The Flaming Corsage

by William Kennedy

  Now his resentment was growing: a muffled fury accumulating toward his wife of eight years. He was stifling it at this instant, admiring the assertive swatch of color the corsage of violets made on her breast, when the waiter served the lobster gratiné. For no reason except his strange intuition to monitor portent, Edward then took his watch from his waistcoat pocket and noted the hour, eight forty-one o’clock, and that Toby, the elevator operator, was waddling, at the highest speed his stubbiness allowed, across the dining room to the maître d’. Edward saw Toby whisper a message, and then return on the run to the hallway, from which Edward now saw smoke entering the dining room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the maître d’ announced in a loud but thoroughly courteous voice, “I suggest that everyone leave with all swiftness. The hotel is on fire.”

  Edward grabbed Katrina and Adelaide by the arm and moved rapidly away from their table toward the rushing and already whimpering throng that formed an instant clot in the dining room’s double doorway. Edward saw the maître d’ and Maginn already in the hallway beyond the clot, turned to see Jacob and Geraldine just behind him, and then he rammed himself into the edge of the clot, his force breaking the impasse and sending people stumbling into the hallway toward the stairwells.

  In the hall Edward heard Archie behind him saying, with a voice full of panic, “The stairway’s jammed and the hallway’s full of smoke. We should go to the roof.”

  “The roof?” Edward said. “How will you get down? Look, this hallway has two staircases.”

  “The elevator,” Geraldine said with a high-pitched gasping that wanted to be a screech, “where is the elevator?”

  “Hunker down, get under the smoke if you can, and follow me,” said Edward, and the family did as he said and followed him in a crouch along the hall. Edward heard Toby calling, “Here, here, the elevator, I can take one more!” and Edward grabbed Geraldine’s shoulder and thrust her at Toby, who pulled her inside the crowded car, slammed the door, and descended to the street level in a rush.

  “Mother’s coat,” said Adelaide, and she ran back to the dining room before Archie could grab her, and vanished in the hallway’s thickening smoke.

  “Don’t die for a coat,” Edward yelled to her.

  “The roof,” said Archie in a voice broken with panic, “we’ve got to get to the roof! The firemen will get us down.”

  “You don’t even know how to get to the roof,” Edward said, but Archie was already on the run into the dining room, pursuing Adelaide.

  Two people came toward Edward on their hands and knees, coughing, crying in their fear and asphyxia, a woman in a blue gown and a man Edward recognized as the New York Assemblyman who had been at Maginn’s table. He was dragging a trunk as he crawled, and when he reached the staircase he pushed the trunk down the steps ahead of him.

  “Come on, Edna,” he called to the woman in blue. But Edna had stopped moving, and Edward saw Jacob wheezing badly, immobilized by the smoke.

  “His heart,” said Katrina, and Edward lifted Jacob and dragged him toward the narrow southern stairway. Through the thinning smoke Edward saw that the New York politician had gotten ahead of his trunk and was pulling it down the stairs behind him, oblivious of the loss of Edna.

  Edward began to cough, and Katrina, who could not stop coughing, fell on the stairs. “We’re in hell,” she said.

  “Only on the outskirts,” Edward said. “Don’t panic on me. Hold my coattail so I know you’re here.” He saw the winding stairway below, pocked with flame.

  “We’ll go,” he said, but Katrina’s cough revealed her weakening strength, and Edward took off his jacket and wrapped her head with it. “Breathe through the cloth,” he said, “and wait one second,” and he crawled back toward the collapsed woman.

  “Let’s go, Edna,” he said, and he dragged her by one arm to the stairway. Behind him the hallway’s carpet in front of the elevator was a running pathway of flame. No one else would get through that.

  “Grab her other arm,” Edward told Katrina, and together they moved down the stairs, Edward holding his father-in-law under his left arm like a sack of grain, Jacob’s head forward, and he and Katrina pulling Edna, faceup, by her arms. The smoke lessened dramatically, for reasons Edward could not understand, as they descended to the first-floor landing. They moved down the final flight to the ground floor, the fire erratically licking only two walls, and when they reached the billiard room they found four sawhorses blocking the nearest street doorway, which had been painted earlier in the day. Edna’s husband was throwing his weight against the door with no success. Edward left the women and Jacob near the door, picked up the man’s trunk and used it as a bartering ram, smashing the door outward and letting in a rush of cold air. He tossed the trunk out onto the sidewalk and its latch snapped open, revealing a score of wrapped packages of cash lying atop folded shirts.

