The roof. It wasn’t a bad idea. Especially when the elevator was silent and shut and the ninth floor was an inferno and the fire kept pouring in the windows. Bella turned toward the nearest stairway, carrying Harriet and pulling on Mr. Blanck’s sleeve.
Harriet squirmed in Bella’s arms.
“No!” she said. “Those are the wrong stairs. The ’vator operator said only the Greene Street stairs go up to the roof. Only the Greene Street stairs!”
“That’s true,” Mr. Blanck said vacantly. “She’s right.”
Bella turned him around so they were facing the other stairway. Those were the stairs Bella had used only moments before, to climb to the tenth floor. But now the door was hidden by the billows of smoke, and the flames were thickest on that side of the room.
“Hurry up!” she snapped at Mr. Blanck.
They made it halfway across the room before Mr. Blanck stopped again. A man was standing on a table, pounding on a piece of glass in the ceiling. Bella could tell this was ridiculous: He was using his bare hands, and the glass was thick. But Mr. Blanck blinked up at the man.
“Mr. Silk?” he called. “Do you think the skylight’s the best way out?”
Mr. Silk didn’t hear or didn’t bother answering, but Mr. Blanck kept standing there, waiting.
Bella put Harriet down on the ground—“Just for a second,” she whispered to the girl—and ran over to the table.
“Sir!” she hollered. “Sir! Come down from there! Use the stairs!”
While Bella was standing by the table, another man emerged from the smoke and picked up Harriet Blanck, took Mr. Blanck’s arm, and led the whole group of them toward the stairs.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take you to safety,” the man said, and Mr. Blanck said, “Thank you, Markowitz. I knew I could count on you.”
What about me? Bella wanted to yell after him. But it didn’t matter. Somebody was taking care of the girls, and Bella didn’t have to worry about them anymore.
The smoke was thicker now. Bella could barely see the stupid man still pounding on the skylight. Dimly, she could hear voices around her, other people rushing toward the stairs. A girl slumped against Bella’s back, then slid down to the floor. Bella crouched down beside the girl.
“What are you doing?” Bella screamed at her.
The girl was still breathing, so she wasn’t dead; she’d just fainted.
“Wake up!” Bella screamed, shaking the girl’s shoulders. The girl’s head rolled from side to side; her eyes lolled in their sockets.
Live, Bella’s mama had told her. Save the living. But it didn’t seem as though Bella could do both. Was Bella supposed to save the fainting girl and the stupid man? Or was she supposed to save herself?
Another man appeared in the smoke—Mr. Bernstein, the factory manager.
“Lucy Wesselofsky, get off that floor!” he screamed. “Mr. Silk, come down from that table!”
And then Bella and Mr. Bernstein were working together, lifting the girl, pulling down the man, shoving them both toward the stairs. Bella felt as though she were walking through fire, breathing flames. Or maybe it was only the heat, pressing in on all sides of them. They reached the stairwell, and there were flames there, too, reaching in through the broken window.
“I can’t . . . ,” the girl, Lucy, moaned.
“You will!” Bella shouted at her.
Lucy had a jacket on, and Bella pulled it up over both their heads, shielding their faces as they ran blindly up the stairs. Bella stopped running only when she felt fresh air in her lungs. As soon as they stumbled out onto the roof, she lowered the jacket and discovered that it was burning now too, lines of flame shooting along the collar, along the seams and cuffs.
Bella dropped the jacket. She patted out the sparks on her skirt.
“It’s no better up here,” Lucy sobbed.
That wasn’t exactly true. There was a serene blue sky overhead, and pure white clouds that seemed a million miles away from flames and smoke. But the smoke was blowing out into the sky, and the flames were beginning to crawl up from the tenth floor.
“Then we keep going,” Bella said.
She realized that that was what she’d been doing her entire life. Her father died, and Bella went to America. Pietro vanished, and she started working two jobs. Her mother and siblings died, and she joined the strike. The strike ended, and she and Yetta helped Jane. On and on and on it went; she’d had to climb back from one tragedy or setback after another. That was life.
