Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Page 5

  Her walks with Helen Bones usually began with Edith driving herself and Helen to Rock Creek Park in her car. Afterward, they invariably returned to Edith’s house in Dupont Circle for tea. But one afternoon in March 1915, Helen arrived at Edith’s home in a White House car, which took them to the park. At the end of the walk, Helen suggested that this time they have tea at her place, the White House.

  Edith resisted. The walk had been a messy one. Her shoes were muddy, and she did not want to be seen by the president of the United States in this condition. As she told Helen, she feared being “taken for a tramp.” In fact, shoes aside, she looked pretty good, as she herself later noted, with “a smart black tailored suit which Worth had made for me in Paris, and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very-good-looking ensemble.”

  Helen insisted. “There is not a soul there,” she told Edith. “Cousin Woodrow is playing golf with Dr. Grayson and we will go right upstairs in the elevator and you shall see no one.”

  They rode to the second floor. As they emerged, they ran headlong into the president and Grayson, both of whom were in their golf clothes. Grayson and Wilson joined the women for tea.

  Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ‘turn a corner and meet your fate.’ ” She noted, however, that the golf clothes Wilson had been wearing “were not smart.”

  Soon afterward Helen invited Edith to a dinner at the White House, set for March 23. Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick her up and to collect Dr. Grayson as well. Edith wore a purple orchid and sat at Wilson’s right. “He is perfectly charming,” she wrote later, “and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.”

  After dinner, the group went upstairs to the second-floor Oval Room for coffee and a fire, “and all sorts of interesting conversation.” Wilson read three poems by English authors, prompting Edith to observe that “as a reader he is unequalled.”

  The evening had a profound effect on Wilson. He was entranced. Edith, sixteen years his junior, was an attractive and compelling woman. White House usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover called her an “impressive widow.” That evening, Wilson’s spirits soared.

  He had little time to dwell in this new hopeful state, however. Five days later, on March 28, 1915, a British merchant ship, the Falaba, encountered a U-boat commanded by Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner, one of Germany’s submarine aces. The ship was small, less than five thousand tons, and carried cargo and passengers bound for Africa. A sharp-eyed lookout first saw the submarine when it was three miles off and alerted the Falaba’s captain, Frederick Davies, who turned his ship full away and ordered maximum speed, just over thirteen knots.

  Forstner gave chase. He ordered his gun crew to fire a warning shot.

  The Falaba kept running. Now Forstner, using flags, signaled, “Stop or I fire.”

  The Falaba stopped. The U-boat approached, and Forstner, shouting through a megaphone, notified Captain Davies that he planned to sink the vessel. He ordered Davies and all aboard—242 souls—to abandon ship. He gave them five minutes.

  Forstner maneuvered to within one hundred yards. The last lifeboat was still being lowered when he fired a torpedo. The Falaba sank in eight minutes, killing 104 people including Captain Davies. A passenger by the name of Leon C. Thrasher was believed among the lost, though his body was not recovered. Thrasher was a citizen of the United States.

  The incident, condemned as the latest example of German frightfulness, was exactly the kind of thing Wilson had feared, for it held the potential to raise a cry for war. “I do not like this case,” he told his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. “It is full of disturbing possibilities.”

  Wilson’s first instinct was to issue an immediate denunciation of the attack, in sharp language, but subsequent discussion with his cabinet and with Secretary Bryan caused him to hold off. Bryan, a staunch pacifist, proposed that the death of an American who knowingly traveled aboard a British ship through a declared war zone might not even merit protest. To him it seemed the equivalent of an American taking a stroll across the battlefield in France.

  In a note to Bryan on Wednesday, April 28, the day after a cabinet meeting at which the Falaba incident was discussed, Wilson wrote, “Perhaps it is not necessary to make formal representations in the matter at all.”

  LEON THRASHER, the American passenger, was still missing, his body presumably adrift in the Irish Sea. It was one more beat in a cadence that seemed to be growing faster and louder.

  LUSITANIA

  SUCKING TUBES AND THACKERAY

  THROUGHOUT THE WEEK BEFORE DEPARTURE, PASSENGERS who lived in New York started packing in earnest, while the many who came from elsewhere began arriving in the city by train, ferry, and automobile. They found a city steaming with heat—91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. “Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried in their hot, moist hands.”

  The city seemed untroubled by the war. Broadway—“the Great White Way,” so dubbed for its bright electric lighting—came brilliantly alight and alive each night, as always, although now with unexpected competition. A number of restaurants had begun providing lavish entertainment along with meals, even though they lacked theater licenses. The city was threatening a crackdown on these maverick “cabarets.” One operator, the manager of Reisenweber’s at Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle, said he would welcome a ban. The competition was wearing him out. His establishment was running a musical revue called “Too Much Mustard,” featuring “a Host of BEAUTIFUL GIRLS,” and a separate “Whirlwind Cabaret” with a quintet of minstrels and a full lunch—table d’hôte—for a buck, with dancing between courses. “The public,” he complained, “is making such ridiculous demands for elaborate entertainment with meals that it is really dangerous for everybody in the restaurant business.”

