The front page of the Scranton Times for Christmas Eve, 1984, lay on the screen of the microfilm reader at the library like a photograph from another world. The headline was in black block letters across all six columns. FIRE AT CAPOUSE LACE KILLS THREE. Below it ran a blurred picture of the burning mill, flames in every window, firemen on ladders, a crowd of workers in coats huddled in the snow. I leaned closer, my heart thudding. In the third paragraph was a name I knew, Walter Dombrowski, the best friend of my father. And in the fifth, a name I did not expect at all. Rosemarie Kaminski, night inspector.
I read the article twice. The fire had started shortly after midnight in the carding room of the old mill on Capouse Avenue, from a short in the wiring that had been reported to management twice that year. Three men had died. Walter, who had run back inside for a younger worker. A boy named Teddy Sokol, only nineteen. And a foreman, Henry Lutz, whose body was found by the loading door. The fire had been contained by three in the morning, and most of the sixty workers on the shift had escaped. My mother, thirty one that year, had been one of them.
I sat there with the pages in my lap for a long time. Rosemarie Kaminski, night inspector. She had never told me. All my life I had known her as a quiet woman who brought lace scraps home in her coat pockets. I had never known that she had worked in the carding room. The article quoted her briefly. “I told them the wires were hot,” she had said, in a statement to the fire marshal. “I wrote it on the form. They said it was nothing.” The paper had called her a witness. It did not call her anything else.
I went back to St. Ann the next morning. Monsignor Healy sat in the sacristy in his black cassock, a very old man with a face like folded parchment, his hands trembling on the table. “You found the paper,” he said. I nodded. “Then you know what she carried.” I asked what he meant. He told me that my mother had filled out the warning on the night of October 12th, 1984, and handed it to the shift manager, who tossed it in a drawer. Ten weeks later, three men were dead. She never forgave herself.
Guilt can turn into a lifetime of quiet service when it is given a place to go, and a name to say, and a small paper angel to carry it.
“She came to confession on Christmas Eve that year,” the Monsignor said. “She was white as paper. She said, Father, I could have made them listen. I could have gone to the newspaper, to the union, to the fire marshal. I was afraid I would lose my job. I told her there was nothing to forgive. But she would not be comforted. So I gave her a penance. I told her to do one small kind thing each year in memory of the men, and to do it in secret, so that it would cost her something. And that is how the angels began.”
I looked at the forty angels on the vestment table. There were forty because there were forty years, but the names inside, he said, were not all the dead. Each year she wrote one name. The first was Walter. Then Teddy, then Henry. In later years she added the names of the men who had worked beside her, who died young of the lung diseases that the mill gave them, one at a time. Eventually she had written every man who ever worked in the carding room and was gone. She had taken it upon herself to pray for them by name. No one had asked her.
I began to cry. The Monsignor took my hand. “Theresa,” he said, “I have heard ten thousand confessions. Yours was the most faithful penance I ever knew.” He told me that over the years, my mother had gone to the funeral of every one of those men. She had sat in the back pew. She had signed the guest book with a false name. She had sent cards to the widows, anonymously, and when she could, small sums of money. Nobody in Scranton had ever known where it came from. I thought of the coffee can on our kitchen table.
We decided together what to do. On the last Sunday of Advent, with the parish gathered, Monsignor Healy would read each name from the pulpit. Then the families would come forward, and each would take an angel. I called the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the forty men. Some had left Scranton and had to be found through old directories. They came from Philadelphia, from Ohio, from Florida. When the day arrived, the church was full to the walls, a sea of faces I had never seen and yet felt I knew.
The Monsignor read the names slowly. Walter Dombrowski. Teddy Sokol. Henry Lutz. A silence followed each one, deep as water. A gray haired woman in the third pew stood at the name of Teddy and put her hand over her mouth. A man in a blue suit came forward for Walter, and the Monsignor placed the little lace angel in his palm. He held it a moment, looking at it. Then he laughed, a rough, astonished laugh, and said to the whole church in a clear voice, “She made these? My father never told me he had a friend like that.”
I stood at the back with my hands folded. When the last name had been read and the last angel handed over, the Monsignor asked me to come forward. He gave me the oldest one, the yellowed first angel of 1984, and he said, “This one stays with the family.” I took it. I held it up to the candlelight and looked at the tiny wire circle at the top. In the hush of that great church, I could almost see my mother at the kitchen table, bent over the glue pot, with her reading glasses on her nose.
This Christmas Eve, before midnight Mass, I sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee can of clothespins, a glue pot, and a handful of lace from the old factory. I made one angel. Just one. Before I wired the little crown on, I wrote a name on a slip of paper, rolled it small, and tucked it inside. It was the name of my mother. I slipped away from my children in the vestibule, and when I came back a few minutes later, I had nothing in my hands but a light heart. Above the manger, a forty first angel gleamed on the beam.