The Blue Cathedral

  ***

          Hannah jiggles a key into a padlock, swings open a plywood door, installed to keep prying trespassers out, the kind you’d see at construction sites. The insurance crew have covered all the windows with half-inch plywood, wrapped the roof with an enormous plastic tarpaulin, which adds an eerie blue tinge to the interior.
         It feels just like a blue cathedral.
 She really wants to show me the inside of the yellow house. The fire marshal gave her the keys to access the smoke-stained, charred interior, the same ones she now uses every day in her frantic expeditions to mine Leah artifacts from beneath the sheet-rock rubble,  water-soaked carpet rubble, linoleum tile rubble, and burnt timber rubble.
          We wander a few feet into the kitchen, and the aura of dank desolation and mournful spirit takes my breath away. The tarped roof and plywood windows on the outside cannot even hint at the stark horror on the inside. One simply cannot imagine that a family once actually lived here. It looks as if the house was hit by a Cruise missile, not some reasonless thing of architectural decrepitude, once hidden by fresh coats of beige paint, ancient electrical wires hidden inside its plaster skin.
           Hannah provides a quiet, running monologue, like a tour guide describing exhibits in a museum.  Here is what used to be the living room, where Victor used to sleep; there is the hall closet, still hung with sooty winter clothes. We peer into a small office. A desktop computer sits abandoned, ruined by hose runoff. Like everything, a fine layer of soot coats the screen and keyboard.
           It will never send another email or Facebook post again.
           It reminds me of Pompeii. Victims frozen into statues by the fiery rivers of molten Vesuvius. I think of sepia photographs of the infamous Triangle Fire in 1911, a human catastrophe that changed industrial fire safety laws forever. The aftermath of that catastrophe was every bit as sobering as what has occurred here, at 34 Mechanics St.
          Inside Triangle, on the tenth floor, New York City firefighters discovered ashen bolts of Egyptian cotton, rows of treadle sewing machines still manned by blackened corpses, floor-to-ceiling windows smashed when immigrant women in billowing dresses chose to jump rather than wait for the flames.
          Hannah pauses in the kitchen, once the happy heart of her family. It still has recognizable features. A row of sooty cabinets, a sooty stove, a sooty center table piled high with new cardboard boxes, filled with random items unearthed from her daily archaeological pilgrimages.
          We enter a windowless hallway. Dark, unbelievably dark. Creepy dark. But I know that for Hannah and her family the remains of their burned home constitute a kind of religious shrine, sanctified by the daily unearthing of melted toys, sodden clothing, and water-stained photographs. It’s the only reason the fire officials allow them back in here. Despite the dangers inside, indicated by the big red X stapled onto the front clapboards, they are fulfilling the mandate of every major religion: to worship their dead. Public safety has its bounds, but certain latitudes are given where the needs of a grieving family are concerned.
          The house is a shambles, much more than you'd imagine a killing fire would create.
The investigators, Hannah whispers, they tore apart everything.
Neither one of us has a flashlight. We navigate by the thin fissures of sun piercing each plywood window.
 Hannah pauses at the stairs.
          Be very careful, she says, with the confident authority of an explorer that has made the journey many times before. I watch where she places her feet, only on the outside six inches of the stringers, where the balusters used to be. Towards the middle, the treads are charred, some are even split in two. Below us, the black murk of the basement. A tumble might mean severe injury, even death. I carefully follow, to the landing at the top of the stairs. We take a few steps forward, suddenly find ourselves standing in the middle of Hannah's once-bedroom.
          I am amazed by her courage to revisit this place, even if it is hallowed ground. In here, ground zero, where the devastation was most extreme, the flames the hottest, the smoke the thickest. In here, two young girls died in the scantest of moments, less time than it takes to walk to the corner and back.
 Somewhere in this room, after all the first responders, the rubberneckers, and the reporters had gone, save for the two deeply traumatized firefighters from Athol, who had drawn the short straw to hold the death watch, and would need weeks of counseling, a solemn pair of coroners in white HazMat suits from the State Medical Examiner's Office quickly located the remains. After carefully lifting each body from their final hiding place, they slid them gently into two juvenile body bags, carefully descended the stairs.
          It must have been a deeply disturbing experience. The rafters above their heads were still hot to the touch,  still smoking. The astringent stench of smoldering walls that had not seen daylight since 1890 seared into their nostrils. And worst of all, the incinerated bodies of recently asphyxiated children.
          Today, much of the overwhelming stink has been toned down, in those eternally long, sorrowful months since the afternoon of March 5th.
          Now, it reminds me of a country house in late summer, whose residents burn wood in the fall to take the chill off.
          A large, sodden rectangle leans against the outer wall.
          My bed, Hannah explains. I try to imagine a sleeping Leah quietly snoring in the crook of her arm, the two of them laying beneath a quilted comforter, rows of colorful silk scarves hung overhead.
 She picks up a framed photograph, sooty around the edges, an image of my father, her grandfather, as a younger man, a frozen Kodak moment in front of the Cape Cod art gallery where he sold his work.
          She lifts another object, amazingly intact, because it’s made entirely of paper. A homemade book of babysitting coupons,  a gift from Leah’s grandmother, each with a famous painting clipped from a book, with a handwritten promise: Good for one hour.
          Above one coupon, she’d pasted Mary Cassatt's Mother and Child.  
          We stand together in the bedroom.
          Where did they find them? I ask, meaning, of course, the bodies.
          Hannah purses her lips.
          It's a difficult image, an impossible memory.
          Finally she shakes her head.
          I really don't know. They haven’t told us.
          I am scanning the room, examining the ceiling, the walls, this amount of char, that degree of smoky black stain. The wiring hanging from the ceiling, ripped from walls, is a complete hodgepodge, an illustrated history of rural electrification, beginning with the 1890s, the earliest installation of knob and tube, then on into the 1930s, the primitive armor-wrapped BX cable, then to the forties, when the first rubber-covered wires were introduced. I even see a glimpse of modern Romex, from the sixties or seventies, white plastic insulation with a ground wire covered with paper. 
          The investigators have been busy. They’ve attached red tape over many wire terminations, places where switches and plugs emerge from the charred lathe and two-by-fours. Hannah points to a wall on the left, an opening into a closet. The door was vaporized.
          That’s the crafts closet. She says, then points to a second closet, the one on the right. That was mine, she explains. She never went in there.
          I duck my head through the dark maw of what remains of the crafts closet. It's obvious this is where the fire began, where it was at its most extreme. Everything once wooden has been reduced to rippling charcoal. Stout rafters that once held the roof, walls that held plaster, the floorboards. Everything is just rubble and char. Dull tendrils of archaic copper wire dangle everywhere, each terminus wrapped in red tape. I look harder, trying to see what the investigators saw. Flame patterns,  tell-tale stains of darker areas, indicating the presence of accelerants. If you know what you're looking for, you'll find it. But so far the fire had remained obstinately Sphinx-like, slow in surrendering its tragic secrets.
          One thing is obvious. Something very quick and very flammable destroyed the crafts closet, even to my untrained eye. The fire began from a single spark, exploded upward, spread and grew exponentially, ignited everything in its path.
          Yet where the girls were situated, in those first horrifying moments, is still the subject of official speculation.
          Hannah’s disembodied voice again, from the murky shadows. Tommy said he saw the bed in flames.
          My eyes keep returning to the crafts closet.
          Where are you, Leah? I ask the tiny cubicle under the eaves.
 I remember what Victor had tried to tell his wife, lying in a hospital bed, the vivid memory of Vera grabbing for the younger girl’s hand, as if dragging her into the closet. One wants to think it was a protective act, done out of love and concern, to shield her friend from the flames.
          I keep looking around me, an amateur sleuth sifting for clues. From the bedroom door where Tommy would have stood, you cannot possibly see around the wall into the crafts closet. And by that time, flame-hot and smoke-thick, any thought of entering would have been impossible.
 Some things simply don’t add up.
          The family still doesn't know everything. I haven't even asked Hannah who had to identify Leah. Perhaps the coroners chose to forego this bit of grim housekeeping. Probably not. These guys are pros, with implacable work protocols.
          She nods down the hallway toward the furthest door. 
          That was Tommy’s room.
          Then she points to the closest one, on the right. This, she says, was Leah's official bedroom, although she rarely slept in her own bed.  A flash of bright blue plastic pokes from the fallen lath and plaster. A fragment of a toy. Hannah’s eyes begin to well up. I put my arm around her broad shoulders.
          There can't be much left, I say. She's gone. Time to let go.
          Hannah nods, but says nothing.
          Before descending, we take one last look around. Hannah is now behind me,  as we step carefully on the precipitous edges of the staircase that once echoed with the sounds of tiny feet.

