The Museum of Extraordinary Things Page 8

  At first, the falling girls had seemed like birds. Bright cardinals, bone-white doves, swooping blackbirds in velvet-collared coats. But when they hit the cement, the terrible truth of the matter was revealed. Their bodies were broken, dashed to their deaths right before those who stood by helpless. A police officer near Eddie groaned and turned away, his head in his hands, for there was no way to save those who were already falling and no way to come to terms with the reality before them. The life nets being held out were worthless; bodies soared right through the netting. Many of the desperate leapers barreled onward, through the glass cellar lights embedded in the sidewalk, to the basements below.

  The firemen from Company 20 did their best to soak the building, so that the gutters along the street turned to rivers. Charred belongings were scattered everywhere, and flames continued to burst through the air like stinging bees. Those workers who had survived, from the eighth and the tenth floors, huddled together, stunned. Eddie held a hand over his eyes so that his vision wouldn’t be blurred by heat waves. He couldn’t take in even a small portion of the destruction he saw. He turned back to his camera, the truer vision, the eye not tainted by human fear and regret. But the horror of the disaster was the only thing in sight, and the lens found the same anguish Eddie viewed. It was an even worse sight to behold through the eye of the camera, for its focus was sharper and more defined.

  Girls and a few young men continued to gather on the windowsills, gazing out over the scene before closing their eyes and leaping. It seemed an endless stream of beautiful young people would continue to fly above them. The twisted fire escape still popped and shot off sulfurous bits of metal into the sky, the echo resembling gunfire. The only other sound was that of the water hitting the building, then running into the streets, a tragic waterfall. Before long Eddie was standing in a black pool up to his ankles.

  It was then he spied the owners being ushered away in chauffeur-driven cars, behind them a carriage drawn by two fine black horses. The bosses and their associates had all managed to escape by climbing onto the roof, then making their way to the rooftop of the next factory. Eddie turned his camera, catching the moment when one of the owners gazed at the burning factory before a younger dark-haired man drew him back inside the curtains of the carriage. For an instant Eddie thought he knew this young man, though it was impossible; he wasn’t acquainted with anyone of this ilk. No one he crossed paths with would wear a beaver coat and ride in a coach with velvet curtains while girls leapt into the air with no net to catch them, and no salvation, and no carriages to carry them away.

  By then there were scores of bodies on the sidewalk. Even those hardened men who saw death every day, firemen and police officers, were crying as they worked. Eddie did his job, but as he photographed the fallen he had the sense that he was standing at the end of creation. If the ground split open beneath the Asch Building and took them all into the fires of hell, this day could not have seemed any more horrifying. The heat of the Asch Building could be felt two blocks away, though the flames were now smoldering. The crowd was hushed, even as more and more people were drawn to the scene, witness to the worst workplace disaster in the history of the city. Eddie took one photograph after the other. He could not stop, his angry heart convinced that he needed to document every inch of the catastrophe. In those hours on Washington Place, as he stood in the water and ashes, he lost the ability to be detached. All of those times when he hadn’t felt another man’s losses now came back to haunt him. He saw not only in black and white but also in every shade in between. The effect was humbling. The pools that bloomed red on the concrete were indeed blood, the white shards flung upon the cobblestones, bone. The bodies of the girls and a few strong young men were illuminated; each shone with light, the silver-edged sorrow of the recently deceased. Many were so wounded from their falls that the policemen who’d been sent to move them and tag the bodies so they might later be claimed, were doubled over in shock, the toughest among them gasping for strength and breath.

  It was then a wind seemed to arise suddenly, for there was all at once a roar cutting through what had been silence. But in fact what they heard was the sound of sobbing, for those who had managed to survive were already searching for sisters and friends, and what they discovered was devastating. As the families of the dead arrived, many had to be restrained. Eddie himself felt maddened as he wandered among those who’d been lost, documenting as many as he could. He let the camera make his choices, for his eyes were burning with soot and his head spun. He continued to photograph the scene until a company man came over, there on behalf of the bosses, the very ones who had refused to install sprinklers, who some were saying were known to burn down their buildings for the sake of insurance money.

