Peter Orner: Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

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.

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?

Two decades later Herb Swanson began to tell the story at dinner parties. He knew every inch of the trivia. 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.