Touched by Fire (16 page)

When I hear cries and gasps from the watching crowd, I open my eyes and wish I had kept them closed.

Voices scream, “Don’t jump! Wait.” Girls are leaping from the window ledges of the ninth floor, their hair and skirts ablaze, their arms entwined. They jump in twos and threes, holding hands, or one by one. I put my hands over my ears to shut out the sound of bodies landing on the pavement. They sound as though they are bundles of soiled laundry dropping on a kitchen floor. I dare not think of Rosie and Malka.

I can’t look away. Firemen run and bring life nets, spreading them out tightly beneath the jumping factory workers. But the nets are not strong enough to catch the falling bodies. The dead sprawl in ever increasing heaps.

The street is littered with pocketbooks, with hats and keepsakes and coins. The dreadful thuds continue. My face is wet with tears.

Finally, arms embrace me. “Miriam, you are safe! Thank God.” Rosie makes the sign of the cross. “Where is Malka?” she says, looking around, expecting to see us together.

“I don’t know. We started out together, but we got separated. I called her name and asked everyone I saw if they’d seen her. I looked for her as long as I could, but the fire was too fierce. I don’t know if she fell or jumped or if …”

I cry and cry. My chest hurts – from smoke, from heat, but mostly because my heart is breaking.

Rosie points towards the building. “Look, they have put the ladders up! Now they will save those still clinging to the window ledges.”

The crowd groans – the ladders reach only to the sixth floor. A girl throws herself towards the top rung of a ladder thirty feet below her, but misses and falls on top of the growing heap of bodies. A doctor signals to ambulance workers for help to carry a woman away.
How can she still be alive?

The streets fill with people desperate to find their loved ones, but police hold them back.

“Oh, Rosie, I could not have borne to lose you!” I say. We both see girls we know – Nettie, Annie, and Paula from the eighth floor. But many more from the ninth floor lie crumpled on the sidewalk, like broken dolls.

Rosie asks me how I got out. I tell her how Louis Brown got the Washington Place door open. I want to curse the doors that open in, which almost caused our death, and the skimpy balconies leading to the treacherous fire escape.

An angry murmur runs through the crowd. The words spread fast from one person to another. “The fire escape collapsed. I saw it twist and break with my own eyes. Escape route? More like a death trap, if you ask me,” a man says.

“The bodies were thrown off,” another says.

A woman grabs a policeman’s arm. “My girl, where is she? I want my daughter, Bella. Give me my little girl.” He beckons to a neighboring woman, who leads her away.

A hush falls. We watch, mesmerized, as a young man on the ninth-floor ledge holds out his arm, as if to invite a young lady to step into a carriage. She steps, not into a carriage but into space. He helps another and another, and then the last girl kisses him before she leaps and he follows. Another gasp, as a girl – her skirt and hair burning – leaps down, her clothes catching on a pole protruding two floors below the Triangle Waist Company sign. She hangs there, burning before our eyes, then falls to the ground below.

A man standing next to us says it is only half an hour since the fire brigades arrived. Water from the fire hoses hurls endlessly against the building. The streams of water pooling in the gutters are stained red with the blood of those who lie on the sidewalk. Some bodies still smolder.

Across the street, the dead are being covered with tarpaulins by doctors and police.

“So many dead,” Rosie whispers in horror.

S
moke rises above the Asch Building, blackening the sky. I want to go home, but am too afraid of what I’ll see when I close my eyes.
Will anyone who heard the thud of falling bodies ever forget? How could so many die in such a short time?

It is not dark yet as we wait for news of Malka. More and more people arrive. They have come in the thousands. The clanging of fire engines and the sight of flames and smoke over the skyscraper have spread word of the disaster. Police gather up the scattered possessions dropped or thrown by falling girls: coins, purses, necklaces, hats, and small mementos. They place them carefully in baskets and take them away.

Mrs. Singer arrives. “Miriam, Rosie, thank God you’re alive!” she says. Beckie is with her and throws herself into our arms. Then, taking off her shawl, Beckie places it
around my shoulders. Mrs. Singer wraps hers around Rosie. “Come,” Mrs. Singer says, “now I take you both home.”

I see Mrs. Pinski turn the corner into Greene Street. She is followed by Papa and Reuven. My father searches the crowd for me. He calls my name, “Miriam!”