But life was also three girls skipping down the street, their arms entwined; Rocco Luciano paying his penny back faithfully, every single week; Rahel’s new baby. It was bread and potatoes and roses, velvet and real.
Lucy had begun to stumble over toward the edge of the roof.
“No!” Bella screamed at her. “You’ll fall!”
It was a sheer drop down to Greene Street, ten stories below. Bella couldn’t even see clear to the ground, through all the smoke and flames and floating ash. Bella tugged Lucy over to the side of the roof facing Washington Place, but there was no safe way down from there, either. Frantically, she looked around. The other two sides of the roof ran into towering brick walls, walls two or three times Bella’s height.
“You brought me here to die!” Lucy spat at her. “You ruined my jacket for nothing!”
“No, wait—”
Through the smoke, Bella saw a man beginning to climb one of the walls, digging his fingers into the mortar, balancing his toes between the bricks. At the top, he disappeared over the edge—onto the roof of the building next door, Bella realized. It was just taller than the Asch Building; that was why it looked like nothing but a wall.
Moments later, the man came back to the edge of the other building’s roof and lowered a ladder down toward the factory.
“We’ll go that way,” Bella said. “That building’s not on fire.”
They rushed over with dozens of others who’d escaped from the tenth floor. Mr. Blanck was already handing Harriet up the ladder, then Millicent climbed up behind her, almost falling because she was trying so hard to hold her skirt in close around her legs. Men were shoving Mr. Blanck up the ladder.
“Bella! Come up here! There’s no fire on this roof!” Harriet cried out, leaning over the edge. Now that she was safe, she seemed to regard the whole experience as an adventure. Millicent was retching and trembling and Mr. Blanck was sweating and moaning, “My factory ... my factory . . . ,” but Harriet sounded as if she’d done nothing more dangerous than riding a Ferris wheel at Coney Island.
“Thanks, but I’m going to wait for Jane,” Bella called back to her.
She made sure that Lucy climbed up to safety, without fainting again or falling. Then Bella backed away from the ladder, peering into the faces around her. Only thirty or forty people had found their way to the roof, but it was hard to tell if Jane was among them. Everyone was soot-covered and singed, and the smoke swirled around them. Bella kept walking backward, staring.
Somebody grabbed her arm.
“Careful, there, miss.”
It was Mr. Bernstein, the factory manager again. He pointed at the ground. She’d been one step away from falling down into a huge hole, a gaping pit of flames. Why was there a hole in the roof? Bella squinted, puzzled, her mind flashing back to a man standing on a table, pounding on seemingly unbreakable glass. The skylight. This was where the skylight had been—the man’s attempt to break it had been pitiful, but the fire had shattered the glass almost effortlessly.
Bella stared down into the flames, hypnotized.
“It’s not safe here,” Mr. Bernstein said. “Go over to the ladders.”
“I’m looking for my friend,” Bella said. “What if she’s still down there?”
She pointed down into the fire, where the flames bubbled across the remains of a table.
“There was nobody left on the tenth floor,” Mr. Bernstein said impatiently. “Or the eighth. I don’t think. I was on the eighth floor too.”
Mr. Bernstein turned his head, avoiding smoke. Avoiding her question.
“Somebody!” he yelled. “Get this girl out of here!”
A figure appeared out of the smoke, a young man.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
He tugged on Bella’s arm, pulling her toward another set of ladders rigged up alongside the other building.
“They said the NYU library was in danger of burning,” the young man said. “I said, ‘So are those girls on that roof. Let the law books burn. I’m going to save the girls.’”
Bella liked the sound of his voice, so firm and certain in the shifting smoke.
“Yetta and Jane were both on the ninth floor,” she said. The words were pounding in her head now that she herself was being saved. She barely realized that she’d spoken aloud until the young man startled at the names.
“Yetta and Jane—?” For the first time, he peered at Bella closely, as if trying to discern her features under the soot and ash. “You were with that crowd?”
