Titanic: The Long Night (29 page)

Would she ever be able to sleep again without hearing those terrible screams?

She had never even asked Max if he knew how to swim.

Instead of sleeping, she spent the next hour wandering the decks and the public rooms, checking each pallet, mattress, and cot that held a survivor. She knew in her heart it was hopeless. But she also knew she would never be able to rest until she was absolutely certain that her father and Max hadn’t survived.

She found Lily, white of face and sound asleep on a cot, a gray wool blanket covering her to her chin. But Elizabeth did not find Arthur.

Nor did she find her father or Max.

Fighting tears, Elizabeth returned to the public room. Unable to sleep, she sat huddled in a chair beside her mother’s, trying to warm herself beneath a gray wool blanket. Every time she closed her eyes, she pictured Max or her father struggling in the frigid, dark water, and her throat closed and she couldn’t breathe, and her eyes filled with fresh tears. She finally gave up trying to sleep and sat staring straight ahead, watching the
Carpathia’s
passengers attempting to comfort the survivors lying on cots or mattresses or reclining in deck chairs.

It struck her as odd that there was so little crying. What there was, was quiet. It was as if none of the grief-stricken wanted to disturb anyone. Or perhaps they were still in shock.

After a while, a woman approached to tell Elizabeth and her mother that two religious services were going to be held. “One,” she said quietly, “will be a short prayer of thanksgiving for the seven hundred people rescued, while the other,” her tone deepening, “will of course be a funeral service for the fifteen hundred who perished. You are both welcome to attend.” Then she went on her way, spreading the word to other survivors.

Elizabeth swayed in her chair, clutching its wooden arm for support. Fifteen hundred? Fifteen
hundred
people had died in this one night? How was that possible? So many lives lost, so many families torn apart, so many hearts broken…all in one long, terrible, frigid night.

If that many had died, it was impossible to think that Max might have survived.

Elizabeth covered her face with her hands. Hadn’t she known all along? Hadn’t she given up, in truth, when the
Titanic
sank and she saw all those people being torn from the rail and tossed into the icy sea like rag dolls? Hadn’t she known then that Max couldn’t possibly have survived? Fifteen hundred people had been lost. She’d been a fool to think that he might have made it just because she needed him to. Hadn’t the other women thought the same thing of their husbands and sons? And now they knew better. Now they had accepted the truth. She would have to do the same.

But it hurt so terribly.

Elizabeth leaned her head back and closed her eyes again, oblivious to the activity taking place around her. Women were being comforted by the
Carpathia’s
passengers, who seemed so willing to help. Stewards and stewardesses were moving about, warm blankets in their arms, cups of hot liquid in their hands, seeing to the ill, the exhausted, the frozen. Children unaware of the depth of the tragedy played quietly, darting curious glances now and again toward their grieving mothers, who were comforting each other. Survivors who refused to give up hope walked among other survivors, peering down into faces, searching for a husband or son lost to the sea.

But Elizabeth was lost in her own misery. What was going to happen to them? Without her father, would they still be a family? Would her mother ever recover from this terrible shock?

Even as Elizabeth thought this, Nola roused herself. She sat up, glanced around as if suddenly becoming aware of her surroundings, and noticed Elizabeth sitting off to her left. With great effort, Elizabeth’s mother tossed aside the blanket wrapped around her and got to her feet. She was at Elizabeth’s side in seconds, kneeling beside the chair, putting her arms around her daughter. She didn’t say that much. She said only, “I am truly sorry about Max, Elizabeth. I am. But it will be all right, it will, I promise you.” But that was almost enough. Elizabeth put her head on her mother’s shoulder, and without tears, they clung to each other for several moments.

Then Nola raised her head and said in a voice only slightly shaken, “Now, I believe we might both feel better if we attend a service. But first”—in a normal voice now—“we must both do something with our hair. I’m sure we look a fright!”

They did the best they could, without benefit of comb or brush. Even Nola seemed to realize finally that how they looked mattered little in view of the circumstances. Still, she walked to the services with her head high and her shoulders back, as if her appearance were as impeccable as ever.

