Ashes of Fiery Weather (28 page)

I waited until I was sure Sister Joseph had time to make her way back. Still, I was relieved when I got to the chapel and saw the doors shut.

I had cat's feet. It was dark the night my mother first came here. From the edge of my eye, I saw the hollowed children climbing the steps beside me, dying with every step. They'd always be hungry. One of them was Bridie Cavanaugh. It's not only the dead who have ghosts. The children disappeared as I reached the top of the stairs. They were back at the bottom, starting the climb again.

The fourth door was open slightly and it was the only one with a light on. Behind each of the five closed doors—I counted quickly—lay a sleeping nun.

I went into the room and my eyes jumped to the still figure on the bed. Shadows fell over her wasted face. She wore a white nightgown and was covered with a sheet. Her hands were folded at her waist and I could see that she held a rosary, though most of it was hidden in the cup of her hands.

Bridie was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She beckoned me closer.

“Una went back to the chapel, then?”

I nodded.

“And you came up here on your own?”

I nodded again. I didn't say that
Sister Joseph
had all but given me permission.

Indeed, my bare answer pleased her. “Good girl,” she whispered. “Shut the door.”

I did, and then she had me stand at the foot of the narrow bed.

“Sister Benedict was the one in charge of us when we first got here.” Bridie leaned over.  “
A mhúinteoir Béarla?
I have all my words in order.”

The three of us breathed.

Then Bridie spoke to me. “Not many of us brought anything from home, not many had anything left, but the ones who did, the things we had, she took away. She told us we were starting new lives. You're to speak English or you're not to speak.
An mhúinteoir Béarla.
”

Bridie knelt, and I was relieved because I thought she was going to say a prayer for the safe passage of the nun's soul into heaven, but instead she reached underneath the bed and drew out a tin, the sort that held sugar or flour.

“They're supposed to own nothing, but they don't always.” Bridie paused in removing the lid and said, “You'll do well to remember that.”

She must have seen the confusion on my face because she added, “The clergy don't always follow their vows to the letter.”

I didn't believe her.

Bridie set the lid aside and reached in. First she drew out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. “Tell me what it says.”

I slowly unfolded the brittle paper. I had to hold it close to my face to read the small print in the candlelight.

At the top of the page it said, “
Newry Telegraph,
December 23, 1845.”

I whispered, “‘To the Farmers and Peasantry of Ireland: Directions for making wholesome food from diseased potatoes. First, grate down the potato by means of a grater, which may be made from a piece of sheet iron . . . or a better machine may be had for four or five shillings . . .'”

Around the middle—the fourth or fifth step—she interrupted and said, “Go to the end.”

Relieved, I jumped to the final two sentences: “‘This meal will serve very well for making both broth and soup, and for mixing it with oatmeal to make bread. In this way almost every potato can be made into wholesome food.'”

I held it out, hoping she wouldn't tell me to put it in my pocket. But she returned it to the tin. Next was a handkerchief edged with two rows of Irish lace, clusters of flowers and vines. It was stained and stiff and the lace had torn in places.

My mother tried to smooth it on her knee. “That's seawater did that.”

Ruined as it was, I could see how beautiful it must have been.

“I suppose they thought they'd sell it when they got to America.” Bridie turned it over and pointed to a particular stain. “Green, you see?”

I peered closer, but in the dim light I saw a dark stain of no color.

“She took it from her mother's pocket and tried to wipe the grass from her mother's mouth and then she put it in her own pocket and kept walking.”

Bridie put the handkerchief back. “She never got better. She died here on the third floor, where we slept.”

Bridie looked up at the ceiling and I did too.

She put her hand back in the tin and pulled out what looked like rosary beads, but smaller, with a ring on one end and a crucifix on the other.

She held it up and I moved closer. The rosary was just a single decade and the beads were made of wood. My mother slipped the ring over her index finger and deftly tucked the beads up her sleeve.

“To pray in secret. From the days when you could be killed for going to Mass.”

With her thumb, Bridie slipped the rosary, bead by bead, into her palm.

“Do that ten times and you'll have said a whole rosary.
An paidrin beag,
” she said. “The little rosary.”

It was the only time my mother spoke her language and then told me what she said.

“If she'd tossed it away or buried it in the garden. But she kept it.” Bridie opened her hand to let me see
an paidrin beag.

This had belonged to her. She didn't have to tell me.

Bridie turned back to the nun and began to sing in a whisper.

Sister Benedict's eyelids flickered. I sensed that up and down the hallway, each nun was either lying still in her narrow bed or propped up on one elbow, but all had an ear turned to the sound. As quietly as she sang, they heard her. Those who'd been here a very long time might know the voice. Perhaps those sisters were wondering if Bridie Cavanaugh had finally come to take revenge on them all for saving her life.

After getting the rosary back, my mother grew quieter. I saw my father look at her with concern, but I don't think he ever asked her what was wrong. Consolidation had him busy. We didn't see him for days at a time. A month after New Year's, on February 1, the Feast of Saint Brigid, we moved into the brownstone behind the firehouse. The third floor was ours, and my father intended to buy the house when the old lady who owned it died. She'd already agreed. Her only son, against her advice, ran off and married a wreck of a girl, and his mother answered back by selling his inheritance.

Though I thought often of the peace of the cloister and the peace on Sister Joseph's face, something missing entirely from my mother, the night Sister Benedict died was not the night I heard the call.

March 17, 1899, the last St. Patrick's Day of the century, was a beautiful day, until the fire.

Mary Clark and I were fourteen. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the crowd lining Fifth Avenue. Her older brothers had ridden with us on the trolley over the Brooklyn Bridge. They were twenty and seventeen and supposed to be our chaperones for the day, but after they secured us a spot in front of the Windsor Hotel and told us to stay put, they left with the promise that they'd be back in three hours. Mary said they went off to drink. They might be back or we might be going home by ourselves.

