MAX SEEMED SURPRISED BUT delighted to see Elizabeth. When he opened the door of his third-floor apartment to find her standing there, he took little notice of how inadequately she was dressed or the snow melting on her hair and dress. Nor did he ask her what she was doing there or how she’d managed it. Instead, he grabbed a hand and pulled her inside, saying excitedly, “I didn’t really think you’d come or I would have waited with the unveiling. But I just took the newspapers off a few minutes ago. That’s what I was using to cover my work. No one’s even said anything yet, they haven’t had time, so you haven’t missed much. Come on, I’m anxious to see what you think.”
The tiny living room was crowded. People were seated on an ugly tweed davenport far too large for the space, and an old wicker rocking chair, which Bledsoe, with Anne sitting on his lap occupied. Other guests were seated or reclining on the threadbare brown rug, on the windowsills, on the small, wooden kitchen table, and two chairs crammed into a small nook. Elizabeth noticed immediately that the room was ominously silent. There were no voices raised in praise of Max’s new work. No one exclaimed in awe or delight. Although all eyes were focused on one or another of a dozen paintings encircling the room, leaning up against the wall, no one said a word.
Max didn’t seem to find the silence ominous. “Look who’s here everybody!” Max said into the silence. “Elizabeth finally made it!”
Heads swiveled. “Well, hello there, Betsy,” Anne said lazily from her spot on Bledsoe’s lap, and Norman waved an equally lazy hand. “Mumsy let you out again? My, my, perhaps she’s becoming a free-thinker like the rest of us.”
Elizabeth didn’t answer. No one laughed. And no one took their eyes off the paintings. They all seemed mesmerized.
Max scooped up a pile of sketches from a wooden table beside the couch and motioned to Elizabeth to perch there. Then, standing beside her, an arm around her shoulders, he said, “So? I can’t believe I have to beg for opinions from this crowd. I expected critiques to be pouring out of you, as they usually are. Go ahead, tell me what you honestly think. I can take it.”
No, you can’t, was Elizabeth’s unspoken response. You don’t want to hear what people are thinking, Max, not this time. She felt sick. Because she had noticed the eerie hush the very second she entered the apartment. Her eyes had flown to the paintings displayed around the room. It wasn’t hard to guess they were the reason for the lack of gaiety at what was supposed to be a holiday celebration. And what she had seen had sickened her.
They were truly awful. Not in technique. Max was a fine artist. It was the subject matter, and the way it was depicted, that was so horrible. Elizabeth’s eyes had darted around the room once, a quick look, then again, a more thorough look. Every painting, without exception, was appalling. An even dozen depictions of … her heart began pounding ferociously … the sinking of the Titanic.
Max was not an abstract artist. That was one of the things she had loved about his Paris street scenes. He painted what he saw exactly the way he saw it, with wonderful attention to detail. These paintings were no different. Artistically speaking, Elizabeth knew they were probably very good. But these were not pictures of the Eiffel Tower or outdoor cafes or gardens in full bloom or lovers strolling along the Seine. These paintings were of a terrible tragedy. Every grim detail of that long, shocking, frightening night stared back at Elizabeth as her eyes moved from one canvas to the next in disbelief. It was as if they were all taunting her, saying, You wanted to forget, but we’re not going to let you.
The first group of paintings were of the last moments on board the ship. In the first, Max had caught perfectly the fear in the eyes of passengers waiting on line to climb into a lifeboat. But in a bizarre, haunting contradiction, he had painted in the background people playing cards, smoking cigars, laughing, either unaware of what was happening or in denial.
And while Elizabeth recognized the painting as truth … it had been like that for some … it sickened her. Those people who had been unwilling to accept reality, who had insisted to the end that the ship was not about to sink, that they weren’t leaving a “warm, comfortable” ship to go out on the cold, dark sea in one of those “flimsy” lifeboats, those people had all perished. They had waited too long. What she and the rest of the world had later learned was, by the time they had accepted harsh reality and were ready to abandon the sinking ship, there were no lifeboats left. They would not be leaving … alive.
