“Why did you follow me?” she asked him, choking out the words. “You were safe on the stairs. You could be down there right now.”
Jacob brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes.
“I was a scab during the strike,” he said. Even now, there was such shame clotting his voice. “But I saw you picketing. I saw you. You were . . . incredible. I wanted to be on your side.”
If there’d been time, Yetta could have joked, “Then join a strike, already. Don’t go running into fires.” But words were too precious, on this ledge, to make jokes. It was enough to hold on to Jacob, while he held on to her. She saw that she’d misjudged him, thinking he wanted to go dancing only to practice his English.
Right now she couldn’t even think whether they were talking to each other in Yiddish or English.
“Yetta—we can’t stay here,” Jacob said.
She knew that. The flames were lapping at their heels, eager to escape the factory, to ruin the blue-sky world, too. The ledge was so narrow, they could only inch along. It was impossible to move far enough away from the window with its flames and smoke. But Yetta wanted one more moment of staring out into the blue sky.
It’s Saturday, she thought. Still the Sabbath. Yetta knew it wouldn’t be long before devout Jews—her father, Rahel’s husband—would begin the havdalah prayers, dividing the sacredness of the Sabbath from ordinary, everyday life. But Yetta had not had a sacred day. She faced a different kind of divide.
“They’re coming to rescue us,” Jacob said.
And it was true—the fire truck down below had begun unfurling a ladder, reaching higher and higher, in a race with the flames at Yetta’s heels. The ladder was four stories high, five stories high, six stories high . . .
The ladder stopped.
“Don’t they have a longer ladder?” Yetta asked. “Don’t they? Don’t they?”
It was a useless question. The ladder had stopped growing. The flames were going to win.
“We could jump for the end of the ladder,” Jacob said. “Or for the nets on the ground.”
The firemen—impossibly tiny, down there on the ground—were indeed holding out nets, standing there so hopefully. Yetta could have laughed at their hopes. It was not exactly a plan Jacob was offering her, not exactly a chance, in the nets and the ladder. But it was something besides flame.
Jacob bowed to Yetta, as elegantly as if they were about to launch themselves onto a dance floor instead of into thin air. He would have been a good dance partner, Yetta thought with an ache. He wrapped his arms around Yetta; she wrapped her arms around him.
And then they jumped.
It does not take a long time to fall to the ground, even from nine stories up. But it felt like a lifetime to Yetta—she felt like she passed through years worth of Rosh Hashanahs, Yom Kippurs, Hanukkahs, Purims, Passovers. She had her regrets: Oh, Rahel, I am so sorry I was mean to you. I never met your baby, never gave your husband a chance . . . I shouldn’t have expected you to be like me, shouldn’t have thought we had to be the same . . . And, oh, Jacob, what if I’d gone dancing with you sooner? She saw now that so much more was possible than she’d ever believed. She could have danced at a thousand weddings, all at once.
They missed the ladder. Both of them stretched out a hand but the ladder rung slipped past them.
“There’s still the net!” Jacob shouted. Or maybe there wasn’t time for him to shout it; maybe she could only feel him thinking it. She was glad that he had his arms around her, glad that he’d helped her in the fire, glad that she wasn’t alone.
Oh, Bella, you were smart to go looking for love. And, Jane, you were looking for all the right things, too. But oh, God, I tried so hard, I wanted so much to change the world. . . .
The net was right beneath them. Yetta felt a surge of gratitude for the firemen who angled the net so carefully, who ran to the exact right spot to catch two immigrant workers falling from the sky. These men were trying so hard to save her life. She and Jacob landed on the net, exactly in the center.
And then the net broke and they plunged on through.
It does not take a long time to fall to the ground, even from nine stories up. But it took a lifetime for Yetta. It took every single one of the last moments of her life.
Jane
Jane stamped out the fire licking at the bottom of her skirt.
