Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World Read Online Free PDF Page A

when a cable sent by her daughter caused her to immediately make plans to sail for home. As she sat alone on one of the Nomadic ’s slatted banquettes, her petite, elegantly dressed figure topped by a modish hat, Helen, too, was almost certainly preoccupied by anxious thoughts as she wondered what had possessed Harold to get into one of those dangerous new flying machines.
    The most somber group of all, however, were the Ryersons of Haverford, Pennsylvania, who were returning home for the funeral of their twenty-one-year-old son, Arthur, a Yale student who been thrown from an open car while motoring on the Easter weekend. The family had received word by telegram in Paris, and Arthur Ryerson Sr. had cabled back to arrange his son’s funeral for April 19, two days after the Titanic was to arrive. His wife, Emily, was being given comfort by two of her daughters, Suzette, aged twenty-one, and Emily, aged eighteen, while thirteen-year-old Jack Ryerson was tended by his tutor, Grace Bowen. The Ryersons were part of Philadelphia Main Line society, named for the fashionable suburban towns built along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a group that would be well represented on the Titanic ’s first-class passenger list.
    Margaret Brown described her time aboard the tender as an hour or longer of sitting in a “cold, gray atmosphere,” which may have referred to more than just the weather, given the number of anxious or grieving passengers on board. The mood on the tender certainly affected Margaret’s friend Emma Bucknell, a wealthy widow from Philadelphia, who had also been traveling in Egypt. The matronly, nervous Emma had confided to Margaret that she feared boarding the Titanic because of her “evil forebodings that something might happen.” Mrs. Brown simply smiled at her friend’s premonitions and offered reassuring words to her.
    Yet Emma Bucknell was not the only one on board with apprehensions about the voyage. Fashion writer Edith Rosenbaum had at first been looking forward to the crossing, but on reaching Cherbourg she had been gripped by fears and had sent an anxious telegram from the station to her secretary in Paris. Perhaps it was simply nerves, she thought, since this was her first trip to New York as a fashion buyer and stylist, and she was bringing trunks of valuable Paris gowns to show to American clients. Edith also hadn’t fully recovered from a car crash the summer before that had killed her German fiancé and severely injured another friend. They had been motoring to the races in Deauville, which Edith was covering for Women’s Wear Daily , when their automobile crashed into a tree. She had survived with only minor injuries, but the emotional trauma of it lingered.
    The accident, however, hadn’t diminished her love of France. On her first trip to Paris five years before, Edith had known instantly that it was the city for her. Back home in Cincinnati, marrying a young man from a suitable Jewish family was what was expected of her, but at twenty-eight the prospects for that were growing slim. Over her father’s objections, she returned to Paris in 1908, determined to find work in the fashion trade. Her first job was as a salesgirl for Maison Cheruit in the Place Vendôme. Madame Cheruit herself had been impressed by Edith’s American verve and jolie laide looks—and her claim that in Cincinnati she had always ordered her dresses from Cheruit. After a year, Edith left the fashion house to write about French style for a small periodical distributed by Wanamaker’s department stores, and this led to a job as Paris correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily . She also drew sketches for the Butterick Pattern Service and later even designed her own line of clothes for Lord & Taylor in New York. But designing, in her words, was “just a sideline.” As she would later say, “I never fooled myself that I was going to be another Lady Duff Gordon.”
    Edith had written about the opening of the