As Bright as Heaven(29)

The door swings open. It is on my tongue to announce in a firm voice that we can take no more dead when I see it is Fred. Instead of a handkerchief, a surgical mask he must have gotten from the coroner half covers his face. He pulls it down to speak to me.

“Only me,” he says as he comes through. A welcome gust of fresh air swirls in with him, settling on the bodies closest to the entrance. The sickly scent of decay and loss rises and settles. He closes the door but doesn’t bolt it.

He turns to me with the day’s mail in his hand. “Three thousand are dead now in the city. Tens of thousands more are sick with it.” He pulls off his coat and hangs it on a hook in the mudroom. “Too many of our doctors are away on the front. They’ve got first-year medical students and old washouts like me doctoring the sick!” He holds up the mail. “Thomas wants you to take the girls and go home to your parents’ in Quakertown. I agree. It’s not safe here.”

Fred extends an envelope in my direction, and as I reach for it, I see the depth of his concern for our welfare. Thomas’s absence has given me eyes to see that Fred would have been a good husband, a caring father. He has quietly looked out for the girls and me in the three weeks Thomas has been gone, asking every other day if we need anything, making sure I have enough money for groceries, double-checking the doors and window locks at night like a conscientious father would. He still has his rough edges, of course, but they are few compared to the range of his generosity toward us this past year and especially since Thomas has been gone. Making my husband his assistant and heir has reshaped all of our lives for the good. Because of Fred our girls will never want for anything.

The letter, addressed to both Fred and me, is void of any pretense of normalcy. The influenza is bad at Fort Meade, Thomas says. Nearly two thousand soldiers lie sick. They’ve closed the base theater, the YMCA, the Hostess House. No visitors are allowed in and no soldiers are allowed out on leave. Even so, the flu is out among the public outside the Fort, just like it is here. Civilian workers took it home from the army base with them.

“Take the girls and go home to your parents’ until the plague passes,” Thomas wrote in a hurried hand. “If I were home I’d take you there myself. You need to get out of the city.”

I look up from the note.

“How will you manage without us?” I ask Fred, even though I know with all my being that Thomas is right. I need to get the girls home to Quakertown.

“I’ll manage.”

I am suddenly worried for Fred. The physical toll on him has already been immense since the flu descended on the city. Someone mentioned to him early on that he stood to make a great profit from this sickness, and Fred told that person that this was a horrific way to make a living. Some undertakers in the city have been raising their rates the last few days, charging twice as much as they usually did for their work. But not Fred.

“Do you suppose Mrs. Landry could return to do housekeeping for you?” I ask.

“No . . . no,” he says, a strange tenor to his voice, as though he is afraid Mrs. Landry sports a grudge from having been let go and won’t welcome an invitation to come back.

“I am sure she bears us no ill will, Fred,” I say. “She understood that I wanted to run the house myself. I don’t mind ringing her.”

He shakes his head. “No. That’s not it. She’s . . . Mrs. Landry died three days after the parade. She was one of the first victims I attended. I didn’t say anything for fear of distressing you.”

Picturing Mrs. Landry’s slate gray body—all the cadavers of the flu victims are as pale as ghosts—lying inert on the embalming table silences me for a moment.

“Just three days after?” I finally say.

“She went quick. Many of them do. It’s a mercy when they do.”

“I’m so sorry, Fred.”

He shrugs. “I’ve not had time to give it much thought. It’s better for me not to give any of this much thought.”

I had not considered that they aren’t all strangers who have been carried through the funeral home doors. Some have surely been Fred’s friends, business acquaintances, people he greeted regularly at church.

“Is there another housekeeper I can call for you?” I say, wishing there were better words.

Uncle Fred shakes his head. “I will manage. This scourge can’t last forever.”

It is the first time since the parade that anyone has dared to suggest the flu will spend itself and then be gone. That perhaps its very viciousness is what will kill it.

“Go on back into the house and make your arrangements,” Fred says as he pulls the mask up over his nose and mouth. He moves past me to the embalming room, where the rest of the day’s work lies waiting for him. I wish I could help him, but I know he won’t let me. The bodies are riddled with a disease that no doubt clings to them like soot from a fire. And no one is expecting my usual cosmetic touches anyway.

I return to the main part of the house. Maggie and Willa are working on a puzzle in the sitting room, and Evie has moved a chair to the foyer, where she can keep an eye on the front door while she reads. I insisted the girls continue with their lessons in the morning, but it is midafternoon now, nearly the time they would be coming home from school if classes had not been canceled.

They look up at me as I enter the room, their expressions a mix of boredom and uneasiness. It occurs to me that maybe the girls and I should remain in Quakertown not just until the flu passes but until after the war is over and Thomas returns. What is keeping us in the city, really? I am no closer to putting Death back in its proper place than I was when we first arrived ten months ago, even with all my ministrations to the dead, and the arrival of a merciless killing flu. My easy familiarity with it remains.