Rich took Elaine’s hand as if to remind himself of their ultimate reunion. “I pushed my way through a mob of people ascending one of the interior stairways and rushed down a corridor in which I had remembered seeing a wooden locker marked ‘life jackets.’ I retrieved one from inside and made my way back to the stairs. Now water had begun to cascade down the stairwell and directly into the corridor. I turned to find another means of egress and slogged my way toward a set of stairs that proved more promising. By this time, however, I had forfeited easy passage to the deck where I had left Elaine and the little girl. For the next several minutes I engaged in an ultimately fruitless attempt to make my way back to them. I was thwarted at every turn by debris. It was as if the ship were in the process of dismantling itself right before my eyes. Every passage I found was blocked by thick knots of desperate, panic-stricken passengers and impotent crew members. Men and women were pushing, shoving, clawing their way through the pack, while still others stood or sat immobilized by shock. I passed one of the ship’s saloons. An old woman sat alone in a wicker chair, awaiting the inevitable. Water lapped at her ankles. She was staring vacantly at the wall—staring at the ornately paneled wall of that once stately room.”
Will continued his own family’s story: “I felt that our best chance was on the starboard side, so I took the hands of my two little girls and Olive took the hand of our little boy, and we headed in that direction. Our path was strewn with crushed and bleeding bodies. Few of the still ambulatory were able to stand now without holding onto the railing. As the angle of the deck became more pitched, I felt my youngest daughter’s hand slip from my own, but I was able to catch her in time to pull her up and into my arms. She wrapped her arms and legs around my chest like a tree monkey while we moved in fits and starts to the other side of the ship. On the starboard side we encountered even more pandemonium, even greater panic. It was at this moment that we realized that the ship was sinking too fast for everyone to get away. I lost my footing, as did Olive, who also lost her hold on the railing. Frankie slipped away and tumbled down the deck. Lucy slipped away and did likewise. I held on to the little one, Dorothy, as tightly as I could. The water rose to meet the three of us. I witnessed the horrible sight of my wife being pulled under by the strong suction.”
“I remember blackness,” said Olive. “Things were slamming into me, first from one side and then from the other. I remember a hand in the water—a ghostly hand already stilled. I remember losing any sense of what was up and what was down. And then I recall popping to the surface in an area so choked with bobbing, flailing bodies that I imagined I had arrived in Hell—a numbingly frigid cesspool in Hell.”
“I swam with Dorothy clutched to my side,” said Will. “I paddled like a sloppy-pawed dog in the water, the life jacket making every stroke a trial. I called for Olive but my voice was drowned out by the cries of hundreds of others.”
“I feared that the worst had happened to Rich,” said Elaine softly, “so I vowed to try to save myself and the child. With luck I chanced upon a crew member who had been distributing life jackets. He had one left. I put it on little Harriet. I then sought out a place for us to jump. I waited until the water had risen high enough that the drop wouldn’t prove injurious.”
Rich leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. He massaged the back of his head. Staring down at the floor he said, as if in fresh disbelief, “I couldn’t get back. Every path was blocked.”
He looked up. “From the listing of the ship I now concluded that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to Elaine and the little girl. I knew that the odds were against their even still being where I had left them. Within only a few minutes the Lusitania would go under. I prayed that Elaine had somehow gotten the girl a life jacket and found a safe way off the vessel. Seeing the liner’s screw propellers and rudders fully exposed above the water line, I knew that the time for my departure had come. All around me people were jumping or sliding down wires and ropes, burning and flaying skin in their desperate descents. I wanted no part of this. Babies were being thrown overboard, to be caught by men standing in lifeboats, or never to be seen again.
“I turned and to my surprise saw Vanderbilt and his valet Ronald surrounded by a circle of women and small children, frantically securing life jackets around first one and then the other. ‘Give me a hand, will you, Doc,’ he said, and I stepped over to assist in getting the jackets put on the group even as the sea rose to meet our feet. One by one the young women—who were they, I wondered: mothers? Governesses? Total strangers?—took a child or two by hand and floated off and away from the ship.
