by J. G. Sandom
Hundreds of victims were memorialized that day, drawn in by cart and horse-drawn carriage to the Lutheran Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens, where, even now, the memorial spins, hazy, in the air. Cool, white marble. Waiting to be built. Dozens of men in dark suits carried tiny homemade coffins under their arms. They spilled along the streets. So many undertakers charged such extortionate rates that most of the people of Kleindeutchland were forced to plane home-fashioned coffins on their dining tables after work. They were so small, so delicate, those doll boxes. They looked so tiny in their arms.
And then it was my turn. I saw my mangled body being lowered down, across the frightful lip of that mass grave – great hole for the unrecognized remembered. I felt my torso slide, my legs unfold beneath me. Legs wrapped about yet other limbs, despite our individual coffins. And arms and fingers, intertwined. That’s how I finally stumbled onto Nixie. What was left of her was propped up underneath another girl so that it was hard to tell where one began and the other finished. They had been baked together by the fire. My sister sat there, looking so nonchalant, without fear, without the slightest trepidation. I caught her eye, and I could feel her smile. She recognized me with a nod. I nodded back, but she was off already, already someplace else, snuggling up against somebody else’s soul.
Beyond the waving limbs, I looked up, and I could just make out the crowd, lining the lip, gazing down as if at hell itself. They looked afraid. Was that the word? They looked so . . . mortal. So I reached out to them, to give them comfort, but my arms slipped through them like a memory, and I held nothing – just the unknown. What might have been? What might have been? If you say it three times, will it be?
My mother and father, Helmuth and Louisa stood off to the side, as if staring down into that pit would render their feelings too clear. They stood apart. They stared at everything and anything that wasn’t there, directly in front of them – right there. This hole! Couldn’t you see me in this hole?
The earth is wet and cool. It isn’t what I imagined it would be. Not fearsome, dank. Not darkly claustrophobic. It’s like a blanket tucked around your neck. It does not smother or encumber. It does not hold you down. I’m wrapped inside the bosom of the earth. I’m safe. Protected. Below my stone memorial. Far from uncertain, and yet still unresolved. Our heads float through the clouds. Our feet splay clay.
I could see Bingham and his father, Otto Goldstein. It made me shiver to remember. It had been anything but fun in him.
I saw our neighbors from downstairs, their neighbors and their neighbors’ neighbors. Nancy and Gretchen. And Frederick from school, and his mother, too. His father was but three corpses down, observing the ceremony with the detached self-consciousness that’s generally reserved exclusively for atheists. He found the whole thing, well . . . amusing. And Klaus and Eric and Mathilda, with that birthmark shaped like a sea horse on her left breast. And Mrs. Kemp, the butcher’s wife, and her two daughters, the twins. They’re all in here, beside me.
I could even feel Dustin. I could feel him peering out at me from behind that poplar. Watching and waiting. Watching and waiting. But for what? For some release? He was thinking of me. He could see me running still on that warm summer’s day, my head turned, and that wisp of golden brown hair between my teeth. I will run with you forever, Dustin.
And I could feel my sister looking too, and spotting you – the way you stood there, slightly bent, peering out from between green branches. A little comical perhaps, because you were the least clown-like of all of us. You were the most preoccupied, most serious. The most intense.
I remember the day I confronted you at school, and called you melancholy. You stood there for such a long time after that, up against that wall, just thinking. You smiled and shrugged and said, “Aware, not melancholy. Sometimes I wish I weren’t. I wish I were more like you.”
“Like me?” I answered, fishing.
“Hearing instead of listening. Being instead of becoming. Living – not just alive. I don’t know. You’re . . . you.”
I could have eaten you, just then, right there and then. I could have popped you right into my mouth like some boiled sweet, a sugar ball, like caramel on the tongue. You were the first and only boy who ever made me feel so special. I’d heard such things from my father, of course – so many times, in fact, that they no longer sounded real. But when you talked with me that way, I was no longer “one of the Meer girls.” Nor just another winsome student from St. Mark’s. We stood outside Kleindeutchland. We were New Yorkers, plain and simple, dreaming the dream of America. And I became yours.
