A Fall of Marigolds

by Meissner, Susan

  I made the call to Kent, glad that I had to leave a voice mail. Then I showered and got ready, choosing a pale pink sundress patterned with tulips, as it was supposed to be eighty degrees for a high. The phone call from Rosalynn Stauer came as I was putting on earrings. At first I was annoyed by her intrusion and ridiculous request. She wanted me to essentially rearrange my morning so that I could pick up from her a piece of fabric she wanted me to match. Mrs. Stauer lived on Long Island, more than an hour’s train ride away.

  “We’re leaving for Scotland today. I have to be at Newark at eleven,” she said.

  If she hadn’t been Celine’s best customer I would have told her she should’ve taken care of this before the day she had to leave.

  “Can you stick it in the mail to me before you go?” I said instead, grabbing a pair of ballerina flats from my closet.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s a family heirloom, Taryn.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t come to Long Island. I’m meeting someone downtown this morning, Mrs. Stauer. It’s important.”

  “Oh! Didn’t I mention it?” she said excitedly. “I’m already downtown! Roger had business to take care of before we head out, so we stayed overnight in the city. This is perfect.”

  I slipped on my shoes and looked at my watch. Celine was in Paris on a buying trip and I was in charge. I wanted her to be glad she had left me at the helm, as she had only recently made me assistant manager. If I left Brooklyn at that moment, I might have time to make a very quick stop before meeting Kent, depending on the location of her hotel. “Where are you?”

  “At the Millenium.”

  The Millenium was just a five-minute walk from the North Tower. Practically across the street from it. For just a moment, the strangest feeling came over me. It was as if it were no quirky twist that Mrs. Stauer had stayed downtown last night, that there was a reason I had this errand to run before meeting Kent.

  But I shook that unfounded notion away. I didn’t want to think about Mrs. Stauer or her fabric. I just wanted to get in, get out, and reach Kent.

  “Okay. I’m leaving now, Mrs. Stauer. I should be there in twenty-five minutes. Can you meet me in the lobby?”

  “Oh, splendid, Taryn. Just splendid. See you soon!”

  She clicked off. I scooted into the kitchen to turn off the coffee and close the window above the sink—despite its squeaky protest—and then I dashed out the door.

  The morning commute was in full swing and the High Street station was bustling with people heading into Manhattan. I sandwiched my way onto an A train and we took off. Ten minutes later I emerged onto Wall Street and I could feel how lovely the new day was going to be. The air was warm and fresh. And I was carrying a tiny speck of human life inside me.

  After a quick five-minute walk, I was standing inside the Millenium’s lobby and it was twenty-four minutes past eight. I still had plenty of time. But there was no Mrs. Stauer.

  I waited five minutes and then went to the front desk to have the desk clerk phone her room.

  “She wants you to come up,” the clerk said as she replaced the phone. “Sixteenth floor, room sixteen twenty-four.”

  I sighed audibly but there was nothing the desk clerk could do for me. I headed for the elevators.

  Seventy-plus Mrs. Stauer, sporting auburn curls of a shade seen only on Irish setters, greeted me in her bathrobe.

  “Oh, thanks for coming, Taryn. I am so glad we can take care of this before I go. Here, come in, come in.” She opened the door wide.

  “I really should be on my way. I’ve an appointment and—”

  “But I’m not even dressed. And this won’t take but a minute. I have it right here. Come in.”

  She waddled back inside her room and I followed. The door eased itself shut behind me. Mr. Stauer was apparently out getting a paper or coffee or fresh air. Several large suitcases filled one corner, and a service table in the middle of the room boasted two plates of nearly eaten blueberry pancakes.

  Mrs. Stauer picked up a large handbag from off the floor and set it on the unmade king-size bed. She stuffed her hand inside and drew out a drawstring hosiery bag.

  “We planned this trip to see my cousin in Glasgow ages ago and then I suddenly remembered yesterday that I’d promised her I would try to find a scarf like the one our auntie had. I wasn’t sure where I had put this old thing.” She looked up at me. “My side of the family is Scottish, you know. This particular aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, came over in 1912, a month after the Titanic. Went through Ellis and everything. She had been a maid for a professor at the University of Edinburgh.”

  “Mrs. Stauer, I really must be going.”

  “Of course. Well, I found it buried in the cedar chest in the guest room.” Mrs. Stauer opened the bag and pulled out a length of shining orange-red. Right away I could see the sweeping pattern of marigolds woven into the fabric’s Indian design. The color palette was a soft mix of autumn hues, warm and inviting. Mrs. Stauer unfolded it and draped it across her ample front to show me the scarf in its entirety. It was beautiful.

  Instinctively I reached for it.

  Pleased with my interest, Mrs. Stauer laid it across my open hand. “Pretty, isn’t it? It has to be near a hundred years old.”

  I fingered the silken threads. The scarf had no doubt been spun in France based on an Indian motif. Marigolds were used heavily in India in the worship of deities, the celebration of weddings, and in mourning the dead. A bit of black on the trailing edge caught my eye. Someone had stitched a name. Lily.

