Here to Stay

by John Hersey

  What neither of them could know was that at that very time policemen, firemen, and Civil Defense volunteers were combing all the tenements along Main Street and telling the occupants to leave the buildings and go to higher ground, but that somehow the warners had missed the stairway on which the ladies lived, and that they, together with Art Royer and a woman who was still sleeping like a log on the second floor, Mrs. Peter Placek, had been left stranded in the Landi block.

  * * *

  —

  The next two hours were anxious ones for Jessica Kelley and Yvonne Brochu. They were together, and that was a comfort, but they were very restless. They went out on the back porch that opened off Mrs. Kelley’s rooms, where they peered down at the black river, and then they went to the windows in Yvonne’s apartment, at the front, and looked down at the street. The water, which was flowing swiftly along Main Street—from left to right as they viewed it—had crept over the sidewalk across the way. They saw three cabs standing in front of the office of Sox’s Taxi, two buildings upstreet on the near side; the water eddied around the wheels of the cars. The street seemed deserted. They expected to see some kind of Civil Defense rescue boat in the flooded street, and they kept talking about it. Where was the boat? When would it come? They returned to the porch in the rear, and then went again to Yvonne’s window, and so kept uneasily moving back and forth. Finally, Mrs. Kelley felt she must rest her foot, and she took the straight chair from her dressing table and sat in the kitchen.

  Then the lights went out. At first, both women had an impulse to scream for help, but they talked it over in trembling voices and decided that that would be useless in the rain-muffled night. There was no telephone in the building. Yvonne remembered that she had some candles, and, groping her way into her rooms, she found them and lit several. The light was a relief.

  Mrs. Kelley began by candlelight to gather about her chair a small pile of valuables: her black winter coat, her handbag, her prayer book, a few keepsakes, and the dear little green box that contained her insulin packet. In her handbag were her insurance policies, her old-age-assistance papers, and three cloth purses containing her ready money. For more than twenty years she had lived on the nest eggs her prudent husband and father had left her, and now the money was nearly gone. Only a few weeks before, she had applied to the government for old-age assistance, for which she qualified now that her savings were running out. She had just had word that payments of about a hundred dollars a month, plus, she understood, an extra allowance on account of her diabetes, would begin soon. As she sat there in the kitchen, she thought, for some reason, of a ten-dollar gold piece that C. L. Maloney, an undertaker friend of her husband’s, had given them once as a luck piece, as lightly as if it had been no more than a lucky penny. Then she remembered the meerschaum pipe the Winsted Elks had given her husband just before a trip he and she took to Florida in the twenties; he was fussy about that pipe, but it had led to his giving up cigars, thank goodness. Those were the heydays! They had been caught right in the thick of the Florida boom-and-bust. They had had two thousand dollars in traveller’s checks with them, and her husband had literally sunk it in some real estate: the land had turned out to be under water. They had had to wait to come home until another thousand dollars could be wired down from Winsted. There had been a time, in the early years of the century, when the Strong Manufacturing Company, the makers of coffin trimmings for whom her husband worked, met its payroll in gold coins. When she and her husband built a new home, at 23 Wetmore Avenue, they had laid the foundations, waited a year till the crisis of 1907 blew over, then resumed building, and paid in gold the stonemasons who laid the front walk. She forgot how many gold coins that had been, but she clearly remembered handing them out. The men had scarcely been able to believe their eyes. For years she had had stocks and bonds galore. Somehow, Connecticut Light & Power and United States Steel had seemed to last the longest. Now there was almost nothing left, and she was watching every penny. Ten dollars a week to Anna Landi for rent; less than that for food; enough for a while in the three purses; a tiny bit in the bank.

  Jessica Kelley could not say that she was worth much, but what she was worth was right there in the stiff straight chair in the middle of the kitchen and on the floor around it.

  Yvonne Brochu, coming on her surrounded by her little heap of wealth, said, “My goodness, Jessie, where do you think you’re going?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Mrs. Kelley said. “But I’m ready.”

