by Peter Orner
This isn’t right.
And he didn’t just talk to Mr. Ludner. Sometimes they played chess, too. And Edward put a bandanna over his eyes and played blindfolded to make the teams fair. They played chess in the dark in Mr. Ludner’s little kitchen. So three weeks after Edward left, I finally asked Mr. Ludner if he had any idea. I hadn’t wanted to bother him before, upset him. I was standing at the bottom landing and he was coming slowly down the stairs, his long thin cane in front of him, tapping the stairs. Mr. Ludner? I said. Edward’s gone. He’s been gone almost a month. The old man kept heading toward me down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he looked at me. Normally he didn’t face you when he talked—he talked to you in profile—but that morning he faced me and he said, Yes, that must be true. Three weeks at least. Mr. Ludner straightened his tie. Even though he was retired, he always wore a tie when he left the house. I told him I don’t even know if Edward has any family. All I know is that he had a grandfather who died and I’m here in his apartment and I haven’t paid any rent. Mr. Ludner laughed when I said that about the rent. Why, my dear, I don’t pay any rent, either. Why not? I said, and he laughed again and said, You don’t know, do you? Interesting young man Edward. Modest to the teeth. He owns this building, my dear. Passed down to him from the very grandfather you mentioned. His parents are both gone. And he’s a good man to let me spend my retirement peanuts on things other than rent. Like fresh fruit, for example. I’m of the opinion that fresh fruit, far more than those vitamin pills they peddle to seniors—But I paid Edward rent, I said. I wrote him checks for my half. Well, he must have mailed the check to himself, Mr. Ludner said. I found out later he never deposited any of my checks. You know how I am about my checkbook. I wouldn’t have noticed in a thousand years the money wasn’t gone.
All right, now I just want to know.
So this shocked me a little, that he actually owned the house and never said anything, but then I figured he was probably embarrassed. I mean, who at twenty-four owns a house?
Just tell it.
Right, cutting to the chase now, Barry. One night toward the middle of January, Mr. Ludner was playing Mozart when the power went out. It was minus who knows what the fuck with the wind chill. Coldest night of the year and we’ve got no lights. I opened the inside door and called up to Mr. Ludner, who said the fuse box was in the basement. It was one of those old-fashioned basements with the double doors, you know, that open upward. I asked Edward about the basement once and he said there was nothing down there but mice and rusting bike parts. I crept around the apartment and found a flashlight in the utility drawer. Then I called up to Mr. Ludner and asked him if he had a key No key necessary, he says. The basement doors are always open.
Wait! Say no more! You went down there, and there was Old Edward, Mr. Bohemian Spokane, down in the cellar with his head blown off.
He used Hefty bags and rubber bands.
Come on.
Not come on.
Stace, I was kidding.
He took pills, but before that, he wrapped himself up in garbage bags because he didn’t want us to smell him. And we didn’t, because of the plastic and because of the cold. Mr. Ludner said it was probably because he wanted to die in his grandfather’s house, the house his grandfather left him, but that he also wanted us to go on living there because he was a good man. Mr. Ludner said Edward was a good man. When I found him, there were these black bugs that live straight through winter, the kind that sort of hop backward, crawling all over the plastic. He was still wearing shoes. But let me back it up, Barry. Let me take it step by step. I went around back to the basement doors and brushed away a crust of old snow, pulled them open, and went down the wooden stairs. I found the fuse box on the far right wall, where Mr. Ludner said it would be, and flicked the switch. I heard Mr. Ludner shout out the window, Hurrah! Mozart came back on. Then I found a string for the light and pulled. Not much there. Like Edward had said. Some cardboard boxes. A pair of old ski poles. A tire. A stack of waterlogged phone books. And then right beside the furnace, I saw a mattress with some books on it. A dirty yellow pillow. Some socks. And a bag of Cheetos. Edward thought it was funny that he still loved Cheetos. The crunchy ones, not the puffy. He said he hated the way the puffy ones melted in your mouth before you even had a chance to chew. And I thought, Holy shit, he lives down here. But for some reason, I wasn’t really freaked out. I just whispered, Edward? Edward? Jesus, Edward, why are you living down here when you’ve got a nice apartment upstairs? When it’s your house? I’ll move out and you can have your place back, but for godsakes, don’t live down here. And I’m talking to the walls of the basement as if he can hear me, as if he’s hiding in the dark corners and watching me. Isn’t that nuts?
