Ashes of Fiery Weather (21 page)

But let the boy think she and Teddy Cullen had been on separate strolls through the park on a summer day.

“Did, uh, Teddy always want to be a fireman?”

Mattie nodded. “His uncle was a fireman.”

His uncle had responded to the
Slocum,
and sent Teddy to that memorial service to pay his respects, as he was too sick to go himself.

“His father too, but the father died when Teddy was two or three years old.”

“In a fire?” Ian asked.

Drink, Mattie wanted to say, but she thought for a moment. “Tuberculosis. They called it consumption back then. When Teddy was a boy, he used to chase after the firemen when they went out on runs. There were no trucks then, you know. They were horse-drawn wagons until, my God, the 1920s. Those men never wanted to make things easier for themselves.”

Ian scribbled and Mattie was pleased. These were the details she could easily give.

“We were married in St. Brigid's the September after we met. September 20, 1919.”

“Then, when Aunt Josephine was ten, Teddy died.” Ian paused.  “And then you stayed in Brooklyn for a while and then married Grandpa and moved here and then Dad was born.”

“That is an excellent summary,” Mattie said dryly.

Ian smiled. “Thanks. It was 1931 when Teddy died.” His voice picked up speed. “An apartment building caught fire because of two boys who were playing with matches.”

Mattie pursed her lips. “The father had taken off. The mother was out working.”

Ian opened his folder and withdrew a laminated newspaper clipping. He shyly handed it to Mattie.

BROOKLYN FIREMEN KILLED IN TENEMENT BLAZE

It was from the
Irish Eagle,
dated March 2, 1931, the day after the fire.

Mattie had never seen it. She hadn't been reading the papers during those first days.

There was a picture of the scene, a group of firemen standing before the building, staring up at it. Except for the broken windows, it looked undamaged. The firemen were in profile. She saw the nearest one.

“Jack.” Mattie didn't mean to speak out loud.

“Who?” Ian asked.

“On the left. Jack Keegan,” she said. “Teddy worked with him.”

She would leave it at that.

“Maybe I should talk to him?” Ian said.

Mattie looked up from the picture, but the boy's face was innocent.

“Lord, Jackie died in 1941. April.”

“
Jackie? 
” Ian echoed.

“It's not a girl's name in Ireland,” she said. “His parents were from there. Sometimes people called him that.”

Mattie held the picture out to him. For God's sake, look at it, she wanted to say. You are a child, but you are not a blind child. Ian accepted the clipping without a glance. But then, the photograph was grainy and Jack was wearing his helmet.

“Him and Teddy were in the same firehouse?”

Mattie nodded. “In Brooklyn. Jack taught Teddy everything about firefighting. Everything the formal training didn't.” She hesitated. “Does it say in that article that Teddy saved a boy's life in the fire that killed him?”

“No! He did? How?”

“Check the papers two days after the fire. The reporters would have gotten the details by then.”

Ian leaned forward. “But what happened?”

Mattie sighed. Teddy deserved his due.

The firemen were searching for victims. Teddy found a boy in a closet. That was one of the things Jack taught him. Check beneath the windows and in bathtubs for adults, since they try to escape or get to water, but children hide.

Teddy passed the boy out the window to the fireman on the ladder and was about to climb out. Word came up the ladder that the mother was screaming that she had two sons. Teddy went back and never came out. The second floor collapsed.

Ian's eyes were bright. “Oh, wow.”

Mattie spoke slowly. “Jack spoke at Teddy's funeral. He said, ‘Teddy Cullen was a good fireman.' He was one of the best. Write that in your essay, Mr. Ian Brauer. Write those exact words.”

January 1931

Mattie could not touch her bleeding lip because Teddy had her by both arms. She pushed against his chest and he shoved her. Her head cracked against the wall. Pinpricks of white light darted before her eyes. She raised a hand with the thought of catching them in her palm, like snowflakes.

Snow had been falling since early afternoon.

