Ashes of Fiery Weather (24 page)

With her eyes closed, Mattie said to Jack, “Mr. Brandt waited for two weeks before he gave up and held the funeral. He had one coffin for Liese and Dora, and he put some things of theirs in it. Dora's doll. Liese's second-best dress. She was wearing her very good one that day.”

Jack was silent. Mattie waited.

“What ever happened to him? Josef Brandt.”

“I don't know,” Mattie said. “He left the neighborhood. A lot of the families moved up to Yorkville. Mr. Brandt was alone, though. I can't imagine there was anything there for him.”

“And your family went to Ossining?”

“A new start.” Mattie didn't say that her parents had taken her away out of guilt. “They didn't think about the prison until the
Slocum
trials. Then the captain was convicted.”

“Yeah, Christ, he did time in Sing Sing, didn't he?”

“Funny, isn't it? Captain Van Schaick became our neighbor. Mama wanted to move again, but we didn't have the money.”

Jack shook his head. “Christ.”

The captain was the reason Mattie first went to stand outside the prison wall. She was supposed to blame him, but she was not sure she did. He had not conducted fire drills on the ship, but he had not meant to kill anyone, just the way she had not meant to abandon Dora to die alone, frantic to find her mother and baby sister.

After the first time Mattie heard the singing, she began to go every evening in the spring and summer as night came on. She told her mother, but her mother said it couldn't be the convicts. The men inside were not allowed to speak, much less sing. After that, Mattie wondered if the voices were the voices of ghosts.

Jack's finger bumped along her scar. “Does it look very bad?” Mattie asked.

“You never looked? Not once?”

“The doctors said it was better if I didn't and that I was lucky it wasn't on my face or my hands. Mama expected me to be a nun or a schoolteacher because I'd never marry.”

But as a child, she'd expected to outgrow the ruin. The taller she got, the smaller the scar would get, until she was a woman and it was no bigger than a nickel.

Sometimes Mattie would run her hand over the rough skin as far as she could reach. It itched, especially in the heat of summer. In the winter it got stiff with the cold and made her think of shirts frozen on a clothesline. That was how it felt.

The one mirror in their house hung on the wall in the hallway. When she was twelve, early one morning when it was just getting light and no one was up yet, she placed a chair in front of the mirror and removed her nightdress. First she studied her breasts, which had begun to grow. She covered them with her hands. She'd turned her back on herself and waited for the courage to look over her shoulder. She didn't, couldn't, just like the day it happened. A coward still. She had not tried since.

“Hell, Mattie, it's not so bad.” Jack ran his hand over her skin like he was smoothing a rucked blanket.

After that, Mattie took her blouse off.

Jack brought some kind of sweet lotion for burns and rubbed it on her back. One of the firemen had concocted it during the long hours between runs. Mattie had to laugh. Goddamn firemen and their industriousness.

Jack said it would help make her skin softer, and it did. The itching eased. He didn't let her stay on her back when they were together. He said he didn't mind the way the scar felt. He spoke more about Teddy, as though to talk her into loving him.

“I know you had your problems with him, and he drank more than he should have, but Teddy Cullen was a good fireman,” he said once.

Sometimes Jack ate supper with her and Josephine. He would bring meat from the butcher, a cut Mattie couldn't afford herself, and she'd cook it for the three of them.

He tried to talk kindly to Josephine, but she didn't give him more than one-word answers.

Nights, Mattie lay in the center of her bed and thought that what they had was better than a marriage. They didn't have to live with one another. They would not get tired of each other.

She could tolerate her daughter's confused, accusing looks. She could ignore them.

By October, Jack was eating an early supper with them as often as three times a week. One Saturday afternoon when she was cooking
hühnerfrikassee,
with boiled potatoes instead of rice, for Jack, Josephine asked if she should set the table for two or three.

“Three,” Mattie said, and Josephine did so listlessly.

When they heard the footsteps pounding on the stairs, Josephine didn't wait for Mattie to tell her to answer the door.

