A Fall of Marigolds

by Meissner, Susan

  I shook the new doctor’s hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

  “Dr. Randall just finished his training in Boston,” Dr. Treaver continued, and an unbidden image of Daniel Borden rose to the forefront of my mind. Daniel had also studied medicine in Boston. I pushed the image away. “I am taking him around to meet the patients in the wards today. Tomorrow he’s on his own.”

  Dr. Treaver smiled and Dr. Randall laughed lightly. “I hope I don’t get lost in the wards,” Dr. Randall said. “This place is bigger than it appears from the docks.”

  Dr. Treaver started to head to the first bed. “Ah, well, the nurses here will keep you from falling off into the water. Nurse Wood knows her way around.”

  I retrieved my cart of supplies and the washing basin from behind the desk while the doctors donned cloaks over their clothes and put on masks. As we made our way around to the men on the cots, waiting a time or two for an interpreter to arrive, I caught Dr. Randall looking at me, sizing me up, or so it seemed. I kept my eyes glued to the patients, not wanting to encourage his stares. When we arrived at Andrew’s cot, I retrieved the chart from the foot of the bed and dutifully recorded what Dr. Treaver dictated as he palpated Andrew’s swollen glands, checked for early signs of the telltale rash, took Andrew’s temperature, and gazed down his throat. Dr. Randall turned to me while Dr. Treaver listened to Andrew’s heart.

  “So I hear you escaped the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.”

  Three words that did not belong to my in-between place fell onto me like hot embers. Triangle Shirtwaist fire. I startled at their sizzling presence and nearly dropped the chart in my hands. Andrew turned his head to look at me.

  Only a few of the other nurses knew what had sent me to the island. The topic never came up outside our sleeping quarters, which was exactly how I wanted it. My reason for taking a nursing post on Ellis was no one’s business but my own. I desired very much to ask the new doctor how in God’s name did he know this, but that is not what I said.

  “Um, yes, Doctor.”

  “That must have been quite a terrible scene. I read about it in the Globe. One hundred forty-something dead?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled, searching for a way out of the conversation.

  “And you were on the sixth floor of the building? That’s just two floors down from where the fire began, isn’t it?”

  The air around me was growing warm. I felt a line of sweat appear above my brow. How did he know? Who had said this to him? Certainly not Dolly. Not Dolly. She would never. Not Dolly.

  I could see Andrew staring at me, one eyebrow crooked in consternation.

  “How very fortunate you were to have made it safely out,” Dr. Randall continued.

  He sounded genuinely glad for me, but I could think of nothing else to say except to ask him where he came by this information.

  “Who told you this?” I asked.

  Dr. Treaver looked up from Andrew, surprised at what must have seemed like a disrespectful question from me. He probably expected me to say something like, “Yes, I am so very grateful I made it out safely.”

  Dr. Randall hesitated only a second. “One of the nurses in the children’s ward this morning.”

  Not Dolly. Please not Dolly.

  “Carter. Nurse Carter, I think was her name.”

  Ivy.

  I nodded, wordless.

  “I’m sorry, Nurse Wood. You appear to be shaken. The topic came up quite by accident. I mentioned the fire and your colleague said there was a nurse here who survived it. My apologies for bringing up the matter. I only wished to say I am glad that you survived.”

  “Quite . . . quite all right,” I stammered. “It’s going on six months.”

  “Still, it was a terrible day in New York,” Dr. Treaver said. “Six months, six years, it will always be a terrible day. So many lives lost. I had no idea you survived that fire, Nurse Wood.”

  I felt for the footboard of Andrew’s bed to steady myself as the room seemed to gently spin. Neither doctor appeared to notice. But Andrew did.

  Dr. Treaver asked Dr. Randall to step over to the bed and examine Andrew’s throat and feel the swollen glands in his neck. Andrew opened his mouth when Dr. Treaver asked him to, but his gaze was on me.

