Nothing But Water

I don't recall her face, but why would I? We were in different classes, different lifeboats and, from what she's just told me, she spent all her time on the Carpathia stealing napkins to use as diapers. I, on the other hand, alternated between mourning my 19 lost trunks and collecting business cards.

Juliette's hair is piled loosely atop her head in a large bun. It's an old-fashioned style—I much prefer my own short bob—but her long, thick strands are luxurious enough for me to envy them. Her dress is a little out of date, too, but the color, an Egyptian blue, is remarkable. I feel a little guilty for making mental notes about my guest, which I fully intend to use in my book, but I don't get the sense she's the type who'll hold it against me.

Sunlight slants through the balcony doors and envelopes the apartment in a gauzy haze that makes me feel like a character in a Colette novel. It's spring in Paris and we're in between what will undoubtedly be two bookend wars. A rather quaint way of phrasing my fears, but on a morning like today it's not hard to shake off the sense of gloom that's settled over the city. Everything's green, green, green and the air is ethereal with hope.

On the street below, motor cars rush past while the usual crowds congregate at the tables outside the cafes. Up above, wispy clouds dot the sky. If anyone speaks of Hitler today, they're a fool.

When I compliment Juliette on the color of her outfit, she beams.

“I dyed it myself,” she says. “I convinced my father to let me confiscate a tiny room in our tiny house. Which was no easy feat, I can tell you. With the cloth dying and the crafts, I've managed to bring in a nice little sum so far. Next month should be even better. It helps so much with the girls' expenses, you know.”

The mention of money strikes me as crass but I let it go.

Juliette's brow furrows, as if she senses my disapproval, but she helps herself to a second chocolate croissant and downs it along with a hefty dose of cafe au lait. When she wipes her mouth with her napkin a few minutes later, she grins across the table at me with the guilt-free smile of a school girl. “Funny, isn't it?”

“That we barely know each other but it feels like we're old friends?” I ask, though it isn't really a question. It's what they all say. And it does feel comfortable for the two of us to be sitting here on this bright morning. There's something endearing about her I can't put my finger on.

Juliette nods. “As if we've been through hell together.”

I eye the lone chocolate croissant left on the tray at the center of the table. It looks enticing but at 53 I don't have the figure I once did. Better to have a smoke. Without asking her permission, I reach for my silver case and tap out a cigarette. “We have been through hell together.”

Her expression dims.

“And come out on the other side,” I add belatedly. I want all the information she can give me but at the same time I dread the dark words that will inevitably follow our opening banter. Every interview proceeds along the same trajectory, no matter what pastries I serve or how temperate the weather is.

Not for the first time I wonder why I've set myself the task of writing about the disaster. As it is I've got four haute couture articles commissioned for Women's Wear Daily, all of them overdue. Yet instead of getting down to business, here I sit, foisting croissants on an unsuspecting Frenchwoman before I probe her soul.

Juliette's dark eyes meet mine. “You know I lost my husband that night?”

I'm not surprised. Nearly all the women on board lost their men. I flick open my lighter and hold the cigarette to the flame. The tip glows red as I lean back in my chair and take a long drag.

“No,” I say. “I didn't. I'm sorry.”

“I was pregnant—”

The rest of the sentence hangs unspoken in the air. I wave my arm over my head to dispel the cloud of smoke above me but I can't help feeling I'm trying to rid the air of sadness as well. “I'm sorry,” I say again. “I mainly lost a lot of expensive dresses meant for rich American ladies so I can't truly understand what you've been through.”

She sets her cup carefully into its saucer. “I remember you.”

I consider claiming to remember her too, but my blush would give me away. Anyway, I don't want to sabotage our rapport with a silly white lie. Odd though, that so many I've interviewed could describe me so clearly when they were wholly unfamiliar to me.

Of course, everyone rambles on about the musical toy pig I toted around back then, my mascot so to speak. But it goes beyond that. So many recollect my great plumed hat perched at just the right angle on my head and my fur muff draped nonchalantly over my arm. They proceed to tell me about my high-waisted dinner gown shimmering as I descended the grand staircase. Or they'll say they spotted me on A Deck next to Hugh Pemberly as he walked his French bulldog.

As if my every moment on board had been filmed and then broadcast across America. It was like that then, though. All of us in first class so accustomed to our fishbowl lives we barely gave it a second thought.

I offer Juliette more coffee but she shakes her head. She breaks eye contact and stares through the open balcony doors. A moment later, she seems to come to a decision.

