Alice Cleaver lived out her life in North America, fading into obscurity, dying in 1984. What became of her relationship with William Stephen Faulkner-the only person she would let near baby Trevor, on the rescue ship Carpathia-is unknown.
Baby Trevor was raised by his aunt and uncle, George and Lillian Allison, and grew to manhood, only to die in his teens of ptomaine poisoning. His parents’ fortune became the object of a struggle between his aunt and uncle and a woman who claimed to be (but never was able to prove she was) his now grown-up sister, Lorraine.
May Futrelle, rescued in lifeboat nine, never remarried. She spent the rest of her life in Scituate, mostly in the home she’d shared with her husband. While their children’s education was well provided for, May felt a responsibility to pay back $17,000 in cash advances that had gone down on the ship, along with Jack’s half a dozen new “Thinking Machine” stories.
She oversaw the publication of her husband’s final posthumous works, as well as aggressively sought reprinting of his earlier work. The straightforward, journalistic style of Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” stories allowed his wife to keep many of them in print, for many years; and of course “The Problem of Cell 13” became an acknowledged classic of the mystery genre.
Active with the Authors’ League of America and first chairwoman of the American League of Pen Women, May published a number of her own novels, and was a pioneer in conducting writers’ workshop-style clinics for beginning writers, leading to a CBS radio show in the thirties, Do You Want to Be a Writer?
Well into the 1960s, she was pushing the republication of her husband’s fiction-witness the bestselling 1959 Scholastic Book Club collection of “Thinking Machine” stories-and shortly before her death in 1967, May signed exclusive rights for radio adaptations of twenty-eight Futrelle “Thinking Machine” stories, many of which were presented on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. She is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Scituate.
Throughout her life, as her daughter Virginia reported, May would carry out the ritual of tossing a bouquet of fresh flowers into the sea on the anniversary of the tragedy. The memories of that last night remained vivid and with her always.
Futrelle had come rushing into their stateroom, saying, “Get dressed at once-throw anything on. The boat is going down.”
She recalled the screams of women and shrill orders of officers on deck, “drowned out intermittently by the tremendous vibration of the Titanic’s bass foghorn.”
Futrelle remained calm, telling May, “Hurry up, dear, you’re keeping the others waiting,” kissing her, then lifting her like a bride over the threshold and placing her into the lifeboat, one of the last to leave.
“There’s room,” May said frantically, looking about the boat as it began to lower. “Look! Come with me! There’s room!”
“I’ll be along later,” he said.
Her last memory of him, she carried with her-to that cliff, from which she tossed her flowers, and to her grave.
Their lifeboat had not been in the water for more than a few minutes when the Titanic made its final plunge. Over the years she came to question whether or not it was only her imagination…
… but she always swore that she’d seen Jack, standing, clinging to the rail with one hand.
And waving good-bye to her with the other.