Theodate’s recovery took time. Her spiritualist friends rallied and arranged for her to stay in a private home in Cork. She arrived with her face still battered and vividly hued, wearing a mélange of clothing that she had selected from a collection donated by Queenstown residents. Her host family placed her in a guest room with white walls, tulips in window boxes, and a lively coal fire. Until this point she had existed in a kind of emotional trance, unable to feel much of anything. But now, suddenly, in this cozy home, she felt safe. “I dropped into a chair and, for the first time, cried my heart out.” She received letters of consolation. Mary Cassatt wrote, “If you were saved it is because you have still something to do in this world.”
To complete her recovery, Theodate moved on to London, to the Hyde Park Hotel. Henry James was a regular visitor. Theodate described herself as being “in such a state of exhaustion and shock” that she would drift off to sleep in his presence, but each time she awoke, he was there, “his folded hands on the top of his cane, so motionless that he looked like a mezzotint.” Though she had adored England on her past visits, she now found it utterly changed. “You can have no idea of the war atmosphere here,” she wrote to her mother. “It is suffocating, it is so—not depressing—but so constantly in the thoughts and on the lips of everyone.” She returned to her beloved house, Hill-Stead. For long afterward she endured severe insomnia, and nightmares in which she searched for her young companion of the Lusitania, Edwin Friend. On the worst nights a cousin would walk her through her house until she had calmed enough to return to bed.
She eventually adopted the “gold collar” and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys’ school as a memorial to her late father. She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today.
Her companion, Edwin Friend, had indeed been lost but was reported by members of the reconstituted American Society for Psychical Research to have paid the group several visits.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Gun in the Museum
IN THE DUSTY TIMELINE of world events installed in my brain back in high school, the Lusitania affair constituted the skimpiest of entries, tucked somewhere between the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years—half the span of the entire war. But that was just one of the many aspects of the episode that took me by surprise. As I began reading into the subject, and digging into archives in America and Britain, I found myself intrigued, charmed, and moved.
What especially drew me was the rich array of materials available to help tell the story in as vivid a manner as possible—such archival treasures as telegrams, intercepted wireless messages, survivor depositions, secret intelligence ledgers, Kapit?nleutnant Schwieger’s actual war log, Edith Galt’s love letters, and even a film of the Lusitania’s final departure from New York. Together these made a palette of the richest colors. I can only hope I used them to best effect.
Finding these things was half the fun. Every book is an expedition into unfamiliar realms, with both an intellectual and a physical component. The intellectual journey takes you deep into a subject, to the point where you achieve a level of expertise. A focused expertise, however. Am I an expert on World War I? No. Do I know a lot now about the Lusitania and World War I–era U-boats? Yes. Will I ever write another book about a sinking ship or submarine warfare? Most likely not.