It was the end of November 1942, and Emily Brennan was hungry.
She had only allowed herself one hard-boiled egg on dry toast for each meal of the last fourteen days. The dry toast wasn’t much of a sacrifice since they’d started rationing butter. Her mother bought the substitute — just a small can of lard and an envelope of yellow powder you were supposed to stir in to make it look like the real thing. Emily hated the stuff. It had come to signify all that was stifling and small about their life. But there were still temptations at the table in the form of potatoes and stews and sometimes, meat. She resisted. She hadn’t been on a date in months, and she saw this new suitor, this Roger Kelleher from Melrose, as her last best chance, even though he had only been sent to the reserves, never even leaving the state of Massachusetts, which to her, seemed utterly unromantic.
Roger Kelleher majored in business at Holy Cross before going to work for the Transit Authority, her brothers had told her. She herself had had dreams of studying painting at Manhattanville College. Her father had told her she could go if she kept her grades up in high school. But when graduation came around and she mentioned his promise, he grumbled and her mother whispered quietly, “Now really Emily, we don’t have the money for something like that.”
She went to work for the phone company. By then, her three brothers had been to Germany and back, and were enjoying Boston College, courtesy of the GI Bill. She and her sister Mary lived at home with their parents. They had always been close, but now they too were at war, silently competing to see who could get out first, who would be the classic Catholic spinster forced to stay at home and take care of the parents into their dotage.
Emily prayed at night: Dear Lord, Mary would be the better homemaker; she’s the kinder one of the two of us, the simpler one. She can better serve you in that way. Don’t let me get left behind here. Let it be her.
Since they were children, Mary had been suited to staying at home. She had infinite patience and she was the better cook, the daughter their parents had always preferred because she was practical and neat and predictable, while Emily could be dramatic and, as their mother put it, she needed so much attention the well would run dry before she got her fill.
When her older brothers were still living in the house, Emily would order the nicest dresses in the Lord and Taylor catalogue, cash-on-delivery. When the delivery boy arrived, she’d dash upstairs and watch from the second floor landing as one of her brothers fought with the kid, saying they hadn’t ordered any goddamn dress, and they sure as heck weren’t going to pay for it now. The delivery boy would insist he had the right address, tough and unwavering because he knew the fate that awaited him if he returned to the store without the cash. Once or twice her brothers had been so flummoxed that they’d actually paid up, and she’d gotten a brand new dress for nothing.
As a teenager, Mary hardly cared about dresses. There had never been any doubt which of them was the most feminine, or for that matter, the prettiest. Emily had always been fine-boned and bright-eyed, while Mary had a thick neck and liked nothing more than to spend a Saturday afternoon playing baseball with the boys in the street. She was a chunky, muscular kid who grew into a fat teenager, and she wore one of their father’s old oversize sweaters, even in the summertime. She never went on dates either; instead she’d stay home to read a book in bed.
But by the time high school ended, things had changed. Mary had been fired from her first bookkeeping position, the boss citing that she was too young for the job.
“Too rotund for the job he means,” she had said, sobbing into their mother’s dress.
She enrolled in secretarial school, and went on a strict diet: Cottage cheese for breakfast and lunch, scrambled eggs and string beans for dinner. She got a great job at Gillette that paid twenty-eight dollars a week.
By the fall of ‘42, Emily had begun to panic. She had no prospects to speak of, and she wasn’t earning nearly enough at the phone company to save for a place of her own, which her father wouldn’t have allowed even if she could afford it. Mary was two years older — twenty-four — and making a fortune by comparison. Suddenly she was able to buy herself a car, a pair of dove-grey suede gloves with heels to match.
She was out almost every night, out with her Henry at all the finest places. She had been working at Gillette for five years by then, and having an affair with her married boss for three. Emily often wondered when he ever saw his actual family: Every weekend, he and Mary drove out to Cape Cod for lobsters, or went dancing in Boston. After work, she was the woman on his arm for cocktails with business associates. He had told her that he intended to leave his wife once the children were old enough that he could be assured she wouldn’t poison their minds against him.
Mary loved Henry terribly, her moods fluctuating between undiluted joy and pure sorrow. She wanted him to be hers, really hers, so intensely that it felt she would make it so simply by willing it to happen. Emily had no doubt they would get married. She was up nights thinking about it: Mary would be raising some other woman’s kids in a mansion in Cohasset, and she, younger by two years and tragically single, would be the one to stay behind in their parents’ cramped and stuffy house, minding them into their old age and then living on alone until she died.
