‘Ahh, a man of the earth.’ Professor Andrews perched on the edge of the desk. ‘They make the best poets in my estimation; full of senses and emotions and in touch with their surroundings.’
Grace had never thought of it like that, but it kind of made sense. She had always attributed her love of reading and writing to her father who had read to her every night at bedtime, no matter how exhausted he was from a hard day’s work. ‘Just one more chapter Daddy, please,’ she would plead when it was time to turn out the light, especially when he read from The Little House on the Prairie, her favourite. She liked to imagine herself as Laura Ingalls Wilder and her father as Pa, re-living their adventures in her mind and basking in the warmth of their family’s unfaltering love for one another. She adored the book so much that she’d cried inconsolably into her pillow when Laura’s sister Mary went blind.
It was her father who had taught her to read long before her school teachers did; he who had encouraged her to keep writing her little stories about a family travelling across America in a small wagon and of princesses locked in towers by evil witches. It was he, a hardworking, unassuming, uneducated farmer who had uttered phrases such as one last dance before harvest time, who had told her about the memory of water, who had inspired her to observe the world around her and make it as beautiful written down on a page as it was to see in reality.
‘So Ms Butler,’ Professor Andrews continued, folding his arms casually over his grey sweater which, Grace noticed, was wearing thin on the elbows. She wondered whether there was a Mrs Professor Andrews who might take him shopping to buy a new one, although for some reason, she got the feeling he still lived with his mother. ‘You’re probably wondering why I asked you to stay back.’ He paused for dramatic effect, as he was prone to doing, before continuing. ‘Well, you see I was speaking to a colleague of mine in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week and I happened to mention to him that I have a very talented young lady in my tutorial group.’ Grace felt herself blush a little at his compliment and shuffled her feet awkwardly. ‘He has agreed to take a guest feature article from you.’ He stood up then, striding around the heavy desk to collect his briefcase. ‘So, what do you think of that? You up for the challenge?’
Grace was stunned. This was big news. A feature slot with The Tribune was the Holy Grail of journalism. She knew people who had been pitching ideas to them for months and hadn’t even had a response.
‘Wow,’ she gushed, her cheeks flaming scarlet now. ‘Erm, wow. Thank you. Thank you very much. That’s amazing.’
‘Yes it is. So, send them the best two thousand word feature you can possibly write and if Bill likes it, he’ll run it this summer. Get this right Grace, and you will almost certainly be guaranteed an internship with them, if not a job when you graduate.’
She’d spent the next week researching ideas in the library, sitting for hours at the battered, teak desk in her dorm, typing up her handwritten notes on the electronic Brother typewriter she’d been given as a Christmas present the previous year, only to tear the printed pages from the machine, screw them up and throw them into the bin. The university dorms were small, just big enough to fit two single beds (her room-mate Ella Jackson was at home sick with glandular fever), two desks, a dresser with a mirror and a small window. Thank god for the window, Grace remembered thinking to herself as she’d unpacked her case on the first day of term. The small, boxy room with its stark white walls, flimsy teak furniture and cold, vinyl flooring felt like a cage to a girl who was used to roaming along hedgerows and swinging in the seat on the front porch drinking homemade lemonade.
In the run up to the Thanksgiving vacation, she gazed out of that small window for hours at a time, hoping that inspiration would strike her. President Reagan’s inauguration? The Pacman game craze? The first space shuttle to be launched? These were all big news stories which dwarfed Grace’s confidence and caused her to doubt her ability to do them justice. She needed to find something more personal, a story which ordinary people could relate to, a story which, above all else, she felt compelled to write. Professor Andrews always told his students that, ‘great news journalists write with their head, great features journalists write with their heart.’ She needed to find a story which touched her heart, and she was failing to do so.
It bothered her over Thanksgiving and continued to bug her over the holiday season. Although she enjoyed the time at home with her family, catching up with Art who was back from travelling around India, relishing her mom’s home cooking and savouring the late-night conversations between just herself and her dad, she was distracted and couldn’t wait to get back to the city and college life. A few weeks into the New Year and the start of the spring semester, she still hadn’t found her story.
