That Fatal Night Read online

  The next thing I remember was Beryl throwing aside the curtain on my berth and saying, “What is going on here? You need to be on the boat deck,” in a very stern way. Miss Pugh was saying dithery things about it being a drill and all she seemed to do was try to take the curlers out of her hair. Then Beryl lifted me down and pushed shoes on my feet, put my coat over my nightgown and my lifebelt over that, wrapped a blanket around me and pulled me out the door, all before I had really woken up. As Beryl left the cabin she said to Miss Pugh that she would be back and that Miss Pugh must be ready to go.

  In the alleyway we met Joe, and Beryl told him that Miss Pugh was still in the cabin and he swore and said that he would fetch her.

  Now that it is all over and it has been in the papers and everyone wants to know about it, it seems foolish that I didn’t understand. But Beryl did not sound afraid, just serious. There were noises and conversations in the alleyway but no rushing or raised voices.

  The boat deck was crowded. The crew were launching lifeboats over the edge of the ship. It looked horrible — they were just going down into darkness. They made women and children go forward and the men stood back. I did not want to go. Even then I did not understand that the ship was sinking. All I could do was be obedient and not move.

  Some of the women would not get into the boats. They would not leave their husbands.

  It was cold. We could see our breath. I think I heard music but maybe somebody only told me that later.

  Some men were throwing the deck chairs over the rail, into the sea. I did not understand why.

  Beryl was standing beside me, looking over her shoulder. Finally she said, “Come with me, then. We’ll get in the boat together. No need to be frightened.”

  I said, “What about Miss Pugh?” but Beryl said that the captain wanted us to get into the boats as quickly as possible and that Joe would take care of Miss Pugh and they could get in a different boat. She took me firmly by the hand and led me forward. A crew member in charge loaded us into the boat and Beryl wrapped my blanket around me.

  As the boat started jiggling down the side of the ship I finally knew what was happening. It was as though I woke up.

  As we went down we passed bright decks with the portholes shining and then darkness. Bright and dark, bright and dark, bright and dark. There were even some people on the decks, looking ordinary.

  Then a man slid down the ropes and landed in our boat with a crash. He was the one who was in charge and he said what we were all to do.

  We landed in the water with a splash and some of the women in the boat cried out.

  I knew I should have waited for Miss Pugh but I wanted to go with Beryl. I did not know who to be obedient to. I have wondered and wondered about what I did. I want to tell the truth now, in this record, but I do not know how to find it.

  There were three men in the boat and they rowed. One had a face black with coal and he was wearing only trousers and a singlet until one of the women gave him a blanket.

  The ship was bright. Way far away was another ship with lights and one of the men said we must row toward it and they would rescue us. They also said we must get away from the Titanic, for if it sunk it would suck us down. But I did not believe it would sink. You could not believe it. It was like saying a whole city was going to sink.

  When you are having a dream it makes sense, like a story, but when you wake up sometimes you can only remember bits. Especially if it was a nightmare.

  This is what it was like on our boat.

  Beryl pulled the blanket around me. She tried to hold me but she had on her lifebelt and so did I, so we could not get close. There was a baby on our boat. He began to cry when the boat hit the water. His mother tried to make him happy by playing peekaboo but he just cried on.

  I put my head in Beryl’s lap and closed my eyes. After a time there was a moan and I looked up and the lights on the ship had gone out. A minute or two later the ship upended and slid backward beneath the water. Somebody said, “She’s gone.”

  Some people were praying.

  One of the rowing men tried to get us to sing but we could not.

  One more thing. I heard some people in the water. They were crying out for help. After a while I did not hear that any more.

  My hand is too tired to write more. I will finish tomorrow.

  June 23

  Miss Caughey is smart about many things, but I do not believe that writing about the disaster is helpful. Last night I had the melting-face dream again. It is worse than ghosts or murderers or giant spiders or anything. Even the Jumblies ten times did not help.

  June 24

  I have been lonely before. When Charles moved away to the United States I used to go and stare into his room to try to conjure him home. When Mother and Father waved goodbye to me at the railway station and I was sitting in the carriage alone with Miss Pugh, I just wanted to curl into a ball. When Midnight died I kept thinking that I saw him, out of the corner of my eye. But I have never been so lonely as I was in that lifeboat. So lonely that there should be another word for it.

  Beryl talked to me and told me that all would be well, and some of the other women were kind, but it was too cold and there was too much darkness all around. Too much darkness for the kindness to get through. The light of that other ship never seemed to get any closer. They were many stars. They only made me feel lonelier.

  I could not stop my thoughts from sinking, down past one thin layer of wood to that water, black and cold and silent where a giant ship was sinking, sinking. I tried not to think of it, but it was as if my mind belonged to somebody else, or if I thought it through just one more time I could change what happened. I could keep the Titanic floating, huge and beautiful and lit up like a Christmas tree. If I thought of it just one more time, perhaps I could make it that we were simply on a lifeboat excursion so that we could see the whole ship, which we could not when she was in port, or certainly not when we were on it. But the story would not stick, so I would begin again, only to have it end with darkness, cold and silence.

