The Circus Fire (27 page)

Charles Coughlan of Bristol searched for his daughter Hortense Murphy and her young family. They'd all gone except baby Jimmy. Coughlan had located his four-year-old granddaughter Patty on the fourth floor of Municipal Hospital, badly burned on the arms and legs, but his daughter, son-in-law and four-year-old grandson Charles were still missing. Shortly before ten, he discovered his namesake in with the other boys. He still had a long night ahead of him.

Dr. Paul de la Vergne, who didn't mind sitting up high, identified his wife Elizabeth by a ring she wore. She'd been trampled and then burned.

Go to sleep

At 10:15, Mayor Mortensen went on the air to brief the public on the status of the missing and injured and to praise the city and state disaster organizations for their prompt response. WDRC and WTHT carried the address live. He'd already made the same speech once, at 9:00, right after he visited Municipal. The first time, his voice had caught on the words, and people listening at home or in their cars, in barrooms or on the shop floor, heard what seemed to be the mayor breaking down.

Now he steeled himself and leaned into the mike. He thanked the Red Cross and the War Council, the Salvation Army and the hospitals. He singled out Commissioner Hickey and Deputy Chief of Police Michael J. Godfrey for their work.

It was a bland performance, all compliments, unless you knew what the mayor wasn't saying. Noticeably absent from his list was his chief of police, Charles Hallissey. Like his circus counterpart John Brice, Hallissey was in his dotage, playing out the string. Mortensen, a reform mayor supported by the immigrant minorities of the North End, had inherited him from the previous, big-machine administration. He'd considered him inattentive to his duties before the fire, at best perfunctory. Now, secretly, he'd made up his mind to drum him into retirement. Political scribes for the
Courant
and the
Times
noted that today he'd named Godfrey his liaison in charge of all facets of the police response. Hallissey, there on the lot at the time of the fire, suddenly disappeared, eclipsed by the dynamic Bull Hickey.

The mayor's speech was brief, with good reason. The people listening

weren't tuning in for him. They were waiting for the new lists. First he read the names of the few children still waiting at the Brown School. Then he read the lists given to his office by the four hospitals, in descending order of patient load: Municipal, Hartford, St. Francis, and finally Mt. Sinai. Then he read the names of the dead. Slowly. Clearly. He was surprised how many he knew, and how many—strangers at the beginning of the day— now seemed familiar to him, and precious. This time he didn't break down.

At police headquarters, the property room finished sorting the last batch of items that had come from the lot. The officer in charge boxed them up and fit them in the vault with the others, shut the door and turned the key. There would be more tomorrow, he figured, and people looking for their things.

At Municipal Hospital the rush had finally died down. Nurse's aides and janitors policed the lobby and the first-floor corridors, sweeping skeins of sloughed skin from the linoleum. The more stubborn bits they had to get down on their knees and scrub with brushes.

One bluebird was intimidated by the injuries of the patients but gamely carrying on. She had plans of becoming a nurse one day. Apparently a colleague could read the strain in her face. "We don't need anybody fainting," the person warned her.

Municipal's staff put into action the mayor and Dr. Burgdorf's plan to alleviate the crowding. They chose twenty-three patients, most with less serious injuries, and a few because Hartford or St. Francis had specialists who could take better care of them. Among those transferred by ambulance was Jerry LeVasseur. Finally he would have his own bed.

Donald Gale's parents finally found him at Municipal. They didn't own a phone. Hulda Grant's boyfriend had told them Donald was dead; other neighbors said he made it out and ran into the woods. Fearing the worst, the Gales drove straight to the armory. Only Donald's father went in. When he came up empty, they tried the hospitals. The Gales were new to the area, there for the war work; they didn't know Municipal existed.

When Donald regained consciousness, he gave a nurse the number of their next-door neighbor. By the time the volunteers downstairs called, it was far too late to catch his parents. They were driving around town in a panic. They blew through a red light, and a motorcycle cop stopped them. Donald's father explained the situation.