More importantly, there was the issue of eternity to think about — her sister was sinning in one of the cruelest manners, damning herself, and for what?
Sometimes Emily imagined ways she might break them up. She pictured herself driving to the house in Cohasset, a silk scarf wrapped around her hair: She would ring the doorbell. “Mrs. Reynolds? I have a terrible secret to tell you about your husband — your husband and my sister. You see, they’ve been carrying on an affair all this time.”
Mary would be brokenhearted. She’d probably want to stay at home, where things were familiar and safe. So Emily might marry some young hotshot from the phone company, or perhaps, with Mary settled in with them, her parents would even allow her to take a little place of her own in the city.
One night in late October, Mary brought Henry home for dinner. Emily had met him plenty of times, but Mary had never brought him around to meet their parents before. She dressed up for the occasion in her favorite blue dress, a springtime sort of dress, Emily thought. Mary even brought a bouquet of daffodils wrapped in brown paper for their mother. But when she and Henry walked in, their father, drunk and cranky as usual, literally picked the man up by the back of his pants and shoved him out the front door.
“Stop!” Mary shouted, but her father screamed out, “Don’t you dare come back here. Don’t you ever let me see you here again.”
He slammed the door, while Henry stood startled out on the stoop. Mary went to open it, but their father said, “You stay where you are. You won’t be seeing him again tonight.”
He was blocking the door with his body, so Mary went to the living room and sat down, breathing hard, which is what she always did when she was trying not to cry. Emily and their mother went after her.
Their father followed close behind, fully whipped up now. He rested an elbow on the mantle, shouting, “What kind of a tramp brings a married man home to her mother and thinks she can get away with it? What kind of fucking idiot waits on a man for years like this, while all her other prospects shrivel up?”
He had often spoken to them harshly, especially when he was drinking, and he had hit them as kids, the boys always getting the worst of it. But Mary appeared stunned, even so. Then something amazing happened. She rose from the armchair in silence, walked to where their father stood, and slugged him in the face. He wobbled a bit, and tried to steady himself on the fireplace screen, managing to singe his palm before falling to the floor with a sickening thud. Their mother screamed, Emily’s mouth dropped open, and Mary walked to the front door and out of it, without so much as a jacket over her blue cotton dress.
After their father got to his feet, he grumbled, straightening his shirt, as though he had merely tripped.
“How long until we eat?” he asked his wife, and she said they could sit down now if he liked, and so the three of them ate in silence. Emily’s heart raced. She wondered where her sister had gone, what on earth she was thinking at this moment.
Mary never came home that night. Their mother said perhaps they should call the police. But their father just shook his head bitterly, no.
Part Two
A few evenings later, Emily sat in the kitchen helping her mother with dinner. The smells from the oven were torture, and she willed herself not to pick at the bread, reminding herself of her diet and her upcoming date. The front door creaked open.
She looked up from the potatoes she was peeling as Mary walked into the room, in a navy skirt suit and hat Emily had never seen before.
“Oh darling, you’re back!” their mother said, running to her and hugging her tightly.
Mary laughed. “I’m back. I’m so sorry, I just—”
A moment later, their father stormed into the room. He was even drunker than usual, and he walked straight to her, shoving their mother out of the way.
“Get out of my house, you slut,” he said. “I never want to see your fat face again.”
“Dad,” she said. “Please listen.”
He slapped her hard, leaving a red print of his palm on her pale cheek. “Out!” he screamed. “Out! Out!”
Mary looked pleadingly at their mother, who turned back to the stove in fear. There was no telling what he might do to her if she tried to come to Mary’s defense. Their mother was a warm woman, but a coward. She had given birth to two stillborns before the rest of them came along, and her sister, Emily’s Aunt Rose (who had scandalously divorced her rum-runner husband and moved to New York City where she now worked at Macy’s in Herald Square) said this loss had changed her completely, swept away any edge, any fight she had in her. For this, her surviving children paid the price.
Emily sat still as a rock. Part of her wanted to go to her sister’s side and hug her, run upstairs to their room together and lock the door, like when they were little girls. But another part was livid: Why had Mary tried to bring Henry to their parents’ home? She must have known how their father would react. Where had she been these past few nights? Out in some hotel that he was paying for, corrupting her soul for an evening’s worth of pleasure? And where had she gotten the money for a whole new suit?
