Mama pulled away a cobweb from a wispy curl at her forehead and smiled one of those thank-you smiles that said she appreciated the words of sympathy but she wasn’t going to volunteer any details. “You’re very kind. What time shall we come, Dora?”
Mrs. Sutcliff stared at Mama for a second. I think she was admiring this new neighbor of hers who had somehow survived the loss she was desperately afraid of experiencing, the death of a son. “Oh. Six.”
“Six it is,” Mama answered.
Mrs. Sutcliff seemed to need another second before she was able to tell us to come hungry because she was making lots of food. All of Jamie’s favorites.
Mama watched her through the glass panels in the front door as Mrs. Sutcliff headed down the marble stairs and back across the street. When Mama turned back around, she said she was mighty glad Uncle Fred had lots of hot water, because we’d all need to bathe for the party tonight after working to clean up the dining room.
Even though we don’t know very many people yet and the Sutcliffs don’t have girls, Maggie and I were both instantly looking forward to the farewell party. The only place we’d been to so far where we got to dress up was the big Methodist church a few blocks away on Sundays. Uncle Fred has been a member of that church since he came to the city, so naturally he wanted us to join him there. We haven’t been to a party of any kind since we left Quakertown, and that already seems like a long time ago.
• • •
We use all of Uncle Fred’s hot water getting ready, and he complains a little about it, but we don’t care. Maggie and I put ribbons in each other’s hair and I plait Willa’s. We shine our shoes and put rose water behind our ears. Then, at a few minutes after six, we walk across the boulevard to Sutcliff Accounting and the living quarters above the shop.
We find the door to the stairs has been propped open with a chair, and there is music from a phonograph and the sound of many voices as we walk up the steps from the street entrance. When Papa knocks on the inside door at the top of the stairs, Charlie swings it open and welcomes us in.
This is my first time inside the Sutcliffs’ living quarters. The apartment is bigger than our house in Quakertown but still only half the size of the second floor of Uncle Fred’s house. It is nicely furnished, but not expensively so. I don’t think Roland Sutcliff is a rich man, but he’s been able to provide for his family. There are residents and merchants from the neighborhood whom I recognize and many other people I don’t. Roland and Dora Sutcliff see us step inside, and both of them come over to us.
“Where’s that brave lad of yours?” Uncle Fred says happily, and I see that he’s wearing his APL badge on the inside of his suit coat like it’s a medal of honor.
Mrs. Sutcliff greets him with a smile, but I see the uneasiness in her manner at Uncle Fred’s question. You can almost hear her saying back to him, “You wouldn’t be so jovial if it was your son being sent off to war.”
“There he is,” Roland Sutcliff says, motioning to the far end of the sitting room. Jamie is talking to two young women who seem to be hanging on his every word. He has a glass of punch in his hand, and it is trembling slightly at their coquettishness. At least that’s how it appears to me.
We make our way through the crowd of people. Jamie looks up as we approach and seems relieved to have a reason to ease himself away from the girls’ flirtations.
Despite having his mother’s eyes and his father’s build, Jamie Sutcliff has a voice of his own, soft and a bit like my teacher Mr. Galway’s. He has the look of someone who is neither soldier—what he will be very soon—nor assistant accountant, which is what he had been before. I wonder what he might want to be if he were allowed to choose. He thanks us for coming.
“Who are they?” I hear Maggie ask him under her breath, eyeing the girls who he’d been talking to before.
He shrugs. “Just old friends from my school days.”
And then Mr. Sutcliff is bringing someone else Jamie’s way. We all step aside.
We eat a supper of fried chicken and succotash, beaten biscuits and coleslaw, and chocolate cake—all Jamie’s favorites. Charlie, who considers Papa and Uncle Fred his employers, sits with us. After the meal, everyone stands with a glass of punch to toast Jamie and we sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The reverend from the Sutcliffs’ church prays a blessing over Jamie, asking God to protect him and bring him safely home when this time of conflict is over. Then Mrs. Sutcliff hands out little cards with the address of Jamie’s army unit so that we all might write him letters so he won’t feel so far away. She was going to give our family just one card, I think, but Maggie holds out her hand after Mama already has one. Dora Sutcliff smiles and gives her one.
When people start to put on their hats to go, Mrs. Sutcliff begins to cry and excuses herself to the kitchen. I understand why. Once everyone leaves, the party will be over. The next big thing the Sutcliffs must do is take Jamie to the train station in the morning and say good-bye. Dora Sutcliff doesn’t want the party to end.
Once we’ve come home Willa wants to know where Jamie is going after training camp. I take her up to my room, get out the atlas, and show her where France is. Maggie lingers over the page, too, even though she knows the geography of Europe. Willa wrinkles her brow and says she hopes Jamie isn’t afraid to go so far away from home to fight in the war.
“It’s a stupid war,” Maggie mutters.