Teddy was saying the usual things.
Bitch, whore,
ruined my goddamned life,
but she barely heard the words anymore. She would have the marks of his fingers around her forearms tomorrow, purple blooms that would fade to green and brown. The colors never failed to amaze her, and she often studied her bruises as though they were small bits of art Teddy had gently painted on her arms and thighs and, sometimes, on the smaller and more breakable canvas of her face.

Their upstairs neighbor banged on the floor, aggravated by the noise. Teddy loosened his grip as he turned his anger toward the ceiling, cursing the neighbor. Mattie pushed him again, but this time he nearly fell. She ran for the window and shoved it open. Cold air rushed into the room and she dove onto the fire escape. They were on the fourth floor. Had she chosen one of the other two windows, she probably would have died. Later, she wondered if she was perhaps trying to kill herself. She could have run to the small room where Josephine slept and hidden herself behind the child. He never touched the child.

The metal of the fire escape bit her knees and she pulled herself upright. Her lip throbbed. She turned to see Teddy in the window. His own face was ugly with bruises.

Teddy had not told Mattie what happened. She'd paid the neighbor boy a nickel she could barely spare to tell her. Stevie Crowley was no tattletale but his mother was a widow with a crowd of kids. The boy only gave her bits, enough to earn his money. Stevie told her there was trouble at the Glory Devlins because of the Negro fireman who'd been assigned to the company two months ago.

Mattie knew about that. Even the secrecy of the firehouse couldn't contain the story of how all the Glory Devlins put in for transfers the day the man reported for work. Captain Keegan had refused every single one. Resignations, he said, he would be glad to accept. The man had passed the test. Teddy had told her, bitterly, that Jack figured the nigger would quit in a month anyway. Let it happen natural.

From Stevie, Mattie learned that the newest Glory Devlin was called Micah Barnes. The men threw his bed down in the basement. Three times he brought it back upstairs, and three times they threw it back down. After that, any man who made trouble for him, Micah challenged to a fight in the basement, where, finally, he'd set up his bed.

Mattie was surprised that Jack was letting it go on. Stevie shrugged and said Cap figured better in the firehouse than outside of it.

Teddy's bruises spoke of the man's skill. Mattie saw his face and looked away before a smile could escape.

“Fucking stay out there.” Teddy shut the window and locked it. He went and sat down on the sofa, stretched out and pulled a pillow over his eyes to block the light.

For the first few moments, Mattie was at peace, alone in the quiet night. The building next door sometimes seemed close enough to touch, but an alley separated them. At this hour, nearly ten o'clock on a weeknight, and because of the weather, it was empty of drunks and kids up to no good and young couples who somehow thought that it was a private place. The alley was almost pretty in the snow-brightness.

If she'd gone to the nuns to have Josephine, she could have left the baby with them. It was what her mother's cousin flatly advised her to do. But she hadn't.

The blood trickling from Mattie's split lip warmed her chin. As if waking from a dream, she began to shiver. She was dressed, thank the Lord. If she weren't, she'd be blue with cold already.

She shouldn't have started it, but he hadn't come home with his pay. She'd sent Stevie from across the hall to the firehouse to ask where he was. The boy came back and told her that Teddy wasn't there and none of the men would say where he'd gone. Hours later, Teddy had come through the door from wherever he'd gone to drink his horrible illegal beer or whiskey. Before he could hit her, Mattie swung hard with an open hand that left an imprint on his cheek.

“Your daughter is hungry,” she said, though she'd given Josephine supper. She was the one who was hungry.

Mattie peered through the window. Probably the idiot meant to pretend to fall asleep but had then really passed out. She wanted to sit down, but soaking herself wouldn't help. She could start screaming. She could bang on the window. Somebody would call the cops. But freezing to death might be better than the shame of the neighbors leaning out their windows to see what was going on.

Mattie looked down, readying herself to climb down the fire escape, measuring the distance she might fall. Then she looked back inside, and there in her white nightgown stood Josephine. She remained at the edge of the living room staring at her father, perhaps wondering if he was still alive.

Mattie crouched at the window, hoping she wouldn't frighten the child too badly. She scooped a fistful of snow off the fire escape and rubbed it on her chin to clean off the blood. She dropped the pink snow and, with her wet fingers, rapped on the glass.

