She said, “And what job is it you have?”
“Well, if I have one, it’s to annoy the hell out of you.” She laughed. I said, “Unless it’s painful. I don’t want to upset you.”
“It was painful at the time. Devastating. But that was in 1919, a lot of years ago. The pain mostly fades when you have enough years to pore over the absurdity of the thing.”
While she wiped down the vanity mirror and the sink below it, she talked me back to Boston, where she had lived in 1919.
Harmony had been twenty, a talented pianist who provided music for customers as they shopped in the city’s finest department store. “I also performed livelier music in a nightclub the year before prohibition. In those days, it wasn’t a thing many women would set their mind to do, but I had a bit of dreamer in me, which some called a bit of devil. I expected to secure work in one of the dance bands that were achieving success as the popularity of jazz grew.”
On January 15, 1919, a Wednesday, Harmony was celebrating her twentieth birthday, having taken off work at the department store to enjoy a long lunch with her parents at a restaurant in Boston’s commercial district. Shortly past noon, at the Purity Distilling Company, a fifty-foot-high iron holding tank exploded. People in the vicinity were killed by shrapnel, but that was only the first wave of death and destruction. Instinctively, Harmony broke into a run, but her mother and father halted and turned to look back.
“When I realized they weren’t with me,” she said, pausing in her cleaning to stare into the vanity mirror, “I stopped and turned and shouted at them to run. The explosion had killed the driver of a Purity delivery van, which came hurtling down the street, a runaway Ford, wide of my parents but angling toward me. Beyond the truck, farther uphill, something strange was happening, but it didn’t make sense—what I was seeing—and the truck was my first concern. I’d passed the firehouse before I looked back, and now I dodged into a service passage between the next two buildings. The truck went past and crashed into something, so I didn’t need to keep running, but panic had hold of me because of the horses, the screaming horses.”
She fell silent. Although she still gazed into the mirror, I suspected she didn’t see her reflection. “The horses were screaming. There were still some horse-drawn wagons in those days,” she said. “Not a great many, most of them owned by businesses resistant to the cost of motorization. It’s a horrible sound—the terror of helpless animals. I thought they’dbeen frightened by the explosion, only the explosion, and yet I didn’t turn back. On some deep level, I must have begun to realize what it meant, the strange thing I had seen farther uphill, what was coming. There was a fire escape, a switchback ladder, on the three-story building to my right, and I climbed it frantically, all the way to the top.”
Harmony’s account of the flood was succinct but vivid. In a tremendous gush, the ruptured tank poured out two million gallons of molasses. The tidal wave was said to have been at least fifteen feet high, with the power of a freight train. A few buildings were swamped by the surge. Several firemen were trapped and buried in the sludge. Twenty-one people perished, and forty were badly injured.
“My mother and father were knocked off their feet and swept down the street and slammed into the firehouse. They died. Screaming horses, screaming people—and through all of it, the sweet smell of molasses so overwhelming you could hardly get your breath.” Harmony turned from the mirror to me. “Because they believed prohibition would soon pass and their investment would be worth nothing, Purity had deferred maintenance on the tank. You could say Purity killed my folks, or you might even say it was prohibition that killed them, but however you look at it, God wasn’t to blame. It was bad luck. And by their decisions and their actions, other people make our bad luck—and good luck—for us. My good luck was that runaway Purity truck chasing me out of the path of the wave, and that too was because of the deferred maintenance and the threat of coming prohibition. What do you make of all that, Alida?”
I stood in the bathroom doorway, benumbed by the one-two punch of tragedy and absurdity. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s so ... so awful. How could it mean anything?”
She said, “But it does. Everything is meaningful. Everything. Even death by molasses, as silly as it sounds. But it’s like what we’re being toldis in a language we don’t know, and we have to translate it somehow, puzzle it out from a word here and there.”