“It was our last night at sea,” she says. “Before we hit the iceberg, not long after dinner. Your friend was escorting you back to your room.”

Her tone is neutral and if she means to imply anything by the statement, I can't tell. Still, something in her placid demeanor unnerves me. I'm not used to someone else controlling the conversation and I can't say I like it. I try to recall what friend she means and come up blank. Was it a male? Female? Most likely a male, but which one?

“Did we. . .speak?” I ask when the silence is becoming awkward.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “That's actually why I agreed to meet you.”

“Well, how wonderful that we really are old acquaintances.” I stub out my cigarette and reach for a second, then stop myself. “I've no excuse for forgetting, other than to tell you I'm a dreadful scatterbrain these days. My memory's not what it used to be, you know.”

It's a bald-faced lie and I, at least, know it. My mind's as good as it ever was, better, actually, because I rarely touch liquor these days, other than to indulge in an occasional glass of wine. I'd been drunk half the trip on the Titanic and it was sheer luck that I'd gone to bed early the night the ship went down.

I'd lost a fiance in a car crash the year before and not long afterward an Arab fortune teller had drawn my fate in the desert sand. I couldn't grasp everything the man told me but he managed to get across the idea that I was to avoid water at all costs. Neither of these things did much to thwart my impulse to imbibe as much as everybody else in first class.

“Please tell me I didn't insult you,” I say and mean it. “I was rather under the weather on that trip. And then, well—”

She cuts me off. “Your name used to be different,” she says matter-of-factly.

How this relates to our rendez-vous on board, I cannot guess. “It did, yes.”

“It was a Jewish name.”

“Rosenbaum.”

“Why did you change it?” She looks genuinely curious.

I wasn't ashamed of the name. Once upon a time I'd been rather fond of it. “Being a Jew in France in 1934 is not. . .ideal,” I say, “and it's becoming less ideal by the day.”

Juliette tucks a loose strand of that oh-so-luxurious hair behind her ear. She looks pleased. “Hitler's just getting started,” she says. “At least that's what father says.”

Wonderful. Here I sit across from a woman who's positively aglow at the thought that the new Fuhrer is just getting started. I try to sort out where all this is heading. I have no money, or not much of it. Anyway, whatever I'd done or said on board twenty years ago can't be blackmail material. . .can it?

The memory hits me all at once.

Some slight altercation in the foyer. Raised voices. A woman's screams. Two men. A pool of blood on the deck. Shouting and heavy footfalls. A body. Disturbingly still.

Juliette reaches across the table for my silver cigarette case. Without so much as a word, she flicks it open and helps herself to a Gauloise. “It's finally coming back to you,” she says. “Isn't it?”

I hand her my lighter. The room feels suddenly cooler and I wish I'd thought to wear my matching sweater instead of just the shell.

“Yes. No,” I fumble. “Not really.”

She stares at the flame a few seconds before leaning in to light her cigarette. “Give it a minute,” she tells me. “It will.”

“There was a fight,” I say slowly. “A body.”

She sucks on her Gauloise. “Keep going.”

“Whatever happened,” I stutter, “I assure you my involvement was peripheral.”

Was it? I plumb my mind for details. I had been drunk, I “remember” that, for lack of a better word. The ship had lurched from side to side though the sea itself was smooth as glass. An image of my gloved hand clutching a railing inserts itself into my consciousness.

“I was drunk.” My voice is a plea, a denial and an admission rolled into once. “I can't remember.”

Juliette leans back in the chair and stares at the ceiling. Ever so carefully, she blows a smoke ring. It hangs over her, a gray, wavering halo. “Think harder.”

The smell of her Gauloise is making me mad for a drag. I want to rip it right out of her hand. Instead I shut my eyes in an effort to conjure up the scene. White-tie attire stained red, someone sobbing. I hone in on the faces of the men. One of them looks suspiciously like Hugh—corn-silk hair, icy blue eyes.

What had he done?

I open my eyes to find Juliette staring at me.

“Did someone die that night?” I whisper. "Please tell me someone didn't die."

She blows another smoke ring. This one hovers over the lone croissant, which now looks rather pitiful. She's a skilled smoker and I can't help admiring her technique. Yet as the thought forms I can't help despising myself. Here I am on verge of learning my friend murdered someone in cold blood and all I can think of is the elegance of smoke rings.

