The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham

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      Aunt Fish loosened Ma’s collar.

      ‘Bear up now, Dora,’ she said. ‘Israel will represent you. There’s sure to be a crowd and it’ll take a man of Israel’s standing to get to the head of the queue.’

      ‘Harry will go,’ was all Ma would say. ‘Harry will go.’

      Harry didn’t realize he had a passenger in the back of his automobile. I waited until he turned onto Columbus before I emerged from under the pile of blankets Ma and Honey had had brought out. They seemed to imagine Pa might still be wet from the sinking.

      ‘What the hell are you doing there?’ he said. ‘Get out! Get out at once!’

      ‘Make me,’ I challenged him.

      ‘Oh please, Poppy,’ he whined. ‘You’re going to get me into hot water.’

      For all his talk of turning around and taking me home, he carried right on driving. He knew who’d win if it came to a fight. Harry’s trouble was he didn’t have any backbone.

      I said, ‘When Pa steps off that boat I want to be sure the first thing he sees is my face.’

      ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Getting your hopes up. Well don’t come crying to me. I never invited you along.’

      Around 32nd Street we began to see people. Hundreds of them hurrying down to the Cunard pier. Harry parked the Simplex and we joined the crowds. There was thunder rolling in over the Palisades and the Carpathia was on her way up the Hudson, with tugs and skiffs and anything else that would float swarming round her and blasts of magnesium light flashing from the newsmen’s cameras. She was making slow progress, and then word came up she had paused, down by Pier 32, so that certain items could be taken off. Lifeboats. Property of the White Star Line.

      Harry whispered, ‘They’ll fetch a pretty penny, as curios.’

      But they didn’t. As I heard years later, they were picked clean by human vultures before anyone could start the bidding, and the name Titanic was rubbed off them with emery paper and that was the end of that.

      Slowly the Carpathia came home. Some people had cards bearing the name of the ones they were hoping to see. I wished I had thought to make a card. They held them up, praying for a wave or a smile, but nobody at the rail was smiling or waving.

      It was half past eight by the time they began to warp her in, and then the thunderstorm broke. We waited another hour, in the rain, until she was moored and the gangplank was lowered, and lists of survivors were finally posted. That was when I got separated from Harry.

      There was such a crush I could scarcely breathe and I was wet to the skin.

      ‘Please,’ I asked the man in front of me, ‘can you see if Minkel is there?’

      But he gave me an elbow in the ribs and I never saw him again. A woman said she’d find out for me if I gave her a dollar, but I didn’t have a dollar. And so I just found a place to lean, against the customs shed, figuring the best thing was to stand still and allow Pa to spot me easily.

      Then a Cunard porter noticed me.

      ‘Are you all right, Miss?’ he said. ‘Is it First Class 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’.

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