Remembering the Titanic (3 page)

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, though 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 tablet 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.

W
HEN
K
ATIE, 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.

But this time, before she had a chance to fight back tears of disappointment, she was stopped in her tracks by a loud voice bellowing, “Don’t you be going nowheres, Missy! Stand right there where you are, just like that, while I take a good look at you.”

The woman with the loud voice was overweight, her ample proportions stuffed into a shiny satin dress that made her look like an oversized orange. Her very curly hair was a brilliant shade of blond, and her long, pointed fingernails bore slashes of vivid scarlet that clashed violently with the dress. Lottie was staring openly and disapprovingly at the woman’s makeup, and even Katie had to admit that while rouge and lip paint could often enhance features, on this woman they only exaggerated the wrinkles and puffiness of age.

But her eyes were a clear, bright blue, and she was smiling a warm, friendly smile at Katie. She had beautiful, white, even teeth. “Heard you belting out a tune in there for Pauly,” she said. She shook her head. The curls bounced. “Pauly’s right. You got a great set of pipes. But that song’s all wrong for you.”

Katie bristled. “ ’Tis a good song,” she cried. “Everyone likes it. I like it!”

“Did I say it was a bad song? I said it was all wrong for you.”

Lottie spoke up. “And who might you be? I thought the man inside was the theatrical agent.”

A plump hand waved in dismissal. “He is. I’m Flo Chambers, the wife. I sit out here in the office and answer phones and write letters and handle hysterical clients. But take my word for it, I know as much about show business as he does. I used to be a performer, years ago. Did okay, too. And I’m telling you, this girl is going about things all wrong.” She tapped an index finger against her teeth. “Where in heaven’s name did you get that dress? You look like a wedding cake. It don’t suit you at all. A plainer frock would be much better. And that hair!” She lifted a pudgy, jeweled finger. “You hiding something in there?” Laughing at her own wit, she ordered, “Take them pins out. Give ’em to me. Let that gorgeous red hair fall naturally, the way it was meant to. And then I want to hear you sing a few of them songs you sang back in the home country.” She glanced down at a slip of paper on the desk behind her. “Hanrahan. Sing me an Irish tune, then.” It sounded like a command, not a request.

“What’s
wrong
with my dress?” Katie was close to tears. How could the woman be so cruel? “My aunt worked on it for weeks, gettin’ it just right.”

“Just right for a cheesy theater downtown,” the woman said flatly. “That where you want to be, in some cheesy theater with men catcallin’ at you? It’s not where you belong, I can tell you that right off.”

Katie stood up very straight, her head high. “I think where I belong should be up to me, don’t you?”