In the Shadow of Blackbirds(4)
She didn’t respond, so I trudged beside her with the words about my dead teacher echoing in my brain. Our boots marched in unison. We traded the trunk and the doctor’s bag every two corners and broke the silence of the streets by huffing from the strain of my belongings. My nose and chin sweated beneath my mask. It was entirely too hot for October.
A few blocks north, we turned right on Beech Street. A horse clip-clopped behind us, and I smelled something so rotten I gagged.
“Don’t look, Mary Shelley.” Aunt Eva pulled a handkerchief out of a trouser pocket and pressed it over her mask. “Keep your eyes to the ground.”
But, of course, Aunt Eva’s words made me want to look at whatever horror she was trying to conceal. I peeked over my shoulder and saw a horse-drawn cart driven by a gaunt dark-skinned man who stared at the road with empty eyes. His sun-bleached wagon rattled closer, and in the back of the cart lay a pile of bodies covered in sheets. Five pairs of feet—a deep purplish black—dangled over the edge.
“I said don’t look!” Aunt Eva thrust her handkerchief my way. “Breathe into this.”
Instead, I pulled down my mask, bent over the gutter, and threw up the small snack I had eaten on the train.
Aunt Eva dropped the trunk. “Put your mask back on—quick.”
“I need fresh air.”
“There is no fresh air with this flu. Put your mask on now.”
I yanked the gauze back over my nose and inhaled my own hot, sour breath.
We were quieter after the cart rolled by. We still switched turns carrying my trunk once my nausea passed, but our labored panting softened out of respect for the dead. In the distance, another ambulance shrieked.
Crepes in black, gray, and white marked flu fatalities on several front doors, just the way they did back home: a black piece of fabric for an adult, gray for an elderly person, and white for a child. The Brandywine twins down the street from my house in Portland had died three months shy of their eighteenth birthday, so their mother—unsure whether to call her girls children or grown-ups—had braided black and white crepes together. As we turned left and entered Aunt Eva’s block of modest-sized clapboard homes, I worried about whether my aunt would one day need to hang a piece of cloth representing me on her front door. My stomach got queasy again.
“Somehow, we’ve managed to avoid the flu on this block.” Aunt Eva navigated my trunk along her cement front path. “I don’t know how, but I hope to God we stay immune.”
She led me up the porch steps of her two-story Victorian, an oversized doll’s house with scalloped yellow siding and wooden fixtures shaped like lace doilies above our heads. A tan card in the front window declared the household MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES FOOD ADMINISTRATION and included the organization’s official insignia—a red, white, and blue shield surrounded by heads of wheat. The pledge card ensured Aunt Eva would forgo meat, wheat, and sugar on the days the government requested, to save food for our soldiers and the starving in Europe. It also proved to her neighbors she wasn’t a spy, a traitor, or a dangerous immigrant and should be left well enough alone.
I wondered what my life would have been like if my father had just gone along with Americanisms like that blasted pledge card and let the war progress around us.
Aunt Eva unlocked her door and led me inside the narrow front hall, which, once I tugged my mask down to my throat, smelled as pungent with onions as the train. A Swiss cuckoo clock announced the four o’clock hour from somewhere in the depths of her kitchen, in the back.
From around the corner, a childish voice murmured, “Who’s there?”
Startled, I dropped my bag. “Who said that?”
“That’s just Oberon.” Aunt Eva plunked my suitcase onto the hall’s scuffed floorboards. “He’s a rescued yellow-billed magpie that belongs to my neighbor, a bachelor veterinarian off at the war. I’m taking care of the bird while he’s gone.”
I stepped inside her lavender living room, to the left, and encountered a beautiful black-and-white bird with tapered tail feathers twice as long as his body. He stood on a perch in a tall domed cage.
The bird lowered his dark head and studied me through the bronze wires. “Who’s there?”
I smiled. “I’m Mary Shelley—your adopted cousin, I suppose. What else can you say?”
“He says his name and Hello, and he likes to whistle and squeak,” Aunt Eva answered as she removed her work coat. “You can get to know him better later, but right now you should take your bath. Use water as hot as you can stand, so we can boil the germs off you. And wash your mask while you’re at it.”
“All right. He’s a gorgeous bird. I love those white patches on his wings and belly.” I went back out to the hall, picked up my trunk and black doctor’s bag, and was just about to head upstairs when I caught sight of my own face staring at me from a pale purple wall across the living room.
The image was a photograph of me, taken in Stephen’s older brother Julius’s Spiritualism studio during my April visit to San Diego. I lowered my luggage back to the ground and crossed the room for a closer look.
“Mary Shelley?” asked my aunt from behind me.
My blue irises—almost hauntingly absent in the black-and-white photograph—stared back at me in a defiant gaze. I had been so skeptical about genuine spirits showing up in the developed photo and had done my best to look marvelously stubborn. A pair of silver-painted aviatrix goggles hung around my neck, even though Julius and Aunt Eva had wanted them off me, and I wore a breezy white blouse with a collar that dipped into a V.