We wore green ribbons in our hair and Mary had a green bow around her waist.

On my blouse I had a sprig of fresh shamrock with a green ribbon that said
Erin go Bragh
in gold letters. A pipe and drum band passed by playing “The Wearing of the Green.”

The windows of the Windsor Hotel framed the guests who were watching the parade.

They were smiling and pointing, as though they were on a ship leaving port. On one of the higher floors a woman held a baby wrapped in a white blanket. She made its little hand wave to the assembly of firemen in their finery.

My father was marching in the Brooklyn parade. He didn't see the point of my going all the way across the river for a St. Patrick's Day parade, but my mother said I should get out of Brooklyn once in a while. Mary thought she saw her uncle and began hopping up and down, calling to him.

There was one long scream first, and then in the next second, a dozen. Our heads all turned, the entire crowd at once, to see black smoke pouring from the hotel windows. The firemen in the parade were already running toward the hotel.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Mary seized my arm, breathing in gasps. Men and woman started streaming out of the building, and those higher up threw fire ropes out the windows and climbed down, some of them holding children.

The police shouted at the crowd to move back. The cops tried to stop the firemen from running in. The firemen shoved back and threw punches.

The hotel guests began to jump. The
thump, thump, thump
of bodies hitting the sidewalk sounded like the drum in the pipe band. Birds dropped from the cloud of smoke, and this was as frightening as the fire. To see a bird stop in flight, and fall.

One shriek rose above the other screams. I looked away from the sky and back at the blazing hotel. I sighed and clapped my hands once as a white bird flew from a high window. Then I saw the flutter was not wings but a blanket falling away. The mother leaped from the ledge after the baby.

In the newspaper the next day, they would be listed as “unknown woman, unknown child.” Why, the newspaper reporter asked, had the mother not jumped with her child in her arms? They might have died together. My father said in disgust that clearly she hoped that if the child were released alone, someone below would catch him. But I believe she thought her child would become a bird. She hadn't known the sparrows were dying too.

St. Patrick's night, kneeling at my bedroom window, I looked out at the firehouse. A light was on in the kitchen. Someone was always awake. Tonight many of the men would be up, talking about the Windsor, discussing the collapse, the search for the bodies that would start again at dawn, the luck of the men who'd gotten to fight the fire.

I said the rosary and then stayed on my knees. The nuns at school spoke of a God who never stopped plotting ways to catch us sinning and to punish us for those sins. According to them, we were always disgracing Christ, who'd died for us. For my father, God was like fire. He rarely spoke about his job at home, but once he said that fire has a mind but no eyes or ears. It kills blindly. My mother's God was indifferent to everyone, except for the Irish, whom He hated.

But that St. Patrick's night, I understood what none of them did. God was the baby, saved from one death and handed another. But God was also the baby in flight, the moment when it was not child but bird, not falling but flying. That was God. Everything beautiful, everything sad.

By telling me what the words
an paidrin beag
meant, my mother handed me her legacy of suffering. She knew, I was sure, that Sister Joseph had told me about her sister, a girl with a grave across the ocean. She gave me her dreams. The workhouse and the ship coming over and the first years in the convent. My father too, though not on purpose. I thought of what he must have seen in the war, and what he must have seen fighting fires in New York but never spoke of. Except for the Brooklyn Theatre Fire. Every year on December 5, he took me with him to lay a wreath on the grave in the Green-Wood where the 103 victims who could not be identified are buried together. The monument was erected by the City of Brooklyn. I could close my eyes and smell the smoke and feel the panic set in. Jamesey Walsh finding in the fire the organs of the dead boys. I confessed to the priest once, and he sighed and told me to put my mind to other things.

I thought of the peace in Sister Joseph's face. I wanted to spend my days alone, in prayer. I didn't know what else to do with the weight my parents bequeathed me. The weight of hunger and fire.

Because entering the cloister would mean never seeing my parents again, I would not go until they were both gone.

After I left school at sixteen, I took a job in the post office, in the dead letter office. I liked the work, solving mysteries, always the chance to reunite people. Misspelling was often the reason for a letter gone awry, and so the solution was a matter of deduction based on the first letter of the name and the house or building number. But other times, a street name might be written beautifully but there would be nothing by that name in any borough directory. I would bring it to my father and he would tell me that the street had been renamed, or no longer existed.

In September 1913, a memorial was being dedicated to the firefighters of New York City on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Firemen from all over the country came to New York for the days of events that preceded the dedication ceremony, like the baseball game between the police and fire departments at Ebbets Field.

My father asked me to accompany the niece of a fireman at the Glory Devlins who was visiting from out of town and wanted to go to the ceremony. She was nineteen years old. Her aunt didn't care for crowds. My father would be attending with the other brass.

I was not happy about giving up a Saturday, my day off from work, and also felt a flush of shame. Spinster escort. I couldn't think of why a girl her age would want to go to something like that, a parade of firemen and fire equipment and then a lot of speeches. She must have been short on excitement. When I saw her—Elizabeth, her name was—dressed in what was clearly her best, with a ribbon in her hair she kept fussing with, I realized she was hoping a fireman would take notice of her. I kept my sigh to myself.

We took the trolley into the city and found our way to the grandstand.

I hadn't expected to be moved by the ceremony, or the sight of firemen from all over the country assembled in uniform, or the speech of the son of Isidor Straus, who'd done so much to raise money so that the monument could be built, and who had died last year on the
Titanic,
along with his wife.

It was such a windy afternoon that firemen had to climb on top of the monument and hold down the American flags covering it.

For the unveiling, four girls, about eleven, twelve years old, stepped forward. The daughters of firemen killed in the line of duty. I was startled.
Daughters?