  He turned back to the women, saw that both were safe from flame, Edna regaining her wits. He went toward them and lifted the now-unconscious Jacob over his shoulder just as Katrina bent down to help Edna rise. Edward then heard a great whooshing sound and in the same instant saw the elevator shaft fill with a sudden rocketlike uprush of flame and gas, a blazing cylinder made visible as the elevator door exploded outward, showering sparks and embers on all in the room, setting fires on the green felt of the pool tables, and hurling into the air blazing splinters and sticks, one of which pierced the breast of Katrina and instantly set her gown aflame. She screamed, bewildered by the wound as she looked at it, and Edward could see the flame blackening petals of her violets. With his left hand he pulled the burning stick from her breast and hugged her to his chest to quench the flaming corsage.

  As Edna and her Assemblyman ran to the street, frantically brushing sparks from their hair, Edward moved through the doorway, clutching Katrina ever more tightly with his left arm, the inert Jacob doubled over his right shoulder, a family fusion of three bodies inching toward the outer darkness of the frigid world.

  ON THE SECOND day after the fire, despite the pain in her violated breast, Katrina dressed in her winter bloomers and long woolen stockings, two of her warmest sweaters, woolen muffler, heaviest skirt and cape, skating cap that covered her ears, and she rode the trolley downtown. On this cold and sunny morning she left the car and walked to the corner of Steuben Street and Broadway and joined the crowd of a thousand who were watching firemen with hoses wet down the smoldering bricks of the Delavan’s ruins so that the search for the missing bodies could begin. She watched people pick up a brick or a piece of pipe as souvenirs, watched three workers trying to pull down a standing wall so it wouldn’t topple on the firemen. One worker threw a rope, with a hook at the end, over the wall and, with his mates, then tried to pull the wall down. They tried half a dozen times, but the wall stood. A man in the crowd told the worker with the hook, “Tie a noose around the end of that rope and hang yourself, you dumb mick.”

  A fireman passed by and Katrina asked him, “Aren’t you going to dig for the bodies?” The missing, estimated at a dozen, were all hotel workers. Cora. Her sister Eileen.

  “Not today, ma’am. Still got some fire under there, and in some places maybe eight inches of ice on top of that.”

  Workers would need a month to move ten thousand cubic feet of stone and brick to recover all the dead.

  Katrina stared up at where the third floor had been, only the brick facade standing now. On the night of the fire the firemen’s hoses wouldn’t reach that high, their streams turning into broken plumes just above the second floor and coating the hotel’s lower exterior with the glitter of instant ice, a scandal: low water pressure in the city, pressure turned off at night in the antiquated pumping station, and for twenty minutes after the fire started, nobody there to turn it back on.

  In two third-floor windows, when they were still windows, when there was still a third floor, Adelaide and Archie Van Slyke appeared in Katrina’s memory, Adelaide wearing her mother’s sealskin coat. She climbed ou
t and sat on the window ledge to escape the smoke pursuing her. She said nothing, but Archie was cajoling her to be calm while he uncoiled a rope fire escape, a single braid, and fed it out the window and down toward Broadway, where his in-laws, and a crowd that would grow to twenty thousand, watched. Firemen inched the great weight of their ladder along the icy wall to a point beneath the imperiled Van Slykes, and two firemen began the upward climb. It was suddenly clear that the ladder would not reach the third floor (four stories up), clear also that Archie’s escape rope (designed for a room two floors down) did not even reach the top of the ladder.

  Jacob Taylor said then, “They’re as good as dead.” He was lying propped in the doorway of Iligan the Bootmaker’s shoe repair shop across from the hotel, awaiting a carriage to take him to St. Peter’s Hospital.