“Plenty of people died that night,” she says. “Including my husband. Some drowned, others--”

She taps a pillar of ash into the ashtray on my side of the table. It's a reach, so she pulls the glass container closer to her. “I'm not suggesting anything. I'm telling you my husband died that night. On board the Titanic.”

On board. I can't look her in the eye so I focus on the bookshelf behind her. It's stuffed to the gills with novels, nonfiction, a smattering of poetry. None of the books has my name on it. Stacks of Vogue lie in piles on the floor, years and years worth. When I left France in April 1912 I was so sure my writing mattered. No one was better able to discern what fashions would catch on, no one was more adept at translating Parisien style into American panache. . .

Or so I thought. When I returned in May it was as if the patterns that defined my life had shifted, as if someone had turned some internal kaleidoscope and forever altered who I was. I'd thought it was the collision . . . but had there been something more? Some terrible secret, something so awful I'd repressed it all these years?

I force myself to ask the question. “Did Hugh—did my friend—kill your husband?”

I hadn't seen Hugh for years, not since we'd crossed paths back in Italy before the War. He'd been married, his new wife on his arm. It had been a gallery soiree in Florence and he'd greeted me stiffly then disappeared for the rest of the evening. I'd attributed it to the fact that he was married and that I'd rebuffed him after the wreck. He'd written a half dozen times but I'd left his letters unanswered. For that matter, I hadn't even read them. At some point I got rid of them.

Surely, if Hugh had committed murder. . .but why wouldn't Juliette have filed charges?

Nothing makes sense. She must be lying. Has to be lying. But the blood, the body . . .so still. The broken sobs.

All the intimacy I felt upon Juliette's arrival dissolves. As if even the weather is under her control, the sun hides itself behind a mass of clouds and the wind picks up. I rise out of my chair with the intention of pulling the balcony doors shut. But I'm really buying myself a little time.

“Sit down.”

Juliette's voice is hard now and there's no trace of the school-girl grin. The woman in the dated blue dress with a weakness for sweets is gone. I sit down.

“Why on earth didn't you press charges?” I ask. “Why didn't you tell anyone?”

She laughs. I wait.

“My husband was Haitian,” she says, laying the cigarette in one of the slots on the ashtray. “Well, half Haitian. On his mother's side. His father was all French, which is how we met. He came to study here when he was a boy. Engineering. He was a brilliant child and an even more brilliant student. One day I was bringing some of my father's wine to the cafes. It was late in the day and it wasn't my usual occupation. My father was shorthanded and the wine wasn't going to deliver itself. So I volunteered for the task. And there he was, his nose deep in a book, while all around him people laughed and gossiped and drank absinthe. But he took his nose out of it long enough to get a good look at me." She raises both shoulders. "After that—”

“The two children you spoke of, the babies you stole nappies for—they were his?”

“They were his. Simonne was healthy as a horse. Smart as a whip, like her daddy. Louise came early. From the beginning, she was sickly, but with cascades of curls, also like her daddy. She was a fighter too—”

Her voice trails off. I take her distraction as a sign and buy myself that time. When I reach the balcony doors and lay my hands on them, the sky has gone pewter. Outside on the street, a fat man chases his hat as a group of boys erupts into laughter. In the building across the way, women are closing windows and balcony doors. Two elderly gentlemen tuck matching newspapers under their arms and vanish into the depths of their apartment. A girl reading a book jumps up and rushes toward a dim interior.

By the time I return to the table, Juliette's eyes are closed. As if, unlike me, she sees those fatal minutes all too clearly. I get up again and turn on a lamp. Its yellow cone leaps out of the shadows.

“Your friend didn't kill Joseph,” she says when I can finally bring myself to sit down across from her.

“But I thought—”

“He tried to save him. As did you.” She sighs. “Though I can't say your efforts made much difference one way or another. You were very drunk.”

In the dim light, her words reach me but their meaning doesn't sink in. “Hugh didn't kill anyone,” I say. The sentence is tentative, as if I'm trying it on for size.

“My husband wasn't one to suffer fools. His family in Haiti was powerful, closer to royalty than not. He was brought up almost entirely without any consciousness of race. France taught him more than math and science. That's why we were returning to the island, so he could find work there. With two babies and a third on the way, we couldn't go on living off my father's income. And Joseph hated that as it was. My father didn't mind—he tried to convince not to go, but my husband wouldn't listen.”

All this background is lovely but it doesn't answer the question at hand. “If Hugh didn't kill your husband, who did?” I ask her.