I love you. You’ve got to know I love you, honey, I—
So I walk around whispering to him, thinking he’s either hiding or he’ll be back soon and I’ll wait for him and tell him, Look, I’ll leave. I’ll find a new place—
Shhhhhhhhh. It’s all right. Enough.
Lumped against the far wall like an old sack of leaves. And you want to know what my first thought was? Totally ridiculous. That it was a bag of clothes somebody had meant to drop off at the Goodwill and never got around to—I thought maybe I’d rummage through and find a good pair of Levi’s. Least Edward could do was leave me a good pair of Levi’s before I went my merry way. Then I stepped closer, and it couldn’t have been more obvious what it was. And I started to smell him, even though he was half frozen. But it’s strange. I wanted to touch him. I wasn’t terrified and I didn’t scream when I felt the squish of decay. Like this was all very fucking normal. Like this was the way some people lived and died, and this was the way other people found out about it. Like I wasn’t surprised. And I knew—without knowing why or how—that he’d done this to himself. Edward in late morning, on the stoop. Edward sitting on the sidewalk with a long piece of grass in his mouth. Edward naked, kneeling. Edward in a wool hat with a tassel. Edward holding a bronze tomato, early evening. Edward eating cereal with a fork. Edward wrapped in plastic bags and rubber bands. And I’m still calm and I just walk right out of there and up the stairs and go to Mr. Ludner’s and knock on his door and go into the dark of his apartment with his Mozart and tell him Edward’s dead in the basement. I’m pretty sure Edward’s dead in the basement. And he stood up, said quietly, Would you wait a moment? Would you sit down and wait a moment? Then he picked up his cane by the door and went down the stairs. Tap, tap, tap, down the stairs slowly. I listened to him, listened to each step. And Mr. Ludner found him down there, somehow, and ripped the bag open and felt his face, Edward’s decomposing face. Then he left him and came back up the stairs. He called to me from the landing. Miss Mueller, he said, looks like our boy didn’t want to trouble us. Then Mr. Ludner gagged. I sat there in the dark with that music on the stereo and listened to the old man retch. The coroner said it’d been at least a week, maybe longer.
Stace.
He was living down there, Barry, reading, and when he couldn’t even do that anymore—
Stace.
Don’t touch me.
Stace.
I said don’t touch me.
THE POET
Since his stroke, the old poet hadn’t been able to read his poems, much less write any new ones. Still, those few summers he had left, they trotted him out, a novelty act, and stood him up at the podium. He’d stare forward, eyes wide, clearing his throat. His redheaded lover would hold him by the elbow and he’d do the best he could, retrieving half-remembered phrases out of the dark muddle of his brain, and the crowd, not knowing much more about him other than that here before them was what’s left of an important voice, would watch with reverence, even awe, and then, finally, fear.
As he asked: Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts?
HERB AND ROSALIE SWANSON AT THE COCOANUT GROVE
Two decades later Herb Swanson began to tell the story at dinner parties. He knew every inch of the triv
ia. He knew that the forgotten movie star who burned to death that night was named Buck Jones. Nowadays people don’t know the guy from Adam, Herb would say, but back then Buck Jones, no joke, was big as Gene Autry. Herb knew that the final death toll was 492, including the five firemen, not 474 like some accounts still claim. Herb knew that the name of the busboy who struck the match to start the greatest conflagration in the history of Boston—to this day you can’t call a business Cocoanut Grove within Boston city limits, not even if you sell coconuts—was named Stanley Tomaszewski. Wretched Stanley Tomaszewski. He’d been trying to change a lightbulb. He needed light to see better and so lit a match. The ceiling caught. Tomaszewski escaped out the kitchen door and lived the rest of his life guilt-struck in Waltham, listening to those screams in his sleep.
