The Flaming Corsage

Katrina Visits the Ruins, January 1895

ON THE SECOND day after the fire, despite the pain in her violated breast, Katrina dressed in her winter bloomers and long woolen stockings, two of her warmest sweaters, woolen muffler, heaviest skirt and cape, skating cap that covered her ears, and she rode the trolley downtown. On this cold and sunny morning she left the car and walked to the corner of Steuben Street and Broadway and joined the crowd of a thousand who were watching firemen with hoses wet down the smoldering bricks of the Delavan’s ruins so that the search for the missing bodies could begin. She watched people pick up a brick or a piece of pipe as souvenirs, watched three workers trying to pull down a standing wall so it wouldn’t topple on the firemen. One worker threw a rope, with a hook at the end, over the wall and, with his mates, then tried to pull the wall down. They tried half a dozen times, but the wall stood. A man in the crowd told the worker with the hook, “Tie a noose around the end of that rope and hang yourself, you dumb mick.”

A fireman passed by and Katrina asked him, “Aren’t you going to dig for the bodies?” The missing, estimated at a dozen, were all hotel workers. Cora. Her sister Eileen.

“Not today, ma’am. Still got some fire under there, and in some places maybe eight inches of ice on top of that.”

Workers would need a month to move ten thousand cubic feet of stone and brick to recover all the dead.

Katrina stared up at where the third floor had been, only the brick facade standing now. On the night of the fire the firemen’s hoses wouldn’t reach that high, their streams turning into broken plumes just above the second floor and coating the hotel’s lower exterior with the glitter of instant ice, a scandal: low water pressure in the city, pressure turned off at night in the antiquated pumping station, and for twenty minutes after the fire started, nobody there to turn it back on.

In two third-floor windows, when they were still windows, when there was still a third floor, Adelaide and Archie Van Slyke appeared in Katrina’s memory, Adelaide wearing her mother’s sealskin coat. She climbed out and sat on the window ledge to escape the smoke pursuing her. She said nothing, but Archie was cajoling her to be calm while he uncoiled a rope fire escape, a single braid, and fed it out the window and down toward Broadway, where his in-laws, and a crowd that would grow to twenty thousand, watched. Firemen inched the great weight of their ladder along the icy wall to a point beneath the imperiled Van Slykes, and two firemen began the upward climb. It was suddenly clear that the ladder would not reach the third floor (four stories up), clear also that Archie’s escape rope (designed for a room two floors down) did not even reach the top of the ladder.

Jacob Taylor said then, “They’re as good as dead.” He was lying propped in the doorway of Iligan the Bootmaker’s shoe repair shop across from the hotel, awaiting a carriage to take him to St. Peter’s Hospital.

“They’ll get them,” Edward said to him, and Katrina ripped her petticoat to make a bandage for Edward’s blistered left hand.

As the flames rose up wildly behind her, Adelaide chose to make her silent leap. She clutched the sealskin coat around her and, to the shrieks of the crowd, pushed herself feet-first toward the firemen on the ladder, swiping both men with her leg (neither man lost his grip on the ladder), bounced onto the trammeled snow cushion of Broadway’s sidewalk, and landed at the feet of the half-dozen firemen holding the ladder.

“She’s dead,” Katrina said, and she wailed like a wounded hound and buried her head in Edward’s embrace.

Then Edward saw Adelaide stand up and talk to the firemen. “She’s not dead,” he said. “Look at her, she’s up.”

Katrina looked and saw Adelaide, then kissed Edward.

“God help her live,” Jacob Taylor said.

The firemen on the ladder reached upward toward Archie, who now dangled from the end of the rope just above the second-floor window. A chorus of voices in the crowd yelled to him, “Hold on. . they’ve nearly got you. . don’t let go.” The topmost fireman’s hands reached Archie’s shoes, then touched them (to a cheer, Katrina remembered), then gripped them both, and at that moment Archie let go of the rope and let himself fall palms-forward to meet the hotel wall. The second fireman grabbed his pantleg and then his knees, and together the two firemen eased him down atop their backs and shoulders onto the ladder. The crowd sent up its roar.

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.”

“How might you know that?” the foreman asked him.

“I gave it to him,” the man said. “He’s my son.”

“I’m sorry for that, Mr. Myers, but we won’t be digging him up tonight.”

“Why not, in heaven’s name?”

“Just too dark. These men been here eleven hours, and I hate to say this, but the smell up from there is tough to work in. We’ll let the grave here air out and get back at it in the mornin’.”

Most workers were smoking pipes to mask the odor of the malignant vapor that rose from the ruins. To Katrina the odor had been an onset of reality, a proof that death was more than an assumption. Workers put the lanterns in a circle around the open grave and the coroner ordered police to guard the dig. Twice during the night they chased away a bulldog.