  Before the disaster I never really thought of the deep ocean beneath us. I did think about all the decks and all the rooms, with the fancy people all piled up, like layers in a cake, chocolate and raspberry jam and lemon curd and whipped cream. The ship was more like a big grand building than like a boat. I thought about the boilers and the engines but I never went deeper in my mind.

  All night it was calm, but as the sky started to lighten, a breeze came up. When it was light enough to see, there were no other boats, just sea and ice. There were huge pieces of ice. First they were pink, then they turned gold as the sun came up. And that is when I made sense of all the talk of icebergs. That is what had happened. The Titanic had hit an iceberg.

  In my mind, because I did not watch it disappear, I could not believe that it was gone. All those chairs and china and pillows and pianos and grapefruits. It was impossible. I did not think about all the people who had disappeared because I did not know that yet. The women who were crying for husbands and sons — I thought that they were on other lifeboats. I thought the people in the water would have been rescued.

  As the boat began to move up and down in the waves, all my seasickness came back. I had to close my eyes and ears and think only of not being sick.

  I was not sick, but other people were. The men were not rowing and nobody was talking. The only sound was the woman with the baby saying lullaby things, when one of the women suddenly pointed toward the horizon and there was a ship, first a dot, then getting closer. It was the Carpathia. All night Beryl had been cheerful and calm. When she saw the great ship coming toward us, so slowly, she said, “We’re safe now,” and she just began to sob.

  June 25

  What is underneath me? What is underneath me right now? What if I could dig straight down? Right now it is a mattress, bed, floor, corner of the dining room, floor, cellar, dirt, dirt, dirt.

  Then what? The centre of the Earth. I remember talking about this with Grandfa
ther.

  I will pretend that it is breakfast at Mill House. I will finish this story by pretending that I am telling it to Grandfather and Grandmother.

  The Carpathia came close to us and the rowing men rowed up against the side of it. There were lifeboats all around and many men’s voices. There were ladders over the side. The two rowing men helped me into a seat like a garden swing and I was hauled up the side. It was like being pulled up a cliff. I would have been frightened but I had nothing left to be frightened with.

  I had to use the toilet urgently and as soon as we were on board Beryl found one right away.

  On the decks of the Carpathia everyone was milling around, looking for their people. I looked for Miss Pugh. Beryl looked for Joe. We did not find them. Beryl didn’t leave me for a minute.

  I found Marjorie and her mother right away. Marjorie was just saying, over and over, “Where’s Papa? He said he was getting on that other boat.”

  I couldn’t find the words to talk to Marjorie.

  That is when I put together the things I had seen and heard.

  There were not enough lifeboats for everybody.

  Many people had drowned.

  June 26

  Everyone on the Carpathia was kind. The crew brought us food. The passengers shared their cabins. But they stared at us. This was the first of too much staring. That was the beginning of it.

  When Irene accused me of liking all the attention, she was the exact total opposite of right.

  People kept saying that other ships were in the area and some of them must have picked up more survivors.

  We were three nights and four days on board. When I think of the five days on the Titanic I can remember what I did every hour, but the time on the other ship is blurry. Beryl found me some playing cards and I played Patience. She taught me Grandfather Clock Patience, which is more complicated than Clock Patience, which is what I knew. I made myself think that if I got it to come out three times in a row, then it would all not have happened. No iceberg, no sinking, no drowning. But I could not get it to come out three times in a row. If I got it to come out two times in a row, then there was another rescue ship sailing to New York with Miss Pugh, and Joe and Marjorie’s father. But I could not get it to come out two times either, so I had to keep trying.

  On the Titanic, Marjorie and I had mocked the people who just sat on deck chairs for hours, but that is what I did. Beryl brought me food. I was hungry all the time, hungry for cake.

  I sat with Marjorie and her mother but it was like we had forgotten how to be friends, we had forgotten how to play.

  Momon and Lolo were there, but not their father. There was a woman taking care of them. I had not seen her before.

  The last day I did eat in the dining room, at a table with a woman with a baby. When lunch was over she took her dinner napkin and put it in her bag. She whispered to me that she had run out of clean nappies for her baby so she was making do. Nappies are the sort of thing that people in charge don’t think about. I passed her mine as well.

  Some kind ladies made space in their cabin and one of them took one of her own dresses and cut it down to make a frock for me. When she was sewing, her needle flicked in and out like a silver fish. I liked seeing her sew, but I did not like the frock. It stuck out. I should have been more grateful, but being grateful takes heart.

  June 27

  The time on board the Carpathia was a fog of cake and Patience. To help pass the time, Beryl told me stories. She spent the long hours telling me about when she was a little girl and all the places she had been and the ships she had been on and all the passengers she had served. The stories took me right away from worry and loneliness and the horribleness of wearing the same underclothes for five days.