“Josephine? The window! Open the window.”

Josephine turned as though half asleep. She was more the size of a child of eight than one who would soon be eleven.

Mattie often chided her over her meals. “Finish what's put in front of you.”

Josephine would bow over her plate. The crooked part in her pale hair made Mattie want to rap her on the head with a knuckle or a spoon. She usually held back.

Josephine looked at her father and then back at Mattie, her mouth open wide enough to let a sparrow in. Mattie bit back her impatience. She wondered sometimes if the girl was a simpleton.

“Open the window.” She mimed lifting the sash. “Open the window!”

Josephine turned and ran back to the bedroom, where she would probably curl up in her bed and will herself to fall asleep.

Mattie dropped to a crouch. It hurt her ribs, which her husband had punched. But it took a kick to break ribs. A punch, though, if hard enough, did cause babies to drop from wombs.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn stupid girl.”

Mattie slammed a numb hand against the glass. She could take off her shoe and break the window. But then the landlord would make them pay for it, and Teddy would be furious. The snow was soaking through her shoes. She would freeze if she didn't move.

She took a cold shot of air and started down the fire escape. The ladder's slips of steps felt no more substantial than pencils. The cold metal burned her palms. At the ladder's end, just before the first story, she jumped before she could think about the height. She landed on her feet and staggered forward but didn't fall. She straightened up proudly.

It took perhaps twenty minutes. She was stumbling by the time she reached the right street. She'd been to the house once, last year, for the daughter's twelfth birthday party. Josephine had been invited, though she and Delia Keegan barely knew each other. Teddy didn't often take his family to firehouse outings. Maybe a son he would have.

During the party, Mattie had kept a jealous eye on Delia Keegan. Delia was quiet and slender, the image of her mother but with her father's sharp blue gaze.

Mattie went to the door beneath the stairs. She used calm, measured knocks, though she knew they might not hear, because she didn't want to pound as if she was being chased. She half hoped Jack would be at work, but she didn't think he would be. He and Teddy generally worked the same shift.

Indeed, Jack opened the door, fully dressed, an unlit cigarette in his hand.

“Holy fucking God.” He took her arm and pulled her inside.

He ushered her into the kitchen, where the warmth and the smell of cinnamon almost made her cry. She wanted to sleep. She wondered if his wife could possibly have been baking at this hour.

Jack lowered her gently into a kitchen chair, perhaps sensing she wasn't sure how to bend her knees. He took both her hands in his and rubbed them hard as he studied the injury to her face. His callused palms felt so much like Teddy's, she nearly pulled away.

“Put the kettle on?”

Mattie started to get up, but he put a hand on her shoulder. Only then did she notice Annie-Rose had come into the room. She was also still dressed.

“Kettle?” he said without turning around.

“Tea?” Annie-Rose asked, moving to the stove.

“Tea,” he answered.

“Silly question,” she said.

Jack gave her a brief smile over his shoulder, which she returned, though he didn't see it. Annie-Rose set the water to boil as Jack bent down to take off Mattie's shoes.

Annie-Rose came to watch. Mattie had never realized how small she was. Maybe not even five feet tall. Mattie felt a familiar surge of envy. She was too tall. She'd always felt her own breasts were too heavy and her hips too wide.

When Jack had her feet bare, Mattie looked up at her and Annie-Rose smiled.

“Oh! Dry socks,” she said, and disappeared from the kitchen.

Mattie heard a voice and then Annie-Rose answer. The girl. The voices stopped. Annie-Rose must have sent Delia back to bed.

“Where is he?” Jack asked.

Did beat-up wives arrive on their doorstep once a week? Mattie would have asked but she didn't want to be rude. On the walk over, her mind had flown from one lie to another. She'd gone outside with the trash or to visit a sick neighbor and she'd locked herself out, then she'd slipped and fallen. But there was no coherent reason for walking all the way here.

“He was—asleep on the couch when I left.” Her swollen lip made it difficult to talk, as if the words had to climb out of her mouth.