The service did help. Elizabeth said a silent good-bye to her father, though she knew he would always be with her in some way. She said another to Max, feeling a fierce pain of regret that they had had so little time, and that she had spent so much of that time arguing with him.

If her mother had broken down during the service, Elizabeth would have, too. But Nola kept her head high, held her daughter’s hand tightly in her own, and any tears she shed were quiet ones. Elizabeth saw men with tears streaming down their faces, too, and wished fiercely that her father were among them.

When the service was over, Elizabeth’s mother said in an exhausted voice, “I must go send a Marconigram to your grandparents, to prepare them. I doubt that word of the sinking has reached New York yet, but if it has, they mustn’t receive word of their son’s death from the newspapers. You go and rest. I’ll be right back. Then I believe I shall find a cot to lie down on. I seem to be feeling quite tired.”

Elizabeth was looking for an available cot or mattress for her mother in one of the public rooms when she spotted the red-haired girl who had boarded at Queenstown. She was in the company of one of the two young men who had arrived in separate tenders that day. The younger brother, Elizabeth decided. Where was the older one? Remembering how the Irish girl had insisted the two young children be put into a lifeboat and how it was Max who had done that for her brought tears to Elizabeth’s eyes.

The two wore anxious expressions on their faces, and were moving from one survivor wrapped in blankets to another, bending down. Clearly, they were looking for someone.

I hope you find whoever it is, Elizabeth telegraphed silently to the pair as she sank gratefully into a vacant deck chair parked in front of a huge potted plant in the large, crowded public room. Perhaps they were looking for the boy’s older brother. So many families had been shattered when the
Titanic
floundered. Including the Farr family.

She laid her head back and closed her eyes again, thinking that all she could ask for now was that her mother would be all right. She didn’t even care if they fought constantly, without her father there to act as a buffer. What did it matter? They were alive. If there was one thing she had learned during the terrible night just passed, it was that life was too precarious to take for granted. She never would again. And it was too precarious for her to waste a moment doing what others expected of her, if what they expected was intolerable to her. Like marriage to a man she didn’t love.

Had this night changed her mother as well? Possibly not. Once Nola had recovered from the shock, she might very well be as she had always been. In which case, there would be battles. It didn’t matter. They would work something out, she and her mother. They were alive. That was all that counted.

At any rate, she couldn’t think about the future now. It was all she could do to deal with the terrible present.

Her mother returned, her face strained, her eyes sad. She settled gratefully on the cot that Elizabeth had found for her and when Elizabeth had covered her with a blanket, she closed her eyes. Before she fell into a deep sleep, she said in a voice husky with grief and fatigue, “You’ll be happy to know I thanked that Mrs. Brown. Heaven knows what would have become of us without her. Perhaps I judged her too harshly. And Madeleine Astor survived. That is good news, for her and for the baby she’s carrying. They have taken her to the hospital.” Nola fell silent then, and in only moments she seemed to be in a deep sleep.

She didn’t notice, then, that Elizabeth had sat bolt upright at the word “hospital.” Hospital? It hadn’t occurred to her that some of the survivors might be there. Of course they would. Frostbite alone would have sent some there, and there could be all kinds of injuries suffered by someone thrown from the deck of the
Titanic
into the open sea.

Don’t do this, Elizabeth
, a cautious voice inside her warned.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re being foolish. You’re just setting yourself up for more heartbreak.

She didn’t even know if Max could swim.

She stopped a passing stewardess. “Excuse me, miss, but could you tell me where the hospital on board is located?”

“Of course, miss.” The directions were precise.

All the way there, Elizabeth argued with herself. Her head told her she was wasting time when she could have been sleeping off her exhaustion, while her heart told her that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, anyway, until she knew the awful truth for certain. Her head cautioned,
Elizabeth, don’t you think that every other woman who survived the
Titanic
is feeling as you are? You don’t see them running all over the ship chasing false hope, do you?
Her heart replied, You may be right. But I’m doing what I want from now on, and this is what I want.

She was almost there when she saw him. He appeared first as no more than a figure, unrecognizable at such a distance. He was walking unsteadily toward her in an empty corridor, the last she had to pass through to arrive at the hospital.