And then she was so proud of herself: Look! she wanted to tell someone. I did this! I didn’t fall into a dead faint at the horror of it all! I didn’t scream hysterically for a servant or a man to help me! I put out the fire all on my own!
But there was no one to tell. And there were flames all around her. She could see Bella disappearing into the stairwell, and she almost called out, “No! Wait! Stay with me!”
But Bella, loyal to the end, would probably turn around and come back if Jane called to her. Jane couldn’t do that to Bella, couldn’t endanger her when she was only seconds away from safety.
And I’ll be fine on my own, Jane told herself. I’m not some ignorant immigrant shirtwaist girl, frightened out of her wits. I can think about this logically and reasonably.
A towering wall of flames now stood between Jane and the stairs that Bella had used.
So I’ll go back to the elevator I took before. Wonder which operator I’ll get—the swarthy man or the pimply boy who winked at me? Jane was forcing herself to stay calm, to think about things that didn’t matter. Because if she had time to think of things that didn’t matter, she wasn’t really in danger here; she didn’t have to worry.
Around her, people were panicking, screaming, and scrambling away from the flames.
“Into the cloakroom! We’ll be safe in the cloakroom!” one boy yelled, and there were actually people who followed him into the cramped, small room. Jane wanted to tell them that they needed to find another sanctuary; that anyone in the cloakroom was doomed. But the flames were already climbing the cloakroom walls. She couldn’t get close enough to tell the people inside anything.
And anyhow, her feet were carrying her across the room, in a frantic dash for the elevator. She didn’t have the breath to say anything to anyone.
Should have left my corset behind when I ran away from home.
She couldn’t pretend anymore that her thoughts were logical and reasonable. They were disjointed, chaotic, haunted. The flames around her twisted and intertwined and multiplied just as randomly. For a second Jane could see Miss Milhouse’s scornful countenance looming ahead of her in the fire. She could hear Miss Milhouse’s voice in her head, scolding her, telling her it was her own fault she’d gotten caught in this fire: Whatever did you expect, associating with shirtwaist girls?
Jane spat into the fire, the most uncouth, ill-mannered act of her life.
“I will not think your thoughts anymore, Miss Milhouse!” she screamed, her voice miraculously back again.
Through the smoke now, she could see the elevator right in front of her, the doors open, the pimply elevator operator helping workers in.
“Wait for me! Wait for me!” Jane sobbed. “Oh, please, wait for me!”
A huge crowd stood between Jane and the elevator, all screaming and shoving their way in.
“Oh, but you have to save me,” Jane yelled. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m—”
She stopped. What was she going to say? I’m Jane Wellington. I’m from a rich family. I’m the Blanck girls’ governess. I’m planning to go to college. I’m due a grand tour of Europe. What did any of that matter? Why was her life worth any more than anyone else’s?
The elevator doors were closing.
The workers nearest the doors jammed their arms and legs between the doors. They leaped onto the top of the elevator, they slid down the elevator cables, they jumped down the elevator shaft. Jane wasn’t close enough to do any of that.
“He’ll come back, won’t he?” Jane asked. “Won’t he?”
Nobody answered.
Jane looked behind her. The flames were so close now.
To keep away from them, she had to cram in tightly against the other people: scrawny boys and dazed-looking girls and women with a world’s weight of sorrow in their eyes.
“Oh,” Jane breathed, a catch in her throat. “I don’t want to die.”
“None of us do, darling,” an old woman said. She was a crone in a tattered shawl, clutching beads and murmuring, “Hail, Mary, full of grace . . .” But she stopped her prayers for a moment and drew Jane into a hug.
She’s probably somebody’s mother, Jane thought. There will be children who cry when she’s gone. Children and maybe grandchildren, too, all sobbing, missing her...
“Mama,” Jane whispered into this strange women’s smoky shawl. She stayed in the woman’s embrace, packed in with all the other workers. The elevator didn’t come back.
The elevator didn’t come back.
