As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  I wanted to tell her about the job I’d insisted on having, preparing the deceased for their funerals. I wanted to tell her how I put rouge and lipstick on dead women to make them look beautiful again. I dress them in their prettiest clothes. I put toilet water behind their ears so that they will smell like verbena instead of that awful solution curdling in their veins. I talk to them and sing to them and I assure them that they look lovely and I try to guess what they were like when they were alive. I wanted to say that I tell those lifeless bodies about my day. I tell them about Henry. I wanted to tell my mother how inexplicably easy it is to go into the embalming room and do these things, often with Maggie at my side.

  I wanted to say, “It’s the strangest thing. I’m not afraid of Death anymore. I know I should be. But ever since Henry died, Death is not the phantom that it used to be. It is more like a quiet friend. I thought coming to Uncle Fred’s funeral home would change all that, and Death would go back to being what it was before. But we’ve been there all these months and nothing is different. If anything, Death is more my friend than ever.” I wanted to ask her what is wrong with me, and I wanted her to say, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you, Polly. Your child died and your mother’s heart is healing the best way it can. The heart always does what it needs to do. Don’t you fret, now. Everything will be all right in time.”

  But we never had that conversation.

  My parents came to the station on the morning of our return to Philadelphia and watched us dry-eyed as we boarded our train. The girls and I waved to them as well as to Grandad, Jane, and a few other family members who had come to see us off. My mother raised one hand in farewell and kept it steady. It was more like a salute or a quiet command to stop the train. Clarity came over me as our car chuffed past the platform. My mother hadn’t wanted us to move away. She was hurt that we did. And I’d failed to see it.

  “She misses us. She misses you,” Thomas said when I arrived home and told him about the visit. “Keeping you at a distance like this is no doubt how she manages it.”

  My mother had looked for a way to cope with our having moved away from her. And she had found one.

  The heart always does what it needs to do.

  CHAPTER 17

  Evelyn

  I’ve never seen so many people in one place at one time. Broad Street, which stretches as far as I can see in both directions, is a sea of faces on both sides. I can’t even guess how many people are lined up for the Liberty Loan Parade. Uncle Fred told me when we first moved to Philadelphia that more than a million people live here, but I have never been able to grasp what even a percentage of that number looks like—until today. The newspaper predicted two hundred thousand will come out to watch the parade. Even the late-September sun seems determined to break through the clouds and attend.

  The spectators are all packed onto the sidewalks like dominos, waving little flags and cheering. A dozen warplanes are flying overhead, the pilots pretending they are in battle, and everyone sings victory choruses as they swoop past. On the other side of the street, a man with a megaphone is asking women who’ve lost their husbands and sons and brothers in the war to speak to the crowd the names of their dearly departed. And then we are told that these women gave their all. And asked, what will we give?

  Floats bearing cannons and massive guns and the skeletons of ships have passed us. Troops have marched by, and a truck filled with shoes has followed them bearing a sign that announces that every soldier needs a pair of new shoes every month. On what are they marching that they use up a fresh pair of boots every thirty days? I want to know. But today is not the day to ask questions. Today is only about taking out coin purses and checkbooks and breaking open piggy banks.

  Parade organizers want to raise millions of dollars today to pay for the war—and the shoes. That’s why we’re all out here. It would be unpatriotic not to attend, disloyal not to give. Uncle Fred is planning to hand over a wad of money, but he’s not his usual jolly self. He’s been in and out of the city morgue all week, getting called in at all hours to undertake the final affairs of sailors who came to the Philadelphia Naval Yard last week from Boston with a killing influenza hiding inside them and who are now dead. Everyone is calling it the Spanish flu, even though it didn’t originate in Spain. No one is sure where it came from. Spain has been the first to speak openly about it in its newspapers. Spain is also neutral regarding the war, Uncle Fred told me, so it has nothing to lose by being candid about how many of its soldiers and citizens are sick or dying. That openness has saddled Spain with the name of this terrible sickness.

  “This is not the kind of busy I like,” I heard him say to Mama yesterday. “These were our brave soldiers! These were the young men who were to defeat the Kaiser and end the bloodshed. We cannot spare them to this infernal disease.”

  Mama doesn’t want us anywhere near the embalming room now, not that I have much notion of going in there. This influenza is apparently highly contagious and travels seemingly as easily as a housefly alights on one person and then another. Uncle Fred is not entirely sure if the flu victims in his embalming room can pass the disease on to one of us, since the deceased are no longer breathing, and that’s how the virus travels—in the breath and spittle of the one who has it—but he is taking no chances. He wears a mask and keeps the connecting door from the kitchen to the funeral parlor locked so that none of us can accidentally expose ourselves.

  A few days ago, the newspaper said there were six thousand cases of influenza at Camp Devens in Massachusetts and sixty-six soldiers have already died from it. That’s not where Papa is, but that doesn’t comfort Mama or me. The flu is wherever there are soldiers and sailors, so it’s there at Fort Meade, too, she says. There is a professor from Harvard and doctors from New York who are working together to see if they can figure out how to create a vaccine, but the paper didn’t say how far along they are.

