Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “There’s none to be had.” Eliot snapped the reins and the chaise kicked forward. “Most men are either abed or drunk at this hour on a Saturday night.”

  “We’re neither!” shouted Theodore as the chaise came out the drive.

  “Who is it?” Eliot pulled up on the reins.

  “Bunting and Wedge,” said Theodore.

  “The librarians? Wedge of Brattle Street? Bunting of Church Green?”

  Theodore smiled up at a face that looked ghostly blue in the gaslight. “Your memory is excellent, sir.”

  Eliot looked at Bunting. “And your home is on fire, sir, if reports are correct.”

  “My home?” Samuel Bunting gasped and brought a hand to his mouth. “On fire?”

  “It began in a building on Summer Street, not far from Church Green. I’m told it’s spreading,” said Eliot. “I’m bound for the office of our treasurer to rescue our records.”

  “Oh, God,” said Samuel Bunting. “Theodore, what am I to do?”

  “Get in,” said Eliot. “The both of you. Perhaps we can help each other.”

  By the time Eliot’s chaise clattered over the West Boston Bridge, the hump of Beacon Hill was silhouetted against a sky radiating waves of red, pink, and purple, as if there were a great bruise expanding somewhere beyond.

  “Hurry. Please hurry,” said Samuel Bunting.

  “I’ll hurry only so fast as a single mare pulling an overloaded chaise will go,” answered Eliot.

  “But my house . . . the family portraits . . . my father’s Orientals.”

  Theodore said, “I asked you to move away when everyone else did.”

  “There you go”—Samuel waved his handkerchief—“always criticizing.”

  Theodore was jammed between the grim president and the hysterical librarian, who leaned around Theodore and said to Eliot, “If the university paid us a decent wage, we wouldn’t have to live in our families’ old houses long after the neighborhood had sold out to merchants and banks. Even the New South congregation left.”

  “Then you should have left,” said Eliot. “If your congregation moves, take it as a sign.”

  “Oh, Mr. President, but you are heartless, sir,” said Bunting.

  “If he were heartless,” said Theodore, “he would have left us to ride the horsecars. Stop complaining and make a plan.”

  “A plan!” cried Bunting. “You make a plan. I can’t even think.”

  The chaise lurched past the hospital, up the slope of Cambridge Street, amid crowds hurrying toward the flames.

  “The plan,” Eliot told them, “is to go through Scollay Square and down State Street to the treasurer’s. Once we’ve rescued our securities, we’ll make for Church Green.”

  Eliot’s horse was growing more skittish, as if she could smell the smoke. Or perhaps she was spooked by the sight of ten firemen hauling a big steaming pumper up the street.

  “Where are their horses?” asked Theodore.

  “Distemper. It’s killed most of the fire horses in the city.” Eliot snapped his reins.

  As they pushed through Scollay Square, the deep roar of the fire became a living groan, and Theodore swore that he could feel the heat, though they were still shielded by block upon block of five-story granite buildings, far more substantial than the wooden structures lost in the Chicago fire the year before.

  No one could have imagined that such modern buildings—with their huge plate-glass windows framed in cast iron, with their square slate-covered mansard roofs framed in wood—could burn so ferociously. But the hundreds of joined structures were built on streets just wide enough for two carts to pass, and as the heat shattered the windows and as the wood in the mansards ignited, they became perfect granite chimneys.

  At the intersection of State and Washington Streets, a police officer stepped in front of Eliot’s chaise. The horse reared and almost turned them over.

  “Here now! Here!” shouted the policeman. “You can’t be goin’ down Washington, ’cept on foot. A chaise with a spooked horse’ll clog things for certain!”

  “Do you think we’re here to gawk?” demanded Eliot. “Let us pass. We’re bound down State Street.”

  “And who might you be, up to no good on State Street?”

  “I’m the president of Harvard.” Eliot thrust his face forward so that the policeman could see it, and almost as if he had planned it, a column of flame jumped somewhere, illuminating the birthmark. “I’m going to retrieve the college financial records.”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said the policeman. “If you’re goin’ down State Street, good luck to you, sir, but just keep the horse away from the fire.”

