As Bright as Heaven(33)

This is not the way it is at the house. There is no fight at Bright Funeral Home, only an endless influx of defeated souls.

Fred had to hire someone to watch over the most recent delivery of caskets or they would have been stolen right off the back stoop. Those coffins were claimed and then gone in a day and I never even saw who was laid in them. The dead are buried as quickly as Fred can arrange it now. The parlor isn’t being used for long and tearful good-byes with open caskets and the dead all readied and beautified for the occasion. If a family uses the parlor at all, it is to weep at a safe distance over a closed casket, and none stay very long. The cabinetmaker on the next street over is working day and night to fashion impromptu coffins, having put away his half-finished highboys and sideboards to nail together simple boxes instead.

This is what Maggie wanted a few hours’ respite from. I could see in her eyes her fearful need to step away from the house for just a little while. This is what I would tell Thomas if he were here and asked why I am letting her come. I would leave off my sliver of a worry that she has begun to sense my companion’s shadow in the corners of our home. I don’t think Death has been watching her as it watches me, but who can say what that specter is truly up to?

“And what about you, Polly? Why are you going down there?” Thomas might have said next.

I would’ve replied that my reason is the same as Maggie’s—I need to do something decent and useful—and yet I know he would’ve seen right through that answer.

You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

I hear these words in my head as if he were saying them to me this very moment as my heels click on the pavement.

I need to prove to myself I’m not selfish, Tom.

You’re not.

But I feel like I am.

You did nothing wrong.

I shouldn’t have asked my mother to let us come. I shouldn’t have put her in that terrible place of having to say no.

You did nothing wrong.

As Maggie and I walk, I replay the telephone conversation I had with my mother when I begged her to let us come home.

“But we aren’t sick,” I answered when her response to my entreaty was that it was unsafe to let us come. “The girls and I have been careful. We keep to the house. We don’t have it.”

“But you are living right there with it! You sleep over it!” my mother replied, a rare display of emotion choking her words. “How can you even ask me to let you all come when you know how terrible it can be to lose a child, Polly! I can’t put Baby Curtis and Jane and the rest of the family at risk like that. Jane and the baby live right next door, as you well know. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You know I can’t! How can you even ask me?”

You should never have left is what she’d been really saying. You should never have left the safety of home in the first place.

I look down at Maggie walking beside me, and I wonder if maybe my mother is right. Maybe we shouldn’t have. We didn’t know the war would get worse. We didn’t know a plague was coming that would change forever the way my children think of life and death. But you can’t get back the day you make a decision that changes everything.

“Do you know where we’re supposed to go?” Maggie asks now, interrupting these thoughts. It’s on my tongue to answer that I tried so very hard to get her where we were supposed to go. I tried my best. But then I realize she is only asking if I know which houses to take the soup to.

“I have a list from Mrs. Arnold.” I pull the note from my coat pocket and show it to her.

The four names are foreign, long and hard to pronounce and almost exotic the way they look on paper. Mrs. Arnold told me the neighborhood where we are headed is heavily populated by immigrants from Croatia. I didn’t even know where that was. Evie had to show me in her atlas, on a map that stretched across two pages.

“They don’t speak much English there, but they know enough,” Mrs. Arnold had said. And then she’d added that words aren’t what these wretched souls need anyway. They need food and the gentle touch of compassion. The sweet attention of a selfless giver of mercy.

Maggie looks at the list, whispering the strange syllables as she sounds out the names.

“Do these people go to our church?” she asks.

“No, I don’t think they do.”

“Then how do we know they need us?”

I reach for the list, and Maggie hands it back to me. “Mrs. Arnold and the other ladies went to a big meeting about how to help. They made a trip down here.” I slip the note back in my pocket.

“And there are others doing what we’re doing with the soup?”

“Many others.”

After fifteen minutes or so, we turn east on South and walk another ten or eleven blocks before we finally arrive at a stretch of streets that look so sad and dirty, it is no wonder the flu is running around this neighborhood like it’s trying to burn it to the ground. Some people are out and about, but a stuttering slowness seems to characterize the speed of the automobiles and the buggies in the street and even the pedestrians on the sidewalks. The streetcars aren’t running here, either. Some of the shop signs are lettered in a language I don’t know. I look at Mrs. Arnold’s directions for finding the first person on the list, a Mrs. Abramovic. Turn right at the barbershop with the green awning, Mrs. Arnold had written.