Coast money. From impeccable Philadelphia stock, she had married John Borland Thayer, ten years her senior, on her twentieth birthday. Before taking on the Vice-Presidency of the Philadelphia Railroad, Thayer had been one of the state’s premier cricket players. Three months before the Titanic set sail, Mrs Thayer’s presence at Philadelphia’s First Assembly Ball had drawn the usual press attention. This was ‘the Prime Social Event of the Season’ and the lovely Marian Thayer was ‘one of the most strikingly costumed women’ of the night. She wore, according to Women’s Wear Daily, a high-waisted white satin gown with long train and a ‘gauzy overdress, heavily spangled with gold’. Her slippers were also gold, and her thick dark hair shone in coils around her head. In love with her husband, devoted to her four children — the youngest of whom, Pauline, was eleven when the Titanic went down — and loyal to her friends, Marian Thayer was the image of contentment but seemed also to understand unhappiness, and this was her appeal. Her husband may have suffered from bouts of melancholia; he was periodically described in gossip columns during 1910 and 1911 as being unwell and in need of rest, and the Thayers visited ‘nerve doctors’ in Switzerland. It was typical of Mrs Thayer to have insisted on the grief-stricken Emily Ryerson’s taking a walk with her on the deck of the Titanic the afternoon that they met Ismay; the grieving and the troubled gravitated towards her and she drew them in. Graceful and low-voiced, she shirked the superficiality of groups, preferring the intimacy of one-to-one conversation. She was a collector of life stories; people talked to Mrs Thayer as they would to no one else. She soothed the lonely with her promise of friendship, she reassured the bereaved with her belief in an afterlife. There was no pain that Mrs Thayer apparently could not take away.
The night the Titanic went down, the Thayers had been at the dinner for the Captain hosted by their friends George and Eleanor Widener. Other guests included William Carter, who jumped into the same lifeboat as Ismay, Carter’s wife, Lucille, who would divorce him on account of it, and Major Archie Butt, the trusted aide of President William Howard Taft. During the evening, while Ismay was dining with the ship’s doctor on the other side of the room, Mrs Thayer locked herself in private talk with Major Butt, who was returning on the Titanic from a European holiday which the President had advised his ‘dear Archie’ to take.
Six days later she described their conversation in a letter she felt ‘compelled to write’ to the President. ‘In my own grief’, Mrs Thayer began, ‘I often think of yours.’ She addresses the most powerful man in America as a fellow suffering being. ‘I feel I must write to tell you how I spent the last Sunday evening with Major Butt — for we all cherish news of last hours — and we spoke much of you. How devoted to you he was, and oh what a lovely noble man he was!’ Her meeting with Major Butt was ’meant to be’, Mrs Thayer says; he ‘opened his heart to me and it was as though we had known each other well for years’. This was the first time that she had ever spoken to Major Butt, but ‘from the moment we met [we] never turned from each other for the rest of the evening’. She felt ‘as though a veil was blown aside for those few hours illuminating distance between two who had known each other always well long long before and had just found each other again — and I believe it’. While the rest of the room discussed the stock exchange and crossing speeds, the society wife and the forty-six-year-old bachelor were ‘opening our innermost thoughts to each other’. He spoke of his love for his mother (‘he told me I was just like her’) and his sister-in-law, Clara, to whom he wrote every day about his life in the White House with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, letters which were later published. He spoke of his ‘love’ for the President and of ‘someone else he loved but that I do not’. They made an engagement to meet again the next day, ‘as I was going to teach him a method of control of the nerves through which I had just been with a Swiss doctor, knowing it would be a very wonderful thing for him if he could get hold of it for he was very nervous and did not know how he was going to stand in the rushing life he was returning to, and we were going to work so hard over it the rest of the time on board’. She ends by asking if the President thinks there is ‘any chance of seeing my husband or [Major Butt] again here in this life? My reason tells me No but how can we give up all hope until some days yet go past of this cruel torture?’2
Marian Thayer’s appeal is disarming. She has a belief system, she is searching for a deeper truth; her interests are in fate, the spirit world, alternative medicine; she is intense and odd and immediate. She sanctifies human relations; she describes her conversation with Major Butt as though it were the beginnings of an affair, she writes a letter of condolence as though it were a love letter. She speaks to everyone in the same way. Her genius lies in the realisation that Taft responded to the Titanic not as an international catastrophe but as a personal loss. ‘I cannot turn around in my room,’ he wept at Butt’s memorial service; ‘I can’t go anywhere without expecting to see his smiling face or hear his cheerful voice in greeting.’ While the former President, Theodore Roosevelt, who had also been close to Butt, was sending his ‘deepest sympathy to the kinsfolk of those who have perished’, Taft was thinking of the death of one man only: ‘Archie was the soul of honour. He was wholehearted and wholesome; courteous and courageous and a charming companion.’ While others thought Taft’s self-involved grief inappropriate at a time when he was required to steer his own ship through rocky waters, Marian Thayer opened her arms to him. ‘Never had I come in such contact immediately with anyone,’ she told Taft of her encounter with the Major. ‘He felt the same and we both marvelled at the time at the strangeness of such a thing…’ But there was a quality of strangeness to all her relationships, particularly the one she shared with Ismay.