‘Why can’t I do this Jimmy,’ she complained as they lay on her small, dormitory bed, legs perpendicular to the wall. She often lay like this; enjoying the sensation of the blood flowing down her veins, pulled by the force of gravity. It made her feel weightless, as if she were floating in water.
Jimmy turned to face her, pushing her hair gently from her forehead. ‘You will find your story Gracie,’ his smooth, velvety voice captivating her as always. ‘Don’t force it babe. Stop panicking. Something will come to you, it always does.’ He lent towards her and kissed her gently on the cheek to reinforce his certainty. They gazed at each other for a moment and as her eyes fell across the familiar contours of his face, she wondered what the future held for them, whether their relationship would continue, or whether, like so many university-bred romances she had seen, it would fall apart outside the familiarity and security which an academic institution provided.
As she considered this, Macy Johnson, the dorm monitor, knocked on her door to tell Grace that her mother was on the phone. Her father had been in a terrible car crash and she had to go home immediately. All thoughts of her feature, and her future with Jimmy, were forgotten.
Jimmy drove as quickly as he could, breaking the speed limit on the interstate and running red light after red light. As they drove, Grace sat motionless in the passenger seat of Jimmy’s blue Ford Mustang and gazed up at the light winter fog which shrouded the tops of the higher buildings in downtown Chicago. She noticed odd things like the last of the recent snowfall still clinging to the kerb sides like moss and she remarked on the new, digital, time and temperature display on one of the buildings.
They reached Mason District Hospital at 7.32pm, nine minutes too late. Her father was pronounced dead at 7.23pm. By the time Grace got to his bedside, a frightening array of tubes and drips hung listlessly from the machines around him. They had failed to stop the internal bleeding; failed to keep him alive. He’d been hit head-on by a truck on a blind bend just outside their farm. The truck was travelling way too fast for the road conditions and had lost control. Her father, sensible and practical as always, had been on his way to get salt to grit the roads because he knew they were dangerous to drive on.
Grace stood in front of her father’s lifeless body, stunned into a total silence. All she could do was entwine her fingers tightly around her mother’s careworn hands, her mother who was only forty-one years old and already a widow. She’d barely had chance to put away the gifts from the twentieth wedding anniversary she had recently celebrated with her husband. Mother and daughter didn’t speak. Together they wept desperate, relentless tears.
The hours, days and weeks that followed were a blur within which Grace supressed her own grief in the knowledge that her mother’s was far greater. Jimmy returned to campus five days after the funeral. She hardly remembered him leaving.
She made the phone call to Professor Andrews exactly two weeks after Macy Johnson had knocked on her dorm door. Sitting on the bottom stair in her mother’s house, tracing the abstract, spider web carpet pattern with her toes, she dialled the numbers carefully on the recently installed rotary dial telephone. The circular face seemed to move in slow motion as it rewound to the start position after each digit she dialled, her heart thum
ping as she listened to the hypnotic whir of the internal mechanism. She hoped Professor Andrews wouldn’t pick up. He did.
Twisting the grey telephone cord anxiously around her fingers, she explained quietly what had happened and that as a result she would be dropping out of University to remain at home with her mother during this difficult time. Professor Andrews listened silently at the other end of the line, waiting until Grace had finished before speaking himself. He told her he understood entirely and supported her decision and was extremely sorry for the terrible situation which had forced it upon her. Sensitive to her grief, he hesitantly mentioned the matter of the feature.
‘I hate to raise this now Grace, but is this something you think you can still work towards? It really is such an outstanding opportunity for you and I’m sure Bill would wait a while, given the circumstances.’
‘I’m so sorry to let you down Professor Andrews,’ Grace replied, speaking softly into the telephone receiver, her words concise and measured, ‘but please can you pass the opportunity to someone else. I can’t write anything at the moment, I’m just too full of sadness. For now, I just have to put my career to one side and be here for my mom.’
