Fiona listened to these stories in vain, hoping to hear Anders’s name.
And then, on a rainy afternoon—after many days serving the destitute in the ruined city—when the girls sat in the salon, staring out at the rain and trying to rest, a stranger came to call.
Miss Lupin announced him from the front room of the hotel, and the girls revolved in their armchairs to see a gentleman removing his hat as he approached.
“Emmeline Tree?” he ventured uncertainly.
The girls were dressed in similar plain, dark dresses, and they wore their hair in the same simple braid, so Fiona supposed he could be forgiven for the confusion. Emmeline stood and said, “Pleased to meet you.”
“I am Ephraim Brown, of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I represent your late husband’s account.”
Emmeline lowered her eyes, and murmured, “Yes, well, I never knew much about that.”
“No, he didn’t want to trouble you. But his sister has recently filed a claim—did you not know?”
Emmeline shook her head. “I did not know.”
As if remembering the sad state of everything, Mr. Brown said, “I am sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tree.”
“Thank you.”
Mr. Brown cleared his throat. “Ordinarily, we would require more proper documentation of a death in order to proceed—a certificate, a body—but in the case of the Tree family, they have held many policies with us over the years, and we of course wish to proceed on good faith. But, after looking into the matter, I had to inform Mrs. Garrison that Frederick had recently made you the beneficiary of the policy on his Terrace Row house, and also of his life policy, effective as soon as you became man and wife.”
“Oh.”
“I should tell you that Mrs. Garrison was rather displeased with this news, but my firm does a great deal of business with your father, as well as with the Trees and the Garrisons, and I of course want to assure your family like all our customers that as a company we pay out our settlements to the letter of our policies.”
Emmeline glanced at Fiona, as though for some indication of what she should do, but Fiona was confused as well, and simply nodded that she might as well accept the check he was placing in her hands.
“Thank you,” she said a little doubtfully.
“Thank you,” Mr. Brown replied, and produced a card from an interior pocket. “If you have need of my services in the future, do please call.”
Emmeline watched him leave the room before she glanced at the check. When she saw the amount, she reached for the chair’s back, and then sank heavily into its well-worn seat. Fiona watched her friend, waiting for her to say something. She had told her, that first day, while the fire was still burning, that she had seen Freddy on Gorley’s block, and that her father, in his fury and fear for Emmeline’s safety, had shot Freddy. Emmeline had nodded stoically, but had not seemed to want to hear more. Perhaps she could not bear to think of her father that way.
Emmeline frowned and stared at the check as though she wasn’t sure she wanted it. “He was not a particularly good husband. . . .” she remarked.
For some reason this struck Fiona as absurd, and a peal of laughter escaped her mouth and a tear rolled from the corner of her eye. Emmeline glanced at her, and she began to laugh and cry, too. “Oh,” she wailed, “it’s all too much, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Fiona. “It’s too much for any one heart to take.”
“He didn’t deserve to die, though,” Emmeline murmured.
Fiona thought a moment. “No, he didn’t. He wasn’t himself, though, in the fire. So many people weren’t themselves. Your father . . . he wasn’t himself, either. He lost reason. But he was thinking of you—he was crazed thinking how he could save you.”
Emmeline nodded sadly, and turned the check over in her hands, as though it could make sense of all the awful things that had happened. “I don’t know if I want this. It doesn’t really seem like mine.”
“You could return it to Ada—she’d be pleased, but she also might take it the wrong way.”
Emmeline gazed at the window, where droplets went on beating a pattern against the pane. “During the fire . . .” she began, without shifting her eyes to meet Fiona’s.
The phrase made Fiona stiffen, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what Emmeline had to say. But she was speaking in a deliberate fashion, and Fiona thought she had better just listen.
“. . . when I was locked in that room, I felt sure I’d die. I thought about all kinds of things there. Thought about . . .” She trailed off, and her brow flexed in pain. “Anyway, when I thought about it, I realized that I was always happiest when I was with you, you and . . . With Father, we were always thinking about the future, and what we would someday become. But with you two, we were just ourselves. So I made out a will, and I left everything I had to you. I was angry, but when I thought about you having my things, it made me happy. It doesn’t make much sense, does it? Because if I died in the fire, my will would have burned up, too. And now I’m alive, so the will wouldn’t mean anything, anyway. But when everything seemed rotten and at the end, it made me feel better to think of giving what I had to you. Well, everything still feels rotten, and I still think it will make me feel better to give it to you.”
“You can’t—” Fiona started.
“Of course I can!” Emmeline’s face was sad and wet with tears, but she was smiling, too, and she seemed quite sure of herself, and Fiona had known her long enough—if Emmeline was sure, then there would be no stopping her. “But you have to do something beautiful with it, all right? I will absolutely die if I don’t see something beautiful in this godforsaken city soon.”