  And on they went to Devonshire Street, where one of the few steamer companies with a healthy team came roaring past, its bell clanging, its three big horses straining, the smoke pouring from the engine stack.

  Theodore could actually feel the wind from the galloping horses. Then he looked to his right and realized that it wasn’t the horses that were causing the wind, but the fire, which was sucking air along the narrow streets, sucking it in like a living thing, causing—there—an explosion of flame to burst through the smoking roof of a building three blocks away.

  “Oh, God!” cried Samuel. “My house! I must save my house!” The little man leapt out of the chaise and began to run toward the fire.

  Theodore jumped down and called after him, then looked back at Eliot. “Sir—”

  “Go,” said Eliot.

  “But the university records.”

  “I’ll save them myself.” Eliot looked up at the flames jumping from roof to roof. “I have time. Your friend may not.”

  A few blocks away, men who had seen hell in war were seeing it again in Boston.

  Heywood Wedge and Dan Callahan needed only to park on Tremont Street and step into the crowd surging down Winter, toward the flames rising beyond Washington.

  Even on two good legs, Heywood would not have ventured into such a maelstrom, except that the company offices—investment, accounting, and legal—were in a magnificent new structure called the Wedge-Fleming-Royce Block, built on Summer Street, on the old Cowgill land. Shortly after Heywood and Amelia had merged families, their families had merged firms.

  “Stay on my left, sir,” said Dan Callahan. “That way I can keep the mob from knockin’ you off your cane.”

  Though gas lamps on Winter Street still put out their bluish white glow, the light all around was red—shimmering in the plate-glass windows, reacting like a chemical that turned gray granite to pink, and glowing on the faces of hundreds of men pushing toward the flames.

  But those men did not go like mindless creatures drawn to disaster. Most carried bags or boxes or satchels. A few pulled handcarts they hoped to fill with what might be left of their own goods or someone else’s. And neither the thunderous roar of a wall collapsing into Summer Street nor a blizzard of embers exploding into the air could keep them from surging forward.

  Then a unit of Veteran Guards—wearing old uniforms and forage caps, with bayonets fixed—came rushing along Washington Street, and like a sluice gate, they closed the intersection.

  “We can’t let you through!” shouted the captain. “The fire’s comin’ this way!”

  “The fire’s goin’ every way,” cried someone in the crowd. “Let us through!”

  And a hundred voices joined in. “Let us through! . . . Stand aside! . . . Let us save what we can!”

  “Now, lads,” answered the captain, “let the firemen do their jobs.”

  “Dan,” said Heywood, “we have to get through. There are papers to save.”

  Then they heard the clanging of a fire bell, followed by cries of “Gangway! Gangway!” And Steamer Number Twelve came rolling down Winter Street, hauled by a crew of firemen in leather helmets.

  Dan whispered to Heywood, “Give the lads a hand.” And they helped push the steamer past the guards and onto Summer Street.

  And somehow, in the midst of this disaster, four men met.


  Theodore Wedge and Samuel Bunting rushed south along Devonshire, past buildings igniting one after another like Roman candles. Then they came by the brilliant white Beebe Block, which dominated Winthrop Square on sunny days and dominated it now, with fire roaring from hundreds of windows, while firehoses sent streams of water hissing impotently against the red-hot granite walls.

  Meanwhile, Heywood Wedge and Dan Callahan slipped away from the steamer crew and hurried east on Summer Street, past C. F. Hovey and Company, past Trinity Church, past Stedman and Penners, Wholesalers of Drygoods.

  “They’re all doomed”—Heywood looked up at the flying firebrands and the smoke seeping through the roofs—“every building from here back to Washington Street.”

  “Includin’ yours.” Dan looked ahead.

  “We have to try to save the company papers,” said Heywood.

  So they hurried on, with carpetbags over their heads to protect them from red-hot flecks of granite and from plate-glass windows that exploded as the pressure built up behind them and sent shards of glass flying into the street.