“Emily,” Mary said softly.
“Don’t talk to her,” their father shouted. “No one in this family is to speak to her again as long as she’s with him. Now I said get out.”
And so she turned and walked back down the front hall. The sound of her sobbing lasted even after she closed the door behind her.
Their father went upstairs, and Emily began to cry.
“There, there,” her mother said, not moving from her spot at the stove. “He just needs time.”
* * *
November twenty-eighth. The night of the Holy Cross-Boston College game at Fenway Park. BC was undefeated, and winning this game meant a trip to the Sugar Bowl. But in an upset that sent Emily’s brothers into a tizzy (no doubt they’d lost plenty gambling on the damn game), Holy Cross won, fifty-five to twelve.
Emily didn’t give a fig about football; she hadn’t even gone to the game with the boys. But she had been preparing to meet Roger Kelleher at the Cocoanut Grove later that night since right after lunch. Emily was naturally slender, but after two weeks of dieting, her waist looked exquisitely small, her silver silk dress fell perfectly over her hips, pooling on the floor and covering the scuffed toes of her shoes. The dress belonged to Mary. It had been a week since their father sent her away.
Emily was wearing Mary’s mink coat tonight, too. It was a birthday present from her married boyfriend, and she had left it behind. Finders, keepers, Emily thought. Someone ought to be getting wear out of it.
She herself didn’t have a single thing nice enough to wear to the Cocoanut Grove. Everyone would be in formal evening attire, and she wasn’t about to try to dress up a work outfit with pearls, as her mother had suggested. But her brothers had invited her to come. Tommy’s college roommate from BC had an older brother named Roger who’d gone to Holy Cross, and Tommy had gotten it into his head that this older brother ought to marry one of his sisters.
For months he had been telling Emily and Mary how wonderful Roger was, even though he hadn’t served, and wasn’t a Boston College grad. Finally, over dinner a few Sundays earlier, Emily had said, “If you like the man so much, why don’t you marry him?”
“Ha. Ha.” Tommy said. “Just come out with us to the BC game at the end of the month, and afterward we’ll go somewhere special for dancing.”
Having no intention of meeting a potential husband in the freezing cold and wind of a football game, she had agreed to meet the boys at the Cocoanut Grove at 7:30.
Emily had been there only twice before, once to see Joe Frisco perform, and the other time, Helen Morgan. She loved the place — the long oval bar beside the stage, the wide dance floor surrounded by tables covered in white linen cloths. The room was lined with palm trees and dripping lights. In summertime, the roof could actually be rolled back for dancing under the stars.
She arrived on time, gliding through the revolving door, feeling like a movie star. She wore a bright red lipstick that her Aunt Rose had sent from New York at Christmas. She had styled her hair in a soft wave, just like Veronica Lake in “Sullivan’s Travels.”
A few months earlier, they had expanded the club to accommodate the servicemen who came while on furloughs, and the wartime workers flush with overtime pay. Still, hundreds of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder: Handsome men in uniform by the dozens, glamorous women in their finest gowns. Every corner was full, every table taken up. Emily scanned the room for her brothers, pushing through the crowd. She looked at the packed dance floor, but she couldn’t make any of them out. She lingered over small talk with the redheaded coat check girl for far too long, just to have something to do — Yes, it was a chilly one out there. Pity about Boston College, and did Emily know that the entire team was meant to be there tonight for their victory party, but had cancelled, and it was a shame really, because the redhead had been pining after the BC fullback for positively ages.
When she went back toward the dance floor, the boys still hadn’t arrived. And so she stood alone by the bar, feeling like an absolute fool, and vowing to murder her brothers as soon as she saw them again.
It was ten to eight when they finally rolled in, drunk as skunks and towed by a couple of strangers. Emily’s brothers were big, dark, strapping men, built like lumberjacks. The pair behind them looked like scarecrows in comparison — rather short and spindly, with hair the color of straw.
“There she is!” her brother Paul hollered out, far too loudly. A few people turned to stare.
“You’re late,” she snapped, when the boys got close enough. “I’ve been waiting here forever.”
“Oh now, don’t be dramatic,” Paul said. “We’re only a few minutes behind schedule, and believe me you wouldn’t have wanted to see us before we had a drink. Tom was in tears!” He laughed uproariously, and the other boys joined him.
