“Get your mask and your coat,” she says gently as she brushes past me. “I’ll tell Uncle Fred and Evie I’m taking you with me. Wait for me on the front stoop.”
My mask is in my coat pocket from when we went to the market a few days ago. It’s just one of Mama’s lace scarves, doubled over. It looks pretty, even wrapped around my face like I’m a bandit bent on robbing a bank. I tie it on.
I step outside holding the basket by its handle and my coat over my other arm because it isn’t that cold and the morning air is so fresh and clean. When Mama joins me a few minutes later, she just looks at the coat over my arm and doesn’t insist I put it on.
“We’re going to walk,” she says, taking the basket. “It’s a bit of a ways.”
“I don’t mind.”
She has on a new mask that was delivered with the soup a little bit ago. It makes her look like a nurse. As we step out onto the street, I look up in the upper-story windows of Sutcliff Accounting, and I see Charlie gazing down at us. I wave to him and he waves back. He looks like he wants to come to wherever it is we are going. I would ask Mama if he can join us, but I know Dora Sutcliff would never let him come. I’ll go over to see him when we get back from the south side, though, and I’ll tell him about it. I can ask him what he’s heard from Jamie. Mrs. Sutcliff was over a couple days ago for a cup of flour—she was out—and I heard her tell Mama they’d finally gotten a new letter and she was so thankful to hear Jamie wasn’t injured or sick. But she didn’t say anything else about his letter and Mama didn’t ask. Charlie or Mrs. Sutcliff would probably let me read the letter if I asked. I am still waiting for a new letter from him.
We turn south down Broad Street to join other people who have somewhere to be and must walk if they don’t own a car or buggy. The streetcars have stopped running because people stand too close to one another on them and their breath mingles. It’s not safe. People glance up at us as we walk. But nobody says, “Good morning” or “Where are you headed this fine day, Mrs. Bright?” They just nod as they take note of which direction we are headed. Most people have masks on; a few don’t. Some stores we pass are open; some aren’t. Some doors have red-lettered placards that read INFLUENZA tacked to them—which means there is flu inside—some don’t. Some doors have crepe banners tacked to them—white if a child died, black if it was an adult, and gray if it was an old person whom the flu had killed—and some don’t. It is like any other day, except it isn’t. Broad Street is half the way it always is and half ghost town.
It’s as if Philadelphia has been cut in two like an apple, and one side looks just the way the inside of an apple should and the other side is dark and wormy and makes you gasp when you see it. That side isn’t an apple at all anymore but something sinister and wrong.
And the worst thing is, no one’s sure which side of the apple they’re going to get.
I’m thinking that maybe you don’t know you got the wormy side of the apple until you’ve already eaten half of it. You can’t see the flu coming for you. You can’t see when it skips you and picks someone else. You can’t see anything at all except one shiny red apple that looks just fine.
Even though I’m thirteen, this thought makes me reach for my mother’s hand for reassurance. And she just lets me clasp it, without so much as a glance down in wonder.
I’m not wishing I hadn’t come with her. I want to be walking down this street with Mama, headed where we’re headed. But her hand in mine makes me feel like I’m not alone in this world where you can’t always see what’s in front of you.
CHAPTER 22
Pauline
If Thomas weren’t off training for war, he would ask why in the world I am taking Maggie with me to South Street. “Do you really think that’s a good idea,” he would have said, in a way that wasn’t a question at all.
Truth be told, I’m not sure there are any good ideas right now. Perhaps I should turn around and take Maggie back home, but I admit I was too moved by her desire today to reconnect with life and the living. The sick people who we’re off to minister to may be hovering at death’s door, but they are still breathing; they are still fighting. They are still alive.
This is not the way it is at the house. There is no fight at Bright Funeral Home, only an endless influx of defeated souls.
Fred had to hire someone to watch over the most recent delivery of caskets or they would have been stolen right off the back stoop. Those coffins were claimed and then gone in a day and I never even saw who was laid in them. The dead are buried as quickly as Fred can arrange it now. The parlor isn’t being used for long and tearful good-byes with open caskets and the dead all readied and beautified for the occasion. If a family uses the parlor at all, it is to weep at a safe distance over a closed casket, and none stay very long. The cabinetmaker on the next street over is working day and night to fashion impromptu coffins, having put away his half-finished highboys and sideboards to nail together simple boxes instead.
This is what Maggie wanted a few hours’ respite from. I could see in her eyes her fearful need to step away from the house for just a little while. This is what I would tell Thomas if he were here and asked why I am letting her come. I would leave off my sliver of a worry that she has begun to sense my companion’s shadow in the corners of our home. I don’t think Death has been watching her as it watches me, but who can say what that specter is truly up to?
“And what about you, Polly? Why are you going down there?” Thomas might have said next.
I would’ve replied that my reason is the same as Maggie’s—I need to do something decent and useful—and yet I know he would’ve seen right through that answer.
You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
I hear these words in my head as if he were saying them to me this very moment as my heels click on the pavement.
I need to prove to myself I’m not selfish, Tom.
You’re not.
But I feel like I am.
You did nothing wrong.