  “That’s enough,” the company man said flatly. He was wearing an overcoat, though the air was stifling. He carried a thick wooden club he seemed more than ready to use. “Get going now.”

  Eddie hoisted his camera stand over his shoulder. “No problem. On my way.” He muttered a few ripe curses under his breath, but he let it go at that, though he was steaming. He would have liked to have it out with the stooge, but this wasn’t the moment to create an incident. Instead, Eddie went along Washington Place onto Waverly, but, as soon as the company man had moved on, he continued to work, despite the warning he’d been given. The air was cold and damp in the oncoming dusk, but his skin was burning. He was in a fever, and sweat washed down his back and chest. He couldn’t help but wonder if Moses Levy had experienced this same heat, if true images burned their maker. He wondered, too, if the hermit at the riverside was right, if there wasn’t some element of capturing a soul in each photograph, if he wasn’t responsible for those whose images he caught, whether they be a bird in a cage, a fish in a pail, or a girl on a windowsill.

  Eddie wiped his lens clean of soot. He tried to disappear from view as he photographed families desperate to find a sister or daughter, and girls crying in the gutter, arms around each other, clothes covered with ashes, the hems of their skirts singed black. In deference to their grief, he turned to photographing a clutter of personal trinkets, hair ribbons, purses, love letters, combs, all floating like debris in the drenched gutters, scattered over the cement like confetti. But every object seemed to have a soul as well, a throbbing heart, a remembrance of small pleasures and true love. There would be sixteen engagement rings found on the pavement by morning.

  When darkness fell the police chased everyone away so they might cordon off the street to bring in the wooden coffins for the dead. So many were needed they could not gather enough in all of Manhattan. Carpenters came to fashion dozens more from floorboards and doors. Eddie huddled in a doorway so that he could continue on. His skin was aflame, and a cough had settled in his chest. He was still positioned on the soaked pavement when the firemen went into the building to retrieve the dead who’d been trapped in the charred rooms. They wrapped the bodies in sheets of oilcloth, and when those ran out they turned to using burlap, though the fabric quickly became damp and some of the sodden threads unraveled as corpses were lowered to the street on heavy ropes. The last image Eddie photographed belonged to one such terrible bundle, the pale feet of a lifeless young girl as she was delivered through the air.

  That night Eddie went to the covered pier at East Twenty-sixth Street. The city morgue was too small for the sheer number of the dead, 147 in total, and so a makeshift morgue had been set up along the East River. The water was black as oil, and the night was black as well, illuminated by the lanterns the police held as they patrolled the pier. Eddie saw a cop he knew from the Tenth Precinct. For a fiver the officer let him past the barriers, but he told Eddie to hurry, for the families would be allowed in soon enough. One hundred thousand people would line up to view the dead before the night was through, families alongside gawkers who simply wanted to see the tragedy for themselves. The police would work through the day and night, holding up lanterns in the murky air so that the dead might
be identified. Some of the bodies were so charred they were unrecognizable; others were oddly preserved, with so little damage Eddie half-expected them to rise from their coffins. Moses Levy had told him that, in Russia, children who had died were photographed in their finest clothes in the instants after death, propped up on velvet couches, to ensure that their images would be captured before their souls had flown. Perhaps it was true and a soul lingered close by after a person had passed on, for Eddie had found some of Levy’s one-of-a-kind hand-tinted ambrotype prints tucked away in a drawer after his mentor’s death. The technique, using nitric acid or bichloride of mercury, was so difficult and time-consuming it was rarely employed anymore. Some photographers considered it a cheap substitute for the more well-made daguerreotypes, but, in Levy’s hands, these prints were magic. Silvery beads appeared upon the heads and clothing of the departed, as if they had been touched by something far greater than any human form. Looking at the serene faces of the two boys in one photograph, Eddie realized they must have been Moses’s sons, children he’d never spoken of but whose images he’d managed to preserve for all eternity. And so it seemed, a soul could be captured after all.

