Water
by Joyce H. Munro
Music to read by: “Le Mémoire et la Mer” by Brad Mehldau
Every soul alone knows and can never fully tell its own grief. Every household alone realizes and can never fully tell its own loss.
—Marshall Everett [Henry Neil], Story of the Wreck of the Titanic, 1912
In the middle of the night without a moon, a mother and daughter struggle to climb into the lifeboat, hampered by bulky life vests strapped over their fur coats and evening gowns. They say very little and make no fuss. Their husbands do not join them, although there is plenty of space in the boat. Don’t worry, they tell their wives, this ship is not mortally wounded. It cannot possibly sink ... so many watertight compartments. Besides, help will be along soon enough and we will be rejoined.
All the while, a quivering runs the length of the ship.
The mother and daughter get in the lifeboat willingly because they, too, believe they will be rejoined. Their belief is so absolute they do not even think to kiss good-bye.
Ghastly sounds like the death knell of a great behemoth carom across the water, louder, much louder than their thudding hearts. But more gruesome than the ship’s agony are the cries of those still alive, flailing in the sea.
Soon after their lifeboat pulls away, the impossible happens to the ship that cannot sink. It is torn asunder. The stern rises out of the water as though bound, full steam ahead, for the heavens and is sucked back down. People on deck fall into the ocean, their passage lit by unflinching stars. Those fleeing in lifeboats see bodies fall into the ocean feet first, head first, like divers, like logs, like cruciforms, en masse, too many to count. They see bodies fall because there is no fog, no mist, no wind, no clouds. Only stars.
Ghastly sounds like the death knell of a great behemoth carom across the water, louder, much louder than their thudding hearts. But more gruesome than the ship’s agony are the cries of those still alive, flailing in the sea. Afterward, newspapers will report that survivors heard loud explosions, one after another, then shrieking and wailing. Then, a horrible quiet.
With stars as spotlights, mother and daughter see the rigid ship heave up and writhe and slip into the sea. They do not know if their husbands join hands and jump or stand resolute and hold tight to the brass rail. They do not know if their loved ones flail on their way down, if they yell out, if they pray.
The half-full lifeboat carries a dozen crew and two dozen first-class passengers. Among the passengers are several men who, for one reason or another, did not remain with the ship. Two of them light up cigars and are chided for wasting matches, but they do not heed and soon repeat their offense.
Without searchlight, without compass, the survivors row in waters still as a mill pond, lashed to their seats by terror, little knowing where they are heading or who sits beside them. They soon dissolve into squabbling over which direction to row, whether they should look for people thrashing about, whether they will capsize if they take on any others. One woman nips from her flask and does not care who sees. Then, as their uncommon stamina fades and squabbling turns to panic, they see salvation steaming toward them. One by one, they are hauled high in the air onto a ship-out-of-nowhere. In a rope sling. Like so much baggage.
Their rescuer, a luxury liner from a competing steamship company, undergoes an abrupt conversion from ship of leisure to ship of woe and sets off with its precious human freight.
Enroute to safety, the mother sends a wireless dispatch to her husband’s company, confirming their rescue—but not his. There is no word of him, he is still missing. We are abandoning hope of his rescue, the same for my daughter’s husband.
In sea-sodden fur coat and crumpled hat, the mother hunches close to two fellow survivors on deck of the rescue ship. Her gloved hand covers the side of her face. Perhaps she is recounting her ordeal. Perhaps she is bemoaning her husband’s unshakable belief in an untested ship. Afterward, newspapers across North America will run her photograph above the fold.
Previously
On a summer’s day, in a graceful bower of trees, the mother poses for the camera with her husband and daughters. She is seated in a straight-back chair, and she looks a tad bemused, as though she has been interrupted while reading the book in her lap but doesn’t mind so much. She wears a white gigot-sleeved jacket and long white skirt. The youngest daughter perches on the arm of her mother’s chair, one foot resting on the ground and her petticoat is showing. Both of the younger daughters, still children, wear tailored dresses that reach their shins, but the two older daughters have graduated to high-collared shirtwaists and long skirts.
The mother’s beauty is written on the faces of all four daughters, the kind of effortless beauty that, a few years hence, will make young men catch their breath when they see them at a party, at church, on the street. Among the four, a vibrancy so irresistible that later, a certain beau idéal will propose first to the eldest, then next, then next, then youngest, only to be spurned by each in turn. Though perhaps ‘twas all in jest, since he was known to be cheeky and they were known to be spit-fires.
