The Midnight Watch (17 page)

‘Hello, Olive,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Harriet.’

‘She’s not here.’

‘I can wait,’ I said, pushing past her into the parlour. ‘I’ll take a bath.’ My tiny apartment in the fetid air of the Back Bay fens had no plumbing to speak of, and I had ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements’ too: at the very least, to use the bathtub from time to time in my own house.

Olive followed me into the parlour, nowadays sparsely furnished with two black sofas. There were no flowers on the tables; instead there were books everywhere. There had once been flowers, of course, in the same way that my wife had once worn shiny silk gloves and bodices with eyelets of gold. Today she wore a plain white dress with a loose, dark green jacket – the colours of the suffragettes – and her hands, I saw, were stained with ink.

‘You may stay,’ she said, giving me permission I did not need and seating herself at a table. Vivienne, my wife’s tall and cadaverous friend, loitered in a corner smoking her cigarette. I had never liked Vivienne. She lived in my house without paying rent and never did me the courtesy of thanking me. She was a radical – a nihilist who hated men and gave speeches at the university while forcing my daughter to stand by and turn the pages. She proclaimed herself a mesmeric healer and asked my wife to help her contact spirits and enchant clients by lighting lamps behind coloured veils. So I was pleased that by the time I returned from my bath she was gone. Olive sat alone at a table among newspapers, books and writing paper. I sat on one of the black sofas. I had scrubbed myself so clean I glowed.

‘Where’s our daughter?’ I asked.

‘She is in North Street visiting the Negroes.’

‘You allow her to go there unaccompanied?’

‘I do.’

‘To walk among the Negroes?’

‘Yes, and to talk to them. Their suffering is very great.’

‘But you don’t go with her?’

‘She’s seventeen. And I have my own work to do.’

‘The vote?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Olive said, ‘the vote. To thinking women, the vote is as important as air. And we’re tired of our suffocation.’

‘But Vivienne, at least, finds breath enough to give lengthy speeches.’

Olive looked up from her work. ‘That has always been your way, John: to mock things that ought not to be mocked. You take nothing seriously.’

‘I may mock, but she
hates
.’

‘She hates your mocking!’

My wife returned to her writing and I rose to stare out a window. I felt sorry for Olive. In the ten or so years since the death of our son I had never seen her smile. Worse: I had never seen her cry. She worked for The Cause with mechanical ferocity; she took no time for fun or sorrow. She blamed me, of course, for our son’s death, and the weight of that blame never lessened.

‘What is wrong, my dear?’ I asked. ‘You seem displeased.’

‘I
am
displeased,’ she replied quickly, and her reason surprised me. ‘This
Titanic
disaster has set us back terribly.’ She lifted a newspaper from the table and waved it about. ‘We were attacked this morning at our meeting – physically attacked, by a boy throwing fruit – and now there’s a call for the New York parade to be cancelled. Anyone would think it was we women who sank that ship.’

‘The newspapers have not been helpful?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be cute. Of course they’ve not been helpful. All this talk of chivalry and heroics – the rich men who did not get into boats, and so on – it’s all aimed at
us.
You know that more than anyone.’

‘You do not approve of the behaviour of the men that night?’

‘I neither approve nor disapprove. I say nothing about it one way or the other. I was not there. But what I do say is that I already hear people ask, Is it to be boats for women or votes for women? Well, if we must choose, then I say to my sisters: Don’t get in the boat! But even my sisters have lost their nerve.’

I listened in silence. It was just like my wife to speak so. On this topic she had great passion. ‘You,’ she went on, rather bitterly, ‘in your paper, I suppose, are writing all about these courageous men.’

‘As a matter of fact, I am not.’

‘But you are writing something?’

‘I am – but it’s not a story of chivalry.’

I had no chance to explain. The front door slammed and a moment later our daughter burst into the room. She leapt at me with joy as I rose to greet her and almost knocked me over. Her hat fell to the floor, scattering its white and green flowers and releasing a great blur of auburn hair. She embraced me and then held me at arm’s length to survey me.