The elevator didn’t come back.
So this is how it ends, Jane thought.
She’d banished Miss Milhouse’s thoughts from her mind, but she knew how her father and Miss Milhouse and all of society would view this, Jane dying with the shirtwaist workers, in the embrace of a crone with a shawl and a rosary. Her death would be seen as a defeat, a disgrace, a sign that girls who run away from home always come to a bad end.
No, Jane thought. No.
She saw that she’d expected to go back, someday. Sending the letter to her father would have been her first step. When she got tired of living on pickled herring and pasta, she might have compromised her principles, might have let Mr. Corrigan stage a “prodigal daughter” reunion with her father. Her father probably would have taken her back.
Or she might have saved her money, worked her way up to teaching at a school, worked her way into college and married one of her classmates’ brothers, someone like that unformed, uninformed law student, Charles Livingston. And, back in high society, she would be That Daring Girl Who Spent a Year Slumming It in the Tenements. She’d be like that matronly grandmother who’d once worked as a spy in the war—the picture of propriety with a shocking past.
No, Jane thought again. None of that would happen now. She would die pure, her principles intact, society shunned.
This, too, can be seen as a triumph, Jane thought.
Jane and the crone in the shawl and all the other workers had slumped down to the floor because there wasn’t any air left anywhere else. They were all lying together, but Jane made sure that she moved her hand to the top of the pile, so that anyone who found them would see her signet ring, would see that it wasn’t just poor people who died.
The tragedy of the workers’ condition threatens us all. Jane had heard the Vassar suffragist say that during the shirtwaist strike, back when Jane was just a foolish rich girl in a frilly dress. She hadn’t understood the words then, any more than she understood the fire now. But she felt connected to the crone in the shawl, the pimply elevator operator, the boy who thought the cloakroom was a safe haven. And Bella and Yetta and Millicent and Harriet Blanck ... All of them were threatened by the fire escape that fell away from the building, by the blocked stairway, by the tiny elevators that served the entire ten-story building. All of them were threatened by this fire.
Around her the workers were screaming out prayers and curses. Screaming, then murmuring, then just moving their lips, their words known only to God. Jane discovered that she herself was sobbing tearlessly, or maybe her tears were evaporating in the heat the moment her eyes produced them. Her only prayer was still, “I don’t want to die.”
Oh, please, God, don’t let me die, she thought. I’ve never even had a chance to live.
Or had she?
Jane remembered that day so long ago, when she’d been on her way to tea in Washington Square just as the Triangle workers were spilling out of their factory. She’d been so taken with the sight of them; she’d envied them, without understanding why. She believed now that she’d probably witnessed their first attempt at a strike—their first heady moment of standing up for themselves, of challenging the men in power. They’d looked so alive that day, so full of life.
Everything she’d done since then had been a quest—a quest to fill her own life with meaning. She’d gone from lying uselessly in bed, to standing on the picket line watching, to taking in Bella. And then she’d stood up for herself, she’d taught Harriet and Millicent—oh, Lord, I hope I taught them something—she’d learned to appreciate a single red rose with Yetta and Bella.
But I’m not finished yet. I’m not finished.
The fire was inches from her skirt and there was nowhere left to go. The air was nothing but smoke. The elevator wasn’t coming back.
I am finished, Jane thought, but it wasn’t like she was giving up. Giving up would have been marrying whatever boy her father picked out for her, drinking tepid tea the rest of her life with women she didn’t even like. This was more like a blaze of glory, seeing all her choices tallied up, seeing what her life had meant.
I was alive, she thought. I lived. I mattered.
She squeezed in tighter against the old woman in the shawl, hugging the crone as she’d always wanted to hug her own mother. The crone and the other workers had also lived, had also mattered.
And now they were also dying. All of them were dying together.