Although she would never know it, her university Professor was so moved by her sense of duty to her mother, by the maturity she displayed for a nineteen-year-old girl, that he shed a tear himself when he replaced the receiver.
Two years later, she hadn’t been able to let go of that sense of duty to her mother and that is why Grace Butler stood here now, celebrating her twenty-first birthday in the small kitchen of her family home, rather than in the fancy new bars of Chicago; the same wallpaper with the repeating patterns of barnyard chickens providing the backdrop to her birthday photographs, just as it had done since she was a little girl.
While the rest of the guests gathered around Grace to watch her blow out her candles, Maggie, her eighty-seven year old great-grandmother, sat quietly in the back porch watching the celebrations from a distance, the faintest whisper of a smile playing across her paper-thin lips.
Grace spotted her sitting quietly on her own and walked over, the hum of conversation fading slightly as she moved away from the main gathering of guests. It struck Grace how fragile Maggie looked recently; so frail and diminutive, her skin almost translucent, her tired body unable to function without the assistance of medication and walking sticks. It was hard to believe that this same woman had started the four generations of the family which was gathered here now; that it was this, almost insignificant old lady who, as a young girl of only seventeen, had made the difficult journey from Ireland to America in the hope of starting a new and better life.
‘Here’s your slice of birthday cake Maggie.’ Grace always used her first name, at her great-grandmother’s insistence. Great Grandmother makes me sound ridiculously old. I don’t like it she’d said, even before her first great-grandchild was born. ‘It’s your favourite - chocolate sponge with fresh cream and Aunt Martha’s homemade raspberry jam.’
The back porch was lightly scented by the fragrant camellia bushes which grew in the garden. Grace loved the smell and inhaled deeply as she handed over the birthday cake. The old lady took the plate from her, the involuntary shaking of her hands causing the silver dessert fork to rattle on the ‘in vogue’ avocado coloured plate. It was part of a wedding anniversary present which had never been out of the box until today. Grace had watched her mother wash and dry each plate, cup and saucer with great care, especially for the occasion and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by anybody that the simple act of opening that box of avocado coloured crockery was as much about a symbolic gesture of her mother moving on in her life as it was about a practical necessity for more crockery.
‘You’re a very kind girl,’ Maggie said, with a slight nod of the head. ‘Thank you dear. Are you having a nice birthday?’
Grace noticed that Maggie’s distinctive duck-egg blue eyes seemed lost in distant thoughts, small pools of water gathered at the corners. She pulled up a small, plastic yellow stool to sit closer to her. ‘Are you OK Maggie? Is it too noisy for you, or too cold maybe? I can close the window if you’d like. Or how about a nice cup of tea to go with that cake?’
The old lady simply smiled and brushed a crumb from her lap. ‘Did I ever tell you that it snowed the day you were born?’
Grace laughed. ‘You did Maggie. Snow in April hey! Who would believe it?’
Maggie often told the story of how it snowed the day Grace was born; a brilliant, pink snow of cherry blossom that fell in a blizzard from the trees outside the hospital, dancing and whirling in the brisk, spring breeze, drifting around the cars parked outside. She had a particular fascination with the annual spectacle of the blossom trees bursting into life with their colourful blooms; loved to watch the blossom fall. ‘Like the prettiest snowflakes,’ she would comment, ‘or a bride’s confetti.’ She said it reminded her. Nobody knew what it reminded her of.
‘Come here,’ the old lady whispered, patting the seat next to her on the sofa, her eyes twinkling now with a sense of mischief. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
Grace laughed. She found Maggie so charming; cheeky, unassuming and direct. She was almost childlike in these latter years of her life, particularly since her husband James, Grace’s great-grandfather, had died a few years ago. Grace sidled up to her conspiratorially. ‘What,’ she whispered back to her, ‘What is it? Do you want another slice of cake?’