“‘Lousy luck, huh, Rich?’ Vanderbilt asked. I nodded. ‘God save you and me and King’s Navee.’
“‘God be with you too, Alfred,’ I said. Then Alfred Vanderbilt plunged into the water. His body was never found.
“Through all the chaos and confusion I could faintly discern the sound of young women singing in delicate, Irish-brogued voices, ‘There is a Green Hill Not Far Away.’ I could make out the green hills, too, tantalizingly near, yet far too removed for anyone to think of swimming for them. I slid into the water and began to kick away from the ship. The Lusitania was entering the final stage of her submersion now, the strong suction pulling me back, forcing me to swim as hard as I could away from her. Finally free of her, I watched men dragged under by the funnel stays, others entangled by falling wireless aerials, still others drowning in tangles of ropes. A man dangling from a rope over the ship’s stern was sliced in two by a still-revolving propeller.”
Rich’s three companions nodded. They had seen such things themselves.
Rich continued, locked inside his memories: “A moment later there was a violent explosion from below. A thick cloud of steam burst up from the surface. A tidal wave surged outward from the place where the ship had gone down. In its center, giant bubbles of foaming, churning water brought deck chairs and oars and unidentifiable wooden and metallic flotsam to the surface, along with the bodies of those already dead and those nearly so. The centrifugal wave engulfed everyone in its path.”
Rich grew silent. Elaine picked up the story. “Then the sea calmed itself. All movement upon the now gently rippling water—all movement now belonged to the survivors.”
The sea, in Elaine’s painful memory, had been transformed into a mass of waving, flapping arms. She and young Harriet had jumped into a thickly clotted mattress of animal, vegetable, and mineral that bobbed upon the undulating water’s surface. Too many had met its icy waters without life jackets and now clung with slippery fingers to pieces of floating wreckage. Screams of terror had given way to a long, lingering choral-like keen—one great collective moan from the bereft and the bereaved, from those for whom life held fast and others for whom life would drain away through exposure to the cruel, cold water. Unlike those passengers of the Titanic, floating in the icy North Atlantic southeast of Newfoundland, for whom death from hypothermia came quickly and in some ways mercifully, the survivors of the Lusitania had longer to await resolution to their predicament. The lucky ones were pulled into lifeboats during the long hours between the sinking and the arrival of the first rescue ships. (Many of the larger vessels enlisted for rescue were reluctant to venture out into U-boat-treacherous waters until they could be assured of their own safety.) The unlucky ones, who either found themselves outside the vicinity of the lifeboats or were refused a spot in boats that were already dangerously overloaded, were forced to float and shiver, to fight to stay conscious, to keep their air passages clear of the oily water, to keep shock and derangement at bay. Some succeeded. Many did not.
Olive found the words to continue her own account. “I could see Will and Dorothy perhaps two hundred yards away. I wasn’t sure if they could see me. I swam toward them, nonetheless, passing men and women clinging to buoyant corpses, people without life jackets supporting themselves by hanging onto those for whom life jackets did not, in the end, assure life. Through a thick film of oil and ash, I swa
m to the side of my husband and my youngest daughter. I wept in gratitude for having found them, and they wept as well. If we were to die, at least we would now die together.”
Elaine took her turn: “Harriet and I floated for what seemed like over an hour. I despaired of ever finding Rich, just as I despaired of being spotted by one of the few lifeboats still gathering up survivors from the water. Finally, I caught sight of a half-filled boat that seemed more than willing to take the girl and me aboard. As it rowed toward us, I assured little Harriet that she’d get dry and warm now. Things would be better for her once we were taken into the boat. I received no response. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed tight, her head tilted back, her beautiful long brown hair trailing in the dirty water. Her skin had turned a dark, bruised color, and there was froth upon her lips. The little girl I had sought to save was dead.