It hit her then, as it sometimes did, that her brothers had been to war and back, like so many other young men in the room. That all of them — herself included — had suffered for this war, with coffee and tea and meat and butter mostly out of the question, with news all the time of boys you had grown up with, dead and gone. Yet they still got upset over football games, and dressed up to go dancing. Life didn’t stop for anything.
One of the scarecrows extended a hand. “Roger Kelleher,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Is he handsome?” she had asked her brother Tommy a few night earlier, and he had scoffed a little before saying, “He looks like Clark Gable, okay?”
She realized now that her brother had been joking.
“Can I get you a drink?” the scarecrow asked, and Emily requested a gin and tonic with a lime.
He made his way up to the bar and she grabbed her brother’s sleeve.
“Tommy, I’m gonna kill you,” she hissed.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“He’s a dud!”
“What?” Tommy sounded shocked. “Quit being such a snob. Roger’s great. Just give him a chance, will ya?”
He returned a few minutes later with a glass of clear liquid on ice.
“They were fresh out of limes,” Roger said. “Or should that be, out of fresh limes?”
Emily hated him at once. She took the glass from his hand, and turned toward the others to let all of them — especially Roger — know that she wasn’t interested.
“These boys of ours are a bunch of real sore losers, Emily,” Roger said with a laugh. Of course he meant his own brother too, but she certainly didn’t appreciate him referring to her brothers that way.
“Never underestimate the power of the Crusaders,” he went on, beaming. “Fifty-five to twelve, how does that feel, fellas? I bet it smarts, huh?”
“Well, there’s such a thing as an ungraceful winner, too, you know,” Emily said. She gulped down the gin.
“Uh-oh,” Tommy said. “Pay her no attention, Roger. She’s just mad at us.”
“No, no, she’s right,” Roger said with a grin. “Very ungentlemanly of me.”
“Well, I owe you a drink, I guess,” Tommy said.
“You owe me more than that, but we can discuss it when your sister’s not around,” Roger chuckled.
Emily emptied her glass. “Tommy, another G and T,” she said. “You certainly owe me a drink, too.”
“May I say, you look positively stunning,” Roger said to her in a hush while Tommy was at the bar and the rest of the boys were talking sports. “Your brother said you were a looker, but, wow. How he ever saw fit to set a guy like me up with a girl like you, I’ll never know.”
My sentiments exactly, she thought, though she just smiled back.
She drank the second glass down quickly, and then another. She began to feel light, swaying in place to the music. She hadn’t had much to eat or drink for the past two weeks, and she thought a bit tipsily that this Roger wasn’t really the sort of man you needed to starve yourself for, but maybe he wasn’t so bad.
He asked her to dance. It was a fast one — “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree,” even better than the Glenn Miller version — and she was pleasantly surprised to find that he wasn’t as clumsy as she might have imagined. He dipped her back and his big palm felt warm against her spine. He spun her and spun her until she began to feel dizzy. After a while, Emily grabbed his arm and said, “I need to sit down. I’m a little lightheaded.”
He took her hand, and led her off the floor. Her brothers were gone by then, off to the movies to forget the pain of what they had seen at Fenway Park. Emily couldn’t believe they would just up and leave her like that, but leave they had.
There were no empty seats at the bar, and Roger approached a bunch of young men in uniform clustered around the taps. He put a hand on one man’s shoulder.
“Hey buddy, do you mind giving up your seat to the lady?”
Emily wasn’t sure whether to be mortified or enchanted.
The young man jumped to his feet — he was tall with jet black hair and broad shoulders. She wished for a minute that Roger Kelleher could somehow figure out a way to look like him.
“My pleasure,” he said with a wink as he stood up, and Emily wanted to grab him and say that she wasn’t with this person, not really. Years later, she imagined, they’d tell their children the story of how they’d met while she was on some dreadful fix-up courtesy of her stupid brother, and then her real true love came along and offered up his chair.
But a moment later, the man was pulled off into the crowd, and vanished.
“Can I get you anything?” Roger asked. “Another drink? A glass of water?”
She knew she ought to go for the water, or see if he’d like to sit down to dinner so she could get some food into her stomach, but Emily just said,
“Another gin sounds swell.”
It was then, as he leaned forward so that the bartender could hear him over the din that Emily spotted her sister coming through the crowd on Henry’s arm.