  * * *

  —

  At about three-thirty, in a rented room in a building known as the Keywan block, diagonally across and about a hundred yards up the river from the tenement where Mrs. Kelley sat waiting, a young man named Frank Stoklasa was being roused from sleep by the occupant of the next room. If two human beings could be opposites, Jessica Kelley and Frank Stoklasa were those two. Stoklasa was a steeplejack, thirty-two years old. Though slight, he was powerfully built. His hairy arms were covered with tattoos that he himself had applied: a dagger, a snake, the Disney dog called Goofy, a ship, and a death’s-head. On the backs of the proximal phalanges of the fingers of his left hand were tattooed the letters L-O-V-E; on those of his right hand, H-A-T-E. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and his friends called him Tex. He was part Czech, part Polish, part Indian. His mother died when he was twenty-two months old. As a small boy, he had typhoid, diphtheria, and pneumonia. When he was about six, his father took him, his two brothers, and his sister to Oklahoma, and they became Okies—migrant farm workers who moved with the seasons to California, Arizona, Texas, and back to Oklahoma. Stoklasa went to school through the ninth grade, then left his family and wandered all over the Southwest, earning a bare living as a truck driver, gas-station attendant, and common laborer. He fought in a Golden Gloves tournament once in San Francisco. He was taken into the Army in 1942, and after his training went to North Africa and Germany as an infantryman. In the Rhineland, he was wounded by shrapnel in his upper right arm, and was shipped home and eventually discharged.

  Because he liked to get high up on things, and because the money in crazy climbing was good, Stoklasa went to work for the Brown Steeple-Jacking Company, in Norfolk, Virginia. He did welding and painting on water towers, smokestacks, radio towers, and bridges. Once a man has become a seasoned steeplejack, he hears of every topnotch steeplejacking company in the country, and after two years Stoklasa left Brown’s in favor of the Universal Construction Company, in Indianapolis. There he took up, as a hobby, stock-car racing—because it was dangerous—but after some time he dropped it, not because it was too dangerous but because of the expense. From Universal, Stoklasa moved to the Kessler Company, in Fremont, Ohio, and he stayed there nearly six years. In Fremont, he married and divorced two young ladies; he was on the road too much to settle down. Several times, Stoklasa had seen men “go off,” as steeplejacks speak of falling, but it was not until the year before that he had his first accident. In Youngstown, while climbing with three other Kessler men over the lip of an empty hundred-thousand-gallon water tower a hundred and fifty feet high, to get inside and paint it, he put his weight on the spider rods that braced the top of the cylinder; the rods had been weakened by rust, and he fell through them fifty feet to the bottom of the tank and broke an ankle. He went back to work as soon as it mended. He was then earning three dollars and twenty cents an hour. For a year or so, Stoklasa had buddied with a native of Winsted named Donald Linkovich, and some months ago he had decided to move with him to Connecticut. Tex went to work at a dollar-sixty an hour for a tree man named MacBurnie, and worked with him until MacBurnie fell and hurt his back, about a fortnight before Diane; then he took a job with another local tree man, Nickerson, at two dollars and five cents an hour. Nickerson’s crew was clearing a forest pathway on Avon Mountain for high-tension wires. Stoklasa had always had a rough time, and he had liked it that way. He was taciturn to the point of rudeness, for he had learned to keep his mouth shut and enjoy hi
mself. He was cynical; there was no room for sentiment in his life. In his view, the average dog’s favorite food is living dog meat.

  Wakened by his neighbor, Tex put on his dungarees, a T shirt, a canvas jacket, and his working shoes, and went out of the building to move Donnie Linkovich’s brand-new Mercury convertible up to high land near the Winsted railroad station, which is across Willow Street from Capitol Products. Then he went into a bar and had a couple of beers. It struck him as being wet as hell out.