  If there was any good in this, it was that there were no families caught in their beds. This was a district for business. Most of the people who would have been living here had moved away long ago. One who had not was the man they saw as they approached the intersection of Summer and Devonshire.

  They knew him. And even though the fire was roaring, the firemen shouting, and the granite walls cracking like thunder, they could hear him crying.

  Samuel Bunting was on his knees in front of the y-shaped intersection where the majestic New South Church had once stood. Now, a mercantile building was there, and the flames were tearing it apart. But Samuel’s eyes were fixed on an ancient bowfront on the far side of the intersection. It was the last private home in the neighborhood. It was his, and it was a four-story tower of flame.

  “Theodore!” Heywood came hobbling up to them with Dan Callahan close beside. “Get him out of the street before he gets hurt.”

  “I don’t care if I get hurt,” cried Samuel.

  “Don’t say that.” Theodore put his hands under Bunting’s arms and tried to help him to his feet. “Here, here . . .”

  “No.” Samuel curled up like a ball on the street.

  Theodore said to Dan and Heywood, “Help us.”

  “No!” cried Heywood. “If that old poof can’t—”

  “Don’t call him that!” cried Theodore. “Don’t call anyone that, damn you!”

  “Let him stay there and cry, then,” Heywood said. “You cry with him. I’m going to save the family papers.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir.” Dan was looking ahead to the W.F.R. Block, as it was called, and flames were leaping in half the windows.

  Heywood said, “The office windows are still dark. The fire hasn’t gotten there yet. But we must hurry.”

  Samuel Bunting continued to cry, “My house, my paintings, my carpets.”

  Heywood looked at Samuel, shook his head, and said to Dan, “Come on.”

  Theodore grabbed Heywood’s sleeve. “You can’t go into that building.”

  “Would Aunt Dorothy say that?” demanded Heywood. “What about family wills and secret codicils? What about that ‘small gift of majestic proportions’? Its whereabouts may even be told in one of the safes.”

  “But a good safe is supposed to be fireproof!” cried Theodore.

  And a row of windows blew out right beside them.

  Samuel Bunting screamed in fright, and the others all dropped to their knees as though a Confederate battery had just opened up.

  And Heywood brought his big, drooping mustache close to Theodore’s face. “Tonight, nothing is fireproof.”

  “For certain not that wooden leg,” answered Theodore. “So don’t go into that building.”

  “Then who will?” Heywood looked down at Bunting. “This old poof?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Dan. “I been in tighter scrapes.”

  Just then, the roof of Bunting’s bowfront fell in with a tremendous crash that sent flames leaping into the sky and Samuel screaming toward his house.

  “No!” cried Theodore, and he ran after his friend.

  Dan went to follow them, but Heywood grabbed his arm. “Let him go. Let the old poof burn. Burning is all that men like that have ahead of them, anyway.”

  “But, sir . . .” Dan wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked hard into Heywood’s eyes. “He’s a human man, just like me or you.”

  “He can’t be saved.”

  “I saved you, sir,” said Dan, “when they told me you couldn’t be saved.”

  For a moment, Heywood Wedge seemed to soften. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words were blown away with the row of windows that exploded out of the W.F.R. Block. Then Heywood pointed Dan down the street. “Now, you must save my papers.”

  By the time they had gone another block, the gold-leaf lettering—WEDGE, FLEMING, AND ROYCE—was beginning to bubble.

  “Here.” Heywood shoved a piece of paper into Dan’s hands. “This is the combination to the safe. Open it, fill the carpetbags, and get out fast.”

  Meanwhile, a big fireman had grabbed Samuel Bunting and pushed him back to Theodore, shouting, “Save your friend. There’s nothin’ we can do for his house.”

  Theodore wrapped both arms around Samuel and wrestled him into the middle of the street, where Samuel collapsed in tears. Then Theodore looked down the street and saw Heywood giving a slip of paper to Callahan.

  The Irishman glanced at it, looked up at the burning building, took a deep breath, and ran inside.

