The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham

you’re looking for?’

      I said, ‘Mr Abraham Minkel. I can’t pay you though. I don’t come into my money until I’m twenty-one. But my father will tip you.’

      He touched his cap and disappeared, and I didn’t expect to see him again. A sense of service was a thing of the past, as Ma and Aunt Fish often remarked, and everyone expected something in their grubby hand before they’d stir themselves.

      And so I waited, shivering, wondering at the uselessness of Harry Glaser, trying to draw up a balance sheet of my standing at home. I believed my crimes of disobedience, ingratitude and impropriety might just be offset by the triumph of being the one to bring home Pa.

      The ladies from First Class began to file into the echoing shed. There were children, too. Some were crying, most were silent, and the ladies still had on their hats. ‘How odd,’ I thought. ‘A sinking must be a good deal gentler than I imagined.’ And then this happened. I saw a face I knew.

      The very moment I looked at her, she sensed it and looked back at me, quite directly. Then she turned her head away and disappeared into the crowd. I was still puzzling how an Irish, dismissed without references, could have sailed first-class and in such Parisian style, when the Cunard boy reappeared beside me.

      ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid to say I couldn’t find a Mr Abraham Minkel listed, but Mrs Minkel is there, alive and well. You should be seeing her any moment now.’

      But the women had all disembarked. The men filed through next, but my Pa was not amongst them. They all had downcast eyes, and a hurried step, and somewhere in the crowd I heard somebody hiss. Being a survivor isn’t necessarily a happy condition, I realized later. There would always be the question, hanging in the air, too awful to ask, ‘And how were you so fortunate? What other poor soul paid for your life with his? Or hers?’ If you were an able-bodied man, it would have been better form to perish nobly.

      ‘Not spotted her yet, Miss?’ the porter asked. ‘Well, that’s a mystery.’

      He was now taking more interest in my case than I liked. He was like a stray dog, eagerly padding along at my side, on the strength of one brief expression of gratitude.

      I said, ‘It’s not a mystery. It was a cruel mistake. There was no Mrs Minkel. Only my Pa, but he’s not here. Is there another boat? Are there more following on?’

      He looked away.

      ‘I don’t think so, Miss,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t think so at all.’

      People milled around us, plucking at him, wanting his attention.

      ‘My Pa’s lost,’ I said. I knew it.

      And he was glad enough then to make his getaway.

      A woman said, ‘There’s to be a service of thanksgiving. Right away.’

      What did I care? Thanksgiving for what?

      ‘Not just thanksgiving,’ she said, reading my expression. ‘To pray for the ones that were lost as well. A prayer is never wasted.’

      The third-class passengers had been directed to another shed, and a group of them were leaving, and some first-class ladies, too, walking to the nearest church.

      Over the heads of a hundred people I thought I saw the feather trim of the Irish’s hat, and I decided at that moment to add another item to the list of my transgressions. I abandoned all thoughts of Harry Glaser and followed the throng, walking as quickly as I could so as to catch up, trying to remember whether I had ever known her name.

      We had had any number of Marys, several Annes and a Videlma Teresa who broke, against stiff competition, all previous records for brevity of employment with us, but on the whole, their names disappeared. They were, to a girl, impertinent, uncouth and given to ‘carrying on’ so that Ma often predicted her death would be certified as ‘caused by Irish’.

      I had never been in a church before. Ma and Aunt Fish had formulated a plan for their concerted rise in New York society, and a key decision had been to keep a low profile vis-à-vis God.

      ‘Religion gives rise to intemperate opinions, Dora,’ Aunt Fish advised, ‘and a hostess does well to keep those from her table.’

      So we avoided any association with God as carefully as we avoided cold drafts, and, with regard to this, nothing could have made Ma happier than Honey’s choice of Harry Glaser as a husband.

      ‘A good thing about Harry,’ I had often heard her say, ‘is that he doesn’t go in for religion.’

      I knew therefore, as we came to the doors of St Peter’s Episcopalian church, to expect dangerous excesses inside, and I resolved to stay in command of myself. I kept my eyes downcast for five minutes at least, for fear of coming face to face with this God who was too controversial to have to dinner.

      All around me grown men wept and crumbled, and candles were lit, and a song was sung, in poor cracked voices, for those in peril on the sea.

      ‘Too late now for that,’ I thought, aching for the smell of my Pa’s hair tonic. But I liked being there, close to people who had been saved from the dark and deep. I liked how determined they had been to walk to 20th Street and pray when they might have gone home directly and been cosseted with warm milk and cake.

      She was kneeling, across the other side of the church, busy with some Irish hocus-pocus. I kept her in my sights and moved a couple of times, to get nearer to her, squeezing past people who complained and people who were too lost in their sorrow to notice. I had remembered her name.

      When the singing and praying was over I moved quickly, to be sure of blocking her path as she made to leave.

      ‘Nellie,’ I said, ‘is it you?’

      She gave me a stubborn look I recognized, but her face colored. She may have been dressed by Mr Worth, but she still had the look of a maid caught trying on her mistress’s gown.

      I said, ‘My Pa was on the Titanic. Did you see him, by any chance?’

      Still she resisted me, and I felt my chance slipping away, to know the worst, or to find new hope.

      ‘Please, Nellie,’ I begged. ‘Can you tell me anything at all?’

      Her pertness dissolved.

      ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Poppy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. He went back for my muff. I begged him not to, but he would go …’

      We stood face to face but at cross purposes, and people flowed around us, away, out of the church and back into life.

      ‘… it was my Persian broadtail muff,’ she said, ‘and it was an awful cold night.’

      I said, ‘So you did see him? Were you close to him? Did he say anything?’

      ‘He said “Go to the boat station, Nellie. I’ll come to you there.”’

      Then her tears started.

      ‘He lived and died a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Whatever people may say, there were no irregularities between us. I was there by way of secretary to him.’

      I said, ‘How could you be? Mr Levi was his secretary. And anyway, can you read?’

      ‘I can,’ she said. ‘Well. I was more of an assistant. A personal assistant. There was no one could take away his headaches the way I could. And that’s how things stood. I’d swear to it on the good book.’

      They always said that when they were lying. Next thing she’d be asking for wages still owed.

      I said, ‘Where do you live? Where are you going?’

      ‘To my sister,’ she said. ‘Or maybe to my cousin.’

      The slipperiness of the Irish. How right my mother was.

      It was a long walk home. Three miles, I now know, but then I had no idea of distance or time.