In Tiny, Close-Knit City, Death Touches Everyone

If the four Ayer sisters aren’t typical Rhode Islanders, it’s only because they didn’t all stay home.

Rhode Island, once derided in the Wall Street Journal as “a smudge on the fast lane to Cape Cod,” is tiny, insular, close-knit, a village-state of big extended families where it isn’t unknown for people to be born and die rooting for the Red Sox without ever visiting Boston, an hour north.

After growing up in the small mill town of Coventry, Tammy Ayer, 33, moved to Bristol, R.I., about 20 miles away on Narragansett Bay. Carmen Ayer, who lives in Rochester, N.Y., hadn’t been to her home state in five years.

But Tammy and Carmen and Angel Ayer, and their father, Steven Ayer, were back together Saturday, sitting around folding tables with a few friends in the big, wood-paneled function room at the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, a religious and social club in West Warwick, next door to Coventry.

Missing from the group, and the reason for the anguished reunion, was Tammy’s twin, brash and fun-loving Tina, the one who stayed closest to home.

“She was that type of good-hearted person, very high-spirited,” Tammy said. “She would help anybody before she helps herself.”

Tina, a housekeeper at a local inn and the mother of a 15-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son, was a fan of the ‘80s “hair band” Great White. She went with her best friend, Jackie Bernard, to the band’s club date Thursday at The Station in West Warwick.

Jackie escaped, after losing her grip on Tina’s arm in the smoke and the crush of the crowd fleeing the nightclub.

The distraught family came to the Holy Ghost club, where Steven Ayer has friends, to wait for almost certain bad news. One way the dreaded identification might be made is through Tina’s three tattoos, the names of her grandmother, her mother and her son.

In the Holy Ghost club bar in the next room, the mood was equally bleak because club members knew that Carlos Pimental, whose wife, Dotty, works at the club, also was missing.

“There’s nobody in this town -- nobody -- who doesn’t know somebody who was there,” said former West Warwick Mayor Mike Levesque, who can see the charred wreckage of The Station from his backyard.

If anything, Levesque may have understated the case. In the whole state, it seems as though hardly anyone has more than two degrees of separation from the tragedy: If you don’t know someone directly affected, you know someone who does.

At a news conference Saturday, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri distributed a list of the first seven names of confirmed victims to be made public. John Casey, for 30 years a math teacher at Coventry High School and now a home-district aide to U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, picked up a copy of the list and looked it over.

“I know three,” he said softly.

And among the first people Reed saw Friday evening when he visited the resource center for victims’ families at a nearby hotel were the parents of a former intern, whose brother was among the missing. Then he spotted a man who had worked as a firefighter with Reed’s brother. The man had come with the family of a cousin, also missing.

When outsiders think of Rhode Island, they tend to think of Newport, with its yachts and mansions, or perhaps of Ivy League Brown University on Providence’s stately College Hill.

But West Warwick, the state’s geographic center, is more like Rhode Island as a whole. It’s a network of small villages with quaint names like Arctic, Phenix, Quidnick and Clyde, which grew up around Roman Catholic Church parishes.

It’s a blue-collar town of $30,000 salaries where, according to Levesque, 40% of the housing stock is rental property. It contains the state’s predominant ethnic flavors: Portuguese, Italian, French Canadian, Irish.

The cotton and textile mills that dot the twisty Pawtuxet River are mostly closed, including the imposing Royal Mills, five stories of granite block with twin, castle-like towers, ghostly and sad in Saturday’s chilly, day-long downpour.

The rain matched the mood that is settling through the Pawtuxet Valley and all of Rhode Island.

“The whole town grieves,” Levesque said. “It’s families grieving with families.”

At the Holy Ghost club, Carmen Ayer, holding her 8-month-old daughter, Tori Lee, lamented that she hadn’t visited home more. Of Tina, she said: “Now she’ll never meet her niece.”