It was then a wind seemed to arise suddenly, for there was all at once a roar cutting through what had been silence. But in fact what they heard was the sound of sobbing, for those who had managed to survive were already searching for sisters and friends, and what they discovered was devastating. As the families of the dead arrived, many had to be restrained. Eddie himself felt maddened as he wandered among those who’d been lost, documenting as many as he could. He let the camera make his choices, for his eyes were burning with soot and his head spun. He continued to photograph the scene until a company man came over, there on behalf of the bosses, the very ones who had refused to install sprinklers, who some were saying were known to burn down their buildings for the sake of insurance money.
“That’s enough,” the company man said flatly. He was wearing an overcoat, though the air was stifling. He carried a thick wooden club he seemed more than ready to use. “Get going now.”
Eddie hoisted his camera stand over his shoulder. “No problem. On my way.” He muttered a few ripe curses under his breath, but he let it go at that, though he was steaming. He would have liked to have it out with the stooge, but this wasn’t the moment to create an incident. Instead, Eddie went along Washington Place onto Waverly, but, as soon as the company man had moved on, he continued to work, despite the warning he’d been given. The air was cold and damp in the oncoming dusk, but his skin was burning. He was in a fever, and sweat washed down his back and chest. He couldn’t help but wonder if Moses Levy had experienced this same heat, if true images burned their maker. He wondered, too, if the hermit at the riverside was right, if there wasn’t some element of capturing a soul in each photograph, if he wasn’t responsible for those whose images he caught, whether they be a bird in a cage, a fish in a pail, or a girl on a windowsill.
Eddie wiped his lens clean of soot. He tried to disappear from view as he photographed families desperate to find a sister or daughter, and girls crying in the gutter, arms around each other, clothes covered with ashes, the hems of their skirts singed black. In deference to their grief, he turned to photographing a clutter of personal trinkets, hair ribbons, purses, love letters, combs, all floating like debris in the drenched gutters, scattered over the cement like confetti. But every object seemed to have a soul as well, a throbbing heart, a remembrance of small pleasures and true love. There would be sixteen engagement rings found on the pavement by morning.
When darkness fell the police chased everyone away so they might cordon off the street to bring in the wooden coffins for the dead. So many were needed they could not gather enough in all of Manhattan. Carpenters came to fashion dozens more from floorboards and doors. Eddie huddled in a doorway so that he could continue on. His skin was aflame, and a cough had settled in his chest. He was still positioned on the soaked pavement when the firemen went into the building to retrieve the dead who’d been trapped in the charred rooms. They wrapped the bodies in sheets of oilcloth, and when those ran out they turned to using burlap, though the fabric quickly became damp and some of the sodden threads unraveled as corpses were lowered to the street on heavy ropes. The last image Eddie photographed belonged to one such terrible bundle, the pale feet of a lifeless young girl as she was delivered through the air.
That night Eddie went to the covered pier at East Twenty-sixth Street. The city morgue was too small for the sheer number of the dead, 147 in total, and so a makeshift morgue had been set up along the East River. The water was black as oil, and the night was black as well, illuminated by the lanterns the police held as they patrolled the pier. Eddie saw a cop he knew from the Tenth Precinct. For a fiver the officer let him past the barriers, but he told Eddie to hurry, for the families would be allowed in soon enough. One hundred thousand people would line up to view the dead before the night was through, families alongside gawkers who simply wanted to see the tragedy for themselves. The police would work through the day and night, holding up lanterns in the murky air so that the dead might be identified. Some of the bodies were so charred they were unrecognizable; others were oddly preserved, with so little damage Eddie half-expected them to rise from their coffins. Moses Levy had told him that, in Russia, children who had died were photographed in their finest clothes in the instants after death, propped up on velvet couches, to ensure that their images would be captured before their souls had flown. Perhaps it was true and a soul lingered close by after a person had passed on, for Eddie had found some of Levy’s one-of-a-kind hand-tinted ambrotype prints tucked away in a drawer after his mentor’s death. The technique, using nitric acid or bichloride of mercury, was so difficult and time-consuming it was rarely employed anymore. Some photographers considered it a cheap substitute for the more well-made daguerreotypes, but, in Levy’s hands, these prints were magic. Silvery beads appeared upon the heads and clothing of the departed, as if they had been touched by something far greater than any human form. Looking at the serene faces of the two boys in one photograph, Eddie realized they must have been Moses’s sons, children he’d never spoken of but whose images he’d managed to preserve for all eternity. And so it seemed, a soul could be captured after all.
IN THE DAYS that followed the Triangle Fire a dark lens was placed over Manhattan. The sorrow did not ease with time but instead seemed to multiply. There was a rising indignation over what had befallen the victims of the fire. Meetings at Cooper Union saw thousands attending, reminiscent of the protests of 1909 and 1910, when the city was forewarned that the conditions of the garment workers would lead to tragedy. Now the bloody portents had come to pass.
More workers gathered in the streets, their confusion turning to pure rage when it was discovered that the doors of the factory sewing loft had been locked, making it impossible for the girls to escape. A bolted doorknob had been found by investigators, there among the debris on the ninth floor, but because the door it had been attached to was nothing more than a few black planks, it could not be used as proof in a court of law. Still, every working man and woman knew what it meant. The dead had been locked into their death chamber, like common beasts, sheep penned up and forsaken. Eddie found a dark doorway from which to watch the mayhem. He bowed his head and let the words of the workers wash over him, a river of anger he understood all too well. In truth, he had been outraged all of his life.
When his insomnia gave way in the early morning hours and he at last found sleep, Eddie dreamed of the river and of his father’s black coat. In his dream he was thirteen again, sleeping beside the horses, as he had when he first came to beg Moses Levy to take him on as his apprentice. He heard a knock on the stable doors and awoke within his dream. Inside his dream life, his father was waiting on the rough cobblestones. The elder Cohen had the suitcase that he kept beneath the bed. In real life, Eddie had once opened it, though he knew it was breaking a trust to do so. Inside there was a change of clothing for both Eddie and his father, along with a prayer book and a photograph of Eddie’s mother.
In his dream he went to his father and stood beside him, a dutiful son once more.
“Are we going somewhere?” his dream self asked.
“No. But if we have to, we’re ready,” his father said reasonably.