From the Ashes

Cathleen McNamara Callahan

From the Ashes

A fire whistle wails and my heart pounds, sweat forming in the palms of my hands. Deep inside me is a fear I can’t shake: those fire engines are coming for me.

It began with a home, an old Victorian three-story brown shingle, white-trimmed “cottage” with a gambrel roof and a wide, wrap-around porch. Constructed in the 1800s  with a large columned portico it sat on the south side of Main Street in a small Long Island town. Mature trees canopied the street it was on, which led to the Great South Bay. Grand but a bit scraggly around the edges, the home was centered on two acres with a hand-trimmed hedge in front. And it sat quiet and still, just before dawn on Sunday, the first of May, 1960.

Nine souls slept scattered in high-ceilinged, airy bedrooms on its three floors. On the second level, my mother Mary was alone in the master bedroom while my sister Maryann and her college roommate Clyde (our house guest) occupied two other rooms. I was with my five-year-old identical twin sister Patti in a fourth bedroom. My four brothers – Emmett, Richard, Paul, and Vincent slept upstairs on the massive third floor. My dad Emmett, Sr. was not home but away on an overnight religious retreat an hour east in Sag Harbor, with no idea that his prayers were most needed at home.

And in his usual spot on the black and white linoleum kitchen floor in the back of the house, our Beagle “Skippy” slept soundly, sedated from an earlier visit to the veterinarian to have a torn paw repaired. There would be no warning barks.

The sudden bang of our bedroom door flying open and hitting the wall jolted me awake from a deep sleep. Maryann rushed in, screaming.

“TWINS WAKE UP!” she shouted, throwing us each out of our separate beds. We could only see the shadow of her, as if a ghost, desperately grabbing at our squirming bodies on the floor.

“Don’t hurt me!” I screamed at her, who at 21 was more like a second mom.  Why is Maryann being so mean, why is she angry?  

A thick putrid smell of smoke followed her in from the hallway and through the darkness. I heard a commotion and my mother’s voice. Usually calm and steady even as the mother of seven, she now yelled panicked instructions to my older sister. It sounded muffled as if something covered her mouth.

“TWINS, GO WITH MARYANN NOW! STAY WITH HER!” she commanded. We didn’t understand but felt her urgency. 

 Why are they yelling in the dark? Why don’t they turn on the lights? We didn’t do anything wrong.

“I’M GOING TO GET THE BOYS,” her voice coughed through the blackness, “YOU GET OUTSIDE WITH THE TWINS.” Those were the last words I ever heard my mother speak. A dutiful daughter to the mom she adored, Maryann did what she was told.

Dragged and pulled down the front staircase, Patti and I were coughing and gagging from the nauseating odor that filled our nostrils and mouths. We couldn’t find relief for the thick, foul air followed our every footstep as if pursuing us.  Everything was pitch-black as we tripped and fell our way down the 14-steps. Thrown on the floor next to the door, we landed nearly on top of one another and tried to bury our faces into each other’s nightgowns to stop the smell. Mare grabbed around the door and finally found the knob but it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked.

“Oh my God, help us!” she screamed as we heard her banging her hands desperately against the door frame, struggling to find the bolt. 

"Oh my God, oh my God," she repeated until, finally, she was able to locate and undo the lock. She threw open the door, picked us up – one at a time – and ran outside toward the wooden railing of our massive front porch, throwing each of us out over the railing and onto the dew-soaked lawn which was illuminated by some kind of strange light. While in Mare's arms, I looked over her shoulder to see orange flames and grey smoke climbing up the clapboard, discovering it to be the source of the light. So quickly had everything happened it was only in this instant that I fully understood, that our home was on fire.

"RUN!" our sister shouted. I tried to gulp in the cold air of the early morning but the smoke felt thick as tar, blocking any fresh breath. The wet cold grass chilled my bare legs and feet and soaked my nightgown. Disoriented and gripped in fear, Patti and I fumbled to our knees, picked ourselves up, and, holding hands, ran toward the hedges silhouetted in the distance. Arriving we crouched down and huddled together, hugging one another, crying and gagging.  

Where is Maryann? Where is mommy?

