As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  He looks at the book with what seems to me to be longing, despite what he just told me. “Go ahead and borrow it,” I say. “The more you read, the better you’ll get at it, you know.”

  Charlie picks up the book and turns to the first page. He has a puzzled look on his face, as if the words on the page are written in another language.

  “Where do you go to school, Charlie?”

  “Oh. I don’t go to school anymore. No. I just work for Fred.”

  I can see how much he wants to be able to read those words. I feel sorry for him. To be sixteen and unable to read! If Evie were in the room, she’d probably burst into tears. I wonder how his parents could’ve failed him so miserably.

  “Here.” I pull the book from his hands; shove my pile of clothes, the doll, and the quilt to one side; and pat the bed. “Have a seat.”

  I sit down and wait for him. He just stands there.

  I pat the mattress again. “Sit down. I’ll help you get started.”

  He finally ambles over to me and sits down beside me. He has the most amazed look on his face, like I am the sand fairy about to grant him his wish for the day.

  I open the book and point to the first word of the first chapter. “Can you read that?”

  He smiles shyly and shakes his head.

  “Sure you can. You did go to school, didn’t you?”

  “I work for Fred now.”

  “Yes, I know that. But when you were a little boy, you went to school, right? And your teacher taught you your letters?”

  His grin spreads wide. “I do know my letters.”

  “Well. See? Words are just letters put together. If you know your letters, you can learn the words. And if you can learn the words, you can read. Here. I’ll show you.”

  He and I pore over that first page, sounding out every word at a wretchedly slow pace. I don’t know how long we are absorbed in the task. Long enough for him to be missed downstairs, I guess. Because next thing I know, there is someone else in the room—a young man with wavy brown hair, slate blue eyes, and Charlie’s kind features. But this man is thinner. Taller. He is smiling down on me, and for a second I feel like all the clocks in all the world have stopped. Our eyes catch each other’s, and it’s a breath or two before the world starts turning again.

  “Well, here you are, Charlie. We were all wondering where you were,” the young man says. “Time to head back home.”

  “She was reading,” Charlie says.

  “You were reading.” I close the book and put it in his lap. “Take it with you. Keep it as long as you like.”

  Charlie is beaming as he stands up.

  I stand up, too. The man steps forward. “How do you do? I’m Charlie’s brother, Jamie,” he says.

  I start to answer with my own name, but Charlie fills the tiny space of silence. “This one’s Maggie. Evelyn and Willa are the other two. Sometimes people call Evelyn Evie.”

  Jamie tips his head toward me. “A pleasure to meet you, Maggie.”

  I want to say something in return, anything, but my tongue seems tied up in knots.

  Charlie puts the book in the crook of his arm, closes the lid on my empty trunk, and starts to drag it to the door. “Thanks for letting me borrow the book, Maggie!”

  “Let me help you with that.” Jamie bends to grab the other end of the trunk as Charlie hoists it over the threshold.

  “Nah. I got it. It’s empty now. I got it. Here, you can carry Maggie’s book for me.”

  Jamie takes the book and then steps away to let his brother do his job. It appears to be one thing Charlie can do, and he wants to do it.

  When Charlie is on the first step, Jamie turns back to me.

  “That was nice, what you did for my brother,” he says softly, looking at the book in his hands and then at me.

  “Pardon?” I’ve heard the words, but I can’t make sense of them. I’m wondering just how long Jamie Sutcliff was standing there, watching us toiling over the words. The whole time?

  “Not many people take the time to make him feel like he can try something new.”

  “Reading is new?”

  “It is for him in a way.”

  “Why isn’t he in school?”

  “He went for as long as he could. He just can’t retain what he learns from books and teachers. Not like you and I can. But today’s the first time in I don’t know how long that he even wanted to try reading a book again. So thanks. You’re very kind.”

  Jamie turns to leave, and I find that I don’t want him to.

  “Wait. . . .”

  Jamie pauses at the open doorway.

  I search for a reason to have asked him to stop. “Um. Charlie says I should see Hog Island. He says you take him there sometimes.”

  Jamie smiles. “I do.”

  “So. Maybe . . .”

  “You want to come with us next time we go?”

  “Okay. Yes.” I look away, embarrassed by how forward I’ve been. “It’s just that, we just moved here and, well, I want to get to know the place.”

  “Sure.” He turns, takes a step, and eases back around. “And I meant what I said. You were very kind to Charlie just now. I appreciate that.”

  He is on the third or fourth step and gone from my view before I can whisper the words you’re welcome.

  I’m alone in my room again, and my heart is beating like I’ve just run up the two flights of stairs to get to it. I can’t explain why, but I feel like everything about my life is suddenly different. Not just the outside of it—like where I live now—but the inside of it as well. Something has begun deep within me.

  I don’t understand what it is. I just know I don’t want it to stop, even though it scares me a little. I don’t want to go back to where I was yesterday.

  CHAPTER 7

  • February 1918 •

  Evelyn

  Everything in the city is different. The way we start our day and the way we end it, the way we eat our meals, the way we bathe and wash our clothes and say our prayers. Even the night sky seems different; because there are so many lights here, the stars are shy and shimmer less.