I shouldn’t have asked my mother to let us come. I shouldn’t have put her in that terrible place of having to say no.
You did nothing wrong.
As Maggie and I walk, I replay the telephone conversation I had with my mother when I begged her to let us come home.
“But we aren’t sick,” I answered when her response to my entreaty was that it was unsafe to let us come. “The girls and I have been careful. We keep to the house. We don’t have it.”
“But you are living right there with it! You sleep over it!” my mother replied, a rare display of emotion choking her words. “How can you even ask me to let you all come when you know how terrible it can be to lose a child, Polly! I can’t put Baby Curtis and Jane and the rest of the family at risk like that. Jane and the baby live right next door, as you well know. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You know I can’t! How can you even ask me?”
You should never have left is what she’d been really saying. You should never have left the safety of home in the first place.
I look down at Maggie walking beside me, and I wonder if maybe my mother is right. Maybe we shouldn’t have. We didn’t know the war would get worse. We didn’t know a plague was coming that would change forever the way my children think of life and death. But you can’t get back the day you make a decision that changes everything.
“Do you know where we’re supposed to go?” Maggie asks now, interrupting these thoughts. It’s on my tongue to answer that I tried so very hard to get her where we were supposed to go. I tried my best. But then I realize she is only asking if I know which houses to take the soup to.
“I have a list from Mrs. Arnold.” I pull the note from my coat pocket and show it to her.
The four names are foreign, long and hard to pronounce and almost exotic the way they look on paper. Mrs. Arnold told me the neighborhood where we are headed is heavily populated by immigrants from C
roatia. I didn’t even know where that was. Evie had to show me in her atlas, on a map that stretched across two pages.
“They don’t speak much English there, but they know enough,” Mrs. Arnold had said. And then she’d added that words aren’t what these wretched souls need anyway. They need food and the gentle touch of compassion. The sweet attention of a selfless giver of mercy.
Maggie looks at the list, whispering the strange syllables as she sounds out the names.
“Do these people go to our church?” she asks.
“No, I don’t think they do.”
“Then how do we know they need us?”
I reach for the list, and Maggie hands it back to me. “Mrs. Arnold and the other ladies went to a big meeting about how to help. They made a trip down here.” I slip the note back in my pocket.
“And there are others doing what we’re doing with the soup?”
“Many others.”
After fifteen minutes or so, we turn east on South and walk another ten or eleven blocks before we finally arrive at a stretch of streets that look so sad and dirty, it is no wonder the flu is running around this neighborhood like it’s trying to burn it to the ground. Some people are out and about, but a stuttering slowness seems to characterize the speed of the automobiles and the buggies in the street and even the pedestrians on the sidewalks. The streetcars aren’t running here, either. Some of the shop signs are lettered in a language I don’t know. I look at Mrs. Arnold’s directions for finding the first person on the list, a Mrs. Abramovic. Turn right at the barbershop with the green awning, Mrs. Arnold had written.
My quiet companion is with me as always, but I sense indifference as Maggie and I walk nearer and nearer to our destination. It is a strange disinterest in my task that is both welcome and disconcerting. After all this time, I should know Death’s ways and wiles, shouldn’t I? But I can’t explain the apathy I’m sensing.
We turn into the long, narrow street by the barbershop. It is lined on both sides with brick-and-wood storefronts and row houses, three and four stories high, all of them tattered and in need of paint and window washing. There is presently a little alley off to our left as we make our way up the block, and I can see little dwellings even more dilapidated than the ones in front of us. And then there is another little alley, and more tumbledown residences, laundry lines linking them together like Christmas garland.
I find the narrow, multistory house of Mrs. Abramovic, and I knock on the door, hoping there is someone inside who will let me in, since she is sick with the flu and surely won’t be answering. The rheumy-eyed old man who responds to my knock coughs when he swings the door open. It could be an innocent attempt to rid his lungs of a scattering of dust, but there are no harmless coughs anymore. I instinctively take a step back and I turn to Maggie on the bottom step and hold up a finger.
“Don’t come into this one. Wait right here for me,” I say quietly.
I turn back to the man. “My name’s Mrs. Bright, from the Methodist church up the boulevard. And I’m here to see Mrs. Abramovic. I’ve some medicine and soup for her. May I come in?”
He says nothing and steps aside as he coughs again, this time into his collar. I tighten my mask around my nose and mouth and glance back at Maggie. She has moved away from the bottom step and is now eyeing a skinny striped cat strolling toward her.
“I’ll be out soon,” I call to her.
The foyer I step into is chilly even though it is a relatively warm day for October.
“That one,” the man says, pointing to a door with the letter B nailed to it. He unlocks it with a key from his pants pocket and then ambles away. I had assumed this man to be Mrs. Abramovic’s husband, but apparently he is just the landlord in the crumbling house. I knock on the door as I turn the knob.
“Mrs. Abramovic?” I push the door open as I peek inside. The front room is sparsely furnished and smells faintly of roasted onions, garlic, and spices I can’t name. Little bits of lace lie about on the end tables, and faded antimacassars hang on the backs of the sagging sofa and an armchair. A cracked window above a tiny sink lets in a welcome draft that is probably not so welcome on cold days. “Mrs. Abramovic?” I call again as I make my way down a narrow hall that leads to the only bedroom.
