Alice and Elbert Hubbard were never found; nor was Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish. In Queenstown, his wife, Belle, roomed for a time with young Robert Kay, as he recovered from his measles and waited for his grandfather to come and claim him. Joseph Frankum, who had huddled with his family in an unlaunched boat during the Lusitania’s last moments, survived, as did one of his sons, but his wife, his baby daughter, and his four-year-old son were lost. Nellie Huston never got to mail that charming diary-like letter in which she confessed that the size of her derrière impeded her access to her berth. The letter was found in a purse floating on the sea. The three members of the Luck family—thirty-four-year-old Charlotte and her two young sons—disappeared as well. Alfred Vanderbilt was never found, despite a $5,000 reward—a fortune—offered by the Vanderbilt family. Charles Lauriat’s friend and traveling companion, Lothrop Withington, likewise disappeared.
The absence of so many bodies raised haunting questions for families. Were their loved ones now among the anonymous corpses buried at Queenstown? Were they locked somewhere within the hull, owing to an ill-advised last-minute dash for a personal belonging? Did chivalry do them in, or cowardice? Or did they suffer a fate like that of one unidentified woman, whose body came to rest on Straw Island, off Galway, where she was found by the keeper of the island’s lighthouse? She was wearing her Boddy life jacket correctly and had drifted alone for thirty-six days.
Mothers lost children and would be left forever to imagine their final moments or to wonder if somehow, miraculously, their babies had actually been saved and were now in the care of another. Norah Bretherton, the Los Angeles woman who had handed her Betty to a stranger, was spared that brand of haunting. Betty was Body No. 156. Her mother buried her in the graveyard at the Ursuline Convent in Cork. Bretherton’s son survived.
For families at home, waiting for news, the absence of a body left them suspended somewhere between hope and grief. One mother set out to learn as much as possible about her lost boy, Preston Prichard. She was aided by her surviving son, Mostyn, who traveled to Queenstown to search the morgues. “The place is alive with miserable creatures like ourselves,” he wrote. He found no trace of his brother. “It is bewildering to know what to do.”
Mrs. Prichard wrote to dozens of survivors, and, on the basis of information she received, she wrote to dozens more. She sent a flyer with Preston’s picture and a detailed description. Among those she contacted was Grace French, Prichard’s dining companion, who told Mrs. Prichard that she believed herself to be the last person on the ship to have spoken with him. In one of several letters, French told Mrs. Prichard that she had thought of her son often and of their interrupted excursion to find her double on board. French wrote, “I can see his face so clearly in my mind so sunburned and full of life and ambition.”
The many replies offered a fresh view of the voyage and of the trials and sorrows of the last day. The writers recalled fleeting glimpses of Prichard, especially his gregariousness and popularity, and offered their own stories. Mostly, though, survivors tried to offer some small bit of consolation, despite having had only glancing contact with Prichard, or none at all. They assured Mrs. Prichard that her son, given his physical prowess, must surely have been helping women and children up to the last moment.
Theodate Pope, ever true to her spiritualist beliefs, wrote to Mrs. Prichard on February 4, 1916. “I beg of you not to dwell on the thought of what has become of the physical part of the boy you love,” she urged. “Can you not constantly keep in mind that whatever has happened to his body has not in any way affected his spirit and that surely lives and will await reunion with you?”
A second-class passenger named Ruth M. Wordsworth, of Salisbury, England, sought to address the disparity between how things actually unfolded on the ship and the nightmarish scenes conjured in the minds of next of kin.
“I know you must be tempted to have most terrible imaginings; may I tell you that although it was very awful, it was not so ghastly as you are sure to imagine it. When the thing really comes, God gives to each the help he needs to live or to die.” She described the quiet and the lack of panic among passengers. “They were calm, many of them quite cheerful, and everyone was trying to do the sensible thing, the men were forgetting themselves, and seeing after the women and children. They could not do much, because the list prevented the launching of most of the boats, but they were doing their best and playing the man.”
Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.