  My school is not just a walk down a lane anymore; it is a brick building many blocks away, and I must take a streetcar to get there. It’s a private academy that Uncle Fred is paying for because Papa told him I want to go to college and Uncle Fred says this school is the best. Maggie and Willa go to a different one closer to home, although Maggie can join me here next year if she wants to. I must wear a white high-collared blouse and the same dark blue skirt every day and my hair must be pulled up into a neat pile on top of my head like I am already married. The boys wear vests and ties, and their hair must be slicked into place. The boys’ classes are on the first floor and the girls’ are on the third, and we are allowed to experiment with polite conduct toward one another on the second floor, where the dining and music and art rooms are.

  On my first day, my classmates were most interested in where I’d come from and in which neighborhood I lived now and what my father did for a living. They hadn’t heard of Quakertown and were thoroughly shocked when I answered that Papa is—I am still getting used to saying this—an undertaker. Maggie apparently had the same reaction at her school. Willa’s new classmates don’t care what someone’s father does for work; they don’t even ask.

  My classmates allow me to keep to myself now that they all know where I live and what the family business is. There is a girl named Irene whose last name sounds German and who stays on the fringe like I do, but she and I have no interest in aligning ourselves with each other just because we are both apparently outsiders.

  I like my new teachers. They are smart and they don’t care what kind of work pays my tuition. Mr. Galway is especially brilliant. He is the teacher for social sciences and philosophy. He sees the other girls twittering like ducklings when I stand up
to answer a question in class. He told me once, in front of all of them, that he is impressed with how thorough my answers are. If I didn’t want to be a doctor, I’d want to be a philosophy teacher like Mr. Galway.

  There is one boy named Gilbert Keane who is different than the rest. He told me in art class on the first day to pay the gossiping girls no mind when they had speculated among themselves if I would paint a cadaver instead of fruit in a bowl. Gilbert is handsome and well-liked at the school, and those girls were perplexed that he spoke to me so kindly. Their surprise at it occupied their whispers for the rest of the afternoon. The following day they all wanted to be my friend.

  Gilbert’s father expects him to go to law school and become an attorney, just like he is. But Gilbert wants to live in Manhattan and be a playwright. He showed me a few pages from one of his plays the other day. It’s about a young man who buys an old house and then finds letters from a hundred years ago hidden in the attic. The man falls in love with the young woman who wrote them.

  “But that woman is long since dead,” I’d said. “It must be a very sad play.”

  He winked at me and said the dead woman has a beautiful great- granddaughter who is very much alive.

  “But he will have to stop loving the one to love the other,” I pointed out.

  “With all great loves there is first a great struggle,” Gilbert said, smiling as if he was quite happy with this cosmic arrangement.

  I’m not sure I completely agree with him, and yet I can’t stop thinking about what he said. Or him. Gilbert unsettles me. But in a nice way.

  As for our new house, it is quite lovely from the outside. The inside is nice, too, but rather dull and lifeless, and I don’t mean that as a comical reference to what Uncle Fred and Papa do in the rooms past the kitchen. My bedroom furniture is new and of exceptional quality, but it’s plain. All the furniture downstairs is plainly functional, too, and at least thirty years old. The trouble with exceptional quality is that it takes a long time for it to wear out. We’ll clearly live with these things forever.

  The rugs and curtains are a bit faded. There’s hardly any art on the walls. It all adds to the drab appearance of the house. But Uncle Fred does have a good selection of books, and not just on the art and science of embalming. On our second day here, I asked if I would be allowed to read them, and he seemed quite pleased that I wanted to, but then he cautioned me on the care and handling of his books, as if it were my current habit to lick my fingers and then dip them into the cocoa tin before turning a page. He found out soon enough that I love books and treat them with the respect they deserve. He’d come upstairs a week after we’d been there, to take a box of ledgers up to the attic storage room, and he’d seen the shelves of books just inside my bedroom door as he started to pass it.

  He had stopped, the box of ledgers in his arms, and stared at them. “That’s quite a collection of books you have,” he’d said a second later, and I could tell it had suddenly made sense to him why I had been so interested in his bookshelves. We were both lovers of knowledge.

  Uncle Fred had cocked his head as he looked at the spines, and it seemed to me he was looking at some of my books the way I had been looking at his.

  “You’re welcome to look at one anytime you want,” I’d said, and he’d smiled. It was the kind of smile a father gives a child or an instructor gives a pupil. There was a measure of pride to it, as though he was happy that he was my great-uncle and I was his niece.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “I just may do that.”

  Today, when I was sitting at the little table in his office and looking at one of his books on anthropology, he came into the room, saw me there, and pulled out an enormous volume all about the human body. Gray’s Anatomy.

  “It’s a marvel, what your body can do when it’s alive,” he said, running his hand over the front of the book. Then he leaned closer to me. “I, like you, wanted to be a doctor once.” He whispered this like it was a secret just between us.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged as though he didn’t know what had come between him and his dreams. Or maybe he knew but it saddened him to talk about it. “It wasn’t to be, for me. For a host of reasons. But you? You’re smart. And you’re young. And you’re more than just the son of a poor tobacco farmer.”

