The Second Mrs. Astor(77)

*

“There will be suction,” announced the quartermaster. “I need you to pull, lads. This is the time to put your backs into it.”

The boat spun for a moment while the two sailors found their rhythm; then it began to skim along the water, away from the boiling center of the wreckage. With the profile of Titanic gone, Madeleine thought she saw the bobbing lights of the other lifeboats around them, hundreds of them, thousands, until logic caught up with her perspective and she realized she was seeing the stars reflecting off the ocean, a boundless looking glass that cast their lights up and down and everywhere else in between.

She felt dizzy, her mouth dry. She shut her eyes and tried to measure out her breaths. When she opened them again, she was gazing downward, forward, at the blades of the oars that dipped and lifted and dipped again, stirring up phosphorus in the water, a golden green glow that spread outward in ripples, softly outlining the boat’s path before sinking back into oblivion.

“Do we have a lamp?” asked the quartermaster.

“No, sir,” replied one of the sailors. “I searched and found none.”

“Very well.”

The phosphorus dripped, shattered, dripped. Across the ocean, a terrible new noise began to rise.

She would think, later, that it was the sound of a mortally wounded beast, only if the beast had a thousand-some voices, all of them howling with pain and panic and pleading. The frothing of the water where the stern had gone down had not calmed with its loss. It was full of people, flailing and begging for help.

The blond woman next to Madeleine was quaking, the child on her lap clutched against her chest. Madeleine noticed that she was wrapped only in thin shawls, cotton or something else like it; beneath the starlight, the colors were faded, but she imagined that when touched with wind and sun, they resembled butterfly wings.

She pulled the fox shawl from her shoulders, draped it over the woman. She couldn’t fasten the hooks, not while the woman held the child, but she tugged the ends closed as best as she could.

“Tack s? mycket,” the mother whispered. The little girl squirmed, blinking. She lifted a hand to stroke the fur by her face, her eyes amazed.

The oarsmen had ceased their rowing, blades up, huffing. The lifeboat resumed its slow, aimless spin.

“We have to go back,” Madeleine said. It was difficult to get the words out without her teeth chattering. She looked up at the quartermaster, who now stood by the tiller with, oddly, an unlit pipe in one hand. “We have to. Only listen to them.”

“Yes,” agreed Eleanor. “Yes, she’s right.”

“The suction,” said one of the oarsmen instantly. “We can’t.”

“Surely it’s done by now,” said a woman seated on the other side of Eleanor.

“This boat is half empty,” added someone else, a matron wrapped in sable like Madeleine. Her voice shook, but Madeleine thought it might be from anger, not cold. “We abandoned ship with seats to spare. We left behind our husbands and sons because you told us we had to, and now they’re out there dying.”

The quartermaster stroked his moustache. “I don’t think it’s—”

“They’re dying,” Madeleine shouted, enraged. She stood up, holding her coat closed over her chest, her fingers bent into claws. “And we have the room! Listen to them! Listen! We have to go back!”

The quartermaster turned, looked back at the distant chaos, the frantic splashing.

“Sir!” protested the same oarsman. “Sir, think on it! It’s madness! They’ll swamp us for certain!”

A murmur of assent rose from a pair of women near the front, but the quartermaster spoke over them.

“Not if we’re vigilant. We’ll circle along the edges to start.” He jammed the pipe into his front pocket. “Right, then. We’re coming about.”

The oarsman dropped his oar. “I’m not doing it.”

“Are you refusing a direct order, seaman?”

“Not refusing, sir. I injured my shoulder just now.” The man crossed his arms, sullen.

“Well, ain’t you just a bloody princess?” sneered one of the men they’d rescued from the aft ropes, the one who hadn’t fallen into the water. “Shove off, then, mate. I’ll row.”

*

But in the end, it took all of them rowing, Madeleine and Eleanor and any of the other women who could, to stroke back to the flotsam of human souls and debris, to begin the dreadful task of trying to salvage the dying from the glossy black sea.





CHAPTER 26


We pulled eight men from the water that night. Two of them were drunk. Two of them died, one right at my feet. All of them seemed delirious, almost—I can’t think of a better word for it. Crazed, perhaps. Even after we’d gotten them aboard, covered them with rugs, they moaned and raved. I believe some of them didn’t even realize they were no longer in the water.

All of them were wearing lifebelts, which seemed a godsend at the time.

It was, I guess. For them.

But for all those other souls, those fifteen-hundred or so still thrashing for their lives . . . they, too, were wearing the cork-and-canvas vests that would not save them, nor let them drown. And so that is how they died. Frozen in place.

I looked and looked for him. I looked in the darkness of night; I looked in the dawn. I searched every face I found, first the living, subsequently the dead. Like the ocean and stars, sometimes I still see them floating, one after another, behind my closed lids.