  The doctors conferred with each other and then Dr. Treaver told Andrew he was in very good hands and to mind the nurses, to take his medicine when we offered it to him, and that he and Dr. Randall would be back to see him the following day.

  Then they washed their hands in the little basin on my cart, and proceeded to examine the man in the cot next to Andrew. I stayed at Andrew’s bed for a moment longer, gathering my composure and letting the room—and what I could only describe as anger—settle, so that the island could slide back into its role as an in-between place where the fire did not exist.

  I knew Andrew was watching me the whole time.

  But what could I do about it?

  He had already seen the dark place I had somehow emerged from. Just a tiny corner of it.

  He knew I had survived something terrible that others had not.

  • • •

  THE day after the fire had been a Sunday. Churches all over lower Manhattan tolled bells of mourning for the senseless loss of life, but I could not bring myself to step inside one. Newspaper headlines lamented the city’s sorrow in a typeface meant for unimaginable woe, but I didn’t read the account. I didn’t need to read what I had seen with my eyes and heard with my ears.

  I looked out my apartment window over Washington Square Park, where the side of the stalwart Asch Building met my gaze. The outside showed hardly any evidence of the catastrophe that had taken place inside it the day before. Word on the street was that it was a fireproof building. And indeed the building itself had survived marvelously. It was the people on the floors where the fire had raged—and the tinder-dry goods they worked with—that had not been fireproof.

  The fire had already begun when I got on the elevator to meet Edward. As soon as the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor a rush of heat, smoke, and girls pressed in. “There’s a fire!” one of the girls yelled, and the car instantly filled with as many people as it could hold. I could smell ash on their clothes and hair. I asked one of the girls where the fire was and she said it was everywhere, gobbling up shirtwaists in the workroom as they hung on their hangers. As soon as we were safely delivered to the lobby, the elevator operator bade us to quickly exit so that he could go back. I wanted to wait in the lobby for Edward to arrive, but after only a few minutes I was shooed outside as the building was being evacuated. I rushed out onto the other side of Greene Street, where a small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk. A fire engine was just arriving and police were cordoning off the area around the building. A ninth-floor seamstress who arrived after me said the elevator could make no more trips, as the fire was now in the elevator shaft. Several girls had fallen into the shaft and been killed, pushed into the abyss by panicked coworkers behind them.

  I asked whether anyone had been using the stairs. She said no one could get to the stairs. The door was locked. There were others from the building standing where I stood but Edward was not among us.

  The first faces appeared at the fire-laced windows as I prayed Edward had made it out safely. And then a man close to me gasped. “She’s going to jump!” I looked to where he pointed, and as the crowd cried out in horror, the first girl stepped out of the smoke and into air that refused to hold her. She crashed onto a plate-glass protection over part of the sidewalk and it shattered with terrifying force. Even from many yards away we could see that her fall had reduced her to ribbons. Then there were more women at the windows, high above us, making their way out onto the sills.

  “Don’t jump! Don’t jump,” the bystanders all around me started yelling. I started yelling it, too. But girl after girl began to jump anyway.

  A trio of f
iremen scrambled to spread open a net, but the distance was too high. The first girl to land in the net soared out of it and landed in an unmoving crumple many feet away.

  I staggered forward into the street, my instinct to nurse the broken striking me like a lightning bolt. A man next to me, a greengrocer with the smell of cabbage on his hands, stopped me.

  “Stay back, miss!”

  “But I’m a nurse!” I exclaimed.

  “They’ll fall on you and kill you!”

  The audacity of this notion immobilized me for a moment. That someone falling on me could kill me. Absurd.

  I looked up then at these falling people, challenging reason to prove to me it could be true. And that was when I saw him: Edward, standing on a ledge a hundred feet above me. Fire wreathing his neck. A girl next to him. Flames ballooning her work dress. Her long hair on fire. Edward, moving toward the edge. The girl screaming. Reaching for Edward. Him taking her hand.