No answer.

After what seems like forever, the memory begins to sharpen. "I remember a body. Stewards. Someone sobbing. It was you, wasn't it.”

“Yes.”

Outside, the heavens open and the rain begins to fall. Droplets pelt the glass and the roof rings out with the din of a thousand typewriters. Part of me is moved to tears by Juliette's story. Part of me is already writing the scene. Which makes me a bad person, of that there is not much doubt. But at least I wasn't party to a homicide.

Juliette's eyes fill. I shift in my chair.

“We were heading for our cabin as well," she says. "Hugh, your friend, had you propped up against him. He was half dragging you along the B Deck, even though it was still early. You were, I think, singing but I don't remember what. I recognized the words, even though the tune was American. Someone was behind you. Following you. Another man.”

“I Love You Truly.” The song comes to me out of nowhere. I can hear its melody, smell the glassy sea.

She blinks but isn't as impressed as I am by my contribution. “All through the voyage. . .there were insults, looks. It wasn't bad when we were apart, when it was just me and the girls. But that night we ate together as a family. It was the last night, you know. The waiter seated us right at the center of the second-class dining room. I told Joseph to ignore the talk—what did it matter? We'd be in Haiti soon enough and then we'd have enough money to live like kings. He couldn't let it go. Afterward we put the girls to bed and I convinced him to come with me for a quick walk, to cool down. We were on our way back when the two of you turned the corner.”

“Why were we on the B Deck?”

It sounds horrible but I have to know. Because for the life of me I can't imagine why Hugh and I would have left the comfort of our own insulated world. Not that Edith, with her colorful but relentlessly two-dimensional habits.

She shrugs. “I don't know.”

“Who was the other man?”

Another shrug. “I don't know. But he knew you. You all knew each other. He called you by name. He was trying to catch up with you and he thought my husband pushed you. You. . . lost your footing. . .as we were passing, you see, and he thought, well, he imagined—”

“That your husband pushed us,” I finish for her.

She doesn't respond. Wrong answer.

I take a breath. “That he pushed me.”

The rain on the roof is deafening. It's so loud it has to be hail but I can see through the windows that it's nothing but water.

I can just make out Juliette's voice when she mutters, “I suppose so.”

A few seconds pass before she continues. "You fell against the railing. He, your friend who was following you, thought Joseph had tried to shove you over the side of the boat. To kill you. But he hadn't!"

I try to remember even though I don't want to, not anymore. My gloved hand on the railing. The bloodied shirts. The stewards running toward us. A woman bent over a body. But nothing more.

By sheer force of will, I make myself go back to the beginning. See my hand on the railing. My arm breaking away from Hugh's.

I'd stopped singing. Started crying. Hugh was shouting at me to leave off being so bloody morbid. I'd already broken away by then. I was running for the railing, slipping in my heels. My hands on the railing, my leg raised. Then came the sudden rush of the sea below. So beautiful and serene. So inviting.

Then a man's grasp around my shoulders. A voice, speaking to me in French. Pulling me back.

“Did I—” my voice is hoarse. “did he—”

She lets the silence settle. I press my fingertips against both eyelids.

“When he began hitting Joseph, you tried to explain. You even tried to stop him. You hit him several times. It was your friend—Hugh, the one who'd been helping you—who finally knocked him off his feet," she says. "But by then it was too late. I still can't understand why—my husband was a strong man, still young. The doctors I consulted afterward said it might have been the angle of the fall, or perhaps his heart—the stewards helped your friends move the body. I don't know where they took it but I had to get back to the girls--”

“And you came here,” I interrupt, “to see me, of all people, after all these years. Why?”

“You invited me,” Juliette says simply.

I burst into laughter. I can't help it and I can't seem to stop. I'm not sure if I'm hysterical or if it's genuinely funny. She joins in and I'm not sure if it's because she's sorry for me or not. We laugh so loudly the sound of the rain fades away.

“Are you going to write it in your book?” she asks when we've somewhat regained our composure.

“Of course.”

Even as I say the words, I know I won't. I can't face the possibility that the world would find me culpable. I can't face the possibility that it would dismiss me as a selfish drunk whose recklessness caused an innocent man's death.

I search Juliette's face for a sign of disbelief but she seems satisfied. My gaze flicks away from her to the bookshelf and I bid goodbye to my own ambitions. The Titanic's final voyage is the only story I ever wanted to tell. Now it's the only story I don't want to tell. I don't even want to tell it to myself.

