As Bright as Heaven(25)

So that was what he did. He volunteered and now he’s headed to Fort Meade at dawn tomorrow.

The girls haven’t known what to make of this. None of us knows what to make of it. And on top of all that, that dreadful influenza that has been killing people in Europe and the Orient is now here in the States and the paper is saying it’s showing up at the navy shipyards and military camps. Places just like Fort Meade.

“I’ll be careful,” Thomas said to me when I told him this. We were all in the sitting room after supper.

“This flu doesn’t care how careful you are,” I replied quietly so that Willa playing with one of her dolls on the rug wouldn’t hear me. “I’ve read about it.”

“The flu is not a thing that can care or not care.”

“This one is different,” I murmured. “It seeks out the young and healthy, and there is no cure for it. You are as likely to die from it as survive.”

And he kissed my forehead, something he never does if we aren’t alone in our bedroom, and said, “I’m coming home to you and the girls. I promise. As soon as the war is over, I’m coming home.”

But as I lie here next to him now, feeling the warmth of his body next to mine, I know he can’t promise me this. He wants it to be true. But wanting something is not the same as having it.

I called my parents at the restaurant they’ve owned since I was a little girl to tell them Thomas was enlisting and why, and to ask them to keep him in their prayers. My mother answered and said they surely would. But the call was awkward and the conversation stilted. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I took the girls home to Quakertown to see my parents last month before the new school term began, and our visit was greatly overshadowed by my sister Jane’s remarkable news that she was again expecting, and their miracle baby, Curtis, was only just eight months old. I was very happy for my sister and her husband and had been so looking forward to seeing my sweet nephew again. The girls were, too. But as soon as we stepped off the train, I felt as though I were a distant relative who had picked an inopportune time to visit. My mother seemed hesitant to fully welcome us back home. It was as if she couldn’t quite believe we were actually there. My mother and father have always been careful with their emotions, preferring a life of steadiness and calm, even when my sister and I were young, but there was a dignified happiness for Jane, and I felt on the fringe of it. A spectator. Especially around my mother. It was almost as if she wanted to punish me for having moved away by lavishing all her affection, subdued though it was, on Baby Curtis and pregnant Jane. When I hinted about how I felt, she seemed offended and in a roundabout way accused me of being jealous of my sister.

“I can understand why you might be feeling that way because you lost Henry,” she’d said, “but it’s not becoming, Pauline. And think of the example you are setting for the girls.”

“I am thinking of the girls,” I’d said. My mother and I were in the kitchen, speaking in hushed tones while we shelled peas. “They have missed you. We are only here for a short while, and then we’ll have to go back to the city.”

Her eyes had filled with tears then, something I rarely saw. But she held those tears in, blinked them all away as she held her hand motionless over the bowl of peas in the sink. “It’s not my fault you and Thomas wanted to leave and take the girls,” she said evenly, with the barest hint of anger. Or maybe fear. “You should have thought through how this move would affect your girls—and your father and me—before you left. You’ll be back on that train before you know it, and I’ll have to say good-bye all over again.”

She tossed the peas she was holding into the bowl, and they rolled about every which way.

“But we’ll visit again!” I replied, still unaware of what she was really telling me.

“I have laundry to bring in,” she said, as if I had asked her what she wanted to get done after the peas were shelled. She pulled off her apron and left the kitchen.

There was so much I wanted to talk about with my mother on that visit. Her letters to me since we had left—as well as our few phone calls—had been short and only about things like the restaurant and the weather and what the rest of the family was doing. I thought it was because she preferred seeing someone she loved in person, so my expectation when we arrived was that she’d make up for the little she’d written in her letters with meaningful face-to-face conversations. While my parents have never displayed a great deal of physical affection toward Jane and me, I’ve never doubted their loyalty or love. I had always thought they would take on hell itself to save one of us. I had been looking forward to at last telling my mother about the shadow that has been following me since Henry died. My mother has the benefit of years and, with her emotional modesty, a cool head. I’d been an undertaker’s wife for nine months and was still pondering why Death hovers over me like a tender shepherd, and why this doesn’t alarm me. It should, shouldn’t it? I’d wanted to confide in her and ask for advice.

I wanted to tell her about the job I’d insisted on having, preparing the deceased for their funerals. I wanted to tell her how I put rouge and lipstick on dead women to make them look beautiful again. I dress them in their prettiest clothes. I put toilet water behind their ears so that they will smell like verbena instead of that awful solution curdling in their veins. I talk to them and sing to them and I assure them that they look lovely and I try to guess what they were like when they were alive. I wanted to say that I tell those lifeless bodies about my day. I tell them about Henry. I wanted to tell my mother how inexplicably easy it is to go into the embalming room and do these things, often with Maggie at my side.