"Have you tried Municipal?" the cop asked.

Instead of giving them directions, he escorted them to the door. Mrs. Gale was afraid to come up, so she stayed in the car in the parking lot.

His father talked with Donald. There were three other boys in room 509 with him. By morning two of them would be dead. Donald himself was optimistic. Despite his injuries, he assured his father that he was okay. He imagined he'd be home in a day or two.

Father Murphy from St. Justin's was at Municipal too, anointing the dying as he had on the lot. A young husband asked him to bless his son. The boy died soon after. Father Murphy stayed with the father. The man was torn but clung to his faith; to the Father his strength typified the goodness and courage shown by all those he'd ministered to today.

In 502, in his oxygen tent, Elliott Smith drifted in and out of consciousness, his body packed in cracked ice. He still didn't know about his mother, but his mother knew about him. Downstairs, Grace Smith had been lying in a hallway on a gurney beside an elevator when the doors opened. She had a sudden compulsion to raise herself up and look. There, being wheeled out on another gurney, was her son.

In Vernon, the Smith family knew the two were in Municipal, but only after some confusion. Earlier, the hospital had called to say Mrs. Smith was all right but that she hadn't been able to locate Joan. Joan had answered; she said she was fine, then gave the phone over to her grandmother. Only much later did they figure out the call had been misdirected. Somehow the volunteers at the hospital had transposed the number supplied by Elliott and Joan's mother Grace Smith and the number of the Edward Smith family in Bloomfield. Their daughter Joan-Lee Smith was still missing.

Mr. Smith, like Mr. Gale, had gone to the armory and found no one. When he called home, Joan told him her mother was in Municipal. He went there and found Elliott listed as well.

In Middletown, Sophie Kurneta Erickson was trying to find out what happened to her son Raymond and her sister Mary. She'd missed the circus, taking care of baby Joann. Her mother, her younger sister Betsy and her nephew Tony had all made it home. Her brother Stanley was in Hartford Hospital. He hadn't seen Mary since the fire, but Raymond he'd taken to Municipal Hospital. He told Sophie the whole story over the phone—

bringing him up to the fourth floor, leaving him on the mattress with the priest—but when she called the hospital they had no record of a Raymond Erickson. Yes, they were sure. They'd checked and double-checked their lists. No one by that name had been admitted.

So, hours after the fire, unsure just what was going on, Sophie Erickson reported her son missing. Raymond Sr. was in the navy, stationed at Gulfport, Mississippi. She needed him here now.

The staff at Municipal had hoped to move Mildred Cook to Hartford Hospital with the other transfers. She was only in fair shape but stable enough to go. The trouble was Edward. "Child can't be moved," a note beside Mildred's name read. For now they would stay.

Emily Gill had already found Mildred; now Marion and Ted Parsons visited, bringing along Donald. He'd eaten supper with the family that had taken him home, then given them the address of his mother's apartment. Uncle Ted was waiting for him, also Aunt Marion and the family's minister, the Reverend James Yee, who'd accompanied her down from Southampton.

Mildred was not completely there. Her head was a ball of gauze, only her eyes and a hole for her mouth showing. The visit was quick.

Edward was registered on the fifth floor. They took the elevator up, watching the numbers turn. The room he was in had three other boys in it. The lighting was low so they could sleep. Outside, cars rolled by on Vine, accelerating through the turn by Keney Park, spinning off into the night. Donald could barely see. Edward's bed was tucked into a dark corner, his bandaged arms white lines on the blanket. Weakly, he asked what had happened to Eleanor.

Across the room, in his own dark corner, Donald Gale slept.