  IN THE DAYS that followed the Triangle Fire a dark lens was placed over Manhattan. The sorrow did not ease with time but instead seemed to multiply. There was a rising indignation over what had befallen the victims of the fire. Meetings at Cooper Union saw thousands attending, reminiscent of the protests of 1909 and 1910, when the city was forewarned that the conditions of the garment workers would lead to tragedy. Now the bloody portents had come to pass.

  More workers gathered in the streets, their confusion turning to pure rage when it was discovered that the doors of the factory sewing loft had been locked, making it impossible for the girls to escape. A bolted doorknob had been found by investigators, there among the debris on the ninth floor, but because the door it had been attached to was nothing more than a few black planks, it could not be used as proof in a court of law. Still, every working man and woman knew what it meant. The dead had been locked into their death chamber, like common beasts, sheep penned up and forsaken. Eddie found a dark doorway from which to watch the mayhem. He bowed his head and let the words of the workers wash over him, a river of anger he understood all too well. In truth, he had been outraged all of his life.

  When his insomnia gave way in the early morning hours and he at last found sleep, Eddie dreamed of the river and of his father’s black coat. In his dream he was thirteen again, sleeping beside the horses, as he had when he first came to beg Moses Levy to take him on as his apprentice. He heard a knock on the stable doors and awoke within his dream. Inside his dream life, his father was waiting on the rough cobblestones. The elder Cohen had the suitcase that he kept beneath the bed. In real life, Eddie had once opened it, though he knew it was breaking a trust to do so. Inside there was a change of clothing for both Eddie and his father, along with a prayer book and a photograph of Eddie’s mother.

  In his dream he went to his father and stood beside him, a dutiful son once more.

  “Are we going somewhere?” his dream self asked.

  “No. But if we have to, we’re ready,” his father said reasonably.

  Eddie pinned the images of the dead to the wall of his loft. He studied their faces, committing them to memory. There was a girl with freckles on her cheeks, her complexion turned chalky in death. Another donned a hat decorated with white silk daisies. Eddie thought it odd that the hat had stayed on her head despite a sheer fall of nine stories. Upon close inspection with a magnifying glass, he spied the reason for this: a hatpin in the shape of a bee. There were two sisters, neither one more than sixteen, each with lovely arched eyebrows and coils of auburn hair. At night, when he tried to sleep, he saw their faces. He listened to the fish swimming in the pail. The trout had grown larger, and it bumped against the bucket with every turn. By now there was an attachment. Eddie knew he couldn’t bring himself to eat his catch. Instead, he fed it bread crumbs and worms dug from beneath the stable floor, caring for it as though it were a pet. He took photographs of his new companion at the end of each day. After so much death, there was a real pleasure in recording the image of a living creature. Still, he wished the day he’d caught it had never happened, and that he’d never gone down to Washington Place to watch those girls fly from the windowsills.

  One night there was a knocking at the stable door. Eddie was deeply asleep, helped along by gin, in the thick black fog that is every insomniac’s eventual fate if he stays awake long enough. He assumed it was his dream again, his father once more arriving with their suitcase. When at last he rallied long enough to realize the knocking was real, he guessed the caller wanted the fellow who had taken over the rent of the stable for the past few years, letting out his carriage and raising birds in large cages kept in the tack room. He pulled the blanket over his head and sank back into his pillow. But the banging on his door continued, and through the fog of sleep Eddie heard someone shout out for him. It was the wrong name, but he was too groggy to realize that, and, in all honesty, it was the only name he would have answered to, for in his darkest dreams he was always called Ezekiel.

  He crawled out of bed, pulled on his trousers, then took the stairs two at a time. As he opened the door there was a moment when he thought his father was before him. If this was a dream in which Joseph Cohen had come to bring him home, Eddie might have agreed. On this night, he might have given up his new life in exchange for erasing the vision of the bodies of the young girls at the morgue. But it was another man at the door. The visitor was Orthodox and wore a black coat and hat. His stooped posture made Eddie yearn for his father, for this stranger was clearly a tailor who had hunched over a sewing machine for many years.