Part Three
Mary’s cheeks were flushed, and she wore an emerald green gown that Emily had never seen before. She was laughing gaily at something Henry whispered into her ear.
Emily felt her insides tighten up. What would she say? What would this Roger think when he saw her sister out on the town with a married man? She thought of turning her back to the crowd so that Mary might not see her, but then their eyes met. Mary took hold of Henry’s hand and pulled him toward Emily, moving slowly through the crowd as the band switched gears and began to play a soft, slow song, one of Emily’s favorites, “Moonlight Serenade.”
“Emily!” Mary said when she reached her side. She threw her arms around Emily’s shoulders, and Roger looked over in surprise. “Oh it is so good to see you! How’s mom? And the boys?”
“Everyone’s fine,” Emily said. “The boys were here, but they left. This is Tommy’s friend.”
“Roger,” Roger said, extending his arm and shaking Henry’s hand vigorously, like it was a carton of orange juice. “Roger Kelleher. Pleased to meet you, uhh—”
“Henry,” Henry said. “And this is Mary.”
“My sister,” Emily said quickly. The wedding ring on Henry’s finger gleamed, and Emily felt overwhelmed with the shame Mary was bringing upon herself, on all of them, really.
“Nice dress,” Mary said with a smile.
“Oh, I know, it’s yours, I—”
“No, really, it looks lovely on you,” Mary said. “Have it.”
Something in this plain statement made Emily’s blood run hard and fast. How dare her sister flaunt what she had done, how dare she speak to Emily that way, as if she were above her now?
“Well, I was about to leave, so if you don’t have anything else to say,” Emily said briskly.
“Oh, we were just going downstairs for a bit. Come have a round with us,” Mary said.
Down below was the Melody Lounge, a dim bar with booths and tables scattered here and there, where Emily had allowed Martin McDonough to kiss her right out in the open one night over the summer, considering it her patriotic duty, since he would be heading to the Pacific the following day, though after a moment she told him to stop.
“Sure,” Roger said.
“No,” Emily said. “How dare you, Mary? You heard Dad. As long as you’re with him, none of us can be around you. You’ve made your choice.”
“Please, come on now,” Mary said.
“You’ve made our parents the laughing stock of the neighborhood,” Emily said hotly. “You’ve disgraced our entire family.”
Mary looked stunned.
“Well then. We won’t disturb you anymore. Have a great night.”
She turned and walked toward the red carpeted staircase that led down to the Melody Lounge, with Henry trailing sheepishly behind.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on your sister,” Roger said.
“You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said.
“No, you’re right. I don’t.”
“I’m going home now,” she said. “Please get my coat.”
“I’ll walk you,” he said.
“Walk me? I’m all the way in Hyde Park,” she said. “And anyway, I live with my parents and I’m a good girl, so forget whatever it is you had in mind.”
She knew he had nothing of the sort in mind, but she was spoiling for a fight.
“I meant I’d walk you to a taxi,” he said with a smile. “You’re just bound and determined not to like me, aren’t you, Emily Brennan?”
It was nine-thirty when they left. Outside the air was frigid, and Emily pulled the fur coat tight around her waist.
“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said. “I’m sorry for — well, I’m not quite sure what. I guess another date is out of the question.”
“I should say so,” she snapped. Then, a bit softer, “Sorry for wrecking your evening.”
“You didn’t wreck anything,” he said. “The night’s still young. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go back in there and find me a pretty girl to dance with.”
“You ought to,” she said.
He grinned goofily. “Shoot, I hoped that would make you jealous.”
Part Four
She wept in the taxi on the ride home. She was done for. All around her, other girls were getting married, having children — her best friend Virginia was already pregnant with her second. And Mary, frumpy, fat Mary, had become this elegant lady with a man who adored her and bought her all the finest things. She was never coming home, and because of that, Emily would never be a famous artist like she’d hoped, or even a housewife, hosting garden parties and luncheons. No, she would be alone, and work her days away at the phone company with all the other spinsters.
At home, she took the leftover roast from the stove to the living room coffee table and pulled bits of it off with her fingers, still wearing the silver gown. Such dinners were a rarity these days, and she knew her mother was probably planning to serve the remaining meat the next night, but she didn’t care.
