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secondary effect of what?” asked the Colonel, and no one could answer him.
    Nearly everybody had a story to tell about the Titanic, which had sunk in a spectacular fashion just over two years before. Mrs. McCain’s younger sister had been one of the survivors, so we listened spellbound to everything she had to say on the subject and pestered her for details about her sister’s experience. In the case of the Titanic, the problem was the lack of lifeboats, but those who made it into a boat were rescued very quickly. “The ship sank at night, so many people were not properly dressed,” said Mrs. McCain. “Whenever my sister tells the story, she laughs and says that her biggest worry was the fact that she was wearing on her feet only a pair of jeweled Arabian slippers and that her ankles showed beneath her robe when she was getting in and out of the boat.” The other female passengers and I simultaneously looked down at our feet and blushed, which was a nice reminder that somewhere a world existed where this might be our primary concern. Mr. Nilsson drew on his knowledge of the shipping business to say that the sister ship of th e Titanic was to have been named the Gigantic, but that after the disaster, the White Star Line renamed it the Britannic. “I suppose they didn’t want to tempt fate again by using such an arrogant name.”
    “It wasn’t the name that sank the Titanic, ” said Mrs. McCain. “It was an iceberg. Do you think the same thing happened to us?”
    “We didn’t hit an iceberg,” said Mr. Hardie. “After the Titanic sank, the transatlantic routes were shifted to the southern track to prevent that very thing.”
    Mr. Sinclair added that many of the Titanic lifeboats had been rescued within four hours, and it was these stories as much as anything Mr. Hardie had told us that encouraged us to believe that our rescue was imminent, even overdue.
    Mr. Hardie assured us that the experience of the Titanic had translated into revised safety protocols, but clearly mistakes had been made putting those protocols into effect. Because of the fire and the listing of the Empress Alexandra, it became more and more difficult to operate the lifeboat-lowering mechanisms, and there was understandable confusion throughout the ship as people tried to make sense of what was happening and decide what to do.
    “I was knocked clean out of my bed,” said Mrs. Forester, the silent older woman I recognized from the ship. “I had retired after lunch for a nap, while Collin had gone somewhere to play cards. My first thought was that he had come in drunk again and knocked into me. I do worry about him, but Collin is such a survivor.” Because we had all done so, surviving seemed an easy thing, though just beneath the surface of our own stories lurked the stories of the people we had seen throwing babies into the water to save them from the flames.
    Isabelle said, “Why did they start to lower our boat and then raise it back up again?” Then she turned directly to Mr. Hardie and said, “You must know why they did it. Weren’t you helping with the boats?”
    Mr. Hardie, who had been particularly talkative that day, suddenly became quiet and only replied, “Nay. I don’t.”
    Then Isabelle asked, “Do you think the little girl who hit her head on the side of our boat when it was being raised back up got into the next one?”
    “What little girl?” asked Mrs. Fleming, who was in deep despair over the unknown fate of her family and was untouched by the illusions that buoyed the rest of us.
    “The one who was knocked out of the way when our boat was launched.”
    “Was someone knocked out of the way? Was it Emmy? You’re not talking about Emmy, are you?” Mrs. Fleming added that her husband and daughter had fallen behind in the mad dash for the lifeboats and that she hadn’t noticed until it was too late. “They were right behind me! I had injured my wrist somehow, and Gordon pushed me ahead. I thought they were right