Secrets

I’d known Derek Hastings my entire life, but never truly considered him until this moment.

We first met when I was five and he was six, when his family moved into a brownstone just a few houses down from our own. We’d gotten along easily enough and found a mutual love for getting into trouble, whether it was cutting the hair off of his sister’s dolls, pouring ink into my mother’s tea, or hurling dirt clods at carriages as they drove down our street.

After one particularly awful stunt that involved dowsing all of his nanny’s possessions in a can of paint we’d found in his family’s carriage house, he leaned over and kissed me. I was so startled that all I could think to say afterwards was that he better marry me when we grew up. He agreed, and I went to sleep that night secure in my future prospects—even though marriage was easily another 13 years down the line for us both.

The next day, however, I found him in our neighbor’s azalea bushes kissing another young girl that lived on our street. I annulled our fledgling courtship by holding him face down in a puddle of mud until both of our nannies ran out into the street screaming for us to stop.

From then on, our relationship became more about pulling pranks on each other rather than being partners in crime. Our childhood years flew by in a flurry of scraped knees, pulled hair, and ruined pinafores until he was old enough to attend Collegiate School and I was old enough to go to Spence School. Only school—as well as the strict tutelage of the governess my mother hired as soon as I turned 12—were enough to keep Derek and I from attempting to kill each other.

And now here we were, at the same table on the same ship on the same journey back home from our respective family trips across the pond. His family had boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, much to our surprise and our parents’ collective distress.

Once dinner concluded, my mother whisked me back to our staterooms and his father dragged him away for cigars and brandy, anxious to prevent us from causing a scene. But gazing into Derek’s deep brown eyes made me feel more curious than caustic. After all, I was just a few months away from 17, nearly a lady, and he was 18, most certainly a man. Couldn’t our parents recognize that our childhood feud was long behind us?

But no matter how many times I told Mother that she had nothing to worry about, that Derek and I could handle being around each other, she refused to listen. For the first four days of our journey, she held tight to my arm no matter where we were on the ship, always prepared to steer me away should the Hastings family appear.

Dinner, however, could not be avoided. Both the Hastings family and my parents had petitioned the dining room staff to reassign one family or another to a different table, but every time, the wait staff claimed that their hands were tied and that the seating arrangements couldn’t be changed. Our parents were left to come up with their own solutions on how to keep us apart at dinner, which mostly involved pushing us into conversations with every one of our table companions except each other.

They couldn’t stop us from looking at each other, though. Furtive glances across caviar and champagne, small smiles at our companions’ ridiculous quips about wealth and class, longing looks when dinner ended all too quickly and he was corralled into the smoking room with the other men.

On the night of the 14th, I decided that enough was enough. Most everyone had gathered after dinner in the reception room. My mother had been over-served at dinner and was gossiping away with the other mothers over yet another glass of champagne. My father had disappeared into the smoking room. Derek’s parents were taking a stroll on the deck. And Derek, impossibly tall, impossibly handsome Derek, had managed to sneak away from his parents and lock eyes with me from across the reception room.

I quietly excused myself from a conversation I’d been half paying attention to with two ladies around my age, claiming that there was something I needed to retrieve from my room. As I rose and made my way towards the door, I kept my eyes on Derek the whole time. The closer I got to the exit, the closer he did as well, until we found ourselves both leaving the reception room at the same time.

We surveyed the hallway outside the reception room and when we found it empty, we ran, giggling like children, towards his stateroom.

We paused, breathless, in the doorway to his room, gazing intently at each other as we had the past four evenings.

“Our parents have been dead-set on keeping us apart, but I’d say that we don’t hate each other anymore, Derek,” I said.

“It was never you that I hated,” Derek confessed. “It was myself. I hated myself for ruining the relationship I had with you, even though we were so little. Because to me, you are perfect.”

I stared into his deep eyes for one long, loving moment before leaning in and kissing Derek like it was the only thing I needed to be good at in life.

Between kisses, we planned out our lives together. When we got back to New York, he would explain to our families that our feelings for one another had changed and ask my parents if he could court me. With some careful convincing, we’d get them to say yes. After all, what was not to love about the Hastings family? They possessed enough wealth, status and power to satisfy my mother. Then we would court for as long as necessary—no more, maybe a tad bit less. We would marry next spring, and take our honeymoon somewhere adventurous.

As things heated up between the two of us, we made the final decision. If by this time next year we were to be wed and our relationship consummated, then why wait? Why not make things official at that very moment?