  Once when she was a stewardess on a Caribbean ship she went ashore in Jamaica with a friend. They wanted to get away from all the passengers and the hubbub of the port so they hired a driver and cart and went to a farther-away part of the island, near an inlet. Then they walked through the forest. By the time they got to the water it was getting dark and they were tired and hot so they decided to have a rest before they hiked back to the cart. They sat down on a log and chatted for a bit. Then there was a slurping sound and the log started to move. They jumped up and saw the great swish of a crocodile tail. They had been sitting on a crocodile’s back! They ran like billy-oh back through the forest and when they got to the cart they were half-crying and half-laughing.

  June 28

  Hearing Beryl’s stories on the Carpathia was comforting, but it is not so comforting to retell them. I need to get to that final day at sea.

  We arrived in New York at night, in a cold rainy storm. We all went up on deck. As we approached the harbour there were lots of small boats with men shouting questions through megaphones and trying to take photographs with flashes of bright light. Beryl told me they were newspaper reporters. Someone called out to them to find out if there had been other rescue ships and they told us that Carpathia was the only one.

  That is when I knew for sure that Miss Pugh had drowned. And Jack. And Joe. And Marjorie’s father. And the quiet father of Momon and Lolo. But I knew already, because of the Patience. Beryl did not say anything. She just held my hand a little tighter.

  Miss Pugh had drowned and it was my fault.

  She did not get to the boat deck in time, and that was because she could not find her things and that was because I had thrown everything about the night before.

  That is it. That is the truth I can tell only to these pages.

  Miss Pugh was right. I am willful and wicked.

  June 29

  When you have done something terrible, it does no good at all to write about it. But I said that I would write the whole story so I will.

  We left those small boats behind and people called out, “Get ready to see the lady!” They meant the Statue of Liberty. When she appeared in a flash of lightning everybody gasped. I didn’t care about her; I only cared about who would meet me. Did Mother and Father know I was on the Carpathia? Did they know I was alive? Had they come to New York?

  Beryl told me that she could not disembark with me because the crew had to get off last, but that there would be someone to meet me and take care of me and make sure that I got home safely. All that time on the Carpathia I did not cry. It was not that I was brave. It was like I was frozen inside. But when I had to leave Beryl I could not stop the tears. She gave me one tight hug and said that it was time to disembark via the aft gangway and now that I was a real sailor I was never to forget the proper names for things. I lost sight of Marjorie and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.

  There were wooden fences that made a path from the bottom of the gangway to the door of a big terminal because there were so many people waiting. They were waiting in silence.

  As soon as I was inside the building, there was Charles. He didn’t hug or kiss me. He just opened up his big coat and pulled me inside. It smelled like wet wool and tobacco smoke. It smelled like the safest place in the world.

  June 30

  When I finally got home after a train to Montreal and a train to Halifax and the horrible arrival with all those newspaper reporters, the first thing that Mother said to me was, “Oh, Dorothy, where did you get that dress?”

  Two things about that moment. The first is that I remembered the care that Grandmother had taken so that I would not arrive home looking like a ragamuffin. She cut my hair and trimmed my fingernails. We even planned what I would wear on the day I arrived and she ironed a set of hair ribbons for me to wear when I left the ship. Then I arrived in a strange lumpy dress that didn’t fit. I had scrapes and bruises on my legs that I didn’t remember getting. I had been wearing the same underwear for five days. There were no hair ribbons.

  The second thing is that I knew that Mother didn’t really care about what dress I was wearing. She just said that because she didn’t know what else to say. In plays people say real, important things every time they speak, but in real l
ife sometimes words just fall out of your mouth.

  July 1912

  July 1

  White Rabbit.

  I don’t see the point of writing more except that I’m nearly at the end of the notebook.

  Today we had a picnic for Dominion Day. Every year, old Mr. Thorpe next door gets up very early so that he can fly his flag at half-mast to protest Nova Scotia entering Confederation. This happened way back in the olden days but Father says some people have long memories and know how to hold a grudge. As we passed by his house he was out digging in his garden so I called out, “Happy Dominion Day, Mr. Thorpe.” Mother shushed me because that was cheeky and forward but what she doesn’t know is that Mr. Thorpe winked at me. I believe he waits all year for the pleasure of protesting and enjoys the holiday as much as any picnicking family.

  Phoebe was at the picnic and she and Winnifred and I chummed around but they were talking mostly about something that happened at a basketball match this spring. Of course I wasn’t there. I left them to it and went back to my family.

  July 2

  Jam. I have been chopping rhubarb. Mother is so patient when we are making something together. It is only when she is trying to teach me ladylike things and manners that I get so fidgety and cross. Sometimes I get so fidgety that I want to jump out of my skin, and all because she does something like lick her finger and run it across my eyebrows. I try to remember Mrs. Bland’s advice on not staying cross one second longer than necessary, but it is easier said than done.