The Dressmaker (9 page)

Tess stared at the small face, with its crown of silky hair. A boy or a girl, she didn’t know. She looked now to the mother, realizing that she wasn’t stirring, and felt a sense of relief when she saw that the woman, too, was dead, and would be spared the pain of mourning for her baby. Tess wrapped the baby in her jacket, put it in its mother’s arms, and tried to weep, but no tears would come.

CITY ROOM,
NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK CITY
APRIL 15
1:20
A.M. EST

A
late-night quiet had descended over the newsroom. All the yelling and running and staccato typing that swelled to its usual climax before deadline was over. Carr Van Anda, a gruff, paunchy man with no peer in his ability to pull a story together on deadline, was not one to waste time on stray observations. But now, surveying his domain, the
New York Times
editor was struck with the thought that this grubby place looked as exhausted as he felt.

Cigarette butts on the floor. Papers crumpled, tossed in the general direction of wastebaskets, scattered like dirty snowballs everywhere. Only a few deskmen left hunched over the city desk. He had a fondness for the night crew; they tended to keep bottles of bourbon in their half-open file drawers at which they nipped leisurely through the night. He hadn’t been averse to the offer of a nip or two himself on some of these long night shifts. The bourbon had vanished in the stepped-up pace of the past twenty-four hours, at least among the veterans. No one could afford to lose his edge on a primary night. Now the returns were in, and the morning edition was locked up. It was
going to be a great fight. So Roosevelt won Pennsylvania tonight. But Taft had plenty of tricks up his sleeve and the two men hated each other. They were going to split the Republican vote, which meant a great opportunity for the Democrats, no question. Lots of good stories ahead.

He eyed a bottle propped discreetly in the desk drawer of his city editor, leaned back in his chair, and savored the anticipation of lighting up a fresh cigar. His job was done. He could relax.

“Mr. Van Anda, this just came in.” The night copyboy, his face a shade paler than usual, thrust a wireless bulletin into the editor’s hand. Van Anda scanned it rapidly, noting that it was from the Marconi station in Newfoundland.

“You read this?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the copyboy said, speaking tentatively. “It’s the biggest ship in the world, sir. How could the
Titanic
hit an iceberg?”

“Son, anything can happen at any time.” Some of these green kids never quite seemed to understand that was
why
there was a news business. “Now get me everything we’ve got in the archives on that ship. And”—he stopped him with a raised hand—“bring me anything we’ve got on iceberg collisions.”

The bulletins in their metal cylinders began tumbling down the chute from the wire room above, clattering one after another into the
New York Times
city room, each one adding details to the escalating crisis. The front page of the early edition was opened; reporters were writing fast and the Linotype operators were back in business, waiting for orders.

Van Anda lifted his head after reading one report and listened. The chute was silent.

“Is that all?” he asked.

Nobody answered.

He stared down at the report in his hands: a scrambled transmission from the
Titanic
had come in at 12:27, asking for help, but it cut off abruptly in midsentence.

“Almost an hour ago,” he muttered as he read through the morgue files, listening for the clatter of a cylinder. He paid special attention to the specifications for the
Titanic
, counting and recounting
the official number of required lifeboats. No matter what scenario might unfold, he realized, there weren’t enough. Stupid bastards—a fancy ship without enough lifeboats.

Van Anda paced. How could there be total silence for a full hour from the
Titanic
? He strode over to the reporter writing the original story. “We’re changing the lead,” he said. “Forget the ‘worrisome reports’ angle. Say the ship has sunk.”

“Are we sure?” asked the reporter, mouth agape.

Van Anda sighed. He had been in the business a long time, and he not only trusted his instincts; he saw no need to defend them.

“I am,” he said, and started to trudge back to his desk. It was time for that cigar. He turned back with another thought. “Call Pinky Wade. If there are any survivors, I want her on this story. Full-time.”

“She won’t like that,” the reporter said.

She would be furious, Van Anda knew that. But she was the best human-interest reporter he had, even if it meant taking her off the mental-asylum story.

“I know, not enough danger for her. Call her anyway.”

