A Fire in Queens

When I was six years old, the house across the street from ours burned down. House fires were not uncommon in our neighborhood in Queens, but previous fires had been far away, with only the cry of distant sirens and the sweet smell of the remnant smoke to disturb our equilibrium. On this occasion, policemen knocked loudly on our door and ordered us to stand outside in preparation for an evacuation. It seemed the fire was threatening to raze the dense, incongruent building patterns that formed the streetscape of Roosevelt: houses, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, offices, libraries and churches all in a disorderly line, huddled one against another as if jostling for position on the grimy concrete. Even the garbage strewn along the streets – candy wrappers, cigarette butts, old newspapers, rotten food, tread-worn tires, empty cans and bottles – offered fuel for the flames. Adding to the danger were fuel and electrical lines feeding the elevated train system that carried commuters high above the streets on steel beams covered in graffiti and the excrement of those daredevil pigeons that flew under the trackbed and between the trestles.

That night, the temperatures dropped below freezing. My mother dressed Alexia and me as if we were going to school or church. She pulled us from our beds and put us in wool coats, hats, face masks, scarves, gloves and boots before dragging us down the stairs. My father was already standing outside. He had walked around the neighborhood several times to get information from policemen and other neighbors about the fire’s likely path. He reported that things looked bleak. “Hurry, hurry, the boiler across the street exploded, and the fire is going to take it all.” He yelled for my mother, who was dragging my sister and me down the stairs as she prayed, her words almost soundless as they leached into wisps of frozen air. My mother often prayed this way – to herself – when she felt most scared, or when we would get lost in Harlem or the Bronx during one of our rare Sunday drives in my father’s Audi as nightfall blanketed his never-reliable sense of direction.

That night we stood downstairs, on the steps of our walkup, staring in disbelief at the burning house across the street. Our neighborhood had lost its familiar look and feel: emergency vehicles crisscrossed the thickly drawn yellow lines of the four-lane highway in front of our home; men in uniforms crowded streets and sidewalks; dazed neighbors roamed around in pajamas, slippers and unbuttoned coats while tongues of sporadic orange flame licked at and consumed the house that had always seemed as unexceptional as all the others on the street, then ballooned and distended towards the sky, the elevated trains and neighboring houses.

            “The danger is in the fuel lines. Can’t you smell it?” Capote asked my sister and me.

I nodded my head slowly. An odor of fuel was ever-present in our neighborhood; there was no greenery on our streets to mask it. In the spring and summer, warmer temperatures gave the train fuel a harshness that hung in the air like a musty blanket; in the fall and winter, the mix of cool air and petroleum gave off a heady, full-bodied scent. No matter the season, the smell evoked a sense of perpetual motion, of the urgent comings and goings of trains as they passed overhead along Roosevelt Avenue on their way to Forest Hills in one direction and Grand Central station, in Manhattan, in the other.

“Everything will go if the flames reach the fuel lines,” my father explained breathlessly. “Then we’ll have to get in our cars and drive as fast and far as we can.”

“Basta,” my mother said, trying to still his interruption of her prayers, but his imagination was running wild and he wanted us to feel his excitement.

“This reminds me of the great Chicago fire,” he continued, “that started in a factory, traveled with the wind and went across the river until the whole city burned down. That could happen here today.”

“Basta!” my mother said again, more shrilly this time.

Capote allowed himself the last word. “Goddamn beautiful, isn’t it?”

I shivered. My sister’s head fell to one side in sleep as we continued to wait out the fire while it made up its mind whether to let itself be contained or to force us to flee in Capote’s blue Audi. It did not seem to me the wisest course – to have everyone encapsulated in gasoline tanks on wheels, trying to outrun a fireball that reached up to the sky and was spreading fast with the help of the railway track – but no one could quite bring themselves to question the fine details of father’s escape plan. He was too wrapped up in the spectacle of the house being consumed across the way to have been receptive to any dissenting voice.

 Just as quickly as it began, the fire was doused. Emergency vehicles dispersed, and our sleepy neighbors were ordered through hand-held megaphones to return to their homes. No one spoke about the people who had lived in the wrecked house. Every morning, en route to school, I had noticed a woman, who lived in the house, walking several children to P.S. 19, the elementary school Alexia and I attended. We all walked side by side, separated by the four-line highway between our sidewalks, until we simultaneously reached the school, a few blocks from our respective homes. Later, when I asked my mother what happened to the children who lived in the ravaged house, she stifled my curiosity with an insistent “Shh!” I was too young, to her way of thinking, to become acquainted with death, though in fact her protectiveness came too late. Peter, a boy who sat beside me in first grade, had died suddenly not two weeks before.

My teachers, Ms. Russo and Mr. Greene, had announced the news in the hall where we lined up to go into class. Before the bell rang, Mr. Greene had told us, “Children, Peter is no longer in the class; he died on Saturday of pneumonia.” Though I was anxious to learn more about this deadly force, pneumonia, none of the other children questioned the teachers about it, and I was too scared to ask myself. Mr. Greene and Ms. Russo then shared a private joke and a giggle that struck me as rather out of place in the circumstances, before leading us in into the classroom in single file, exactly as they did every ordinary day of the year.

All that day, I stared at Peter’s desk, perplexed as to when and how he could have become sick, as he had never been absent. Even now I remember him as the tall, thin boy with the blond hair and blue eyes who reached slowly and methodically for the pencils and papers he kept neatly arranged in the cubby of his desk. He was quiet but always attentive in class, invariably knowing the right answer when he was called upon. After he died, Peter was never mentioned again. The lesson that gave me was that death meant disappearance, a nullification of existence.

