I made Jessie wipe her feet because it was thawing now, as February turned to March, and muddy in places where the snow was gone on the path. Then I made her wash her hands before we got the paper dolls out. Last time we played, I hadn't, and she got dirt smears on a fine Summer Leghorn Hat of Real Japanese Silk that she wanted for the lady in her paper doll family.
Jessie washed her hands, but she said our bathroom smelled peculiar.
And it was true. Peggy had taken Father's clothes away, the ones he had worn all night at the hospital, but the smell from them remained. Peggy told me later it was the smell of burned people on him; she opened the window wide, though it was cold outside, and scrubbed the bathroom with carbolic acid.
It was only one week later that we heard the terrible, terrible news from New York. Peggy gasped and made a sound like "Oh!" when she heard at first, because her sister Nellie had been talking lately about New York, about going there to work and earn some money and maybe make her way into the pictures.
It was young girls like Nellie, and some even younger, who were working there and were caught in that terrible fire. From the eighth floor, the newspaper said, they jumped, some of them holding hands, their skirts and hair afire. Hundreds of them. Their bodies lay in heaps, smoldering, in the street. I thought of the smell of Father's clothes.
There was a list in our paper of all of them, the Mollys, Rosies, Annas, and even a Kate, my name, fourteen years old. Some of them weren't even identified; no one knew who they were.
One was only eleven, and her name was Mary.
In New York, thousands of people lined the streets in mourning for those working girls who wanted only to earn a better life for themselves. It was raining, and the newspaper picture showed thousands of umbrellas; I wanted to be there, holding a black umbrella, with rain dripping from the edge, and to bow my head as they were carried past, to the cemetery.
I was filled with a feeling of frustration at having no way to mourn for them. Finally, when no one was around to see, I went into Mother's room, opened her bureau drawer, and looked carefully through all of her ironed, folded shirtwaists. I was looking for a label that said Triangle Shirtwaist Company. I would tear it, scribble on it with ink, punish it in every way I knew.
But I found none there. Mother's clothes had been made for her, most of them, by Miss Abbott.
Instead, I made up a little prayer for Mary Goldstein, age eleven, who had died that day. I said it every night for several weeks. "Dear Mary Goldstein, please be happy in heaven and don't be frightened or on fire ever again, and now you can fly instead of falling." I murmured it every night before I went to sleep, adding "Amen" at the conclusion, so that God knew it was a prayer even though it hadn't been addressed to him.
8. MARCH 1911
"Please take me, Father!"
It was Saturday afternoon, so there was no school. Peggy had gone to visit her parents. Jessie was being punished for some mischief and was not allowed to play, and Austin was visiting his cousins in Harrisburg. Mother was resting upstairs. I was very bored.
The buggy was waiting, and Father was looking through his medical bag to be sure he had what he might need. We were in his office, and I watched while he added a small bottle of a white powder that he kept in the locked cabinet. The call summoning him had come just after lunch.
"You know I'm not a bother!"
He snapped the bag closed. "Of course you're not. Sometimes you're even a help, Katydid."
"Then may I come?"
"I won't be able to take you inside, Katy. It's not a patient's home, you know, where you can sit in the kitchen and wait. Not like the mill, where the men always thought it a fine thing that you were my helper. This is like a hospital."
"I won't mind. I can wait in the buggy. The horses will like me to do that. They get lonely waiting by themselves. And I'll take a book."
Father laughed. "All right. Let me just go tell your mother that you're coming along," he said.
And so, for the first time, an hour later, I found myself at the Asylum. I had seen it only at a distance before.
On the outskirts of town, the massive stone building was set in the center of expansive grounds surrounded by a wall with an iron gate. Carved deep into one of the stone pillars that formed the side of the gate were the letters that spelled Asylum, a word I could not have pronounced from sounding out the letters. Once, some time ago, when we drove past, Father had told me how to say it, and what it meant.
"I believe the dictionary would call it 'a place of protection, " he had said.
"But who needs to be protected?"
"People who are ill and can't take care of themselves."
"So it's a hospital, really," I said. "Yes. In a way."
"Jessie says it's for crazy people. She said imbeciles and lunatics and madmen."
Father smiled. "Those are just other words for people who are ill," he explained. "Ill in their minds. And at the Asylum, people take care of them."
"Jessie's afraid of it."
"No need," Father said.
"Jessie's afraid of bugs, too. I'm not." I felt quite smug.
But in truth, on this day, when the heavy gate was actually opened by the attendant in the gatehouse and Father drove the buggy inside the grounds, I did feel a little frightened. The building was so large—I counted five floors, and that was only in the central section; there were wings to the sides—and so silent.
Paths curved around the grounds, and benches dotted the landscape here and there, but on this late-March day no one was strolling or sitting outdoors. There was still leftover snow not yet melted, and the air was chilly. Father had wrapped a blanket around me and made me wear my mittens.
He tied the horses to the post in front of the building and told me he would not be long. If my feet got cold, he said, I should climb down and walk briskly until they warmed up. One good quick walk up and down the driveway, stamping hard with each step, would be a good treatment for cold feet. "Doctor Thatcher's prescription," he said to me, laughing.
Then he went up the granite steps, pulled the bell cord at the front door, which opened for him, and went inside.
I talked a bit to Jed and Dahlia, and I could see their ears flick back and forth, so I knew they were listening. Then I opened my library book and found the marker to show me where I had left off. It was a book I liked, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, but it was hard to turn the pages with my mittens on, and too cold to take them off. I couldn't concentrate and tried reading aloud. Chapter 6, where the little Wiggs girls have their hair ironed on the ironing board, was very funny; I had read it once already, and it made me laugh, so I read that part again, to the horses.