“I let her go, gently releasing her to the arms of the sea. A moment later someone pulled me into the lifeboat and wrapped a blanket around me.”
With the passage of time, the floating island began to break apart, and people began to drift off with the current. Rich found a lifeboat bobbing upside down. He and several others held on to it as best they could, but as muscular paralysis from the cold began to set in, they would one by one lose their grip and drift away. In time he found himself alone.
“I lost track of time,” said Rich. “I became delusional. I saw Elaine behind every floating crate, or perched upon every hencoop or jagged flat of planking. I knew that my time was short, yet fear had begun to subside to be replaced by a kind of peace—the peace of acceptance. Some of us would survive this man-made catastrophe. Others would not. It was so ordained: I was to be among the unlucky ones.
“Then, as these stories sometimes turn at the most hopeless moment, I saw a miraculous thing—a lifeboat. An empty upright lifeboat—not one of the twenty-two wooden vessels, only a few of which were successfully launched—but one of the collapsibles, each of which had been designed to float free of the ship should it sink, but very few of which actually did so. I learned later that the bloodiest of all bloody monkeys, Captain Turner, had decided not to loosen them when the ship reached the war zone because he was concerned that they would slide across the deck. This one, to my good fortune, not only slid across the deck but slid itself right into the water to be discovered by me a full two hours later.
“I climbed inside and spent the next several minutes trying to raise the boat’s canvas sides and get them lashed into place. It had taken on much water and I spent a good deal of time bailing. I had recovered my wits in this newly minted desire to survive, and in very short order had succeeded in picking up several other passengers nearing their own ends and effusively appreciative of receiving this last-minute reprieve from death by exposure to the icy waters. They were additionally pleased to learn that the boat’s newly commissioned captain was also a doctor of medicine, and I set myself to rendering medical assistance as best I could.”
“‘Do you have room for three more?’ I believe that was the first thing I said to Dr. Tattersall here.” Will turned to his wife. “Isn’t that right, dear?”
Olive nodded.
“Yes, it comes back to me now,” said Rich. “The very polite man with his wife and young daughter. I was happy to see that a family had survived intact. I wasn’t aware—” Rich stopped himself.
“No, you weren’t aware,” said Olive stoically. “How could you have known about our loss?” A sad, sepulchral silence descended upon the room.
Olive took a moment to compose herself. “I’ve totally neglected to ask: have you any children, Elaine? I recall that you and Rich took that trip as newlyweds.”
Elaine nodded. “Yes, we’d just gotten married a month before sailing. Rich and I—we were on our way to work in a military hospital in Great Britain. I’m a nurse, you see. Yes, we have a little girl. She’s two.”
“What’s her name?” asked Olive, taking Elaine’s hand.
“Harriet. We decided to name her Harriet.”
The Tattersalls stood and the Donnells stood with them. The evening had come to an end.
“Please ring us up the next time you’re in town,” said the doctor, placing a hand warmly on Will’s shoulder.
“Of course,” said Will. “And we’ll speak of other things. I’m a saltwater taffy man, by the way. Olive and I run a couple of concessions down in Atlantic City.”
Later that night, after the Tattersalls had returned to their apartment in Gramercy Park, Elaine entered her daughter’s dark room and kissed her little girl as she slept. She wept for the first Harriet and for the two children whom the Donnells were unable to bring home. Elaine knew that, even though she’d finally brought herself to speak of it, she’d never be whole again. Not really. Yet that shared moment, standing sadly transfixed before a poster for the Cunard steamship line outside a Manhattan travel agency’s window—that moment that had brought Elaine and Olive together in silent, grieving kinship—had led to the chance to at least give a name to what they had communally endured: survival.
For those who can find within themselves the will to go on, there is no better consolation to tragedy.
1916
INCARCERATED IN OKLAHOMA
The younger of the two men, Ames, slept in the less-convenient upper bunk, and the older, Tyson, slept in the lower. This was as it should be; there were still twelve years left to Tyson’s sentence, while Ames, serving time for manslaughter, would be up for parole in four.