  “Lily was your aunt?” I asked.

  “Not sure who that was. My aunt’s name was Eleanor. But she was given this scarf by someone who also worked for the professor, an American. That’s why my aunt gave it to me instead of my cousin. There’s only the one scarf, though, and two of us nieces. Corrine would love to have a replica of this scarf if that’s possible. Our auntie wore it all the time. I’d like to get to Glasgow tonight and tell her you’ll be able to find something for her.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, still intrigued with the scarf’s beauty and the way it seemed to beckon me. But then I remembered I was to meet Kent at a quarter to nine and tell him the most amazing news. I looked at my watch. It was eight forty-two.

  “I’ve got to go. I’m late. I promise I will get right on it, Mrs. Stauer.” I rushed to the door. “Have a great time in Scotland.”

  I pulled the door open and flew out of it, folding the scarf into a rectangle as I sailed down the hallway toward the elevators. Behind me I heard Mrs. Stauer shout that I’d forgotten the bag. I hurriedly retraced my steps and took it from her. I hurried off again, rounded the corner to the elevators, and waited impatiently.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the first-floor lobby. There was a faint tremor in the elevator car between the eighth and ninth floors, but I thought nothing of it. As soon as the elevator doors parted on the lobby level, I reached into my purse for my cell phone to let Kent know I was on my way. My fingers groped the inside but I could feel no phone. Had I left it at home? Had someone stolen it out of my purse during the standing-room-only commute? Distracted, I was only half-aware that people were coming to the lobby with strange looks on their faces. I heard someone ask a bellman what had happened outside, but I didn’t listen for his answer. I looked at my watch again. Now it was eight forty-eight. It would take me five minutes to walk across the World Trade Center’s central plaza and another five minutes to ascend to the one hundred and sixth floor. I was angry at Mrs. Stauer for stealing those minutes from me. Kent would wonder why I hadn’t called or texted him.

  As I neared the revolving front doors I heard someone say “plane crash” and someone else invoke the name of God. I stepped outside to the smell of smoke and fuel, and a strange sprinkling of paper and fluff.

  I looked across the plaza. A fire-tinged scar marred the uppermost fl
oors of the North Tower, high above me. Smoke poured out like a monster being released from the darkest cave imaginable.

  “It was a jet!” someone shouted a few feet away from me. “I saw it. It flew right into it.”

  “I heard it,” someone else said. “Shook the windows in my room.”

  Sirens began to punch the air from far away, and right in front of me as a trio of police cars went by me.

  Kent.

  I pushed past the people gathering outside the hotel and dashed across Church Street to enter the plaza. But police were already starting to fan out and prevent anyone from getting any closer to the North Tower.

  Kent!

  I plunged my hand again into my purse, desperate to find my phone. I had to call him. But there was no phone. Evacuees were soon filling the plaza and the sidewalks as bits of plastic and paper and metal continued to waft down. Police and security personnel were blocking all entrances to the complex so that I had to continually reposition myself to see the faces of the people fleeing the building. I had to find Kent among them to let him know I was okay, that I hadn’t been in the elevator on my way to him. And I had to assure myself that he had been able to get to one of the fire exits.

  Surely he could get to one of the fire exits.

  I walked back to Church Street to try to see the top of the building, where Kent had surely been waiting for me. The smoking scar was below him. If he could just get to one of the fire exits . . . God, let him get out!

  My tear-filled gaze was tilted toward the sky when a roaring whine shrieked above me, and to the left of my field of vision a whoosh of white soared into the South Tower. An explosion rocked the air above us and a fist of fire ballooned out from the upper half of the building. Screams and curses erupted all around me as those on the ground cried out in utter horror.

  One plane flying into a building could be an accident. But not two. Something terrible and malevolent was happening. Fear coursed through me as more fragments fell from the sky.

  I simply had to use a phone to call Kent and let him know where I was so that he could find me. I was afraid and I wanted him with me. I crossed the street in between wailing emergency vehicles and ran back inside the Millenium, now in a state of mini chaos as the hotel was being evacuated.

  The television screens in the lounge were tuned to CNN. As I swept past I heard the news anchor declare that two planes had slammed into the twin towers: the first into the North Tower at eight forty-six a.m. and the other into the South Tower at just three minutes after nine.

  “Please can I just use your phone,” I yelled to frantic desk clerks who were attempting to help ten people at once. No one heard me.

  I begged two people brushing past me for the use of their phone but they shook their heads.

  Mrs. Stauer! I could go back to her room and use her phone. I skipped the elevators brimming with people getting off and headed for the stairs. I was breathless by the time I’d reached the sixteenth floor and pounded on the Stauers’ door, but there was no answer.

  It was now twenty minutes after nine.

  Still breathing hard, I made my way back down to the lobby and was ushered out by hotel staff who clearly wished to be away as well. Outside, the smell of fuel and sense of destruction were intensifying. I was pushed with the crowd of fleeing people down Maiden Lane toward Broadway, where I stopped to catch my breath and to plant my feet. I would move no farther. I would stand there until every last evacuee ran past me. And I had to find someone who would loan me their phone just for a minute. As I gathered my wits I heard people around me talking and crying and cursing.