  In case any of the newly arrived passengers needed some last-minute clothing for the voyage, there was New York’s perennial attraction: shopping. Spring sales were under way or about to begin. Lord and Taylor on Fifth Avenue was advertising men’s raincoats for $6.75, less than half their usual price. B. Altman, a few blocks south, didn’t deign to list actual prices but assured female shoppers they would find “decided reductions” in the cost of gowns and suits from Paris, these to be found on its third floor in the department of “Special Costumes.” And, strangely, a tailor of German heritage, House of Kuppenheimer, was advertising a special suit, “the British.” The company’s ads proclaimed, “All men are young in these stirring days.”

  The city’s economy, like that of the nation as a whole, had by now improved dramatically, owing to the wartime boost in demand for American wares, especially munitions. The lull in shipping had ended; by year’s end, the United States would report a record trade surplus of $1.5 billion, or $35.9 billion today. Real estate, ever an obsession in New York, was booming, with large buildings under construction on the East and West Sides. Work was about to begin on a new twelve-story apartment building at the corner of Eighty-eighth and Broadway. Expected cost: $500,000. There were extravagant displays of spending. It’s possible that some of the Lusitania’s first-class passengers attended a big party at Delmonico’s the Friday night before departure, thrown by Lady Grace Mackenzie, “the huntress,” as the Times described her. The party had a jungle theme, with fifty guests, among them explorers, hunters, zoologists, two cheetahs, and “a black ape.” Delmonico’s had filled the banquet room with palm trees and layered the walls with palm fronds to create the effect of dining in an African glade. Black men in tights and white tunics kept watch on the animals, though in fact the black pigment proved to be the effect of burned cork and low lighting. The list of appetizers included stuf
fed eagles’ eggs.

  Although the city’s newspapers carried a lot of war news, politics and crime tended to dominate the front page. Murder was a fascination, as always. On Thursday, April 29, in the midst of the heat wave, a city produce merchant who had recently lost his job sent his wife to the movies, then shot his five-year-old son to death and killed himself. A Bridgeport, Connecticut, man presented his girlfriend with an engagement ring and handed her one end of a ribbon; the other end disappeared into his pocket. “A surprise,” he said, and urged her to pull it. She obliged. The ribbon was attached to the trigger of a revolver. The man died instantly. And on Friday, April 30, four criminals escaped from the drug ward at Bellevue Hospital, wearing pink pajamas. Three of the men were found, “after a thorough search of the neighborhood by policemen, hospital attendants, and small boys,” the Times said. The fourth man was at large, presumably still dressed in pink.

  And there was this: a report that plans had been completed for a ceremony to dedicate a memorial fountain to Jack Phillips, wireless operator aboard the Titanic, and to eight other Marconi operators likewise killed in maritime disasters. The article noted, “Space is left for the addition of other names in the future.”

  THE LUSITANIA’S roster of passengers included 949 British citizens (including residents of Canada), 71 Russians, 15 Persians, 8 French, 6 Greeks, 5 Swedes, 3 Belgians, 3 Dutch, 2 Italians, 2 Mexicans, 2 Finns, and 1 traveler each from Denmark, Spain, Argentina, Switzerland, Norway, and India.

  The American complement, by Cunard’s official tally, totaled 189. They came from locales throughout the country. Two men from Virginia were officials of a shipbuilding company on their way to Europe to explore the acquisition of submarines. At least five passengers hailed from Philadelphia, others from Tuckahoe, New York; Braceville, Ohio; Seymour, Indiana; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Hancock, Maryland; and Lake Forest, Illinois. A number came from Los Angeles: the Blickes, husband and wife, traveling in first, and three members of the Bretherton family, in third. Christ traveled among them as well: Christ Garry, of Cleveland, Ohio, in second class.

  They stayed in hotels and boardinghouses or with family and friends, at addresses in all parts of the city. At least six stayed at the Hotel Astor, another six at the Biltmore. They arrived at intervals during the week, bearing mountains of luggage. Cunard allowed each passenger 20 cubic feet. They brought trunks, some brightly colored—red, yellow, blue, green—and others with surfaces of leather embossed with checkerboard and herringbone patterns, braced with wood. They brought “extension suitcases” for transporting dresses, gowns, tuxedos, and business suits. The largest of these could hold forty men’s suits. They brought large boxes built especially for footwear, and these smelled pleasantly of polish and leather. They carried smaller luggage as well, mindful of what they would need while aboard and of what could be left in the ship’s baggage hold. Passengers arriving by train could check the most cumbersome bags straight through from their cities of origin to their staterooms or to the baggage hold of the ship, with confidence that their belongings would be there when they boarded.

  They brought their best clothes, and in some cases, their only clothes. The dominant palette was black and gray, but there were cheerier items as well. A heliotrope-and-white-checked frock. A boy’s red knitted jacket, with white buttons. A green velveteen belt. Babies complicated things. Their clothing was intricate. A single outfit for one infant boy consisted of a white wool wrapper; a white cotton bodice edged with red and blue piping; overalls of blue cotton embroidered with dotted squares, plaited down the front, fastened in back with white buttons; a gray wool jacket with four ivory buttons; black stockings; and shoes with straps. He topped this off with a “sucking tube,” or pacifier, tied around his neck with cord.

