“Just a moment, please!” called M.K. There was trepidation in her voice. I had never seen her afraid before. “I must dress.”
M.K. pointed to the window with urgency. But how was I to dress and escape in so short a span of time? How was I to negotiate the fire escape from the third floor of this large house? It was an impossibility. M.K. saw that the broth was made. We would have no choice but to eat what we had set upon our table.
After she had drawn on her frayed dressing gown, she said, “Will you? Will you come with me?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I simply could not make such an important decision in the blink of an eye. In the blink of her eyes. Eyes that spoke so sweetly yet so urgently to me.
The door flung upon. Mrs. Barnes, the lady of the house, had company: my mother and my Aunt Carolyn. Mother appeared distraught. Aunt Carolyn seemed cool and self-possessed. This was, no doubt, the moment that confirmed whatever it was she had speculated about me — whatever she had finally said about me to my mother.
“Gather yourself up, Jennie,” said Mother in a voice that sounded broken and dispirited.
“You are never to see this girl again,” crowed my aunt, who appeared to be taking special delight in saying that which my mother in her present distressed state could not bring herself to say.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Mrs. Barnes. “I will speak to Mr. Gillen this very night. Miss Healy will wake tomorrow morning to find that she is no longer in the employ of the New Piasa Chautauqua.”
“Come, Jennie,” said my aunt, her lips unpursing to utter her edict, then pursing themselves again in comical rectitude.
“Stay,” countered M.K.
“Upon my word!” ejaculated my horrified aunt.
“Come,” said my mother calmly, putting her hand out to me.
“Stay,” M.K. repeated through plump, Irish lips that only an hour before had blissfully explored every inch of my hungry, yielding body.
Time stood still.
The room grew silent.
I could not speak.
And then.
And then my heart cried out its need. It trumpeted its desire. I listened in ecstacy.
I attended.
And I obeyed.
“I am a grown woman now,” I said to my mother, taking care not to dignify my odious aunt with even an acknowledgement of her presence. “And I choose to be with M.K.”
Mother swooned, not nearly so melodramatically as did Miss Maude Willis when reading the part of the young mother who received news of her husband’s death upon the battlefield, but frightfully and painfully so. Yet in the end this display of maternal injury was insufficient to wring from me a change of heart.
I belonged to M.K. now.
And so I stayed.
Thursday, July 23
This morning Miss Dawson led the girls’ clubs in “rhythmic work.” The boys enjoyed “freak races.” My Aunt Carolyn listened to Mrs. Ford of the School of Household Science speak on the “value of fruit in the diet.” I understand there was a canning demonstration, as well. Mother didn’t attend. She spent that time saying goodbye to me. Papa, who had gotten word in the night, was there to bid me adieu as well. They didn’t need to tell me how strongly they opposed my decision to follow my heart. I commend them for registering their objection only through tears and plaintive expressions.
I don’t know if I’ll ever come back here. I suspect that the time of my “Chautauqua summers” has come to an end. There is so much I’ve learned in this place. Though I think, in the end, the heart is the best teacher of all. M.K. agrees. (That last sentence was penned by her own hand.)
1915 HAVING A SINKING FEELING IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC
And so they all sat down. And so the conversation began.
Elaine opened the gates to her memories of the trip and the dastardly act that abruptly ended it. Rich choked back tears and cursed the headache that underscored the pain of his own recollections, but held back not a single detail of his own part of the story. Will and Olive Donnell added their own harrowing account of the eighteen minutes that passed from the moment the torpedo hit to the last gasp of the great liner before she sank beneath the humanity-clogged waters off Old Head of Kinsale.
There was fresh corn soup and deviled clams. But the soup grew cold and the clams went untouched.
It was a chance meeting that brought the two couples together four years after the trip that nearly claimed their lives. One hundred and twenty-eight other American men, women, and children had not been so lucky. In all, the deliberate wartime sinking of RMS Lusitania took the lives of 1,198 of her passengers and crew.
Over the intervening years, none of the four had found the right time or place to share with family or friends the particulars of that tragic day, and so they — Elaine and Rich, and Olive and Will — had kept it largely to themselves.
The memories were the most oppressive for Elaine. The sinking was a ghost, haunting her and keeping her anxious, and frequently tearful. It sabotaged social gatherings. It stole all the joy from her heart.
At first Rich didn’t think that his wife would remain in the Donnells’ hotel room once the two couples had gathered for drinks. He worried that once conversation steered itself to the ill-fated voyage, Elaine would excuse herself to go and drink alone in the saloon downstairs and wait. She would wait until her husband had completed his visit. She would hide there in the saloon so that the couple couldn’t see the residual pain in her eyes or the look of practiced impassivity that so often characterized her public face.
But Elaine surprised her husband. She stayed. In fact, she remained for the entire evening, which was long and cathartic and, in the end, just the emollient her long broken spirit had required. Some of the things remembered and shared within that hotel room were these:
As the Lusitania backed herself into the Hudson River just after 12:20 p.m. on the afternoon of her departure, the ship’s band played “Tipperary” at one end, while a Welsh male chorus entertained passengers on the opposite end with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The vessel’s final voyage began in brilliant sunshine.
One always approached Captain Will Turner with caution. As a rule, the crusty captain disliked most passengers, whom he called “bloody monkeys.” (The recounting of this fact constituted one of the evening’s few moments of levity.)
Elaine made the observation that there was an unusually large number of children on board for this particular crossing.
Elaine and Rich accepted an invitation to dine onboard with Alfred Vanderbilt. The multimillionaire was on his way to attend a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association for which he served as director. He was also planning to offer a fleet of vehicles for use by the British Red Cross. Vanderbilt had, coincidentally, booked passage on the Titanic in 1912 but changed his mind before it sailed. The dinner was a delight.
Just as they hadn’t bothered to heed the notice published in New York newspapers by the German Embassy warning American passengers against traveling on British vessels while a state of war existed between Great Britain and Germany, few bothered, as well, to read posted instructions on how to put on their life jackets. When the time came, many passengers tied them on backward or upside down, with fatal consequences.
As the Lusitania entered waters off the coast of Ireland and the dreaded danger zone, passengers were puzzled by the fact that there was no discernible increase in speed. They were told that the enveloping fog made such an increase a hazardous prospect. Additionally, the ship was conserving its coal in this way and keeping reserve steam up so that if a submarine were spotted she would have ample power at the ready to remove herself from harm’s way.