“Don’t let Uncle Fred hear you say that,” I tell her.
“I don’t care if he does hear me,” Maggie says. “All wars are stupid. They don’t fix anything.”
“What do the Germans want?” Willa’s forehead is puckered by curiosity.
“It’s not just the Germans, Willa. It’s . . . it’s complicated.” I close the atlas to end the conversation. I don’t want our voices to carry downstairs and perhaps provoke a lecture from Uncle Fred.
“But what do they want?” Willa persists.
I have no answer other than they want to win. The assassination of some faraway heir to a foreign throne as the reason Jamie must leave his family seems impossible to explain to a seven-year-old. But Maggie seems to be waiting for my answer, too.
When I say nothing, Maggie walks to my bedroom door with Jamie’s address card still in her hand. Sleet begins to fall outside as she leaves the room and I slide the atlas back into its place.
“Show me my insides.” Willa points to Uncle Fred’s anatomy book on the shelf. I withdraw it and open the volume to a page that shows us what we’re all made of.
CHAPTER 12
• May 1918 •
Pauline
Did you know people have been caring for their dead since the most ancient of times? I read this in one of Uncle Fred’s books. He’s letting Evelyn read anything in his library that she wants to, and she left a book about ancient history open on the sofa table in the sitting room a few mornings ago when the school day beckoned. Fred has an interesting array of books in his office and in the sitting room—only one shelf in the office is dedicated to publications about his trade. The rest are about nature and history and science—all the things Evie loves to study. I picked up the book to see what Evie had been reading about and saw that she’d stopped on the chapter about ancient rituals for the dead. My interest piqued, I read the chapter in its entirety.
I learned that in every culture in human history, the living have treated their dead with honor and respect, some even with adoration. There is something sacred about the body when the soul has left it, no matter which corner of the globe or how far back you look.
You’d think the opposite would be true, that this tent of flesh, which starts to decompose within hours of the soul leaving it, would immediately be cast aside as worthless. Instead, our mortal remains are given more reverence after Death’s visit than even before it.
It’s as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out,
all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle, and even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep.
And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little flame it held.
This fascinating thought keeps me company now when I go into the embalming room with Mrs. Brewster’s basket of combs, scissors, and curling rods: this idea that what we do here is holy more than it is needful. Perhaps I see it that way so strongly because Fred and Thomas ask that I stay away until the chemical process they undertake is complete. When I am called in, the deceased are washed and waxed and dressed in their finest. All that is left to do is primp and prepare their faces and hair for their laying out.
Fred nearly always leaves the viscera intact. Some embalmers thrust a device called a trocar up the navel and tease out the insides in a terrible maneuver Fred says I would find appalling. And he says it’s unnecessary. Unless the cadaver must travel a long distance, or be laid out for many days, there is no need to suck out the innards. Emptying the body of its insides is no new thing, however. I read in Fred’s book that the ancient Egyptians used to remove the brain with a sharpened metal rod shoved up the nostrils. Can you imagine? The organs were also removed and then immersed in salt harvested from the dry lakes of the desert. After the organs were washed and laid to dry in the sun, they were placed in elaborate jars made of alabaster and limestone. The body cavity was then filled with a mix of resin, sand, and sawdust. Linen bandages, often made from cloth saved throughout a person’s lifetime, would be used to wrap the body from head to toe. Lotus blossoms were pressed between the layers of strips.
Then the body would be laid in its beautiful coffin all wrapped up in spices like myrrh and cinnamon, and the jars would be tucked right alongside it. The body would last a long time. A very long time. But the book said that mummies that have been opened and unwrapped look very little like the people they had been several millennia before. Eventually, the candle disappears, too. It just does.
• • •
“But children do not belong in the embalming room,” Fred is saying. He and Thomas are getting the funeral parlor ready for a viewing, and the girls are at school. Maggie wants to help me with the hair and cosmetics, and I’ve come to Fred and Thomas with her request. She’d apparently asked Thomas before if she could do this, weeks ago, when he was still learning his way around the embalming room. He’d said then that he’d have to mull it over, thinking perhaps Maggie would lose interest. But she had complained to me last night at bedtime that her papa was taking too long to decide.
“She’s nearly thirteen, Fred,” I reply. “Not so much a child anymore. She just wants to help.”
Maggie’s birthday is indeed fast approaching, and she has said nothing about it. As I made her toast this morning, I asked her what kind of cake she’d like, and she merely shrugged and said any kind would be fine.
This answer and her desire to be with me in the embalming room had me wondering if my companion has been trailing her, too, like it’s been trailing me, and filling her dreams like it’s been filling mine, and if this is the reason why she wants to help me. My heart had begun to somersault inside me because I do not yet trust my companion even though I sense nothing but benevolence from it. How can Death be trusted? It can’t. So I changed the subject and told her as I handed her a plate of toast that I’d ask about her request to help me in the embalming room. I also said that I might need to tell Fred and her papa why she wanted to, though it was I who needed to know, and she’d answered, “I just want to help fix something that will stay fixed.”
