Titanic: The Long Night (17 page)

Every girl Elizabeth knew expected to go straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s home. Young women did not leave their parents until they married. Even Monica Beaumont, who was attending Vassar, still lived at home when she wasn’t attending classes. Young women did
not
live on their own.

“Just because a person never lives in a garret somewhere in New York City,” she said indignantly, sliding off the bicycle seat to stand up, “doesn’t mean that person never grows up. Marrying and raising children is very maturing, I’m sure.
My
mother’s not a child.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Everything she had ever told Max about her mother had made Nola sound like a spoiled child. If he laughed now, she would never speak to him again.

He laughed. Then, seeing the look of fury on Elizabeth’s face, he sobered and said seriously, “Well,
my
mother is very childlike. My father caters to her every whim, but he also treats her like she doesn’t have a brain in her head. She knows that’s not true, and I know it’s not true, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. But they pretend. When she gets unhappy or restless because she isn’t doing anything very interesting, he brings home a new fur from the store, and she pretends it’s what she wanted all along. They play this game, and it keeps peace in the family, so…” Completely serious now, he added, “I would never treat you like that, Elizabeth, whether or not you ever go to college. I know you have a brain, and I know you’re not a child. But you have to prove that to your parents by not acting like one. By insisting on having what you need.”

Elizabeth stared at him. He was
lecturing
her! Talking to her as if she couldn’t figure that much out for herself. And saying at the same time that he knew she had a brain! He certainly wasn’t treating her as if he believed that.

“Compromising is part of being grown-up, too,” she said coldly, turning away from him. “Since you’re not willing to do that, not even so we can see each other in New York, I guess you’re not any more mature than I am, even though you’re older and have lived in Paris. So why should I take advice from you?” She began walking away.

Behind her, she heard, “Elizabeth, don’t storm off like this. Wait.”

Elizabeth was becoming very weary of walking away from arguments. She seemed always to be storming out of a room: her parents’ stateroom, the dining room, the restaurant, and now the gymnasium. But what else was there to do when people refused to listen to her? To take her seriously?

She kept walking. When she exited the gymnasium and the frigid air outside took her breath away, she remembered Max’s earlier remarks about ice in the area. Though she had wished then for an ice field, to slow down the
Titanic
and give her more time, now she wanted nothing more than to race straight to New York and put an end to this useless, disappointing voyage.

Max did not follow her.

Hurt and angry, Elizabeth locked her cabin door and threw herself across her bed, too furious to cry, too despondent to sit up and close the porthole, which someone, probably her mother, had opened again. The air streaming in through the opening was so bitterly cold, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find frost on the coverlet.

She buried herself in the bedding for warmth and as she fell asleep, she made up her mind to stay exactly where she was until they arrived in New York Harbor on Wednesday.

Sunday, April 14, 1912

At eleven-thirty on Sunday night, Elizabeth awoke suddenly. She couldn’t have said what had disturbed her sleep. The sound of her parents’ door slamming shut? A sudden, abrupt motion of the ship? Whatever it was, it yanked her out of a deep, disturbed sleep, and it took her several moments to clear her head.

She lay in bed listening to the distant vibration of the engines far below. The sound was like the steady beating of a heart. Without the rhythmic vibrations, she would have forgotten she was at sea.

It was icy cold in the cabin. Wrapping the coverlet around her shoulders, Elizabeth rose to a kneeling position to close the porthole over her bed.

The bed moved.

No, the bed couldn’t have moved. The bed was stationary, firmly affixed to the floor.

But there had been something. She’d felt it. Nothing alarming. No sound of a collision, no warning whistles shrilling. The lights were still on. The brass antique lamp on her nightstand was still in place, and the crystal pitcher of water beside it had jiggled only slightly.

Nothing in the cabin looked any different.

To Elizabeth, lying in bed on C deck, it felt as if the great ship had briefly stumbled in its smooth, easy glide across the water, the way someone trips over a small stone in the path while strolling in the woods. The person doesn’t fall, quickly regains his balance, and is on his way again, no harm done.