Max had captured their terror, too, in the second group of paintings. The faces in these works were more painful to look at than those in the first. These passengers left on board, clinging to the rail as the ship climbed ever higher in the water, nearly perpendicular to the deep, dark water waiting below, knew they were about to die a horrible death. The ocean temperature was below freezing. Even those who were expert swimmers had to know they had no chance of survival in such conditions. And those who had climbed up to cling to the rail at the very highest point of the ship knew that should they lose their grip, the resulting fall would either dash them to pieces when they struck some part of the ship on the way down, or kill them when they hit the water However they died, they knew that death was at hand.
All of this was reflected in the ugly, twisted, faces Max had painted. The mouths were opened in screams, the eyes wide with terror. And in a touch of irony not lost on Elizabeth, Max had painted out on the sea surrounding the ship a trio of lifeboats which were, disgracefully, no more than half filled. This, too, was truth. But it was embittering to gaze upon. Her father could have been in one of those boats, as could many other people who had perished. She tried never to think about that, because it made her so angry. And now Max had painted it, forcing her to think about it, to remember.
The third group of paintings was almost impossible to look at for more than a second. It was, she guessed, from what little she had seen of the area, a depiction of steerage passengers trying in vain to break through the locked iron gate that kept them from the upper decks and safety. There were men, women, and children. Some of the faces expressed terror, others fury, while most of the younger faces were bewildered or frightened.
Elizabeth knew that most of the people in the painting had never made it through that locked gate.
But the last group was the most painful. The backgrounds were all somber tones of purple and brown and black, but the figures, the people, were done in brighter colors: reds, yellows, greens, as if by coloring them so vividly, Max meant to point out how alive they had once been. The scenes were grim. People falling to their death as the pull of gravity tore them from the rail. The ship breaking in two, the detail in this painting so graphic Elizabeth could almost hear the ripping, tearing sounds just as she’d heard them that night from the lifeboat. The worst of the lot were the scenes of the ocean after the Titanic had slid beneath the surface, disappearing from view. The now-smooth, flat, dark water was broken in Max’s last three paintings by the bodies of floating victims encircling the lifeboats, including one child, lifeless, its eyes closed, improbably clutching a glassy-eyed doll under one arm.
It wasn’t like that, Elizabeth cried silently. We weren’t that close to the victims, we didn’t ignore them in the water, not like that. At least, it hadn’t been like that around her lifeboat. If it had, she would never have forgotten it, never. Bad enough that she had heard the screaming. Still did hear it. Probably always would. But she had not seen what Max was depicting here.
He was clearly saying, “More people would have been saved if the survivors in the lifeboats had helped.” And that, too, was a truth. She knew that. Everyone knew it.
But only Max had painted it, which was the same as saying it aloud.
“No one’s going to buy these, Max,” Bledsoe finally said into the shocked silence. “As art work goes, they’re technically damn near perfect. The detail, the colors, they’re great. But no one’s going to buy them.”
Other people murmured agreement.
Max frowned. “I didn’t paint them to make money. I thought you’d understand that.” He glanced at Elizabeth. “You do, don’t you, Elizabeth?”
She didn’t. She had no idea why he’d painted them, couldn’t imagine a reason. There couldn’t be a reason. When the only response she could give him was a slow, sad shaking of her head, he looked hurt and confused.
Only Anne said, “I like them. They’re, well, they’re scary, but they’re good. I like them.”
You would, Elizabeth thought angrily. Anything to be different. But then, Anne, you weren’t there, were you? You have no idea how these paintings will twist the knife already imbedded in the heart of every survivor, in the heart of every relative of every victim. You don’t understand. How could you?
It was then she noticed something in the first painting that she’d missed, and it took her breath away. One of the faces waiting on the lifeboat line was her father’s face. There was no question about it. Max had captured his likeness perfectly. The face seemed incredibly sad but brave, the head up, the shoulders back. The eyes were gazing out at sea. She realized then that he was standing alone, that what he was looking at in the distance was a lifeboat already launched, in which sat, among other passengers, a young girl wearing a large red hat and an older woman in a similar hat of royal blue.
Their hats, hers and her mother’s, had been black. But Max had used brighter colors, just as he’d done in the other paintings.
Elizabeth began crying quietly. “Oh, Max,” she whispered, unable to look up at him.
