There Was an Old Woman (2 page)

Chapter Two

The freight elevator of the Empire State Building descended slowly, bouncing a little as it landed. A maintenance worker pulled open the scissor gate and Evie Ferrante, her colleague Nick Barlow, and the team of four movers they'd brought with them emerged from the car—like clowns, Evie thought, spewing out of one of those tiny circus cars—along with a rolling platform loaded with tools and packing equipment. An officer from building security had escorted them down, presumably to make sure they took only the old jet engine that the Five-Boroughs Historical Society had been authorized to remove.

In this cavernous sub-subbasement, the ceilings were low and the lighting meager. Here none of the art deco architectural detailing of the building was present, just the structural bones. Evie had to watch out to keep from tripping over coal cart rails embedded in the floor or banging her head on the yellow pipes that snaked along overhead. A roach the size of a silver dollar skittered past her feet and into the shadows.

They followed the security officer into the core of the building, past massive support columns of bare concrete with veins where moisture had hardened into lime deposits. If she closed her eyes, the cool dampness and the smell could have convinced her that she was walking through ancient catacombs.

Evie's heart quickened. There, sitting on the floor among some cardboard boxes, was a battered Wright Whirlwind engine, or what was left of the one from the B-25 bomber that had lost its way on a foggy Saturday morning in 1945 and slammed into the north side of the building. The wings and propeller had sheared off on impact. The plane itself had turned into a fireball, feeding on its own fuel and taking out offices on four floors.

Evie crouched beside the engine, savoring the moment. She was about to bring to light an artifact that no one had thought to look for. She hadn't made history—that wasn't her job—but she was about to preserve an important piece of it.

“Holy shit,” said Evie's onetime mentor, Nick. “That's it, isn't it?” The expression on his face was of unabashed delight. “You did it. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Nick had been so incredibly generous to her. He'd been stoic if not supportive when she'd gotten promoted over him to senior curator, her academic degree trumping his many years of experience. “That means a lot to me, coming from you.”

The engine was round, about five hundred pounds of metal, five feet in diameter and caked with dust. With its center crank and rusting cylinders that radiated out, the thing resembled a miniature space station that had been through an intergalactic war. Upon impact with the building, the engine had been pulled right out of its cowling, and it had shot partway across the seventy-ninth floor before plunging to the bottom of an elevator shaft. It was miraculously still intact, not twenty feet away from where workers had hauled it from the elevator pit days after the accident.

It surprised Evie that so few people knew about the spectacular crash. Maybe it was because a few days later the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“This is so cool,” Nick said. He crouched beside her. “They're just going to let us take it?”

Evie waved the release and letter of agreement she'd worked so hard to get. Finding the engine had been a reward for persistence. She'd been looking for artifacts to feature in the upcoming
Seared in Memory
exhibit, the first she'd curated solo, and it had occurred to her to wonder what had happened to the plane engines after the fire. From Alice Chen, a friend from college and now director of community relations for the Empire State Building, Evie had learned that not only did one of the engines still exist, it hadn't been moved. Getting the building owners to agree to let the Historical Society feature the engine in the exhibit had taken months of diplomacy. It helped that one of the Historical Society board members was the wife of a senior partner in the property management company that ran the building.

While the movers got started assembling the polyurethane-sheathed cage that Evie had designed to protect the engine during transport, Nick set up lights and Evie started to take pictures. Of the engine. Of Nick standing over the engine, his arms spread to give a sense of scale. Of the closed door just beyond with white stenciled letters that read
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Of that door open, shooting down into the pit where the engine had landed. It must have sounded like a bomb exploding, a quarter of a ton of burning metal plummeting from more than a thousand feet overhead.

 

It took the rest of the morning to get the engine wrapped and hoisted onto a platform. By the time they were ready to leave, Evie's arms and legs were coated with dirt and rust—and those were just the parts of her that she could see. She was glad she'd worn jeans and steel-toed work boots.

As they were bringing the engine up in the service elevator at the Historical Society, her cell phone vibrated. Maybe it was Seth. He'd promised her dinner at her favorite soup dumpling restaurant in Chinatown for a change. Handsome in a Colin Farrell kind of way, without the mustache, he and Evie had met at an auction. He'd outbid her for a gold-and-pearl tie tack that had belonged to Stephanus Van Cortlandt, New York's first American-born mayor. It was a refreshing change to date someone who'd actually heard of Stephanus Van Cortlandt or knew that the pattern tooled on those gold cuff links was acanthus leaf. It wasn't the worst reason she'd had to go to bed with a man.

The doors opened on the second floor, where the main exhibit hall was located. A minute later there was a chime. A text message. Evie fished out the phone.

The message was short and sweet. It was not from Seth; it was from her sister, Ginger, and it was so not what she wanted to see.

Chapter Three

It's mom. Call me. xx Ginger

Why now? Not again.
Evie knew she should return the call right away, and as she and Nick entered the Great Hall of Five-Boroughs Historical Society, pushing ahead of them a platform truck with the B-25 Wright Whirlwind engine wrapped up on it like a gigantic pastrami sandwich, that's what she was intending to do. But her boss's reaction to their arrival sidetracked her.

