A LIFE SO CHANGED
Chapter Seven
July 11, 1998
Titanic stands silhouetted against a purple
post-sunset sky. She is lit up like a floating palace, and her thousand
portholes reflect in the calm harbor waters.
In the first class reception room from the
tender are a number of prominent passengers.
The church group had their own chapel and a
ballroom, and they are going to chapel and then dinner in the ballroom.
A petite woman in a red dress is talking to
Ruth.
Rose: "In our group, we had a woman
named Molly Bates. History would call her the 'Unsinkable' Molly Bates."
"Oh, isn’t this ship beautiful?"
asked Molly, with a smile, as she and Ruth walked with the group.
"Yes, it is."
Rose: "By the next afternoon, we had
made our final stop and we were steaming west from the coast of Miami, with
nothing out ahead of us, but ocean..."
July 12, 1998
The ship glows with the warm creamy light of
late afternoon. On the bridge, Captain Smith turns from the pinnacle to First
Officer William Murdoch. "Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let’s stretch her
legs."
"Yes, sir."
Murdoch leaves to go toward the bridge room.
"Full ahead, Mr. Moody."
"Very good, sir."
Sixth Officer Moody moves the engine
telegraph lever to "All ahead full". In the engine room, the
telegraph clangs and moves to "All ahead full".
"All ahead full!" said Chief
Engineer Bell.
On the catwalk, Thomas Andrews, the
shipbuilder, watches carefully as the engineers and greasers scramble to adjust
valves. Towering above them are the twin reciprocating engines, four stories
tall, their ten-foot-long connecting rods surging up and down with the turning
of the massive crankshafts. The engines thunder like the footfalls of marching
giants.
In the boiler rooms, the stokers chant a song
as they hurl coal into the roaring furnaces. The "Black Gang" are
covered with sweat and coal dust, their muscles working like part of the
machinery as they toil in the hellish glow.
"All right. We go all full ahead. Let’s
stoke her right up," said one of the stokers.
Under water, the enormous bronze screws chop
through the water, hurling the steamer forward and churning up a vortex of foam
that lingers for miles behind the juggernaut ship. Smoke pours from the
funnels.
Jack and Fabrizio are running toward the bow.
Jack leans over, looking down fifty feet to where the prow cuts the surface
like a knife, sending up two glassy sheets of water. The riven flares higher at
the bow as the ship’s speed builds.
Captain Smith is standing at the rail of the
bridge deck. He looks happy at the sight of his ship gaining speed. Murdoch
comes back. "Twenty-one knots, sir!"
Captain Smith smiles.
At the bow, Jack and Fabrizio lean far over,
looking down. In the glassy bow-wave many dolphins appear, under the water,
running fast just in front of the steel blade of the prow. They do it for the
sheer joy and exultation of motion.
Jack saw the dolphins in the water. He taps
Fabrizio on the arm. "Look, look...do you see them?"
They watch the dolphins swim, and one was
about to jump.
"Look, it’s going to jump."
It did.
"Woohoo!"
Captain Smith accepts a cup of tea from Fifth
Officer Harold Lowe. He contentedly watches the white V of water hurled from
the bow like an statement of his own personal power.
Fabrizio looks forward across the Atlantic,
staring into the sun sparkles.
"I can see the Bahamas already. Very
small of course."
Jack climbs excitedly up on the railing,
exulting in the moment.
"I’m the king of the world!"
Both of them shout in a happy joy. Jack
spreads his arms out like wings, and closed his eyes to feel the wind in his
face and hair.
*****
"She is the largest moving object ever
made by the hand of man in all history..." said J. Bruce Ismay, the
managing director of the White Star Line. "...and our master shipbuilder,
Mr. Andrews here, designed her from the keel plates up."
He indicates a handsome thirty-nine-year-old
Irish gentleman to his right, Thomas Andrews, of Harland and Wolf Shipbuilders.
They were invited to lunch.
The group assembled for lunch the next day.
Ismay was seated with Cal, Rose, Ruth, Jenna, Molly and Rob Bates, and Thomas
Andrews in the Palm Court, a beautiful sunny spot enclosed by high arched
windows. The others were there, too, in other tables in the Palm Court.
