As Bright as Heaven(24)

In one of my letters to Jamie, I told him how hard it has been making close friends and that the summer has been especially boring. He wrote to me that sometimes people can be slow to give new things a try. He told me to be patient. The right friend will come along in due time. He said not to go sour on people just because they haven’t given me a chance yet.

Reading those words that he wrote special to me made me feel light as a feather. There were only two people I could think of who would be as happy as I was at that moment to have heard from Jamie.

? ? ?



I open the front door and take off across the street to show Mrs. Sutcliff and Charlie my letter. Mrs. Sutcliff comes to her door with a polishing cloth in her hand. She invites me inside, and I can see that she’d been polishing a silver tea service set atop newspaper pages on her dining room table.

“Is Charlie home?” I say as I close the door behind me, a bit out of breath from running across the street and up the stairs to their apartment.

“I’m afraid you’ve just missed him,” Mrs. Sutcliff says, stuffing her polishing cloth into her apron pocket. “He’s gone to the mechanic’s with Mr. Sutcliff. The car needed servicing.”

I am only momentarily disappointed. “I’ve a letter from Jamie!” I say, showing her the envelope, and suddenly realizing I am quite likely offering to let Dora Sutcliff read it. Why else have I brought it?

“Do you, now?” she says brightly. “We received one today, too.”

She turns to a little writing table behind her on which a little stack of mail is resting, along with a tin of peppermints, an electric lamp with an emerald green shade, and a brass dish with a handful of coins in it. Mrs. Sutcliff reaches for an envelope and turns back around. The outside of her letter looks exactly like mine.

“Shall we trade for a moment?” Mrs. Sutcliff says happily.

“Sure.” I hand over my precious letter and she gives me hers.

When I take her letter out of its envelope, I’m surprised and pleased that my letter is twice as long as the one Jamie wrote to his parents and Charlie. But I say nothing about that, of course. Mrs. Sutcliff takes mine out and easily sees it for herself. She looks surprised, too.

Jamie wrote to his parents about the voyage on the troop ship, just like he wrote to me. He wrote about the weather in France and the army food they were eating and how much he missed home-cooked meals. He also said there had been reports of influenza spreading from camp to camp, but that his mother needn’t worry. It wasn’t showing up in his regiment. He said nothing about how strangely the same we all are no matter where we live. That was something special he wrote just to me, as well as the advice about making friends at school.

“What a very nice letter,” Mrs. Sutcliff says as she folds mine into thirds and slips it back inside its envelope, but her voice has a funny little lift to it, like she is saying one thing and thinking another.

“Yours is, too,” I reply.

We exchange envelopes and I’m glad to have mine back.

“I’m glad you’re writing to him, Maggie,” Mrs. Sutcliff tells me, and this time I can tell she means what she says.

I stay for a bit longer, hoping Charlie will arrive home. But he doesn’t and I need to get back myself.

Mrs. Sutcliff thanks me for coming over to show her my letter and offers to send Charlie over when he returns if I want. I tell her I do.

When I am back inside my house, my feet head to the funeral parlor without my thinking about it. Mama is in the embalming room applying flesh-colored paste to the cheeks of an older woman whose white hair looks as soft and fluffy as candy floss.

She smiles up at me. “Did you see your letter?”

I smile back. I cannot help it. “Want me to read it to you?”

“Certainly.”

I read Mama the letter, and Jamie’s words sound even nicer said out loud. When I get to the part where he wrote that people aren’t so very different from one another no matter where they live, I look down at the dead woman Mama is caring for, and I can’t help thinking that somewhere in France, somewhere in Germany, somewhere in all the places in the world, people like Mama are doing the same thing for loved ones who’ve just died and are being made ready for their last moments above the ground.





CHAPTER 16



? September 1918 ?





Pauline


I can’t sleep.

Thomas is lying next to me for the last time before he leaves us for the army camp. I am still stunned that this is happening. He is not young anymore. He is not like Jamie Sutcliff or any of the other men who’ve already been called up to serve. He’s thirty-six years old. A husband. A father!

I want to blame Uncle Fred and his APL for this even though I know it’s not his fault. He doesn’t want Thomas to leave us, either. If Thomas was my only source of provision, he wouldn’t have to go. But Uncle Fred can run the business without him and also take care of the girls and me. Congress has decided the war in Europe can’t be won unless more men are sent over to fight. It’s not just young men they want now. All men older than eighteen and under the age of forty-five must register. It would have made no difference if we had stayed in Quakertown, Thomas told me. The draft is the draft no matter where you live.

There is a plumber here in Philadelphia whom Thomas knows who is a forty-four-year-old grandfather. A grandfather! And that man must now sign up for the draft. If he fails to register he can be arrested. The day Congress enacted the new draft law, Thomas told me he was going to volunteer so that he could ask to be placed in the medical corps. He knows so much about the human body now after working with Uncle Fred, he’d be of better use in the field hospital than in the trenches. And none of us wants him in the trenches.