My train pulled into Penn Station after dinner, and I talked to my mother on the phone as I walked home to Neal and Oliver. My parents were staying one more night with their neighbor George. Then we’d move them to a hotel for a few days. I wished we had a big place with a guest room rather than a tiny Brooklyn apartment without the floor space even for a full-size air mattress.
The next morning, I arrived at George’s apartment, bearing new glasses for my father that I’d rush ordered. My parents both seemed shell-shocked, and yet my mother was somehow in full makeup she’d been able to salvage from the destroyed apartment.
“Of course you have mascara on!” I said, and she smiled.
I got my father a new computer from the Union Square Best Buy and new Converse sneakers, and I got them each bags of new-old clothes I thought they’d like from Buffalo Exchange.
“We’d like you to do the thinking for us,” my father told me.
Each evening for the coming weeks, I arrived at my parents’ temporary quarters—a hotel, then another friend’s empty apartment, then an Airbnb—bearing bags full of things they needed: socks, underwear, vodka, a cashier’s check for the furnished East Village sublet I’d helped them find, the insurance inventory I’d assembled (three times greater than the maximum they could get from their policy), takeout.
Neal and I kept their cat Theo at our place in Brooklyn. Smelling like smoke, he slept all night by our heads, purring, and spent the days staring in reverential awe at Oliver’s pet turtle. I went full Saving Private Ryan on the other cat, Bertie. When people asked what they could do to help, I told them to look for Bertie. I filed his picture with multiple databases so if he wound up at a shelter he wouldn’t be destroyed. I posted flyers around the neighborhood.
With my mother, I spent hours each day going through rubble at the St. Marks apartment. All the windows and skylights were bashed out. Pieces of roof beams lay on the floor like piles of kindling. My father’s office was ash. Gone were all his papers and the dictionary I used to look words up in when I was a little girl. A hole in the floor gaped, revealing the apartment below. Bookshelves from which my father had pulled the Nakian catalog and the Donald Allen boxes were charred, the remaining books looking like slices of bread long forgotten in a toaster.
I wondered if the O’Hara appointment books had been in some neglected drawer. I should have violated my father’s privacy and done a proper search, I thought, when I’d had the chance. I’d worried about whether I’d have to share my father’s papers and books with Spencer. Now that worry was gone. There were no more treasures to covet.
With glass and cement crunching underfoot, sweating behind the mask I wore to keep out the fumes, I gathered all the surviving art, some now sporting fireman bootprints, into the front room. I called handlers who could take it for restoration. I collected family photos—many waterlogged but salvageable—and took them home. I brushed grit from Polaroids of my elementary-school birthday parties, cabinet cards of anonymous ancestors, and little black-and-white prints of my parents in the 1960s. I spread them out around my apartment on towels.
No matter how much Febreze and apple cider vinegar and Lysol and dish soap I threw at everything, whatever I took out of that apartment kept the acrid smell. A housefire odor is the opposite of a campfire smell. Rather than burning sticks and sizzling food, this scent was melting plastic, sparking wires, shower curtains fusing to curtain rods.
My parents’ whole building was uninhabitable—the top because the fire had burned it and the bottom because the fire hoses had flooded it. That week we learned a phrase: “Fire goes up; water goes down.” Smoke is greasy. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of the smell. All the walls throughout the building would have to be opened and treated for mold.
Out in the world, I kept misspeaking, as if half my brain was doing something else and I was only half there. I fell down three times in three weeks—missing a step, misjudging the curb, stumbling on the subway platform. Time made no sense. I lost track.
My therapist said it was because I hadn’t had time to metabolize the present, so the past and future were getting a little abstract. “It’s like a snow globe,” she said. “When it keeps getting shaken up, the snow never settles down enough for you to see.”
One afternoon, my parents and I met up at the apartment to do yet another pass through it, looking for things to save. In the living room, my father fixated on a Duke Snyder–signed baseball in a little plexiglass display box. He picked it up, carried it around for a while, then set it down while he looked through another room. As he was looking in that room, he called to me to help him find the ball because he’d forgotten where he’d put it. I found it in the hallway and gave it back to him. Then I found a little model of a Spitfire plane made out of the remains of an actual Spitfire and asked him if he wanted to take that. He did. I asked if he also wanted a little antique futuristic toy car I’d found. He did. He seemed happy holding the ball and car and plane.
I felt a surge of maternal love for him, the same kind I’d felt years before watching Oliver fall asleep in his car seat or shriek on the playground swings.
Turning back to the apartment, though, I felt despair. A few weeks earlier I’d been mopping these floors and putting pillows in fresh new pillowcases. And to what end? Would anyone ever be able to live here again? What a waste that I’d bought new blankets.
Then I thought of a line attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew the world was to end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree today.”
There’s a line like that in Middlemarch, too: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
My desire for the good took me once again to K-Mart. While I was pushing my cart, loaded with more necessities for my parents—Ensure, A&W root beer, yet another humidifier—my phone rang. It was one of my parents’ oldest friends, Katie Schneeman, who lived down the street at 29 St. Marks Place.
“Well, it’s good that the fire wasn’t so bad,” she said.
She was going deaf, so I had to speak loudly to make myself heard.
“It was bad, Katie!” I yelled into the phone, probably startling fellow shoppers. “The whole back half of the apartment was destroyed. There’s a ton of smoke and water damage and they can’t live there for a long time. The whole building is empty now and will be until they can fix the roof and the electrical system and the hallways.”
“What?” she said.
“EVERYTHING BURNED!” I yelled into the phone. My voice echoed down the cat food aisle.
While nothing was left of my father’s office, some things of his did survive: the chapbooks he pulled off the bookshelf that night he read me the Auden poem about Yeats, the Donald Allen boxes he gave me that time after dinner, the poetry he gave Spencer, the O’Hara tapes.
But it had gotten so that I couldn’t bear to listen to the tapes anymore. I kept thinking about how all those people were dead and about how soon my father might be, too. I worried about the cancer and about how reckless he was with his body. He was still smoking. Every time I checked on his meds, I found him taking too much. When I brought him the new humidifier, I saw that he’d taken fifteen doses of codeine cough syrup in the time he was supposed to have taken two.
Then, a miracle: Bertie, the missing cat, was found in a neighbor’s closet. He’d been living on toilet water and mice, the New York City wonder diet. A stone had been rolled away and a crypt found empty. There was rejoicing in the East Village.
Of Frank O’Hara, critic Geoffrey O’Brien once wrote: “He welcomes whatever is incomplete, interrupted, unplanned: anything that contradicts the orderly completeness of death.” Here now was this cat back from the dead: this otherwise unremarkable animal eating Fancy Feast, sleeping at the foot of the bed, using the litter box—every moment a thumb in the eye of Death.