“Wow. Is that what I think it is?” Connor Kennedy's familiar voice boomed behind her. A moment later, he was in her space and she could smell his cologne and cigarette breath. He stood absolutely still and silent, staring at the engine. Moving the thing had eaten up a good chunk of Evie's budget, but judging from Connor's reaction, it had been worth it.

“So this is going to be sensational,” he said, doing a 360 and surveying the disarray in the exhibit hall with apprehension. “We are going to make it, aren't we?”

“Of course we'll make it. We always do,” Evie said, sounding more confident than she felt.

The parquet floor of the Great Hall was awash in packing crates. The other two members of Evie's small staff were assembling bases and plexi mounts for the installation. The museum's resident electrician was drilling into the wall and wiring one of six massive flat-screen monitors. One of the janitors was sweeping up wood and plaster dust with a wide push broom.

Outside, beyond a row of narrow two-story arched windows, bright yellow banners for the upcoming exhibit snapped in the breeze. Dramatic red-orange letters on them read:
SEARED IN MEMORY.
Below that and smaller:
June 10–November 17.
Just three weeks until it opened.

Evie could envision the room, silent and cleared of debris. Each of four historic fires would have its own timeline and photographs, audio and video. Artifacts she'd culled from their own collection and borrowed from others would be mounted, lit, and documented. Together, each grouping would tell its own story.

She walked Connor through the half-finished installations. Greeting visitors and already in place was a magnificent red-and-black steam-powered pumper like the one used to fight the Great Fire of 1776 that destroyed the Stock Exchange and much of lower Manhattan. The next section, commemorating the fire during the ugly 1853 Civil War Draft Riots, would feature blowups of inflammatory broadsides (“We are sold for $300 whilst they pay $1000 for negroes”) that stoked passions so much that anyone with dark skin risked being chased through the streets, beaten, and even killed. One of her favorite pieces in that section was a long speaking trumpet, the kind that would have been used to shout orders to firefighters over those five hellish summer days when the city burned.

Another section remembered the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, arguably the saddest of all time. In the center was a raised platform where they'd set a battered fireman's net that couldn't save the young, mostly immigrant women who'd thrown themselves from the windows of the upper floors of the Asch Building. Foam-core mounted photographs, showing views of the devastated factory interior filled with charred sewing machines and coffins lined up tidily on the floor like fallen soldiers, were already on the wall. Something about the photographs from that one always did her in, filling her head with the gut-wrenching smell of smoke, a smell seared in her own memory.

The list of the 146 who died in that fire was particularly heartbreaking. Mary Goldstein had been only eleven; Kate Leone, fourteen; most of the rest were in their teens and early twenties. A few of the bodies remained unidentified a hundred years later.

Journalists back in those days were allowed, encouraged even, to write unabashedly emotional prose, and Evie had selected a quote from a reporter's viscerally melodramatic eyewitness account:

I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. . . . Thud-dead, thud-dead—together they went into eternity.

Thud-dead, thud-dead, together they went into eternity.
The elegiac passage, more poetry than prose, moved Evie profoundly. She couldn't imagine today's
Daily News
or
New York Times
printing anything like that.

As she finished showing Connor around, taking notes on his suggestions for ways to tweak the displays and adding to her to-do list, she was reminded what being senior curator meant. Much as she might delegate, she was the one responsible for seeing that every little detail, down to the spelling on the signage and the training of security guards, was done properly and completed in time for the opening gala.

When Connor stopped to chat with Nick, who was carefully cutting away the protective covering they'd built around the airplane engine, her phone chimed again. Evie reached into her pocket and turned it off.

 

Evie meant to call Ginger back. Really, she did. But she got pulled into one meeting and then another. Two hours later, eating a midafternoon granola bar instead of lunch, she was back in her office, the door closed, trying to finish editing transcripts of eyewitness accounts of the fires before the voice-over actors arrived to record them. When her cell phone rang, she recognized the number with its Connecticut area code and for only an instant considered not answering it.

“Didn't you get my message?” Ginger started right in.

“I'm sorry. I was tied up. I was going to call back but . . .” Evie bit her lip and took a breath. She didn't want to make it sound as if her time was more important than Ginger's. “Listen, I am sorry. I should have called you right back. How's Ben? The kids?”

“You know that's not what I called about. It's Mom.”

“Again,” Evie said, at the same time as Ginger.

Even though there was nothing even remotely funny about that, and even though she knew that laughing was wildly inappropriate, Evie couldn't stop herself. A moment later, Ginger was laughing, too, and that made Evie laugh even harder until she nearly dropped the phone and had to sit down to keep from peeing in her pants.

At last, laughed out and gasping for breath, she wiped tears from her eyes. “So how bad is it?”

“She fell and dislocated her shoulder this time. And I guess it was a while before she managed to call for help. Mrs. Yetner left me a message. She's at Bronx Metropolitan. The shoulder's not all that serious. It's everything else that's the problem.”