"Well, I may have knocked her together,
but the idea was Mr. Ismay’s. He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale, and so
luxurious in its appointments, that its supremacy would never be challenged.
And here she is..." with a knock on the table, "...willed into solid
reality."
The waiter arrives to take orders. Rose is
writing notes to Jenna. Ruth notices.
"Stop it! You're being rude," she
said in a whisper.
Rose made a face at her.
"She knows," said Cal, taking the
note away from her, and crumbled it up. Then he turns to the waiter.
"We’ll have the steak. Medium rare." He turns to Rose after the
waiter went to Mr. Ismay. "You like steak, right, sweetpea?"
Rose turns to him and gave him a fake smile.
Cal ordered all three of them. Him, her, and Ruth. She hated steak, and he knew
that.
Molly is watching the dynamic between Cal and
Rose.
"So, you gonna cut her meat for her too,
Cal?" She turns to Mr. Ismay. "Hey, ah, who came up with the name
Titanic? Was it you, Bruce?"
"Yes, actually. I wanted to convey sheer
size. And size means stability, luxury...and above all strength."
Rose is hearing this. She thinks he’s boring.
She asked him a question.
"Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay?
His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular
interest to you."
Jenna choked on her breadstick, suppressing
laughter. So did Mr. Andrews.
"What’s gotten into you?" asked
Ruth, angrily.
"Excuse me," said Rose, as she got
up and walked away.
"I do apologize," said Ruth,
mortified.
"She’s a pistol, Cal. I hope you can
handle her," said Molly.
"Well, I may have to start minding what
she reads from now on, won’t I, Molly?" He was tense, but feigning
unconcern.
"Freud? Who is he? A passenger?"
asked Mr. Ismay, a little angry.
*****
Jack sits on a bench in the sun. Titanic’s
wake spreads out behind him to the horizon. He has his knees pulled up,
supporting a leather bound sketching pad, his only valuable possession. With
conte crayon, he draws rapidly, using sure strokes.
An emigrant from Manchester named Cartmell
has his five-year-old daughter, Cora, standing on the lower rung of the rail.
She is leaned back against his beer barrel of a stomach, listening to him,
about how the ship moves.
The sketch captures them perfectly, with a
great sense of the humanity of the moment. Jack is good. Really good. Fabrizio
is talking with a young Irishman, Tommy Ryan.
"The ship is nice, ah?" asked
Fabrizio.
"Yeah. It’s an Irish ship."
"It’s English, no?"
"No, it was built in Ireland. Fifteen
hundred men built this ship. Solid as a rock. With big Irish hands."
They see four dogs being walked. One of them
is a black French bulldog. It is among the ugliest creatures on the planet.
"That’s typical. First class dogs come
down here to take a shit," said Tommy.
Jack looks up from his sketch. "That’s
so we know where we rank in the scheme of things."
"Like we could forget? I’m Tommy
Ryan." He shakes hands with Jack.
"Jack Dawson."
"Hi," said Tommy.
"Fabrizio," said Fabrizio.
"Hi. Do you make any money with your
drawings?"
Jack glances across the well deck, not
hearing Tommy’s question. At the aft railing of B deck promenade. He sees Rose
walking up the rail. Jack, unable to take his eyes off of her.
They are across from each other, about sixty
feet apart, with the well deck like a valley between them. She on her
promontory, he on his much lower one. She stares down at the water on her
right. Jack is on her left. He is riveted by her. She looks like a figure in a
romantic novel, sad and isolated.
Fabrizio and Tommy follow Jack’s stare to
Rose. Fabrizio and Tommy grin at each other.
"Ah, forget it boy, you have to have the
angels to fly out of your ass to get next to her," said Tommy.
Rose turns suddenly and looks at Jack. He is
caught staring, but he doesn’t look away. She does. Why is that guy staring at
me? But then looks back. Please stop staring at me, she thought. But deep
inside, she liked it. It was the way he was staring at her.
Fabrizio is waving at Jack, and laughs. Jack
sees a man come up behind her and takes her arm.
"What?" asked Rose.
"What is wrong with you?" asked
Cal.
"Nothing!"
Rose jerks her arm away, but when she did,
she looked at Jack. Jack looked concerned.
I just want to die, she thought when she
stormed away and Cal followed her.