Two decades later Herb Swanson began to tell the story at dinner parties. He knew every inch of the trivia. He knew that the forgotten movie star who burned to death that night was named Buck Jones. Nowadays people don’t know the guy from Adam, Herb would say, but back then Buck Jones, no joke, was big as Gene Autry. Herb knew that the final death toll was 492, including the five firemen, not 474 like some accounts still claim. Herb knew that the name of the busboy who struck the match to start the greatest conflagration in the history of Boston—to this day you can’t call a business Cocoanut Grove within Boston city limits, not even if you sell coconuts—was named Stanley Tomaszewski. Wretched Stanley Tomaszewski. He’d been trying to change a lightbulb. He needed light to see better and so lit a match. The ceiling caught. Tomaszewski escaped out the kitchen door and lived the rest of his life guilt-struck in Waltham, listening to those screams in his sleep.
Then Herb would lower his voice and say in a whisper coated with breathy awe: Listen, it’s just after ten. Ro and I are upstairs in the dining room. Micky Alpert’s just launched into the first chords of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” There are palm trees and piña coladas all over the place, like we’re in Tahiti. Corny, but you buy it. There’s glamour in that kind of nonsense. And you’re out on the town with your girl and you’re thinking this is it, this is what it comes down to, seeing and being seen, you remember? You’re young; you can’t imagine anything other than being young. And the music and the drinks and the waiters spin through the crowd with trays hoisted over their heads like ancient high priests sending up offerings to the gods when it—
When it—
Herb would always hustle past the actual fire part. What mattered when Herb told his Cocoanut Grove story was the great aftermath. The courage of the firemen, the heroics of the policemen, the essential contributions of the Women’s Army Relief Corps. How the people of Boston, Massachusetts, joined together in the face of such disaster, a beautiful thing amid all that incalculable horror. It even prepared people, Herb would say, for what was to come soon enough with our boys being sent home from France wrapped in the flag.
Still, Herb couldn’t completely ignore the fire itself. His credibility depended on it. The almighty fact of his and Rosalie having been there, having survived it. Got lucky was all he’d really say. Our number wasn’t up. All there is to it. Our table was near one of the few exits that didn’t get blocked up with people right away. We were the fourth couple out the door. For years Rosalie never said anything when Herb told the story, and this, too, gave it a mystique. It was too painful for her to talk about, to remember. Yet at some point, when both of them were well into their sixties, as Herb continued to rattle on and on about flammable ceiling material, how the biggest problem from a fire-safety perspective was that the few exit doors opened inward, how there were no sprinklers either, how four brothers from the little hamlet of Wilmington, Massachusetts, all died in it and the town put up a statue of them on the green—Rosalie began to enter the story with her own details, quietly at first. She’d talk about how the fire was less like a wall and more like a flapping curtain. She’d talk about its not being hot either, but windy. She’d talk about the soot-covered sailor in the famous Life photograph, an unconscious barefoot girl draped across his arms like a bride, the sailor all the newspapers called an angel dispatched from heaven. Well, yes, I did see him that night, Rosalie would say. Before it. A hard man not to notice—let me be honest. But I wasn’t a slouch then, either. I swished by him in my latest red dress. I was thin then, if you can believe it. Still hippy, but thin, maybe even a little pretty in a certain light, and yes, sailor boy winked at me. And Herb would shout across the table (because even then it was a performance and they were still in cahoots): Everything she says is true. Pretty? To hell with pretty! Beautiful! Beautiful then, beautiful now, my Rosie. I wanted to break the jack-tar’s neck, but Rosie said, Let him stare, it’s patriotic.
And Rosalie, whispering now: After he left that girl on the sidewalk, that sailor went back inside.
And Herb: Poor kid. Died of his burns two days later at Boston City.
Herb Swanson was a dentist, everybody’s favorite dentist. In his line, he needed a reputation for telling a decent story. Rosalie didn’t need stories any more than she needed these interminable dinner parties Herb loved so much. Yet there was something, wasn’t there, even for her, about that fire? Maybe it was that sailor’s famous, cockeyed, confident face. An unshaped face, an unravaged face. In any case, something happened when Rosalie joined in. It was as if she’d actually known it. As if that dead boy was more to her than just a picture she’d seen so many years ago in a magazine. Because none of it was ever true. The Cocoanut Grove didn’t happen to them. She never saw that sailor, before or after, and neither had Herb. There was no “Star-Spangled Banner,” at least not in their ears. (Herb read that somewhere; Herb read everything somewhere.) As for the sober facts: They were at that club that night. This much was whole truth. But Herb’s stomach was acting up, and this time it was more than a bad case of gas. They left an hour before the fire. Saved by indigestion! But what kind of story would that make? A one-shot laugher, not the kind you tell and tell again. And far beyond this, it was not the kind of story that gave you the incontestable authority of the messenger. And only I am escaped to tell thee. Anyway, twenty, thirty, forty years on, who was going to know or care? Harmless table talk. And if you think about it, in a way, they had escaped, hadn’t they? They just didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they retrieved their coats from the hatcheck sweetie (she didn’t survive—she was from Malden, engaged, one of the last bodies recovered) and marched out into the chill and brr of an ordinary Boston November night. Why split hairs? Escaping’s escaping.
