Ashes of Fiery Weather (22 page)

The kettle's whistle turned to a shriek, and Annie-Rose returned carrying a towel and a pair of socks. She handed both to Jack and busied herself making tea.

Mattie took them, as the scrap of pride she had left would not let Jack put the socks on for her. Besides, her hands were warmer now. She could bend her fingers. Her feet were bone white and wrinkled.

“Jesus, Mattie,” Jack said suddenly, “where's Josephine?”

“Asleep,” she said.

“Asleep?” he repeated. “You'll stay here tonight.”

Annie-Rose handed her the mug, nodding.

“I can't leave her alone all night,” Mattie said. “Josephine wouldn't open the window.”

Annie-Rose and Jack exchanged a look. Jack's mouth thinned even further.

“I want the cops. I want him in jail this time,” Mattie said.

Jack sat up straight. “Mattie, come on. He could lose his job.”

Mattie raised her eyebrows at him. He wouldn't be fired unless he was convicted and that wouldn't happen unless she testified. She wouldn't go that far, but he might always wonder if next time she would. It wouldn't stop him when he was drunk, but it might when he was mostly sober.

“You have to trust each other on the job. The men hear about this—”

Mattie snorted. Some might think less of him for hitting his wife. Others would say he should have hit her harder. “They would figure it's his business.”

Jack frowned. “The decent ones wouldn't, and most of us are decent. My shoes?”

Annie-Rose nodded and left the room again.

“You're not going over there,” Mattie said. She sat up straight in a panic.

If she got the police in it, Teddy would spend the night in a cell. But Jack—sending his captain would be a humiliation Teddy might not be able to take. She ran her tongue along her teeth.

Annie-Rose reappeared and Jack took his shoes from her. He put them on and Annie-Rose bent slightly, as though she might kneel and tie them for him, but then stepped back and folded her hands.

“I'll stay at your place for the night. Josephine can't be there alone and I can't bring her here in the middle of the night in this weather.”

Mattie looked up at him. She should want to see Josephine, but her lip hurt.

“I'll make up the couch for you, Mattie,” Annie-Rose said.

Mattie, of course, had heard the stories about how poor Jack's wife was crazy, but she didn't see it now. Her hands and eyes were calm. She bent over her tea to hide the tears in her eyes at being pitied by a woman who had spent time in a sanatorium. Melancholia, they said.

Jack nodded. “Sleep.” He looked at his wife. “Both of you.”

Annie-Rose smiled back and lifted her slight shoulders.

“Jack?” Mattie called as he started to leave the room.

Jack turned, his face grim.

“Don't—” She touched the cut in her lip with her tongue. “I don't want
you
to go to jail.”

Jack said, very seriously, “I won't kill him.”

Annie-Rose followed him out of the room and they stood whispering by the front door.

Mattie leaned forward and saw their silhouettes merge as they kissed. She sat back and stared into her tea.

Annie-Rose came back in. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and said, without looking directly at Mattie, that she would get a blanket and pillow for her.

Mattie sipped the tea as Annie-Rose slipped by her with the bedding.

“It's ready,” she said shyly.  “It's comfortable. I sleep on it sometimes.”

“I'm tired.” Mattie stood, holding the mug, and headed to the sink, but Annie-Rose took it from her.

“Do you want a nightgown? I have an extra one.”

“It would never fit.”

“I must have something—”

Mattie shook her head. She couldn't undress. Jack might come back.

When Mattie woke, she knew she'd been asleep for a while, but it was not close to morning. The living room windows were still dark. A light was on in the kitchen. She thought perhaps Jack had returned, but she heard no sound. He wouldn't know how to be quiet. Teddy didn't. Her brothers never had.

She tossed the blanket aside and got up.

Annie-Rose sat alone at the kitchen table, a glass of whiskey before her. Behind her on the counter sat a bottle of Jameson. Mattie didn't know much about Irish whiskey but assumed it was expensive even before Prohibition. She wondered how Jack had managed to get it. But she supposed he had plenty of connections in the fire department. The real question was why Annie-Rose would be drinking it alone in the middle of the night.

Mattie sat and Annie-Rose tilted the glass toward her.