  “They’ll get them,” Edward said to him, and Katrina ripped her petticoat to make a bandage for Edward’s blistered left hand.

  As the flames rose up wildly behind her, Adelaide chose to make her silent leap. She clutched the sealskin coat around her and, to the shrieks of the crowd, pushed herself feet-first toward the firemen on the ladder, swiping both men with her leg (neither man lost his grip on the ladder), bounced onto the trammeled snow cushion of Broadway’s sidewalk, and landed at the feet of the half-dozen firemen holding the ladder.

  “She’s dead,” Katrina said, and she wailed like a wounded hound and buried her head in Edward’s embrace.

  Then Edward saw Adelaide stand up and talk to the firemen. “She’s not dead,” he said. “Look at her, she’s up.”

  Katrina looked and saw Adelaide, then kissed Edward.

  “God help her live,” Jacob Taylor said.

  The firemen on the ladder reached upward toward Archie, who now dangled from the end of the rope just above the second-floor window. A chorus of voices in the crowd yelled to him, “Hold on . . . they’ve nearly got you . . . don’t let go.” The topmost fireman’s hands reached Archie’s shoes, then touched them (to a cheer, Katrina remembered), then gripped them both, and at that moment Archie let go of the rope and let himself fall palms-forward to meet the hotel wall. The second fireman grabbed his pantleg and then his knees, and together the two firemen eased him down atop their backs and shoulders onto the ladder. The crowd sent up its roar.

  When Katrina learned there would be no digging for bodies today, she took the trolley back to North Albany.

  Edward explained to Katrina how it was possible that a flaming stick could fly through the air and pierce her breast.

  A porter emptying ashes from the furnace, he told her, had spilled embers on a pile of rags in the basement, without knowing what he’d done. Allowed to kindle unseen, the smoldering rags became the cellar fire that sent foul smoke, and eventually sparks, up the stairwells and heating vents, igniting the south wall of the staircase, and creeping along that wall to the elevator shaft.

  The shaft’s four wooden walls glistened with spattered oil, Edward said. The wooden elevator cab was built to glide on its cables three inches away from all walls, making the shaft a perfect chimney with perfect draft. The fire licked that oily interior but once, and then blew skyward with instantaneously-cubed ignition that shaped the shaft as a fiery skyrocket, as perfect in its elemental power as the stack of a blast furnace. It swiftly turned the elevator cab into a blazing coffin, and then shot fire through the roof, exploding disaster onto the attic superstructure. The ravenous blaze trapped a dozen employees in their windowless bedrooms under the attic eaves, the only exit door to the roof nailed shut by management to keep housemaids and kitchen boys from loafing, from watching parades pass by on Broadway, to keep them from sleeping on the roof on those summer nights when temperatures in the attic hit a hundred and five. The door burned to ashes, and there was no proof of the nailing. But surely, Edward said, those trapped people must have tried to reach the roof to save themselves, for the hotel had no fire escapes, no fire axes, no hand grenades, no standpipes; and the fire extinguishers hadn’t been examined for eighteen months, and many did not work.

  Not a dozen but fourteen people lost. Cora and Eileen.

  The stack of a blast furnace.

  You can see how it could blow a stick through the air to stab you, Edward said.

  Geraldine Taylor, recounting her escape for her family, said she had moved through the main lobby, coatless in the early exodus, and out onto Steuben Street, where firemen pointed her toward the Dutch Kitchen, an all-night lunchroom that had become one of several havens for the dispossessed and the injured. She stood in the zero-degree night, searching the thousands of faces, watching the hotel entrance for a glimpse of her family, until she could no longer bear the cold, then went to the lunchroom, which was already out of all food except bread and coffee. Two doors away, in the sheltered doorway of the bootmaker’s shop, Jacob Taylor would soon lie in the care of his daughter and Edward.

  Geraldine would not see Adelaide’s leap, or Archie’s rescue, would not see Jacob lifted into the same carriage with Adelaide and Katrina, to be taken together to the hospital. She heard from Maginn, that vulgar reporter, that all were alive but injured, and had gone to St. Peter’s Hospital.