  I heard Uncle Fred tell one of his APL friends yesterday afternoon that the situation at Camp Devens is deplorable. The base hospital can only accommodate twelve hundred soldiers, but six thousand have the flu, so there are sick men lying in all the corridors and on the porches, coughing up blood everywhere. And there aren’t enough nurses because half of them have the flu, too.

  I don’t know if Mama heard this conversation, but this morning she asked if we should all stay inside the house and listen to the bands from the upstairs windows. Uncle Fred might have actually let us, but Willa didn’t want to be indoors with all the fun happening a few blocks away. Maggie and I didn’t want to stay inside, either. We aren’t near any of the soldiers or sailors and we’re outside, so Uncle Fred doesn’t think we need to worry. They would have called off the parade if it wasn’t safe. But Mama has asked us to stay on the steps of the milliner’s store and not go down onto the sidewalk.

  Easy enough. There are so many people that there is no room on the sidewalk for us.

  But I worry about those soldiers at Camp Devens. And I worry that Fort Meade is just like it. Papa is training for the field medical corps, but if the base hospital there needs help caring for soldiers with the flu, won’t they bring him in from training to lend a hand? If half of Fort Meade’s nurses end up with the flu like the nurses at Camp Devens did, will he be called in to assist?

  I know this is what Mama worries about, too. She doesn’t think Papa is safe at Fort Meade. She is waving her little flag, but I can see in her eyes that she is not thinking about the parade.

  She is wondering, just like I am, what the future truly holds for us. When we moved here to Philadelphia, Mama and Papa both thought they knew, but even I can see that they were wrong. None of us really knows.

  CHAPTER 18

  • October 1918 •

  Maggie

  Empty school desks are all around me as the morning bell rings. It’s been only five days since the parade, and the influenza that was at the army bases is everywhere now. At first, there we
re just a few sick people here and there. But by the third day every classroom was missing someone. Seven of my classmates were home sick yesterday, and there are five more absent today, including Sally. Ruby, two rows away, eyes the empty desk next to mine. A boy named Stanley usually sits there. I nod toward the seat, beckoning her to come sit by me. She looks toward the door and hesitates. Miss Darby was called out of the room and hasn’t come back yet.

  “She won’t care,” I say. At least I don’t think our teacher will mind if Ruby comes to sit with the few of us remaining in the classroom. Ruby slowly makes her way to me. A boy ahead of me turns to us as she sits down. His name is Wendell, and he has enormous teeth. The other boys like to tease Wendell about his horse mouth, as they call it. But the fellows who mock him the most aren’t in class today. He’s easily the smartest boy in our class.

  “They’re going to close the school today,” he says. “I heard two teachers talking about it in the hallway. They’re sending us home.”

  “For how long?” Ruby says. She sounds afraid.

  Wendell shrugs. A boy whose name is Chester says everything is being closed. All the schools. The churches. The theaters. Parks. Any place where a crowd would gather. His father, who is a custodian for the city, heard the officials at city hall talking about it. It’s as bad here in Philadelphia as it is in Boston and New York and Washington, D.C. Worse, maybe.

  “My neighbor said there are no more beds at any of our hospitals,” says a girl named Louise, turning toward us from her seat. “He stood in line with his sick wife and waited for two hours before the nurses told him that he’d have to carry her back home. And they didn’t give her any medicine.”

  “That’s because there is no medicine,” says Wendell.

  “How can there be no medicine at a hospital?” Chester says. “It’s a hospital!”

  “There is no medicine for this,” Wendell says.

  “It’s like one of Egypt’s plagues,” Louise says.

  “I hear you cough up your insides,” a boy says from behind me.

  “I hear your lungs turn to tar and then you choke on them,” says another one.

  Ruby shudders next to me. “Stop it,” she whispers, but I don’t think anyone hears her.

  “You can’t choke on your lungs,” Wendell says. “That’s impossible.”

  “How do you know? You’re not a doctor.”

  “You don’t have to be a doctor to know you can’t choke on your lungs.”

  There is a little flurry of debate about this to which Ruby says, louder this time, “Stop!”

  Everyone is quiet for about two seconds. “My dad says the morgue is full,” Chester continues. “The city undertakers are being told to come get the bodies to make room for more, but they won’t come get them.”

  At this, all the heads in the room swing in my direction.

  “Is that true?” Chester asks me.

  I have no idea if it is or isn’t. I know there is only so much space in the embalming room. Only so many tables. Mama has forbidden me to go back there, so I can’t say for sure that we’ve no room for more. “I think we might be full,” I venture. It both scares me and thrills me to say it because it’s the first time since we moved here that I have everyone’s attention.

  “How many have you got?” Chester tries to sound nonchalant, but I hear the tremor of dread in his voice.

  I don’t know how many bodies are in Uncle Fred’s embalming room. I haven’t seen Uncle Fred in three days. He’s been up before the sun, and he doesn’t come through the house to his room until after I’m in bed. Yesterday Uncle Fred hired a man named Patek to help him move the bodies and transport them to the graveyards because Dora decided it wasn’t safe for Charlie to help him anymore.

