As Bright as Heaven(26)

I wanted to say, “It’s the strangest thing. I’m not afraid of Death anymore. I know I should be. But ever since Henry died, Death is not the phantom that it used to be. It is more like a quiet friend. I thought coming to Uncle Fred’s funeral home would change all that, and Death would go back to being what it was before. But we’ve been there all these months and nothing is different. If anything, Death is more my friend than ever.” I wanted to ask her what is wrong with me, and I wanted her to say, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you, Polly. Your child died and your mother’s heart is healing the best way it can. The heart always does what it needs to do. Don’t you fret, now. Everything will be all right in time.”

But we never had that conversation.

My parents came to the station on the morning of our return to Philadelphia and watched us dry-eyed as we boarded our train. The girls and I waved to them as well as to Grandad, Jane, and a few other family members who had come to see us off. My mother raised one hand in farewell and kept it steady. It was more like a salute or a quiet command to stop the train. Clarity came over me as our car chuffed past the platform. My mother hadn’t wanted us to move away. She was hurt that we did. And I’d failed to see it.

“She misses us. She misses you,” Thomas said when I arrived home and told him about the visit. “Keeping you at a distance like this is no doubt how she manages it.”

My mother had looked for a way to cope with our having moved away from her. And she had found one.

The heart always does what it needs to do.





CHAPTER 17



Evelyn


I’ve never seen so many people in one place at one time. Broad Street, which stretches as far as I can see in both directions, is a sea of faces on both sides. I can’t even guess how many people are lined up for the Liberty Loan Parade. Uncle Fred told me when we first moved to Philadelphia that more than a million people live here, but I have never been able to grasp what even a percentage of that number looks like—until today. The newspaper predicted two hundred thousand will come out to watch the parade. Even the late-September sun seems determined to break through the clouds and attend.

The spectators are all packed onto the sidewalks like dominos, waving little flags and cheering. A dozen warplanes are flying overhead, the pilots pretending they are in battle, and everyone sings victory choruses as they swoop past. On the other side of the street, a man with a megaphone is asking women who’ve lost their husbands and sons and brothers in the war to speak to the crowd the names of their dearly departed. And then we are told that these women gave their all. And asked, what will we give?

Floats bearing cannons and massive guns and the skeletons of ships have passed us. Troops have marched by, and a truck filled with shoes has followed them bearing a sign that announces that every soldier needs a pair of new shoes every month. On what are they marching that they use up a fresh pair of boots every thirty days? I want to know. But today is not the day to ask questions. Today is only about taking out coin purses and checkbooks and breaking open piggy banks.

Parade organizers want to raise millions of dollars today to pay for the war—and the shoes. That’s why we’re all out here. It would be unpatriotic not to attend, disloyal not to give. Uncle Fred is planning to hand over a wad of money, but he’s not his usual jolly self. He’s been in and out of the city morgue all week, getting called in at all hours to undertake the final affairs of sailors who came to the Philadelphia Naval Yard last week from Boston with a killing influenza hiding inside them and who are now dead. Everyone is calling it the Spanish flu, even though it didn’t originate in Spain. No one is sure where it came from. Spain has been the first to speak openly about it in its newspapers. Spain is also neutral regarding the war, Uncle Fred told me, so it has nothing to lose by being candid about how many of its soldiers and citizens are sick or dying. That openness has saddled Spain with the name of this terrible sickness.

“This is not the kind of busy I like,” I heard him say to Mama yesterday. “These were our brave soldiers! These were the young men who were to defeat the Kaiser and end the bloodshed. We cannot spare them to this infernal disease.”

Mama doesn’t want us anywhere near the embalming room now, not that I have much notion of going in there. This influenza is apparently highly contagious and travels seemingly as easily as a housefly alights on one person and then another. Uncle Fred is not entirely sure if the flu victims in his embalming room can pass the disease on to one of us, since the deceased are no longer breathing, and that’s how the virus travels—in the breath and spittle of the one who has it—but he is taking no chances. He wears a mask and keeps the connecting door from the kitchen to the funeral parlor locked so that none of us can accidentally expose ourselves.

A few days ago, the newspaper said there were six thousand cases of influenza at Camp Devens in Massachusetts and sixty-six soldiers have already died from it. That’s not where Papa is, but that doesn’t comfort Mama or me. The flu is wherever there are soldiers and sailors, so it’s there at Fort Meade, too, she says. There is a professor from Harvard and doctors from New York who are working together to see if they can figure out how to create a vaccine, but the paper didn’t say how far along they are.

I heard Uncle Fred tell one of his APL friends yesterday afternoon that the situation at Camp Devens is deplorable. The base hospital can only accommodate twelve hundred soldiers, but six thousand have the flu, so there are sick men lying in all the corridors and on the porches, coughing up blood everywhere. And there aren’t enough nurses because half of them have the flu, too.