The Second Mrs. Astor: A Heartbreaking Historical Novel of the Titanic

Madeleine tells Jakey he is wrapped in lace they bought in Queenstown, the ship’s final port of call before leaving Europe. Jack bought it for their child, along with a lace jacket for Madeleine. She says reporters have asked her the best thing she remembers about the Titanic, and she’s realized she doesn’t have to tell them anything. But she tells Jakey it was all so epic, she “never felt any sort of vulnerability aboard that ocean liner, right up until the very end” (205). She imagines that’s a blessing.

April 11, 1912. Madeleine listens to music in the Café Parisien, “everything tasteful and subtle and full of undercurrents neatly hidden beneath the brighter notes” (206). Margaret joins her. Mrs. Cardeza stops by and addresses Madeleine as Miss Force; Margaret corrects her. Mrs. Cardeza invites Margaret to dine at their table that evening, and Margaret replies that she has already been invited to join the Astors. Madeleine and Jack go on deck to watch the ship depart land.

That night, as Rosalie dresses her for dinner, Madeleine watches a sophisticated, bejeweled woman emerge. She is ready to glimmer on her husband’s arm, but in the dining chamber, she thinks “the celebrated men and women surrounding them lived as if captured in amber” (212). The orchestra plays, and Madeleine reminds herself to be the wife Jack needs. Their guests at dinner are the Fortunes, and Mabel Fortune says she thinks Jack and Madeleine’s story is romantic. Alice tells them how, in Cairo, a fortune-teller approached and told her she would be in danger if she traveled on the sea, and she would be set adrift on an open boat. Her brother Charlie scoffs, but Madeleine remembers the boaters that the Noma rescued the previous year.

Madeleine tells Jakey that the Titanic was an uncanny dreamworld. Jack took his tour and was impressed. Ismay wanted to set a record for the fastest voyage to New York.

April 12, 1912. Madeleine and her nurse, Carrie, visit the Turkish baths. They are large and luxurious. April 13, the weather turns cooler. Madeleine strolls the deck with Jack and feels the baby move. Later, seated in a deck chair, she is approached by another woman, Helen Bishop, who starts chatting as if they are old friends, saying she feels she knows Madeleine so well because of all the coverage of her in the papers.

Sunday, April 14, Madeleine sleeps through the church services. She dresses to dine that night with Jack at the Ritz restaurant. They hold hands, and Madeleine looks at “all her rings and bracelets afire like the sunset in the low, flattering light” (229).

April 14, 1912, 11:40 pm. Madeleine dreams she is standing on a rooftop, looking down at a busy street, and feels an earthquake. Jake wakes her to say the ship has struck an iceberg. The captain wants passengers on deck as a precaution. Jack gives her and her maid lifebelts as Madeleine dresses. He pulls out her jewelry box and tucks jewels in her pockets. Madeleine takes the Irish lace.

On deck, they wait in the first-class lounge while the orchestra plays. Captain Smith tells them to put on their lifebelts. It is cold, and Jack sends his valet to their cabin to fetch Madeleine’s furs. They watch crew readying the lifeboats, but Jack assures her the ship will not sink: “Every precaution was taken in building her, every innovation employed” (237). They wait in the gymnasium as the lifeboats fill. When the ship begins to list, passengers are sent to A deck.

Jack helps Madeleine crawl into a lifeboat. She doesn’t want to leave without him, but he says they’ll only be separated a few hours at most, and he’ll see her in the morning. She must think of the baby and remember she is a mermaid. Jack asks the officer on the lifeboat if he may accompany his wife, but the officer tells him the boat is for women and children only. Jack tosses Madeleine his gloves, “the leather still warm from his hands” (243). He smiles at her as the lifeboat descends to the water.

Madeleine tells Jakey some nights she still feels trapped in those next few hours, “flattened between the mirrored line of the ocean and the suffocating stars” (245). She’s glad her son won’t remember any of it.

April 15, 1912. Alongside the Titanic, Madeleine can see the water rising inside the ship. The officers on the boat say they are to go aft to pick up more passengers. Madeleine hears Kitty bark and sees Jack outlined at the railing. There is no one to pick up aft, but some men climb down from the ship to their boat. A few miss, hit the water, and are helped into the boat. As the lifeboat sails away, Madeleine watches the stern of the sinking ship rise into the air, propellers still working. The lights go out. People fall overboard. Madeleine hears explosions and the “Titanic split apart. Just like that, she broke in two, and everything before the aft funnel dropped down in a rush beneath the water. Gone” (249).

Then the aft section sinks, and the officer of their lifeboat says they must pull free of the suction. Madeleine hears people crying out for help and demands that the lifeboat go back. They have seats in their lifeboat, and people are dying. Madeleine and the other women help row the boat back “to the flotsam of human souls and debris” (252).

Madeleine tells Jakey they pulled eight men from the water. One of them died at her feet. She searched for Jack, through the night into the dawn.

April 15, 1912. Their lifeboat leaks. The cries for help diminish, then silence. A woman next to Madeleine says Ismay knew there were icebergs along their route, but he told the captain to increase speed to get to New York faster. They join with other lifeboats and rescue a group of men floating on an overturned lifeboat. Behind them is a steamship, headed their way. As the sun rises, they can see the icebergs, “glass mountains, jagged and pale […] frozen fairy-tale monsters gleaming like opals, coral and salmon and mauve, scattered near and far” (256-57). Madeleine is lifted aboard the Carpathia by the boatswain’s chair.

She wakes in a cabin, her clothing tattered. A woman named Marian Thayer brings her soup. Marian was on the lifeboat with Madeleine. Madeleine insists she must go look for Jack. Marian says Jack is not aboard the ship, and they are on their way to New York. Madeleine becomes frantic, and Marian reminds her that they have all lost their husbands, and some have lost sons too.

