimed that he had been kidding. After Tesla quit, he had to dig ditches for the Edison Company for a while in order to support himself. Tesla had no respect for Edison's methods, claiming he relied on guesswork and had no background in sound mathematical or scientific practice.

The most famous argument between Tesla and Edison centered on a disagreement about whether alternating electric (AC) current was more efficient than direct current (DC). Tesla favored alternating current, while Edison believed in direct current. By 1887, Edison launched a propaganda war to convince the public that AC current was unsafe. He filmed a rogue elephant being electrocuted with 
AC current in order to horrify the public and have them associate their horror with AC current. Eventually, though, the public embraced AC current as more efficient, less expensive, and safer.

After this, Tesla returned to his lab to work on high-frequency vibrations. He felt that this would have many practical applications, particularly the efficient and safe transmission of energy. He wanted to reproduce the vibrations of sunlight, which he believed would create virtually free electricity for humanity. Jumping off from this, he began work on the wireless transmission of energy and is credited with laying the groundwork for today's wireless technology. All the inventions and theories mentioned in this novel, such as the Teslascope, Tesla coil, and Tesla turbine and the fact that Tesla believed viruses could be shattered with vibrations, are true. He did move to Colorado Springs, built a radio tower, and attempted to contact extraterrestrial life. He did this because he believed that his tower had picked up signals from outer space. This tower eventually burned to the ground. Some speculated that this was done by agents of Edison or his financial backers, though this has never been proven. Others believe it was either lightning or the high voltages of electricity Tesla was experimenting with that caused the fire.

In 1900, he built another radio tower in Shoreham, Long Island, in New York. This tower, however, was a failure, and was foreclosed by the bank in 1908. He sold 
the scrap metal to
George C. Boldt
, manager of the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel
, to pay back the rent he owed for staying at the hotel for almost twenty years.

Many believe that he was experimenting with
time travel
as early as 1895. In the 1930s, Tesla was involved with a group at the University of Chicago investigating invisibility and the possibility of moving through the time-space continuum. For more on this work, research the
Philadelphia Experiment
.

Tesla died in 1943 at the age of 86. He continued to feed all the pigeons in Bryant Park until his death. Tesla's later years were spent working on such concepts as free energy, radar, electric cars, rocketry, and electric current therapy.

Tesla was
not
on the
Titanic
-- or, at least, not that we know of. Emil Christmann, Tesla's alias,
was
the name of a real person on the passenger list. Also, Tesla
was
working on experiments to light shipping lanes in the Atlantic and to improve ship-to-ship communications. He did not propose a means to shatter icebergs with vibration, but given his extensive work in the area and his belief that the world itself could be split in half if the right frequency was found, such a device is certainly within the realm of possibility.

On the train to Spirit Vale, Maude Taylor reads a book called
Futility
. It was a short novel published in 1898, fourteen years before the
Titanic
sank. It is eerily prophetic. The author,
Morgan Robertson
, called his ship the
Titan 
and described it as "the largest craft afloat." In the novel, the ship has its first voyage in April and has a collision with an iceberg on that journey. Its publisher later renamed it
The Wreck of the Titan: A Nineteenth-Century Prophecy.
This novel can still be found and ordered online.

Spirit Vale is a fictionalized version of
Lily Dale
, in the town of Pomfret, about an hour south of Buffalo, New York. This community of spirit mediums was founded in 1879. By the early 1900s, it was a thriving center of spiritualism, as well as a political meeting place for those supporting women's suffrage.
Susan B. Anthony
was a frequent visitor, and
Frederick Douglass
came with his suffragist second wife. Many celebrities of stage and the early movies also came in search of a way to contact deceased loved ones. For more on Lily Dale, read
Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead
by Christine Wicker.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859 and died in 1930. He first debuted his famous detective tales in
Beeton's Christmas Annual
in 1887, and in 1890, Sherlock Holmes appeared in a story featured in
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.
The character became so popular that it became a regular series in the
Strand
magazine in 1891.

