Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Rosalie began to play along more intensely. Her eyes would get bleary. She’d talk with her fork suspended near her mouth, as if something crucial to understanding everything had only then just crossed her mind. Everybody would stop chewing to listen. Like a horde except that nobody was moving in the same direction. You see? Had people moved in the same direction, maybe it would have been different. See? What you have to understand is that it wasn’t the heat or the flames or even the dread smoke, it was how the people—

Then she’d pause and take a breath, her fork still up in the air by her ear: I’m not saying I blame them. No. God, no. I love them. How can you not love them?

Somehow her saying this was worse than the melting walls and the charred bodies and the unopenable doors, or even the useless, desperate screams, which she never talked about but were always there in her voice. Herb knew how many fire departments responded to the alarm, trucks as far as New Bedford roared to Boston. Herb knew the score of the Boston College — Holy Cross game. B.C. 12, Holy Cross 55. He knew how many young and virile lives were saved by that humiliation, because Boston College called off the victory party scheduled for that night in the Grove’s Melody Lounge. He knew the name of the last Buck Jones picture, Forbidden Trail , where Buck, playing a cowhand, not only saves Mary and her mother from the villain Mr. Coffin, he also rescues a man from a burning cabin. All this before being unjustly accused of arson and murder himself! But Herb Swanson had no talent for putting people inside that nightclub, and the truth is that he began to be a little frightened by his wife. The last thing Rosalie cared about was hoodwinking anybody about what she did or didn’t see one night in 1942, and yet when she got started in about things like fingernails tearing the flesh of the shoulders, it was as though she couldn’t stop. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. Clawing each other. Even husbands and wives . And Herb would watch her anxiously, fidgeting, waiting for an opening and a chance to recapture the story. Bring it back to the busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, and an interview he did with the Globe on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, in 1972, where he said he prays for the souls of those innocents every day and often visits their graves, the ones that are here in Massachusetts. He told the reporter that the movie star was buried too far away, but that he’d always wanted to make that trip out to California. There’s your human interest. Stanley Tomaszewski guilty and prostrate before the headstones. Because it was almost as though Rosalie (even though she always denied it) judged people for trying to save themselves, which was wrong and terrible and not at all the point. The point was glory. The point was redemption. Think of all the good that came out of that fire. Municipal solidarity. Nationwide sympathy and understanding. New fire codes for every public building in the United States of America. Pivotal advancements in emergency medicine and response…

And there’s a night, isn’t there, when Rosalie stares at Herb and there’s nobody else in the room, even though they are having dinner with the Selvins and Tony Bickleman and his latest wife, Maureen, and they’re all sitting right there. Not their fault, such rage, Rosalie says, not their fault. There’s nobody else in the room, and Herb watches her watching him, and he tries not to listen, and he vows to himself he’ll never bring any of this up again, ever. He even goes one further and promises himself that one of these days he’ll come clean, which after all these years would make a good story in itself. It never happened, folks. We weren’t there. My dear friends, let me be frank, the long and the short of it was (pause, drumroll) Pepto-Bismol. I stand before you a prevaricator. And he can hear Harvey Selvin saying, For Christ’s sake, Herb, it’s a story. And Tony Bickleman: And I wasn’t shot at Anzio either, shot at, but not shot. I always say shot. What’s the difference? Coulda bin, couldn’t I a bin?

Around the middle of the 1980s, not long after he retired, Herb did stop telling the story, at least in public. And when he stopped, Rosalie stopped. She’d never initiated it; she only carried it places it wasn’t supposed to go. Herb in his chair in the den looking out at the backyard and Rosalie on the patio reading, slowly turning pages, or not turning pages at all, the woman could spend five minutes on the same page, and still the ceiling ignites and the flames spread across the walls and he tries to run and can’t. Herb flings himself against the crowd, elbows cocked like an offensive lineman, trying to use his bulk to plow forward, stumbles, shouting absurdly, “Make way! I’m a doctor!” while Rosalie remains behind, at their table. Rosalie sips her Scotch. She crosses and recrosses her legs. She rubs the clean white tablecloth with her palm. After he stopped telling the Cocoanut Grove out loud, this is the part that was most alarming. This is what made Herb try to banish those two words from his brain the way the city of Boston forbade them from the commercial register. Rosalie serene while he and everyone else in the place—

Not in his dreams, in the morning, in the den, in his chair, awake.

When she died, it all got more vivid. The specter of her sitting and watching. She left the same way. That morning she’d been talking about craving fresh cucumber salad. When was the last time I had cucumber salad? At my aunt Gert’s in the fifties? As she napped in the guest room with her clothes on, a stroke took her away, on a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known her. He had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had, in her way. And she’d always been Rosie, always the girl in the red dress who got the twice-over from sailors and sauced it right back. Still, she always held herself, not alone, apart. Maybe this was why people craved her sole attention. When the kids were little and even after they’d gone away, they were still always trying to get their mother away from Herb in order to be listened to, beg advice, confess. They didn’t want Herb’s bigheartedness, his hugs, his compassion. Mom, I shoplifted. Mom, I’m strung out. Mom, I’m getting a divorce. Mom, I’m broke again. Mom, I’m tired, I can’t figure out why I’m so so tired all the time . And she’d stare back at them as if they were strangers. No answers or empathy or even comfort. But something. What did you give — what? Tell me. Talk to me, Ro, I’ll listen. Herb in his chair by the window, overlooking her azaleas. The glare of the sun white now against the glass. A frenzied waiter douses a blazing tinsel palm tree with seltzer water, and Rosalie laughs, raises a long, thin finger slowly to her lips, and breathes, Let it come, Herb, just let it come—

My old boss E.J. once told me he was famous for goofy hats. This was when he worked the lock-in ward at Hennepin County. The hats, E.J. said, came to represent his solidarity with the ones called patients. One day he’d wear a sombrero, the next a feathered Tyrolean, the day after that a plastic hard hat with placeholders for two beers they gave away free at a Twins game. He said they began to trust him and treat him as if he were one of them, which meant they toned down the loony and just talked to him the way they talked among themselves, which was like everybody else in the world talks to everybody else in the world, normal with a touch of nuts. E.J. told me this as he lay in a bed at Nicollett Methodist. How that job on the psych ward was less about the daily incidents of mayhem, which he could recall vividly, than a sense of camaraderie he’d never felt before or since. Looking back, he wondered whether he hadn’t been most alive, most in tune with his fellow men, those years he worked the lock-in. They trusted me, E.J. said. They had not a thing left to lose. This was when he could talk, because in the weeks and days before he died, he stopped talking altogether and only screamed if you went near him. The nurses needed two orderlies to hold him down to give him his shots. Last I spoke to him was on the phone. I put the receiver down on the table and just listened.