The boys jumped to their feet and held her close, and even her father hugged her. Alice felt so loved for an instant, before she remembered: “Mary was inside.”
“What do you mean?” Timmy said.
Alice thought of telling them the whole story, but she couldn’t do it.
“I saw her there and I don’t think she came out,” was all she could manage. “I was already outside when the fire started. I couldn’t get back in.”
“Maybe she left before you,” her mother said. “Maybe you just didn’t know.”
Alice sobbed. She could not tell them the truth. “I hope so.”
At the mortuary the next day, a freezing rain fell, and Mayor Tobin himself read the names of the dead. Their father didn’t come. It was only Alice, her brothers, and their mother. After almost every name, someone screamed, the most shrill and awful sound Alice had yet to hear in her life, or ever would. The rare name that was met with silence made her wonder whether that person’s loved ones had no idea yet. Maybe they were on the Cape, walking along a frigid beach with a thermos full of coffee, and they hadn’t switched on the radio all weekend long. She wished that for herself, for her mother.
The mayor finished the list off after an hour, but Mary’s name wasn’t mentioned.
“That means she might still be alive,” their mother said, hopeful. Alice wanted to believe it, but she saw the looks on her brothers’ faces and knew.
They drove from one hospital to the next, searching.
Those who had died on the way to help the night before had been piled in hospital lobbies while doctors and nurses scrambled to save the living. The bodies were still there. The stench made Alice ill as she passed through. She had to cover her nose with the sleeve of her coat.
Hundreds of people were lined up on gurneys in the halls of Boston City Hospital, some of them burned beyond recognition. Every medical examiner in the state was brought in to help identify the dead. It was hardest to figure out who the women were. Most of the men had their licenses in their wallets. But the women, dressed in gowns, had nothing that revealed them.
They walked in silence up and down those hallways for hours. Alice looked only at the gowns, telling herself that it was because she knew what Mary was wearing. In fact, she did it because she could not bear to look at the faces. She had always bossed her sister, but she had protected her too. Now Mary was probably dead, and it was Alice’s fault.
A nurse told them that there was the threat of a blood shortage, so the government had allowed access to the emergency blood banks that had been set up for air raids. And, she said, the police were using the method set in place for an air raid, of receiving calls from relatives and loved ones, of assigning cards to the victims: white for the missing, green for the injured, and pink for the identified dead. Everyone had been focused on the war for so long, expecting a catastrophe tied to it somehow. Now something else entirely had taken its place.
Alice tried to bargain with God: if they found Mary alive, she would never eavesdrop on Trudy again; she would never have one of her temper tantrums; she would learn to cook and to be quiet. She looked at the sky and told Him that she knew her sister had sinned in one of the very worst ways, but if He would just let her live, Mary would redeem herself. She would marry the man she had sinned with and raise a good Catholic family.
In the days that followed, they would learn that the fire got started when two young lovers kissed in a corner of the Melody Lounge and, perhaps as Alice herself once had, the girl said it was too indiscreet, too bright under the lights like that, with a hundred other people in the room. So her date reached up over their heads and removed a lightbulb from where it hung on a wire stretched from one palm tree to another. Minutes later, they had forgotten it—they were interrupted by a teasing friend, maybe, or drawn out to the dance floor, where the piano player had just started another verse of “Bell Bottom Trousers.”
Meanwhile, a bartender instructed a sixteen-year-old busboy to replace the missing lightbulb, so he climbed onto a chair and lit a match to see by, wobbling a bit as he held the match in one hand and the bulb in the other, and accidentally setting fire to one of the artificial palms.
Holiday ornaments, newly strung around the basement bar, caught fire. Flames flew up the stairs and tore through the flimsy silk draping, all the way up to the roof. Fireballs dropped down onto the tables and the bar and the bandstand and the floor, where seven hundred people were crammed in, dancing, drinking, flirting, and then—a moment later—pushing toward the doors, fighting to get out alive, which precious few of them did.
The room was dim enough on its own and quickly filled with smoke.
At the auxiliary doors, people were crushed to death, pushing in vain to get out. The doors had been bolted shut. Others ran aimlessly in all directions, scrambling like mad to escape before they died of smoke inhalation or were trampled where they stood. By the end, bodies were piled six feet high at all of the entrances, to the tops of the doors. There were bodies everywhere. They fell into the stone basement when the ballroom floor collapsed.
Later, four hundred fur coats and evening wraps were found in the coat check, destroyed by water and smoke. The redheaded gal with the crush on the Boston College fullback lay dead in the midst of them.
The fire chief told the Globe that really, the fire hadn’t been so particularly bad. If people hadn’t panicked and flooded the sole exit, if they had allowed the firemen in, if they hadn’t had to dig through heaps of bodies at every door to reach the fire, he estimated there would have been at most a handful of deaths.
The chief loss of life resulted from the screaming, clawing crowds that were wedged in the entrances of the club, the paper read the next day. Smoke took a terrific toll of life and scores were burned to death.
Four hundred ninety-two people died in all.
