As Bright as Heaven(115)

I asked Evie, how long can she do that? Take care of that woman? Isn’t she jealous? Doesn’t she wish Conrad would put Sybil back in the asylum? Evie said Conrad’s devotion to Sybil is one of the things that drew her to him in the first place. I told her that was plain weird. And she said the little bit of Sybil that Conrad still loves is so small, it’s no trouble to love that part of her, too.

I can tell you right now, when I fall in love it’s going to be with someone who is mine and only mine. But I don’t know if I will ever marry anyone. Maggie is always thinking only about Jamie and his happiness, and Evie’s over the moon about Conrad and his. I’d rather concentrate on my own happiness, thank you.

The Weisses have been very nice to me since the night of the raid. And Mr. Weiss never told Papa about the Silver Swan. I don’t think it’s because telling Papa would mean he’d have to admit he was there. I don’t think Mr. Weiss cares if Papa learned he had been at that speakeasy, too. Mr. Weiss decided not to tell because he doesn’t want my relationship with Papa to suffer. He still misses Gretchen just like I miss Mama. She was their only child. I think he and Mrs. Weiss like having me over to play with Fritz because I remind them a little bit of her. Mr. Weiss takes care to remind me now and then that it’s not my fault Mama died. It’s sweet how that matters to him. Maybe he’s right that the flu randomly took whoever it wanted, no matter what any of us did or didn’t do.

I let him say what he wants. I like going over there and Fritz loves it when I come. Louisa makes the most delicious things in their bakery, and she always gives me something yummy to take home with me.

So I’d say 1926 is starting out rather nicely, especially when you compare it to other years. Evie and Conrad are happy, Maggie and Jamie are happy, and Alex and Ursula are happy. Even Papa seems relatively happy, though his happiness will always be a little thinner compared to everyone else’s.

I look into the mirror again, closer this time. I may be fifteen, but I sure look the same. At least to me. No matter. I glance up at the clock on the wall. It’s getting late. Just a few seconds before midnight. Time to stop all these contemplations.

I slip Mama’s butterfly hat pin into the knot of ribbon that holds my curls so that it looks like the little thing just landed there to listen to me sing.

Then I step out of my dressing room at the Landmark Club, just five blocks away from where the Silver Swan had been. Lila meets me on the other side of the door. She’d made it out of the raid and wound up at the Landmark a week after the Swan was shut down. Her new employers had heard about me. Can you imagine? They’d asked her to see if Sweet Polly Adler was interested in working at the Landmark, too. Lucky for me Alex is still a sound sleeper, so sneaking out his window is still easy. Some things just don’t change.

“They’re calling for you, doll,” Lila says.

I hear the patrons shouting my name as I part the stage curtain.

The piano music begins for my entrance and I imagine that I’m not in some speakeasy owned by gangsters but in a concert hall and my papa is in the front row with Mama beside him. They are cheering for me, their heads close together. Then Mama whispers something to Papa, and he grins and kisses her temple. A smile breaks wide across my face as the curtain falls away behind me, and I step into a flood of light, bright as heaven itself.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTE


Deepest thanks are extended to my insightful editor at Berkley, Claire Zion, and literary agent extraordinaire, Elisabeth Weed, for all the wise counsel regarding both the big and little details of this story. I am also so very grateful to everyone at Penguin Random House—Ivan Held, Craig Burke, Danielle Dill, Roxanne Jones, and Fareeda Bullert, to name a few—for coming alongside this book so enthusiastically. Thanks also to my mother, Judy Horning, for careful proofreading and unflagging affirmation and for just being my mom; to the Free Library of Philadelphia and specifically map curator Megan MacCall; to the staff of the Kimpton Hotel Palomar, the Philadelphia History Museum, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the kind citizens of Philadelphia for always being ready and willing to answer my questions. And thanks are extended to everyone who, when I said my next book would be set during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, told me about the long-ago aunt or cousin or great-grandfather whose life was irrevocably changed because of it.

I read a great many articles, books, and excerpts as part of my research for As Bright as Heaven, but I could not have written it at all without the following resources, and which I recommend for further reading: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (Viking, 2004) by John M. Barry; American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Oxford University Press, 2012) by Nancy Bristow; America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) by Alfred W. Crosby; and Embalming: History, Theory, and Practice, Fifth Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2011) by Robert Mayer.

While I endeavored to stick to the facts wherever I could, I made use of literary license with regard to a few details. There is no Broad Street Methodist Church, but there is a beautiful Gothic Revival–style church on South Broad Street that was known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Chambers-Wylie Presbyterian Church, and which is now the home of Broad Street Ministry. I wanted to be able to control the particulars regarding where the Bright family attended church and thus invented one for them, but I patterned it after this one. The asylum where Evelyn works in the later chapters is also fictional, but loosely patterned after Dr. Thomas Kirkbride’s Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, which in 1918 was located along the north side of Market Street at Forty-ninth Street. Lastly, while in the story Evelyn and Conrad traveled by car to Camden, the bridge that spans the Delaware River and connects Philadelphia to New Jersey did not officially open to traffic until a few months later, in the summer of 1926. The day-to-day details of the pandemic as it swirled about Philadelphia in the fall of 1918 are as factual in the pages of this story as I could make them. The official count of Philadelphian lives lost to the Spanish flu is 12,191.