She shook her head. “I never drink.”

Annie-Rose took a sip. “They say I shouldn't drink, but I only do on special occasions.”

“What's this occasion?”

“You've come to visit.”

Mattie didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing. “Who says you shouldn't drink?”

“Jack. Dr. Neumann. He's Jewish. Jack said I had to go to a Jew. They know what they're talking about, but I'm not so sure this one does.” Annie-Rose stood, went to a cabinet and came back with a second glass. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor.

She poured Mattie a small shot and pushed it toward her.

“Take a little.”

Mattie sipped and grimaced.

Annie-Rose lifted her glass. “This bottle was my father's. The men gave it to him when he retired from active duty. That would have been 1900. First year of the new century.” She smiled. “He kept working for the fire department until he died. In the old days, they used to pour booze down their boots in the winter to keep their feet from freezing. Cheaper stuff, of course. He never drank this. I'm not sure why. Maybe he was saving it for some occasion.”

“I didn't know your father was a fireman too,” Mattie said.

Annie-Rose's eyes widened slightly, as if there were no other profession. “Oh yes. He came over from Ireland and he used to say he was one of the men who turned the department Irish. It was volunteer in those days, and he was one of the few who got hired when they made the fire department professional and started paying. The city didn't take too many of the fire laddies.”

Mattie didn't much care. Fixed in her tired mind was an image of Jack sitting silently in a hard chair from the kitchen, placed with precision in front of the couch, waiting for Teddy to open his eyes.

“In the old country, my father would have picked a husband with a farm, but here it was a man with—” Annie-Rose stopped as if confused. “Jack. It was Jack. A man with fire. You were right to come get him.”

“I should have left him out of it. I don't want Jack in trouble if anything happens.”

“Jack won't hurt him too bad, not with Emily there.”

“Josephine,” Mattie corrected.

“Who's Emily?” A small frown creased her brow. She shook her head. “And he's drunk, you said. Jackie won't beat a man who can't hit back.”

“Gentleman Jack,” Mattie said.

“Gentleman Jack?”

“That's what they call him in the firehouse,” Mattie said. “Gentleman Jack.”

Annie-Rose laughed. “I never heard that.”

Mattie nodded. She understood. Teddy didn't talk about the firehouse much either. “The boy who lives across the hall from us said it once.”

“Did he say why?”

“He didn't know. I guess only the firemen know.”

“Hmm,” Annie-Rose said. She spun her glass twice.

“Jack's a good man,” Mattie said bitterly.

Annie-Rose was silent, contemplating her drink. “He is,” she finally said. “He always deserved better than me.”

“Who deserves anybody?” Mattie said.

Annie-Rose laughed and lifted her glass toward Mattie. Mattie smiled and toasted back.

March 1931

Jack came to tell her. Jack, even though Teddy had transferred out of the Glory Devlins a month ago.

She and Josephine were folding the laundry when Stevie banged on the door to tell them that there was a big fire a couple blocks away. Teddy's company was there.

Mattie and Josephine looked at each other, then Mattie went back to folding clothes. Josephine opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape. The smell of smoke drifted in. Sirens went wailing up the street. Mattie recalled Teddy's uncle telling stories about the banshee. Americans thought everyone Irish could hear the wail, but that wasn't the way of it. The banshee was attached to certain families, and the Cullens were one of them.

A while later, Stevie came back, panting, to tell them there'd been a collapse. Some firemen were trapped and the rest were digging them out. The Glory Devlins were there too.

By the time the knock came two hours later, Mattie and Josephine were sitting at either end of the couch. Mattie stood up, smoothed her hair and checked that her blouse was tucked into her skirt. Josephine jumped up and seized her elbow. Mattie shook her off, and Josephine sat back down as though she'd been shoved.

Jack stood in the doorway and Monsignor Halloran stood next to him. Mattie stepped aside and let them in. Jack had cleaned himself up and put on his dress uniform, but he reeked of sulfur. His eyes were red, but that might have been from the smoke.

He glanced at Josephine.

“Go ahead,” Mattie told him.