  * * *

  —

  At about four in the morning, the whole Landi tenement began to tremble. Apparently, the river was running through and around its ground floor and was eating at its underpinnings. At first, the motion was barely perceptible, but through the small hours it increased, until it had become a real shaking and heaving, and Jessica Kelley, trying to keep up a cheerful front for Miss Brochu’s sake, said to her, “Dear me, Yvonne, this is like being on a rocking horse, isn’t it?” Mrs. Kelley moved her chair from place to place, thinking that there might be some part of the building that was still. For a while, she sat out in the hallway, on the theory that the center of the tenement might be solid, but she was disappointed. Each time she moved, she fetched along her little clutter of precious things.

  Mrs. Kelley held her prayer book in her hand all the time, even though it was almost impossible to read by the flickering light of candles. She improvised some prayers, particularly requesting the arrival of the Civil Defense rescue boat and, for herself, strength of body and character. She had long thought of herself as physically puny and weak. As an infant, she was plump, she had been told; she was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1879, and, on first seeing her, her father exclaimed, “That’s the nicest turkey I ever saw!” By the time she reached high school, however, she had grown thin and jumpy, and for a year or two her family thought she had St. Vitus’s dance and put her in a private school on Meadow Street, but she got over the disorder. She had a stillborn baby by Caesarean section in 1905, and from that time on was never able to have children. Her mission in life, even after her marriage, was to care for her parents, and she eventually came to think she had been too close to them for her own well-being. Three months after her mother’s death, in the late twenties, she began to have diabetic symptoms; she had never had a trace of them before. Her husband died two years later. After her father died in 1935, at the age of ninety-three, she shut herself up in the house for several weeks, and pulled down the shades, and would not answer the telephone, and became suspicious of all human beings, and ranged from room to room like a wild creature. But she recovered and began a new life alone.

  One thing that helped her in all her tribulations was her will power, of which she had enough to dole out to ten strong men. Once, a quarter of a century ago, she read somewhere that tooth infections might have serious consequences for a diabetic, so she called her dentist for an appointment and told the nurse she would tell the dentist what she wanted when she arrived; she seated herself in the dentist’s chair a few days later and said, “Take all my teeth out.” The dentist said, “Heavens! You have granite teeth. Your teeth are far better than mine, and I wouldn’t part with mine for a thousand dollars.” It was true that her teeth were sound. Strong and prominent teeth ran in her family. Her father, then pushing ninety, had all his own teeth and could still crack walnuts and untie knots in a clothesline with them. Jessica’s teeth had perhaps been too much of a good thing. She had once made the mistake of giving her husband a picture of herself smiling, and every time he looked at it on the bureau he used to say, “Fetch me the toothpaste, Jessie.” She told the dentist she had fastened her mind on having the whole set out. He gave her novocain and pulled three teeth, and Mrs. Kelley’s jaw began to hurt. By this time, the doctor was perspiring and pale. “That’s enough,” he said. “You can come back another day.” “No, sir,” Mrs. Kelley said, speaking with difficulty but firmly through the new gap in her mouth. “I said all, and I meant all.” He pulled them all, using nothing but novocain. That was one of the days in Jessica Kelley’s life that helped convince her there was nothing even a weakling woman could not do if she made up her mind to it and held fast.

  Some of her tenacity had come, she was sure, from her father, William Gilbert Barnes. He was related to the Gilbert Clock people, and after being in the wooden butter-tub and washtub business in New York State for a few years he had come to Winsted and helped make clocks. He had been foreman of Winsted Volunteer Fire Company No. 2 several times and had been an active fireman well into his eighties. He had magnificent white handle-bar mustaches, but to his dying day his hair was hardly even gray, and he stood as straight and trig as a fence post. Right up until his ninety-third year, he celebrated each birthday by walking the seven miles around Highland Lake.