Evie thought she had a pretty good idea what that meant. “You saw her?”

“Just for a few minutes. She was barely conscious. Stabilized is what the doctor called it.”

“Stabilized,” Evie said. Did that mean she was going to get better? Or was she going to stay as sick as she was?

“On top of everything else, the EMTs who pulled her out alerted the health department. They sent an investigator over to the house. They say the place is a health risk. If it gets condemned—”

“Condemned? You've got to be kidding.”

“I guess it's gotten that bad. If Mom can't go back, she won't have anywhere to go and, well . . .”

Evie finished the thought:
then she'll have to move in with one of us.
Ginger couldn't be thinking that Mom could move into Evie's one-bedroom apartment. Ginger was the one with a house. A guest room.

“Evie, I can't always be the one,” Ginger said.

“Why does it have to be either of us? She's a grown-up.”

“She's never been a grown-up, and you know it. And now she's in the hospital. All alone.”

Right. Alone because one after the other she'd pissed off the friends she and their father had once had. Alone because she hadn't been able to hold a job for years. Thinking about her mother made Evie furious and unbearably sad at the same time. Talking to her was even worse. And seeing her?

“No way.” Evie looked down at the pile of audio scripts, sitting on her desk, deadline looming. At her to-do list that only seemed to grow longer, no matter how much got checked off. “Come on, Ginger, I can't take time off right now. This exhibit is my first. It has to be great. It's opening in three weeks, and there is still so much to do. I promise as soon as I'm done, the very minute it opens, I will pitch in.”

“Pitch in?” There was a long silence. Then Ginger sniffed, and Evie realized she was crying.

“Ginger?”

“I don't want you to
pitch in,
” Ginger said, her voice a harsh rasp. “I want you to take charge.”

“I will. I will.”

“And not in three weeks. Now.”

“But—”

“Surely you're not the only person who works over there. No one is irreplaceable.”

“I . . . I just can't. I'm sorry.”

“Sorry?
Sorry?
Sorry doesn't cut it. I have a life, too. In case you've forgotten”—Ginger's voice spiraled up—“I'm taking classes. The paralegal certification exam is in four weeks. Ben is working two jobs. Lisa's got dance classes and soccer practice. And . . . and . . .” Ginger blew her nose. “And why is it that every time, every fucking time she crashes, I'm the one who has to drop everything?”

There was a knock at Evie's door, and Nick stuck his head in. He pointed to his watch. The voice-over actors must have arrived, which meant the meter was ticking—they charged for their time whether the script was ready or not.

Evie put up her hand, fingers splayed.
Five minutes.
Nick nodded and disappeared.

Ginger was saying, “—can't do it, Evie. Not this time. I'm tapped out. Completely tapped out. It's your turn. I'm sorry, but this time you don't have the luxury of cutting her off unless you're planning to cut me off, too.”

In the silence that followed, Evie could hear the massive schoolhouse clock behind her desk
tick-tick-ticking.
The last time she'd seen her mother, they'd arranged to meet for brunch at Sarabeth's in Manhattan, halfway between Evie's Brooklyn apartment and her mother's house at the edge of the Bronx. They were supposed to meet at noon. When Mom hadn't shown up, and hadn't shown up, Evie had tried calling her. No answer at home. No answer on her mother's cell.

As minutes ticked by, Evie had gone from being furious with her mother, late as usual, to being hysterical and in tears, imagining the worst as she tried to flag a taxi to take her to Higgs Point. Good luck with that. Three cabs refused before she snagged one that would.

When she got to the house, her mother was passed out in front of the TV. “I must have lost track of time,” she said when Evie finally managed to rouse her. Later, as Evie made an omelet, she caught her mother sneaking some vodka into her orange juice. She'd tried to talk to her mother about her drinking, but her mother flat-out denied it, like she always had. Evie was the delusional one, she'd insisted, then screamed at Evie for butting in and trying to run her life.

On the bus and subway ride home, Evie had seethed with anger. That was it, she promised herself. Never again. If her mother couldn't stop drinking long enough to get herself to Manhattan for a lunch date with her daughter, wouldn't even admit that she drank, then to hell with her. Evie was finished. Finished taking care of her. Finished talking to her even.

After that, Evie stopped returning her mother's calls. Screened out her e-mails. Maybe if she cut her off completely, she told herself, her mother would get serious about drying out. But the truth was, it was a huge relief to sever the cord, to allow herself to give up responsibility for caring.

That had been months ago. And now Ginger was finally fed up, too, but she couldn't walk away. She wasn't wired that way.

“Okay, okay.” Evie couldn't believe she heard herself saying it. “I'll take care of it. I'll go up to the house tomorrow and start getting things cleaned up. I'll go over to the hospital in the afternoon. Stay—”

“And stay? Oh, would you?”

“Just for the weekend.”

“But—”

“Then we'll see.” Evie swallowed. “And you're right. It is my turn.”