ATLANTIC OCEAN
APRIL 15
2:45 A.M. EST

Time had disappeared, floating away on the currents. It was cold, so cold; biting deep into her bones, leaving fragments of ice under the skin of her fingertips and ears. The cold was so impossible, it hurt to breathe. The lifeboat felt as if it bobbed on a bubble of air, as if they were somehow in the sky, not on the black water. Where was the horizon? No one bothered to row anymore. With great effort, Tess tried to bail the frigid water seeping through the floor of the half-sunken boat, even as the pleas for help from the water grew fainter and fainter. She looked at Mrs. Brown, and they shared with their eyes a somber reality. They were low in the water, precariously balanced. Any sudden shifting of weight and they would sink. She
stopped bailing as the last cries ended; now the lifeboat moved lazily in circles. A crewman started whistling a mournful tune. She pulled Edmond and Michel close to her, massaging their arms in an effort to impart warmth.

“Merci,”
Edmond whispered.

“Maybe it’ll help a little,” she replied. Their clothing had frozen to their bodies.

All across the black sea she could see blurs of white. What was she seeing? The faces of the dead, she realized. Faces above the water. They hadn’t drowned; they had frozen. It was a graveyard; their faces were the tombstones.

One by one, the bodies began to vanish, sinking down. Those that still floated stared at the sky with sightless eyes. Finally, nothing. The sea was totally calm, a virtual mirror, reflecting the brilliant stars above. The lifeboat floated on the reflected stars, creating an almost magical suspension, as if plucked from a child’s dream.

She could not erase from her mind the face of the man holding out the child with the yellow ribbon in her hair. Another few seconds and she could have done it. She had strong arms and hands; she would have lifted the baby up, held her tight, and brought her into the boat. The child would have held on, arms around her neck, and she and the father would have looked at each other; there would have been relief on his face and she would have promised him, without words, to protect and endure.… She replayed this scenario, over and over, through the long night. Was that child now, with sightless eyes, looking up at the stars?

WASHINGTON, D.C.
APRIL 15
7 A.M. EST

The rising sun filled the eastern sky of Washington with hues of orange and gold, thrusting into silhouette the graceful lines of the
U.S. Capitol. Had the founding fathers understood precisely how beautiful this sight would be on a soft spring morning? William Alden Smith, a Michigan man of small stature, whose kinder colleagues considered him a rough-edged, somewhat naïve product of the Midwest, asked himself that as he stood staring out the window of his fourth-floor office in the Senate Office Building. Soon enough, he would be back to the legal problems of building railroads in Alaska. He liked giving specific attention to detail, something many of his colleagues could not abide. But it was the sight of the Capitol just past sunrise that stirred his soul. Strolling past the guards, wishing them good morning, getting attention back from them—no competition, this time of day—it gave him confidence that he held a niche in this place of power.

A hurried, sharp knock; his door opened before he gave permission. “Senator, did you hear the news?” It was an aide, holding up a copy of the
New York Times
as if it were a shield. “The
Titanic
is supposed to have sunk.”

Smith grabbed the paper, scanning the headline.

“The White Star Line is denying the
Times
story,” the aide said, glancing quickly down at his scrawled notes. “They’re saying everybody is safe and the ship is being towed to port. The
Syracuse Herald
is going with that, and most of the other papers are jeering at the
Times
. But there hasn’t been a word from the ship since twelve-thirty last night.”

“They’re fools,” Smith said sharply. He knew the reputation of Van Anda—if the managing editor of the
New York Times
said the ship had sunk, the ship had sunk. His eyes traveled down the passenger list, riveted by the famous names. Astor, Guggenheim—my God, even Archie Butt, Taft’s White House aide. Who survived? “Bring me every bulletin,” he ordered.

The aide disappeared and Smith walked to the window, catching his own reflection in the glass. Maybe he wasn’t the most imposing legislator in this town, certainly not the most glamorous, but he knew damn well the country would want something more than speeches out of Washington after this catastrophe. There would be a scramble
now—everybody in Congress would be grandstanding and orating and introducing addled legislation that would do nothing. The usual harebrained response.

He stared out his window at the Capitol, drawn as usual to the bronze Statue of Freedom crowning the glistening white dome. He felt his indignation rising. This was a disaster, a moral outrage; it should not be happening. Hearings. There had to be hearings, where the tragedy could be dissected and understood. If he moved fast, he was the man to lead them.

ATLANTIC OCEAN
SUNRISE, APRIL 15

Lord, the cold. Tess could not feel her feet or her fingers now. There was nothing, nothing, not even a groan or a complaint from the others; they floated between sea and sky.