Tyson had big shoulders and beefy arms. He had a prognathous jaw and an overhanging forehead that gave him a slightly simian look. He was a smart man, though you couldn’t tell it just from looking at him. Ames, on the other hand, was tall and wiry, and the horn-rimmed eyeglasses and the arresting symmetry of his face gave him an owlish appearance.
It was a barroom brawl that put Ames into McAlester. He had delivered a fatal brain injury to a fellow roughneck by shoving him into a mirror. Ames’s father, a Bible salesman without a sense of humor, noted humorlessly the appropriateness of his son’s sentence of seven years, the crime having involved a broken mirror and all.
Tyson had never told his cellmate the details of the felony that had landed him in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He’d only said that he’d taken the life of a man without malice aforethought, but clearly not by accident—the textbook definition of second-degree murder.
Both men were prepared to do their time, take their licks, and then, once released from McAlester, try to get on with their lives.
In the meantime, though, there were the stories.
Early in his sentence, Tyson, a storyteller of the first order, began to regale his cellblock neighbors with tales of his family and all the colorful, comical characters who populated the small western Oklahoma farming and ranching community where he’d grown up. Tyson saved his more personal tales, though, for Ames alone.
These tales got told just before sleep in that drowsy hour after lights-out. They were delivered in soft whispers from Tyson’s bed to the vicinity of the chair that Ames pulled up alongside it, so that not a word should get missed.
One muggy night in the summer of 1916, Tyson told the story of his youngest brother among a brood of eleven. Tyson had spoken often of his many siblings and how his tenant farmer father and mother struggled to keep all their young ’uns fed. He had spoken often of the lengths to which his parents and their older sons and daughters had gone to earn a few extra pennies to keep starvation away.
And how relentless and unmerciful was that struggle.
And even to this day, after the passage of over twenty years since Tyson was taken as a teenager and stood before a judge and sentenced to spend a good half of the rest of his life behind bars, he could still feel the gnaw of hunger in his gut and knew that this was what had motivated his father to do the unthinkable: seek to end the life of Tyson’s two-year-old brother.
This is the story that at long last got told in the thick, quiet air of the m
idnight prison cell, when, having offered up every other narrative from his childhood, Tyson finally decided to relate the one that until that night lived only within his darkest memories. Its telling had come about this way:
Ames had made a comment about the newest resident on their cellblock. The man—half Choctaw, it was said—appeared slow, of limited mental capability. Ames wondered if he would be treated cruelly by the other inmates—especially the hardened ones—or would he, instead, be shown compassion for his intellectual frailty?
Talk of Grinning Pete brought Tyson’s two-year-old brother to mind, and what became of him.
The boy’s name was Wink. There had been a fever going around, and the Tyson family had weathered it and kept themselves intact by either luck or God’s good grace, even as other families in the county had lost one, two, or even three beloved sons and daughters to the epidemic.
Seventeen-year-old Broderain Tyson, who at an early age had taken from his surname the nickname Tie, and his older brother and two older sisters were assembled by their parents upon the rickety wooden porch that fronted the family’s sharecropper shack to discuss a family matter to which the sleeping younger children would not be privy. Ma sat upon her rocker but did not rock. Pa sat uneasily upon his whittling chair with empty hands. The four oldest children, having found places for themselves upon the steps and floorboards, wore expressions that anticipated nothing good from this exclusive family conference.
“Now, children,” began the father in a serious, preacher-like tone, “times is hard for the poor man and they’s gettin’ harder. Crops are good this year as we all know, but Mr. Jimson, he don’t give us any more for ’em than the usual. He’s a Christian man, I figger, but it seems he ain’t looked in the Good Book in a long while. Else’n he’d see some verse or two about how a land-man’s miserly ways can put his croppers in a sorely bad place, and how that ain’t the sort of thing that Jesus would abide.”