Remembering the Titanic (20 page)

“I wouldn’t know. He never said. And he’s not my Paddy.” It was upsetting … how saying that still pained her so. She hadn’t seen or talked to Paddy in months. That girl, Elizabeth Farr, had said she had “great stage presence.” Maybe that just meant pride was keeping her head up. What she really wanted to do was bury it in a pillow and bawl her eyes out, she still missed Paddy so.

Not that bawling would do any good.

They were still nearly ten blocks away when they saw smoke in the distance. It was thick and dark, spiraling steadily upward to bruise the night sky, turning it a deep, ugly purple.

Noticing the smoke, Katie sat up straight on the seat. “That smoke there, see it? It looks to be near my aunt’s house. Maybe you could go a bit faster?”

But other drivers returning from a night out in the city had noticed the smoke, too, and had slowed their pace, sensing excitement and fearful of missing it. Flo had no choice but to proceed cautiously. Katie, anxious for her aunt and uncle’s safety, began fidgeting, sitting very far forward on the seat and peering through the windshield.

By the time they had less than three blocks to go, the smoke had intensified, a high wall of gray wool so thick, it was impossible to discern which roominghouse might be the victim. Katie couldn’t even be sure on which side of the street a fire might be raging. She knew only that it
was
raging, knew that what she was seeing from a distance was no boiling pot overturned on the stove, no ashes from a coal burner setting a small throw rug ablaze, no heated iron burning a hole the size of a silver dollar into a wooden ironing board. It took more than a small fire to spew forth such giant clouds of evil black smoke.

With two blocks still to cover, Flo’s car, held captive in a long line of curious drivers, was moving at a snail’s pace. Katie could stand it no longer. Taking advantage of the lack of speed, she shoved the door open and jumped out. As late as it was, almost eleven o’clock, she could see just fine. There were streetlights, and lights from houses. Besides, she’d walked this avenue many times with John or with Mary and Tom. She knew the way.

Flo shouted after her, “You stay away from that smoke! It’ll be the ruin of your voice!”

Katie was already racing up the street, slipping and sliding on the suck sidewalk. Heart pounding, holding up the hem of her green dress to keep from tripping, she ran toward the smoke. She saw no flames, but perhaps she was still too far away. Another block, and now she could see the source was a house on
this
side of the street, not on her aunt’s side. Her knees would have gone watery with relief then except that just as quickly she realized that the house directly across the street from her aunt’s was Agnes Murphy’s. Where Mary and Tom lived. And Bridget.

Katie ran faster.

When she was close enough to realize that it was indeed Agnes Murphy’s house spewing smoke, her eyes quickly scanned the scene for some sign of a skinny little girl with bright red hair. There were no small children present. It was late. They were safely in bed, asleep. Most of the neighborhood men worked the night shift at a nearby factory. They wouldn’t be working on Christmas Eve, but that was tomorrow night. Not tonight. That left only elderly neighbors, some with nightwear poking out from beneath their winter coats, to gather on the lawn.

Katie saw no sign of Bridget.

But her eyes did locate Mary, sobbing in the arms of her landlady. Tom was away at work, and wouldn’t be home until seven in the morning. Katie pushed her way through the crowd. The wind had changed, now blowing the smoke toward the rear of the house. Though there was plenty of the thick, dirty gray stuff pouring from the open front door and first floor windows, she saw no flames. Perhaps there was no real fire, only smoke, though Katie couldn’t imagine how that could be so.

She ran to Mary and Agnes. “Where is the baby?” she called, tapping Mary on the shoulder. “Where is Bridget?”

Incapable of speech, her face still hidden in Agnes Murphy’s ample bosom, Mary could only point. She pointed straight at the house.

“She’s in there?” Katie cried, horrified. “Has no one gone in after her, then?” She whirled, her eyes flying accusingly from one face to another. She saw no one who looked hale and hearty enough to enter a smoke-filled house. They were all too old.

Katie turned back to Mary. “Are you certain sure she’s inside?”

Silent nodding from Bridget’s mother.