Downstairs, there was a crisis. Nurses noticed that the plaster casts they'd fitted some of the patients with were digging into their skin. Typically, the burned tissues had filled with edema and were now grossly swollen. The rigid casts pinched off circulation; people's hands and feet were turning purple. The staff began cutting the casts off, but soon it was clear there were too many for them to handle, and they had to call Hartford Hospital and ask for a fresh set of internes. There weren't any; they'd been working hard all night. They went anyway. "By that time we were exhausted," one doctor remembered. "We had to guzzle a few cups of coffee for energy and start cutting."

Mayor Mortensen returned to Municipal with the secretary of the Bushnell. She'd given her mother the tickets to take her daughter and a boarder. Now she was finding them, one by one.

The boarder was on the third floor. Charles Tomalonis was Lithuanian, and had only recently come to America; he didn't speak English. Municipal's lists never had his name the same way twice— Kamelonis, Tabolcoks. On top of the language barrier, Charles Tomalonis was in extreme pain, his face, like Mildred Cook's, lost under yards of cotton. The secretary spoke Lithuanian. She leaned close to the slit for his lips.

"Is Mrs. V. all right?" he asked, meaning her mother.

They knew she was dead because they'd just come from the armory, where her husband had identified her. But they didn't want to tell him bad news, not in his state. They said she was okay.

"Oh," he said, relieved. "Now I can die."

In the four operating rooms on the first floor, surgeons worked on the worst cases. On one table lay the woman who burned while huddled over her niece, both of them unable to run because their ankles were broken. The doctors would try to patch the sieve of her skin for hours, watching her blood pressure fluctuate, her pulse dwindle, finally, to nothing.

One volunteer nurse from New Britain spoke of a doctor toiling over the dead and dying all night even though he'd lost a child in the fire. At Hartford Hospital, the building staff set up cots for the exhausted nurses to catnap on. No one was going home.

At home, one woman's son couldn't get to sleep. All he'd gotten was a blister on his ear. He closed his eyes but it was no use, so she stayed up with him.

In Middletown, ten-year-old Betsy Kurneta couldn't sleep either. She had minor burns on her right arm, but that wasn't what was keeping her up. It would be days before she could sleep.

Joan Smith's father said she could sleep in his bed tonight. She had no idea why. It never crossed her mind that she'd have bad dreams.

Meade Alcorn and Burr Leikind weren't planning on getting to bed in the near future. Their investigation at McGovern's was slowly progressing with each new witness. The detectives who had failed to serve Haley returned, added two state troopers to their retinue and headed for the Windsor Street railyards. They went from car to car, stirring up the berths,

and still they couldn't find him. They came back to Barbour Street again. Herbert DuVal—no great fan of Haley's, from his testimony—suggested he might go along as a kind of guide. They checked the railyard again. This time they found him easily.

In the meantime, Commissioner Hickey had made his way to McGovern's and caught up on what he'd missed. When the detectives brought in Haley, all the principals were in place. Hickey needed to hear very little testimony before he decided to move the entire procedure downtown. Unraveling exactly what happened would take some time. State police headquarters had a hearing room perfect for the job. For now, the admission that the canvas had been treated with the paraffin and gas mixture was tantamount to pleading guilty to criminal negligence. Prosecutors drew up arrest warrants on the spot for acting head of the circus James Haley, general manager George W. Smith, canvas boss Leonard Aylesworth, light gang boss Whitey Versteeg, superintendent of trucks Deacon Blanchfield, circus police chief Brice, and head usher John Carson.

They adjourned, Leikind leaving a detective in charge of interviewing the other circus workers they'd summoned. The detective was to take their statements and then release them, with the promise that they wouldn't skip town. Leikind went in one car with Haley; two policemen rode in another with Aylesworth, Blanchfield and Smith. The streets were deserted. They didn't need sirens.

Meanwhile, in a larger arena, Ringling's publicity machine fielded questions from the press. Roland Butler reassured America that the circus was far from done in. They still had last year's big top. The centerpoles were charred but structurally solid. The performers were fine, the menagerie untouched. They would probably retreat to Sarasota, retool and go back on the road.