  Few Bostonians slept that night. In the tenements of the North End, on the rooftops of South Boston, and along the avenues of the Back Bay, people watched the sky to see which way the sparks might blow. But only the city’s commercial heart was devoured. And just as they would never know how the fire started, they did not understand why it stopped about seven o’clock on Sunday night, with so much more yet to burn.

  But it had burned enough, and Monday’s dawn revealed a panorama of destruction. Almost everything from Washington Street to the waterfront, from Summer Street to Liberty Square, was gone. Here and there, a wall stood starkly, its windows framing broken columns, or mounds of smoking brick, or ash heaps of burned goods—china, cutlery, fabrics, footwear, carpet, furniture, books, hand tools, harpsichords, all the manufacture of a modern society—all of it, for sixty acres, all utterly gone.

  In the brokerage houses, men calculated the chances of survival for the city’s insurance companies. On the streets, they said that Boston’s business district now resembled Richmond after the siege.

  The fire never reached State Street and the offices of Harvard’s treasurer, but the midnight ride of Charles William Eliot instantly became part of college lore.

  And the efforts of Dan Callahan became part of the Wedge family lore, though the fire took him and the family papers both.

  On that bright and sunny Monday afternoon, Theodore and his sister went down Summer Street, through the devastation, toward the W.F.R. Block.

  There were guard units about, keeping order, and steamers were still pumping water onto smoldering rubble, and the stink of melted metal and baked stone hung heavy in the air. But the business of cleaning up had begun.

  On one side of the street, men were removing coffins from the crypt of Trinity Church. On the other, scavengers hunted for melted silver in the ruins of Shreve, Crump, and Low. And in the middle of the street, a man had set a large camera on a tripod. As Theodore and Dorothy stepped around him, he asked if they would stand in the middle of Summer Street, so as to give scale to the disaster. They kept walking.

  They found Heywood with several others, including Amelia’s father, the rotund Augustus Fleming, watching workers pick through a mountain of granite debris and rubble that had been the W.F.R. Block.

  When Heywood saw his aunt and uncle, he stepped away from the others and came up to them. “Why are you two here? There
’s nothing to be done.”

  “Amelia told us you were trying to find your safe,” said Dorothy.

  “Better to find the body of the man who died opening it,” said Theodore.

  Heywood ignored his aunt and said to his uncle, without a trace of true sympathy, “How’s your friend?”

  “Mr. Bunting is at my home,” said Dorothy. “Recovering.”

  “Good,” snorted Heywood. “Keep him there. Half the city is digging out of the ruins, and poor Mr. Bunting is indisposed.”

  “That’s very unkind,” said Theodore.

  “Unkind or not, I don’t want him living in any property of mine.”

  Theodore Wedge said, “If you mean the house on Brattle Street—”

  “I do,” said Heywood. “Given our losses here, I may be forced to sell it.”

  “Sell it?” sputtered Theodore. “Where will I live?”

  “You and Samuel both can live with me,” said Dorothy. “This long-mustached Napoleon holds no deed on my house.”

  Heywood ignored them both, because half a dozen men had tied a rope to a large safe and were hauling it out of the rubble. He stepped closer and asked, “Is that it?”

  “’Fraid so,” said one of the workmen. “Looks like the combination was worked.”

  And sure enough, the great safe had been opened.

  “My man must have gotten it open before the roof fell in,” said Heywood.

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference,” said Mr. Fleming. “I thought the safe in my office was fireproof, too, but when I opened it and reached inside, a thousand dollars in cash turned to green powder in my hands. Fire just plain baked it.”

  Theodore stood beside his sister and whispered, “A small gift of majestic proportion . . . will we ever know what it was that Lydia left us?”

  “You and I won’t. Not now. Not after this. But we are not freed from the responsibilities Lydia left us.” Dorothy turned on her heel and started back up Summer Street. “Come along, Theodore. We have work to do.”

  iii

  “It has taken me most of my life,” said Theodore Wedge on a rainy March afternoon twenty-six years later, “to understand what the gift was that my aunt Lydia promised to Harvard at the Bicentenary.”