  I hadn’t considered too much to that point that Uncle Fred had been born and raised in Quakertown just like me. He was my grandad’s older brother. He had grown up picking blossoms off tobacco plants and rolling cigars just like I had. But he’d come to the city decades before I had been born, and he’d come with a dream that had somehow been taken from him.

  This was no doubt the reason why Uncle Fred was so willing to pay for me to enroll at the private school. I have the aspirations he’d once had. I wanted to say something then that communicated that I understood this, and that I was going to work very hard to accomplish my goal, but I couldn’t think of how to say it without it sounding like I was going to succeed where he had failed.

  He handed the heavy book to me. “My favorite section is neurology. There in the seven hundreds. You won’t believe how stunning the nervous system is. Everything else fails without it. It’s what makes you you. It’s what makes you alive.”

  “I’ll be careful with it,” I said, nearly speechless with wonder and gratitude. “And I’ll put it back where it was when I’m done with it.”

  He shook his head. “It’s yours.” And he left his office without getting whatever it was he’d come for, perhaps to recollect his thoughts or walk the house and funeral rooms and remind himself that he had done very well for himself despite the death of that dream.

  I took the book up to my room.

  I like having my own bedroom. Since there are electric lights in every room, I can stay up reading after Maggie and Willa have gone to bed. Willa is across the hall from me, and I can hear her singing to herself at night. I don’t think she’s overly happy having her own room. I told her she will feel differently in a few years. Maggie is one more flight up in one of the attic rooms and seems to feel the best thing about our move is that she now has the entire third floor to herself.

  I asked Papa what Uncle Fred did with these rooms before we came, since there was only him in his house. Uncle Fred’s housekeeper, a useless woman named Mrs. Landry who somehow makes everything she cooks taste like soap, doesn’t live here, thank goodness. Papa said Uncle Fred had an assistant for several years, and that man lived here until he got married and moved away. Before that he rented out the rooms to single men, but he was always losing his tenants when those men met girls they wanted to impress. I doubt it was only that the girls didn’t like their beaus sharing living quarters with corpses. No doubt Mrs. Landry’s cooking also had something to do with their leaving.

  Mama has her sights on relieving Mrs. Landry of her duties. I would wager by this time next week she’ll be gone. Mama also wants Mrs. Brewster, the hairstylist, to be given notice. I overheard her asking Papa if he might tell Uncle Fred that she could do what Mrs. Brewster does and that he wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the work getting done at the wrong time, nor would he have to pay for it.

  I know why Mama wants Mrs. Landry gone, but I don’t know why Mama wants Mrs. Brewster’s job, too. I can’t ask her yet because I only overheard that conversation between my parents. I wasn’t part of it. I don’t want them to think I eavesdrop. But it’s curious to me that Mama wants to be in that room where the dead are made ready for their burial. She wants to.

  She seems happy to be here, but sometimes I will catch her staring off into the corner of the room, as though she is looking at a picture that isn’t there. I will call to her, and sometimes I must do so three times before she will hear me. Papa is so busy trying to learn all that Uncle Fred knows, I don’t think he has noticed Mama’s odd behavior. Those times when I’ve had to practically shake her to get her atte
ntion, I’ve asked her if she is all right, and she always says she’s fine; she was just thinking.

  “About what?” I asked once.

  She smiled and said it was nothing I needed to be worried about.

  I suppose she’s missing Henry. What else could it be but that?

  We have wonderful neighbors across the street. Roland Sutcliff is Uncle Fred’s bookkeeper, but he’s also a good friend. He and his wife, Dora, have two sons. The older one, Jamie, works with Mr. Sutcliff. Charlie is sixteen. He’s a simpleminded but sweet young man who does odd jobs for Uncle Fred. Moving caskets, lifting heavy things, carting away rubbish, and that sort of thing. Jamie is slated to head off to Fort Meade for army training the first of April. Uncle Fred is very proud of Jamie and boasts about his patriotism as if he were his own child. Jamie turned twenty-one several months after the last mandated draft registration, but he volunteered to serve anyway. I guess all his friends are already off doing their part, or so I overheard him telling Maggie and Papa.

  Uncle Fred is very proud of all his friends’ sons who are off fighting in the war, and there are a lot of them. Every other merchant on our block is Fred’s acquaintance, and it seems each one has a son either already in Europe or training to go or who has registered for the draft and will likely be called up any day. Uncle Fred reads the newspaper in our sitting room every evening, puffing on his pipe like he’s a locomotive, and relaying to Papa and Mama every despicable thing the Kaiser has done, is doing, and will do if we don’t stop him. Uncle Fred’s American Protective League alerts the authorities when they find people loyal to Germany or who are unpatriotic about the war or who were supposed to sign up for the draft but haven’t. Slackers, Uncle Fred calls them.

  I’d like to ask him why we even need the APL, but I suppose I’ll have to do what I always do, and that’s figure things out by myself. There are plenty of books and newspapers and magazines that will tell me what I want to know. I’ll find out on my own what the APL is about just like I figured out easily enough what Uncle Fred has been teaching Papa in the embalming room behind that forbidden door.