My twin sister and I were saved by our mother’s screams, but no one saved her. Instead of running out with us she turned back into the darkness, enveloped by the smoke, and made her way to the third floor in an attempt to save her four sons. My mom Mary and three of her four boys would perish, her body later recovered close to all three: Emmett, a college freshman at Fairfield University, Richey, a high school Junior and track star, and Vinnie, a "momma's boy" and second-grader.  And our houseguest Clyde Fitzgerald, an only daughter of a couple from Holmdel New Jersey, would also lose her life that night. 

One son of four survived. Paul, age 11, was found alive clinging to a burnt section of kitchen roofing that had fallen away from the pile. A miracle, people would say.

 A police escort brought our father Emmett from Sag Harbor quickly, one of the perks as head of the FBI’s Long Island office but it was in vain. His dear friend, the chief of police, had known where my dad was that night and as soon as the call came in about the fire, had dispatched Suffolk County police to retrieve him.

When he arrived Emmett was restrained by the police and firemen who kept him from running into flames, the adrenaline-fueled terror, grief, and desperation giving him strength the 53-year-old didn't possess. Strangled cries escaped his throat. Before him in the heaps of wood and ash, window and door frames and railings, somewhere in that dark and disgusting pile of debris lay his life – an adored wife of 25 years and their precious children. He was forced to do nothing but watch. 

What he saw was a scene filled with chaos and confusion. Spotlights among a sea of flashing red lights illuminated the house where flames seemed to shoot out of every crevice. Water sprayed from hoses on fire trucks that had arrived late (The Firehouse had had a celebration earlier that night, making the volunteer firefighters slow to respond.) The trucks were driven through a portion of the hedge and sat scattered, crisscrossed on the front lawn. People were yelling instructions in high-pitched, frantic voices, words of caution.

And in the background, a loud sick and crackling sound could be heard as wood splintered, and windows shattered. There was also a kind of whooshing noise as the fire seemed to catch some unseen breeze and flames grew larger and larger engulfing every surface, every inch. 

Not soon enough, though, everything would be eerily quiet – silent and smoldering, with the air a thick fog of choking smoke the only constant.

I’m not sure how much time passed but I awoke in a strange place with Patti lying next to me. People, shadows really, milled around us, talking in whispers.

“I want my mommy,” my first words, as I spit to get the nasty taste out of my mouth. I pulled off a heavy wool blanket that scratched my bare legs. Patti stirred, awoke, and started to cry, coughing.

“Where is Maryann?” she asked, “Why did she hurt me?” her only question.

Mrs. Roskot, a neighbor from across the street, came into view. “You’re safe girls, you’re at our house,” she said gently, so strange because Mrs. Roskot was usually mean, yelling at us for cutting through her property on our bikes. “Would you like something to drink?”

Why is she being so nice? 

“I want my mom, where’s my mom?” I croaked, shaking with cold and confusion. 

Sometime later our dad came in, sat on the couch, and gathered the two of us up in his arms, kissing and hugging us. I felt myself relax with relief.

“My twins, my twins,” he kept saying, “thank God, my twinnies. Everything will be alright, everything will be alright," he kept saying over and over again in a kind of soothing cadence though his usually happy face was creased with worry, betraying his words. These words would become his mantra to us in the coming months and years. At that moment we were so happy to see him that we believed his every word. Still, no one would answer our questions, as we pleaded for our mom.

A few minutes later Maryann joined our little circle, hugging and caressing Patti and me and we brightened, sure the rest of our family would join us soon. But they never came.

Much later we would learn that an electrician rewiring the side porch of our home had sparked this event. Of all people, he should have known old wires don't mesh with new ones. As a result, by daybreak, our elegant old lady of a Victorian home would be nothing but large mountains of ashes with five of the nine souls, ashes as well. A “funeral pyre” Newsday called it. We’d learn Patti and I had been discovered cowering and crying in the bushes after too much time had passed and, only then, taken to the neighbor’s house.

In the empty days that followed our dad started to pick up the pieces of what remained.  He had the support of his friends, neighbors, and extended family, and he had his prayers. Borrowing the money needed to bury his wife and three sons and to purchase their four white caskets, it would be years later when a well-meaning relative would show us a New York Times picture of those four boxes being carried up the front steps of our hometown church.

 Patti and I were sent to stay with two dear friends who lived close by – the Ryan’s for the first week or so and then the McAllister’s. We saw our dad on and off, but he was distracted and quiet. I’m not sure where Maryann stayed. Everyone whispered around us, no one would tell us anything. 

