It was dinnertime aboard the Keldysh when we came to rest on a ragged patch of deck where hermit crabs now roamed toward the grand stairway crater. In my mind’s eye, the specter of Murdoch was still out there, eighty-nine years earlier, doing whatever was necessary, as the deck began to slip away, to give the women at his back a few seconds more to get the ropes undone and push themselves away in the last lifeboat. There were, at that moment, barely more than fifty seats at Murdoch’s back for fifteen hundred people still aboard.
In this replay of history, the decks still seemed alive as I turned away from the viewport and penned a promise on the title page of Stormer’s book.
SEPTEMBER 10, 2001
ON BOARD RMS TITANIC
To First Officer William Murdoch:
A wise archaeologist named Trude Dothan once told me that we (we who stroll through the cellars of time) are the biggest storytellers in the world—that we have become speakers for the dead; simply that. Nothing more. Nothing less. But we are more than that, and I believe [my friends] and I have done you wrong, William McMaster Murdoch—done you wrong by focusing on the last [three] minutes of your life without realizing that [nearly] 75% of the people who got away from this place owed their lives to you. I, especially [committed a wrong against you]—for I painted less than half of your face and asked the world to guess from that the measure of the whole man. [Someday,] I will correct this picture. Trude was wrong. [Archaeology] is not so simple as telling stories about the dead. We must keep a faith with the dead—and I’ve a faith to keep with you, Mr. Murdoch.
Earlier that day, during our flight over the port side of the stern, the terrain below lay so flattened and distorted that we found it difficult to distinguish between the launch points of boats 14 and 16. What we could discern and what we did understand was that some ten meters (almost 11 yards) below us, at the top of a portside wall of steel that was now stretched out almost perfectly horizontal across the sea floor, Annie Robinson, Violet Jessop, and the baby thrown into Violet’s arms had been among the many who were saved by Murdock’s actions.
From a vantage point equivalent to two or three city blocks away, in boat 16, it seemed to Jessop that the ship was taking “a sudden lurch forward,” an inevitable illusion created by the dipping of the bow, the simultaneous rising of the stern, and the wave running back along the boat deck. The sudden motion gave the liner the false appearance that it had come alive again and was driving ahead, trying (unsuccessfully) to shunt great quantities of seawater off to the starboard and port sides. Before Jessop could even begin to interpret the illusion, one of the smokestacks toppled off as though it had been nothing more than a huge cardboard model, “falling into the water with a fearful roar.”
Sauce chef George Harris, another person saved by Murdoch, sat in boat 11 with Maude Slocomb, who tried to comfort the baby someone had put into her arms, but Slocomb’s nerves were becoming increasingly frayed by the dying ship and by the constant ringing of an alarm clock some woman had judged important enough to bring aboard the lifeboat.
“Shut it off!” Slocomb hollered, adding, “You old bitch.”
The woman was neither old nor a bitch, and the alarm clock was not an alarm clock. Boat 11 had more children aboard than most of the others, and Edith Russell was sitting on the gunwale, winding the tail of her musical toy pig, playing the Maxisie and trying to keep the children’s attention diverted from the ship.
A mile away, in boat 13, nine-week-old Millvina Dean had started to cry when her bare feet were exposed from beneath the blanket in which she had been wrapped. Ellen Phillips, the daughter of Kate Phillips and Henry Morley (“the Marshalls”) was almost nine months away from being born on the night her mother took her turn among the women who cradled and comforted baby Millvina.
Unlike Millvina, Ellen was destined for a life of neglect by a mother who was to become increasingly unbalanced and (in the best of times) distant. For Ellen, the saddest cut of all was to learn one day that Millvina was cradled and cared for by “Mrs. Marshall”—and by almost every other woman in boat 13. Ellen would eventually grow up to resent the tiniest Titanic survivor, unable to understand how her mother treated a stranger’s child, however briefly, like her own adored infant but then treated her own daughter like a stranger.
15
To Dream on the Ship of Sorrows
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
Sometime between the post–dive 7 debriefing and Georgyj Vinogradov’s 3 a.m. visit to the bio lab, another one of the Russian biologists found me at work on something that, puzzling though it might have seemed, I simply thought should be done.
I was carefully cleaning what had by now come to be called the two Titanic crosses: the boat 8 railing and the davit bitt. Days earlier, Lori Johnston and I had stripped them completely of their rusticle roots, and I was carefully cleaning and oiling the two crosses for their return to the portside boat deck. Wherever the metal allowed it, I tried to make their surfaces appear shiny and new.
The other Russian scientist, like Vinogradov, thought I should be in my cabin resting; he added that there was no apparent “use or purpose” for what I was doing.
“Why this?” he asked.
I did not know why. I said that I simply wanted to return something to the Titanic in better condition than we found it. He nodded and said that he understood.
There was no way of guessing, between 2 and 3 a.m., the weight of time and coincidence in the heft of a rope from the boat 8 davit bitt as I draped it around the shoulders of its cross. There was no way of knowing that in just a few days, journalist Rip MacKenzie would be e-mailing me photographs of a Franciscan chaplain standing with a group of firefighters and recovery workers beneath a steel cross (with a sheet of aluminum down-blasted over one shoulder to resemble a shroudlike piece of cloth), atop a place that would briefly be called Ground Zero Hill.
Recalling what a Russian scientist had said many days earlier about two Titanic crosses and a third cross coming, MacKenzie captioned the photo, “Here’s your third cross.”
About 3:30 a.m. Titanic time, I stepped out of the lab onto the portside deck and looked up at the stars. In the past few nights there seemed to have been more bright meteors than usual, including the occasional smoke trailer and spark thrower.
Either one found boredom out here or one found peace. For me, the middle of the ocean was incomparable peace.
Under the meteor shower, as the line of shadow that bisected Turkey and Egypt retreated toward us from the east, my cousin Donna Clarke was still peacefully asleep in New York City. She had shared some tears with our Aunt Hannah earlier that night, a bit worried (in a superstitious sense) that her thirties were almost at an end. Donna “knew” from childhood that she would not see age forty.