A Titanic Obsession

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Titanic.

Titanic who?

Titanic hit an iceberg! Women and children first!

That one gets me every time. Not because it’s funny, but because Tessa tells it with such obvious joy, every time. She loves the Titanic. She lives and breathes the Titanic. And because she’s four-and-a-half, so do I.

We’ve been down this road before. There was the Mike Mulligan periods, right around her third birthday, when she would only respond to the name “Tessa-Mike,” and only called me “Mommy-Mrs. McGillicuddy.” Then one day Mike was out, and it was all Magic School Bus, all the time. Tessa was Ms. Frizzle, of course, and the rest of us rotated roles. We made a Magic School Bus, dressed up like Ms. Frizzle, and even wrote and illustrated our own Magic School Bus book. It lasted for months, but then one day it was over, and the Magic Tree House had claimed Tessa’s heart. We read all forty-three Magic Tree House books in one crazy summer, and Tessa lobbied hard for her own tree house.

In each phase, the book and the characters changed, but the pattern was the same. Tessa tried on the protagonist’s role, with us as her supporting cast. She played out the plot of each book, then took the characters into her own elaborate fantasies, pushing the boundaries of each story and imagining new worlds far removed from her everyday life.

The Titanic period is different. This started with a storybook too – in Magic Tree House #17, Jack and Annie help a little boy and his big sister escape the Titanic – but the story is real. And this time, instead of playing roles and imagining stories, Tessa is reciting facts and asking questions. She’s begging for more Titanic books, and can’t remember the last time we read a novel.

We’re in the bookstore on a rainy afternoon. My in-laws are reading to the kids while I search for Titanic books.

“I don’t think you’re going to find anything,” my father-in-law says, shaking his head.

“Why not?” I ask absentmindedly. “Lots of kids are into the Titanic.”

“I don’t think so. It’s this huge disaster. Hundreds of people died. It’s kind of a dark thing for a four year old… kind of morbid, don’t you think?”

Maybe we’re both right: none of the local bookstores have anything in stock, but the library shelves are brimming with choices. We carry them all home: the DK Eyewitness fact book, the picture book from the perspective of a rescued teddy bear, even a choose your own adventure type book, where you can follow the fates of first-, second-, and third-class passengers. This last one makes me queasy; too many of the stories end with “the last thing you see,” or “you never see them again,” or simply, “you do not survive.”

I know kids who never seem frightened or troubled by anything. Tessa is not one of these kids. She worries about everything, and is easily scared. She has refused to watch Blues Clues because it’s too scary, yet she insists on reading about the Titanic every night before bed. We cannot believe that she’s not freaking out about it, or having nightmares, or something.

“Tessa, does the Titanic make you feel nervous?” my husband asks one night.

“No, Daddy. Why?”

“Well, it’s pretty sad and scary, don’t you think?”

She nods her head solemnly and agrees, “It was super sad, Daddy.”

It affects her, to be sure, but it doesn’t deter her. We read every Titanic book, finally settling on one that tells the stories of passenger Jack Thayer and wireless operator Harold Bride as our favorite. We go down to the cruise ship terminal to check out modern ocean liners as big, but somehow not as impressive, as the Titanic. We watch National Geographic videos of Robert Ballard exploring the wreck. We build our own Titanic out of cereal boxes and sail it around the living room. (It crashes into couch-icebergs, and table-icebergs, and baby-brother-icebergs.) We sing the old camp song my mother teaches us – Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives! – and eat a cake that I have miraculously constructed to look just like the great ship.

We are obsessed.

“Mommy, I think only you and I would get in a lifeboat, because we’re the only girls. Daddy and Calder couldn’t come.” She says this casually, but I can tell she’s been thinking about it.

“Oh, Tessa,” I assure her. “Calder is just a baby, so he could definitely come with us. And lots of men did get into lifeboats, so Daddy would come too. Definitely.”

“But it’s women and children first,” she reminds me. Rules are important to four-year-olds, but so are Daddies, and she’s thinking hard. “Maybe we could put a hat on him and pretend he was a woman,” she suggests. “Didn’t someone do that?”

“Yeah, I remember that too. But if they were getting ready to lower a lifeboat and there was still room, they’d let men get in. And that’s what would happen with Daddy.”

Between the heart-wrenching moments where we imagine being on the Titanic ourselves, I have plenty of time to think about why this disaster has captivated my little girl. She’s not the first, of course. Since the Titanic sank in 1912, there have been more than a dozen movies, including highest grossing film ever. There are books and songs and museum exhibits and Broadway shows and features about survivors. The world loves the Titanic, and no wonder. It is quite a story. Technological marvels and mistakes, nature’s beauty and danger, incredible bravery and cruel self-interest… there is more human drama in this one moment than we can even begin to understand.