  And as I shouted, “No!” they took to the sky.

  The grocer reached for me as I dashed for the street, but I slipped from his grasp. I arrived at the cordon and a policeman held up his hand, ordering me to stop.

  “I’m a nurse, I’m a nurse!” I yelled. Beyond him lay rag-doll people, broken and twisted, sprawled over red blooms that marked the spots where they had landed. I saw Edward’s contorted body several yards away, saw his broken neck even from behind the rope, saw the girl he’d escorted to heaven with him, their hands no longer touching.

  “You can’t be here!” the policeman barked. “It’s not safe. And there’s not a one of these poor souls you can help. Now get back to the other side of the street!”

  Above us came the sound of a terrible wail and a whoosh of air. The body of a black-haired girl landed a few feet away.

  “Go!” the policeman yelled.

  It was several seconds before I found the strength to obey him.

  I don’t remember getting back across Greene Street to where the greengrocer was. I didn’t remember until later his wife folding me into her arms as I wept. And I don’t remember at what point they brought me into the back room of their store and made me sip brandy. It was into the evening when they insisted their delivery boy walk me home. The crowd on Greene Street had not diminished. But the bodies had blessedly been removed.

  The fire had long since been put out by then; it had lasted only half an hour.

  Thirty minutes.

  The owners of Triangle Shirtwaist, I learned later, were on the tenth floor when the fire broke out. But they had quickly evacuated onto the roof and then to the adjoining building, a way of escape that had not been available to the eighth- and ninth-floor workers.

  Edward might have been with the owners at the top of the building when the fire started had he not made plans to be on the sewing floor at that moment. He was a bookkeeper, not a seamstress. There was only one reason he was on the ninth floor at twenty minutes to five.

  He was waiting for me.

  Ten

  TARYN

  Manhattan

  September 2011

  THE first reporter found me in two days.

  I hadn’t taken Celine up on her offer to call the magazine and tell them I didn’t wish to be contacted. That would merely identify me.

  “The magazine is going to find out it’s you,” Celine had countered. “It’s a phenomenally emotional picture. Other publications are going to want to print it; I can guarantee it. You’re going to get a call, probably several. A quarter of our customer base knows you lost your husband that day.”

  “Well, then I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

  Celine had been right. With the tenth anniversary only a week away, the dailies had the most interest in hearing how bystanders on the streets had escaped the collapse of the South Tower, the first one to fall. The photo had reacquainted the public with its horror of having witnessed the slaughter of so many innocents. The two faces in the photograph—one male and one female—resonated with every person on the planet who remembered that day, so the editorials said.

  I politely turned down the first interview request, then the second, and then the subsequent morning TV talk shows. No one in the media pressured me to reconsider; that was one of the kindnesses extended to those of us who lost someone we loved on 9/11. We were not made to feel guilty for declining to speak of our heartaches.

  But Kendal had questions that I did feel compelled to address, though I didn’t know where to begin. For ten years I’d been able to crouch in between reality and regret and pretend neither had any influence on me, never moving forward, never looking backward. Residing above the Heirloom Yard was like living above the stuff of other people’s dreams, not my own. It took the photograph for me to realize that.

  The photographer who had happened upon the memory card said it had been a fluke, a chance rendezvous with a camera bag she didn’t think she still owned.

  But this wasn’t the first time that what some would call a coincidence had shattered my notion that life is composed of mere random events, both lovely and terrible. It had happened to me an hour before the photographer snapped that shot.

  As I lay in bed on the fourth night after the photo was published, I knew my flimsy truce with chance and destiny was gone. That in-between place had never really existed.

  People who say everything happens for a reason usually say that only when they agree with the reason.

  Those people are not the ones who wish they could fold back time and make different choices. They don’t lie awake at night and whisper, If only . . .

  • • •

  THE sky that Tuesday morning was the sweetest shade of robin’s-egg blue, cloudless and smooth.