Bella
Bella was crying and gasping for air in the smoky stairwell. Flames glowed on the landing below, but that didn’t matter; she wasn’t supposed to go that way. Go get the girls, Jane had said. Make sure they’re safe up there. . . .
Up there. Up. Blinded by smoke and tears, Bella inched forward until her feet struck the first step leading to the tenth floor. The girls will be so scared, Jane had said, and Bella could picture them, standing alone in smoke and flame, clutching each other, their faces pale and terrified beneath the perky bows in their hair. Then the smoke did something to Bella’s eyes, and it wasn’t the prim, proper little Blanck girls she was seeing. It was other children: scruffy, barefoot, half-starved, runny-nosed Italian peasant children—three boys and a girl, wearing only rags.
“Guilia,” Bella whispered. “Dominic. Ricardo. Giovanni.”
They may have looked half starved and ragged, but they were grinning from ear to ear; they were jumping up and down and cheering. They were beckoning to her.
“My family,” Bella whispered. “I’m coming. . . .”
But then she saw her mother with her brothers and sister, and Mama wasn’t grinning and cheering. She was shaking her head.
No. Not yet, she said.
“But I wanted to die young, Mama,” Bella sobbed. “It’s all right. I’ll be with you.”
No. Mama kept shaking her head, even as she faded back into the smoke, only her voice remaining. You’re alive. Live. Save the living.
The words flickered in Bella’s mind like flames, but stronger than flames. Choking on her sobs and the smoke and her sorrow that her family had disappeared, Bella stumbled up the stairs. She didn’t care that flames lashed in through the broken window and sizzled on the wet skirt she held over her head. She couldn’t die now. Mama had said she should live.
She burst onto the tenth floor and dropped her skirt down to its proper position. People were running and screaming here, too, but the smoke and the flames had only begun to roll in the windows. Across the room, Bella could see the bows on two little girls’ heads bobbing up and down, like they were skipping. No—like they were hopping over flames in their path, or jumping up and down in terror.
Bella took off running for those bows.
Just as she neared the other side of the room, the Washington Place elevator doors sprang open. A whole crowd of people crammed onto the elevator, sweeping one of the bow-girls along with them. It was little Harriet, her pretty face twisted in fear.
“Papa!” she screamed. “Papa!”
And then a man in a dark suit reached into the elevator and pulled her out. As the elevator lurched away, plunging down through the fire below, Mr. Blanck hugged his daughter close to his chest, wr
apping his suit coat around her shoulders. Harriet nestled her head against his neck, sobbing into his collar. Millicent clutched onto the bottom of his coat.
They don’t need me, Bella thought. They’ve got their father. Their big, strong, rich father
But Mr. Blanck was only standing there, with a dazed look on his stout face.
“Sir!” Bella cried. She’d never spoken to Mr. Blanck before. He was her boss. He was a man. But she had to yell at him now. “Sir! You can’t stay here! You’ve got to get out!”
Mr. Blanck turned, startled, his eyes unfocused.
“There you are, Mademoiselle Michaud,” he said, vaguely. “I couldn’t think where you might have gotten to.”
He slid Harriet into Bella’s arms.
He thinks I’m Jane, Bella thought. Can’t he tell the difference? Didn’t he hear my accent? Is one girl just the same as another to him?
Bella remembered that her face was covered in soot, her hair was in total disarray, her shirtwaist was stained ash gray. And with everyone screaming, it was hard to hear anything. She leaned her face close to Harriet’s and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
“Bella and Yetta and Jane,” Harriet whispered back. “You’re Bella, the one who talks funny.”
Encircled in the safety of Bella’s arms, Harriet seemed calmer and more reasonable than her father. Of course, with her face pressed against Bella’s shirtwaist, she couldn’t see the flames climbing through the Greene Street windows, streaming across the ironing boards.
“Harriet,” Bella whispered. “We need to get away from here. Don’t be scared if we have to start running.”
“But I wanted to go to the roof. Papa was ’sposed to take us to the roof.”