Juliette rises from her chair and grabs her purse. She hasn't worn a coat or even a shawl to match the dated dress. I rush to the entryway and lift my best umbrella out of the stand. When I press it into her hands, she doesn't object.

As she stands before the door, a thought strikes me. “How did you know I was writing a book?”

If she notices the tense shift, she's savvy enough not to say so. After all, it's pouring outside and my umbrella is the only thing saving her from the deluge. “You're a writer,” she says. “It's who you are.”

We say our goodbyes and I pledge to stay in touch. “I'm sure I'll have lots more questions for you,” I tell her and she lays her hand over mine so she can give it a quick squeeze. I promise to send her a copy of the book once it's published. She promises to invite me to Villejuif to sample her father's wine.

Why she believes in me, I cannot fathom.

When I can't hear her heels on the stairs anymore, I lean back against the door and survey the apartment I've loved so much. What seemed spacious two hours ago is unbearably cramped, almost claustrophobic. The roses I've scattered about look wilted, the paintings dull, the novels pretentious. I won't write my book, but I won't stay in Paris either. Another turn of the kaleidoscope, another shift of the soul.

**

This story is fictional but the real-life Edith Russell and Juliette LaRoche were indeed passengers on The Titanic, as well as the young Simonne and Louise. Edith's "lucky pig," a gift from her mother was on the ship too. On a trip to Africa, Russell had her fortune told and the man drew a line in the sand that warned her to avoid the water. Consequently, she felt uneasy about her trip across the Atlantic and actually sought to take another vessel at the last minute but was told her baggage would have to remain on board. So she didn't make the change.

Juliette's husband Joseph was half-Haitian and the two met when he was studying in France. Due to the difficulties of a black man finding work as an engineer in Europe, the family was sailing back to his native country in hopes that he could find a job there.

While many of the Titanic staff were minorities, Joseph was the only black passenger aboard the vessel. Juliette was pregnant at the time and Edith, who then went by Rosenbaum, her Jewish family's name, was an up-and-coming fashion writer.

Newspapers were full of stories about the fates of wealthy passengers but none mentioned Laroche's death at sea. According to Encyclopedia Titanica:

The silence about the stranger-than-fiction life story of the Titanic's only Black passenger astonished noted Titanic historian Judith Geller, author of Titanic: Women and Children First, who said,

"It is strange that nowhere in the copious 1912 press descriptions of the ship and the interviews with the survivors was the presence of a Black family among the passengers ever mentioned."

To be clear, Joseph drowned and was not murdered on board. That part of my story is purely fictional.

Edith did in fact write a story about the Titanic disaster shortly after it occurred, however. And she later met Juliette in the 1930s at the Claridge Hotel in Paris. The widow had refused to meet with other writers but agreed to speak about the disaster with Edith.

It was a labor of love that took decades. Just days after the tragedy, Edith spent hours on the Carpathia talking to survivors, taking down their accounts, and collecting their cards so she could contact them in the future. When she interviewed Juliette years afterward, she apparently told her she intended to publish a book about the Titanic. According to some sources, every publisher she sent the manuscript to turned it down.

The popular fashion writer lost 19 trunks filled with valuable Parisian women's wear on April 15, 1912, but it was Juliette who suffered a far worse ordeal. She never remarried after Joseph's death and, since there is no record of a third child, she must have lost the baby before it was born.

Yet her daughters survived. Simonne lived a happy life and even the sickly Louise made it to the ripe old age of 87. As is true in my story, Juliette returned to France with the girls in 1912 and moved in with her father, a wine seller. To make ends meet, she began dyeing cloth and selling crafts. She worked out of a room in her father's small house.

Despite Edith's lack of a book on Titanic, her detailed account became an important resource for historian Walter Lord. When Edith died, she even left Lord her "lucky pig." She also told him that the ship's sinking made her realize the precariousness of life and, as a result, turned her into an "action-adventure junkie" of sorts:

By the time World War 1 seemed destined to erupt, the former fashion reporter simply knew, inwardly and urgently, that she had to report from the trenches. Had to. She would manage, if requisite, by developing a taste for rugged living, and a talent for deepening her tone, cursing and wearing men’s clothing in a manner that looked just right.

She traveled all over the world in subsequent years and is often credited with being the first female war correspondent, though much of her writing on World War I has been lost.

For years after they met, Edith would send Juliette a box of chocolates or a bottle of perfume on April 15.