Louisa was standing by you now. She had wandered off and stood beside you by the poplar. You were both whispering. You weren’t looking at her – not directly, anyway. You were staring at the ceremony. But you were talking to her. You were talking, and she stood quite still, her head cocked, intent on every word, each syllable. I could see your lips move. The words were lost – too many voices murmured – but I could see them forming words: pressed tight, and oval; little “ohs” and “ahs” and “oohs.”
“Get out of there,” my mother said. “Louisa, get away. At once.”
The Reverand Haas looked gravely down his nose. He was not used to being interrupted. He looked back at his Bible. A visible ripple shifted through the crowd. There were hundreds of people at the ceremony. They’d come from all over New York. Dressed in their Sunday best on Saturday, they already felt out of place. They carried the guilt of the survivor on their backs. It lined their overcoats. They shifted their feet and sighed collectively, a great gray mass of grief.
“Get away from him.”
Louisa startled like a deer. She stepped back without thinking, almost tripping on the path. Dustin reached out with his right hand to steady her.
“Keep your hands off my daughter. There’s blood on those hands. Keep them away, you dirty Jew. Was Christ’s blood not enough?”
“Minna!” my father cried.
The Reverend Haas had found his place. “‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’” He looked desperately about his flock but he’d already lost them. They’d been submerged inside a different melodrama. The crowd was watching my mother carrying on.
“He killed your sister, Mallory. And Nixie too. Burned them alive. Murderer.” She turned and faced the great gray mass. “Are you just going to stand there?” She pointed at Dustin in the trees. “He’s there. Right there. Look! The Jew who murdered your wives. Who killed your daughters and your sisters. Murderer! Is there not one brave man amongst you?”
That’s when the earth moved underneath me. I felt the tremor and the tear. Between the shifting and the opening up, the deck simply gave way. We slipped at first, then slid, all of those arms and legs, like clumps of chicken skin and fat choking a drain. Into the earth. Into the wet red earth. The Jew who murdered your wives . . .
Louisa began to walk back down the path. She looked transfixed. She glowed. Everyone stared at her. No one knew what to do. They’d never seen her look that way before. “No one murdered Mallory,” she said. “Nor Nixie. Unless, perhaps, the steamship company. They died, Mama, that’s all. We all need to accept that.”
And the earth stopped sliding downward. I felt myself begin to rise, to spin above the ground like some great samara, a whirligig, just hovering, just out of reach, on some late-summer twilight breeze. Looking down from my memorial.
That’s all, Mama. That’s all that happened. We just died.
Chapter 7
June 20, 1904
Coroner’s Office, New York City
William O’Gorman, the coroner, lay his head down on his desk, buried his fleshy face within his giant alabaster arms, and moaned. The knowledge that an inquest was unavoidable languished like gravity on his frame. Despite, or because of his massive shoulders, his bulbous bi- and triceps, his beefy neck, he felt crushed, completely inundated, as if he wer
e sitting at the bottom of the sea. He could barely breathe. He had not slept in four days, and it was starting to show.
“Alright,” he finally said to the jackal-like man in the corner.
The man grinned, prestidigitating perfect teeth. He had the smile of a movie star trapped in a small, lupine frame. “It was inevitable, boss. The machine moves only one way. Forward. Either you roll with it, or you get rolled underneath. I prefer it on top.”
“Spare me the folksy metaphors, Stanley. I’ve been pulling bloated bodies out of the surf for the past three days, nonstop. And do you know what the worst part about it is? I don’t know how many more are going to wash up someplace else tomorrow. Under some pier. Trapped in some causeway. Sucked in through some intake valve. As far as I’m concerned, Stanley, tomorrow can wait. Let the dead bury themselves.”
Once, as a young man, Bill O’Gorman had seen a wave of typhoid fever lay waste to an entire section of his hometown in North Jersey, and the local coroner had become a kind of celebrity civil servant, a font of clinical wisdom, quite the hero in a heroless age. So, it was with a perverse sense of justice for his hubris at secretly wishing for a typhoid epidemic of his own to overcome, at praying for it, that he was thrust into the maelstrom of the inquest.