We fell into his bed. Neither of us knew what we were doing, except that it felt right—so very, very right, even though it had been preached from the pulpit that what we were doing was very, very wrong.

It was only when we were holding each other afterwards that we noticed how still and silent the ship was.

The engines had shut off.

Something was wrong.

-x-

Leaving his stateroom, finding our parents, and making our way to the lifeboat deck was a blur, but my last moment with Derek remains crystal clear in my memory.

Mother was arguing with an officer, begging him to let my father board a lifeboat, while Father hung back, trying to do the noble thing. While they were turned away, Derek and I had our last private moment.

“I’ll get on another boat, I promise,” he whispered, pressing his forehead to mine.

“You promise?” I whispered back. He pulled away slightly and looked at me—really looked at me with those eyes—and it was clear that he could not make that promise.

I quickly grew hysterical.

“You’re still technically a child.”

“I’m eighteen. They won’t let me in the boat.”

“We can tell them you look older than you actually are.”

“They won’t let me in the boat.”

“You can’t leave me.”

“I know I can’t.”

And before I could cry, before I could scream, he kissed me. His final gift to me, one last kiss to remind me of all the others we’d shared just hours before.

We held tightly to each other, soaking in every last detail: his blond hair, mussed from rolling about in the sheets; his evening coat, which he whipped off to wrap around my shaking shoulders; his deep gaze, which had shown his affection for me even as our parents had struggled to keep us apart.

That night, his gaze remained strong and steady while mine blurred with tears. He wanted to be strong for me. And the more apparent it became that he would not be joining me in the lifeboat, the more I tried to stifle my sobs and be strong for him as well.

Father stepped back into the crowd on the deck while two stewards forced my mother into a boat. I climbed in as well and the officer yelled, “Lower away!” just as Derek put his lips to my ear.

“I love you.”

I said it back to him a hundred times over. I repeated the three words until I knew he could hear me no longer. I held his gaze until the boat hit the water and we were twenty, thirty, forty yards away. I continued to stare at the spot where I last saw him until I forced myself to realize that he had moved to another part of the ship.

After that, I broke down.

-x-

Father died that night, as did Derek, Mr. Hastings, and over 1,300 other men. Mother and I found some closure in the fact that Father’s body was retrieved, but Derek and his father were never found.

Father had no debts upon his passing and had left Mother and I quite comfortable financially. We realized how fortunate we were to be so well set up for success, as many other Titanic widows found themselves destitute upon their husbands’ passing. Mother ordered us both a mourning wardrobe from Lord & Taylor and assured us that we had all the time in the world to grieve for Father. Still, though, there was an unspoken understanding between us that one or both of us would need to find a husband to continue supporting us should Father’s trust reach its limits.

Although girls younger than I had married recently, I naively assumed that this responsibility would fall primarily on Mother–after her two years of mourning was up, of course. In that time, I could go to university, find someone who excited me as much as Derek had.

Life, however, got in the way.

The first month after the sinking, Mother and I both were pale, fatigued, and withdrawn. Everyone attributed it to our grief. As she improved, however, I got progressively worse, scarcely able to keep any food down. My monthly cycle had stopped entirely, which my lady’s maid had dismissed as another side effect of grief.

But as I was trying on new dresses in front of Mother and my maid ahead of my 17th birthday in July, we all finally acknowledged what could no longer be ignored: a small, yet defined bump on my stomach.

Mother let her anger overcome her for a single moment, reaching out and slapping me across the face for my indiscretion. My maid cried out, but I refused to make a sound. Part of me felt that I deserved it.

Then Mother went into planning mode, determined to find me a husband before the situation got even more out of hand.

By August, I was engaged to one of Mother’s friend’s sons, a man 10 years my senior who understood my situation and was amenable to raising my bastard child.

By September, we were wed. I spent most of my wedding day enclosed in a foggy world where Derek was my groom, where my mother’s friends didn’t pester me for details about the sinking, where my stomach wasn’t awkwardly constricted under Mother’s stiffest corset.

My new husband and I spent our honeymoon at his family compound in Nantasket, although the gossip columns reported that we were in France. My husband eventually returned to work in the city, and I remained at the Nantasket house, waiting out my confinement under the careful eye of my maid. In December, I gave birth to a baby boy with no one but my maid and a midwife present. Once it became apparent that my son—Derek’s son—was healthy and strong, my mother saw fit to announce to her friends that my new husband and I were expecting.

A year to the day after the sinking, my son made his debut in New York society, even though he’d been cooing, kicking, and crying for nearly four months at that point. The other ladies commented about how strong he was already, how much he looked like me, and I encouraged the comparison, even though every time I looked at him, all I could see was Derek.