“She was sleepin’, Mary was,” Mrs. Murphy said over the top of Mary’s head. Her tone was not unsympathetic, even though it was her house that might be burning. “Had herself a bad day, so she went to bed early. I was next door, havin’ a cuppa tea with Mrs. O’Donnell, when we seen the smoke. Come right over here and woke up Mary, but the smoke was so thick we couldn’t stay in there. ’Twas grabbin’ us by the throat and yankin’ all the breath out of us. When we tried to call for Bridget, we swallowed smoke so bad, nothin’ came out. I don’t…”

But Katie was already gone, pushing open the gate and dashing up the cobblestone path toward the smoke-filled house.

She paid no attention to the warnings shouted after her.

H
AD IT NOT BEEN
for the image of Bridget’s small, pale face firmly lodged in Katie’s mind, she would have turned and fled instantly from the thick clouds of smoke billowing through the open front door. There were no flames, but the smoke itself engulfed her, tearing at her throat. She was coughing even before she stepped over the threshhold.

But Bridget was inside….

As Katie hesitated for a second in the doorway, her hands over her nose and mouth to protect them, she heard the faint wail of a siren. Too distant, much too far away to be of any help quickly. And how, then, would a fire engine make its way through that long line of autos crawling along the avenue hoping to see something exciting? What if the siren she was hearing wasn’t even headed her way? Could be going somewheres else, to a different fire, maybe, or to a car wreck because of the slippery roads.

She dared not wait. Bridget couldn’t wait.

Katie plunged headlong into the thick wall of dirty gray.

Once inside, she felt as if she had been swallowed up by a giant steel-gray monster. She could see nothing. There was not the tiniest shred of light to help her find her bearings. The smoke was so acrid it sent tears streaming down her cheeks. Her hands left her face to yank her skirt and petticoat up to cover her nose and mouth. This helped only a little. She couldn’t be sure exactly where the staircase was. In all that gray wool, there seemed to be no left, no right, no stairs….

She dropped to her hands and knees, thinking to get her bearings by crawling along the floor and using touch to locate various pieces of Mary’s furniture … the couch along the front wall, the parlor piano, the telephone stand decorated with seashells positioned along the wall just below the stairs … if she could find that stand, she could find the stairs. If it was the piano she found first, she would know she had moved in the wrong direction.

She found the seashell stand. She was already coughing so hard, the crawl from doorway to stairs took ten times longer than it should have. And crawling with one hand holding the skirt and petticoat over her mouth was very difficult. But she had no choice. She had intended to call for Bridget as she went, but the first time she opened her mouth to do so, the only sound that emerged was a harsh croak. Smoke rushed in, gagging her, and she shut her mouth quickly, only to have it forced open again by a wracking cough.

The realization that Flo had been right, that the smoke had already damaged her voice, making it impossible to call for Bridget, was frightening. Finding the child would take so much more precious time now that she couldn’t summon her by voice. Katie almost turned around then and went back outside. But she had heard no sirens arriving at the house, no sound that help was at hand. She couldn’t desert the child. That would be too cruel.

Brian hadn’t deserted the steerage passengers on the
Titanic
, even when he knew there was no hope of rescue, knew he would not be saved. Still he had stayed.

I’ll stay, too, Katie vowed, until I find Bridget.

She still saw no flames. That was a blessing. Perhaps there was no real fire, perhaps something in the house … the old coal stove in the basement, maybe, was spitting out the smoke. Katie had no idea if that was even possible, but the thought was comforting so she clung to it as she slowly, painfully, made her way up the stairs, crawling on her stomach, tears pouring from her red and swollen eyes.

Why, Katie thought in a flash of anger as, exhausted, she reached the top step, had Mary gone outside without her small daughter?

If anything terrible happened to their only child, Tom would never forgive his wife.

A small orange flame, like a curious kitten peeking around a corner to see who was there, darted straight at Katie from the corridor. It shocked her. It wrecked her notion that the house held only smoke. She heard, then, a new sound. Like feet tramping on small, dry twigs, snapping them in two, or on dry autumn leaves. She and Paddy made sounds like that when they walked in Central Park in the fall.

But no one needed to tell her these were not the sounds of feet in the park. This snapping and crackling was the sound of furniture and framed photographs and the pages of books and the soles of shoes and the glass of mirrors being consumed by flames. She pictured the very walls themselves being devoured by the fire, leaving nothing behind of Agnes Murphy’s house but smoke and ashes.