  The building trembled more and more, and Mrs. Kelley began to imagine how pleasant it would be if only she could be whisked somewhere far away—to Meriden, perhaps, or New Britain. If only she could fly! During the three-quarters of a century of her life, aviation had shrunk the earth, but she had never been up in a plane. On their Florida trip, her husband had teased her and teased her to go up in a barnstormer, but she had refused. He had gone off then without telling her and had taken a flight, and later he had said it was awfully nice and airy up there. He was a sly one! She hadn’t learned until after his death what a proficient cardplayer and billiards player he had been. She had known, of course, that he spent a great deal of time at the Elks Home and at the Winsted Club, but he had never boasted to her about his skills, and she had come to hear of them only when someone brought his cues around to the house after the funeral. His favorite cue, the handle of which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, she had given as a keepsake to one of his best friends—Billy Phelps, president of the Hurlbut National Bank. The thing her husband liked best in the world was precisely what she wanted in those anxious hours—to get up and go. He loved to travel. He took two trips a year; he never missed an Elks’ convention. The year he was Winsted’s Past Exalted Ruler, his lodge sent him as a delegate all the way to Dallas, Texas. He slipped off to New York quite a bit, too, especially during inventory time at the casket-trimmings plant.

  Mrs. Kelley reflected that, besides flying, one thing she had neglected and would like now to have done was to learn to swim. Just a couple of years before, a man at the Y.M.C.A. had tried to coax her to take lessons, saying that he had succeeded once before in teaching a woman to swim who was over seventy. But she had said then, as she had said to her husband when he tried to get her to fly, “I like the feel of terra firma under my feet.” There were times during the early-morning hours in the shaking building when the possibility of drowning in the flood outside had forced itself on her, and she reflected that for some hours—perhaps even for some years—she had had sensations like those of a person slowly going down into the darkness of deep water, with the happy scenes of her lifetime flashing through her mind. The sensations had not been too bad. She had had fortunate years; she considered herself ready for whatever might be her lot.

  It was beginning to get light, and Yvonne Brochu came running in from time to time with alarming bits of news. It was still pouring. The water was almost up to the awnings on the stores across Main Street, and it was going down the street awfully fast—maybe thirty miles an hour. Two of Sox’s taxis had simply disappeared. The water was coming down in great surges—could it be that the causeway at Highland Lake was giving way? There was something floating down Main Street that looked like a refrigerator. And there was a brand-new car—just being rolled along! There went Sox’s other cab! A chair from the hairdresser’s was going down the street! There was a whole roof out there floating down!

  Worst of all was when, after peering out from the back porch awhile, Yvonne came in crying, “The bridge has gone, Jessie! That bridge has gone!”

  Mrs. Kelley spoke in as careful a voice as she could command. The bridge at the Winsted center had been built of steel. �
�I think you must be mistaken, dear,” she said. “It must be that the water’s over it and covers it, because it’s rising so fast.”

  “No! No! I saw the bridge go,” Yvonne said. “It’s gone.”

  After a good long wait, so as not to be rushing hysterically to check up on a piece of calamitous information, Mrs. Kelley went out on the porch and looked upriver and saw for herself: The bridge was washed away, no mistake. Mrs. Kelley returned to her chair and prayed some more. She wept, too, but she managed to hide her tears from Yvonne.

  Not long afterward, there was a terrifying crash out back, and bricks and glass and something very heavy fell. Mrs. Kelley and Miss Brochu went to the back window and saw that a whole corner of the brick Capitol Products building was sagging and gaping, and a cement floor was hanging down like bent cardboard. Huge machines had slid about, and the fall had probably been that of one or more of them into the river.

  Art Royer came running upstairs, and rather wildly he suggested that the ladies leave the building with him. They would go out the front door into Main Street. He would go in the center, he said, and hold the two ladies by the hand. Yvonne Brochu pointed out that automobiles and refrigerators were bobbing downstreet like corks; people wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that water. All during the morning, Mr. Royer kept renewing his mad, chivalrous offer.

  Some time later, Mrs. Placek joined the others. Mrs. Placek, a solid, phlegmatic woman of sixty-nine, whose husband was away in Waterbury, said she had been sleeping until a few minutes before. “The water woke me up,” she said. “It told me, ‘Get up, you lazy head.’ ”

  In a calm voice, Mrs. Kelley welcomed Mrs. Placek to her apartment and said, “Things seem to be giving way outside.”