Every day after our neighbor’s fire, I climbed the stairs to the attic and stared out the window at the burnt-out house. The two-story structure, plus basement and attic, had been clad in white aluminum siding, but now its exterior was stained by smoke and only a hollow darkness could be seen through the swinging front door. The fire had spared the frame but gutted the innards.

In the wake of that fire, I came to the conclusion that our boiler was a similar disaster waiting to happen. I had seen the boiler in the basement of the house. When the engineer came to inspect the appliance, my mother, sister and I followed him down the stairs to see how the white, deceptively benign behemoth converted boiling water into the steam that hissed through the radiators of our house. “Don’t stand too close,” my mother warned, “that thing is liable to blow up in your face.”

We considered the basement to be off-limits, because it housed the “monster” boiler and its confederates, the rats, in what was a dark and unfinished part of our house. Before our neighbor’s fire, we had never given a thought to the boiler’s potential for devastation. We welcomed its ability to keep us warm in bone-chilling winters, and simply took for granted that it would continue to do its job indefinitely and without repercussions – even though we had heard of boiler fires in other cities and witnessed, on our yearly Halloween walks through the neighborhood, two-by-fours nailed across the doorways and blown-out windows of houses that had suffered such explosions. Until, that is, the fire across the street filled me with an obsession about saving my family from the consequences of its own folly.

When everyone else fell asleep upstairs, I snuck down the staircase, pulled a chair from the dinette set in the kitchen and placed it by the fireplace so that I could reach the temperature gauge and shut the boiler off. At that age, I was too short, my fingers too stubby, to easily reach the knob on the gauge, which was located on the wall high above the fireplace’s mantelpiece. But I stretched on tiptoe until I was able to brush the knob with my fingertips, moving it so that the needle backed away from the red “danger zone” on the thermostat dial. After I finished, I looked around to make sure no one had seen or heard me. Then I quietly returned the chair to the kitchen, crept back up to my bed and slept soundly the rest of the night.

Once the boiler shut down it didn’t take long for the chill of the night to penetrate our bones, making my mother fearful for us, so that every night thereafter she made Alexia and me wear coats, hats and gloves to bed. I was now of the unshakable mind-set that my parents were ignorant, or had a criminally reckless disregard, of the catastrophic consequences of using a boiler – as witness the fire at our neighbors across the way. Why else would they have anything to do with such a deadly device? From time to time, my mother paid lip service to caution, adjusting the thermostat so that the gauge settled in mid-range, between 60 and 70 degrees; it was Capote who played Russian roulette with our lives. He overworked the boiler, setting it at its highest temperature so that the needle stuck firmly in the gauge’s red zone, contemptuous of the warnings of engineers that temperatures in excess of 80 degrees could cause the gas to overheat and explode.

He insisted on simulating the tropical climate of his long-ago island home; he also refused to wear the flannel pajamas my mother bought him, wearing instead a sleeveless undershirt and cotton boxers to bed – a bone of contention between my parents, who argued incessantly about whether he was asking for trouble in the form of a cold that would claim his life.

A caravan of engineers came to inspect our boiler; they never could give my parents an explanation for its spontaneous nocturnal shutdowns. One morning, while we were all sitting at breakfast, Capote raised hell over the temperature in the house.

“If you keep turning off the boiler, Esperanza Suarez, you are going to kill us all,” he told my mother at the table, as he shivered in his undershirt and cotton boxers.

“What are you talking about now?” she would respond. “You need to worry less about the boiler and more about dressing properly at night, before you catch your death of pneumonia.”

“Keep shutting that thing off and not even your God will be able to save you from what’s waiting for you, crazy woman.”

I listened to my parents argue, oblivious to my responsibility in the matter. My main concern was to keep us all alive, and to that end I had no compunction about keeping up my nightly boiler adjustment duties. Until, that is, the night my father caught me red-handed. That particular night he planted himself at the top of the stair, watching me at my labors, climbing the rickety dining chair and stretching my fingertips to their fullest extent, even then only just managing to slide the temperature control to “off.”

After I’d finished, my father broke into hysterical laughter, which miraculously did not wake anyone else in the house. Not that his amusement deflected me from my task. With dogged single-mindedness, I stepped down from the chair, pushed it back to the kitchen and returned to my bedroom, all the while under the barrage of his laughing. After I went back to bed, he sidled downstairs to turn the boiler back on, then returned to bed himself. I, in turn, waited for him to fall asleep, went back down, retrieved the chair from the dinette set, reached for the temperature gauge and solemnly turned the boiler off a second time.

Next morning, when we sat down for breakfast in our coats, hats and gloves, my father said nothing directly about our joint, nighttime escapade. But he skewered me with his eyes. Whispered at me: “You can’t hide from death, Barbara Bernarda Capote; it gets you when it wants you.”

At the time, I did not much care for what I would come to characterize as my father’s “whatever will be, will be” fatalism. I was fixated on my sacred duty to save the family from his hubris, while he was equally committed to keeping warm, so we played out our secret contest of wills, vying for control of the temperature in the house. Every night before we went to bed, Capote set the boiler’s gauge to maximum. Once I heard him safely snoring away, I scurried down and shut the boiler off. On one occasion, I waited so long to be sure he was asleep that I accidentally slept through the night myself. A stuffy, suffocating warmth awoke me, prompting me to dash downstairs in a panic, barely before the whole house came awake, drag a chair from the kitchen over to the mantelpiece and fumble with the heat control. Read my exciting memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO.