Ashes of Fiery Weather (23 page)

Emmet Brauer ran the brewery in Red Hook that his father had started. Emmet had kept it going, barely, since Prohibition, by switching to soda. Beer would be his profession again once the amendment was repealed, supposedly very soon. But the FDNY was his passion.

Emmet set down one of the growlers and took off his hat. His brown hair was thinning. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Cullen,” he said shyly. “They're out?”

Mattie nodded. “They've been gone about five minutes.”

“Did you hear where the fire is?”

She shook her head. “I didn't.”

“Well, I'm sure they won't mind if I get these inside, out of the sun. Then I'll go see if I can find them.” Emmet nodded, blushing, and she nodded back, not quite comfortable with reverence.

“Mr. Brauer,” she called after him. “The song you were whistling?”

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed. “It's an Irish song called ‘Carrickfergus.'”

Mattie nodded, but he seemed to feel he had to explain, as though he knew she was repeating his last name in her mind.
Brauer?

“My mother was from County Cavan,” he said. “My full name is Emmet Robert Brauer,” he said.

She said, “My husband's given name was Theobold, for Wolfe Tone.”

“Oh, I know! Robert Cullen was his uncle. He responded to the
Slocum.
”

“The
Slocum,
” Mattie repeated.

“The
General Slocum,
a steamboat on a picnic excursion. A fire broke out as the boat was passing Sunken Meadow, near Randall's Island. To this day, it's the greatest loss of life in a single event in New York City history,” Emmet said.

“Terrible,” Mattie said.

Emmet probably would have kept talking, but Mattie started sweeping again. He put his hat back on, picked up his growlers and disappeared inside the firehouse.

Jack lay still, after. Mattie always kept her blouse on, but unbuttoned. He never asked why, even now when the afternoon gave no breeze, just dead air and the stink of trash from the alley. She and Teddy had never lain together like this. She had never once taken all her clothes off either. He'd never seen her back, unless it was an accidental glimpse as she was getting undressed for bed. But he'd never said.

Though she hardly cared that the bed had been hers and Teddy's, she thought Jack did. He'd never admit that he felt guilty for seeing her, yet she knew he must. He'd never admit that he felt responsible for Teddy's death either. She thought he must, but she couldn't be sure, since she was equally certain that he still believed transferring Teddy and the others was his only choice.

Saturday afternoons when Jack wasn't working, Mattie sent Josephine out and told her to play until it was time for supper. She found out after the third time that Josephine was going to the Keegans'.

Delia Keegan let the younger girl stay with her. Jack began leaving her money to buy them egg creams or tickets to the movies. Mattie ought to have told him not to, but in truth, it didn't hurt Jack much. So many of the men in the firehouse had six, seven or more children. Jack, with only one, was the man they went to when some cash was needed.

Jack's bruises were good bruises and confined to her thighs. The things he did, she had never thought of doing with Teddy. She left her hair down and it nearly reached her waist. She had taken to washing it twice a week. For Teddy, heating the water was too much trouble. She'd worn it twisted and pinned back, out of her face. Cleaner, her hair took on a honey color. She combed it carefully when it was dry, admiring the way it caught the light. There was something to discovering you had a beauty you'd never noticed before, and, as well, noticing it in another.

She liked to simply look at Jack. Teddy had been wiry, strong in that way. Jack was taller and wider across the shoulders. Even at fifty-four, with his dark hair mostly white, and with a nose that had been broken long ago when he'd been thrown from the rig while out on a run, he was the sort of man that women turned to look at on the street.

Between her legs it throbbed a little, but Mattie didn't mind. It was different than with Teddy. Not so much pain as a soreness that was almost pleasant.

Jack was typically quiet after they finished, but today Mattie sensed even more behind his silence. She sat up, pulling the sheet around her. He was staring at the wall, unseeing.

She stroked his chest. “I have no one to tell, you know. The firehouse will never find out.”

“I don't care what those guys think,” he said.

A lie. Mattie hid her smile. Even his wife and daughter came second to his men.

“What is it, then?” she asked, careful to keep her tone light. From the first afternoon, with Teddy gone only a month, she'd sternly told herself that she'd never be more than the woman he went to. And she would never ask him for more.