Emily cried between bites and got the hiccups, but she kept eating. Her father was at work, and her mother sat across from her in the old faded armchair, gently shushing her, saying everything would be fine, and Emily just needed to stop acting so silly and dramatic.
They had the radio on in the background, Irish music that her mother loved. It was smack in the middle of “The Wild Colonial Boy” when they heard the voice that changed everything. Emily never could listen to that song again.
A news announcer interrupted the program: “A massive fire has broken out at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub on State Street,” he said. “Dozens of injuries and deaths are already being reported.”
Her mother jumped to her feet.
“Your brothers?” she said quickly.
“No, they left before me,” Emily said. She thought momentarily of the redheaded coat check girl, and hoped she’d get out all right. And then she remembered.
“Mary was there,” she said, frantic. “Mary was still inside.”
They would learn later from news reports that the fire got started only half an hour or so after Emily left. Two young lovers kissed in a corner of the Melody Lounge, and perhaps as Emily herself once had, the girl said it was too indiscrete, too bright under the lights like that, with a hundred other people in the room. And so her date reached up over their heads and removed an electric light bulb where it hung on a wire stretched from one palm tree to another. Minutes later, it was forgotten — they were interrupted by a teasing friend, maybe, or drawn out to the dance floor where the piano player had just started another verse of “Bell Bottom Trousers.”
Upstairs, Mickey Alpert was about to lift his baton for the “Star Spangled Banner,” an intro to the second show. Every table on the dine-and-dance floor was filled. Meanwhile, down below, a bartender instructed a sixteen-year-old busboy to replace the missing light bulb, so he climbed onto a chair, and lit a match to help himself see, wobbling a bit as he held the match in one hand and the bulb in the other, and accidentally setting fire to one of the artificial palms.
The leather-covered walls had been treated with fire-resistant spray, but the holiday ornaments, newly strung around the basement bar, caught fire anyway. Flames raced up the stairs and tore through the flimsy silk draping, fire balls dropping down onto the tables and the bar and the bandstand and the floor, where 700 people were crammed in, dancing, drinking, flirting, and then — a moment later — pushing toward the doors, crushing one another, smothering human beings to death to get out alive, which precious few of them did.
The room was dim enough on its own and quickly filled with smoke. With the first surge of people, the revolving door that Emily had walked in and out of only hours earlier was clogged in a rush and jammed into place. The glass shattered. Only the central steel beam remained after all was said and done.
The auxiliary doors had been bolted shut. People were crushed to death, pushing in vain to get out. Others ran aimlessly in all directions, fighting madly to escape before they died of smoke inhalation or were trampled where they stood. Later, the fire chief told the Boston Globe that really, the fire hadn’t been so particularly bad. Panic caused far more deaths than flames. If people hadn’t flooded the exits, and had allowed the firemen in, if they hadn’t had to dig through piles of bodies at every entrance to reach the fire, he estimated there would have been at most a handful of deaths.
The sailors, the soldiers, and the boys from the Coast Guard, all home on leave for Thanksgiving, just out having themselves a night, were suddenly thrown into rescue duty. Many escaped death in combat overseas, only to succumb to the flames back home in Boston, running back into the disaster five times, falling dead on the sixth.
Bodies were heaped six feet high at all of the entrances, to the top of the doors. Bodies fell into the stone basement when the ballroom floor collapsed. Rescuers tried to pull people through the doors; arms and legs came off in their hands.
Flames burst through the roof of the club, and a huge crowd gathered in the street, blocking the path of ambulances and fire trucks, until soldiers formed a human chain and pushed the throngs down Shawmut Street and into Park Square.
Ambulances came from the hospitals, from Lynn, Newton, Brookline, and the Charlestown Navy Yard, but there still weren’t enough of them. Railway express trucks were called into service to haul corpses away. Taxicabs drove patients to the hospital. Corpses and living victims lay two deep in the garage next door to the club. Those who died on the way to help were piled in hospital lobbies while doctors and nurses scrambled to save the living.
So many bodies were lined up in the halls of Boston City Hospital that it took days to identify them all, and many were burned beyond recognition. A hundred off-duty doctors were attending a dance in the adjacent nurses’ home, and quickly rushed to help.
There was the threat of a blood shortage and so the government allowed access to the emergency blood banks that had been set up as a safety measure against air raids. And the police used the method set in place for an air raid, of receiving calls from relatives and loved ones, of assigning cards to the victims: white for the missing, green for the injured, and pink for the identified dead. Everyone’s focus had been on the war so long, expecting a catastrophe tied to it. Now something else entirely had taken its place.