Standing in the center of this female maelstrom is the father, husky and slope-shouldered in his four-button suit and bowler. Most likely he has a lot on his mind, for he looks slightly somber and who can blame him, given the company’s law suit, the recent purchase of several hundred train cars and much-contested freight rates. The grand work of coast-to-coast railway expansion is both exhilarating and exhausting.
Everyone smile. Yes, hold just so.
All look at the camera square on, save one. That one, the child with wire-rim glasses, is looking at something out of camera range. The eldest daughter smiles, the others are straight-faced, though not in a mean way. The family and their pet are captured on the threshold of time with promising futures all. But the photographer’s film could not possibly expose the mother’s thoughts.
Passageway
Three days after the tragedy, the ship of woe carrying 705 survivors, including the mother and daughter, arrives at port. Awaiting them, anxiously, silently, are hordes of relatives, friends, business associates, government officials, spectators and reporters with cameras. Mother and daughter arrive in borrowed clothes. Their wardrobes, jewelry cases, shoe boxes are in a steel casket swallowed by the deep. They still do not know where their husbands are. As befitting the next-of-kin of a railway company president, they are whisked away from the chaos by private train, in the care of the company physician.
Once home, they are joined by the other three daughters and sons-in-law. Mother and daughter issue a come-to-grips statement to the press. Trying to bear up, suffering from shock, everyone has been so kind, fully aware our husbands may be lost.
They spend the next two days in waiting. Perhaps they shuffle from room to room, straighten things, jump when the doorbell rings, refuse food, refuse sleep, wonder why, when, how. How to keep from unraveling. How to let go of the horror. How to hold fast to their lost ones. One thing is sure—they will not talk to reporters.
The family has decided to do something more. They will make of their passage through grief something holy. And water will be the means.
The following Sunday afternoon, the family’s minister comes to call. He reads the comforting words of the twenty-third Psalm, or maybe he reads those tear-provoking words of Isaiah: When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. But this is not a perfunctory pastoral visit with a reading from scripture and rote prayer. The family has decided to do something more. They will make of their passage through grief something holy. And water will be the means.
They gather, in the conservatory most likely. And the minister begins the litany with words like these: This baptism with water in His name shall be unto you the sign and seal of your engrafting into Christ and your regeneration by His Holy Spirit.
Then he scoops water from a hollowed place and baptizes first the mother, then eldest daughter, second eldest, third eldest, youngest. Water drips from his cupped hand onto their foreheads, flows down their cheeks, mixes with their tears, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
With this water, warm and consoling, they bind themselves to their two absent loved ones, still unaccounted for. With this water, spiritual and soul-healing, they begin their journey out of horror.
In the quietness of the house meant for lively parties and girlish dreams, surrounded only by closest family members, picture the five women uttering a prayer. In whispery voices, they place a shroud over their anguish. Into Thy hands we commit ourselves, O God. We say of the Lord: Thou art our refuge; our present help in time of trouble, our hiding-place from the wind and covert from the tempest; our God, in Thee will we trust.
You in the Lifeboat Wearing Fur
Will you, can you, trust God in your time of trouble. God the refuge. God the covert from troubling memories that interrupt you during the day and wake you in the night. Memories like losing your footing as the ship heels to one side, like struggling into the life vest, like gripping your daughter’s hand so tight your knuckles turn white. Like biding adieu to your husband as you leave the ship without him.
Did he plead, insist, admonish.
Did you go reluctantly, clingingly, angrily.
Did strains of a sentimental song played by the ship’s orchestra fall flat on your ears.
Did the behavior of strangers on deck—late-night revelers gleefully kicking bits of iceberg around and teary-eyed worriers hovering near lifeboats—confound you.
As the lifeboat was lowered into the ocean, did you look up at him and look and look and squint until you could no longer see his face, his face flush with the certainty that comes from success after success after success.
When the hideous death noises faded away and there was only foolish bickering in the boat, did you wring saltwater from your wetted gown and recall how perfect the evening had been—your sumptuous dinner, your handsome husband, the splendid concert. Life was good until the quivering began.