Then Herb would lower his voice and say in a whisper coated with breathy awe: Listen, it’s just after ten. Ro and I are upstairs in the dining room. Micky Alpert’s just launched into the first chords of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” There are palm trees and piña coladas all over the place, like we’re in Tahiti. Corny, but you buy it. There’s glamour in that kind of nonsense. And you’re out on the town with your girl and you’re thinking this is it, this is what it comes down to, seeing and being seen, you remember? You’re young; you can’t imagine anything other than being young. And the music and the drinks and the waiters spin through the crowd with trays hoisted over their heads like ancient high priests sending up offerings to the gods when it—
When it—
Herb would always hustle past the actual fire part. What mattered when Herb told his Cocoanut Grove story was the great aftermath. The courage of the firemen, the heroics of the policemen, the essential contributions of the Women’s Army Relief Corps. How the people of Boston, Massachusetts, joined together in the face of such disaster, a beautiful thing amid all that incalculable horror. It even prepared people, Herb would say, for what was to come soon enough with our boys being sent home from France wrapped in the flag.
Still, Herb couldn’t completely ignore the fire itself. His credibility depended on it. The almighty fact of his and Rosalie having been there, having survived it. Got lucky was all he’d really say. Our number wasn’t up. All there is to it. Our table was near one of the few exits that didn’t get blocked up with people right away. We were the fourth couple out the door. For years Rosalie never said anything when Herb told the story, and this, too, gave it a mystique. It was too painful for her to talk about, to remember. Yet at some point, when both of them were well into their sixties, as Herb continued to rattle on and on about flammable ceiling material, how the biggest problem from a fire-safety perspective was that the few exit doors opened inward, how there were no sprinklers either, how four brothers from the little hamlet of Wilmington, Massachusetts, all died in it and the town put up a statue of them on the green—Rosalie began to enter the story with her own details, quietly at first. She’d talk about how the fire was less like a wall and more like a flapping curtain. She’d talk about its not being hot either, but windy. She’d talk about the soot-covered sailor in the famous Life photograph, an unconscious barefoot girl draped across his arms like a bride, the sailor all the newspapers called an angel dispatched from heaven. Well, yes, I did see him that night, Rosalie would say. Before it. A hard man not to notice—let me be honest. But I wasn’t a slouch then, either. I swished by him in my latest red dress. I was thin then, if you can believe it. Still hippy, but thin, maybe even a little pretty in a certain light, and yes, sailor boy winked at me. And Herb would shout across the table (because even then it was a performance and they were still in cahoots): Everything she says is true. Pretty? To hell with pretty! Beautiful! Beautiful then, beautiful now, my Rosie. I wanted to break the jack-tar’s neck, but Rosie said, Let him stare, it’s patriotic.
And Rosalie, whispering now: After he left that girl on the sidewalk, that sailor went back inside.
And Herb: Poor kid. Died of his burns two days later at Boston City.
Herb Swanson was a dentist, everybody’s favorite dentist. In his line, he needed a reputation for telling a decent story. Rosalie didn’t need stories any more than she needed these interminable dinner parties Herb loved so much. Yet there was something, wasn’t there, even for her, about that fire? Maybe it was that sailor’s famous, cockeyed, confident face. An unshaped face, an unravaged face. In any case, something happened when Rosalie joined in. It was as if she’d actually known it. As if that dead boy was more to her than just a picture she’d seen so many years ago in a magazine. Because none of it was ever true. The Cocoanut Grove didn’t happen to them. She never saw that sailor, before or after, and neither had Herb. There was no “Star-Spangled Banner,” at least not in their ears. (Herb read that somewhere; Herb read everything somewhere.) As for the sober facts: They were at that club that night. This much was whole truth. But Herb’s stomach was acting up, and this time it was more than a bad case of gas. They left an hour before the fire. Saved by indigestion! But what kind of story would that make? A one-shot laugher, not the kind you tell and tell again. And far beyond this, it was not the kind of story that gave you the incontestable authority of the messenger. And only I am escaped to tell thee. Anyway, twenty, thirty, forty years on, who was going to know or care? Harmless table talk. And if you think about it, in a way, they had escaped, hadn’t they? They just didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they retrieved their coats from the hatcheck sweetie (she didn’t survive—she was from Malden, engaged, one of the last bodies recovered) and marched out into the chill and brr of an ordinary Boston November night. Why split hairs? Escaping’s escaping.
