William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

When Katrina learned there would be no digging for bodies today, she took the trolley back to North Albany.

Edward explained to Katrina how it was possible that a flaming stick could fly through the air and pierce her breast.

A porter emptying ashes from the furnace, he told her, had spilled embers on a pile of rags in the basement, without knowing what he’d done. Allowed to kindle unseen, the smoldering rags became the cellar fire that sent foul smoke, and eventually sparks, up the stairwells and heating vents, igniting the south wall of the staircase, and creeping along that wall to the elevator shaft.

The shaft’s four wooden walls glistened with spattered oil, Edward said. The wooden elevator cab was built to glide on its cables three inches away from all walls, making the shaft a perfect chimney with perfect draft. The fire licked that oily interior but once, and then blew skyward with instantaneously-cubed ignition that shaped the shaft as a fiery skyrocket, as perfect in its elemental power as the stack of a blast furnace. It swiftly turned the elevator cab into a blazing coffin, and then shot fire through the roof, exploding disaster onto the attic superstructure. The ravenous blaze trapped a dozen employees in their windowless bedrooms under the attic eaves, the only exit door to the roof nailed shut by management to keep housemaids and kitchen boys from loafing, from watching parades pass by on Broadway, to keep them from sleeping on the roof on those summer nights when temperatures in the attic hit a hundred and five. The door burned to ashes, and there was no proof of the nailing. But surely, Edward said, those trapped people must have tried to reach the roof to save themselves, for the hotel had no fire escapes, no fire axes, no hand grenades, no standpipes; and the fire extinguishers hadn’t been examined for eighteen months, and many did not work.

Not a dozen but fourteen people lost. Cora and Eileen.

The stack of a blast furnace.

You can see how it could blow a stick through the air to stab you, Edward said.

Geraldine Taylor, recounting her escape for her family, said she had moved through the main lobby, coatless in the early exodus, and out onto Steuben Street, where firemen pointed her toward the Dutch Kitchen, an all-night lunchroom that had become one of several havens for the dispossessed and the injured. She stood in the zero-degree night, searching the thousands of faces, watching the hotel entrance for a glimpse of her family, until she could no longer bear the cold, then went to the lunchroom, which was already out of all food except bread and coffee. Two doors away, in the sheltered doorway of the bootmaker’s shop, Jacob Taylor would soon lie in the care of his daughter and Edward.

Geraldine would not see Adelaide’s leap, or Archie’s rescue, would not see Jacob lifted into the same carriage with Adelaide and Katrina, to be taken together to the hospital. She heard from Maginn, that vulgar reporter, that all were alive but injured, and had gone to St. Peter’s Hospital.

“And Edward is still looking for you, Mrs. Taylor, searching the crowds,” Maginn said. “They don’t know whether you’re alive or dead.”

Geraldine did not wait to be found by Edward. She walked the eleven blocks to the hospital without a coat and caught such a cold that Dr. Fitzroy thought it might turn into pneumonia; and so kept her home in bed for a week.

Adelaide was hospitalized, and in three days, willful woman, walked out of the hospital without help. Three days after that, she developed such pain that Dr. Fitzroy readmitted her, fearing for her life.

Katrina was a presence in the ruins, whatever the weather; two hours a day, or more, watching the work crew grow from six to sixty, coming to know the foreman, the fire chief, the coroner, the policemen, watching ice hacked and shoveled off the debris as the January thaw arrived, hydraulic mining having failed to loosen the debris: for the stream from the hose was too weak. Relatives of the missing sought out Katrina, confided in her; and she locked in memory the names of the fourteen: Florence Hill, housekeeper; Anna Reilly and Mary Sullivan, linen-room workers; Ellen Kiley laundress; Thomas Cannon, sweeper; Toby Pender, elevator man; Ferdinand Buletti, cook; Nugenta Staurena, vegetable cook; Bridget Fitzsimmons, kitchen girl; Simon Myers, coffee boy; Molly Curry, Sally Egan, and Cora and Eileen McNally, chambermaids.

Tom Maginn of The Argus , Edward’s bohemian friend, crossed the street toward Katrina. She’d met Maginn before she became involved with Edward, met him skating on the canal when she was nineteen, a flirtatious afternoon. He was tall, had a bit of a shuffling walk, a mustache now that grew long and drooped, a strong jawline, some might say. At their first meeting he said he knew who she was, “the yellow-haired princess of Elk Street,” and he confessed he could never court her, for he had no money, no prospect of any.

“You are the most sublime woman I’ve ever met,” he had told her, “but I’m below your class. I’m a slug in the cellar of your palace.”

She had not spoken to him again until he came to the wedding rehearsal as Edward’s best man. Edward had asked his father to be best man, but Emmett said he would not stand on any altar in front of God with Jacob Taylor.

Now, hands in his pockets, Maginn tipped his hat, smiled.

“The city is talking about you,” he said. “My editor wants me to write about why you come to the ruins every day.”

“I want to bury the dead.”

“Which dead?”

“The McNally girls. Cora was our housemaid until her sister came from Ireland, and they got a job together.”

“You’re here because of a housemaid?”

“Cora was very special. We told each other things.”

“Did she tell you she was married?”

“Cora?”

“I talked with her husband. He was a pastry chef at the Delavan, but was let go. They married secretly a month ago to bind themselves together, no matter what happened.”

“Oh, the poor man, he must be devastated.”

“I told him I’d let him know when they find her. What about yourself? I heard you were seriously burned.”

“It’s nothing compared to what others suffered. And you? We saw you at dinner. Were you hurt?”

“Not a scratch, not a singe.”

“You were fortunate.”

“Yes, and your husband, he’s one of the heroes of the fire. He always seems to rise to the occasion.”

“He saved my father’s life. And my mother’s. And that poor woman from New York.”

“You helped save that woman, too. You needn’t be modest.”

“I did what Edward told me to do,” Katrina said.

“Anything I can do for you? The slug, as always, is at your service. You only have to ask.”

“I can think of nothing to ask. Please don’t write anything about me.”

“It wouldn’t embarrass you, I assure you.”

“Any story would embarrass me. Please don’t. This is what I ask you.”

“All right, Mrs. Daugherty,” Maginn said, and with a smile added, “Now you owe me one.”

At dusk this day the workers found the first body. Until then the chief discovery had been the safe owned by Ozzie Parker, who ran the cigar stand in the lobby. The safe had protected Parker’s ledgers, gold and silver coins, and seven boxes of cigars, still unlit. The found body was a legless torso, head and one arm attached, sitting erect. It was Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper, identified by her protruding teeth; and under her arm an album of tintypes, all defaced by the heat, no one recognizable.

As the light of day faded, a dozen lanterns surrounded the dig with ceremonial light, and families of the dead moved closer to the ruins, Katrina in the vanguard. One worker with a spade brought up a blue worsted vest. When he held it up to the light of two lanterns, a man came out of the crowd and said, “That’s Simon Myers’s vest.”