Sixty years earlier, my father was joining the fleet that would send him and the rest of the 82nd Engineer Battalion ashore at Normandy, on June 6, 1944. He was written down for a Purple Heart and apparently at least one other medal that he made me promise never to accept for him or allow the children to accept. I knew he had lost much of his hearing. I knew that when a truck came through during the final “mopping up” operation, he had run up to the vehicle seeking help for friends whose legs were blown off and who probably would not live through the night. There were no medals for them. Everyone who ran up to the truck was written down for a medal. It was simply the nature of bureaucracy.
By August 6, he was caught up in the battle of Vire in France, and the tattered remnants of his team were awarded the French Croix de Guerre—the only medal he allowed me to accept on his behalf, saying only, “We earned that one.”
Somewhere between Vire, the Battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of Buchenwald, he was captured by the Germans and, according to my mother, had survived being buried alive, evidently in a mass grave from which he dug his way to the surface. Dad had been claustrophobic ever since. He once said there was no way he could imagine crawling inside one of the Mirs and dropping two and a half miles down through black water to the Titanic. “You’re a braver man than I am,” he said, to which I replied, “Are you nuts? You were on the beach at Normandy! No one was shooting at me in the Mirs.”
On June 1, 2004, we had gone out to lunch together, looked under the hoods of three cars, and spent much of the afternoon talking about engines. In the evening, I drove to my office, put my clothes from the Thera expedition in the wash, then headed back to Dad’s place with some fresh clothes, a stack of notebooks, and my laptop. Forty-five minutes to an hour before I returned, he had died from sudden heart failure. Although I knew that if I had arrived an hour earlier and been able to resuscitate him, I’d only have been saving him to begin suffering the most claustrophobic effects of advancing lung cancer in the weeks to come, that night was nevertheless the beginning of the inevitable, corrosive if only.
Although my father had actually said at lunch that he could not believe what the next couple of months would bring and had wished that an almost instantly fatal stroke would intervene, a darkness began to grow in my heart during each day of the next month in which I fixated on this thought: If only I had arrived in time to save him.
All of that changed on July 1. I was driving toward a family get-together at the home of Bill Schutt, whose son and my children had become the best of friends and who happened to be the zoologist who first identified the lamb bones in the Titanic’s soup-tureen concretion. The ride on the Long Island Expressway to his home was a straight line with only one turn, in Riverhead, and that day there was neither traffic nor any other reason for me to make a sudden wrong turn off our usual, well-traveled path—except for Paddy Brown, again.
I felt his peculiar presence (or imagined it again) just before and during my wrong turn off the expressway. As soon as I was off the highway, a man came running into the middle of the road, waving his arms and screaming for help. No more than a minute earlier, a car had struck an eight-year-old boy on a bicycle.
If only I had arrived in time to save him.
Scratch any cat; might you chase out a flea? Look into any coincidence too deeply; might you find a reason? Put any person in a moment of grave stress and in a moment of coincidence, and he might begin to wonder if the universe, Paddy Brown, or something else (call it what you will) is consciously teaching him a lesson.
The boy’s name was Joseph. He was not wearing a bicycle helmet at the moment of impact. I could feel at once that the damage to his skull, his brain, and his upper spine was severe. I started compressions, and a woman who came running out of a car identified herself as a nurse. As she took the boy’s wrist, she told me that she was beginning to detect a pulse. In this instance a pulse was horrifying news: the light of life was coming back into his veins but not into his eyes.
This time (a month, to the day), I had arrived in time; but now, by every indication, if this child lived, I would be saving him for a fate far worse than the final claustrophobic effects of lung cancer. Whether or not the universe was giving me a lesson, I felt in that moment as though Paddy were showing me what I already knew in the so-called logical left hemisphere of the brain but what I had failed during the past month to feel in my heart. “Here you are, Charlie,” Paddy seemed to be saying, “just in time to save someone. Now, is this a good thing or a bad thing?”
In my mind, in what some might call an agnostic’s prayer, I said, “Okay, kid. If this is not as bad as it looks and you think you can still use this body, then stay with me. But if it’s as bad as it looks, it’s okay if you go away.”
I kept working, even after I felt him go. Perhaps the mind creates strange illusions under the incomparable stress of a child dying under your hands, but illusion or not, I felt a child’s laughter (completely innocent and even soothing laughter) passing directly through my right shoulder. As little Joseph passed, it felt as though a gentle hand, almost as an afterthought, reached into my chest—to my heart—grabbed the darkness that had been growing within me for a month, and took it away with him. I never haunted myself again with if only about my father.
I never distinctly felt the presence of Paddy again, either. Inside, I had a vague feeling that he had seen what I needed to see, put me where I needed to be, taught me what I needed to be taught, and then either gone on to other errands or to peace.
Science is based on doubt—on trying to explain everything away and seeing what still stands afterward. I have maintained my agnosticism, but I often still wonder about what some of us have seen or felt at the Titanic, and especially at the stern.
31
Persevering
Masabumi Hosono—the man who was accused simultaneously of being the Japanese “coward” the women of boat 13 conspired to throw into the sea and Colonel Archibald Gracie’s “stowaway” who seaman Ed Buley said entered the lifeboat dressed as a woman—arrived home in Japan with nothing except his own good word as a defense against what by then had become newspaper gossip. Almost immediately, Hosono was dismissed from his job. Up until 1912, his work had supported him quite well, as indicated by his “Schedule A” listing of gold coinage and possessions lost aboard the Titanic, valued at twenty-five hundred dollars in 1912 (equivalent to more than a hundred thousand dollars a century later).
After the accusations and the firing, Hosono made a request of his family and his friends that they refrain from speaking to him about the Titanic or what the newspapers and the local gossip council were saying about him. He understood that no matter what he said, people would see only what they wanted to see and believe what they wanted to believe. Hearing of it could only depress and distract him. Sorrow and distraction would prevent him from trying to cobble his career back together so that he could provide his wife and his children with a future worth having. Decades later, his daughter Fumiko wrote that her father’s request was never violated, largely because his family and his friends knew that he was a private, strong-willed, hardworking man who would do everything within his power to rise above the gossip.
Fumiko’s father was also a talented man. By 1915, even his detractors at the Ministry of Railways realized that they needed him, and they hired him away from his “freelance, nonregular jobs” and from his design and upkeep of a rare and beautiful garden that reminded visitors of island pinnacles and river valleys sculpted in miniature.