Like all of us, Tessa is interested in why this happened, in what went so wrong. We ask all the what-ifs. What if the builders had used stronger rivets, instead of ones that became brittle in the icy North Atlantic? What if the White Star Line had been less concerned with cluttering the deck and had loaded the full number of lifeboats? What if Bruce Ismay, one of Titanic’s owners, hadn’t been so eager to arrive in New York early, and had agreed to slow down that night? What if Captain Smith had been on the bridge, instead sleeping off his dinner party? What if the Californian had responded to the distress rockets they saw Titanic launch? What if?

Like the investigations that followed the disaster, Tessa doesn’t lay the blame with any one person or decision. She seems satisfied that what’s done is done. And what’s interesting, what I watch her grappling with each time we open a book or talk about the ship, is that it’s complicated. It’s messy, and lots of things went wrong, and lots of things might have been different, and any one of them might have been the difference between life and death for hundreds of people. It’s intimidating – everything matters – but it’s also liberating – everything matters.

Without any coaching at all, Tessa focuses on the positive. The first few weeks of her obsession are spent learning about the rescue efforts. Though she was 58 miles away, the Carpathia raced through the icy waters to rescue Titanic’s 705 survivors just hours after the ship went down. We play Carpathia-rescues-the-Titanic over and over, and Tessa reassigns the title “unsinkable” to the Carpathia.

“I think they should have called the Titanic the sinkable ship!” Tessa laughs, and I wonder if this is part of her obsession. Grown-ups can be so wrong! They think they know everything, and look! She’s not ready to give up the idea of an unsinkable ship though, so she turns to the Carpathia – it’s the little ocean liner that could. But it fails us too. When we learn that the Carpathia did eventually sink – she was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1918 – Tessa stops talking about her all together.

Next comes Harold Bride. He was the junior wireless officer, and it was his idea to send SOS, the then-new international distress code, instead of the CQD call used by senior officer Jack Phillips. Harold was swept off the ship as she went down and was trapped under a collapsible lifeboat, but he beat the odds. He managed to climb aboard the overturned boat and told his fellow survivors that help was on the way – he had heard Carpathia’s message himself.

Tessa loves Harold. She loves the way he worked away, sending distress calls while the ship slowly tilted into the sea. She loves his frost-bitten feet, bundled up like snowballs. She loves the way he went right back to work on the Carpathia, sending out names of the survivors. But she can’t understand why he became a salesman when he returned to England. She insists, “He should have been a wireless operator forever, Mommy. That way he could have kept saving sinking ships.”

It’s hard to imagine that there was life after the Titanic for any of the survivors. It had to be the defining moment for each of them – the moment when they were brave and kind, or the moment when they pushed past another passenger, or turned away from someone calling for help. Bruce Ismay, President of the White Star Line, survived the wreck, but not his actions that night. He got on a lifeboat, though more than 1500 people didn’t. Captain Smith didn’t. Thomas Andrews, who designed the ship, didn’t. Tessa doesn’t get it.

“Why do they say that Captain Smith went down with his ship?” she asks.

“Well,” I tell her, “a lot of people believe that the captain is responsible for the ship and everyone on it. So he should be the last person to get off; he should make sure that everyone else gets rescued first.”

“But he could have gotten on a lifeboat.”

“Right. Just like Thomas Andrews. Remember how we read that he helped people get on lifeboats until the very end, but he never tried to get on himself?” I watch her nod, and wonder for the millionth time just how much she understands. Is she imagining what it must be like to stand there, helping others to safety and contemplating your own death? “Since Andrews designed the ship, he felt responsible for making sure everyone on it was safe. He didn’t think it would be fair to save himself if other people were going to die. Same with Captain Smith. And a lot of people thought Ismay should have done the same thing.”

“That he should have gone down with the ship?”

“Right.”

“But he survived, and Captain Smith and Andrews could have survived too.”

“Right.”

“And the band, too, right? They just kept playing the whole time and never got on the lifeboats.”

“Pretty brave, huh?”

She pauses, considering. “Very brave. But I would want to survive.”

I emphasize all the things people learned from the Titanic. Ships have to carry enough lifeboats for everyone now, and there’s an ice patrol, and we have new ways of looking for ice, and no one ever assumes that a ship is unsinkable. Ocean travel is a lot safer because of this. That’s what I’m thinking when Tessa tells me how glad she is that the Titanic sank. But when I ask her why, she smiles. “Because now I can learn about it, of course!”