  The wealthiest passengers carried rings, brooches, pendants, necklaces, and necklets, embedded with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and onyx (and sardonyx, its red sister). They brought bonds and notes and letters of introduction, but also cash. A thirty-five-year-old woman brought five one-hundred-dollar bills; another, eleven fifties. Everyone seemed to carry a watch, invariably in a gold case. One woman brought her Geneva-made “Remontoir Cylindre 10 Rubis Medaille D’Or, No. 220063,” gold but with a face the color of blood. Later, the serial numbers of these watches would prove invaluable.

  Passengers brought diaries, books, pens, ink, and other devices with which to kill time. Ian Holbourn, the famed writer and lecturer now returning from a speaking tour of America, brought along the manuscript of a book he had been working on for two decades, about his theory of beauty, whose pages now numbered in the thousands. It was his only copy. Dwight Harris, a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker from a wealthy family, brought with him an engagement ring. He had plans. He also had concerns. On Friday, April 30, he went to the John Wanamaker department store in New York and bought a custom life belt.

  Another man packed a gold seal for stamping wax on the back of an envelope, with the Latin motto Tuta Tenebo, “I will keep you safe.”

  FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER Charles Emelius Lauriat Jr., a Boston bookseller, carried several items of particular value. Lauriat, forty, was a good-looking man, with an attentive gaze and well-trimmed brown hair. Since 1894 he had been president of one of the country’s best-known bookstores, Charles E. Lauriat Company, at 385 Washington Street in Boston, several blocks from Boston Common, this at a time when a book dealer could achieve national recognition. It was “the golden age of American book collecting,” according to one historian, when some of the nation’s great private collections were amassed, later to become treasured libraries, such as the Morgan in New York and the Folger in Washington. Lauriat was an accomplished swimmer and yachtsman who played water polo and regularly raced his 18-foot sailboat and served as a judge in regattas that took place off the New England coast each summer. The Boston Globe called him a “born boat sailor.” Something of a celebrity himself, at least in literary circles, he dined regularly at the city’s Player’s Club, often with one of the foremost critics and poets of the age, William Stanley Braithwaite.

  The store, originally situated directly opposite Boston’s Old South Church, had been founded by Lauriat’s father and a partner, Dana Estes, in 1872, under the name Estes & Lauriat, which also published books. Three years later, the two partners divided the business into two companies, with Lauriat taking over the retail side. By the time of the split the store had already become a Boston institution, “as much a debating society as it was a bookshop,” according to one account. It served as a meeting place for writers, readers, intellectuals, and artists and included among its regular customers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The elder Lauriat was said to see himself as a “guide, counselor and friend” to his customers and produced in the store an atmosphere that one newspaper writer called “homeness.”

  The store was long and narrow and jutted far inward from the street, more mineshaft than showroom, with books shoring the walls all the way to the high ceilings and stacked on counters down the center. A flight of stairs led to a balcony full of collectors’ books and “association books,” those made valuable because their owners had been famous or otherwise noteworthy. One attraction for book aficionados was the store’s Old Book Room, in the basement, filled with “great gems” that, according to a privately published history of the store, had come into the marketplace mainly “through the breaking up of old English country house libraries.” The display windows on Washington Street drew crowds of onlookers at lunch hour. Rare books were displayed in the windows on one side of the front door, new books on the other, including those with the most garish covers known even then as “bestsellers.” (One popular American author who turned out a bestseller every year was named, oddly enough, Winston Churchill.) The store was one of the first to sell “Remainders,” stocks of once-popular books that remained unsold after the initial surge of sales and that publishers were willing to sell to Lauriat at a deep discount. He in turn sold them to customers for a fract
ion of their original price, a side of the business that grew so popular the store began printing a “Remainder Catalog,” released each fall.

  But the thing that set Lauriat apart from other booksellers, from the beginning, was the elder Lauriat’s decision to make an annual trip to London to buy up old books and sell them in America for far higher prices, leveraging the differential in demand that existed on opposite sides of the Atlantic, while also taking advantage of the falling prices and faster speeds of shipping brought by the advent of transatlantic steamships. Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible—so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore—drew nearly a full column in the New York Times. By century’s end, the store had become one of the country’s leading sellers and importers of rare books, manuscripts, and illustrations, its bookplates destined to be treasured by future bibliophiles.

  Charles Lauriat Jr. continued his father’s transatlantic harvest and in that last week of April 1915 was preparing to set out on his next buying trip. As always, Lauriat planned to stay in London for several months while he hunted for books and writerly artifacts to acquire, these to be crated and shipped back by sea to Boston. He transported his most valuable finds in his personal baggage and never thought to insure them against loss, “for the risk,” as he put it, “is practically nil.” Nor did the war prompt him to change his practice. “We considered the passenger steamers immune from submarine attack,” he wrote.