The Great Husband Hunt Read Free Page A

start the bidding, and the name
Titanic
was rubbed off them with emery paper and that was the end of that.
    Slowly the
Carpathia
came home. Some people had cards bearing the name of the ones they were hoping to see. I wished I had thought to make a card. They held them up, praying for a wave or a smile, but nobody at the rail was smiling or waving.
    It was half past eight by the time they began to warp her in, and then the thunderstorm broke. We waited another hour, in the rain, until she was moored and the gangplank was lowered, and lists of survivors were finally posted. That was when I got separated from Harry.
    There was such a crush I could scarcely breathe and I was wet to the skin.
    “Please,” I asked the man in front of me, “can you see if Minkel is there?”
    But he gave me an elbow in the ribs and I never saw him again. A woman said she'd find out for me if I gave her a dollar, but I didn't have a dollar. And so I just found a place to lean, against the customs shed, figuring the best thing was to stand still and allow Pa to spot me easily.
    Then a Cunard porter noticed me.
    “Are you all right, Miss?” he said. “Is it First Class you're looking for?”
    I said, “Mr. Abraham Minkel. I can't pay you though. I don't come into my money until I'm twenty-one. But my father will tip you.”
    He touched his cap and disappeared, and I didn't expect to see him again. A sense of service was a thing of the past, as Ma and Aunt Fish often remarked, and everyone expected something in their grubby hand before they'd stir themselves.
    And so I waited, shivering, wondering at the uselessness of Harry Glaser, trying to draw up a balance sheet of my standing at home. I believed my crimes of disobedience, ingratitude and impropriety might just be offset by the triumph of being the one to bring home Pa.
    The ladies from First Class began to file into the echoing shed. There were children, too. Some were crying, most were silent, and the ladies still had on their hats. “How odd,” I thought. “A sinking must be a good deal gentler than I imagined.” And then this happened. I saw a face I knew.
    The very moment I looked at her, she sensed it and looked back at me, quite directly. Then she turned her head away and disappeared into the crowd. I was still puzzling how an Irish, dismissed without references, could have sailed First Class and in such Parisian style, when the Cunard boy reappeared beside me.
    “Miss,” he said, “I'm afraid to say I couldn't find a Mr. Abraham Minkel listed, but Mrs. Minkel is there, alive and well. You should be seeing her any moment now.”
    But the women had all disembarked. The men filed through next, but my pa was not amongst them. They all had downcast eyes, and a hurried step, and somewhere in the crowd I heard somebody hiss. Being a survivor isn't necessarily a happy condition, I realized later. There would always be the question, hanging in the air, too awful to ask, “And how were you so fortunate? What other poor soul paid for your life with his? Or hers?” If you were an able-bodied man, it would have been better form to perish nobly.
    “Not spotted her yet, Miss?” the porter asked. “Well, that's a mystery.”
    He was now taking more interest in my case than I liked. He was like a stray dog, eagerly padding along at my side, on the strength of one brief expression of gratitude.
    I said, “It's not a mystery. It was a cruel mistake. There was no
Mrs.
Minkel. Only my pa, but he's not here. Is there another boat? Are there more following on?”
    He looked away.
    “I don't think so, Miss,” he whispered. “I don't think so at all.”
    People milled around us, plucking at him, wanting his attention.
    “My pa's lost,” I said. I knew it.
    And he was glad enough then to make his getaway.
    A woman said, “There's to be a service of thanksgiving. Right away.”
    What did I care? Thanksgiving for what?
    “Not just thanksgiving,” she said, reading my expression. “To pray