Every medical examiner in the state was summonsed to come and help identify the dead. It was hardest to figure out who the women were. Servicemen were recognizable because of their uniforms. The other men had their licenses in their billfolds, but the women, dressed in gowns, had nothing that revealed who they were. Later, 400 fur coats and evening wraps were found in the coat-check, ruined by water and smoke. The redheaded gal with the crush on the Boston College fullback lay dead in the midst of them, slumped against the back wall of the tiny room.
Four hundred ninety-two people died in all. Among them a boy from Emily’s high school class, a young man she had been out with on two or three dates; the handsome serviceman who’d given up his seat to her; and her own dear sister. Her sister.
Part Five
Mary’s body was found in a pile of corpses, on the steps leading up from the Melody Lounge. She was one of the first to die, trampled to death, her body burned up; her face crushed by the boot of a man twice her size. It was impossible to say how long she had lived that way, or how much she had suffered.
At the mortuary in Hyde Park the next morning, a cold rain fell, and Mayor Tobin himself read the names of the dead. After almost every one, someone screamed, the most shrill and awful sound she had yet to hear in her life, or ever would. The rare name that was met with silence made Emily wonder whether that person’s loved ones had no idea yet. Maybe they were on the Cape, walking along a frigid beach with mugs of coffee, and they hadn’t switched on the radio all weekend long. She wished that for herself, for her mother. Perhaps most of all for her wretched father, who blamed himself for what had happened to Mary, and would continue to do so until the day he died.
He didn’t come with them to the mortuary. It was just Emily, her brothers, and their mother. When the mayor read Mary’s name, their mother collapsed, and Tom and Paul caught her by her elbows before she hit the concrete.
They all cried in the car on the way back to the house, but didn’t say a word. At a red light at Davidson and Collicot, Emily’s mother broke the silence: “You saw her,” she said. “Was she happy, Emily?”
“Yes,” Emily said. Her whole body ached.
“What did she say?” their mother asked.
“She said to tell all of you she loves you,” Emily said. “Honest, she did.”
“What did you say to her?” her mother replied.
The words came flooding back to her now: You’ve disgraced our entire family. The pained look on poor Mary’s face, the last words they would ever exchange.
But Emily only said, “I told her how much we all love her, too.”
At home, she drank half a bottle of vodka, stolen from her father’s secret hiding place under the basement steps, and passed out in her bed upstairs. Mary’s bed beside it had been unoccupied for weeks, but now somehow it felt truly empty for the first time. Emily woke up after dinner. She went to the bathroom and vomited, the vodka like acid in her throat, her temples throbbing. Down on her knees, she noticed a little pearl hair comb of her sister’s that must have fallen behind the sink without notice. Emily took it in her hand, sat down with her back against the tub, and ran her fingers over every inch.
* * *
In the days that followed the fire, the Boston Globe reported little else. The first day, the headline was about the old Western star Buck Jones, who suffered burns at a dinner in his honor, and died just minutes before his wife reached his bedside to say goodbye. Next to that, were reports of others: The body of a young girl was found in the phone booth, where she had tried in vain to call her father to come save her; a couple married that day in Cambridge both died, along with their entire bridal party; a few men and women managed to smash the small window panes along Piedmont Street, but they were impaled on the jagged glass in the windows’ metal frames, and died there. With their heads and shoulders out to safety, priests stood before them on the sidewalk and read them their last rites.
Emily’s father wept openly at the kitchen table as he read it all. The sight of him terrified her. A week earlier, a year earlier, it was bad enough to imagine living at home for the rest of her life — with her father’s angry drinking, her mother’s feeble passivity. But now it seemed worse a fate than death. They would never recover, not from this.
On the second morning, she went down the front hall early, her throat tightening, her hands shaking. She wanted to hide the paper before her father saw it, as if this might make him forget what had passed. When she opened the front door, a burst of cold wind shot through her. She shook open the paper, and saw his picture there, right on the front page: Mary’s Henry, in a hospital bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his smiling wife by his side. He had lived. It was then that the grief filled Emily completely, then that she thought for the first and perhaps only time in her life that there was no God.
At the wake, she scanned the crowd for Henry. He never appeared.