  Rays of a promising saffron sun were creeping over the bedspread as Kent walked across the bedroom to kiss me good-bye, a red travel mug in his hand.

  His dress shirt was celery green, and his tie a silky charcoal.

  I remember that day by its colors.

  My yellow polka-dot pajamas as I lay in bed waiting for him to leave the apartment.

  The white-and-sea-foam package I had hidden under my side of the bed.

  The gray of waiting for several tense minutes.

  The pink plus sign.

  After so many years, a pink plus sign.

  And then later, the marigold scarf—the last beautiful thing I saw that day.

  I used to spend the nights when I couldn’t sleep re-creating that Tuesday in different colors. The sky not so blue, the sun coy behind puffy clouds, Kent in a yellow shirt and no travel mug. Me in my purple pajamas, telling him my period was late and did he want to stick around for a few minutes to see the test results even though it probably meant nothing?

  Or the sky steel gray with rain. Kent in a blue-striped shirt and taupe raincoat, leaving the apartment while I still slept. Me in my teal nightgown with the little white daisies all over it, calling him as he was arriving at his office on the thirty-fourth floor, shouting into the phone those two words I’d been dying to say for four years: “I’m pregnant.” And as we discussed plans for a celebratory dinner, I stepped out onto the balcony where red geraniums were nodding hello and there was no orange scarf that day. The unthinkable would still happen, but Kent would come home to me a few hours later, shaken and ash-covered, but he would come home. We would cry about what had occurred that day, both the good and the bad.

  I’ve imagined that day in different colors so many times.

  When I think back to the first waking moments, before the terrible sequence of events was set in motion, I am awed by how two simple phone calls changed everything. Two ordinary, seemingly unremarkable phone calls.

  The first was mine to Kent a few minutes after seven. I knew he would be on a transatlantic conference call and unable to answer his BlackBerry. I held the little pregnancy test wand in my hand, barely able
to contain myself as I left him the voice mail that would send him to the one hundred and sixth floor. Hey, hon. Can you meet me for breakfast at Windows on the World at eight forty-five? There’s something I want to show you, okay? It’s pretty cool. Call me back if you can’t make it. Love you.

  The second was to me from Rosalynn Stauer, one of Celine’s best customers. Mrs. Stauer had a very old piece of fabric she desperately needed me to pick up before she left for Scotland that day so that I could begin the task of finding its match while she was away. Could I come on my way to work?

  If I hadn’t called Kent, he would have been on the thirty-fourth floor when the first jet slammed into the North Tower.

  If Rosalynn Stauer hadn’t called me, I wouldn’t have been late to meet Kent, and Kendal and I would be dead.

  This was why I hadn’t told Kendal I’d been there on the street when the towers fell and her father flew to heaven. It would mean telling her about those two phone calls, one that gave, and one that took.

  I didn’t want her to think that the day began to unravel when she became a part of it, just like I hadn’t wanted to give Kent false hope when it had been so easy to protect him from it. I’d bought the pregnancy test in secret. If it had been negative, he would never have had to know.

  Seeing that plus sign for the first time in my life was surreal. For several seconds I could only stare at the bit of plastic that quietly announced our baby was growing inside me. And then the joy that filled me was almost painful. It was too magnificent a feeling to experience alone. I wanted to be with Kent when I told him that finally, finally we were pregnant. That was the ache mixed with my joy: He wasn’t with me.

  I paced our Brooklyn apartment, over-the-moon happy as I contemplated how I should tell him. I didn’t want to wait until he got home. I wasn’t sure I could. I actually didn’t think I could wait another hour. I wanted wings to fly over the river to tell him. I remembered Kent and I had enjoyed breakfast not too long before at Windows on the World for our sixth anniversary. The restaurant near the top of the North Tower was the perfect place to tell him, since, at one hundred and six floors off the ground, it was practically on cloud nine already.