Written
by Ananke
Powell
Based on some situations originated by James Cameron.
I had never hoped to see her in the flesh
again, and yet somehow the sight of her did not surprise me.
Eight years had passed since the demise of
the Titanic...countless sunrises and sunsets rising and falling, countless,
myriad sketches drawn against the Santa Monica Pier, all blended together into
one stark mural...the mural by which I had come to measure my life. Now, as
then, it was a fairly meaningless one.
Strange how, in nearly three decades, an
eternity to a broken soul, I've accomplished so little. I could have gone far,
people have told me...a lad with my talent and charisma...could've gone
far...indeed. I've survived. After that night aboard the doomed ship, a ship
built by my fine steel, survival seems to be an accomplishment in itself. I
asked for precious little else from God, or life.
I've never been a person for the material
articles of life...social appearances to the contrary...rough and tumble has
always suited me just as well as anything else. For years after the sinking of
the great Titan, I wondered…would it have suited her? Did it suit her? Was she
out there, scraping out a bare existence beneath the same stars I stared at
each night...was she happy, healthy? Questions I asked myself often enough over
the years, and never sought to answer. What if I had sought...would it, could
it have been different?
No.
I've always known better. I did the right thing
that April, turning my back on New York City and the name scratched on the
condemned survivors’ list. Rose Dawson. Rose. Somehow, after weeks spent
recovering from hypothermia, shock, pneumonia...in the hospital, surrounded by
newspapers and the more official, no stowaways or unaccounted for names allowed
survivors lists, I thought long and hard about that name...and convinced
myself, albeit halfheartedly, that I had to move on. Without Rose.
After I had come to that cold conclusion, the
glory and seemingly infinite beauty of those days we were together seemed much
further away, and reality...the realities of the naivety and childish
recklessness of our affair, the eventual miseries, seemed stark, unbending.
For, at least in my mind, if not heart, that was how I forced myself to see our
relationship...a social arrangement that could have happened anywhere, with
anyone. At the time of our courtship and eventual engagement, I had been adrift
in my own uncertainties, callous in my insecurities...and she a passionate,
lonely, fiery girl verging on womanhood, frightened by nothing and no one.
Brief years later, nothing had changed.
I crumbled the survivors’ lists and gave Rose
DeWitt Bukater a funeral Philadelphia society whispered of for years. God
knows, in those days I wasn't exactly fervent for another fist fight with fate.
I moved on. I survived. In time, after a few years, I even forgot the details
of her face, the intimacies of her body, and flung the last, formally sterile
portraits I had commissioned of her into the ocean, with the memories. Yes, I
survived. Until April 15, 1920.
The pier at Santa Monica was quiet, but by no
means empty...the typical evening crowd of lovers and anniversary couples
filtering in for a glimpse of the always extraordinarily beautiful sunset,
their conversations whispered and shy, marred only by the occasional laughter
or shrill cry of a child. It was a scene I had watched and sketched many times,
but that evening the familiar drawing urge wasn't present. Tired, feeling the sorrow
of the sinking’s anniversary more than ever before, I was stretched out on a
bench, absently listening to the gulls and squinting at a few early stars. The
pier had become my home...a haunt where my most treasured sketches were
created, where my memories could be washed away with the tides.
Strange how I took such a interest in
art...it symbolized everything threatening to my former existence...in Rose's
case, freedom and rebellion, spirit, fire...and, of course...Jack Dawson. I can
still recall the most precise details of that drawing...even when every other
memory of Rose is gone into the misty recesses of my inner mind. It still
infuriates me, though the anger is now tempered by rather amused resignation.
Only Rose would have dared flaunt me in quite that way. I deserved it. And I
have no doubt Jack Dawson got more than he could have hoped to handle.
And lost far more than he could ever have
thought possible. Poor, reckless boy.
I remain uncertain just what it was that
pulled my attention away from the crowds and my artistry…the fading sunlight,
perhaps, glinting on her hair…lighter, bleached by hours outdoors and fewer
treatments…but nonetheless Rose. Her laughter followed immediately after the
sighting, broken by protests and shrieks as her companion--a man, with pale
blond hair and a Bohemian’s grace--pulled her towards the beach. Horse rides, I
realized, the penny for a ride astride variety.