‘Papa, you look so tired,’ she said. She embraced me again and insisted I sit down. ‘Have you and Mama been fighting? She does not look best pleased.’

‘Your father has come here to wash himself,’ Olive explained.

‘Well, he smells like a rose garden!’

Harriet had always had a prodigious energy, but now, as she approached womanhood, she seemed to radiate a solar force. Her intelligence sometimes frightened me; ideas welled up within her like steam in a locomotive. She moved through the world as if there were no power that could stop her. I could not imagine her growing old. As she seated herself next to me – a cascade of colour on the black sofa – I had a vision of something more than youth and beauty: I saw the century opening up and it was something vast and wonderful.

‘I have been up on North Street,’ she announced proudly, looping an arm through mine.

‘Your mother has been telling me. She says you go there to talk to the Negroes.’

‘I do. I want to write about people, just like you do.’

‘I don’t like you going there alone.’

‘Oh Papa, no harm will come to
me
.’

‘And what if I forbade you to go?’

Harriet laughed. ‘I would go anyway. This is a new age, Papa, and girls don’t always do what their fathers say.’

I laughed too and held her close. ‘Then tell me,’ I said, ‘what do you learn from the Negroes?’

‘How to fight. How to be strong. How they won what we want.’

‘And you’re ready to fight – to be strong?’

‘Yes, Papa. We women are ready.’

‘Your mother,’ I said, ‘has been giving me a little lecture. She says the women on the
Titanic
should not have got into the boats ahead of the men.’

‘And she’s right. I wouldn’t have got into a boat before
you,
Papa. I could easily have made a raft out of deckchairs, or else floated about in the water until I climbed onto an old plank or something. It would have been easy.’

I laughed again, taking her warm hands in mine and pressing them against my chest. Her face glowed white and smooth and pretty. But then, quite suddenly, as I looked at her, I stopped laughing. As if a cloud had passed over the sun, I had a darker vision: I saw her face as the child’s face that it still was, and I remembered the fifty-three children who had been left behind on the
Titanic
. Not one of them had made a raft out of deckchairs or climbed onto a plank. I shuddered with the horrible vision of it. I saw Harriet as one of them, crying in that black and icy water, and imagined her hands blue and stiff, reaching skyward to the distant stars.

Our laughing and joking were over. Harriet had fallen quiet and rested her head on my chest. Beyond her I saw Olive looking at me, cold, silent and still. Perhaps she, like me, was remembering our poor baby son crying, his tiny hands opening and closing and his wide eyes begging us to keep him in life.

*   *   *

Later that Saturday afternoon I was berated by Krupp. He huffed and puffed and threatened to blow my house down. ‘You got my message,’ he said, his nose twitching like a rodent’s. ‘I told you to file by three o’clock yesterday or not to bother filing at all.’

‘Yes, and I chose not to file at all.’

He did not laugh. His face flushed red. ‘I meant, don’t bother filing
ever
. As in: you’re fired.’

‘But I’ve got something. Something better than the others.’

‘No, you’ve got nothing. Bumpton, in New York, has something: he sends us more than we can print. Astor, Guggenheim, Butt – the lot.’

‘But everyone has those stories.
The Boston Post
, the
Globe
, the
Transcript
– they have countless columns about rich men’s chivalry. There are only so many times we can read of Major Butt and the cravens.’ I remembered my wife’s complaints. ‘People are tired of it. But there’s only one
Californian
story – it will be different and it will be ours alone. I promise.’

‘Your promises mean nothing.’ Krupp thrust out his jaw, chewing his upper lip with his lower teeth, which were crooked and brown. He was angry, but he was thinking too, and that was enough. He wouldn’t fire me just yet. He couldn’t resist the promise of an exclusive any more than a rat could resist the smell of vanilla bread.

I pressed my advantage. ‘I tell you, there is a story on that ship and I will get it. They’re hiding something.’

But Krupp hadn’t quite finished his resistance. ‘What story? They didn’t get there in time. They had no bodies. They had no survivors. They have nothing. So, what story?’