  “Have you seen them?” one of the boys says. “Did they choke on their lungs?”

  “I’m not allowed right now where the bodies are,” I say, very aware that I can’t provide the assurance that none of the deceased have choked on their own lungs. The smartest person in our class says that’s impossible. If any of us could provide the proof that Wendell is right, it should be me. For the first time ever, I feel like it’s to my advantage that I’m the daughter and niece of undertakers, and yet I can’t give my classmates what they want.

  There is silence for a few moments as they contemplate the fact that I might have been a fount of information if children weren’t always kept away from everything important.

  “Why is this happening?” Ruby says quietly to no one.

  And none of us can answer her.

  The door to our classroom opens, and Miss Darby steps inside. She tells us all classes have been canceled until further notice and that we are to head straight home. She admonishes us as we gather our things to work on our lessons on our own, but no one is listening to her. The only time school has ever been closed for more than a day was for a blizzard.

  Ruby turns to me. “Do you think we’re all going to die?” Her voice is but a whisper and her brown eyes are wide with worry.

  But I don’t get a chance to answer her. Her brother calls her name from the entrance to our classroom and tells her to come. Their mother is waiting outside to take them home.

  When I step outside, I feel numb, like I’m in the middle of a dream. A little voice is telling me I need to hurry along to Willa’s end of the school so that I can walk her home. But I just stand there on the street corner for a few minutes as classmates and parents rush by to get away. Some of the adults are pressing handkerchiefs to their noses and mouths. One man whisks past a streetcar signpost and a No Spitting! sign peels away from it at the tug of his coat. It floats away on the wind, and no one notices.

  There are still little piles of parade confetti in the gutters, but they’re all wet and matted now. You can’t tell the clumps of mush had just a few days earlier been anything pretty to look at.

  I wonder if this is what Jamie feels over there in France, this chilly, empty fear that something bad is happening and it’s so quiet and quick you can’t even name it. I haven’t heard from him since the middle of September, nearly a month ago, even though I’ve written him nearly every day since the parade. The Sutcliffs would have gotten word if something bad had happened to him, and they’ve heard nothing, either.

  I finally start to make my way toward Willa’s part of the school, and I am already penning in my head what I will write to him when I get home. I won’t tell him how awful it is here, nor will I lie and say it’s all wonderful. I will just tell him we are all getting by and doing our best and hoping and praying every day that the flu and the war will both come to a quick end. I look down into the gutter as I walk and I see a small clump of parade confetti, tucked under some leaves, that isn’t soaking wet or dirty. I instantly reach for it and slip the little cluster into my coat pocket.

  I’ll separate the tiny pieces of damp paper when I get home, let them dry, and then put them in the envelope along with the letter I write. When Jamie opens the envelope in some faraway field in France, the confetti will fall out and it will surprise him and he’ll think of home and smile.

  CHAPTER 19

  Pauline

  The back door into the funeral home starts to open, and I stand ready to tell whoever is on the other side of it that they cannot deposit their dead with us. Simply locking the door and putting a sign out that we will accept no more deliveries is not sufficient, as most will leave the sheet-wrapped cadaver on the stoop anyway, with a hastily written note pinned to its chest. It’s been only nine days since the parade.

  “Don’t let anyone leave a body,” Fred told me when he left for the morgue an hour ago. “I don’t have any more caskets. I have no place to put another corpse. I can’t keep lining the embalming room floor with them.”

  He looked to me with weary, bloodshot eyes, and I assured him I would do as he asked even though it meant staking my position in the m
udroom amid the ghoulish rows of flu victims covered in horse blankets. There are too many here for one undertaker to attend. In a matter of days, this terrible sickness has turned our little world upside down. Bright Funeral Home had been a quiet, peaceful place for the most tender care of the dearly departed. It was almost like a library or a church. It was a calm, respected place where life was honored and hence affirmed, strange as that might sound. But now this place is like a terrible corner in someone’s nightmare. Before Fred left for the morgue, I had to position Evie at the front stoop lest any desperate soul try to break down the front door and bring their dead through our living quarters.

  Fred has run out of ice to keep the bodies cool, and the odor of decomposition—imagine putrid meat slathered in sugar gone rancid—is wafting about me despite the scarf tied around my nose and mouth. It is not a human smell. Nothing about the bodies smells or looks human. It’s only when a stray finger or a lock of hair or a toe finds its way out of the fabric cocoon that it’s clear that under the layers of blankets and canvas are people whom my bizarre companion has called to itself. At least that is what common sense would have me believe—that Death has been gorging itself on the innocent of Philadelphia since the parade. And not just Philadelphia. Everywhere. From one end of America to the other and beyond. And yet something keeps me from calling down curses on my companion. Even now I sense the enemy is not who we think it is. My companion hovers kindly in the hellish corners in the funeral home. Like a valet, like a dance partner.