“If she wants to help, why can’t she just take on more chores in the kitchen?” Fred says as he sets a wooden folding chair into a row of other chairs.
“Because she wants to do this.”
Thomas, straightening a chair in another row, looks up at me. “She really still wants to?”
I nod and Thomas furrows his brow. “Is this about Henry? Is it because she’s not done grieving for him?”
This question needles me a bit, though I know Thomas doesn’t intend it to. “Aren’t we all still grieving for Henry?” I reply.
“I didn’t mean she shouldn’t be or that you and I are not still grieving. I just think being in that room might make it worse,” Thomas says gently. “It’s a room of dead people.”
When he says this it’s not the first time I think that grief is such a strange guest, making its home in a person like it’s a new thing that no one has ever experienced before. It is different for every person. “Maybe for her it’s the one way to make it better. Not worse.”
Fred is looking at Thomas, seemingly waiting for him to rule on this. Thomas is thinking.
“She hasn’t made new friends here, except for Charlie and Jamie,” I continue. “And Jamie’s leaving has made her so very sad.”
“Jamie is a grown man,” Thomas interjects softly, as if just to me. I can see that he’s picked up on Maggie’s schoolgirl infatuation just like I have, though we have not talked about it. I didn’t think he had noticed, he’s been so busy, and men typically don’t notice those types of things.
“But that doesn’t mean her feelings aren’t real. Helping me might distract her from her troubles.”
“Or intensify them.”
“She just wants to fix something that will stay fixed, Tom. She told me this.”
He ponders my words for a moment. “All right,” he finally says. “We can give it a try. She can assist you from time to time if her other chores are done and she has no schoolwork.”
As I leave the room, Fred reminds me in his most parental tone yet that the embalming fluid is dangerous and that Maggie must be careful around it.
With all that has recently complicated her young life—losing Henry, moving from Quakertown, having to say good-bye to one of only two friends she’s made here in Philadelphia—I understand her desire to repair something that will stay repaired.
She doesn’t yet realize what eventually happens to the candle. She surely will come to understand when she is older, as we all do. Sooner or later she will learn time changes everything, takes everything: sometimes in a blink, and sometimes so slowly you can’t even see it happening.
CHAPTER 13
• July 1918 •
Evelyn
The long summer days used to be filled with walking the tobacco rows and pinching flowers off the plants, rolling cigars made of last year’s leaves, making afternoon trips to the swimming hole, filling up the salt and pepper shakers at Grandma and Grandpa Adler’s café, and reading books under the locust tree until the evening mosquitoes chased us inside.
The summer recess is different here in the city. The days are long and hot like they were in Quakertown, but nothing else is similar. Always before, we girls spent our days together and everything we did was the same. But here in Philadelphia a person can be more of who she is individually. I can go to the library every day, practice sketching the human body, and volunteer to read to the children who are patients in the hospital. Those things don’t interest Maggie. She’d rather be helping Mama with the bodies or trying to teach Charlie how to play chess or writing letters to Jamie. Willa is at her friend Flossie’s every day or Flossie is here. The only thing we girls do together now is visit Philadelphia’s many parks. There are four large ones close enough to walk to, all of them planned by William Penn and his surveyor back in Colonial times. They are lovely places where the thrum of the city seems far away even though it is still right there behind you and ahead of you, just on the other side of the trees. Still, even at the parks, Willa and Flossie go off on their own, and Charlie and Maggie search out something he doesn’t know about and that Maggie thinks she can teach him, and that leaves me to read on a bench in the shade.
Today I did not mind in the least that when we got to the park at
Rittenhouse Square, everyone left me. As I settled onto a bench with David Copperfield—I am rereading all of Dickens this summer—I heard someone say my name. I looked up and there was Gilbert Keane from school walking toward me with a panting spaniel on a leash. My heart jumped inside my chest. I hadn’t seen him since classes let out the first of June. I’d seen some of the girls from the academy over the past weeks—one invited me to a birthday celebration where many of the girls were in attendance, and another invited me to a poetry reading, but none of the boys was at those two events. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed hearing Gilbert’s voice and seeing his face until that moment.
“It’s you!” I said, and then after remembering my manners, “How very nice to see you.”
“May I?” he said, motioning to the bench.
“Of course.”
He settled down next to me. The dog plopped down at his feet, obviously ready for a rest.
“You didn’t mention you had a dog,” I said, wanting to say something brilliant and coming up with only that.
“It’s my aunt’s. She’s visiting from Cincinnati and unfortunately feeling under the weather today. I offered to take Pansy for a walk. I think I may have overestimated the dog’s stamina.”
We looked down at the little spaniel, and we both laughed. She was resting her snout on his boot, eyes closed, pink tongue peeking out of her huffing mouth.
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