I find the woman in bed with a faded quilt pulled up tight to her chin. I can’t guess how old she is; her skin is so pale and drawn. She is perhaps my mother’s age, late fifties. She opens her eyes and looks at me with such terror I realize I must look like I mean to do her harm with my face covered the way it is.
“I’m Mrs. Bright from the Ladies’ Aid at Broad Street Methodist,” I say, in as reassuring a tone as I can muster. “Mrs. Arnold was here the other day? I’ve brought some soup for you.”
The woman stares at me blankly and I wonder how much of what I’ve said she understands. I approach the bed with my basket and lift out a jar of soup. It is still slightly warm. “Can you eat something?”
Her gaze shifts from me to the soup and she slowly nods. I don’t know if she is in the beginning stages of the illness or if she’s survived it and is now slowly making the trek back to the realm of the healthy. I hold my breath as I lean over her to help her to a sitting position against her pillows.
She is light as a feather and weak from illness. Perhaps I am meant only to leave the soup for her and go, but I wonder if she has the strength to even open the jar.
“How about if I help you eat a little? I have everything all right here,” I say, glad I don’t have to rummage through her tiny kitchen for a spoon. I ladle some of the soup into a small bowl from my basket.
I pull up a rickety chair next to her bed and take a seat, wondering what I should say as I help her eat. I still don’t know if she speaks any English. But conversation is not needed. Mrs. Abramovic is so weak she lies back against her pillows after only five spoonsful of soup.
“Can you not manage a couple more bites, Mrs. Abramovic?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “Thank you,” she murmurs, in heavily accented English. “You are very kind.”
“Is there no one to take care of you? No children or siblings?”
Again, she shakes her head. “My brother die last week. His wife, day before. Only me now.”
I help her take a couple aspirins and then settle her back against her pillows. I am sad to think of leaving her, but I can’t stay with Maggie waiting for me outside and three more names on the list.
“I will try to come again tomorrow, Mrs. Abramovic.” I rise from the chair and put my things away, except for the half-finished soup. I set the bowl on her bedside table next to a worn Bible and a pair of misshapen spectacles. “I’m leaving the soup here for you. You try to eat it later today, all right?”
“Your dish,” she says. It sounds like deesh. “Your spoon.”
“I can get them next time I come.” I pull up her coverlet. The woman is as helpless as a little child, and she looks up at me with eyes glistening with gratitude.
“God bless you,” she whispers.
As she says this, I sense that my companion is so very near to me, close as my breath, but it is not here for this woman. It does not have her name on its lips. It had hovered over her, considered her perhaps, but then it had pulled away, even before I got here.
I am suddenly overcome by my inability to understand why some will survive the flu and some won’t. Why some babies live and some don’t. Why some people pass away in a warm bed full of years while others have their breath snatched from them before they’ve earned so much as one gray hair.
I bid the woman good-bye and head quickly back to the dark, chilly foyer. I close her door behind me and lean my back against it for a moment, unable not to imagine that there is probably a person like Mrs. Abramovic in every row house on this street, and on the next street over, and on every street in this neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, and in Philadelph
ia, in Pennsylvania, in America, in France, in Spain, and in all the countries whose names I don’t even know. This flu is like a black shroud that has been flung across everything that breathes under the canopy of heaven, and if you could stand back far enough, you wouldn’t see all the people it touches, only the immense length and breadth of its expanse.
For no reason that I can see, Mrs. Abramovic was able to crawl out from underneath that shadowy veil.
“You took her brother and his wife, but you didn’t take her,” I whisper. “Why didn’t you? Why?”
There is not so much as a tremble in the air about me. No sound or movement. No indication that I have even been heard. And then there is a startling whisper of a thought resonating deep within me: that my companion never chooses. It merely responds.
I don’t know what to make of this revelation. And I don’t know how I will manage coming back to Mrs. Abramovic every day until she is well enough to care for herself. But I know I must try. I’ve no doubt the others on the list will affect me just as greatly.
My hand is on the front door and I throw it open, eager now to see Maggie and the face of innocence. But she is not on the bottom step.
I step outside and pull the door closed behind me, gazing about for my daughter. “Maggie?”
I see the cat that had been walking toward her when I went inside Mrs. Abramovic’s building. He is sitting on the sidewalk licking his paws and washing his face, paying me no mind whatsoever. There is no other living thing on the narrow street.
“Maggie!” I shout, and my heart starts to thrum inside my chest.
My daughter is nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER 23
Maggie
I never would have heard the baby if I hadn’t followed the cat to the street corner and the front window of the row house hadn’t been broken.
The infant’s little cries were like the yowls newborn kittens make or a creaky step at the top of the stairs or a little bird in a far-off tree. But I knew the second I heard it that it wasn’t a kitten or a stair or a bird that made that noise. I knew it was a baby. It was as if that sunken part that had been a sister to Henry suddenly burst out of me and swirled around like a waterspout, reminding me what that sound was.
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