Then she marched into the lobby to find a pen. When she returned, she had signed the check over to Fiona, and put it into her hands before she had a chance to refuse. The check was for such a staggering figure, Fiona didn’t really believe in it, that any of it would ever be hers. She was just relieved that they had started talking again, really talking, and didn’t want to refuse Emmeline when she had thought of something that made her smile.
“Remember Mr. Polk?” Emmeline asked.
Fiona glanced up from the check in her lap. “Yes,” she replied, although he seemed like a habitué of a long-lost world.
“You make much better clothes than he does. Why don’t you have your own shop? You could call it Madame Mag’s.”
Fiona nodded at this suggestion, but it hurt her heart. She knew that it was ridiculous to feel this way now, when he was lost to both of them. But she couldn’t do away with that old fear, that Anders was Emmeline’s, and that, no matter how he had spent his final day on earth, he had never really belonged to Fiona.
“I loved Anders too, you know,” Emmeline said very gently as she searched for her friend’s eyes.
Fiona gazed back at her, and something inside broke open and made way. They had both loved him, and they had both lost him, and she was suddenly very glad that she did not have to be the only one. She was glad just to hear his name. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“I wish Anders was here.”
“Me too.” Emmeline leaned forward and laced her fingers with Fiona’s.
Fiona could not have guessed, on that gloomy Monday, that by the end of the following summer, when the ladies of Chicago were ordering their new clothes for a season of galas and balls, she’d have established her own dressmaker’s shop in one of the new marble-encased State Street buildings. That her siblings would all be employed there, and well able to pay the rent on a new house on the West Side, or that Emmeline would have found such a calling in running the showroom. In time, they found that they could not be as they had been before—one serving the other, one living and the other half dead. They built the place up, side by side, until it was regarded as one of the fashionable symbols of the new Chicago. The blaze had cut a path through the city, clearing away who they had been, and all they had ever known. But it had cost them
the same love, and forced upon them the same secrets. In this way, the fire bound them more closely together, so that in the end they became true friends.
The girls were still holding hands when a figure appeared in the doorway, backlit so that all she saw was his silhouette. Her skin flushed and her heart lifted. One heard so many stories in those days, of people who had disappeared when a structure went down, but were discovered days later, a little thirsty and frightened but otherwise quite all right. For a few moments she believed it was Anders, come back to her, and a shiver shook her shoulders. But then the figure came forward, and she saw it was only Jeremy, who had worked in the stables on Dearborn but since the fire had been involved in all manner of business for Ochs Carter.
“This came, addressed to the house,” he said, coming forward to put a card in Fiona’s hand. Although he had been elevated by the disaster, he was still afraid to look directly at Emmeline. “Mr. Carter said he didn’t know what it was and that you girls might as well have it.”
Another shiver passed through Fiona when she held the postcard. She studied it, and her eyes rose to meet Emmeline’s, which were shiny mirrors of her own wonder, and her heart became buoyant. On one side of the card was a color illustration of the view of New York Harbor, with the ocean flowing, rich blue and turquoise around the tip of the island, and dotted with little boats and white caps. The other side was postmarked some days ago from Manhattan, and written in simple, strong letters was the message:
All New York talks about is Chicago,
and its heart is full of her
Historical Background of When We Caught Fire
There are two big reasons I love historical fiction. One is that as a reader and as a writer, I want to be transported to places I can’t go in real life, and novels set in the past give me access to strange and fantastical worlds that no longer exist. The other is that when we reach into the past, we find dramatic settings that push characters to the extreme, that challenge their moral and physical selves so that their true identities emerge.
Chicago in the fall of 1871 delivers on both accounts. The fire that began on a Sunday evening in early October destroyed all of downtown Chicago. While much of the city was spared, its core institutions burned to the ground. The Great Fire is legendary in part because it cleared the area now called the Loop to be rebuilt in grand fashion, and for Chicago to become the leading city of architecture in the United States. The city that was there before is quite literally a lost world, and thus a very exciting place to imagine. The people who witnessed its destruction—especially the young people who were born there—were survivors of incredible terror, and when the fire itself died down, they had to face the destruction of their homes, their way of life, and the landscape that until then had been their whole reality.
In 1871, Chicago’s population had undergone fifty years of exponential growth, from fewer than three hundred at the city’s founding to more than three hundred thousand. It still possessed something of a frontier town spirit, and it was most certainly a boom town—the crucial stop-off between the wheat, hog, and lumber producing regions of the Midwest and the big urban centers of the Northeast. Real estate speculation was notoriously wild. Buildings went up quickly and cheaply, with little regulation, and property owners relied on insurance rather than sound construction to protect their investment. Like all cities, the criminals and the city boosters, the civic heroes and the new immigrants (in 1870, over half the population was foreign born), collaborated in creating the special spirit of the place.
The one detail everyone knows about the Great Fire of 1871—the part that makes it into songs and poems and cartoons—was that it was started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lit lantern. Some elements of this story are true—the fire did begin in a barn adjacent to the O’Leary family home, a lantern was possibly involved, and Mrs. O’Leary did have a dairy business. But the official inquiry cleared the family of wrongdoing—they were not in the barn but asleep in the house when the fire began—and the story was probably seized upon because of the strong anti-Irish sentiment in the city at the time. Then, as now, everybody was looking for somebody else to blame.