                                                                                 ***

          We exit the house, blinking up into the noonday sun, adding our sooty footprints to the parade of footprints heading to the curb. The grass in the back yard is getting long. Victor came over, tried to cut it once, a reminder of his previous homeowner’s duties, but the mower, like everything else here, has died. Now, only wildflowers and stalky weeds slowly undulate beneath the blue June sky.
          Hannah doesn’t notice the landscaping deficiencies. She sees only Leah's playset, the wooden seat swing, a teeter-totter, a modest climbing tower, her daughter’s favorite spot being consumed by the encroaching jungle. Everywhere once purposeful is now disheveled abandonment, desolation and wearily beating hearts. Next to the house, a pile of broken ceramic tiles and rusting trowels, distant vestiges of Victor’s working life, now ancient history, polishing other people's dreams so he can feed his family.
          I imagine him turning into the driveway, exhausted from the commute to the college towns, where the money is.  All those happy family archetypes. Leah leaping from the rocking swing, her strong, bony legs covering the distance to his outstretched arms. She reminds me a young Scout Finch, fromTo Kill a Mockingbird, although Leah was much prettier than a tomboy; she loved playing dress-up and girly games.
          Victor is no Gregory Peck. He's fucked up, made all the wrong mistakes, stumbled and been knocked down by his addictions. It was a long, torturous road that led him back here, to a wife, his children, a little money in the bank, plenty of jobs, even if they were a pain in the ass, a dependable work van full of income-producing tools. He finally owned the American dream, a lower case success story.
          What remains of the yellow house is a stark reminder of how quickly it can all be taken away. Hannah and Victor are forever deeply wounded. Their confidence has been shaken, perhaps irreparably, by what happened that terrible afternoon. Someday even the ghosts be gone. Someday somebody will buy their house at auction, tear it down, or maybe rebuild from the ashes. Then a new family, with new dreams, will supplant what’s been lost.