Hours earlier, Johnston had studied the expression on my face and asked, “You heard them, didn’t you?”
“Heard what?”
“The quiet voices.”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
All I did know was my sense that from those first moments at the Titanic’s stern, I was headed on a new journey, like a creature about to be reborn—in pain. It was not an epiphany. It was not a moment of understanding. In fact, it was quite the opposite of understanding.
I found myself turning more and more, during that last night of the old world, toward MacKenzie’s question, and to what Fernando had tried to teach me about the hope of light against the darkness.
To save our civilization, the priest insisted, we must never use violence in fighting for our cause or our principles, and we must not even fight for ourselves. The last great hope of civilization, he believed, was in the human ability to sacrifice one’s own best interests by putting the other person first.
Two and a half miles underfoot, given a Ken Marschall perspective in which the Titanic’s bow section, seen from up here, was no larger than a fingernail on one’s hand held out at arm’s length, the entire spectrum of human behavior had been played out in microcosm. Even in that overromanticized Gilded Age of pride and ignorance, lights had shone out against the darkness. For every Bruce Ismay on the deck, there had to be a Charles Joughin or an Alfred Rush. There had to be.
13
The 46th Psalm
In boat C, Ismay’s boat, forty-year-old Shaneene Abi-Saab Wahabe, like the other Lebanese women huddled with her, had seen America as a beacon of freedom from religious persecution. She would not have been in the boat at all if her cousin Gerios and the other men had not physically lifted her and thrown her in, along with at least three other women. Amid the scuffle, an officer had fired shots into the air, ending the dropping of third-class women into a boat in which twenty empty seats could still plainly be seen.
Like the other women of boat C, Wahabe knew she would never see her husband again. Her adult son was also lost, but neither her husband nor her son were about to become casualties of the Titanic. Both had died recently from common infections. Living by a creed of never giving up, no matter what cross life forced her to bear, and determined to begin again, she would soon arrive in the United States under the temporary care of New York’s Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
On the sidewalks of New York, street vendors of the early twentieth century were selling increasingly popular ice cream treats served in glass cups. Wahabe would never touch the stuff—at least, not the way it was being served. The lessons of her own recent family history ran too deep. The cone-shaped cups, after being licked clean by customers, were rinsed hastily in what often appeared to be dirty water, then reused, customer to customer. Wahabe knew that there had to be a better, more hygienic way, such as serving the ice cream in a single-use, sweet pastry cone.
Soon, as the Ismay family’s fortune waned and the Titanic began melting into the bed of the Atlantic, the obscure middle-aged survivor from boat C would establish the Joy Cone Company. By word of mouth and then by newspaper ads and the wire services, Joy Cone would spread, entering the twenty-first century as the world’s largest ice cream cone manufacturer.
David Vartanian bore a different sort of cross, having lost more family members to the approach of World War I than to infection. He had booked a third-class cabin aboard the Titanic and was traveling to America ahead of his wife, Mary, hoping to build a new beginning and then to bring his life’s one true love as quickly as possible out of their increasingly dangerous homeland. Putting his entire life’s savings into the trip, he seemed to have stepped out of the winds of war into Armageddon at sea.
Corralled below the decks in the stern, Vartanian and the other steerage men found their path upward to the boat deck blocked by a gate. Days later, passenger Eugene Daly would report to Dr. Frank Blackmar of the rescue ship Carpathia that steerage men trying to ascend the stairs were beaten back by members of the crew, and he saw two passengers (whom he derisively referred to as “dagos”) shot.
“But the yelling and screaming above,” Vartanian’s daughter Rose would tell historian Philip Dattilo in 1999, “drove several of the men to tear the gate down.” In the final half hour, some of the gate crashers had weapons in their hands, but their escape route was only an illusion. All of the lifeboats appeared to be in the process of casting away or were already gone, and Vartanian found himself trapped with hundreds of other frightened souls on the stern’s well deck.
Anna Sjoblom was a third-class passenger en route to join her father at a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest. She too found the stairways to the upper decks closed against the third class, and it seemed to her that the crew really did not care whether the foreign immigrants lived or died. Fortunately, a Swedish friend of hers discovered an unguarded emergency stairway leading to the higher decks, and they were able to sneak up through the banquet halls and toward the lifeboats.
By then, hundreds of feet of empty lifeboat ropes were strewn along the boat deck. There were only two or three boats left on the davits, and they were already mostly filled and in the early stages of lowering and casting away.
“I tried to get into one boat and was pushed back,” Sjoblom would report bitterly. Women and children first, indeed. It was her eighteenth birthday. The desperation she saw at this point in the foundering of the ship was increasing to such a level that under the Lightoller protocol, even a girl who had just turned eighteen that day could be barred from the lifeboats. She watched in a state of detached disbelief as a Swedish couple and their five children kissed one another and then leaped together over the side, never to be seen again.
After this, Sjoblom forced her way onto one of the last boats going down, shortly before Lawrence Beesley made his book deal–generating leap into the stern of the same boat. During the leap, he crashed down on Sjoblom’s head and nearly crushed her neck. But this was not the cruelest thing she saw or felt before boat 13 reached the water.
“I remember watching a little boy about thirteen years old whose parent had gone off in one of the lifeboats,” she would write later. “He slipped into a boat and was thrown back on deck by a sailor. He crept into another boat, and again [the sailors] threw him back to the deck. The third time he slid down into the bottom of a boat and was saved.”
Both horrified and strangely transfixed—“fascinated,” wrote Violet Jessop—“my eyes never left the ship, as if by looking I could have kept [the Titanic] afloat. I reflected that [only] four days ago I had wished to see her from afar, to be able to admire her under way; now there she was—my Titanic . . . her splendid lines [standing] against the night, every light twinkling. I started unconsciously to count the decks by the rows of lights [forward]. One, two, three, four, five; then again—one, two, three, four. I stopped. Surely I had miscounted.”
Jessop counted them again more carefully, gently hushing the whimpering baby that William Murdoch had tossed into her arms. “No,” she realized. She had made no mistake. “There were only four decks now,” Jessop would recall. She started her count again. Only three decks now.
“No,” she told herself, trying not to imagine the people she had just left—who would be warm and alive, as she and the baby were, for only a little while longer. Jessop tried to busy herself with the baby; but she could not refrain from looking up again. Only two decks now.