“One of the richest men in America at the time, John Jacob Astor IV, age forty-seven, went down with the ship. As did Ida Straus, sixty-three, and her husband, Isador Straus, sixty-seven, a co-owner of the Macy’s department store. Also dry-goods retailer and Omaha resident Emil Brandeis, forty-eight. As a fellow native of Nebraska, I thought you might be interested in that fact. When Mr. Brandeis’s remains were fished from the ocean, he was still wearing his diamond cuff links. I have often wondered what became of those cuff links.”
“I bet you have. But that thing you said about the IRS choosing April fifteenth to commemorate all the dead rich people. Is that true?”
“It’s held by many experts that the imposition of the graduated income tax in 1913, hard on the heels of the sinking of the Titanic, also sank the ordinary American’s ability to amass great personal fortunes. So I imagine it’s true.”
“You didn’t tell me how you met your friend yet.”
“As I said, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes, reimagining the last moments aboard the Titanic. She asked if she could join in.”
“What did she want to do?” I asked. “Rearrange the deck chairs?”
“I don’t understand. The deck chairs were about to be swept out to sea, so what would be the point of rearranging them?”
“Knock knock.”
“Oh. Ha-ha. At any rate, my new friend asked to join in and I told her she would be most welcome if she could hum the melody the orchestra was playing when the ship went down. She asked, ‘Song of Autumn’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’? I opted for ‘Song of Autumn’ of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“There’s some controversy about which the orchestra played. A wistful, minor-key waltz wildly popular in the day? Or the rather too on-the-nose hymn? When I said ‘Song of Autumn,’ my friend answered, ‘Correct!’ She knew both and understood which was the better choice. It shows her to be a person of unusual intellect.”
Of all the gin joints, she walks into his.
“Anyway, we enjoyed ourselves so much that she asked if we might have another sinking after the school day ended.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “What’s your new friend’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“I can tell you that my friend broke her arm the first day of school. She is still wearing a cast and a sling, though the cast is supposed to come off in a day or so. She intends to keep wearing the sling after that because she feels it lends her an air of tragedy. Also she can hide snacks in it.”
“Fiona,” I said, experiencing the kind of exhilaration Frank must feel every time he unearthed a shiny fact he’d squirrelled away in his vast mental warehouse. “I think your new friend is named Fiona.”
“That sounds right.”
I was dying to meet Fiona. “Invite your friend over to play sometime,” I said without thinking. I couldn’t imagine Mimi’s reaction to a strange child in the house. But a child who was willing to be Frank’s friend? I had to think Mimi would be as eager to meet her as I was.
AFTER I RETIRED to my stateroom that night, I fired up my computer and checked the roster of the passengers who did and didn’t survive the wreck of the Titanic. I’m sort of embarrassed to say it, but I choked up scrolling through the list. I guess I’d never thought about the real people much. For one thing, it happened about a century ago so everybody alive then would be dead already anyway. For another, I’d seen the movie with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, who had zero chemistry if you ask me, so despite all the hoo-ha over it when I was just entering my teens, the film hadn’t moved me.
But that list! Just the victims’ names, ages, and hometowns. It told you almost nothing, yet so eloquently. Here are the facts, the list seemed to say. Break your heart on them as you will. When I finally went to bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. May Fortune, sixty, and her daughters, the Misses Ethel, twenty-eight, Alice, twenty-four, and Mabel, twenty-three. They survived. Mark Fortune, sixty-four, and Charles, nineteen, didn’t.
In the middle of the night I woke up just as Xander or the player piano was working through “Nearer My God to Thee.” I decided I had to be dreaming. I didn’t know what “Song of Autumn” sounded like, so my unconscious, obviously, had to go with the too on-the-nose hymn. When I closed my eyes again I saw Miss Alice Fortune bobbing in the current in her lifeboat, wondering if she’d ever see her father again and whether her only brother would swim to safety or be swallowed up by the sea.