When next you sail the same ocean, do you peer out your stateroom porthole at icebergs, wondering which one stabbed the unsinkable ship in the heart, severing your family.
Did you, just for a split second, consider suing the steamship company for damages. As did your fellow passengers who filed suit before the year was out, including a woman in your lifeboat whose claim for lost cruise wear included eighty pairs of gloves and forty bejeweled hatpins, not to mention vast numbers of gowns and shoes and furs. Although you were a guest of the company director, you too could sue. Yet you declined. But does it vex you that your host did not remain with the ship, that he survived, and your husband and your son-in-law did not.
When did you realize you could not live in that tree-bowered house without him. That spacious, gracious house where the doors of the drawing room and conservatory and library were thrown open to form one vast space and where, festooned with flowers and satin ribbons and sunlight four times over, your daughters were married and you sat close by in your mother-of-the-bride gown, weeping sweetly.
When you emptied the drawing room and conservatory and library and moved to a place with fewer, smaller rooms and settled into widowhood, did you also empty the room where you store dreams and memories and ponderings. Or is everything tucked away in a gloomy dank place that will rarely be visited during daylight, never spoken of, though at times palpable in the air.
Will you, can you, ever be finished with that night.
And when next you sail the same ocean, do you peer out your stateroom porthole at icebergs, wondering which one stabbed the unsinkable ship in the heart, severing your family. Maybe it’s that one, gleaming like faceted diamonds, like the diamonds you wear on your left hand. Is that one with jagged edges sharp as steel the cause of your fear of screeching noises? Or is that one with folds as smooth as your silk evening gown the reason you cry when you hear certain songs.
When next you walk into the ocean on a balmy summer’s day, are you tempted to drop into the waves, arms outstretched like a cross.
When shards of ice sting your face in winter, when April comes again, on his birthday, do you weep.
When you are alone in your widow house and the quivering starts again, do you take from the bedside table his photograph, hold it close and kiss him good-bye.
Subsequently
On the day the mother and her four daughters were baptized, the minister also christened two grandsons. One was named for the missing patriarch of the family.
Two days after the baptism, the third daughter delivered her only child and named him for her brother-in-law who died in the sinking.
Four days after the baptism, a memorial service was held for the father. Afterward, newspapers reported that representatives of the city’s leading institutions attended, that work was halted for five minutes along his railway, that a simultaneous service was held in England, that flags were lowered to half-mast.
Five days after the baptism, the body of the father was pulled from the ocean and taken to shore. He had floated in ice-riddled waters for two weeks, far, far from the ship’s deathbed.
Seventeen days after the baptism, he was laid to rest.
The body of the daughter’s husband was never found.
The mother and her four daughters went on into the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s together. Most summers they vacationed at the family cottage on a private island, where they could breathe the briny air and walk among the brambles and play an occasional game of croquet and where the mother moved from the upstairs bedroom she had shared with her husband to a room without a view.
The scene of the tragedy lay 750 nautical miles east, though no one ever spoke of it, because talk of the tragedy was forsworn that April day when the mother and her four daughters began their passage through the depths by means of water.
Who Was Who
Charles Melville Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railroad, and his wife, Clara Jennings Gregg, boarded the Titanic in Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. Clara survived the sinking; Charles did not.
The Hays’ second eldest daughter, Orian Gregg Hays, and her husband Thornton Davidson, boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, France, the evening of April 10. Orian survived; Thornton did not.
The Hays’ youngest daughter, Clara Gregg Hays, and husband Hope Castle Scott met her mother Clara and sister Orian in New York City when the rescue ship, Carpathia, docked April 18. They traveled by private train to the Hays’ home on Ontario Avenue in Montréal.
The eldest daughter, Marjorie Hays, and her husband, George Duffield Hall, traveled from their home in Massachusetts to Montréal the next day.
The third eldest daughter, Louise Morris Hays, and husband Arthur Harold Grier, joined the family two days later.
Eight months later, Clara Scott delivered her second child and named her for her mother.
One hundred years after the tragedy, two descendants of the Hays family decided to talk to reporters.
Joyce Munro’s work can be found in Philadelphia Stories, Broad Street Review, Hippocampus, Minding Nature, Poor Yorick, The Copperfield Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She is author of a collection of essays, Untold Stories of Compton, published by the University of Pennsylvania.