“Annie-Rose,” Jack said. “She's bad again.”

“What's wrong with her?” Mattie asked. Normally, she would never be so forward, but she felt oddly calm, as if she'd been sipping beer.

“Like the last time, a few years ago. She won't get out of bed. She won't talk to us. She doesn't eat. My kid just looks at me like I'm supposed to know what to do.”

His voice was flat. Mattie knew Jack had lost two boys. Sometimes Mattie hoped to conceive, though she never had wanted to before. The misses after Josephine had been a relief. But Jack made everything different. She liked the idea of giving him a new son.

Yet what would she do with another child? She could not keep working at her firehouse, or any firehouse. Teddy had been dead for four months, too long to pass the child off as his. She would have to go away.

“She's had it hard,” she said, though she thought that Annie-Rose would have done better to accept that terrible things happened.

A minute's silence, then Jack said, “You going to leave?”

“Leave?” Mattie asked.

“Leave the city. Go back to where you're from. I know you've got brothers upstate somewhere. I been wondering why you didn't do that right after.”

“I have three brothers,” Mattie said.

They had not approved of her marriage to Teddy, or rather, its circumstances. She'd shamed the family after all they were doing to gain respectability in the face of the war, and the bigotry toward anyone with a German accent or surname.

She hadn't spoken to any of them in years, since their mother's funeral. They didn't know she was a widow. Walter inherited the grocery store from their father, and he'd take her in, if for no other reason than his horror at the job she'd chosen. Working as a maid, like an immigrant.

To Jack she simply said, “I
will
support my daughter.”

“I should move away,” he said. “Get Annie-Rose and Delia out of the city.  Go someplace quiet, with fresh air.”

“And stop being a fireman?” she said, amused.

“You're allowed out. It's not the goddamned priesthood.”

Isn't it? she thought.

“Did you like it where you grew up?” he asked.

“Ossining. It was nice enough,” she said.

“Ossining? Yeah? Were you anywhere near the prison?”

“Up the road. The lights in the house blinked when they electrocuted somebody.”

Jack laughed. “Jesus Christ.”

“My mother made us say a prayer,” Mattie said, “for the criminal and the executioner.”

“You weren't born up there, right? He said something once—”

He. Teddy.

“No, no. I was born in the city. St. Brigid's parish.”

“Why'd you leave?”

Mattie considered the question, asked so casually. Only rarely did anyone ask about her childhood.

“Mattie—what's that short for anyway?” Jack asked.

“Matilda,” she answered. “I never liked it.”

“That's pretty funny.”

“Why is it funny?”

“Theobold Wolfe Tone, his wife was Matilda. Didn't you know that?”

“No,” she said. Maybe Teddy had liked the thought of it. He could be stupid like that. Maybe that was why he touched her to begin with.

“Maybe if I were Irish, I would care.”

Jack laughed and tightened his arm around her. “Matilda's not so bad. Annie-Rose thought we should name a girl Brigid, after her mother. Said we could call her Delia. That's an Irish nickname for Brigid, you know. But I still wasn't crazy about the idea. When the baby came, Annie-Rose was in no shape to talk about anything, so I just went with it.”

Mattie panicked. He would keep talking about his daughter, or go into his own tragedy, or possibly get up to go home.

“Do you remember the
Slocum
?” she asked.

Jack glanced at her, surprised. “Yeah, of course, 1904. I missed it, being in Brooklyn.” There was a touch of regret in his voice.

Mattie understood. With over one thousand dead in the fire or drowned in the East River trying to escape the flames, what happened to the steamship was the disaster everybody knew before the
Titanic.
Five hundred more died on the
Titanic,
and besides, that ship's dead were far more glamorous.

“St. Brigid's, that's Little Germany.” Jack stared at her. “Jesus, what are you, a survivor?”

Slowly, Mattie sat up and slipped off her blouse. She gathered her hair in one hand and pulled it over her shoulder and then pushed herself off the headboard and lay down on the bed. As Jack watched intently, she turned over on her stomach. The sheet smelled of sweat and the things they had just done. She liked it.

He cursed softly.

