THOUGH ELIZABETH’S HEART WAS pounding like the orchestra drums as she sought out her mother, she found it fortunate that most of the guests were gathered around Miss Hanrahan. If the confrontation became an unpleasant scene, perhaps they would be less likely to notice.
Elizabeth wasted no time when she located Nola in the butler’s pantry, discussing with Cook the finishing touches on the dessert. Was the chocolate Yule log to have an accompaniment of homemade vanilla ice cream, prepared that very morning, Cook wanted to know, or was the topping to be fresh, heavy cream that had been whipped to a snowy froth? “Typical, Elizabeth thought darkly. Another of the crucial, demanding decisions my mother I must make each and every day of her life. These are the matters she uses to exercise her brain. Well, not me. I want much more than that in my life, and I’m going to have it.
“Mother, how could you?” she fairly hissed in Nola’s face. Elizabeth had waited only until Cook returned to the kitchen, the matter of the Yule log topping decided … whipped cream, not ice cream … before planting herself firmly in her mother’s path, barring any exit from the pantry. “How could you deceive me like that? As for Fenton Cooper, M.D., he should have his license to practice medicine revoked. Perhaps I shall see to it. Perhaps when I go to Vassar I shall study law instead of literature and one day see to it that the man is drummed out of medicine forever.”
Nola grasped the situation immediately. She never flinched, or paled, or flushed with guilt. “We have guests. This will have to wait.”
Elizabeth stood her ground. “It can’t wait. I can’t wait. I’ve waited so long already, haven’t I, Mother? Haven’t I been the very soul of patience? Every mother in New York should wish for a daughter as patient as I.” She had begun speaking quietly, in deference to their guests, though her voice shook. But Nola’s insulting lack of guilt or remorse removed every last trace of caution. What did she care what the guests thought? They were Nola’s friends, not hers … except for Claire, of course, to whom she would now be indebted for life. Why shouldn’t Nola’s guests learn of her deception?
Oh, but they already do, you silly girl, a voice in her head scoffed. And Elizabeth realized instantly that of course it was true. Her mother’s friends had to know. Hadn’t Claire said everyone knew about Fenton Cooper? Everyone except Elizabeth, of course. Nola’s friends would have guessed immediately what she was up to. Which explained why they hadn’t been half as worried or concerned as her daughter.
She had thought earlier that she couldn’t feel any more stupid. She’d been wrong.
“How could you do something so vile?” She was speaking loudly, clearly now, her voice no longer shaking. “You tricked me into believing you were ill! Frightening me, worrying me, how could you? I’ve lost Father, and you let me believe I might be in danger of losing you, too. How can I ever forgive you for that, Mother?”
Nola did pale then. “I made it very clear to Fenton,” she said defensively, “that it was only to be a minor heart condition. Nothing serious. I explained that to him. It’s not my fault if he disregarded my instructions. I had no desire to frighten you, Elizabeth. I never intended that.” Her lower lip thrust forward. “It’s cruel of you to suggest that I would be so wicked. I never would.”
“Cruel of me?” Elizabeth’s voice rose another decibel or two. “I’m cruel?”
Nola’s flush deepened, but her defenses remained strong. “I never knew exactly what Fenton said to you. Remember, I wasn’t there. How was I to know he hadn’t followed my very precise instructions to the letter?”
“You knew I was worried about you. You knew that much. I didn’t try to hide it.” Elizabeth’s tone sharpened. She knew her voice was carrying far beyond the pantry. She didn’t care. “Worried enough to turn down my admission to Vassar, and my scholarship. Worried enough to give up any chance at leading my own life, and stay here with you. You knew I had to be very worried to give all that up, Mother. And Dr. Cooper didn’t disobey your instructions. But he also made it very clear that you were not to be agitated or upset. Was that part of your instruction to him? He made it sound as if something very dire might happen if I ignored his opinions. Was that part of your instruction? Did you order him to give me that impression? Because my leaving for Vassar would have done just that, wouldn’t it, Mother? It would have been very agitating and upsetting for you. Wonderful for me, mind you … but very, very bad for someone with a heart condition who didn’t want me to leave. Someone selfish and shallow and spoiled.”
Nola gasped. “How dare you speak to me in this manner! If your father were here…”
“He’d be disgusted with you. Just as I am.” But Elizabeth knew it was hopeless. Her mother was never going to admit she’d done wrong. She was never going to apologize or ask for forgiveness. She was too accustomed to doing as she pleased and too unaccustomed to facing the consequences. When there had been consequences in the past, when she’d done something silly or foolish or childish, Martin Fair had “handled” it. He had stepped in and assumed the responsibility for whatever it was, smoothing things over so that Nola’s life could go on as easily as it always had.
Elizabeth’s anger switched then from her mother to her absent father. You spoiled her so, Father, she shouted soundlessly. You spoiled her, and then you left her to me. That was almost as cruel as her deceit. I can’t, I won’t, pamper her as you did, not anymore, not ever again. And if that was what you wanted for her, then you should have climbed into a lifeboat like some other men on the Titanic, and stayed with her, instead of being so stupidly, foolishly brave. You shouldn’t have left her. You shouldn’t have left us.