The Slocum mishap was a political “tar baby.” Handled masterfully, it might reward. But, ultimately, if you were identified with it, the pundits intoned, you were marked with death as poignantly as any tar oil marked the hand. A pall would linger over you like a cloud till Judgment Day. And politicians already had enough rough seas to weather. So they’d bequeathed it to William O’Gorman. After all, no city ordinance or statute had been broken. This wasn’t a job for the city prosecutor. It was a fire, plain and simple. It called for a coroner’s inquest – formal enough to satisfy the critics, yet still four blocks from City Hall, far enough away to keep any distasteful stench at bay.
Most wanted to go after the Captain. The fact that he’d traveled ever northward, to North Brother Island, seemed perversely comical in the face of what was happening all around him. His decks had become barbecues, blazing grills, blackened with human flesh. Yet he kept steaming northward.
Others blamed the crew. Ill trained and ill equipped, the Negro deckhands were the easiest targets of all. They had no advocates, no special-interest group. Nobody cared about them, so they served a vital purpose: They marked what no one wanted to be. They were the fringe, the boundary.
And then there were the moneymen, who wanted to target the company. “The line’s got the deepest pockets,” they were fond of saying. And there was precedent for compensation through awards. A trust fund needed to be set up by the city immediately.
Those who combined a lust for legal vengeance with an unbridled hunger for financial punishment, those who craved personal attack while coveting corporate compensation, who thirsted most for justice, claimed that the officers should pay – the members of the Knickerbocker Board. Those who had reaped, or could reap, most of all from the steamboat company’s successes were the ones who should be penalized most harshly – Frank A. Barnaby, the president, and his establishment coterie.
And, finally, there were those who wanted to see the country change, to pass new laws, not just to satisfy a sense of justice, but to ensure this kind of human tragedy would never be performed upon the public stage again. They blamed the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service – the USSIS. After all, while the Slocum had recently passed an inspection, it was clear her lifeboats had been inert, immovable; her hoses ancient and flawed; her life-vests decrepit; and, worst, her crew untrained. The USSIS. How quickly this industry acronym became coin of the common realm. Within hours of the disaster, uncounted amateurs changed into instant experts regarding all things maritime, bandying about phrases like USSIS as if they’d been saying them all their lives. For a few weeks, everyone thought they knew everything.
What did you know, William O’Gorman? I stand beside you, trying to hold you up. Trying to transfer to you whatever it is that keeps me going. Trying to feed your hunger for revenge, or justice – that shining thing inside of you, that burns like a living sun.
What did you know as you began to fill out your subpoenas one by one: William Van Schaick, ship’s master; Barnaby, Frank A., of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company; Miss Hall, his secretary; and Henry Lundberg, USSIS Inspector. These were the heart and soul of the drama. The crew and passengers were naught but supporting witnesses. It was this ensemble that would help O’Gorman finally understand how something so terrible, and so tactically avoidable, could have transpired in the first place. And on his watch. It made a typhoid epidemic seem humdrum.
He gathered up the signed subpoenas. He brandished them in his hand.
Stanley Sikorsky smiled and said, “You won’t regret this.”
“I regretted it the minute the Slocum went down. But you’re right, Stanley, as much as I hate to admit it. The machine. It only goes only one way.”
Stanley Sikorsky skedaddled from the room. He had secured his scrap of wildebeest.
O’Gorman sat at his desk. He found it difficult to move. He sat transfixed. It felt like he’d taken a punch, a sudden uppercut, and he was just too stunned to lie down.
* * *
Otto Goldstein hosted a meeting of the Council for German Economic Opportunity, where each month he lost almost twenty-eight dollars entertaining friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, but which rendered dividends immeasurable in power and prestige, which – in turn – could be morphed into money. Goldstein was king in his small kingdom.