Mattie already knew. Stevie would have come with the news of what hospital they'd taken Teddy to if he was only hurt. Yet hearing Jack say the words frightened her. Her hand flew out to the side, searching for something to hold on to.

“Teddy's gone,” Jack said quietly. “Him and Jimmy Libretti and Eugene Connelly. Captain Connelly went to see their wives. I said I'd come tell you.”

Since Teddy was under Jack only two months ago, Jack no doubt thought he deserved this chore. When Teddy came home and told her that he was being transferred, Mattie thought for a moment that Jack had done it out of revenge for what he'd done to her. When she learned the truth, she berated herself for thinking that firehouse business would have anything to do with a woman.

It seemed that Teddy and three other men went to Jack and told him they could no longer work with Micah Barnes. They wanted out. If he'd asked her, Mattie would have told Teddy what Jack Keegan would do. No matter his feelings about Negro firemen, Jack would not stand for being challenged like that. He granted the transfers. And now Teddy was dead.

“Did you find them?” Mattie asked.

“We got 'em out,” Jack said fiercely.

“I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Cullen,” Monsignor Halloran piped up.

Mattie nodded once. “What happened?” she asked Jack.

“I can talk to you about that later,” Jack said. Again he looked at Josephine. Her mouth was open a little but she was otherwise still.

“It's better if she hears it from you,” Mattie said without following his glance. He would find better words. She could do that for her daughter at least.

Jack explained that Teddy had saved one boy and then gone back to look for his brother. The floor collapsed. Jimmy and Eugene were one floor below Teddy. All three of them ended up buried.

The priest bowed his head. “Your husband died a hero, Mrs. Cullen.”

Mattie stroked her lip. “The one boy Teddy got out. The other?” she asked.

Jack's features contorted. “He wasn't in the building. When the fire started, he got scared and ran out. He came back before we even left the scene. The Firemen's Fund will help you.”

Mattie hadn't been thinking about money. Only that Teddy was gone and it was over. A wash of fear replaced the numbness. Where was work to be found these days?

She lifted her chin. “I don't take charity. What will it do for Josephine if I support her on handouts?”

“It'll teach her that the fire department her father gave his life for will take care of you both,” Jack said.

Mattie wanted to close her eyes and sit right on the floor. She would never get away.

July 1931

Mattie pulled the sheet taut on the last of the beds. She went downstairs to the kitchen and got her broom and dustpan. Strictly speaking, the outside of the firehouse was not her responsibility, but she liked to keep it looking neat. Children who came by to visit often dropped candy wrappers on the sidewalk. But it seemed to make the men uncomfortable to see her sweeping.

“Hey, Mrs. Cullen, the probie'll do that,” one or more of them would say. And the probie would jump to attention, ready to take over. So she'd taken to sweeping when the men were out on a run.

Jack had tried to find her a job at a firehouse in Brooklyn, but no Brooklyn firehouses needed anyone at the moment. Mattie told him not to be ridiculous. If she was going to be a maid, it didn't much matter to her where she was going to be a maid.
Matron,
he'd corrected. Fire matron, that's what they were called.

Jack found her a place in lower Manhattan, not far from Tompkins Square Park. In the few months since she'd begun doing the firehouse's domestic work, cleaning, doing laundry, mending, she'd gotten to know the men and worry for them when the bells rang and they went out—a new feeling. Teddy she'd never worried over. She'd learned to accept the respect the firemen showed her. And somehow, it was respect and not pity, even though her pay came out of their own pockets. She made $13 a week.

Teddy was dead, but sometimes when she heard her upstairs neighbor coming home from work, his feet as heavy on the stairs as Teddy's had been, her heart beat out of time. Josephine didn't miss him, near as Mattie could tell. She'd even stopped hunching her shoulders so much.

Almost possessively, Mattie began sweeping the sidewalk, but stopped when she heard whistling, trying to place the song. It was an Irish tune, she believed. The whistling grew closer and the words flitted just out of range. She waited, the broom still. Emmet Brauer rounded the corner, holding two growlers of beer, though if asked he'd undoubtedly claim they were soda. If the police made him remove the caps, he wouldn't be arrested but he'd lose the growlers, as the cops would take the beer back to the stationhouse and drink it themselves.