Katie didn’t care about the house or anything in it. All she cared about was finding Bridget, toting her safely from the house to give her back to her mother.

Her eyes burned so furiously, she had to keep them closed. It made no difference, since she could see nothing. She was surrounded by a thick, gray wool cape. And it wasn’t her eyes that worried her, it was the constant coughing. How long before the thick, cloying smoke pulled every last breath out of her and stopped her heart forever?

Only once in her life had Katie Hanrahan been as frightened. In the belly of the great
Titanic
, wandering panic-stricken along its silent, narrow corridors, desperate to find a way up, to light and air and safety, she had been terrified that she and the two children left in her care would die down there. Paddy had saved her then. But Paddy was far away now, in the city, probably somewhere with Belle, not knowing Katie needed him again.

I was mean to him, she thought dazedly as, gasping and choking, she pulled herself up into the hall. A second shoot of flame reared its nasty head, darting around the corner to tease, I
dare
you, I dare you to keep coming! Katie ignored it, and began sliding along the corridor floor on her stomach. I should have told Paddy why I was being so sour with him, it wasn’t fair of me to turn him a cold shoulder without sayin’ why. ’Twas cowardly, if nothin’ else. If I could just see him again, for a minute….

The agonizing climb up the staircase had left her drained, her chest aflame like the building itself, and there was an ominous roaring sound in her ears. Comin’ from my brain, she told herself. It’s mad it’s not gettin’ enough oxygen and it’s roarin’ in anger.

Dizzy, so dizzy … sleep would be just the thing. If she just took a tiny little nap, just the smallest forty winks, maybe when she woke up the nasty old fire would be gone, the smoke cleared. Then she would find Bridget and they would go outside together into the clean, fresh air.

That seemed to Katie’s oxygen-deprived brain a fine idea. She might have followed it had she not, as she stretched an arm out over her head in preparation to lay her head on it, encountered with her fingers a small, human hand. The hand was limp, lifeless, but…

Gasping in shock, she clutched at the hand. She tried to call out Bridget’s name. Impossible. Her vocal cords, seared by heat and smoke, no longer functioned. Flo would be so angry.

Katie’s head cleared suddenly. She had found Bridget. She had done half of what she came to do. Now she had to get the other half done. She had to get both of them out of this deathtrap of a house and into fresh air and safety if they were to live.

She had no idea how she was going to do that.

Y
ANKING HER SKIRT UP
over her face again, Katie crawled over to the small figure. She knew to feel the tiny wrist for a pulse. It was faint … very faint … but it was there. Bridget was still alive. But she needed to be taken from the smoke-filled house.

How? Katie would have shouted aloud if she’d had a voice.
How?
She was so weak herself, she could barely crawl on her own, let alone carry even as small a child as this one.

Why had no one come to help them?

Anger pulled her up onto her hands and knees. I did not survive the worst sea tragedy in history, she told herself grimly, when so many others did not, only to perish in a fire in a Brooklyn roominghouse!

The voice that Katie heard next was not her own. It was her ma’s. “Well, if you’re goin’ to do what you came in here to do,” her ma’s voice said, “you’d best be about it.”

Katie lifted her head. “Ma?”

No answer. Sheila Hanrahan had said all she meant to say. Now it was up to Katie to heed or ignore her mother’s advice.

Didn’t seem like she’d have heard it in the first place if she was meant to ignore it.

There were no new flames taunting her, and the smoke seemed to have lessened just a bit. Could be her ma had scared it away. Reaching out tentatively with both hands, Katie clasped her hands around Bridget’s small wrists. She could still feel a pulse, which seemed a great wonder to her. Bridget’s spirit must be very strong, then. That thought renewed her own strength, and holding tightly to the two delicate wrists, Katie began inching her way backward, still on her stomach on the floor. She had no free hand now to keep the green skirt and petticoat over her face. But her head had cleared, as if her mother had somehow filled it with life-giving oxygen.

If she could drag Bridget to the top of the staircase, staying flat to avoid the thickest smoke, they could slide or even tumble down the stairs to safety.