The Boston Girl(32)
Her first name was Olive and she must have been as old as Miss Chevalier, but with her uniform and cap and the way she said things like “A-1” and “fed up,” she seemed more our age. She had signed up for the English ambulance service when she found out they let girls drive. “I learned how to change a tire in the trenches and all the boys had to admit I was as good as any of them.”
After she told us about driving through terrible weather and stories about the other women drivers, one of the girls raised her hand and asked if they were still looking for volunteers. “I’d do anything to get behind the wheel of a car.”
“Would you really do anything?” Olive said it with so much bitterness, I swear the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees. She glared at the girl who had asked the question and said, “Would you hold an eighteen-year-old boy in your arms while he died? A boy with a hole in his belly, who had soiled his trousers and was screaming for his mother? Would you do that?”
She went on like that until Miss Chevalier stopped her. Though not before the girl who’d raised her hand ran out of the room, sobbing.
After that night I found myself counting gold star flags hanging in windows—one for each son lost in the war. The next time I saw a picture of Mary Pickford selling Liberty bonds, I wondered which of the handsome soldiers around her were dead. And when I passed a man with an empty shirtsleeve pinned to his shoulder, I shuddered to think he might have been wearing one of our shirts when his arm was blown off.
How do you go on after that?
Today, nobody bats an eye when you hear someone has the flu. It can still be dangerous for older people, but even most of them get well. In 1918, it was nearly always fatal, and it went after young people. More soldiers and sailors died from flu than from the war.
It happened fast. First a handful of sailors were sick, five days later two hundred men were down with it, another few weeks and thousands were dying. When it spread to the city there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to take care of all the sick people, partly because the doctors were dying, too. Not that there was much anyone could do. There was no medicine. Getting well was luck, pure and simple. Or God’s will, if you believe in a God who kills children and babies.
The flu was fast, too. Someone would leave the factory with a headache and two days later Levine would see the worker’s name in the list of flu deaths in the newspaper. There were weeks when that list had five hundred names on it.
The city sent out wagons to pick up the bodies but after a while the drivers were afraid to go inside anyplace where there was sickness, so people left corpses out on the porches and even on the sidewalk. A lot of the dead were buried in unmarked graves. It was a real plague and not so long ago.
The health department closed the movie houses and concert halls and told people to stay away from crowds. Nobody should have been out dancing, but a lot of people ignored all the warnings. My friend Rose was one of them.
Betty took Myron and Jacob out of school even before the health department closed them and she kept them inside. My mother put a red string on all the doorknobs to keep out the evil eye.
It didn’t help. One morning Myron said he had a terrible headache and couldn’t get out of bed. Levine said he would take care of him and told Betty to take Lenny and Jacob downstairs and stay there. But she left them with my mother and ran back to be with Myron, too.
We weren’t allowed near him, but I went up and left them food in the kitchen—trying to hear what was going on in the back bedroom. When I went back later, nobody had touched a crumb and I heard them in the bathroom with Myron, trying to cool him down in the bathtub. At night, I heard Myron coughing and moaning and Levine begging him to hang on.
Downstairs, Jacob was frantic and kept asking where was Mommy and Daddy, where was Myron. Lenny was quiet. Even though he was barely a year old, he knew something was wrong. No one was paying attention to him, not even my father, but he didn’t make a fuss; he just watched us with big eyes.
Papa couldn’t sit anymore and went out to find a doctor, even though there weren’t any. He was only gone an hour, but when he got back we had to tell him that Myron was gone. He was nine years old.
A few hours after Myron died, Betty came downstairs. All she wanted was to see the boys. Jacob ran to her and hugged her and wouldn’t let go. Betty picked him up and whispered, “How’s my Jakey? How’s my Jake?”
Mameh said, “They both ate a good dinner but Lenny was a little cranky so I put him to sleep in my bed.”
Betty dropped Jake and ran to the other room. She screamed, “He’s blue.”
She took Lenny upstairs and Jacob tried to follow her but I caught him and held him tight while he screamed and sobbed and finally cried himself to sleep.
Mameh, Papa, and I sat up at the table most of the night, not talking or looking at each other, listening for sounds from upstairs. When I brought hot tea upstairs, Levine met me in the kitchen and said, “He seems a little better. He took some water and smiled.”
I fell asleep with my clothes on and woke up before it was light. Lying in bed, I listened to the footsteps overhead, back and forth, from one end of the apartment to the other. They took turns. Betty walked faster than Levine, but they followed the same path, back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. It went on like that until the afternoon.
When the footsteps stopped, we all looked at the ceiling. Papa said a blessing. Mameh threw a dish towel over her head and wailed. Jake put his head on my lap.