Rosalie began to play along more intensely. Her eyes would get bleary. She’d talk with her fork suspended near her mouth, as if something crucial to understanding everything had only then just crossed her mind. Everybody would stop chewing to listen. Like a horde except that nobody was moving in the same direction. You see? Had people moved in the same direction, maybe it would have been different. See? What you have to understand is that it wasn’t the heat or the flames or even the dread smoke, it was how the people—
Then she’d pause and take a breath, her fork still up in the air by her ear: I’m not saying I blame them. No. God, no. I love them. How can you not love them?
Somehow her saying this was worse than the melting walls and the charred bodies and the unopenable doors, or even the useless, desperate screams, which she never talked about but were always there in her voice. Herb knew how many fire departments responded to the alarm, trucks as far as New Bedford roared to Boston. Herb knew the score of the Boston College–Holy Cross game. B.C. 12, Holy Cross 55. He knew how many young and virile lives were saved by that humiliation, because Boston College called off the victory party scheduled for that night in the Grove’s Melody Lounge. He knew the name of the last Buck Jones picture, Forbidden Trail, where Buck, playing a cowhand, not only saves Mary and her mother from the villain Mr. Coffin, he also rescues a man from a burning cabin. All this before being unjustly accused of arson and murder himself! But Herb Swanson had no talent for putting people inside that nightclub, and the truth is that he began to be a little frightened by his wife. The last thing Rosalie cared about was hoodwinking anybody about what she did or didn’t see one night in 1942, and yet when she got started in about things like fingernails tearing the flesh of the shoulders, it was as though she couldn’t stop. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. Clawing each other. Even husbands and wives. And Herb would watch her anxiously, fidgeting, waiting for an opening and a chance to recapture the story. Bring it back to the busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, and an interview he did with the Globe on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, in 1972, where he said he prays for the souls of those innocents every day and often visits their graves, the ones that are here in Massachusetts. He told the reporter that the movie star was buried too far away, but that he’d always wanted to make that trip out to California. There’s your human interest. Stanley Tomaszewski guilty and prostrate before the headstones. Because it was almost as though Rosalie (even though she always denied it) judged people for trying to save themselves, which was wrong and terrible and not at all the point. The point was glory. The point was redemption. Think of all the good that came out of that fire. Municipal solidarity. Nationwide sympathy and understanding. New fire codes for every public building in the United States of America. Pivotal advancements in emergency medicine and response…
And there’s a night, isn’t there, when Rosalie stares at Herb and there’s nobody else in the room, even though they are having dinner with the Selvins and Tony Bickleman and his latest wife, Maureen, and they’re all sitting right there. Not their fault, such rage, Rosalie says, not their fault. There’s nobody else in the room, and Herb watches her watching him, and he tries not to listen, and he vows to himself he’ll never bring any of this up again, ever. He even goes one further and promises himself that one of these days he’ll come clean, which after all these years would make a good story in itself. It never happened, folks. We weren’t there. My dear friends, let me be frank, the long and the short of it was (pause, drumroll) Pepto-Bismol. I stand before you a prevaricator. And he can hear Harvey Selvin saying, For Christ’s sake, Herb, it’s a story. And Tony Bickleman: And I wasn’t shot at Anzio either, shot at, but not shot. I always say shot. What’s the difference? Coulda bin, couldn’t I a bin?
Around the middle of the 1980s, not long after he retired, Herb did stop telling the story, at least in public. And when he stopped, Rosalie stopped. She’d never initiated it; she only carried it places it wasn’t supposed to go. Herb in his chair in the den looking out at the backyard and Rosalie on the patio reading, slowly turning pages, or not turning pages at all, the woman could spend five minutes on the same page, and still the ceiling ignites and the flames spread across the walls and he tries to run and can’t. Herb flings himself against the crowd, elbows cocked like an offensive lineman, trying to use his bulk to plow forward, stumbles, shouting absurdly, “Make way! I’m a doctor!” while Rosalie remains behind, at their table. Rosalie sips her Scotch. She crosses and recrosses her legs. She rubs the clean white tablecloth with her palm. After he stopped telling the Cocoanut Grove out loud, this is the part that was most alarming. This is what made Herb try to banish those two words from his brain the way the city of Boston forbade them from the commercial register. Rosalie serene while he and everyone else in the place—
Not in his dreams, in the morning, in the den, in his chair, awake.
When she died, it all got more vivid. The specter of her sitting and watching. She left the same way. That morning she’d been talking about craving fresh cucumber salad. When was the last time I had cucumber salad? At my aunt Gert’s in the fifties? As she napped in the guest room with her clothes on, a stroke took her away, on a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known her. He had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had, in her way. And she’d always been Rosie, always the girl in the red dress who got the twice-over from sailors and sauced it right back. Still, she always held herself, not alone, apart. Maybe this was why people craved her sole attention. When the kids were little and even after they’d gone away, they were still always trying to get their mother away from Herb in order to be listened to, beg advice, confess. They didn’t want Herb’s bigheartedness, his hugs, his compassion. Mom, I shoplifted. Mom, I’m strung out. Mom, I’m getting a divorce. Mom, I’m broke again. Mom, I’m tired, I can’t figure out why I’m so so tired all the time. And she’d stare back at them as if they were strangers. No answers or empathy or even comfort. But something. What did you give—what? Tell me. Talk to me, Ro, I’ll listen. Herb in his chair by the window, overlooking her azaleas. The glare of the sun white now against the glass. A frenzied waiter douses a blazing tinsel palm tree with seltzer water, and Rosalie laughs, raises a long, thin finger slowly to her lips, and breathes, Let it come, Herb, just let it come—