Chapter 14
I forgot to ask you if you saw that warning notice from the German Embassy, the one published in the newspapers the morning of your departure. I have to think you didn’t.
I wish I could tell you that I’m sorry I sent that telegram.
That, in retrospect, I should have told you to stay in New York, that there wasn’t time for a goodbye.
I wish my heart was sorry. But I’m telling the truth in these pages, and the truth is, I’m glad you were aboard the Lusitania too, horrific as it was.
I’m glad he wasn’t alone, surrounded by strangers.
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
To say the Cunard Pier was crowded that drizzly spring morning would be an amusing understatement.
It teemed with people; it was surging and alive with people: passengers and crew and Cunard Company personnel, Secret Service men, private detectives, journalists, photographers, sightseers, film crews, pickpockets, spies.
Nearly every one of them was focused on the colossal black-and-white ship docked at 54; nearly every one of them was talking about the notice printed in over half a dozen New York papers that very morning, the morning the Lusitania was scheduled to depart for Liverpool.
The Imperial German Embassy, the notice read, wished to remind travelers that there was a state of war between Germany and Great Britian (it was unclear if the Germans had misspelled Britain deliberately or not, but there it was), and anyone choosing to sail on a British-flagged ship, or one of any of her allies, was hereby politely warned that such ships were liable to destruction in the war-zone waters surrounding the British Isles.
In several papers, the warning appeared directly next to Cunard’s own advertisement for the Lusy. The message was not subtle.
Rita, in fact, had seen the warning that morning over a very early breakfast of bagels and lox and freshly chopped dill.
She was sleepy still, fatigued, having spent half the night wrestling with the decision of which liner to take to England.
Ellen Terry, the former Lady Capulet to her Juliet, had spent nearly twenty minutes on the telephone with Rita the evening before, trying to convince Rita to join her on the American Line’s New York, but the ship was scheduled to get in at least a day later than the Lusitania, maybe more, and Rita sincerely didn’t know if she had an entire day to spare if she hoped to see Alfred in time.
“Surely, if it’s just one day …” Ellen had coaxed, her rich voice crackling with static over the line. “Think of the fun we could have if we sailed together, darling!”
But Rita wasn’t thinking of fun. She was thinking of her little brother, his golden hair, his serious smile, his undaunted ambitions.
She was thinking of the stories she’d read and heard about young men just like him, brave brothers and sons just like him, over three million of them already dead in trenches and scattered along fields, honeycombed with bullets or blown into chunks of meat or choking on sulfur-green gas.
She was thinking, What if he never comes back? What if I miss him by just a day, just an hour or a stupid damned minute, all because I took the safer route, the slower ship, when nothing about Alfred has ever been slow or safe?
So Rita was still chewing her bagel and scanning headlines when she came across the warning halfway down page five of the New York World, framed in black.
NOTICE! it began, and she did. She put down the bagel, picked up the paper, and read the whole thing twice, her gaze lingering on the typo; was it some sort of insult?
And then, just beneath it, Cunard’s advertisement listing the schedule of the Lusitania.
She glanced at the Sèvres mantel clock above the fireplace; it was nearly eight.
The Cunard advert informed her that the Lusitania, the fastest and most luxurious passenger ship in the world, winner of the coveted Blue Riband for crossing the Atlantic in under five days, would depart for England this morning at ten o’clock.
She ate the last bite of bread, took a hard swallow of coffee, and rang for her maid. Now that her mind was made up, she’d have to hurry.
BUT GOODNESS, THE pier was crowded. It seemed like half of the city had shown up to gawk at the liner, at the passengers who were bold enough or foolish enough to decide that the German warning was nothing but bombast and bluster.
Yes, the Lusy was British-flagged. But she also routinely carried Americans across the sea, usually wealthy Americans, important ones, Rockefellers and Roosevelts and Astors.
It would be the most foolish decision of all to torpedo her and risk the wrath of the United States by killing her citizens.
Everyone knew the last thing the kaiser wanted was to draw America into the war.
By the time Rita had booked her ticket and secured a porter to direct her trunks to the escalator that reached from the dock to the baggage hold inside the liner, the clouds had more or less thinned into a gauzy layer of gray, and the rain that had sprinkled down since early that morning had dried like tears already forgotten.