Obviously reeling from an unexpected reaction to his months of work, Max bent stiffly toward her. “What? What did you say, Elizabeth?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
A tall boy named Gregory who had been sitting on the floor stood up and said, “You know what, Whittaker? I lost an uncle on the Titanic. I’m all for freedom of expression and all that, but I think you’ve crossed the line here. I thought the postcards and the songs and the souvenirs were bad, but this … this is a lot worse. If I were you, I’d burn every single one of these and start over. And pick a different subject next time, all right?” To his girlfriend, also climbing to her feet, he said brusquely, “C’mon, Libby, let’s get out of here, before our holiday mood is completely ruined.”
“I guess he doesn’t like my paintings,” Max said with forced lightness when the two had gone. “Well, I didn’t expect everyone to like them. And Bledsoe, it doesn’t matter if they don’t sell. That’s not why I painted them.”
Elizabeth lifted her head. “Why did you paint them, Max?”
Sensing a confrontation they had no desire to participate in, the other guests got up to leave, mumbling various excuses. Another holiday party … a concern about traffic in the falling snow … a rally to attend early the next day. One or two said, “Interesting work, Whittaker” or “I can see why you’ve been so busy lately,” but no one, not one person except Anne said they liked Max’s new work. And when Bledsoe, sending Elizabeth a sympathetic smile, led Anne from the apartment, she called over her shoulder, “Remember, Max, the important thing is to do as you please!” rather than complimenting him again on the work.
When they had all gone and Bledsoe had closed the door, Max knelt by Elizabeth’s side. Looking up into her face, he asked with concern, “You don’t like them either? You look upset. They’ve upset you? The paintings?”
Elizabeth jumped to her feet. “Of course they’ve upset me, Max! They’d upset anyone, even people who weren’t on the Titanic! They’re … they’re horrible! I don’t understand…” Her eyes caught sight of her father’s face again, and she began crying. “You painted my father. How do you think it makes me feel to see him standing on deck all alone, my mother and I already gone? Why didn’t you just stab me, Max? It couldn’t have hurt any worse than that painting hurts me.”
His face went bone-white, and he took a step backward, away from her. He had put up a puny, scraggly Christmas tree in one corner of the room and decorated it haphazardly with large red colored lights. They were on, and the reflected red playing across his features contrasted sharply with the sudden loss of color. “Elizabeth, I…”
“All these months you’ve been saying how hard you were working, and you never once even hinted that you were painting something like this. You didn’t tell me because you knew I couldn’t bear it,” she accused. “And you’re right. I can’t. It’s cruel, Max, it’s so cruel. People are trying to recover, to get on with their lives, to put that terrible night behind them. And then,” she waved a hand to include the paintings, “you bring it all back.”
His lean, handsome face twisted in pain. “Oh, God,” he breathed, “is that what you think? That I was trying to bring it all back? I wasn’t, Elizabeth, that’s not what I was doing.” Looking ill himself, he sank into the wicker chair, putting his head in his hands.
Elizabeth fought a desperate desire to rush over and put her arms around him. This was Max, whom she loved. There had to be a reason why he had done this. It was cruel, and Max was not cruel. Never cruel. “Then what were you trying to do?”
He didn’t answer for a few minutes. When he lifted his head, his face looked so tortured, so torn, Elizabeth nearly wept for him. “What, Max?” she persisted quietly. “What were you trying to do?”
“Get rid of it,” he said, his voice anguished. He put his head in his hands again. “I was trying to get rid of it. All of it. So I put it on canvas. I didn’t know how else to do it.”
“Get rid of it?” Hadn’t he already done that, months ago? He’d seemed to. And he’d told her to stop thinking about it. As if that were possible.
Maybe it hadn’t been possible for him, either. Maybe she’d been wrong….
Max nodded. “Yes. Get rid of it.” He shook his head, and when he lifted his face to her again, she saw tears in his eyes. “I shouldn’t have done it. The minute I saw the look on your face, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. They are as ugly as that night was, I can see that now. But when I was painting them, I wasn’t thinking that way. I was just trying to get it all out, away from me. So that I could sleep at night again. So the attacks would stop.”
She did move toward him then, sinking to the floor beside his chair to look up at him. “Attacks?”
