November, 1872
Willy kept out late tonight.
Had taken one brandy too many, perhaps. As he was given to most nights. Gone to sleep at the tavern, one time in the street. But we could see to warn ourselves.
The heat and the smoke and the warping of wood and the shouts of the injured and dead were enough. I stood at the door to the room that we shared, Heinrich on the bed behind me.
“Stay. You stay right here,” said I.
“I don’t want you to go,” said he.
“It’s all right. It’s all right. You must sit and be brave. Bravery smothers the fire—did you know? I will be back in . . .” I smiled to myself. “. . . in how many blinks of an eye, do you think?”
“In thirty blinks?”
“In twenty-five.”
“I will start them now,” said he.
I paused when I had reached the door. “I do not know what I should do were I to come back here and find you not blinking. I do not know what I should do. Do you hear what I’m telling you, Heinrich?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
Closed the door and tested it, and climbed the attic staircase slowly. Here the smoke from the fire of the building next door fingered out from the walls like a dangerous scent.
The door to mother’s room was hot. Had to bunch my skirts to turn it.
Already awake at the end of her bed. Sitting with her back to me. Dress the colour of ash that fell down past the windows. Bearing witness to the world, her dolls beside her on the floor. Lining the bucket in which they’d been made in a tilted and gathering spiral of figures, wrapped each one in dunish crepe. There were these and a few random dresses. Her knives. My mother, my maker, was already packed.
Helped her to go down the stairs to the landing, pushed the bedroom door inward. “Come, Heinrich. We’re going.”
“I waited!” said he.
“A whole thirty blink’s worth?”
“I counted to forty.”
Said I: “Needn’t worry. Grandmother is with us.”
When he looked at my mother his eyes were black pools.
Came down the staircase with Heinrich between us. The side of our building already on fire.
“Are we going to die now?” said he, looking back. His frightened, disbelieving face.
“One foot and then the next,” said I.
“Are we, Mommy?”
Smiled. “No, dear.”
“All right.” He gripped my hand. “All right.”
Finally we reached the bottom where Willy’s rooms were, the developing closet. Here I determined to usher them out. But then at the very last second I stopped.
Cut my eyes toward Willy’s door. A jittery glow in the crack of the frame.
I tipped the door wide with my foot and edged in. The bed was completely on fire. And the curtains. They withered like bacon and dropped to the floor where they made other fires that began to grow taller. I strode through the flames to the door of the darkroom, and when I had reached it I gathered my skirts and pushed the door, unlocked, from me.
The negative had been completed. On the counter it sat, freshly dried from the bath.
The woman occupies the foreground. Her hands clasped before her, her mouth a grim line. While Willy, my husband, is standing behind her. Willy, who’d taken the picture himself but also there inside the shot. Already concealed and revealed by my shadow. His body cocked slightly. His head gazing up. The expression that colours his wide, fleshy face no more than one of vague surprise. As though he is seeing, perhaps, a rare bird arranging itself on the window outside.
The negative I wrapped in cloth and holding it to me I rushed from the closet.
Q
The chaos was general. Boston in ruins.
A spout of flame and blasted stone from the upper west side of the block. People crumpling. Crumpled horses crumpling too, beneath the soaring sheet of flame. And Heinrich, beside me, cough-squinting, dry-sobbing while trying to hide in the folds of my skirts.
Mother, calm, surveyed it all. “We should make for the water,” said she, facing forward.
“There may be fire there too,” said I.
“No matter,” said mother. “At least there’ll be water. And there is nothing for us here.”
“Mommy,” said Heinrich. “Burning birds!”
He was tugging my skirts. He was pointing. Exclaiming. My mother beginning down Summer Street now. The path that she carved through the wreckage a good one. The ashed lakes of water, congealing to mud. And sometimes, too, the charred, dark forms. Their faces burned away wholesale or turned to ground from deadly falls.
“There!” said Heinrich. “Watch it, there!”
The water arcing overhead. He bounded ahead of me. Laughing, unthinking. I wanted him to laugh, of course.
But all I could think was: this step or the next one. This fire, which is the whole wide world.
As we went, the fire dimmed down. The muscle of it mostly north. Chalk it up to puddingstone, which did not burn like granite burned.
A little girl stood at the edge of a lawn. Refugee among the many. Looking up at her house, which had been mostly spared. All except the upper floors, which were singed at the edges from skirmish inside them and a window that bristled with torn wood and glass where someone or something had gone pitching out.
Below it a white shape. Onlookers around it.
A person draped under a sheet stained with blood.
The girl on the lawn in a terrible state. Her face was smeared with dirty tears. And her hair was soaked dark from the engines’ exertions. The name of her mother, who lay in the grass, she partly screamed and partly sobbed.
Above the body on the lawn stood a man in a vest greened with age. Golden fob. The singed stateliness of his house all above him. A couple of neighbours stood by in concern.
I saw my mother mark the man. The girl upon the sodden lawn.
And then moving forward, head turning away. Still bent on existing, on being somewhere, for as long as the grail of her blood would allow her.
“Why is she crying?” said Heinrich.
“Who, dear?”
“That little girl.” He pointed. “There.”
“That little girl”—I studied her—“has lost somebody that she loves.”
“Can I go to her, Mommy?”
“No, Heinrich. Not now.”
“But Mommy she needs me. I can’t—I can’t leave her.” My mother paused at Heinrich’s words. “Can I go to her, grandmother, please?” said the boy.
I started to scold him for asking her, too.
Mother showed me her palm. Not a threatening motion. Yet one that impressed me as purposeful, solemn, as though here in the burning and burned Boston street, she would finally do it. Be family to him.
She took up his face in her thin, able hands.
And she turned it, not speaking, this way and then that as the ghost of the firelight played over his cheeks,
“On one condition you may go.” He started to run but she caught him: “Stop squirming.” She straightened his posture. Brushed ash from his face. “You cannot say just anything.”
“I will tell her I’m sorry she’s sad,” said the boy.
“That girl needs more than friendly words. She has just lost her mother—you see that, don’t you?”
He fidgeted. And looked away.
My mother caught him: “Look at me. You must tell her the truth: that her mother is with her.”
“But I don’t even know what she looks like,” said he.
“Then you must imagine her, dear, mustn’t you? And then it will become a game.”
“But she wouldn’t believe me, grandmother, would she?”
“Some part of her may not at first. But that,” said she, “is why we’re here. You have only to point to the two of us, child. Here, now.” She took hold of his arm. “Let us try it.”
She guided Heinrich’s arm away. His finger extending. As though at her urging—as though she plucked the very nerves. Until at last it came to rest on the girl in the gown at the edge of the lawn.
“What do I say to her now?” said the boy.
“‘See them over there?’ you’ll say. ‘Those women there beneath the trees. Those women, so dark and alike, do you see them?’”
“I see them,” said Heinrich. “I’m pointing. Look, Mommy!”
“Go greet them then,” my mother said. “Commend them to your father’s favour. They have so much to show you—so much to reveal. Feed them. Warm them. Ask them in.”