Then Bella recognized the young man: It was Charles Livingston, the law student Yetta had badgered with her questions about union rights.
“We thought you’d marry Jane someday,” Bella said, with a giggle that twisted in her throat. Maybe it wasn’t a giggle at all. Maybe it was a sob.
“Really?” Charles said. “Not until we get you to safety.”
He handed her up the ladder, to other law students. But then he climbed up behind her and led her down stairs crowded with boys carrying books. They made it to an elevator, then out to the sidewalk.
“I always meet Yetta and Jane by the Greene Street door,” Bella told Charles. “They’ll be waiting for me. They’ll be worried.”
But the sidewalk was blocked off by fire trucks and firemen and policemen shooing the crowds away. The policemen were completely different from how they’d been during the strike: They weren’t slamming heads together and beating people with their nightsticks. They were patting the backs of sobbing girls. They were—could it be?—sobbing themselves.
“Yetta and Jane have to see this,” Bella told Charles. “We can wait right across the street. They’ll find me. They will.”
Bella couldn’t have said when she knew that they wouldn’t. It felt like hours that she and Charles stood there. It felt like an eternity. She could see the sheets covering the lumps on the sidewalk—sheets dropped so hurriedly that a hand stuck out here, a boot with a shiny buckle stuck out there. She could see the firemen carrying out more lumps draped with sheets. These lumps seemed too small somehow, burned down to their essence. Bella didn’t need to see underneath the sheet on the Washington Place sidewalk that covered two bodies, not one. She didn’t need to hear the fireman who muttered, as he carried out yet another corpse: “At least this one had a nice ring before she died.” She knew without evidence, without proof, without actually knowing.
Bella began keening. She stood on her own two feet, leaning on no one, but Charles stood beside her, his arm around her shoulders as she wailed. And then Rocco was there and Rahel, hugging her and sobbing and wailing, too. When Bella’s family had died, she’d felt so alone; she’d been frantic in her grief because she was the only one left to mourn them. But now she was surrounded by mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends and fiancés, all mourning for their own dead. And it seemed to Bella that she could feel the sorrow spreading, to millionaires in their mansions and to women in fur coats who’d walked a picket line beside a hungry girl they now wondered about, to college girls who’d gone to jail for an immigrant girl’s job, to young, dreamy-eyed men who’d bought a strike-edition newspaper from a pretty girl they now remembered as if she were their first, true, lost love. And, to Bella, at a moment when everything else seemed so tragically wrong, this, at least, seemed right: that all of New York City was grieving with her.
Mrs. Livingston
Harriet is crying now, wailing in the same brokenhearted way Mrs. Livingston had wailed, all those years ago. It is a messy sort of crying, for Harriet seems to be past caring about wiping away snot or tears, past even thinking about propriety or appearances.
Mrs. Livingston does not hand the girl a handkerchief. She lets her cry.
“Papa told us Jane survived,” Harriet finally sobs out. “He said—he said he fired her and forbade her to ever see us again, because she left us alone during the fire.”
Even after all these years, that stings.
“Jane didn’t know about the fire,” Mrs. Livingston protests. “Not when she left you. And when she couldn’t get back to the stairs, she told me to look for you.”
As she has done so many times, Mrs. Livingston thinks about how that day could have gone differently. She still wants to rewrite history. What if Jane had heard an alarm before she got to the ninth floor? What if she’d carried Harriet and Millicent up to the roof before the flames came? What if she’d ridden the elevator straight down to the street? And what if Yetta had realized that the ninth floor was nearly hopeless—what if she and Jacob had run down the stairs, not up? What if they hadn’t been so noble? But changing even one of her friends’ actions meant that Mrs. Livingston’s life might have been forfeited, in place of Yetta’s or Jane’s. Failing to save their own lives, they’d saved hers instead.
For the longest time, Mrs. Livingston wished that she could have traded fates with them.
“When you came and got us from beside the elevator,” Harriet says slowly. “It was Jane who sent you to us?”
Mrs. Livingston nods, her throat suddenly too swollen to speak.