“Papa, I am here.”

He runs to me and holds me as he and Zayde used to do when I was a little girl, to comfort me from my nightmares. I remember the day of the pogrom, when we lived in the shtetl still, and how he and Malka’s papa carried us to safety. I wish Malka could be safe again.
Why I am standing here without her?
If this were a bad dream, by morning it would be over.

Mrs. Pinski cries out, “Where is Malka? She must be on her way home. Go, Reuven, see if you can catch up with your sister. I don’t want her to be afraid.”

I take Mrs. Pinski’s hand. She looks at me, waiting for me to speak. I don’t know how to tell her that Malka has not come out of the building. I whisper the words and try not to wince at the pain of my burns as she squeezes my hand. She sees the tears in my eyes.

“She will come soon, Miriam. Malka is often late,” her mother says. Finally, when I do not reply, Mrs. Pinski looks at me. She understands. Turning away from us, she runs across the street. She attempts, as so many others have, to break through the police cordon.

“Malka, come to Mama. Where are you? Come, darling, no need to hide.” Papa and Reuven bring her back.

“We should go to the Mercer Street Police Station and find out if there is any news of Malka there,” Beckie says.

The station is only three blocks away. When we arrive, there are hundreds of people ahead of us. After a long wait, we reach the entrance, but a line of policemen, guarding the door, keeps us from going in. We are told that all the bodies have been taken to a temporary morgue on the Twenty-sixth Street pier. It will open at midnight, and we should come back then. The word “morgue” makes me tremble.

We walk home. Papa says he will call for Mrs. Pinski and go with her and Reuven. I think about what I will tell Mama about the fire when she comes.

It grew dark, Mama. The fire was out in the building, but still the firemen and police were there. Lights blazed. We saw shadows move on the blackened floors. Then the firemen lowered bodies, wrapped in tarpaulins, down the side of the building. Firemen stood at the gaps, which only hours ago were windows. They made sure the bodies did not bump against the walls. They were so gentle with our friends, Mama. All I could think of was, why were not more of us given a chance to escape?

When I see Mrs. Pinski and Reuven enter their home and close the door without Malka, it breaks my heart again. We walk in silence until we reach our own building.

Beckie cries out: “I should have been with you! I could have helped. I feel so ashamed I stayed home for a hurt finger. I will never forgive myself. I hope they punish those ‘Shirtwaist Kings’ as they deserve. They are murderers! We should have refused to work behind locked doors and demanded more than one useless fire escape. I will never work for Blanck and Harris again. Rosie, Miriam, I am so sorry I persuaded you to come to the ‘Triangle.’ ”

Beckie weeps. Mrs. Singer takes her back into their apartment. Papa cleans and bandages my wounds and sends us to bed. Rosie cries a little, then settles down. I close my eyes, and even though I changed my clothes when I got home, the smell of burning stays in my nose and throat.

“Miriam, can you sleep?” Rosie says. “I can’t.”

“I’ll make some tea for us. It won’t take a minute to reheat the water.” We go to the kitchen, and Rosie sits down at the table. I pour our tea.

“Rosie, I have not asked you how you got out of the fire. I am so selfish, not thinking about what you have been through.”

She says, “The moment the quitting bell rang, I went into the dressing room. My hair was falling down. The other girls came in, and we were laughing and teasing each other. One of the girls showed us a new dance step, and we tried it out. Esther showed off her new engagement ring. With all
the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs,’ we didn’t hear any warning of the fire.

“When we came out, someone shouted, ‘Fire!’ At the same time, we saw flames at the windows. They shattered the glass and poured in. We panicked. Flames swept over the clothes on the examination table into the aisles, on everything in sight. The Greene Street door was jammed with girls trying to get out. Flames were coming up the stairs. I was near the window leading to the fire escape. I had only seen it once, when the shutters were open. I am afraid of heights, and there were other girls in front of me, jostling for space. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.”

“Imagine if you had been on that fire-escape ladder, Rosie. Thank goodness you did not climb out there and fall, when it collapsed,” I say.

