‘What day of the week is it Grace?’
‘It’s Wednesday Maggie,’ Grace shouted back over the sound of the kettle boiling. ‘Why?
Maggie smiled to herself. ‘No reason. I just wondered.’
CHAPTER 10 - New York, 11th April 1912
Catherine Kenny placed her empty teacup carefully on the saucer and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, the rhythmic tick, tick, tick a comforting constant in her perfectly ordered, peaceful home. If she had the hours of time difference correct, Katie would be sailing by now. She wondered how her young sister was feeling, having never been on an ocean liner before, or on the ocean for that matter.
She looked into her teacup, a cursory glance over the scattered leaves showing, she noted with relief, nothing remarkable. Reading the tealeaves was a bit of a tradition in their family. She remembered her grandmother pointing out the vague patterns and images to her. It had entranced Catherine as an impressionable young child, although she was never quite sure whether her Granny was pulling her leg or could actually foresee the things she claimed to see in the leaves. As she had grown up and witnessed various predictions come true, she’d started to take it a bit more seriously and took pride in reading the leaves herself now, although she was yet to predict anything successfully and often wished she had paid more attention to her Granny’s mutterings.
She stood up to look in the large mirror over the fireplace while she fiddled with the tiny buttons on the high collar of her blouse. She found the tightness around her throat mildly discomforting, hence her reluctance to fasten the very last buttons until it was time to leave. She considered her reflection in the mirror; she looked a little tired, older than her thirty four years. She wondered how she would look to Katie and how Katie would look to her, nearly twenty-four years old and no doubt with an enviable lust for life and an even more enviable, healthy complexion, both of which came from a life spent outdoors.
Carrying her breakfast things through to the small kitchen of her one bedroom, East Side apartment, Catherine filled the sink to rinse them through. As she swirled the soapy water around with the dishcloth, washing her teacup, saucer, bowl, plate and spoon methodically, it occurred to her that Katie might not have boarded the ship at all. She’d sent money home to Ireland once before for Katie’s passage but, by all accounts, their parents had decided to spend the money on a cow rather than on the intended ticket to America. The regular discussions about Katie coming to America to join her sister had lessened in the intervening months and it was only recently, when several others from Ballysheen, her good friends Peggy and Maggie included, had begun to purchase their tickets, that Katie’s interest had surfaced again.
The two sisters had exchanged letters regularly over the years, Catherine enjoying hearing about news from home and Katie enjoying Catherine’s descriptions of her life in America. Tell me about the motor cars she would ask, in her own letters, and the buildings that reach into the sky. And, is it really true that the theatres on Broadway can seat thousands of people at a time?
The latest letter from Katie had arrived just a few weeks ago, stating that she would like to be able to travel over with the others from Ballysheen, it seeming like a good opportunity to be amongst friends, rather than making the long journey all on her own. Of course, Catherine had sent the money immediately, including with it a note to Katie and their mother assuring them both that she would meet Katie herself at the docks in New York. I am, after all, quite keen to see this ‘Titanic’ for myself, she’d written. As a post script, and fearing that they might think it too late to buy a ticket from the local shipping agent and spend the money on another cow instead, she’d emphasised that Katie would be able to buy a ticket in Queenstown, or on the ship itself.
Assuming Katie was on board with the Ballysheen group, Catherine imagined that she would be quite excited. With so many familiar faces from home around her, she was sure that any doubts and anxieties about the journey would be soon forgotten. She might even stop fretting, for a while at least, about her younger brother William who she’d been reluctant to leave behind. William had been deaf from birth and had always been Katie’s favourite among the six brothers in their family. They seemed to share a special bond which allowed Katie to communicate with him much better than anyone else in the family was able to. She understood him when no one else could and she was worried about what would happen to him now that she wasn’t going to be around.
For her own part, Catherine was very much looking forward to seeing her beloved sister again. It had been over three years since she had seen her last, before she had made the trip across the Atlantic herself. Travelling with her friend Maura Byrne, theirs had been a quiet, discreet departure from Ballysheen. Nobody even knew the name of the ship they were to travel on; it had never occurred to anyone to ask. How different Katie’s experience would have been, leaving amid such a fuss and flurry of activity as so many homes waved off a loved one and to be sailing on the most celebrated ship man had ever built, a ship whose name everyone knew.