  “And Edward is still looking for you, Mrs. Taylor, searching the crowds,” Maginn said. “They don’t know whether you’re alive or dead.”

  Geraldine did not wait to be found by Edward. She walked the eleven blocks to the hospital without a coat and caught such a cold that Dr. Fitzroy thought it might turn into pneumonia; and so kept her home in bed for a week.

  Adelaide was hospitalized, and in three days, willful woman, walked out of the hospital without help. Three days after that, she developed such pain that Dr. Fitzroy readmitted her, fearing for her life.

  Katrina was a presence in the ruins, whatever the weather; two hours a day, or more, watching the work crew grow from six to sixty, coming to know the foreman, the fire chief, the coroner, the policemen, watching ice hacked and shoveled off the debris as the January thaw arrived, hydraulic mining having failed to loosen the debris: for the stream from the hose was too weak. Relatives of the missing sought out Katrina, confided in her; and she locked in memory the names of the fourteen: Florence Hill, housekeeper; Anna Reilly and Mary Sullivan, linen-room workers; Ellen Kiley laundress; Thomas Cannon, sweeper; Toby Pender, elevator man; Ferdinand Buletti, cook; Nugenta Staurena, vegetable cook; Bridget Fitzsimmons, kitchen girl; Simon Myers, coffee boy; Molly Curry, Sally Egan, and Cora and Eileen McNally, chambermaids.

  Tom Maginn of The Argus, Edward’s bohemian friend, crossed the street toward Katrina. She’d met Maginn before she became involved with Edward, met him skating on the canal when she was nineteen, a flirtatious afternoon. He was tall, had a bit of a shuffling walk, a mustache now that grew long and drooped, a strong jawline, some might say. At their first meeting he said he knew who she was, “the yellow-haired princess of Elk Street,” and he confessed he could never court her, for he had no money, no prospect of any.

  “You are the most sublime woman I’ve ever met,” he had told her, “but I’m below your class. I’m a slug in the cellar of your palace.”

  She had not spoken to him again until he came to the wedding rehearsal as Edward’s best man. Edward had asked his father to be best man, but Emmett said he would not stand on any altar in front of God with Jacob Taylor.

  Now, hands in his pockets, Maginn tipped his hat, smiled.

  “The city is talking about you,” he said. “My editor wants me to write about why you come to the ruins every day.”

  “I want to bury the dead.”

  “Which dead?”

  “The McNally girls. Cora was our housemaid until her sister came from Ireland, and they got a job together.”

  “You’re here because of a housemaid?”

  “Cora was very special. We told each other things.”

  “Did she tell you she was married?”

  “Cora?”

  “I talked with her husband. He was a pastry chef at th
e Delavan, but was let go. They married secretly a month ago to bind themselves together, no matter what happened.”

  “Oh, the poor man, he must be devastated.”

  “I told him I’d let him know when they find her. What about yourself? I heard you were seriously burned.”

  “It’s nothing compared to what others suffered. And you? We saw you at dinner. Were you hurt?”

  “Not a scratch, not a singe.”

  “You were fortunate.”

  “Yes, and your husband, he’s one of the heroes of the fire. He always seems to rise to the occasion.”

  “He saved my father’s life. And my mother’s. And that poor woman from New York.”

  “You helped save that woman, too. You needn’t be modest.”

  “I did what Edward told me to do,” Katrina said.

  “Anything I can do for you? The slug, as always, is at your service. You only have to ask.”

  “I can think of nothing to ask. Please don’t write anything about me.”

  “It wouldn’t embarrass you, I assure you.”

  “Any story would embarrass me. Please don’t. This is what I ask you.”

  “All right, Mrs. Daugherty,” Maginn said, and with a smile added, “Now you owe me one.”

  At dusk this day the workers found the first body. Until then the chief discovery had been the safe owned by Ozzie Parker, who ran the cigar stand in the lobby. The safe had protected Parker’s ledgers, gold and silver coins, and seven boxes of cigars, still unlit. The found body was a legless torso, head and one arm attached, sitting erect. It was Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, identified by her protruding teeth; and under her arm an album of tintypes, all defaced by the heat, no one recognizable.