They had been forced to use a closed casket, and Emily was happy for that. Still, it felt torturous, standing beside that cold wooden box, calmly shaking the hands of so many sympathetic neighbors and cousins and friends.
“I’m here for you,” they’d say, or “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Emily wanted to tear their hair out. She wanted to tell them that they could never understand this, not really. Part of her wondered how many of them were there merely to bear witness to tragedy — I knew a girl once, from Sunday School, who died at the Cocoanut Grove, they might say years later. I was at her wake. She was so badly burned they couldn’t even have a proper viewing.
Her brothers stood still as stone in their dark suits, rarely speaking a word. Her mother couldn’t even stand, and had to sit in a folding chair with Aunt Rose fanning her with her gloves. Their father was at the end of the receiving line. There were tears at the corners of his eyes that never once fell.
The afternoon wore on that way, and Emily tried to focus on a window at the back of the room, a little slice of blue sky. For most people in the world, today was just a day like any other. Out there, people were buying groceries and teaching children how to ride bicycles and getting dressed for a movie. Why, why, had this happened to Mary, to all of them? Her life, she feared, was as finished as her sister’s.
Then she saw them come through the door: Roger Kelleher, the scarecrow she had met at the Cocoanut Grove, and his brother. In the rush of grief and visitors and funeral arrangements, Emily had wondered over and over whether her date that night had gone back into the club after putting her in a cab, and if so, whether he’d made it out alive. Now her heart expanded at the sight of him.
She moved out of her place at the front of the room, feeling her family’s eyes on her. She walked through the winding line of mourners, past a long table of cold sandwiches and cake. She met him at the back wall, reached for his hand, and whispered, “Come outside for a smoke?”
He squeezed her hand tight, though his palm was clammy. He didn’t let go.
Out on the sidewalk, the bright sun hit her eyes, and she had to squint. He wasn’t a handsome man, not by a longshot, but he was here. She was surprised to feel something like elation at the sight of him, something like gratitude.
“It was good of you to come,” she said, as he lit her cigarette.
“Of course,” he said. “How are you holding up?”
She shrugged.
“I’m so sorry for your l—”
“Please don’t say it,” she said.
He nodded. “Then I’ll just say thank you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“By finding me one hundred percent resistible, you saved my life.”
She smiled weakly.
“Your sister knew you loved her,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because sisters always do,” he said. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for the things you said to her that night.”
“What makes you think that I—” she began, but she started to cry and couldn’t complete the thought.
“Just put that conversation from your head,” he said. “It never happened.”
She wondered if she could possibly love this person, who was excessively kind, but not much of a man in her opinion, nothing like she’d ever imagined for herself. He wrapped his arms around her, and she let herself sink into him.
Everyone in Boston knew someone who had been killed that night, or who had narrowly escaped death. Her brother Tom had once dated a chorus girl who jumped from a second story window into the arms of a male dancer on the street. A teenage kid from the neighborhood who worked as a busboy braved the fumes by sticking his head in an ice cream drum. The Boston College football team, having canceled their game-night victory celebration, lived on because of losing to Holy Cross. And Emily and Roger got into a fight on their first date and decided to go home early.
They were married the following spring. If her parents had assumed she would stay at home, they didn’t say so, and she never once asked their permission to leave.
When they moved into their tiny house in Hingham, the first thing she did was spend half a week’s pay on real groceries, the type of thing her mother bought before the war — cream and coffee beans and sugar, and good butter, Land O’ Lakes. She would never live one more goddamn day without real butter in her fridge, no matter what. Her brothers loved this about the new house, and came over every Sunday night for a roast. (This was before Paul became a big-shot engineer at Chrysler and got a little too big for his britches; before Tommy married that terrible low-class Kitty, a woman for whom Emily had no tolerance.)
Her parents came, too. Her father was more sullen than ever, and rarely said a word.
“Easy on the butter, it costs a fortune,” her mother would plead with the boys as they smeared it onto their rolls, or cut big chunks off and let them melt over the meat.
But Emily would say, “No, no, take more.”
She wore her sister’s mink coat and dove grey suede gloves until the weather turned humid. Sometimes she thought of this as a tribute to Mary, and others she wondered if it was just plain selfish. But what was so wrong with being selfish anyway? She wore that coat and gloves again the next winter and the next, until they were threadbare and had to be sent out to Goodwill with a couple of Roger’s old suits.