“I saw girls running to the Greene Street windows and those facing Washington Place. They were trying to get to the window ledges, their hair and clothes burning. There was nowhere else to go; fire was everywhere. Somehow I managed to reach the only other way out. I remembered the Washington Place door. I called to the girls to go there. Some were able to get through the flames. We hurled ourselves against the door. You know how that door is always kept locked? The key hangs beside it, for the bosses to come and go. Today it was not there.

“Suddenly, like a miracle, the passenger elevator stopped on our floor. The door opened, and I fell inside. Crowds of
other terrified, screaming girls clambered on and over me. There were so many of us, the elevator doors would not close. I was afraid of being pushed through the open door against the wall of the shaft. Cries of ‘Wait!’ and the sound of girls hitting the roof of the elevator followed us down.

“That was the last journey the elevators made. They broke down, buckling from the heat of the flames. Gaspar Mortillalo and Joseph Zito are heroes. They made many trips, saving hundreds of us.

“Miriam, we were the last ones. There was no other way out for those left behind.”

Papa comes in to the kitchen. “Miriam and Rosie, you need to rest. I am going to meet Mrs. Pinski and Reuven. Try to sleep.”

Rosie heads back to bed.

“Papa, I want to go with you,” I say.

“The morgue is no place for you, Miriam. I cannot allow it. You have been through enough.”

“Papa, please. I have to go – she was my friend. I need to find out for myself what happened to her.”

“Then come, Miriam, we’ll go together.”

We step out into the street. Many of our neighbors are going to the same place as we are. So many families from the Lower East Side must have lost relatives. Reuven and Mrs. Pinski wait for us outside their tenement building.
Papa offers Mrs. Pinski his arm, and Reuven walks on her other side. He says he has checked Belleview and St. Vincent’s hospitals. Malka was not there.

“Our only hope is to find her body to bury,” Reuven says. I wonder how we will all endure what lies ahead.

We walk along Misery Lane towards the river and join the crowd waiting for the gates of the morgue to open. A few years ago, a ship caught fire in the harbor and the dead were brought here, to this ugly shed. If I believed in ghosts, this is where they’d walk. The only sounds are of water lapping the sides of the pier, a few seagulls crying like mourners, a sob or two in the hushed crowd.

The gates swing open, and a policeman calls to us to enter. At first, the crowd makes no move, apprehensive of what is inside, before shuffling into the dim hall. Policemen stand at intervals, holding lanterns aloft. No light comes in from the few windows set high on the walls. I look at everything, except the bodies, before I realize I must look. That is why I am here – to find my friend.

We walk very slowly between the rows of bodies. They lie covered by sheets, in wooden boxes. Their heads are visible, supported by boards. I hold Mrs. Pinski’s hand; she is dry-eyed. Occasionally there is a cry, a moan, or someone faints.

We stop at a wooden coffin towards the end of a row. A policeman draws closer and holds up his lantern for us. It is Malka. We recognize her only by her boots.

I cannot look at Malka’s charred face. Mrs. Pinski sinks to the floor beside her daughter. Papa has one arm around Reuven’s shoulders. I clutch Papa’s other hand. The policeman shuts the lid of the box and writes Malka’s name on a yellow card.

At home, Rosie is waiting for us. “Was she there? How did you …?” she asks.

“Malka was wearing Zayde’s boots,” I say and cry on her shoulder.

Days later, we find out that one hundred and forty-six people died that night and many more were injured. Most of the girls who perished were from the ninth floor. The warnings came far too late. The funerals are over now.

At night, I am afraid to go to sleep. “Papa, I don’t know what to do.” I tell him how hard it is to get through the days and nights.

“Go on, however hard it is. That is all we can do after a great sorrow. Be patient, in time it will get easier. You have been spared, and now you owe it to those who were not to live a full life.”

I try. Today, I take down the single candlestick, knowing that soon the second one will stand beside it. In June, Mama will be here. I polish the candlestick until my arm aches and my fingers are black. My blisters are healing, and soon only small scars will remain.

Mama will be dazzled when she lights the candles. I decide to make a welcome present – a dress for Devora – and ask Rosie to help me.

“You are so good at bargaining, Rosie. Come with me.” We go to Hester Street and decide on a length of sky blue cotton. Rosie wheedles a matching blue ribbon from the salesman. For the first time in days, we talk and laugh. It is almost like old times.