Mary’s body was identified after five days of searching, at a morgue in Scituate. She had been trampled, her face crushed by the boot of a man twice her size. It was impossible to say how long she had lived that way, or how much she had suffered.
At home that night, Alice drank half a bottle of whiskey, stolen from her father’s secret hiding place under the basement steps, and passed out in her bed upstairs. Mary’s bed, beside it, stood empty, and Alice had to turn her face to the wall. She woke up long after dinner had ended. She went to the bathroom and threw up, the whiskey like gasoline in her throat, her temples throbbing. Down on her knees, she noticed a pearl hair comb of her sister’s that must have fallen behind the sink. Alice took it in her hand, sat down with her back against the tub, and ran her fingers over every inch.
She was positive that she would go to Hell for what she had done. She felt desperate to tell someone—her mother, her brother Tim—that it was because of her that Mary was inside the club to begin with, that she had murdered her own sister in a way.
Their father wept openly at the kitchen table and glared at Alice through drunken eyes. The sight of him terrified her.
The day after they discovered Mary’s body, she went down the front hall early, her throat tightening, her hands shaking. She wanted to hide the newspaper before her father saw it and searched for Mary’s name in the listings, as if this might make him forget.
When Alice opened the door, a burst of cold wind shot through her. She shook open the paper and saw his picture there, right on the front page: Mary’s Henry, a formal shot from his college days.
Alice began to read the story’s first paragraph, and her chest locked up: Henry Winslow, son of Charles Winslow III, died of smoke inhalation, the story began. Mr. Winslow, who lived through a 1931 bus crash that killed two of his fellow Harvard students and a driver, was an executive with Winslow Shipping Enterprises. A diamond ring was found in his shirt pocket after he collapsed at Boston City Hospital. His sister, Betty Winslow, says that he was planning to propose to his girlfriend, Mary Brennan, the very next day. Documents indicate that Miss Brennan perished in the fire as well, and so she
will remain, evermore, Maiden Mary.
At that moment, grief filled Alice completely. She thought she might not be able to go on living. She still attended the early Mass each day. But the sermons and prayers that had always roused her, soothed her, helped her understand the world, now seemed like only hollow words. She felt nothing and always left the church thinking the same thought: she wasn’t worthy to receive God’s love now; she had committed a sin worse than any other.
Alice had failed her sister. She prayed, not for forgiveness, but for a sign, a signal from God as to how she could repent. She vowed to stop wishing for something better than she deserved. She would behave from now on, and expect nothing in return.
When, on the morning of the wake, her aunt Emily said, “Now, Alice, it’s time for you to grow up. You will care for your parents and bring them some joy, I hope,” Alice realized fully that her dreams were done for, and only answered, “I will.” She wondered what this would mean, how she could best serve them. She pictured a lifetime of being alone, but not in the way she had wanted. She’d be working her days away at the law office, spending her nights in front of the radio while her father got drunk and angry, and her mother ignored it all. She would spend her life fixing them dinner and caring for them in their dotage, all the things that Mary would have done.
That same morning, a letter arrived, addressed to Mary and Alice. It was a cheerful note from their brother Jack, written on Thanksgiving, two days before the fire.
Greetings from the Tin Can! Happy Turkey Day! There’s a festive mood on board today, despite the fact that we are all so far from home and missing our families. The dinner menu is fit for a king, or at least it seems that way from the way they dress up the names of everything: Hot Parker Rolls du Lyautey, Baked Spiced Spam à la Capitaine de Vaisseau, and for dessert—apple pie, strawberry ice cream, cigars, and cigarettes! The captain told us we’ve survived so many attacks “due not alone to skill or to good luck, but unquestionably to the intervention of divine providence.” So don’t you worry about me, my lovelies. I’ve got God on my side.
Your Jack
At the wake, Alice walked to the ladies’ lounge every half hour or so and drank a long sip of vodka from a flask her aunt Rose had brought.
They had been forced to use a closed casket, and Alice was happy for that. Still, it felt torturous, standing beside that cold wooden box, calmly shaking the hands of so many neighbors and cousins and friends.
“I’m here for you,” they’d say, or “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Alice wanted to tear their hair out. She wanted to tell them that they could never understand this. She wondered how many of them were there merely to be a part of the tragedy—I knew a girl once, from Sunday school, who died at the Cocoanut Grove, they might say years later. I was at her wake. She was so disfigured they couldn’t even have a proper viewing.
She stood by the casket with her family. Her brothers were still as stone in their dark suits, rarely speaking a word. Her mother couldn’t even stand, and had to sit in a folding chair with Aunt Rose fanning her. Their father was at the end of the receiving line, with tears at the corners of his eyes that never once fell.
The afternoon wore on. Alice tried to focus on a window at the back of the room, a thin slice of blue sky. Her head swam with dark thoughts that she wanted to scream out loud. They were here, burying her sweet young sister, and it was Alice’s fault. For most people in the world, today was a day like any other. Out there, women were buying groceries and teaching children how to ride bicycles and getting dressed for a movie. But Alice would never have another pure day like that; she didn’t deserve to. Her life was as finished as Mary’s.