Maggie slapped her playfully on the wrist. ‘No, I do not want another slice of cake. I want to tell you a secret.’ She had Grace’s full attention now. ‘Now you listen to me, because this is important. Are you still writing those stories of yours?’
Grace looked down at her feet, guilty almost for her response. ‘Well, not so much. Not since Dad died really. Everyone’s been too sad for me to write anything.’
‘And what about that university you were enjoying so much, and that boyfriend of yours? When are you going back to them?’
Grace was surprised. Maggie had never really spoken to her about this before. She didn’t think she would have even remembered Jimmy it was so long since she had spoken about him, or since anyone from the family had seen him. Since her father’s accident, she had blocked Jimmy out, hadn’t returned his phone calls or letters. Even they had stopped after the first six months. She’d thought about him often, had wanted to get in touch so badly, but something stopped her. Something deep within her was too afraid to let him back into her life, to let herself love him as she had loved her father, unable to bear the thought of feeling that unbearable pain of loss ever again in her life. So she had done the only thing she could and had blocked him out completely and tried to forget him.
‘I don’t know Maggie. Maybe I’ll go back. One day, when mom is better.’
The old lady studied her intently. ‘You know, I left my home when I was around your age. I left people I loved and cared about, but I had no choice. I had to leave, had to come here to find a better life. Your mom doesn’t want you moping around here forever. Maybe you should pick up your notebook and your boyfriend’s phone number and go get on with your life.’ This was said as much as an order as a hypothetical question. Grace knew she was right. She’d been trying to find the right time to talk to her mother about the possibility of returning to university, but the right moment never seemed to come.
‘Anyway,’ Maggie continued, ‘I’ve a story to get you writing again, a story I’ve never told to anyone except your great-grandfather, God rest his soul.’ She paused then, to take a bite from her cake. Grace waited patiently, conscious of the fact that some of the guests were starting to leave. ‘Do you know what the date is today Grace?’
Grace chuckled, nudging her gently on the arm. ‘It’s my birthday. April fifteenth.’
‘Ah yes, but do you know what else happened on this day? A long time ago?’
Grace thought for a moment. Had she missed someone’s birthday, or a significant anniversary? She couldn’t think
of anything. ‘I don’t know? What?’
Maggie paused again. She took a deep breath. Something about her expression had changed, her shaking hands stilled, her eyes searching deeply into those of her great granddaughter.
‘Did you ever hear of Titanic Grace?’
Grace put her glass of coke down on the floor, sensing the significance and importance in Maggie’s tone of voice.
‘Of course I have. Everyone’s heard of Titanic. Why?’
‘It sank seventy years ago today you know.’
‘Really? What, actually today? April 15th? So, I was born on the anniversary of Titanic sinking? Wow, that’s quite cool. I didn’t realise that.’ She was just about to call over her mother to share this revelation about her birth date when Maggie put her hand firmly on Grace’s arm.
‘Do you know how I remember that date so well Grace?’
‘How?’ Grace stared intently into Maggie’s glassy eyes. The very air around them seemed to still for a moment. The hairs stood up on the back of Grace’s neck.
‘I was there. I was on Titanic.’ Maggie paused then, the relief and shock of saying this out loud seeming to shake her to her core. Grace was speechless.
‘You were there? On Titanic?’
‘Yes dear.’ Grace took hold of Maggie’s hands as she continued to speak in a quiet, almost whisper, as if afraid to let the words leave her mouth. ‘Fourteen of us from our small parish in Ireland boarded that magnificent ship Grace,’ she continued. ‘Fourteen of us.’ She looked down at her hands then, unable to look her great-granddaughter in the eyes. ‘Over fifteen hundred people died on that ship you know. I was one of the lucky ones. I got the last seat on the last lifeboat thanks to a man who helped me.’ She looked down at the ground then. ‘I often wonder what happened to him.’
Grace watched her closely, seeing something different now in this incredible lady who she’d known all her life only as Great Nana Maggie, not as a Titanic survivor.