He described then, in agonizing detail, the nightmares he suffered from, terrible, black dreams of drowning in a deep, dark pit whose walls were as slippery as silk. But worse, he told her, were the episodes when he was fully awake. They came upon him without warning, and they came often. “It’s as if I’m suffocating. It’s the same way I felt when I was under the water, before my drunken rescuer came along to snatch me up to the surface and drag me to a lifeboat. I can’t breathe, any more than I could then. My chest feels like the Titanic itself is sitting on top of it. Most often, it happens at dusk, just as the sky begins to darken. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t dusk when I was tossed into the ocean. But when it happens, I can’t breathe, or swallow, or talk. Sometimes it hits me when I’m painting, or eating, or talking on the telephone. It’s as if every last breath of air has been stolen from all around me and my lungs are filled with cotton … or, more likely, saltwater. Dark, frigid, saltwater.”
Elizabeth reached up to touch his hand. “Max, why didn’t you say anything? You never told me.”
“It has even happened,” he continued, “when I’ve been with you. I would have to stop talking in the middle of a sentence, trying to get my breath back. You never noticed.”
“I’m sorry. You should have said something. I had no idea. You hid it well.”
He shrugged, seeming a bit calmer. “You couldn’t have helped. I guess that’s why I never told anyone, not even you, because I knew it was something I had to handle on my own. When nothing I tried worked, that’s when I came up with the idea of the paintings. I figured, other artists paint reality, why not me? I knew I could do it. The pictures were so clear in my head.” He shuddered. “Very clear. Anything that I hadn’t seen with my own eyes, I just pictured from what I’d heard and read afterward.”
Elizabeth thought for a moment, wanting desperately to say the right thing, words that would make Max feel better. “The paintings are very … accurate. I don’t think photographs could be any clearer than the images you put on canvas. You are very, very talented, Max. They’re very good. It’s just…”
He nodded. “I know. The subject matter. Not fit for human eyes. But people should know. I never meant to hurt you. The look on your face…”
“It’s all right, Max.” She held his hand tightly, fixing her eyes on his. “I know you never meant to hurt me. You wouldn’t ever do that, not on purpose.” She paused, then asked, “Did it work?” She waved her free hand to encompass the paintings. “Did painting these scenes do what you’d hoped? Are the nightmares gone? Have you had any attacks since you finished the last scene? When did you finish?”
“This morning. I put the finishing touches on the last one this morning. So I don’t know if it worked or not, not yet. But…” He leaned forward to touch Elizabeth’s cheek. “Just telling you helped. That’s pretty strange. I never expected that. I thought talking about it would make it worse. I was sure that bringing it out into the open would somehow make it bigger, more real, something … give it life, I guess. Not that it didn’t already have a life of its own.”
“I just wish you’d said something sooner,” said Elizabeth. “What’s the point of having someone to love if important things aren’t shared? I don’t expect you to tell me everything, Max. You have a right to your private feelings, just as I do. But we were both suffering. It might have been easier if we’d shared that.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I know. But it still makes me feel bad. Knowing you were going through all that and not being able to help you.” Elizabeth smiled. “I was mad because I thought you weren’t feeling anything. You kept telling me to forget about that night, put it behind me. And the whole time you were doing this.” She waved at the paintings again. “I should be really mad at you now, just for making me think you were getting over it and I wasn’t. You know that wasn’t fair.”
“No, it wasn’t. And it was stupid. I should have been more honest.”
They sat in silence for a while, heads together, Max’s arm around Elizabeth. “So, you forgive me?” he asked finally, sitting up straight but maintaining his hold on her hand. “You don’t hate me?”
“No, Max, I love you. Just don’t keep things from me, all right? Not big things, anyway.” Elizabeth paused, then asked, “What are you going to do with these?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to think about it.”
Elizabeth hesitated, then said, “Don’t destroy the one of my father. I don’t want it just now. I’m not ready. But could you please keep it? Maybe later, when it doesn’t hurt so much, I might want it.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. But I think maybe … it’s a wonderful likeness of him, Max. He looks so … brave.”
“He was brave. Right up until the very last minute. I’ll keep the painting for you, Elizabeth. You just let me know when you’re ready to own it, and it’s yours.”
“Thank you. I’ll be careful not to hang it where my mother can see it. I don’t think she could stand it. But then,” Elizabeth added with a wry smile, “that won’t be difficult, since I won’t be living in her house.”
Then she told Max everything that had happened before she arrived at his apartment.