As Bright as Heaven(61)

But with Mama and Uncle Fred and Charlie, the world doesn’t stop. It just keeps spinning, with all its troubles, yanking us into its wild revolutions. There is no stepping into mourning, all secluded with nothing but much-warranted sorrow for company. Instead it’s as if the train we’re all on switched tracks at full speed and now we are racing forward in a completely new direction with no time to think about the destination we’d been headed toward before and now will never see.

Papa now must be what Uncle Fred was, the undertaker.

I must be what Mama was, the keeper of the house.

Maggie must be what I had been, the older sister to the little ones.

The influenza is still rampant, the war still rages, and there is a business to run and a house to manage and there are young children to take care of. The train is still charging ahead, and whoever is conducting it expects us to fall into our new duties without so much as a backward glance.

And so we do.

I think Papa is glad there will be no quiet reprieve to grieve Mama’s death. He begins to attend to Uncle Fred’s grisly tasks the moment he returns from seeing those three pine boxes safely into the ground. While he was at the graveyards, the bell on the back stoop was rung four times. I did not have the heart to turn the people away. Each time, I answered it, and I instructed those who had brought their dead to bring them into the embalming room. At least the number of dead this day is fewer than it has been, even counting our own losses.

When Papa returns from the cemeteries, he records the new deliveries. Maggie and I push the chairs back against the wall of the viewing parlor and take the flowers our neighbors brought into the main part of the house. Papa needs the viewing room again to become a staging area in which none of us girls is allowed.

When he finally comes into the sitting room hours later, he is exhausted, and still wearing his church clothes from the funeral. He had come in through the back door when he came home from the burials, and in the back he’d stayed.

“Has it really been like this the whole time?” he says to me as he washes up at the kitchen sink. I am warming up some baked chicken brought to us by the Kellers, who live up the boulevard.

“Yes.” I don’t say it has been worse.

“What did Fred do when he ran out of caskets?”

“He . . . he waited for more.”

“With the bodies just lying there?” A look of disgusted worry crosses Papa’s face.

“The morgue hasn’t had room. The city opened a storage facility on Twentieth, but it’s been full, too.”

Papa turns and points toward the door that leads to the funeral parlor rooms. “You girls are forbidden to go anywhere near that door.”

He says it like it’s a new edict, never before uttered.

“We know, Papa.”

None of us is very hungry when I call everyone to the table. I put away most of what I had laid out for supper. And when we are done Papa goes back to work. Maggie feeds Alex, bathes him, and then takes him and his bureau drawer upstairs to her room.

It isn’t until I’m putting Willa to bed that I realize the only other beds in the house are Mama’s and Uncle Fred’s, and Papa can’t sleep in either one until the bedclothes have been boiled and the mattresses aired. Willa begs me not to leave her, but I tell her I’m just going to take care of a few things after she falls asleep and that I’ll be back to spend the night in her room. This comforts her greatly.

“Sing me ‘Daisy Bell,’” Willa says. “Sing it like Mama does.”

I don’t have Mama’s singing voice, but it doesn’t matter. Willa holds my hand and fights to stay awake as I sing to her, but slumber overtakes her in only a few minutes.

I leave her room and make up my bed with fresh linens and then put on my mask and a pair of gloves and take the bedclothes off Mama’s and Uncle Fred’s beds. I’m downstairs with the big bundle in my arms and am about to take it to the washroom when Papa comes into the kitchen. He looks at what I hold.

“I made up my bed for you. I can sleep on the floor in Willa’s room,” I say. “I’ll boil these tomorrow and then air out the mattresses.”

Papa holds out his hands. “I’m burning those. Give them to me.”

I open my mouth to protest, but Papa repeats his command. I give him the bundle.

“Stay away from the mattresses. I’ll haul them away. We’ll get new ones.”

He turns from me to head back into the funeral rooms. When he comes back, his arms empty, he heads into Uncle Fred’s office—his office now—and closes the door. I hear him pick up the receiver of the telephone and ask to place a call. It is urgent, he says. He has a death notification to relay.

Papa tells the operator he needs to place a call to Quakertown. I linger near the door because I know who he is calling. Not Grandad. Papa called him earlier in the day to tell him the sad news that his brother had died. He’s calling Grandma and Grandpa Adler.

“I buried your daughter today,” he says when the call is put through.

A few seconds of silence follow. I can imagine what is happening on the other end. I must close my eyes to stop imagining it.

“She died of the flu, Eunice!” Papa says, his voice raised.

More seconds of silence.

“No, you killed her. You did. She’d still be alive if you had let her and the girls come. . . . You should have thought of that before. . . . How do you think they are? They’ve just lost their mother. Of course they know she had wanted to come home to you. . . . No . . . No, Eunice! This is what it’s like to want to be somewhere and be told you’re not welcome.”