The Council met each fortnight at the Golden Rose. It was one of the oldest German business clubs in New York City, boasting in excess of three thousand paying members, and twice that many aspirants. The top twenty-five officers, the richest men in Kleindeutchland, made up the Council. Every major delicatessen, each lumber and hardware store, each beer garden of significance, each haberdashery of note, each bakery and slaughterhouse was represented in this room.
They sat around the table in the Golden Rose’s most lavish private dining room. They were debating the defection of many of their members to the growing ranks of Socialist Workers’ Clubs. The entire next generation of councilmen was growing up reading Marx.
“We must do something,” Hans Schulman Bering said. “I’ve lost my two best managers.” Tall and willowy, Bering looked like a Prussian Colonel, with boisterous mustaches that seemed to be fighting to the death immediately below his nose. Bering owned nearly all the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Kleindeutchland, plus a bank.
“You fired them,” the laconic Pieter Max replied. Max owned all the fish stores and most of the fish wholesalers in the district. He was short and squat, with the chilling poise and patience of an octopus.
“Well, I had to. They spread talk about collective bargaining, of unions and the like. What was I meant to do? How do you manage it, Otto?” Bering asked.
Goldstein took a long draught of pale ale. He put his stein down on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He waited another moment and said, “Excuse me? What did you say? Manage what exactly, Hans?”
The pause would have been enough to ward off most inquisitors. But Bering would not be assuaged. This issue of the workers’ clubs was like a burr under his saddle. “Your Meister Brauer, Arvin. He runs the People’s Union.”
“I believe that Leonard Meer is chairman of that club.”
“You know what I mean, Goldstein. Meer may be chairman, but we all know who’s in charge. If he hadn’t been born a Jew . . . Anyway, how do you keep your master brewer in line?”
“Arvin Brauer?” said Max. “The father of Dustin Brauer, no?”
“The same,” said Bering. His sparkling light blue eyes grew wide. He had found reinforcements.
“What will you do about Dustin?” said Pieter Max with a frown.
“I thought we were talking about the workers’ clubs.”
“We’ve been dancing about this all night,”
Max replied. He spoke with uncharacteristic candor. He slammed his stein on the table. “Ernest, Derek, Bruno. Herman, Kiefer and Kurt. You lost your wives. Otis and Roland. Rudolph and Willis. You lost daughters.” He turned with a sneer upon Goldstein. “I lost two daughters, my eldest son, and Gretchen, my wife. Otto, you lost your Ula. We’ve just spent almost two hours talking about charities and rehabilitation funds. We’ve touched on everything – from coffins to insurance collateral. We’ve even gone through our obligatory moaning about the blasted workers’ clubs . . . again. As we do each fortnight. No one has said it, so I will. What about this Dustin Brauer? What are we going to do? Or are we to think our chairman is so concerned, so worried about losing his master brewer, that he’d rather cover his eyes to the truth? The inevitable. The indisputable. Someone must pay, Otto, someone. The people demand it. Someone was responsible, and someone has to pay.”
“I believe that’s what the coroner’s inquest is about,” said Goldstein flatly. He could feel the eyes of everyone in the room. They were burning a hole in his head, his neck and back. He felt like an insect, like one of those cockroaches he used to set on fire with his magnifying glass as a boy.
“The coroner’s inquest!” Kiefer Munch began to laugh. Gnomelike and bald, and dressed in a plain black suit, it was hard to believe Munch ran the largest haberdashery in Kleindeutchland. “You think our families care about the inquest? Our women – those who survived, that is; those who remain – all know it’s a farce. Frank Barnaby will never serve a day in jail, mark my words. Neither will Lundberg. The city will protect them. But who will protect us, if not this Council? Let them have their public inquest. They’ll crucify the captain and sweep the rest away, like so much trash, under the city rug.”
“He’s right,” said Bering.
“We cannot duck this,” Max said blithely. “What do we do about Dustin?”
“The fact my master brewer is his father is irrelevant. But I need to stand aside,” said Goldstein, waving a hand. “I have to, gentlemen. Don’t you see? The only one who’s accused Dustin of anything is my own son. And, to be frank–”