Stevie Crowley was out of breath, his red hair damp with sweat. A fire at the Leonard glove factory went to a third alarm. Captain Keegan was missing. They were searching for him. The boy dashed out. Mattie pulled off her apron and folded it over the chair that she'd come to think of as Jack's. She got her coat out of the closet because the weather had turned cold lately.

“Where are you going?” Josephine cried. “You didn't go when—”

“Shut up,” Mattie said.

The block was in chaos, with firemen everywhere and a large milling crowd. Mattie was there only a few minutes when Marco Giancola came over to her.

“It's good you're here,” he said. “We're looking for Captain Keegan and Gary Smith. The whole building could go any minute. They're over there.” He pointed.

“Who's where?” Mattie asked, confused.

“Annie-Rose and Delia,” Marco said. “Gary's wife's not here, far as I know.”

Mattie had thought Annie-Rose might be in the hospital again. Jack had not mentioned her name in three visits. But no. Annie-Rose and Delia stood slightly apart from the crowd, or more likely the crowd was standing back out of respect. Annie-Rose wore a gray shawl around her shoulders. Mattie felt a surge of irritation. It was as though she were in a play and had decided the shawl made the best costume for a woman about to learn she was a widow. As though she felt Mattie's stare, Annie-Rose turned and looked directly at her. Delia followed her mother's gaze and took her arm.

Mattie expected them to turn away, but instead Annie-Rose walked toward her, and the girl followed. She waited, refusing to retreat. When Annie-Rose reached Mattie, she turned to face the building. The smoke was thinning.

“They'll find him,” Annie-Rose said.

“I know,” Mattie said. They wouldn't stop until they did.

“Alive, I mean,” Annie-Rose said forcefully.  “Jackie isn't dead.”

Mattie stared at the wreck of the building. Most of the windows had been blown out or broken. The brick façade was streaked with black.

Annie-Rose turned to Mattie. “Jack said you were on the
Slocum.
”

Mattie pulled her coat tightly around herself.  “He told you?”

“Was it a secret?” Annie-Rose asked.

“No,” Mattie said.

Had he told her about the scar? But then she would know he'd seen it. Had he told her Mattie's story as they ate together at their kitchen table? Or were they in bed? She recalled then what she always tried not to think of. How he and Annie-Rose were with each other the night she turned up on their doorstep.

“You don't have to stay here for our sakes,” Annie-Rose said. “You can go home to your daughter.”

“Josephine will be fine.” Delia sounded angry.

Mattie thought Jack's daughter might be kinder than she looked.

Annie-Rose smiled softly.  “Still.”

Mattie, and she thought Delia too, waited for Annie-Rose to continue, but she just gazed at the building.

“I'll send Stevie. When they find him,” Delia said. She didn't look at Mattie.

“When they get him out, Delia,” Annie-Rose said. “Your father isn't dead.”

Delia looked hard at her mother, then up at the building.

“Don't bother asking Stevie, Delia. He knows to come and tell us,” Mattie said.

Back home, Mattie found Josephine in bed, on top of the covers. Asleep, or pretending to be. Mattie went out on the fire escape. Twilight was beginning to creep over the rooftops before she spotted Stevie sprinting up the block. That he was running and not plodding, watching each foot hit the sidewalk, meant that he was coming to tell her that Jack was alive.

Mattie had lost him. She couldn't say how she knew. But it had to do with the way she was, even in her shock, adjusting to a future without him. Her acceptance of his death lost to his wife's certainty that he had not died.

Mattie let three weeks go by before she went to talk to Emmet at his apartment. His surprise at seeing her did not make him lose his manners. He did not ask why she was there.

He invited her to sit at his kitchen table and offered her the sturdier of the mismatched chairs.

She noted the chairs, and indeed the overall sparseness of the living room, with relief. He did not have a woman. When she told him her idea, he took her hand shyly and said yes, he would help her.

Mattie watched her grandson finish scribbling.

“Teddy Cullen was a good fireman,” Ian repeated. “Said Jack Keegan.”

Shortly after Michael was born, Mattie told Emmet that she went to him because, yes, she knew he was a good man, but also because of his Irish mother. Emmet laughed and said that if Jack were Italian or Greek, maybe they'd have a problem. Irish, though, could easily pass for German.

