It surprised Evie that so few people knew about the spectacular crash. Maybe it was because a few days later the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
“This is so cool,” Nick said. He crouched beside her. “They’re just going to let us take it?”
Evie waved the release and letter of agreement she’d worked so hard to get. Finding the engine had been a reward for persistence. She’d been looking for artifacts to feature in the upcoming Seared in Memory exhibit, the first she’d curated solo, and it had occurred to her to wonder what had happened to the plane engines after the fire. From Alice Chen, a friend from college and now director of community relations for the Empire State Building, Evie had learned that not only did one of the engines still exist, it hadn’t been moved. Getting the building owners to agree to let the Historical Society feature the engine in the exhibit had taken months of diplomacy. It helped that one of the Historical Society board members was the wife of a senior partner in the property management company that ran the building.
While the movers got started assembling the polyurethane-sheathed cage that Evie had designed to protect the engine during transport, Nick set up lights and Evie started to take pictures. Of the engine. Of Nick standing over the engine, his arms spread to give a sense of scale. Of the closed door just beyond with white stenciled letters that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Of that door open, shooting down into the pit where the engine had landed. It must have sounded like a bomb exploding, a quarter of a ton of burning metal plummeting from more than a thousand feet overhead.
It took the rest of the morning to get the engine wrapped and hoisted onto a platform. By the time they were ready to leave, Evie’s arms and legs were coated with dirt and rust—and those were just the parts of her that she could see. She was glad she’d worn jeans and steel-toed work boots.
As they were bringing the engine up in the service elevator at the Historical Society, her cell phone vibrated. Maybe it was Seth. He’d promised her dinner at her favorite soup dumpling restaurant in Chinatown for a change. Handsome in a Colin Farrell kind of way, without the mustache, he and Evie had met at an auction. He’d outbid her for a gold-and-pearl tie tack that had belonged to Stephanus Van Cortlandt, New York’s first American-born mayor. It was a refreshing change to date someone who’d actually heard of Stephanus Van Cortlandt or knew that the pattern tooled on those gold cuff links was acanthus leaf. It wasn’t the worst reason she’d had to go to bed with a man.
The doors opened on the second floor, where the main exhibit hall was located. A minute later there was a chime. A text message. Evie fished out the phone.
The message was short and sweet. It was not from Seth; it was from her sister, Ginger, and it was so not what she wanted to see.
Chapter Three
It’s mom. Call me. xx Ginger
Why now? Not again. Evie knew she should return the call right away, and as she and Nick entered the Great Hall of Five-Boroughs Historical Society, pushing ahead of them a platform truck with the B-25 Wright Whirlwind engine wrapped up on it like a gigantic pastrami sandwich, that’s what she was intending to do. But her boss’s reaction to their arrival sidetracked her.
“Wow. Is that what I think it is?” Connor Kennedy’s familiar voice boomed behind her. A moment later, he was in her space and she could smell his cologne and cigarette breath. He stood absolutely still and silent, staring at the engine. Moving the thing had eaten up a good chunk of Evie’s budget, but judging from Connor’s reaction, it had been worth it.
“So this is going to be sensational,” he said, doing a 360 and surveying the disarray in the exhibit hall with apprehension. “We are going to make it, aren’t we?”
“Of course we’ll make it. We always do,” Evie said, sounding more confident than she felt.
The parquet floor of the Great Hall was awash in packing crates. The other two members of Evie’s small staff were assembling bases and plexi mounts for the installation. The museum’s resident electrician was drilling into the wall and wiring one of six massive flat-screen monitors. One of the janitors was sweeping up wood and plaster dust with a wide push broom.
Outside, beyond a row of narrow two-story arched windows, bright yellow banners for the upcoming exhibit snapped in the breeze. Dramatic red-orange letters on them read: SEARED IN MEMORY. Below that and smaller: June 10–November 17. Just three weeks until it opened.
Evie could envision the room, silent and cleared of debris. Each of four historic fires would have its own timeline and photographs, audio and video. Artifacts she’d culled from their own collection and borrowed from others would be mounted, lit, and documented. Together, each grouping would tell its own story.
She walked Connor through the half-finished installations. Greeting visitors and already in place was a magnificent red-and-black steam-powered pumper like the one used to fight the Great Fire of 1776 that destroyed the Stock Exchange and much of lower Manhattan. The next section, commemorating the fire during the ugly 1853 Civil War Draft Riots, would feature blowups of inflammatory broadsides (“We are sold for $300 whilst they pay $1000 for negroes”) that stoked passions so much that anyone with dark skin risked being chased through the streets, beaten, and even killed. One of her favorite pieces in that section was a long speaking trumpet, the kind that would have been used to shout orders to firefighters over those five hellish summer days when the city burned.
Another section remembered the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, arguably the saddest of all time. In the center was a raised platform where they’d set a battered fireman’s net that couldn’t save the young, mostly immigrant women who’d thrown themselves from the windows of the upper floors of the Asch Building. Foam-core mounted photographs, showing views of the devastated factory interior filled with charred sewing machines and coffins lined up tidily on the floor like fallen soldiers, were already on the wall. Something about the photographs from that one always did her in, filling her head with the gut-wrenching smell of smoke, a smell seared in her own memory.
The list of the 146 who died in that fire was particularly heartbreaking. Mary Goldstein had been only eleven; Kate Leone, fourteen; most of the rest were in their teens and early twenties. A few of the bodies remained unidentified a hundred years later.
Journalists back in those days were allowed, encouraged even, to write unabashedly emotional prose, and Evie had selected a quote from a reporter’s viscerally melodramatic eyewitness account:
I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. . . . Thud-dead, thud-dead—together they went into eternity.
Thud-dead, thud-dead, together they went into eternity. The elegiac passage, more poetry than prose, moved Evie profoundly. She couldn’t imagine today’s Daily News or New York Times printing anything like that.
As she finished showing Connor around, taking notes on his suggestions for ways to tweak the displays and adding to her to-do list, she was reminded what being senior curator meant. Much as she might delegate, she was the one responsible for seeing that every little detail, down to the spelling on the signage and the training of security guards, was done properly and completed in time for the opening gala.
When Connor stopped to chat with Nick, who was carefully cutting away the protective covering they’d built around the airplane engine, her phone chimed again. Evie reached into her pocket and turned it off.
Evie meant to call Ginger back. Really, she did. But she got pulled into one meeting and then another. Two hours later, eating a midafternoon granola bar instead of lunch, she was back in her office, the door closed, trying to finish editing transcripts of eyewitness accounts of the fires before the voice-over actors arrived to record them. When her cell phone rang, she recognized the number with its Connecticut area code and for only an instant considered not answering it.