-x-

Three years later, Mrs. Hastings came calling just as I was putting Derek’s son and his new baby half-brother down for a nap. I was shocked to see her standing at my door; I hadn’t seen her since the night of the sinking.

She was visibly distraught, clutching a handkerchief that was damp with sweat and tears. I escorted her into the parlor and wrapped an arm around her shaking shoulders. She dissolved into heaving sobs.

I held her like that for several long moments before she finally caught her breath and said, “They found him.”

“Found who?”

“Derek. They found him.”

“They found…his body?” I asked, still confused. It seemed impossible to retrieve any bodies from the depths of that freezing ocean, especially three years later.

“No, they found him,” she cried. “He’s been here all along. Well, not here, but in a sanitarium in Philadelphia. He survived.”

The corners of my vision grew black and blurry, and I felt myself slip off the chaise and hit the floor.

-x-

Improbably, impossibly, Derek had survived by clinging to a capsized collapsible lifeboat. But the injuries he sustained during the Titanic’s sinking had damaged his memory so badly that he could not recall who he was. For years, he had mistakenly believed that his name was Darren. Some fellow survivors who had met him on the Carpathia had started a charitable fund to send him to a sanitarium in Philadelphia.

For years, the doctors had tried every method they knew to jog his memory. Finally, some experimental new treatment, one that Mrs. Hastings couldn’t bear to describe, had cured his amnesia. He would return to his parents’ home in two days’ time.

I neglected to mention Mrs. Hastings’s visit when my husband asked me that evening how my day had gone. Instead, I gave him the usual spiel about calling cards, playtime with the boys, and dresses from Bergdorf Goodman. As I prattled on and watched him lose interest, I began forming my plan.

Once Derek was settled at home, I’d call on him and his mother. I’d bring my eldest son, Derek’s son, with me. Derek would see us, stretch out his arms, and we’d fall into them and never let go again.

I’d tell everyone the truth about my eldest son’s parentage, reputation be damned, and the judge would have to grant my husband and I a divorce on grounds of adultery. Then Derek and our son and I would move far away, so far that the scandal couldn’t follow us, and we’d live as a family the way we’d always intended.

But just as she had three years prior, Mother arrived to steer me away from Derek.

She arrived in the middle of dinner the next night, which deeply annoyed my husband, who barely tolerated her even when she wasn’t interrupting his routine. She dismissed our servants from the dining room, which nearly made my husband pop a blood vessel with rage.

“Are you aware that the man my daughter had an affair with has been discovered and is soon to return to the city?” announced my mother before my husband could begin berating her.

His ire quickly switched from her to me.

“Think about it,” I said hurriedly. “We tell everyone the truth, the courts grant us a divorce, I go to live with Derek, and you’re free to marry whomever.”

My husband said nothing for a long beat, then pulled a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook out of his dinner jacket. He lit one, exhaled a long stream of smoke, then finally spoke.

“You do realize,” he said slowly. “That in the eyes of the law, both of your sons are mine?”

My blood turned to ice in my veins as I understood what he was implying.

“If you leave me,” he continued. “If you go to him, this Derek fellow, I will ensure that you will never see either of your sons ever again.”

Tears filling my eyes, I glanced at my mother. She merely smirked with satisfaction.

“Do you understand?” asked my husband.

“I understand,” I whispered.

“I didn’t catch that, can you speak up, please?” he asked.

“I understand,” I said, gulping down a sob.

“Thank you for helping my daughter to see sense,” my mother said before exiting our dining room with a flourish.

-x-

Weeks later, I was at the park with my sons when I saw him.

Derek looked much the same as he had the night of the sinking. Same deep brown eyes, same golden hair. As he approached us, though, I saw how ill-fitting his suit now was, how deep the bags were under his eyes, how there was a touch of premature gray streaking through his hair at his temples. Whatever he’d undergone at the sanitarium, it had made him age 30 years in only three.

He didn’t dare say hello, or get closer than 20 feet from us. Derek merely watched my eldest son—our son—run around and collect pebbles and leaves to throw into his baby half-brother’s pram.

Finally, Derek made eye contact with me, and I drew in a sharp breath when our eyes locked. For all he’d been through, for as frail as he looked, his deep brown gaze remained as strong and steady as ever.

I raised my hand as if to reach out to him, but the memory of my husband’s threat made me pause and instead lift my hand in greeting.

He waved back, then turned and walked away.