  “If you’re here to lease a carriage, I’m not your man,” Eddie remarked groggily. “There’s no one here till six.”

  “I don’t want a carriage,” the caller said. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

  The hour was so early that the horses were still asleep on their feet, their breath turning to clouds in the chilly predawn air.

  “I can’t help you with that.” The only women Eddie knew were ones from the taverns, and he never brought them home. “You’ll have to leave.”

  The older man squinted, his expression grave. Beneath his glasses he had pale rheumy eyes, hazed over with cataracts. “You’re the photographer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re who I want to see.”

  When the visitor started upstairs without an invitation, Eddie had little choice but to follow at his heels, doing his best to persuade his unwanted guest a mistake had been made. “I don’t have any women here. But look if you want. See for yourself. Then you can go.”

  The visitor plainly intended to do so. He entered the loft and peered through the chaos. Eddie had been working nonstop, and the pitted wooden table was littered with prints, including the shining image of the trout. It had turned out better than he had expected. Enough to give him a glimmer of hope that he might one day be good enough to call himself a student of Moses Levy.

  The visitor bumped into the bucket where the fish swam in a forlorn circle. “You sell fish?”

  At this point all Eddie knew was that he kept the fish because he was alive and had as much right to a life as any other creature. He shrugged and felt a fool. “He’s a guest.”

  “He’s a guest, but you didn’t want to let me inside?”

  “Because you’re at the wrong address. Listen, there’s no one here you’d know or want.” It then struck Eddie that his caller might have another photographer in mind. “If you’re a friend of Moses Levy, you’re too late. He died five years ago.”

  The visitor removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses with a pocket handkerchief. “I’m a friend of your father’s. He sent me. That’s how I came to have your address.”

  Eddie took a step back, confused. “That�
��s impossible. My father doesn’t know where I live.”

  “He gave me your address. Therefore he knows something.” The visitor spied the photographs of the dead girls tacked to the wall. “Yes. I’m in the right place. You were there.” The older man crossed the room, his steps echoing on the wide-planked wooden floor. He wore heavy shoes, one heel built up with wooden filler to even out his gait, for his legs were mismatched in length. “You’re going to find my daughter.”

  Eddie’s visitor was Samuel Weiss, a tailor and the father of two daughters, Ella and Hannah, both employed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Ella was safely at home, but Hannah could not be found. Weiss had been to St. Vincent’s Hospital, established by the Sisters of Charity in 1849, then he’d gone on to Bellevue, and finally to the morgue on the pier. His beautiful daughter with the white-blond hair had not been among the wounded or the dead. No one in the neighborhood had seen her since Saturday, not even her closest friends. Now Weiss searched the images on Eddie’s wall, but again, Hannah could not be found. When he had gone through every photograph, he sat in a wooden chair, overwhelmed, his face streaming with tears, his eyes rimmed red. The light filtering through the skylight was a pale, creamy yellow. Between Weiss’s sobs Eddie could hear the horses in the stable below, restless in their stalls now that morning had risen, waiting for the liveryman and their breakfast of oats.

  “Hannah worked on the ninth floor. Do you know what that means? No survivors. Or so they say. How do you believe a pack of liars? I for one don’t trust anything we’re told.”

  “Mr. Weiss, I’m sorry. I truly am. There were no survivors.”

  “I don’t need you to be sorry! Help me! That’s what I need. Your father said you could find her.”

  His father, whom he had not seen or spoken to in twelve years, almost as much time as they had lived together, who knew nothing about what his son was capable of. Eddie often wondered if they would recognize each other if they passed on the street, or if they had become such strangers to one another they would merely keep on walking, having no idea that they shared the same flesh and blood, that they had once slept together under the same black overcoat in the forest, in shock and mourning.