I found myself standing, dropping my papers
and charcoal, watching the noisy, spirited tableau as it unfolded. He pressed
money into the gypsy booth owner’s hands, swinging his hands about her waist
with excruciating familiarity, tossing her up on the saddle with ease. She
laughed, shouting and grabbing for the reins as he backed away and grabbed a
camera from a nearby bench.
Grinning in return, he readied the camera,
tones rising and falling in song, alternately earning embarrassed glares and
posturing smiles from her. The song still echoes in my head to this day--a
long-time favorite of hers, I recall. She would play the thing on the
gramophone for hours on end after a particularly acrid exchange with her
mother…or myself.
Oh, say! Let us fly, dear!
Where, kid?
To the sky, dear!
Oh, you flying machine!
Jump in, Miss Josephine!
Ship ahoy!
Oh, joy! What a feeling!
Feels cold, through the ceiling! Ho, high!
Hoopla, we fly! To the sky so high!
Come Josephine, in my flying machine,
Going up she goes, up she goes!
Balance yourself like a bird on a beam
In the air she goes, there she goes
Up, up a little bit higher!
Oh, my! The moon is on fire!
Come Josephine in my flying machine
Going up, all on good-bye.
One, two, now we're off dear!
Oh, you, pretty soft dear!
Whoa! Say! Don't hit the moon!
Oh, no, not yet but soon! you for me!
Oh, gee! You're a fly, kid!
Not me, I'm a sky kid!
Gee! I'm up in the air about you for fair!
Moments later, photographs taken, he thrust
more coins into the horse owner’s hands, waving her off down the beach with one
hand, smacking the horse on the rump with the other. She shrieked again, but
quickly fell into rhythm with the beast, flying off through the surf,
scattering crowds of people and birds alike.
I stood as if paralyzed, not yards from her
fun-loving companion, watching as she paced the horse to and fro until darkness
threatened to overtake the sand. Her eventual return and dismounting were
reluctant, but in the lamplight her face shone with contentment as I’d never
seen on it before. Looking relaxed and completely natural in the man’s riding
outfit she wore, Rose struggled briefly with the falling strands of golden red
hair, finally declaring them lost and letting the mane tumble free. Her friend
laughed again, slipping an arm over her shoulder and swinging the camera strap
over his own as they made their way up the pier.
Stepping back, I bent to retrieve my
portfolio, half hoping to avoid her glance, half praying that she would take
interest in the drawings scattered about and pause.
In the end, it wasn’t my etched out horizon
that she faced, but the Pacific. She and he stood silently by the rails for
long moments. It amazed me long ago, and amazes me now, how completely her
moods can alter from one moment to the next…celebratory boat flares sounded in
the distance and I watched as the joy drained from her eyes and almost naked
pain flickered across her face, followed by a low, swiftly buried sob. Finally,
she allowed her companion to gently draw her away from the rail, with a shaky
smile, and they walked off hand in hand.
It would be the last I would ever see of
her…I came back to the pier almost obsessively after that anniversary evening,
of course, but they were never to be seen again…actors, the booth owners
commiserated…provided the best business and left town the next day. Indeed, I
found playbills thrown haphazardly under the benches…Jules Calvert and his new
leading lady, the glorious Rose Dawson. It seemed that they got along just as
well in work as in play. Even now, resources say, they have the best of
everything…comfortable careers, frequent travel, two children, a happy
marriage, little to interfere with their Bohemian lifestyle.
April 15, 1929. The last anniversary I
witnessed, and the last I intend to witness. Seventeen years, as many as Rose
DeWitt Bukater was old when she died and Rose Dawson to become Rose Calvert was
born.
At times, when my daughters lie sprawled
across their beds in innocent dreams, I find myself replacing their faces with
those of a beautiful young woman I once loved and of another child, another
little girl that Caledon Hockley used and left to die in a filthy
orphanage…another of Titanic’s ghosts. At times I see Rose’s angry rebellion in
my fourteen-year-old’s gaze, and my youngest…at times she reminds me of my
little crying girl from Titanic. Her weeping echoes even through the cold walls
of this Hockley manse, and at times I think…I think that it is time to join her
in whatever purgatory she calls to me from.
Soon, she says.
Soon, I say.
Caledon Hockley, private memoirs, October
29th, 1929.
The End.