She expected the same thing to happen now. She expected the smooth glide to continue as before.

But before it could, Elizabeth heard what sounded like a giant, sharp fingernail being slowly scraped along the side of the ship. It reminded her of the way that annoying girl, Nina Chevalier, had tormented them at summer camp during the lectures on hiking safety held in the dining hall. Nina had long, pointed, scarlet nails and loved to drag them along the menu blackboard as they were leaving. The noise Elizabeth heard now was like that.

When that sound faded, there was a brief moment or two when Elizabeth listened and waited, with more curiosity than uneasiness.

And then the throbbing heartbeat far below died. Completely.

The porthole closed, Elizabeth sank back to a sitting position, the comforter still wrapped around her. Her first instinct was to rush into her parents’ room and ask them what had happened. But along with the sudden silence from the depths of the
Titanic
, there was also silence from her parents’ stateroom. She glanced at her locket-clock, lying on her bedside table. Not yet midnight. Her parents were still out, possibly having too much fun wherever they were to even notice that the engines had stopped.

Elizabeth remembered then what Max had said about the possibility of running into an ice field in the North Atlantic. “We’d have to stop for the night,” he had told her. “Too hard to negotiate icebergs in the dark.”

If the reason for the silent engines was an ice obstacle of some kind, Elizabeth wanted to see it. She was curious about what a field of ice large enough to halt a massive ship like the Titanic would look like.

In her anger at Max she had gotten into bed without undressing. All she needed to do now was don her gray woolen hooded cape and slip into shoes. She didn’t bother to smooth her hair or put on a hat. She cared little who saw her.

Thus attired, she left the cabin, her spirits rising. She was venturing out alone at night. The idea appealed to her.

A stewardess in uniform was descending the staircase as Elizabeth approached. All she said as she passed was a cryptic, “Iceberg, miss,” as if Elizabeth had asked. Then she hurried on her way.

Elizabeth turned to stare after her. Iceberg? What
about
an iceberg?

Perhaps the stewardess was simply saying an iceberg was the reason they’d stopped.

Wouldn’t it have to be an enormous berg to stop a ship this large? Were the icebergs of such a size in North Atlantic waters?

Elizabeth didn’t know. She had never studied such things. Maybe I would know, she thought as she climbed the deserted staircase, if I were better educated.

When she emerged from the glass-enclosed promenade on A deck, the icy cold took her breath away. Wishing she had borrowed one of her mother’s furs, she climbed to the boat deck and moved swiftly to the starboard rail, where a handful of people had already gathered. Some were wearing nightwear under their coats. One woman, Elizabeth noticed, had the silliest white satin mules on her feet, leaving her bare toes exposed to the cold. The ship’s lights turned her toes a garish green-yellow.

“What is it?” Elizabeth asked as she joined the small group at the rail. “What’s happened?”

“I heard we hit an iceberg,” a woman answered. A man’s voice corrected, “I heard
it
hit
us
.”

No one seemed anxious or frightened. Everyone’s eyes were focused on the third-class recreation deck below, where a makeshift, gleeful game of “catch” was being conducted, with ungloved hands tossing varying sizes of ice chunks back and forth.

There seemed to be fragments and shavings and chunks of ice everywhere.

“How big was it?” Elizabeth wanted to know. “The iceberg.” Judging from the considerable amount of ice sliced from it as it passed, it must have been enormous.

No one at the railing had seen it. One man, reading in an easy chair in his B-deck cabin, had heard the scraping noise. He had glanced up, he said, to see a large, dark object passing his open porthole. “Looked like a building was passing by,” he joked. But by the time he reached the opening, the object was gone, leaving a pile of ice shavings on his carpet.

“You had the porthole open on such a cold night?” the woman wearing mules asked him incredulously.

“I came on this voyage for the sea air, and the sea air is what I’m going to get.”

Elizabeth thought the woman was a fine one to talk about the cold, with her own feet practically bare. “Is there any damage to the ship?” she asked, thinking it a silly question even as she asked it. Surely even a very large iceberg could do no real harm to the unsinkable
Titanic.