Arthur Conan Doyle was interested in spiritualism. His novel
The Land of Mist
deals with the subject, and in 1926 he wrote a book titled
The History of Spiritualism, 
in which he praised the work of two noted spiritualists. His son
Kingsley Doyle
did die as a result of wounds inflicted at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. And, as in the novel, he was also friends with the great magician
Harry Houdini
.

Harry Houdini was born
Ehrich Weiss
in 1874. At the point we meet him in the novel, he had not yet legally changed his name but was using it in his magic act. Unlike his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini never changed his mind about spiritualism, maintaining that it was no more than trickery and fraud. He even claimed to have learned some of his own magic tricks from spiritualists. In the 1920s, he turned much of his energy to proving that spiritualists were fakes. He was a member of a group called Scientific American that offered cash prizes to any medium who could prove true abilities. Houdini made sure this prize was never awarded by continually uncovering tricks that confounded everyone else. His friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was broken due to Houdini's zeal in uncovering mediums. Conan Doyle came to believe that Houdini himself was a spiritual medium. The two men became public antagonists. After Houdini died, Conan Doyle dealt with this in his novel
The Edge of the Unknown,
published posthumously in 1931.

The psychic conference conducted by
William Stead
is a fiction. But W. T. Stead was a respected journalist involved with spiritualism and was a passenger on 
the
Titanic.
Although he had predicted the sinking of the
Titanic,
and predicted his own death by ice, he boarded the ship to attend a peace congress at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan at the invitation of United States President William Taft. He died that night, just as he had predicted. He spent his last hours in dignified resignation to his fate, sitting in the first-class drawing room with his companion
John Jacob Astor
.

The LaRoche family
really existed. Joseph LaRoche went down with the
Titanic.
His wife and daughters survived. I imagined Mimi as Haitian and of mixed race, and then discovered the LaRoches' story -- one of the most exciting discoveries of many I made while writing this book.

Colonel John Jacob Astor the Fourth also died that night on the
Titanic.
At the time, he was one of the richest men in America. He was returning to New York with his much younger, pregnant second wife,
Madeleine Force
. Along with his cousin, William Waldorf, he owned the Waldorf-Astoria, the world's tallest hotel at that time. He let his good friend Nikola Tesla stay there for minimal rent. The two men had been friends since the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and later Astor, along with George Westinghouse and others, was a major backer of Tesla's Niagara Falls Project. He was an amateur scientist who held a patent on a moving sidewalk and who had written a futuristic novel. At the time of his death, he and Tesla were 
talking about the commuter flivver plane that Tesla was developing, part helicopter and part plane. It is said that Astor, a dog lover, freed all the dogs from the kennels so they would have a chance to survive the sinking of the
Titanic.
Madeleine Force survived the sinking and went on to have his son.

Mrs. Brown
was never known as Molly Brown, but rather Maggie. She became known as Molly only after her death, because of a 1960 stage musical,
The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Born Margaret Tobin in 1867, she grew up impoverished and, at nineteen, married a poor man known as J.J. Brown. Although their early married life was lean, they had two children and Maggie was involved in the fight for women's rights. In the early 1890s, J.J.'s work with the Ibex Mining Company turned profitable when he discovered an ore seam in a mine. Mrs. Brown was on the
Titanic
because she was returning early from a trip to Europe, having received word that her grandson was ill. She was traveling with her good friends the Astors. After the sinking of the ship, she was widely praised for her heroism.

Millionaire
Benjamin Guggenheim
and his girlfriend
Leontine "Ninette" Aubart
really sailed on the
Titanic.
With them was their valet
Victor Giglio
. Mimi Taylor is a fictional character and was not engaged to him. Although Mimi was not really her companion, Ninette was rescued in lifeboat nine with the maid with whom she was traveling, 
and did not die until 1964 at the age of 77. Victor Giglio and Benjamin Guggenheim both went down with the
Titanic.