In real life, as in my fictionalized version, the night watchman in the courthouse tower mistook the location of the fire and called the fire trucks to the wrong location. Although Mathias Schaffer (Gabriel’s real-life counterpart) soon realized his mistake, the telegraph operator refused to correct it, saying that it would only confuse matters. Even so, one engine company had spotted the fire before Schaffer, and seven companies were on the scene within forty-five minutes. But by midnight the blaze had jumped the river, and within hours it was too big for anyone to contain.
The true culprits were too many and too nebulous: the location of the city—set on the edge of the prairie—beset the fire with a strong, hot wind that whipped up sparks and spread the flames; the materials of which the city was built (the sidewalks, some of the streets, most of the homes, and even many of the big downtown buildings were made of wood beneath a thin facade of brick); and the drought that summer (only an inch of rain fell between July 4 and October 9) that emptied the wells and left a flammable city drier yet. Making matters worse, the “Saturday night fire,” which I depicted through the eyes of Gabriel, Anders’s cousin, was one of the worst fires in Chicago up to that time, and had damaged some of the fire department’s equipment and left many of the firemen (there were less than two hundred of them) exhausted. In hindsight, these factors make the Great Fire seem almost inevitable.
When I understood these facts about the fire, I realized that it was the perfect metaphor for a certain kind of love triangle. While Emmeline, Fiona, and Anders are close friends, they have kept some really important truths about their relationships with each other secret, and secrecy has made those truths doubly powerful, doubly combustible. The denial of feelings, the unfairness built into these relationships, have heightened all the yearning, desire, loyalty, and sense of betrayal that we see them experience over a handful of days. Like a city built of wood, these characters are tinder just waiting for a match. How could they not set the world on fire?
While the fire was a horror, many who witnessed it also described it as having a terrible beauty—it was a “grandly magnificent scene” in one eyewitness account. Not only were the circumstances perfect for a fire, once it got going, it created its own weather. Fire whirls, which are created when hot rising air meets cool descending air and cause a tornado-like vortex, probably occurred, enhancing the already brutal winds and dominating the sky. This was why flaming debris were carried across natural barriers like the river, and one of the reasons why it was such an awesome and frightening sight to behold.
To me, the craziest fact of the Great Fire is that, legendary as it is, it wasn’t even the biggest fire in the country that day. That distinction belongs to a fire that devoured the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. There were other notable fires in the Midwest on October 8 as well, due to the long dry summer and the strong winds that harassed the entire region, but Peshtigo—which killed at least 1,200 people and perhaps many more, and destroyed 1.2 million acres—remains the deadliest fire in American history. But Chicago was the news story in the days to come, and its myth is the one we retell.
A story of this kind seems especially relevant to me now, following a year of disasters where nature and an environment altered to suit the needs of human civilization came into violent conflict. Not once, but many times. Floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes are as old as time, but the way people create their own habitat determines how safely they will weather these natural phenomena.
There is a final reason that the Great Fire of Chicago appealed to me as material for a romance: My maternal grandparents met and fell in love in Chicago. My grandmother’s parents were both born in Sweden and immigrated as young adults; my grandfather was of German and Irish ancestry. It is family lore that his grandmother witnessed the fire as a little girl, and she used to tell my grandfather
and his four siblings of the terrible orange glow that she remembers seeing in the distance from her South Side home.
I hope that this book will be read as a love story, as a story about real friendship, as an adventure, and as a small window onto the way cities—their governments, their geography, their institutions—affect the personal lives of their citizens. None of us can really live alone.
Acknowledgments
Like all books, this one is a collaboration, and I am indebted to many for their part in making it a real physical object. Most especially to my editors, for making it possible, and then making it readable, and for being such stars to work with. Thank you, Sara Shandler. Thank you, Emilia Rhodes. Thank you, Alice Jerman. Many others lent their brilliance to this project at different stages. Thank you to Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, Hayley Wagreich, Romy Golan, Les Morgenstein, and everybody at Alloy Entertainment. Thank you, Eliza Swift, for the original spark. Thank you, Jennifer Klonsky, Erica Sussman, Alexandra Rakaczki, and everybody at Harper. Thank you, Joe Veltre and Hannah Vaughn and everybody at Gersh. Thank you, Adrienne Miller, for being the greatest of readers and advice-givers. Thank you, Ryan Hawke, for all your support and inspiration. When I had just begun writing this book, I met my best friend and partner; by the time it was finished, we became a family. Thank you, Marty McLoughlin, for being everything.
About the Author
Photo credit Maya Galbis
ANNA GODBERSEN is the author of the New York Times bestselling Luxe series. She was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Barnard College. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
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Books by Anna Godbersen
The Luxe
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Envy
Splendor
When We Caught Fire Page 25