Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [121]
In the days that followed, they would learn that the fire got started when two young lovers kissed in a corner of the Melody Lounge and, perhaps as Alice herself once had, the girl said it was too indiscreet, too bright under the lights like that, with a hundred other people in the room. So her date reached up over their heads and removed a lightbulb from where it hung on a wire stretched from one palm tree to another. Minutes later, they had forgotten it—they were interrupted by a teasing friend, maybe, or drawn out to the dance floor, where the piano player had just started another verse of “Bell Bottom Trousers.”
Meanwhile, a bartender instructed a sixteen-year-old busboy to replace the missing lightbulb, so he climbed onto a chair and lit a match to see by, wobbling a bit as he held the match in one hand and the bulb in the other, and accidentally setting fire to one of the artificial palms.
Holiday ornaments, newly strung around the basement bar, caught fire. Flames flew up the stairs and tore through the flimsy silk draping, all the way up to the roof. Fireballs dropped down onto the tables and the bar and the bandstand and the floor, where seven hundred people were crammed in, dancing, drinking, flirting, and then—a moment later—pushing toward the doors, fighting to get out alive, which precious few of them did.
The room was dim enough on its own and quickly filled with smoke.
At the auxiliary doors, people were crushed to death, pushing in vain to get out. The doors had been bolted shut. Others ran aimlessly in all directions, scrambling like mad to escape before they died of smoke inhalation or were trampled where they stood. By the end, bodies were piled six feet high at all of the entrances, to the tops of the doors. There were bodies everywhere. They fell into the stone basement when the ballroom floor collapsed.
Later, four hundred fur coats and evening wraps were found in the coat check, destroyed by water and smoke. The redheaded gal with the crush on the Boston College fullback lay dead in the midst of them.
The fire chief told the Globe that really, the fire hadn’t been so particularly bad. If people hadn’t panicked and flooded the sole exit, if they had allowed the firemen in, if they hadn’t had to dig through heaps of bodies at every door to reach the fire, he estimated there would have been at most a handful of deaths.
The chief loss of life resulted from the screaming, clawing crowds that were wedged in the entrances of the club, the paper read the next day. Smoke took a terrific toll of life and scores were burned to death.
Four hundred ninety-two people died in all.
Mary’s body was identified after five days of searching, at a morgue in Scituate. She had been trampled, her face crushed by the boot of a man twice her size. It was impossible to say how long she had lived that way, or how much she had suffered.
At home that night, Alice drank half a bottle of whiskey, stolen from her father’s secret hiding place under the basement steps, and passed out in her bed upstairs. Mary’s bed, beside it, stood empty, and Alice had to turn her face to the wall. She woke up long after dinner had ended. She went to the bathroom and threw up, the whiskey like gasoline in her throat, her temples throbbing. Down on her knees, she noticed a pearl hair comb of her sister’s that must have fallen behind the sink. Alice took it in her hand, sat down with her back against the tub, and ran her fingers over every inch.
She was positive that she would go to Hell for what she had done. She felt desperate to tell someone—her mother, her brother Tim—that it was because of her that Mary was inside the club to begin with, that she had murdered her own sister in a way.
Their father wept openly at the kitchen table and glared at Alice through drunken eyes. The sight of him terrified her.
The day after they discovered Mary’s body, she went down the front hall early, her throat