We all knew how to start works of art. Some among us knew how to “sustain” an idea. But endings, how to finish? completions emotional, the payoffs often still baffled us. Noticeable, still part-naïve, Robert, that triumph of Scandinavian coloring, overtly ambitious for a Midwesterner, now made serious progress on the Titanic. His apartment grew ever more stuffed with flotsam concerning the liner’s sinking. He name-dropped the 1912 passenger list. I learned that Harvard’s Widener Library had been given in honor of a student drowned. Above Robert’s mantel, framed charts of the ship’s cross sections. Some earlier fanatic had penned in names of passengers with arrows pointing to their staterooms. When Robert spoke of the sinking now, he got this moist troubled look that made him prettier but scarier.

“You’re young and healthy,” Angie once told him. “Why not study the history of serving strawberries and cream during Wimbledon? Just my luck, one friend is the walking Baptist Southern Gothic Kennel Club and the other goes belly-up over The Poseidon Adventure starring Shelley Winters as Orca the Whale. Laugh riot, the pair of you morbid goons.” He shook his head with pity (her joke no use). He said Ang was not exactly chirpy herself; she believed that being passed over as a deb placed her suffering up there alongside Billie Holiday’s. But Robert went right on explaining that many families in third class, see, were swamped in their little berths belowdecks and before first-class passengers even understood how major the problem was. He said that Captain Smith had not fired the first distress flare till a full hour after the berg struck. “Mostly he seemed to feel this social embarrassment. It was nineteenth-century manners trying to deny the scale of twentieth-century disaster.” There had been an attempt to put the women and children in one place and the stay-onboard men in another; but the working-class families could not imagine separating in that way and so drowned.

I’ve often thought about it since. Robert became ever more pedantic and fascinating on the subject of the wreck. To humor him, we all went under with it, too. Again and Again. We learned. He tried showing Angie and me how it was the earliest, the most poetically condensed prediction of our soon-to-capsize shipwreck of a century. Two years before the First War, there remained this belief that progress and development and the fruits of Industry could be so titanic as to outsmart nature. Angie told him he was overreaching. It sounded like a thing someone less smart than he said at cocktail parties. “After all, only about six or eight hundred people died, right?”

“One thousand five hundred and three.”

“Well, excuse me, bean counter.”