Opal Doucet’s mouth was a perfect O, her angular face looked familiar, a celebrity I couldn’t place. She wore a black lace dress witha high neck. Her eyes looked frenzied, despite the poor photographic quality. Something struck me as familiar in the angular shape of Opal’s face, the way her eyes smarted, the squared-off chin, the nose that sloped like the bust of a Roman soldier.
Some years ago a bystander took a picture of me dining at an outdoor café where slick black grackles were begging for scraps of food. I tossed my bread crust to one, but the camera caught me midthrow. In the frozen frame, printed inTempo of the Times, my arm is pitched forward. My jaw clenched. The bread crust looked like a weapon of assault, and I resembled Lyssa, goddess of fury. Photographs separate the moment from context, time from space, which is how they can lie.
While a director could use lighting and music and a montage of images to set the tone, I only have words, and sometimes words fail us. Isn’t that what art is about? Saying what can’t be said, knowing we’ll never be able to say it right, though we keep trying anyway? Art is optimism in action. The news won’t give us that.
Now my fingertips were inky with newsprint. I considered that the ink was seventy-six years old, about Charlie’s age, born the night of the fire. The fire—that’s what I was looking for, I reminded myself. The Earthshine fire. Bertie had told that story inThe Juggernaut: The factory was burning. Everyone was looking toward the sky in anticipation. Some thought it was the end of the world, but for Charlie, it was just the beginning. The chaos caused Bertie’s water to break—an early labor. She was dragged away from the fire. Before midnight, Charlie was born.
Someone tapped my shoulder. The librarian stood in front of me, holding a stack of books. Her dress was cinched at the waist, and she wore glasses, and she resembled Katharine Hepburn inDesk Set, that movie about a librarian named Bunny who falls in love with the computer guy who’s come to automate her job. Critics say Hepburn’s Bunny had too strong a personality. Now the librarian in front of me smirked.
“I know where I know you,” she said.
“Oh?”
“You died. Poor Stella,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t being serious.
“You don’t strike me as a fan of the show.”
“The billboards are everywhere. The commercials, too. A prime-time wedding in a few days. That’s very exciting,” she says.
“Brought to you by Earthshine.”
“And you on the canister.”
“Not me,” I said quickly. “I sold my likeness. It was theirs to keep.”
“Oh? You’re someone new now? Someone who’s interested in history?”
I didn’t respond, just went back to sorting through the papers in front of me.
“Do you believe them? Those Jane Does?” she asked. “Because…” Here she took off her glasses and folded them, and she didn’t look a librarian any longer, just a regular woman. “Because, I’ve wondered about it myself. And everything I’ve read, all the interviews I’ve seen… I know a lot of women like that, with stories. And I… when I’ve used the soap, I felt—I know this will sound crazy—an overwhelming sense of… I don’t know. Maybeennuiisn’t the right word.”
“I don’t know,” I said, harsher than I intended.
“Maybe I just don’t like cleaning.” She put her glasses back on. “Anyway, I found a few moreInquisitors,” she said. “All the comet frenzy. Everyone wants to know about the last time, when they thought the world would end. It was on the Xerox machine,” she said. She placed the paper on the table in front of me.
I stood again and stretched my arms. Below, that black sedan still idled, its flashing blinkers keeping time. I knew my answering machine would be full of messages from Gene Longworth. I wondered if Carol had told Charlie I’d called. What would I say to him when he finally reached out to me?
The fire.
I imagined what it’d be like to be burned alive—quicker than being buried alive and more painful. But what difference does it make? We die, anyway, then become organic matter or stardust or rocks.
Stella died of oxygen deprivation.
Cancer claimed my mother.
Halley, she took pills. But despite taking her own life, despite her own suffering, she saved me. She saved others. She gave me purpose. She gave them proof. But I’m ahead of myself.
The fire.
On the front page was a photograph of the burning factory. The fire drew attention to the shapes of the building, square windows, high slanted roof, large rectangular door. It was almost like looking at film negatives. Dark appeared light. The factory glowed. I knew what that article would tell me—the story I’d heard hundreds of times—and it did. I saw the names of the workers who died in the fire, the same women listed on that plaque.
I studied those names, let my eyes slowly drift over each one as though to say to their ghosts: I’ll remember you. I sat at that table in the Mercantile Library, and I closed my eyes, and I placed my palms face down and pressed them against the smooth grain. I practiced the breathing technique I’d been taught, up through my toes, out through my head.I tried to imagine Opal Doucet. My lips became a circle. My eyes widened, like in that picture of her.
Then, I heard it again, so clearly this time. That warble of noises, that preverbal cry I’d been hearing. Some people will call me crazy, but crazy doesn’t mean I’m not right. I felt something in that room, a haunting.
If this were a movie, the director would cut to my hands as they turned to Dixie About Town and I read the headline: “Earthshine Workers Strike a Match; Several Perish.”
Though I’ve made no uncertain claims about my feelings on the place of women in the workplace, I pray the souls of the Earthshine Girls rest in peace untildelivered to their Maker. Before she could be taken into custody for her involvement in starting the fire, Madame Doucet displayed the pre-telling signs of childbirth, and thus she was escorted by Mrs. Charles Tuttle, with the assistance of others, into a police wagon. May God save that child’s soul.