Even as the distance between them closed, she still didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t wearing his long black overcoat, but a heavy gray sweater and a pair of black steward’s pants. His hair was wet and slicked back, away from his finely chiseled face. And there was none of the usual jauntiness to his steps as he slowly, painfully, made his way up the corridor, his right palm trailing along the white-painted wall as if to help him maintain his balance.

Elizabeth, walking almost as shakily as he, paused in midstep. Seeing her approaching, he stopped, too. And what she recognized then, in spite of the way he looked, what made her catch her breath and raise a hand to her lips, was the way he regarded her steadily, his eyes on her face, just as he had that very first day when he boarded the
Titanic
at Cherbourg.

“
Max
?” she whispered.

He held out a hand to her.

She ran, her exhaustion gone, her feet flying along the carpeted hallway.

When she was within a foot of where he stood, she stopped short again. He stopped, too. He looked ghastly. His handsome face was gray and drawn, his eyes scarlet-rimmed, his body trembling with cold. Elizabeth, her own eyes brimming with tears, was afraid that if she threw herself at him as every fiber of her being willed her to, she might somehow injure him.

His voice when he spoke was so hoarse, she would never have recognized it as his. A fleeting image of the horrors he must have endured to arrive on this ship flew through her mind, and her tears spilled over, sliding quietly down her cheeks.

Tears appeared in his eyes, as well. “I wonder,” he said huskily, letting go of the wall, “if you would be kind enough to direct me to steerage?”

Elizabeth laughed and ran into his waiting arms.

Monday, April 15, 1912

“I was just on my way to look for you,” Max said when he finally lifted his head. “I meant to as soon as I got on board. But I must have passed out when I hit the deck, because the next thing I knew, I was lying on a table in a big white room and a fellow in a white coat was telling me to open my mouth so he could look down my throat.”

She wasn’t surprised that he’d been taken immediately to the hospital, given the way he looked. And he must have looked much worse when they first brought him aboard.

She didn’t want to let go of him. It would hurt too much to let go, after finding him again. “I thought—” she began, but he interrupted her.

“I know what you thought. I thought it, too, when I was being pulled down into that water.” They separated then, and Max put an arm around her shoulders and a palm on the opposite wall again as they began walking. They went very slowly. “I knew I was a goner. Couldn’t quite face that, so I tried to come up with some other option. But when I kicked my way back to the surface, all of the lifeboats were out of range. I had a life vest on…that helped…but my coat was drenched and felt like it weighed a ton. I figured it wasn’t going to keep me warm anymore and it was dragging me down, so I thought about ditching it. But that meant getting the vest off first.” He shook his head. He was leaning heavily on Elizabeth, and his breathing as they walked seemed labored. “The thought of taking off the vest scared me to death, because even though the sea was pretty calm, I was afraid I’d lose hold of the straps and the thing would float away. Without it, I had no chance at all.” He smiled ruefully. “Didn’t have that much of a chance
with
it.”

“But you’re
here
,” Elizabeth said. She could scarcely believe it herself. But the weight of his arm on her shoulders was proof.

“Almost wasn’t. I was dragged down twice. Fought my way back up, but it was so cold, I knew I couldn’t keep doing that. I figured if I went down a third time, I’d never see blue sky again.”

Elizabeth could see that it pained Max to talk, but she needed to know how he had survived. “But you’re here,” she said for the second time.

He nodded. “I wouldn’t be, if it hadn’t been for my lifesaver. Came along just in time.”

“Lifesaver? What lifesaver?”

Max grinned down at her. “A man so fortified by liquor that he was swimming like a fish, and said he was as warm as toast. Told me to grab onto his life vest and he’d get us to a boat. And that’s what he did. I think it was boat number three. Or it could have been five. Hardly anybody in it, so after arguing a bit about the dangers of being swamped by our weight, they pulled us in. I must have looked like a drowned rat. But the other guy, Ralph something, looked like he’d just taken a healthy dip in a pool. The guy was laughing when he landed in the bottom of the boat, like it was all a big joke. Said he knew he was going to have one heck of a hangover later, but it was worth it.”