The force of her fury toward her father shocked and horrified Elizabeth. She loved her father. How could she be thinking such terrible things? What was the matter with her? It washer mother she was angry with, not her father. Wasn’t that why she’d sought out Nola in the first place? Nola had done something so cruel….
But not as cruel as deserting both of you, the voice inside Elizabeth’s skull muttered.
He had no choice, she argued. She had to clutch the edges of the white wooden shelf beside her to maintain her balance, so shaken was she by her anger toward her father. Captain Smith had insisted on women and children only entering the lifeboats. And even if he hadn’t, Father knew that was the rule of the sea, and he had accepted that.
Other men got in, the obstinate voice continued. Other men were saved, and to this very day are with their wives, their sons, their daughters. Other men are taking care of their spoiled, pampered wives so their daughters can get married or get a job or march for the vote or go to college, whatever they choose.
Those men were cowards, Elizabeth argued.
Cowards? Yet you just called your father stupid and foolish for being brave.
She hadn’t meant it. “I didn’t mean it!” Elizabeth cried aloud in her pain.
Nola, misunderstanding, nodded. She put a consoling hand on her daughter’s arm. “Of course you didn’t. You would never speak to me so harshly if you weren’t overtired and over-stimulated. We’ll talk about it later, dear. I can’t imagine what everyone is thinking, what with all this unpleasant shouting going on in here. I’ll have to say Cook was being difficult, that’s all. They won’t believe it, but they’ll pretend to, and that’s enough for me. Come, let us get back to our guests.”
Elizabeth tore her arm from Nola’s touch as if she feared contamination. “Your guests, Mother, not mine. The only two people my age at this party are the singer and Claire.” She added icily, “I have already spent some time with Claire, in case you’re at all curious as to how I discovered your cruel deception.”
Nola nodded grimly. Elizabeth guessed from the expression on her face that her mother was recalling, too late, her conversation last spring with a friend’s young daughter, and deeply regretting how free she’d been with her information about Dr. Fenton Cooper. Still, rather than capitulate, she shifted the blame elsewhere. “I could strangle that girl! When I spoke with her last spring, I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about other women.” Reaching up to pat her hair into place, an unnecessary gesture, Nola added, “That girl talked too much even as a small child. I remember her mother receiving complaints from Claire’s school.”
“If you knew that,” Elizabeth pointed out, “perhaps you should have chosen someone else to confide in.”
“Perhaps I should.” Her voice was as calm as the sea on the night of that treacherous iceberg in the North Atlantic. As smooth and shiny as a mirror, that sea had been. But people had died in it, anyway. “Now fix your hair, dear, it’s trailing a bit on the left side, just behind your ear.”
Elizabeth reached up automatically to recapture the errant strands as instructed. Halfway there, her hand stopped. It will always be like this, she thought. She will tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. She’ll tell me what to wear, and I’ll wear it. She’ll tell me where to go and I’ll go there. She will give me instructions on what to do, who to see, how to fill my days and nights … I won’t have to decide any of those things. She’ll do that for me … as long as I let her.
Who is taking care of whom here, Father? Elizabeth asked silently.
“You’re right, Mother.” Elizabeth stood aside to let her mother pass. “Your guests are waiting. You go ahead. I have to do something with my hair.” She did not add, I’ll be right behind you. She would leave the lying to her mother, who was so very good at it.
Elizabeth stood in the pantry doorway, watching as Nola, confident the “family crisis” was over, hurried back to her guests, her party. Head high, every fair hair perfectly in place, her step youthful, the green gown accentuating her slim figure, she looked like exactly what she was: a beautiful, confident woman who had emerged some nineteen months earlier from a terrible tragedy relatively unchanged. Not unscathed, Elizabeth understood that. Occasionally, she still heard her mother crying in her bedroom late at night. Nola had suffered. But the experience had not changed her. Not in any significant way. In spite of that terrifying night in the lifeboat, in spite of her sudden and completely unexpected transition from beloved wife to widow, Nola Langston Farr was still basically the same woman who had boarded the great ship Titanic in Southampton on Wednesday, April 10, 1912.
Perhaps that was how she had survived. By not changing. Perhaps she believed that by acting as she always had, mimicking as closely as possible the life she’d led before that night, she could pretend the damage hadn’t been so devastating, after all. With her husband gone, she could never convince herself it hadn’t happened. Even someone as sheltered from reality as Nola couldn’t manage that feat. But clinging to every available shred of her old life might be the only way she could cling to life itself. Without that, perhaps she would simply have given up. Elizabeth wondered, of the seven hundred and five people who had survived the Titanic, how many different ways of dealing with their shock and grief had they found? Seven hundred and five? Probably. Nola’s way would only be one of many.
The minute the hem of her mother’s dress vanished from sight, Elizabeth was on her way out the front door. She scooped up her purse from the table in the foyer. Without a coat or cape, with no hat to protect her head from the heavily falling snow, without gloves for her hands or boots for her feet, on a cold December night, Elizabeth Fan ran from her house and out into the street to hail a taxicab with no thought for the temperature. She didn’t feel the cold.
She was on her way to Max Whittaker’s apartment.