A cool sky arched above the chaos below, dotted with seabirds, with the temperature more reminiscent of March than May.
It was five minutes to ten, she had cut the timing that close, and as Rita struggled through the knots of people, she was truly worried she wouldn’t reach the gangplank in time.
A man in a brown homburg turned a camera her way, lifting it for a shot; instinctively she paused and smiled at the lens. Always look beautiful, always look professional, friendly, even when people are shoving you and stepping on your toes and yelling in your ears.
But far more of the cameras were aimed up at the razor-sharp lines of the ship herself, accompanied by hefty doses of gallows humor.
“Did you get it, Eli?”
“Sure did. Last snap of the Lusitania!”
“It’ll be worth a fortune by next week!”
“Har!”
THREE YEARS EARLIER, almost exactly, on a gloomy and rainy night, the RMS Carpathia had glided slowly and expertly up to this very same pier, surrounded by uninvited tugboats, surrounded by shouting pressmen, with thousands of people ashore pressed shoulder to shoulder, eagerly awaiting her arrival.
Rita had seen pictures of it—well, everyone had; the whole world had—so many pictures in the papers back then, showing the near-hysterical crowds, showing the worn and exhausted survivors of the RMS Titanic disaster disembarking from the ship.
She recalled two of the images quite clearly, and whenever the memory of them happened to resurrect in her thoughts, Rita always felt an uncomfortable welling dread, subtle but definitely there, creeping along her nervous system, because she had crossed the Atlantic so many times before without incident, because she had been so lucky so many times, but luck could always run out.
The first was of Titanic’s junior wireless officer, who had to be carried off the steamer because, even though he was alive, one ankle was badly twisted and his other foot was dead, unusable, blackened flesh wrapped in bandages.
A brave young officer with a grimace on his face, who, by his own admission, had likely killed a man in the great liner’s final moments because the man was trying to steal his comrade’s lifebelt.
The other was of the winsome Mrs. Astor, infamous bride and now suddenly teenaged widow of John Jacob Astor IV, obviously pregnant, obviously in shock, her face white as snow and her lips parted as she was being escorted away.
Eventually it was revealed that she’d been a heroine in her own right, helping to row her lifeboat for hours, giving away her fur coat and shawl to third-class passengers who had nothing but cotton on their backs.
But in the picture that Rita remembered, Madeleine Astor was caught too near the hungry crowd, and there were hands reaching for her from that seething, shadowy mass, so many hands trying to touch her, grab her, tear at her as she stared back at them with wide, startled eyes.
NOW HERE RITA was on the same pier, maybe even struggling along the same path as Mrs. Astor once did, who knew.
She thought there were surely as many people packing the wharf and grandstands now as there were in those photographs capturing the rough and ragged end of the Titanic survivors’ journey.
Press everywhere, cameras everywhere, even motion-picture cameras.
But the passengers heading toward the Lusitania were neither rough nor ragged.
Their journey was ahead of them, not behind.
“Of course it’s safe, madam.” A Cunard man in a Harris tweed jacket was speaking in a plummy, reassuring voice to an elderly woman in a fox stole and a hat trembling with silk petunias. “There isn’t a U-boat in the world that can catch up with this ship. She’s the greyhound of the seas, you know.”
The gentleman standing next to the lady spoke up. “And there will be a Royal Navy escort, Mother, through Great Britain’s waters. Is that not so, sir?”
“Absolutely. We have the guarantee of the Admiralty itself. Once she reaches our waters, Lusitania will be escorted by no less than two destroyers all the way to Liverpool Harbour.”
“Only two?” the woman said, as her flowers bobbed nervously.
“Two more than even necessary, I assure you. You’ll be safe as houses aboard our ship, madam.”
Rita repeated that under her breath, safe as houses.
Naturally they would be. Because they’d be traveling on the fastest steamer to be found, winner of that international Blue Riband that Cunard had plucked straight from the previous winner, a German liner.
Plus those destroyers awaiting them, bristling with arms, with eagle-eyed sailors ready to blow up a U-boat a mile off.