Rosalie began to play along more intensely. Her eyes would get bleary. She’d talk with her fork suspended near her mouth, as if something crucial to understanding everything had only then just crossed her mind. Everybody would stop chewing to listen. Like a horde except that nobody was moving in the same direction. You see? Had people moved in the same direction, maybe it would have been different. See? What you have to understand is that it wasn’t the heat or the flames or even the dread smoke, it was how the people—
Then she’d pause and take a breath, her fork still up in the air by her ear: I’m not saying I blame them. No. God, no. I love them. How can you not love them?
Somehow her saying this was worse than the melting walls and the charred bodies and the unopenable doors, or even the useless, desperate screams, which she never talked about but were always there in her voice. Herb knew how many fire departments responded to the alarm, trucks as far as New Bedford roared to Boston. Herb knew the score of the Boston College–Holy Cross game. B.C. 12, Holy Cross 55. He knew how many young and virile lives were saved by that humiliation, because Boston College called off the victory party scheduled for that night in the Grove’s Melody Lounge. He knew the name of the last Buck Jones picture, Forbidden Trail, where Buck, playing a cowhand, not only saves Mary and her mother from the villain Mr. Coffin, he also rescues a man from a burning cabin. All this before being unjustly accused of arson and murder himself! But Herb Swanson had no talent for putting people inside that nightclub, and the truth is that he began to be a little frightened by his wife. The last thing Rosalie cared about was hoodwinking anybody about what she did or didn’t see one night in 1942, and yet when she got started in about things like fingernails tearing the flesh of the shoulders, it was as though she couldn’t stop. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. Clawing each other. Even husbands and wives. And Herb would watch her anxiously, fidgeting, waiting for an opening and a chance to recapture the story. Bring it back to the busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, and an interview he did with the Globe on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, in 1972, where he said he prays for the souls of those innocents every day and often visits their graves, the ones that are here in Massachusetts. He told the reporter that the movie star was buried too far away, but that he’d always wanted to make that trip out to California. There’s your human interest. Stanley Tomaszewski gui
lty and prostrate before the headstones. Because it was almost as though Rosalie (even though she always denied it) judged people for trying to save themselves, which was wrong and terrible and not at all the point. The point was glory. The point was redemption. Think of all the good that came out of that fire. Municipal solidarity. Nationwide sympathy and understanding. New fire codes for every public building in the United States of America. Pivotal advancements in emergency medicine and response…
And there’s a night, isn’t there, when Rosalie stares at Herb and there’s nobody else in the room, even though they are having dinner with the Selvins and Tony Bickleman and his latest wife, Maureen, and they’re all sitting right there. Not their fault, such rage, Rosalie says, not their fault. There’s nobody else in the room, and Herb watches her watching him, and he tries not to listen, and he vows to himself he’ll never bring any of this up again, ever. He even goes one further and promises himself that one of these days he’ll come clean, which after all these years would make a good story in itself. It never happened, folks. We weren’t there. My dear friends, let me be frank, the long and the short of it was (pause, drumroll) Pepto-Bismol. I stand before you a prevaricator. And he can hear Harvey Selvin saying, For Christ’s sake, Herb, it’s a story. And Tony Bickleman: And I wasn’t shot at Anzio either, shot at, but not shot. I always say shot. What’s the difference? Coulda bin, couldn’t I a bin?
Around the middle of the 1980s, not long after he retired, Herb did stop telling the story, at least in public. And when he stopped, Rosalie stopped. She’d never initiated it; she only carried it places it wasn’t supposed to go. Herb in his chair in the den looking out at the backyard and Rosalie on the patio reading, slowly turning pages, or not turning pages at all, the woman could spend five minutes on the same page, and still the ceiling ignites and the flames spread across the walls and he tries to run and can’t. Herb flings himself against the crowd, elbows cocked like an offensive lineman, trying to use his bulk to plow forward, stumbles, shouting absurdly, “Make way! I’m a doctor!” while Rosalie remains behind, at their table. Rosalie sips her Scotch. She crosses and recrosses her legs. She rubs the clean white tablecloth with her palm. After he stopped telling the Cocoanut Grove out loud, this is the part that was most alarming. This is what made Herb try to banish those two words from his brain the way the city of Boston forbade them from the commercial register. Rosalie serene while he and everyone else in the place—