As Bright as Heaven(12)

He handed the heavy book to me. “My favorite section is neurology. There in the seven hundreds. You won’t believe how stunning the nervous system is. Everything else fails without it. It’s what makes you you. It’s what makes you alive.”

“I’ll be careful with it,” I said, nearly speechless with wonder and gratitude. “And I’ll put it back where it was when I’m done with it.”

He shook his head. “It’s yours.” And he left his office without getting whatever it was he’d come for, perhaps to recollect his thoughts or walk the house and funeral rooms and remind himself that he had done very well for himself despite the death of that dream.

I took the book up to my room.

I like having my own bedroom. Since there are electric lights in every room, I can stay up reading after Maggie and Willa have gone to bed. Willa is across the hall from me, and I can hear her singing to herself at night. I don’t think she’s overly happy having her own room. I told her she will feel differently in a few years. Maggie is one more flight up in one of the attic rooms and seems to feel the best thing about our move is that she now has the entire third floor to herself.

I asked Papa what Uncle Fred did with these rooms before we came, since there was only him in his house. Uncle Fred’s housekeeper, a useless woman named Mrs. Landry who somehow makes everything she cooks taste like soap, doesn’t live here, thank goodness. Papa said Uncle Fred had an assistant for several years, and that man lived here until he got married and moved away. Before that he rented out the rooms to single men, but he was always losing his tenants when those men met girls they wanted to impress. I doubt it was only that the girls didn’t like their beaus sharing living quarters with corpses. No doubt Mrs. Landry’s cooking also had something to do with their leaving.

Mama has her sights on relieving Mrs. Landry of her duties. I would wager by this time next week she’ll be gone. Mama also wants Mrs. Brewster, the hairstylist, to be given notice. I overheard her asking Papa if he might tell Uncle Fred that she could do what Mrs. Brewster does and that he wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the work getting done at the wrong time, nor would he have to pay for it.

I know why Mama wants Mrs. Landry gone, but I don’t know why Mama wants Mrs. Brewster’s job, too. I can’t ask her yet because I only overheard that conversation between my parents. I wasn’t part of it. I don’t want them to think I eavesdrop. But it’s curious to me that Mama wants to be in that room where the dead are made ready for their burial. She wants to.

She seems happy to be here, but sometimes I will catch her staring off into the corner of the room, as though she is looking at a picture that isn’t there. I will call to her, and sometimes I must do so three times before she will hear me. Papa is so busy trying to learn all that Uncle Fred knows, I don’t think he has noticed Mama’s odd behavior. Those times when I’ve had to practically shake her to get her attention, I’ve asked her if she is all right, and she always says she’s fine; she was just thinking.

“About what?” I asked once.

She smiled and said it was nothing I needed to be worried about.

I suppose she’s missing Henry. What else could it be but that?

We have wonderful neighbors across the street. Roland Sutcliff is Uncle Fred’s bookkeeper, but he’s also a good friend. He and his wife, Dora, have two sons. The older one, Jamie, works with Mr. Sutcliff. Charlie is sixteen. He’s a simpleminded but sweet young man who does odd jobs for Uncle Fred. Moving caskets, lifting heavy things, carting away rubbish, and that sort of thing. Jamie is slated to head off to Fort Meade for army training the first of April. Uncle Fred is very proud of Jamie and boasts about his patriotism as if he were his own child. Jamie turned twenty-one several months after the last mandated draft registration, but he volunteered to serve anyway. I guess all his friends are already off doing their part, or so I overheard him telling Maggie and Papa.

Uncle Fred is very proud of all his friends’ sons who are off fighting in the war, and there are a lot of them. Every other merchant on our block is Fred’s acquaintance, and it seems each one has a son either already in Europe or training to go or who has registered for the draft and will likely be called up any day. Uncle Fred reads the newspaper in our sitting room every evening, puffing on his pipe like he’s a locomotive, and relaying to Papa and Mama every despicable thing the Kaiser has done, is doing, and will do if we don’t stop him. Uncle Fred’s American Protective League alerts the authorities when they find people loyal to Germany or who are unpatriotic about the war or who were supposed to sign up for the draft but haven’t. Slackers, Uncle Fred calls them.

I’d like to ask him why we even need the APL, but I suppose I’ll have to do what I always do, and that’s figure things out by myself. There are plenty of books and newspapers and magazines that will tell me what I want to know. I’ll find out on my own what the APL is about just like I figured out easily enough what Uncle Fred has been teaching Papa in the embalming room behind that forbidden door.

All of Uncle Fred’s books on undertaking are lined up like soldiers on the bookshelves in his office. It isn’t that hard to understand how something works. You just need to know which book to open and read the words inside it.

He also has a book called Lepidoptera, and the pages inside are filled with exquisite color drawings of butterflies. Seeing the book the first time reminded me that Maggie had once wanted a set of mounted butterflies under glass that she’d seen in a store in Allentown. She told me about them right after we’d found out Henry would not get better. I told her the butterflies are killed to be put on display like that. It was a cruel thing to say, and she looked so sad, so disappointed. I went back to her a couple days later and told her butterflies don’t live very long anyway. And that I was sorry I had been so harsh to say what I had. She’s never mentioned them again.