She took a deep breath, blew it out. “Enjoy life—that’s what I learned. But stay alert. Always trust in the rightness of the world. But stay alert. Never be bitter or despairing. Life is a great gift. Love and mercy are the promise of life. But stay alert. Remember everything we do spins off good luck and bad luck for other people, so don’t do what’s obviously stupid or wicked. Eleven years, and that’s all I’ve got. It’s more than nothing, but it doesn’t seem like much.”
A few minutes later, when she had finished with my rooms, as I accompanied her to the hall door, I said, “You were a pianist. You were going to be in a big band. Why did you ...?”
“Why am I here instead, a housemaid? My bad luck had two parts that day, with the good luck in between. I lost my parents, but I was saved. Then on the top flight of the fire escape, I stumbled. The treads were open metalwork, and some had been partly eaten away by rust. I grabbed at a higher tread to keep from falling backward, hooked my hands through the holes. In that moment, my feet went out from under me. All my weight suddenly hung from my fingers. Three on one hand snapped, two on the other.” She held up her elegant hands for examination, fingers spread, as if she were a magician assuring the audience nothing was concealed, that the imminent appearance of a dove must therefore be true magic, not a mere trick. “They look all right. They work okay, but okay isn’t good enough.”
My expression must have conveyed a tortured sympathy, for she smiled and said, “I’m happy, Alida. As happy as I’ve ever been. I refuse to be unhappy.” With her red hair, green eyes, freckles, and broad smile, she seemed to emit a light of her own. “I love this family. I love the people I work with. I have a young man I love, and he loves me. Other people make our luck, yes, but we make some of it ourselves. If we’renot always where we want to be, we can find a way to want to be where we are.”
“I want to be here,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be here, but I didn’t know how to find it. Then it found me.”
She regarded me in silence for a moment and then said, “But?”
I nodded slowly. “I want to be here. This is where I belong. I’m safe here, happy here—but I’ll stay alert.”
“Stay alert, Alida.” She stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.
Throughout the rest of Thursday and most of the following day, no need arose to stay alert for impending death by molasses or any lesser threat. At eleven o’clock Friday night, I was wearing my nightdress, curled cozily in an armchair in my living room, readingBarchester Towers. Earlier in the day, my first two pairs of custom-made shoes had been delivered by an employee of Mr. Giovanni Leone. Shaped to my feet, as soft as slippers but with firm soles, they laced up to where my ankles met my calves, giving reliable support where it seemed that my thin bones, if exposed to sudden severe strain, were most likely to fracture one day, though they had never yet troubled me. I had just turned the page to Chapter Twenty-Four when someone rapped softly on my door. Because of the late hour, I thought,Stay alert, and put my book aside on the lamp table.
I had long been of the habit of concealing my abnormalities when not on a stage. Those who paid to satisfy their sick curiosity deserved to have their sleep disturbed by what they’d seen, but I was careful to avoid shocking those who, quite innocently, might get an intimate glimpse of so much as my hands. Even alone in my rooms, I wore a new pair of the elbow-length gloves sewn by Miss Marjorie Merrimen, and the long sleeves of my nightdress provided double concealment. Thus attired, I arrived at the door just as the soft rap-rap-rap came again.
“Who’s there?”
“Clyde Tombaugh,” a girl said just loud enough for her voice to penetrate the door. “Clyde Tombaugh,” said another girl, and a young boy confirmed, “Clyde Tombaugh.”
When I opened the door, I was not surprised to discover that, in spite of the late hour, the Fairchild children stood in the dark hallway. They were dressed in pajamas, barefoot, obviously intent on something other than a courtesy visit. Each child held an Eveready flashlight with the lens under his or her chin so that the up light distorted facial features into a spooky mask. Rafael sat before them, facing me; he did not have a flashlight.
“We are here,” Isadora whispered, “to invite you to join our club.”
“What club is that?”
“The Clyde Tombaugh Club.”
“Would you like to come in and tell me about it?”
“No,” Gertrude whispered. “We need to get on with discovering while Mom and Dad are asleep and drooling all over their pillows.”
