Chapter Text
At Cherbourg a woman came aboard named Margaret Brown. History would call her the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown. But to me, she was just plain old Molly. Her husband had struck gold out west, and she was what my mother called “New Money”. By the next afternoon, we had made our final stop and we were steaming west from the coast of Ireland. Straight to America. Straight to my destruction.
Lunch aboard Titanic is no different than lunch back home in Louisiana. Sam and the buzzards are settled around a table, tea and delicacies scattered about. Sam is pressed between John and Sarah, Molly Brown directly across from him. Smile painted on his face, he watches as Molly throws her head back in laughter and his mother watches in feigned disdain. He remembers her words, told to Sarah for so many years: Women mustn't be too loud. Then who on Earth is ever going to listen to them?
“Our master shipbuilder, Mr. Andrews here, designed her from the keel plates up,” Mr. Ismay says. Mr. Andrews, a handsome man with a mind of steel, sits beside Molly, cheeks flushed under the attention. Sam watches as he clicks his fork awkwardly against his glass, something a well brought up man would never do in company.
“Well, I may have knocked her together, but the idea was Mr. Ismay’s. He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale, and so luxurious in its appointments, that its supremacy would never be challenged. And here she is…” He gestures around him, broad smile on his face. Sam thinks he’s quite handsome for a man his age.
“Wh’re ships always bein’ called ‘she’?” Molly asks suddenly. She holds the attention of everyone on this ship, and she very well knows it. Sam admires her; most women aren’t brave enough to travel without the company of a man, yet alone be boisterous at the dinner table. “Is it because men think half women around have big sterns and should be weighed in tonnage?” She cackles to herself, eyes crinkling around the edges.
John goes stiff beside Sam; he simply keeps his head down, smirk out of sight. Molly shrugs innocently, takes a gulp of her wine. “Just another example of the men settin’ the rules their way.” John opens his mouth to give what Sam undoubtedly knows is his polite way of critiquing one’s life choices when the waiter appears at Sam’s side. Sam sighs to himself and lights a cigarette. He takes a deliberate drag, slow and collected, before he blows the smoke into John's face.
“You know I don’t like that, Sam,” Darlene sniffs.
“He knows,” John says. He plucks the cigarette from Sam as if he’s a mother taking candy from a child. Sam feels his cheeks burn as Sarah’s dark eyes drive a hole into him. John turns to the waiter as if nothing happened, smiles.
“We’ll both have the lamb,” he says. “Rare, with a little mint sauce.” He grabs Sam’s hand, squeezes just a bit too tightly for Sam’s liking. “You like lamb, don’t you Sammy?”
No, you absolute fool. I haven’t touched lamb in nearly a decade.
“So, you’re gonna cut his meat for him too there, John?” Molly’s shoulders shake with laughter, rattling the table. She turns to Mr. Ismay, John long forgotten. “Hey, who came up with the name Titanic? You, Bruce?” Mr. Ismay smiles.
“Yes, actually,” he says. “I wanted to convey sheer size. And size means stability, luxury…and safety-”
“Do you know of Mr. Freud?” Sam interjects. John nails his foot into Sam’s shin under the table. “His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you, Mr. Ismay.”
Sarah chokes on her breadstick.
Darlene lets out a gasp. “My Lord, Samuel, what has gotten into you?” she hisses.
Sam stands, wraps a hand around Sarah’s arm.
“Excuse us.”