“Who'd you lose?” Jack asked.

A good question. Jack was smart enough to know what the number of dead versus the number of survivors meant.

“I had a friend,” Mattie said. “She lived upstairs from us. We were five that year. We would tell people we were twins. The Brandts belonged to St. Mark's Lutheran Church. It was St. Mark's that rented the
Slocum
for the picnic. Dora begged her mother to let me come too. Her father told my parents they got an extra ticket from someone who couldn't use it, but I think Mr. Brandt bought it for me. He didn't go. It was a Wednesday. Most of the fathers and husbands had to work.”

“Yeah, it was all women and kids,” Jack said. “I remember that.”

Mattie nodded. “Reverend Haas was there. He survived. His wife and his daughter died. Mrs. Brandt was holding the baby, Gretchen, and Dora was standing by her, and I was standing by Dora. We heard shouts and saw smoke and knew something bad—Mrs. Brandt ran to look for Liese.”

“Another sister?”

Mattie nodded. “Liese was sixteen. She was the most beautiful girl in
Kleindeutschland.
”

In the years after, Mattie sometimes wished she had a photograph of Liese, just to see her face again, the way one might look at a painting in a museum.

“Almost as soon as we'd boarded, she went off to flirt with this boy she liked,” Mattie said. “Liese died with him, I guess. They never found either one of them.”

“The mother ran to look for her—”

“Mrs. Brandt screamed at us to wait right there, and we did for a minute but then hundreds of people started running toward us, screaming, and some with their clothes burning, and Dora ran after her mother. She grabbed my hand too and I started to go along with her but then the smoke got very thick and black and you could hear the fire—
you
would know.”

“Yeah, I know. It's still scary as hell, and I'm trained for it.”

“I took my hand back from Dora. I took my hand back from her. I ran the other way,” Mattie said. “I ran the other way. There was someone on fire and my blouse caught—” She closed her eyes.

“Who saved you?”

“The burn, Jackie. You see where it is. I saved myself.”

“Hey, Mattie, it was chaos and you were a little kid.”

Mattie had gone to confession when she was fifteen and the priest had told her much the same thing. It is normal, sane, to run from a fire, unless you are a fireman. He'd said those very words. In any case, the priest said, a child of five cannot commit a mortal sin. Seven is the age of reason. He'd given her a light penance anyway, a balm to soothe her. That particular rosary remained unsaid.

“Who saved you?” Jack asked.

“A man picked me up and threw me into the water. He was throwing lots of children in,” she said. “Some of the mothers screamed that they could not swim . . . burn or drown. Drown or burn. In the water, another man took me and two others and he swam on his back with us holding on. All the way to shore.”

“You were conscious?”

“Until we got out of the water. It didn't hurt.”

“A burn that deep wouldn't.”

Because she'd said so much already, Mattie continued.

It was late in the day, almost night. Mr. Brandt knew his wife was dead. She'd been found with Gretchen in her arms. Mr. Brandt was told by a neighbor that Dora was in the hospital. Mattie didn't know who the neighbor was, but assumed it was a man. The mothers on the block would have known Dora Brandt from Mattie Starwaif. Mattie's father went along, thinking that wherever Dora was, Mattie might be. They eventually found her on her stomach in the oxygen tent. One girl. One daughter for two fathers.

Mattie woke up while they were there. Turning her head to the side, she saw them standing over her. She put up her hand. Her father glanced at Mr. Brandt. Though Mattie wasn't allowed to speak German, in
Kleindeutschland
you heard it everywhere. Her father said to Mr. Brandt, “
Es tut mir leid.
”

I am sorry.

The husbands and fathers made posters, advertising for their missing families. Mr. Brandt did one in English and one in German:
zwei Töchter von Josef Brandt missing, two daughters of Josef Brandt . . .

“He put them up at all the hospitals and on North Brother Island where the boat finally went ashore. He put one up at Locust Grove where we were going for the picnic. He put one up at the pier where they'd set up a morgue. They put the morgue there because they were pulling so many bodies out of the water, but it was not a good place. So many found they'd lost their wives, all of their children, they threw themselves in the water. They say Germans don't cry?” Mattie said. “They did.”