On the next morning at half after midnight, the seventh day after the fire, Adelaide died in the hospital. Katrina and Geraldine were with her. Jacob, on the floor above, was unaware she’d been readmitted, for Dr. Fitzroy cautioned against shocking him. He would sedate Jacob when it came time to tell him his daughter died of a ruptured spleen, suffered in her leap from the window. Edward brought the carriage to take Katrina and her mother home. Katrina put her mother to bed and told Edward she would stay the night at Elk Street.

She lay on the canopy bed in Adelaide’s old room, a room of memory now: her old hobbyhorse, and the dozen and a half dolls of all nations, a new one every Christmas, and the Phrygian cap of liberty that was a gift from the French Ambassador when he came to the Taylor home for a dinner in his honor (the cap was supposed to be Katrina’s but was handed to Adelaide by mistake), and the Cleveland for President poster, and the toy sailboat, differing only in color from Katrina’s, that the sisters had sailed together on Washington Park Lake.

Katrina, incapable of sleep, imagined how she might have diverted the course of life from the dreadful conclusion it had come to this night: by not letting Adelaide run away from them at the fire, by not siding with her parents against Edward, by not yielding to Edward’s plan to win back their goodwill with his dinner and gifts. By not marrying him.

She told her mother’s servants to monitor Geraldine, make her breakfast, keep her in bed through the morning. Then she dressed, ate freshly baked bread with butter and coffee, and walked down Elk Street, past the city high school, and down Columbia Street to the Kenmore Hotel, where she bought an Argus at the hotel’s cigar stand. The paper reported there would be a Catholic mass for the dead at St. Mary’s Catholic church. Eleven of the dead were Catholic, three Protestant. Protestant ministers and mourners would be welcomed. When all bodies were presumed recovered they would be buried in a mass grave at St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery unless relatives claimed the remains. But who could say whose remains were whose?

Toby Pender might have been buried in an unmarked grave had not Edward bought not only a grave but a sculpted sword-bearing granite angel to mark the resting place of the fire’s principal hero, the man who saved Geraldine, among many, and who deserved more than anonymity in death. When he first discovered the smoke, Toby rode his cab to every floor to alert all in earshot, picked up passengers, returned for stragglers, returned again, and yet again on a fourth trip, and was rescuing a lone woman guest when the blast of fire incinerated them both. Toby’s and the woman’s presences were verified four weeks later, in the final stages of the dig, days after the mass burial, when the woman’s melted diamond ring and Toby’s tiny crooked spine were found at the bottom of the shaft, along with fleshless, disheveled bones that crumbled at the touch.

Katrina left the Kenmore and walked down to Broadway and stood at her post by the ruins. She was there ten minutes before the digging resumed at eight o’clock. By ten-thirty parts of eight bodies had been resurrected: part of a thighbone and a pelvic bone, both looking like coal; a wristbone with crisp flesh; the cloth of two dresses, one brown, one black with a weave of dark blue on the skirt’s hem, both fragments of cloth found adhering to the same flesh.

“It looks to us that these two died in each other’s arms,” said the coroner to a group of reporters, Maginn among them. “We guess they were under the bed, and fell through to the kitchen, where the fire was hottest. The kitchen and bakeshop were both full of grease and just fed the fire.”

“Those dresses may have belonged to the McNally sisters,” Maginn said to the coroner. “Her husband here recognizes the design in the black one.”

Katrina approached Maginn and Cora’s husband. She stared at the husband, who was holding the piece of dress and weeping. She touched the man’s arm.

“I knew Cora very well,” she said. “Please let me help you bury her and her sister.”

The husband looked at this stranger, then at Maginn.

“This is Mrs. Daugherty,” Maginn told him.

“We can’t help whom it is we love,” Katrina said to the man. “We must learn to avoid love. Love is a mask of death, you know.”

“What’s that?” asked the husband.

“Death is venerable. You can always count on death.” Katrina began to weep, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, saw Edward pushing through the crowd toward her.

“Forgive me,” she said to Cora’s husband. “I weep all the time lately. I weep for everybody. It’s a pity what people come to be.”

“What’s going on?” Edward asked.

“I think you should take her home,” Maginn said.

“Yes,” said Katrina. “There’s other death at home, isn’t there, Edward?”

“Yes, there is, my dear,” Edward said. “I know how you love death, how you need it,” and Katrina smiled at him and wept anew. Maginn and Cora’s husband could only stare at the two of them.

In a subsequent diary entry Katrina fixed on the fire as the point of transformation of Edward’s and her lives into a unity that transcended marriage, love, and a son:

We were united through the fire in freakish fusion, like Siamese twins with a common heart that damned us both to an intimacy that not only knew the other’s every breath, but knew the difference between that every-breath and the signal breath that precedes decision, or unbearable memory, or sudden death. We now live out an everlastingly mutual curse: “May the breath of your enemy be your own.”

Two months after the fire, in the unbanishable melancholia that followed the death of his daughter, Jacob Taylor died of a massive heart attack. Katrina was not the one to articulate the accusation, but she came to believe what her mother had said first: Edward killed Adelaide and Jacob.