“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 swam 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.”