‘I don’t know yet. Perhaps they did find bodies but for some reason didn’t pick them up. Or maybe the captain was drunk. Or one of his officers panicked. Or there was a fight on board, or a mutiny. But something happened on that ship – I can tell from their faces.’

‘You and your faces. Sometimes a face is just a face.’

‘Very well then, there’s more than just their faces. One: the captain wouldn’t let the wireless man speak. Two: he said his overnight position was a state secret. Three: he first said they were twenty miles away but then later said thirty.’

‘An easy mistake.’

‘No, it was deliberate. Don’t you see? He’s trying to
push
the
Titanic
away
. I tell you, he wants to have nothing to do with that ship. In his hour with us he didn’t mention her name once. It’s as if he can’t bring himself to say it. I ask you, why is that?’

Krupp was listening now.

‘And,’ I continued, ‘most important of all, the page for April 15
th
– the day the
Titanic
sank – was cut from the scrap log with a knife. Other pages were missing too, but they’d just been torn out. Somebody cut that page out, carefully and deliberately, and whoever it was did so for a reason.’

‘Well? What was the reason?’

‘I don’t know yet.
That
will be the story.’

Krupp’s huffing and puffing gave way to a tired impatience. ‘Go, then,’ he said, waving me out of his office with an exaggerated gesture. ‘Go and get the story. But I want to see something by day’s end Monday. This is it for you, John. This really is
it!
’

On Sunday morning I went to the ship, but was turned back at the gangway by two men who this time were not persuaded by my boilersuit and did not listen to my talk of coal supplies. I telephoned Jack Thomas but he did not take my call. I went in person to his office but his assistant said he wasn’t there, even though I could hear his voice bellowing from a distant room. Perhaps, I thought, he was holding a grudge. I had not yet written his Lord-as-hero story. I went back to the ship and asked the men at the gangway to deliver a message to the captain. They refused. Everything had to go through the agent, they said. I said he was unavailable. They said there was nothing they could do.

I retired to the Marginal Street saloon to develop a strategy. I hoped Thomas would eventually show up. But he did not; instead my waitress doubled up my drinks so that the rest of Sunday became a blur. On Monday morning I was knocked so low by a headache I could hardly move. But Krupp was waiting: I had to produce
something
. So in the early afternoon I made an appointment to use the saloon’s silence booth and long-distance telephone. I placed a call to Dan Byrne at Dow Jones in New York. It took half an hour for the connection to be made, but then his voice came through with good volume. My notebook was ready and I wrote down everything he said:

The United States Senate inquiry into the disaster had moved from the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York to the Senate Office Building in Washington, D. C. The inquiry was being conducted by Senator William Alden Smith, who acted like a bumbling fool but knew exactly how to get what he wanted.

A sensation had been caused when Bruce Ismay had been denounced by Senator Raynor as a coward.

Philip Franklin had had to explain to the senators why he spent a whole day telling the press that the
Titanic
was safe when in fact she was on the bottom. ‘During the entire day,’ he said, ‘we continued to believe the ship unsinkable.’

The
Titanic
’s surviving wireless operator, a young man of twenty-two, had been paid a thousand dollars by
The New York Times
for his story – equivalent to four years’ salary.

The
Titanic
had sunk in a busy shipping lane, and people were surprised to learn that so many ships had been near her when she went down: the
Mount Temple
, the
Baltic
, the
Birma
, the
Virginian
, the
Carpathia,
the
Olympic
, and others. It seemed that the
Titanic
had been very unlucky that none had reached her in time.

Captain Moore of the
Mount Temple
told newspapers he had wasted time searching the wrong position. In her distress messages the
Titanic
gave a position on the western side of the icefield, when in fact she had been east of it.

The
Mackay-Bennett
had been chartered by the White Star Line to go out and find the bodies. There was hope they would find Mr Astor.

These were all interesting points, but Dan Byrne gave me his most significant information just before he rang off. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘what was the name of that ship – the one you’ve been chasing for the bodies?’

‘The
Californian
.’