  “God, what were those?” someone said.

  And another one said, “Those are people. They’re jumping.”

  I forced myself to swing my head up toward the North Tower as it belched black smoke. I saw a black speck, like a tiny pinprick on a swatch of ugly gray. The speck fell and disappeared from view.

  “The ones on the top can’t get out. They’ve been jumping,” the first person said. “I saw probably fifty already.”

  I wheeled to the people around me. “My husband is in the North Tower!” I shouted. “For the love of God, can I please borrow someone’s phone!”

  “Here.” A man in a florist’s apron bearing the name Mick thrust his phone toward me. “But I don’t know if you will get through.”

  I grabbed it and mumbled my thanks but my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t punch in the numbers. Tears blurred my vision. I could not stop them and I could not stop shaking.

  The florist covered my hand with his. “Let me do it,” he said gently. “What’s the number?”

  I was weeping now, unable to whisk away the vision of the falling speck and knowing it wasn’t just a speck. It was a someone. A person. I handed the florist his phone and sputtered Kent’s number. Then I reached into my purse for a tissue, knowing I didn’t have any. My hand closed around the bag containing Mrs. Stauer’s scarf, and it seemed that it reached for me, caressed my fingertips, urging me to draw it out. I pulled it free and brought the ancient fabric to my face to catch my tears. I caught a thousand different scents in its threads, some, it seemed, as old as love itself. At that moment I wanted to fall into those marigolds and never emerge. Had I been more aware of the other people around me I might have noticed the click of a camera shutter at that moment, but I heard nothing except the sound of my own anguish.

  “I’m afraid it’s not going through, ma’am,” the florist said. “You can try texting him, maybe.”

  My hands were still shaking too badly. I started to reach for the phone but it was obvious I could not tap out a message.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  Was this to be my last communication with Kent? Was he still alive to even see it? I had to believe he was. “Tell him I am safe. Tell him I love him. Tell him . . . tell him he’s going to be a father.”

  The florist was typing the message as I spoke, tears filling his eyes even as my own grief spilled down my cheeks.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  He nodded and looked away from me while he flicked away the wetness at his eyes.

  I turned my gaze back toward the smoke-filled sky.

  “Maybe he’s already out. What floor did he work on?” the florist said, a few minutes later.

  “The thirty-fourth,” I whispered numbly.

  “Oh, well, then he probably got out.”

  “But that’s not where he was.”

  For the next span of minutes, I don’t even know how long it was, I saw the florist checking and rechecking his phone and I wanted to believe he was checking for me. I turned toward him a time or two, and he shook his head.

  At some point, I heard someone tell another that it had been confirmed that terrorists had hijacked the two planes and deliberately flown them into the World Trade Center towers. Someone else said the Pentagon had also been hit. I put my hands over my ears to shut out their voices.

  I continued to watch the faces of the people rushing past me, hoping against reason that I would see Kent among them.

  Then there was an unearthly growl, a wrenching screech that split the tattered sky above us and the littered ground beneath our feet.

  “The South Tower is falling!” someone shouted.

  “That’s not possible,” another said.

  “Run!” screamed a third.

  I was knocked to my knees as a sudden press of people pushed me down, and then a wall of dust and rubble, like a tidal wave from the shores of hell, screamed toward us.

  I was still struggling to rise when the wall of debris reached me. For a second there was only the movement of the wall. There was no light, no other sound, no cries for mercy.

  No air.

  I could see just a tiny tendril of the scarf clutched in front of my face, a last bit of something lovely as the abyss yanked me
down.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Give me your hand.

  The wall slammed against my chest.

  Give me your hand.

  I felt fingers reaching for me and there was a moment when I considered letting the wall have its way instead. If Kent was gone, then what was left for me?

  The fingers grabbed hold of the scarf in my hand and pulled. I felt myself being raised. I only needed to let go of the scarf to be where Kent was. As a searing pain filled my lungs I wondered how much it would hurt to die this way.

  But then I remembered the little pink plus sign. The wall could not touch the life tucked there.

  Kent would want me to live.

  I didn’t let go.

  With the scarf as my lifeline, the florist pulled me to my feet and we lurched away from the darkness.

  Eleven

  CLARA

  Ellis Island

  September 1911

  I had discovered early at Ellis that a hospital nurse performs the same tasks day after day after day, and that an odd solace can be found in the monotony of those duties. Were it not for the steady thrum of the routine, the spectacle of unending human suffering would be a hospital nurse’s undoing. There’s only so much physical affliction the soul can witness. Concentrating on the task at hand and only the task kept me and my colleagues from being swallowed whole by what we saw every day.

  As Dr. Randall prepared to leave the ward after the conversation about the fire, I sought to reclaim my equilibrium by reminding myself of this: Concentrate solely on the simple duties that lay before me. Dr. Randall’s gaze on me was achingly apologetic as he and Dr. Treaver finished up their notes. I pretended not to notice.