Then she saw them come through the door: Daniel Kelleher, the scarecrow she had met at the Cocoanut Grove, and his brother.
Alice moved out of her place at the front of the room, feeling her family’s eyes on her. She walked through the winding line of mourners, past a long table of cold sandwiches and cake. She met him at the back wall, reached for his hand, and whispered, “Come outside for a smoke?”
He squeezed her hand tight. Though his palm was clammy, he didn’t let go.
Out on the sidewalk, the bright sun hit her eyes, and she had to squint. He wasn’t a handsome man, not by a long shot, but he was here. She was surprised to feel something like elation at the sight of him, something like gratitude.
“It was good of you to come,” she said, as he lit her cigarette.
“Of course,” he said. “How are you holding up?”
She shrugged.
“I’m so sorry for your l—”
“Please don’t say it,” she said.
He nodded. “Then I’ll just say thank you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“By finding me one hundred percent resistible, you saved my life.”
She smiled weakly.
“Your sister knew you loved her,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because sisters always do. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”
“What makes you think that I—,” she began, but she started to cry and couldn’t complete the thought.
“Put that bad conversation you had before we left out of your head,” he said. “It never happened.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said.
She wanted to tell him the rest, but she could not manage. She needed someone now, and if she told him, there was no way he would stay.
“It should have been me,” she said through her tears.
“No,” Daniel said.
“I killed her.”
“Now, listen,” Daniel said, more stern and strong than she would have thought him capable. “It was a terrible accident. People all over this city are wondering right now what they could or should have done. But it’s not your fault.”
She sniffed. “Thank you.”
“Let’s get back inside,” he said.
She wondered if she could possibly love this person, who seemed excessively kind, but not much of a man in her opinion, nothing like she’d ever imagined for herself. At best, he could give her the common sort of life she had come to fear. Though it seemed only marginally better than living with her folks, that was still something. She remembered her aunt’s words: You will care for your parents. It’s time for you to grow up.
Perhaps this was what God had been trying to tell her all along. She hadn’t listened when her mother told her to stop putting on airs. She had seen her sister’s love affair as having to do with her own happiness—selfish even then—and now God had taken her sister away. Finally, she had been punished.
Daniel wrapped his arms around her, and she let herself sink in.
They were married six months later. Daniel was allowed a week’s leave after the wedding. They moved into their first tiny house in Canton, where their honeymoon consisted of unpacking boxes and listening to Tommy Dorsey records for six days straight before he had to reboard the ship.
Daniel wanted to talk constantly and he wanted to make love nearly every night, when Alice just wished not to be touched. He asked her what felt good to her, which she happened to know from talking with Rita was a rarity, and a first-class thing. But Alice couldn’t imagine saying the words, even if she knew what they were. It all felt wrong—sweaty and hot and uncomfortable, unholy. It wasn’t painful, not after the first couple of times. But it never once compared to a good warm bath. When he had to leave at the end of that week, she was almost happy to see him go. She was pregnant, but it didn’t last.
She joined St. Agnes, their local parish, and got to know other war brides. They’d gather on Thursday evenings to pray for safe returns or for the unlucky among them whose husbands had already been killed.
The war carried on for two more years. Alice did her duty—saving the drippings from the frying pan and bringing them to the butcher shop every Thursday morning; trading ration coupons for butter and sugar and coffee with the other women on the block; darning old stocking
s she had worn for years, even though they bunched at her ankles and sagged around her waist; drawing all the curtains at dusk when she switched on the lamps, so German subs wouldn’t sink the ships in Boston Harbor, miles away.
She walked around in a state of despair that felt like it had actual weight, pulling her down, making her feel exhausted. No one took much notice, but she grew nervous wondering what it would be like when Daniel came home.
She knew girls who were taking highly paid defense jobs—building bombers with such excitement you’d think Jimmy Stewart himself was going to fly them. Rita would call her in the evenings, gasping with excitement over wearing slacks to work, and having to pick specks of steel out of her hair and wiping grease from her cheeks.
Alice kept her job at the law firm, preferring to be solitary. She didn’t understand the exuberance all around her, as if war were the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. On her lunch hour, she declined to join the others for sandwiches and frappes at Brigham’s, and instead rode the streetcar to the Gardner Museum and walked from room to room, each of them so familiar to her after a time that she felt as though she were in her own home. She’d watch other women make a beeline for the Tapestry Room, or the courtyard, with its palm trees and flowers and pretty mosaics, but she herself was there for the paintings. She could spend the entire hour just gazing at John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo—a woman dancing, the flamenco perhaps, as female admirers and men with guitars cheered her on from the sidelines. It hung alone in the Spanish Cloister, a room that Isabella Stewart Gardner had built specifically for the painting, years before she even owned it.
A year after they married, Alice had her second miscarriage. Daniel cried, but in a way she felt relieved. She told him in a letter for the hundredth time that she wasn’t made to be a mother, though he didn’t understand what she meant and only responded, “Everyone worries they won’t know what to do, darling. It’s natural.”
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