“Then, you saved our lives,” Harriet says. “You got Papa to start walking toward the stairs.”
“Lots of people helped you,” Mrs. Livingston says. It is a delicate thing, saving somebody’s life. That’s why, when she tries to rewrite history, she gets so paralyzed. If only the fire escape had worked, if only the elevators had been bigger, if only the door hadn’t been locked, if only the fire department had had better nets, bigger ladders . . . Just to save Yetta’s life, just to save Jane’s, even in hindsight, would have required such stitching-over of history, so much changing of the world as it had actually been.
Harriet is sniffling now. She pulls a lace-trimmed handkerchief out of her pocket—evidently she had one all along, but was too overwrought to use it before. She dabs at her eyes, wipes her nose.
“The fire was a terrible thing. A disaster,” she says. “I wish it had never happened. But it was an accident. My father and Uncle Isaac didn’t want anyone to die.”
“They could have enforced the rules about smoking,” Mrs. Livingston says. “They could have had fire drills. They could have told us the fire had started. They could have—”
Harriet whips up out of her chair.
“Lots of factories were like Triangle!” she hisses, right in Mrs. Livingston’s face. “That’s what factories were, back then— they were crowded and noisy and busy, and there wasn’t any money for extras, because the factory owners had to compete with every other factory owner. A few pennies here and there could be the difference between staying in business and starving on the streets.”
“Extras?” Mrs. Livingston asks. “Something that could have saved one hundred and forty-six lives is an extra?”
Harriet collapses back into her chair.
“No,” she whispers. White-faced, she stares past Mrs. Livingston’s shoulder. “In March 1908, a furnace overheated in a primary school in Collinwood, Ohio. The exits were defective and people panicked. More than one hundred and seventy children burned, suffocated, or were crushed to death. February 1909, a wooden theater in Acalpulco, Mexico, caught fire during a film, and three hundred people were killed. November 1909, in Cherry, Illinois, there was a mine explosion and fire, and over two hundred and fifty miners died. Shall I go on?”
“No,” Mrs. Livingston says.
“Why is my father the worst criminal?” Ha
rriet asks. “Why is the Triangle fire the one that everyone remembers?”
Mrs. Livingston wants to say, We should remember them all, everyone who’s lost. But the numbers are overwhelming. Harriet has clearly selected these tragedies—memorized these tragedies—because of their death counts. Mrs. Livingston cannot think about one hundred seventy dead children. She cannot think about three hundred people going out for a night on the town, excited about seeing a moving picture, then meeting the end of their lives. She cannot think about being trapped under the ground, dying there. She can only remember Yetta and Jane, can only miss and mourn them.
“I think ... I think people remember the Triangle fire because of the strike,” she tells Harriet. “People had cheered us on. They’d donated money to our cause, they’d bailed us out of jail, they’d marveled at our courage. We weren’t faceless and anonymous and easily forgotten after the strike. And then so many of us died so young, so tragically, so soon after. People felt like they knew us. They took our deaths personally.”
Harriet absorbs this. She’s slumped over in her chair now, utterly defeated.
“Come here,” Mrs. Livingston says.
She leads Harriet up the stairs, pushes open a door.
“Ssh,” she warns.
Inside the dim room, in two beds, there are two little girls sound asleep, deep into their afternoon naps.
“My daughters,” Mrs. Livingston whispers. “Yetta is four and Jane is two.”
Harriet nods, her eyes brimming with tears. She seems to see the beauty of the sleep-tangled dark curls, the peaceful rise and fall of each little chest, the fierceness in the way Yetta hugs her favorite doll, the soothing rhythm of Jane sucking her thumb. She stands there watching the little girls until Mrs. Livingston beckons to her and they tiptoe back down the stairs.
“You have to understand,” Mrs. Livingston says, settling back into her chair. “They can’t ever replace my friends. They don’t make up for anyone I lost. But they are ... a way to carry on. A way to remember that isn’t sorrow and grief.” She pauses. “Rahel has a daughter named Yetta too.”
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