It seems likely that while they were on the Titanic, Mrs Thayer came into ‘contact immediately’ with Ismay in the same way she had done with Major Butt. Ismay, who was not used to having ‘contact’ with anyone — apprehension was the response he more usually generated in people — interpreted their easy communication as a mutual attraction. She flattered him with her attention as she probably flattered other men; women were raised to reflect men at twice their size, and in response Ismay felt unusually relaxed and open. Conrad noted in Victory that forty-five is the ‘age of recklessness for many men’; in the American edition of the novel he increases it to fifty. During his time on the Titanic, Ismay experienced the recklessness that comes from supreme self-confidence and sudden, unexpected joy. His ship was the future; he was enjoying the attention of a beautiful female passenger. Having tried to get out of being present on the voyage, he was now in no hurry to get to New York. Finding time alone with Marian Thayer, who was constantly chaperoned, was impossible but when they met in company, whether in the dining room or on the deck, they never turned from each other. He looked for reasons to detain her, and when he saw her on the promenade deck with Emily Ryerson on the afternoon of Sunday 14 April, he had the perfect excuse: he showed her the message from the Baltic. While Mrs Ryerson told the story to the press, Mrs Thayer said nothing about the encounter herself. When the time came for Mrs Ryerson to sign her affidavit, it may have been Marian Thayer who persuaded her to withhold Ismay’s comments about lighting further boilers to get through the ice. The poor man was going through enough already.
Mrs Thayer phoned Ismay to say goodbye before he left New York on 5 May, and he sent a message to her from the pilot boat as he was leaving on the Adriatic. A letter from Mrs Thayer was then waiting for him when he boarded the ship which, he said, he ‘read every night’. Her letter eclipsed the one from Florence, which he received several days earlier: there is nothing more repellent than a love letter from a person you no longer love. Marian Thayer had lost her husband but her son, Jack, who had also gone down with the ship, had been miraculously saved by clinging on to the same upturned lifeboat as Lightoller. She at least had something to be thankful for and, unlike the other widows in first-class, harboured no ill will towards Ismay. Instead, she gravitated further towards him. Such was Mrs Thayer’s sympathy for Ismay that while the other widows on the Carpathia were spreading rumours about his culpability, Jack went to see him in his cabin. ‘I have never seen a man so completely wrecked,’ he recalled twenty-eight years later.3 Jack Thayer’s description, which he must have taken straight to Marian, suggests that he saw Ismay not as his father’s killer but as his mother’s friend. To Mrs Thayer, Ismay was neither a villain nor a coward but someone who was grieving, as was she. Her sympathy was a cause of irritation to the other widows on the Carpathia, particularly Eleanor Widener, whose dead husband’s father was on the board of the IMM, and who had not liked Ismay sufficiently to invite him to their dinner party. ‘Better a thousand times a dead John B. Thayer than a living Ismay,’ Mrs Widener announced when she heard that the president of the IMM was alive. Her remark was a reminder to Marian Thayer not to let a soft heart besmirch the memory of a heroic husband.
In the letter to Ismay which she sent to the Adriatic, Mrs Thayer said that she wished she too had died that night, that death would be better than living like this, and she asked him not to forget