“There wouldn’t be any damage to
this
ship,” one of the men answered her. “The captain probably just stopped for a minute to check things out. We’ll be on our way again in no time.”

Elizabeth had spotted on the deck below the two young men from third class whom she had seen boarding in two different tenders at Queenstown, along with that lovely red-haired girl. There was no sign of the girl. But it was late, nearly midnight, and their tour guide had said single women in third class were berthed in the ship’s stern, young men in the bow. The girl addressed as “Katie” by one of the boys would have had a long trek, the length of the ship, just to toss a few chunks of ice.

They are brothers, Elizabeth thought with certainty, continuing to watch the two laughing young men. They’re brothers, and that “Katie” is trying to make up her mind which one she likes best, which one would be the better choice.

She’s like me, she told herself, feeling a sudden strong kinship with the red-haired girl. Her head knows the older brother, the one with the quiet smile, is a better choice for her…as Alan might be for me. But her feelings are pulling her toward the younger one, the one with the heart-tugging grin, just as I’m being pulled toward Max.

One of the women at the rail mused aloud. “I wonder if I shouldn’t see the purser about my jewelry? If anything
were
to go wrong, my husband would never forgive me if I lost his aunt Winifred’s ruby brooch.”

Elizabeth fought the urge to laugh. Ruby brooch? If anything
did
go wrong, which of course it wouldn’t because the
Titanic
was impervious to disaster, it seemed to her a piece of jewelry would hardly be of great concern. Of much greater concern would be the freezing cold water and the utter isolation of the area.

Not that there really was anything to worry about. How could there be?

Nevertheless, Elizabeth decided to go in search of her parents. They might know how soon the engines would start up again.
If
her mother or father were speaking to her. She shouldn’t have said the things she had.

The ruby brooch’s owner left to seek out the purser’s office. The woman in mules declared she was “freezing to death” and left, too, presumably in search of more sensible footgear. Elizabeth, hoping her parents would be in their stateroom so she wouldn’t have to go looking for them, followed the two women down the stairs.

As she went, she wondered where Max and Lily were.

Katie had not had a good night’s sleep since she boarded the
Titanic.
Ever mindful that she had never learned to swim, she found herself sleeping fitfully, waking with a start intermittently, always convinced the ship was sinking.

But on this night, she had been exhausted from hours of dancing and merriment combined with the task of seeing to Bridey and Kevin, which Eileen did only in fits and starts. And so, Katie had fallen asleep within five minutes after she climbed into her berth.

When she awoke an hour later, it was with a rude jolt that nearly sent her tumbling to the floor. Only the fact that she was tangled, cocoonlike, in her bedclothes, kept her in the berth.

Eileen had not been so lucky. Although the two children slept on, Eileen, looking stunned, had been tossed out of bed. She was sitting up, her hair tousled around her face, her eyes frightened as she stared up at Katie. She cried, “We’ve hit something!”

Katie sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. The jolt had knocked her sideways, into the wall. Her right elbow hurt. “How can that be, then? I was meself on deck earlier. There wasn’t nothin’ out there to hit. Nothin’ but empty black sea as far as the eyes could see.”

“I don’t care!” Eileen cried, scrambling to her feet. “I wasn’t knocked out of me bed by nothin’! I’m goin’ to see what’s happenin’.” And, still in her flannel flowered nightgown, the red-and-white quilt wrapped around her like a large shawl, she was out of the cabin before Katie could stop her.

Bridey and Kevin slept on.

Sunday, April 14, 1912

When Elizabeth reached the foot of the stairs on B deck, she found Max pacing back and forth. People swirled around him, some looking confused, as if they’d gone to a party and discovered they’d arrived on the wrong night, while others were laughing and joking, as if they’d had better luck, showing up at the appointed place and time. Some were wearing pastel-colored nightclothes under winter coats. Hems of nightgowns and pajamas trailed out from beneath heavy black or brown or gray wool. But there were tuxedos in the crowd, too, and silk, beaded evening gowns.