We wouldn’t see our brother Paul for a month or so as he lay recovering in a local hospital.

“Look, our house didn’t burn down!” I yelled with joy, several days after the fire, laughing back over my shoulder to Patti and our friend Bonnie whose clothes and room we were sharing.

We’d left her property unbeknownst to Bonnie’s mom, “Aunt” Gert, who had sternly warned us “Don’t go back to your house girls, don’t ever go home.” Our curiosity fueled, we’d snuck out and ran through the four back yards that separated the houses, back to our home.

 Our brown clapboard garage was the reason for my cheer for as I came through the last hedge into our yard, there it stood, unscathed, looking as it always had in the sunny May sunshine, nothing different.  They were wrong, our house didn’t burn down!

But I caught my breath, stopping short in my tracks when I looked down the blue-stone pebbled driveway beyond that garage. It was then I saw all the destruction. In place of our massive home, only piles of rubble remained with wooden saw-horses blinking yellow caution lights standing guard around the perimeter, too late to keep anything safe.

My heart sank. That same awful smell still invading my nostrils was wafting even thicker here in the still air of the May afternoon. Large yellow forsythia bushes in full beautiful bloom sat around the property. The biggest bush had been the backdrop of our annual family Easter photograph just three weeks before. Now, these harbingers of spring stood naked and exposed, no longer have a house in front of or around them. They stood in their brilliant budded glory, in sharp contrast to the dirt and ashes, the splintered wood, the mountains of debris now squatting like trespassers where my home had been. 

The swing-set stood nearby, looking rusted and forlorn but still erect, untouched. I didn’t know it at the time but this surreal “snapshot” would remain with me always, seared in memory.

 Fear, loneliness, and anger at I didn't know who gnawed in the pit of my stomach, making me sick. Running the entire way back to McAllister's without stopping or even making sure Patti and Bonnie were following, I ran up her front staircase, desperate to get to Bonnie's room where two little cots had been placed beside her bed. I  flung myself onto one, coughing and crying at what I'd just seen, not understanding what it all meant. 

 I couldn’t go to “Aunt” Gert for comfort or answers since she had forbidden us. I had no mother to hug or reassure me. When Patti returned with Bonnie a little while later, I sat extra close to her as if attached, quiet and withdrawn.

Time passed. We moved into a rental home on the other side of town and Patti and I went to school and lived with a series of housekeepers. We started to call Maryann “mom,” confused and desperate. But she was finding the support she needed in Bill, a young man she’d been dating prior. He would soon become her fiancé and after they married about a year later, Patti and I experienced a second traumatic loss at her departure. 

 But within a year-and-a-half, on the exact site where there had been so much loss, our heartbroken father insisted on rebuilding a house for us. He explained that we needed to be close to everyone we had lost, we would never leave them, the property now “sacred ground.”

And that house, not as grand as the big old Victorian, soon became something more important: a home, built on a strong foundation, not of concrete or cement but faith.   While he may have lost so much that May night, our dad had never lost his faith. And by putting one foot in front of another and accepting God’s plan in his life even if it meant tragedy, he inspired us, his surviving children, to follow him to positively rebuild our lives as well. We would become grateful for every new day we were given.

Our dad played music through speakers he put in every room of our new home. He took lots of photos to replace the ones lost with everything else in the fire. And we had slide shows in our living room, sitting together on chairs and sofas laughing in the dark at a screen full of images of our new life moving forward. We observed holidays and danced in the living room after dinner. And went to church and prayed together, sometimes saying a rosary in a circle in our new living room. We celebrated birthdays. We lived.

My father re-married a widow with three children and they came to this new home and helped us all heal. In the next several years' Mare would have five children of her own and when Patti and I were teenagers we would often babysit.

“What should we do if the house catches on fire?” we asked her nervously one evening as she was getting ready to leave for dinner with Bill. But we needn’t have bothered to ask that question as we already knew the answer.

“You get them out,” she said, “You save them.” The person who had saved us knew she could trust us. We would repay our debt, making sure we’d do for her children what she’d done for us.

So now when the fire siren screams, I try to quiet my racing heart with prayers for the people I don’t know who at that moment are facing their own fire. And I say prayers of thanksgiving for the life I’ve been given, having survived my own.   

But I’ve come to realize that a part of me will always be in that burning home. Till the day I die, there is some part of me that will never escape.