Madeleine tells Jakey that the captain had given her and two other women his cabin. Captain Rostron is hailed as a hero; without him, everyone aboard the Titanic would have died, not just three-quarters of them. The rescued are crowded aboard the ship with the other passengers on the four-day trip to New York.

April 16, 1912. Madeleine wakes in the night and dresses. Her fur coat has been ruined by salt, so she wears a blanket. She walks through the ship quietly, looking for Jack but not finding him. She passes an old woman snoring on a bench; it is the “grand Mrs. Cardeza, looking like nothing more than a grizzled fishwife caught napping in the open, her mouth agape, aged and senseless” (266). Madeleine remembers what her mother said; kinder hearts are stronger. She drapes her blanket around Mrs. Cardeza and moves on. In a second-class lounge, she finds Margaret Brown, who has been helping tend the passengers rescued from steerage. Margaret helps Madeleine back to bed. People tell her stories about seeing Jack in the last moments aboard ship. One night when she is out, a reporter’s wife approaches her asking for a statement. Madeleine asks her if she knows what happened to Jack.

Madeleine tells Jakey the newspapers followed Vincent’s distress as he demanded news of his father.

April 18, 1912. The Carpathia docks in New York, and Madeleine waits with Carrie and Rosalie for Vincent to come get them. The crowd at the dock wants news of Mrs. Astor. When Vincent arrives, he is devastated that Jack is not there and says that Madeleine killed him, left him behind to die. He sees that Madeleine is pregnant. Madeleine says Jack chose to protect her and the baby. As they leave the ship, Madeleine gives her fur to a mother with a young son. Katherine finds her in the crowd of photographers and newsmen and embraces her. Limousines take them to the Force house. Katherine cries when she realizes Madeleine is pregnant.

Madeleine tells Jakey that hope is treacherous, and it tortured Vincent. She, however, had given up hope when she saw all the bodies floating in the sea, “those scattered, terrible human dolls in the North Atlantic” (279).

April 18, 1912. Madeleine is welcomed by her family but can’t help think of the dead people she saw floating in the cold water. She visits her father, who is in bed with a broken leg. Mr. Force feels terrible that he couldn’t protect her, but Madeleine says, “I have been protected by you my entire life […] You, and then Jack. I’ve been the most fortunate girl in the world my entire life” (281).

Photographers line the Fifth Avenue mansion when she arrives, but Madeleine walks past them. The mansion is cold and echoing. The family doctor visits to confirm that Madeleine is well. The doctor asks her not to share distressing details of the wreck with Vincent. Madeleine takes a bath and floats in the water. She holds her breath underwater as long as she can.

Madeleine tells Jakey that she became, overnight, the world’s sweetheart, going from gold digger to tragic widow. She tells Jakey:

I became the dream of countless dreamers, women from all around who still—still—thought my smashed life was perfect. That the marriage which had taken everyone so aback before had crystallized into the most wondrous, sorrowful fairy tale […] At long last, I had managed to gain the world’s admiration and respect, and all it took was the loss of my husband. The felling of my heart (289).

April 23, 1912. Madeleine receives a telephone call from the White Star office informing her that the remains of Colonel John Jacob Astor have been recovered. The ship bearing his body will dock in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Madeleine goes to tell Vincent, who is still searching for news that Jack survived. Vincent shouts that his father’s death is her fault. Madeleine tells him she made the lifeboat turn back, and she would have tossed another man into the ocean in a heartbeat if it made room for Jack. Vincent asks to go to Halifax to collect his father’s body, and Madeleine consents. She notices that the portrait of Ava is gone.

Madeleine offers little input into the funeral arrangements, asking only that the hymn be “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” She heard the orchestra playing the hymn as her lifeboat left the ship, and she thinks Jack would have heard it too, making it the last thing they shared. They will have the funeral service in Rhinebeck. Madeleine wanders the grounds of Ferncliff, remembering being there with Jack in the autumn. Katherine offers sympathy for her grief.

Madeleine tells Jakey about meeting his half-sister, Alice, at the funeral. Ava did not attend. The Four Hundred overflow the small church. Madeleine behaves as the bereaved widow, though she feels wild and pained.

May 4, 1912. Thousands line the funeral route from the train station to the Manhattan cemetery of Trinity Church where Jack will be buried. The scent of lilies suffocates Madeleine. She carries a black lace handkerchief and her strand of carnelian. Families who wouldn’t attend her dinner party—the Vanderbilts, the Huntingtons, the Rockefellers—crowd the church. That night, she dreams of the ship sinking, bodies falling into the water. She goes to Jack’s study and looks at the portrait of him, painted by Bonnat, “life-sized, seated, his legs crossed, gazing back at her with his calm winter look” (304). In his desk, she finds Kitty’s spare collar, engraved with Jack’s name, and finally she cries.

Madeleine tells Jakey that she hid in the mansion and let society go on without her. She became even more fascinating to the public. Strangers contact her claiming they have news about or messages for her from Jack. Vincent follows up on these leads, but Madeleine knows better.

May 31, 1912. Madeleine hosts a dinner for the captain and doctor of the Carpathia. She receives them next to the marble fountain in the entrance hall, decorated with dolphins and nymphs, full of goldfish. Marian brings her friend, Florence Cumings, who was also in their lifeboat. Mrs. Cumings expresses pity for the way Madeleine is hounded by the press. Madeleine presents the captain and doctor with gifts expressing the women’s thanks for saving their lives.

In June, Madeleine turns 19. In August, her son is born. Though the house is full of family and nurses, Madeleine still feels it is empty, felled of its heart. Madeleine holds her baby to her chest and senses his heartbeat.

Madeleine tells Jakey she knew true love, and at the end of her life, she will see Jack smiling at her once more.