Over the years, Mattie wondered if Michael might have asked his half sister for the truth. Josephine almost certainly knew. But the twelve-year age difference meant she and Michael were hardly close. When Josephine left home for good, Michael was a boy of six.

Before her son was born, Mattie would have said it was nonsense, the idea that firefighting was in the blood. True, the department was filled with fathers and sons and sets of brothers and cousins. But didn't the shoemaker's son become a shoemaker?

Michael Brauer was raised upstate. It had been Emmet's idea to move his business there in 1933 when drinking became legal again. Emmet remained a buff, of course. Mattie made one request: “Don't bring it home.”

So Emmet never brought “their” son on the business trips that took him into Manhattan and Brooklyn. Michael never visited firehouses with him, never spent hours poring over the collection of newspaper articles, books and photographs about the FDNY.

Perhaps Michael had simply coveted his half sister's father, the dead hero. Yet. When Michael announced, a week after his college graduation, that he would take the test for the FDNY, Mattie began to believe that something did pass between fathers and sons. Some innate understanding that it is not every man who can run into fire, and if you can, then it's your responsibility to make it your life's work.

“Okay, Grandma. I guess I'm finished.” Ian closed his notebook. “Um, thanks.”

Mattie nodded once. “You're welcome.”

“Is it okay if I go down to the backyard? Into the woods?” Ian hopped up.

She saw how badly he wanted to get away. He was a boy, after all, and what was she but white hair, wrinkles and a stern mouth.

“Yes, but don't go far. Your father will be back soon.”

In seconds, it seemed, he appeared in the yard below. Mattie watched Ian take off at a run for the blazing trees. She wanted to call him back.
Wait,
Ian Brauer. Wait. She would start the interview over, and this time begin with the
Slocum.
She would tell the boy what it is like to be on fire, because he should know. Michael's older boy, Gavin, quiet and sweet, did not need to know.

Mattie would explain to Ian that it was his grandfather, John Michael Keegan, who taught her the scar. Through his touch, she learned its breadth and shape and that it was not Dora Brandt in profile, her mouth arched in a hot scream.

Mattie rose and went to her dresser. In the top drawer, beneath the small jewelry box that had been her mother's (her mother who had never touched her again after June 15, 1904; though it hardly seemed possible, this was what Mattie remembered), Mattie took out the folded paper, a copy she'd made out of fear she'd lose the original. Her hands trembled.

In the spring of 1941, an envelope arrived addressed to Matilda Cullen, postmarked Brooklyn, New York. It held Jack's one-page obituary from the
Irish Eagle.
“Icon of the ‘Glory Devlins' Dies.” Then, Mattie assumed that Josephine, away at college, must have sent it. But Mattie finally admitted to herself that sending the obituary was too bold for Josephine. Now she believed it must have been Annie-Rose. What she could not decide, still, was if it was meant cruelly or in sympathy.

As a buff, Emmet would have heard about Jack's death. No doubt one of his business trips to the city had actually been the funeral. Mattie, in turn, cried only when she had hours alone, so Emmet would not see her swollen eyes. She didn't want him to realize that it was not only grief, but the end of hope. Part of her had always believed Jack would one day find out that he had a living son, and he would come and claim both her and Michael.

Mattie returned to the terrace and sat heavily. Jack had been sixty-five when he died, but in the picture the newspaper had chosen, he was at least ten years younger, not much past the age when she last saw him. Mattie opened her grandson's folder and placed the copy of Jack Keegan's obituary inside.

Jack had asked her once, Who saved you? She'd explained why she'd not burned to death or drowned, but that story wasn't accurate. The answer to Jack's question was
you.
You saved me.

CHAPTER FOUR

November 1918

WHEN JOHN AND PATRICK DIED,
most of me went with them, and that is all that happened.

I knew any boys I had would be born to risk fire, but I never dreamed that it would come from the inside out and while they were still mine far more than Jack's. Their faces were drawn from his, but they had my blue eyes, flecked with green as though someone tossed bits of emerald into the sky.