In the hall Edward heard Archie behind him saying, with a voice full of panic, “The stairway’s jammed and the hallway’s full of smoke. We should go to the roof.”
“The roof?” Edward said. “How will you get down? Look, this hallway has two staircases.”
“The elevator,” Geraldine said with a high-pitched gasping that wanted to be a screech, “where is the elevator?”
“Hunker down, get under the smoke if you can, and follow me,” said Edward, and the family did as he said and followed him in a crouch along the hall. Edward heard Toby calling, “Here, here, the elevator, I can take one more!” and Edward grabbed Geraldine’s shoulder and thrust her at Toby, who pulled her inside the crowded car, slammed the door, and descended to the street level in a rush.
“Mother’s coat,” said Adelaide, and she ran back to the dining room before Archie could grab her, and vanished in the hallway’s thickening smoke.
“Don’t die for a coat,” Edward yelled to her.
“The roof,” said Archie in a voice broken with panic, “we’ve got to get to the roof! The firemen will get us down.”
“You don’t even know how to get to the roof,” Edward said, but Archie was already on the run into the dining room, pursuing Adelaide.
Two people came toward Edward on their hands and knees, coughing, crying in their fear and asphyxia, a woman in a blue gown and a man Edward recognized as the New York Assemblyman who had been at Maginn’s table. He was dragging a trunk as he crawled, and when he reached the staircase he pushed the trunk down the steps ahead of him.
“Come on, Edna,” he called to the woman in blue. But Edna had stopped moving, and Edward saw Jacob wheezing badly, immobilized by the smoke.
“His heart,” said Katrina, and Edward lifted Jacob and dragged him toward the narrow southern stairway. Through the thinning smoke Edward saw that the New York politician had gotten ahead of his trunk and was pulling it down the stairs behind him, oblivious of the loss of Edna.
Edward began to cough, and Katrina, who could not stop coughing, fell on the stairs. “We’re in hell,” she said.
“Only on the outskirts,” Edward said. “Don’t panic on me. Hold my coattail so I know you’re here.” He saw the winding stairway below, pocked with flame.
“We’ll go,” he said, but Katrina’s cough revealed her weakening strength, and Edward took off his jacket and wrapped her head with it. “Breathe through the cloth,” he said, “and wait one second,” and he crawled back toward the collapsed woman.
“Let’s go, Edna,” he said, and he dragged her by one arm to the stairway. Behind him the hallway’s carpet in front of the elevator was a running pathway of flame. No one else would get through that.
“Grab her other arm,” Edward told Katrina, and together they moved down the stairs, Edward holding his father-in-law under his left arm like a sack of grain, Jacob’s head forward, and he and Katrina pulling Edna, faceup, by her arms. The smoke lessened dramatically, for reasons Edward could not understand, as they descended to the first-floor landing. They moved down the final flight to the ground floor, the fire erratically licking only two walls, and when they reached the billiard room they found four sawhorses blocking the nearest street doorway, which had been painted earlier in the day. Edna’s husband was throwing his weight against the door with no success. Edward left the women and Jacob near the door, picked up the man’s trunk and used it as a bartering ram, smashing the door outward and letting in a rush of cold air. He tossed the trunk out onto the sidewalk and its latch snapped open, revealing a score of wrapped packages of cash lying atop folded shirts.
He turned back to the women, saw that both were safe from flame, Edna regaining her wits. He went toward them and lifted the now-unconscious Jacob over his shoulder just as Katrina bent down to help Edna rise. Edward then heard a great whooshing sound and in the same instant saw the elevator shaft fill with a sudden rocketlike uprush of flame and gas, a blazing cylinder made visible as the elevator door exploded outward, showering sparks and embers on all in the room, setting fires on the green felt of the pool tables, and hurling into the air blazing splinters and sticks, one of which pierced the breast of Katrina and instantly set her gown aflame. She screamed, bewildered by the wound as she looked at it, and Edward could see the flame blackening petals of her violets. With his left hand he pulled the burning stick from her breast and hugged her to his chest to quench the flaming corsage.
As Edna and her Assemblyman ran to the street, frantically brushing sparks from their hair, Edward moved through the doorway, clutching Katrina ever more tightly with his left arm, the inert Jacob doubled over his right shoulder, a family fusion of three bodies inching toward the outer darkness of the frigid world.
Katrina Visits the Ruins, January 1895
ON THE SECOND day after the fire, despite the pain in her violated breast, Katrina dressed in her winter bloomers and long woolen stockings, two of her warmest sweaters, woolen muffler, heaviest skirt and cape, skating cap that covered her ears, and she rode the trolley downtown. On this cold and sunny morning she left the car and walked to the corner of Steuben Street and Broadway and joined the crowd of a thousand who were watching firemen with hoses wet down the smoldering bricks of the Delavan’s ruins so that the search for the missing bodies could begin. She watched people pick up a brick or a piece of pipe as souvenirs, watched three workers trying to pull down a standing wall so it wouldn’t topple on the firemen. One worker threw a rope, with a hook at the end, over the wall and, with his mates, then tried to pull the wall down. They tried half a dozen times, but the wall stood. A man in the crowd told the worker with the hook, “Tie a noose around the end of that rope and hang yourself, you dumb mick.”
A fireman passed by and Katrina asked him, “Aren’t you going to dig for the bodies?” The missing, estimated at a dozen, were all hotel workers. Cora. Her sister Eileen.
“Not today, ma’am. Still got some fire under there, and in some places maybe eight inches of ice on top of that.”
Workers would need a month to move ten thousand cubic feet of stone and brick to recover all the dead.
Katrina stared up at where the third floor had been, only the brick facade standing now. On the night of the fire the firemen’s hoses wouldn’t reach that high, their streams turning into broken plumes just above the second floor and coating the hotel’s lower exterior with the glitter of instant ice, a scandaclass="underline" low water pressure in the city, pressure turned off at night in the antiquated pumping station, and for twenty minutes after the fire started, nobody there to turn it back on.
In two third-floor windows, when they were still windows, when there was still a third floor, Adelaide and Archie Van Slyke appeared in Katrina’s memory, Adelaide wearing her mother’s sealskin coat. She climbed out and sat on the window ledge to escape the smoke pursuing her. She said nothing, but Archie was cajoling her to be calm while he uncoiled a rope fire escape, a single braid, and fed it out the window and down toward Broadway, where his in-laws, and a crowd that would grow to twenty thousand, watched. Firemen inched the great weight of their ladder along the icy wall to a point beneath the imperiled Van Slykes, and two firemen began the upward climb. It was suddenly clear that the ladder would not reach the third floor (four stories up), clear also that Archie’s escape rope (designed for a room two floors down) did not even reach the top of the ladder.
Jacob Taylor said then, “They’re as good as dead.” He was lying propped in the doorway of Iligan the Bootmaker’s shoe repair shop across from the hotel, awaiting a carriage to take him to St. Peter’s Hospital.
“They’ll get them,” Edward said to him, and Katrina ripped her petticoat to make a bandage for Edward’s blistered left hand.