As Bright as Heaven(64)

I don’t know if the vaccine worked or if the flu just ran out of gas, but the funeral parlor isn’t something out of a nightmare anymore. Papa still gets bodies brought to him—and still too many for one person to take care of properly—but it’s not like it was. He has caskets again. They aren’t fancy, but they are here. And he doesn’t have to worry that they will be stolen off the back stoop. The streetcars are running again, the cinema is open, the wreaths are coming off doors.

Evie says it’s like we are getting back our humanity.

That’s not how I would describe it. You don’t get back what a thief stole from you unless he gives it back. Mama, Uncle Fred, Charlie, Mrs. Arnold, Sally, and so many others—they are all still gone. And they will stay gone. And who knows now when the war will be over and if Jamie will come home? I’d rather have the people taken from me returned than our humanity.

Evie says I am wrong about that. She says the flu wanted to make barbarians of us, to have us think life is not precious and the dead are not worthy of our kindest care. Our humanity is what made what happened to us so terrible. Without it, nothing matters. Nothing is awful. But nothing is amazing, either.

The one lovely thing about our days is Alex. He is happy and chubby and is turning over now, all on his own. Everyone loves to hold him and play with him and feed him, even Papa. The day after we buried Mama I told Papa that it was her wish that we keep Alex and make him part of our family. No one had claimed him, I’d reminded him, and I knew no one would. He said he knew that had been Mama’s wish and he was going to go to the authorities to make it official but that he wanted me to remember Alex isn’t Henry.

“Of course he’s not,” I’d said. I didn’t need to be reminded of that.

Tomorrow I am going to ask Ruby if she wants to come over to the Sutcliffs’ after school with me to get Alex. Ruby seems kind of lost without Sally. They had been playmates since they were three years old. Ruby sits next to me in class now and eats her lunch by me and is never more than an arm’s reach away. I’m not happy that Sally died, but I must confess it is nice to have a close friend again.

I might tell Ruby that I write letters to Jamie Sutcliff and that I think about him all the time. That’s the kind of thing you can tell a good friend. She won’t say, “He’s too old for you.” She will look at his picture—Dora Sutcliff gave me one—and say how very handsome he is. Or she might not say anything at all, which would be all right, too.

Grandma Adler wrote us girls a letter, begging us to forgive her and telling us she misses us so much and that she wants us all to come for Christmas.

I know for a fact that Papa won’t take us there. Not this year anyway. I don’t think the return of your humanity means you forget what broke your heart.





CHAPTER 42



Evelyn


This time it’s true. The war has ended, three days after that first report threw us all into a whirl. At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of this eleventh month, the armistice was signed. The cessation of hostilities was declared. The Allied Forces are victorious, and Germany has been defeated.

The bells began to peal before dawn. The cover of night still blanketed the city when the news came, official this time. The clanging was joined by factory whistles and the sharp crack of small arms and the banging of pots and pans and any other noisemaker a person could fashion. In our pajamas and nightshirts we all took to confetti-strewn streets to witness the heralding of the end of bloodshed and the beginning of peace over all the earth.

The Great War is finished.

When the day finally broke a few hours later, throngs of people began to march toward Independence Hall in commemoration. School was canceled; work was canceled. Everything but the celebration of life itself was canceled.

Papa asked if we girls wanted to join the marchers. He had three bodies waiting to be cared for—only three now—but he would take us if we wanted.

Willa didn’t want to. Having been woken like the rest of Philadelphia at three a.m., she was tired and wanted to stay home—that is, unless Flossie came over and said she was going. Then she’d go. Maggie wanted to take Alex over to the Sutcliffs’ and celebrate the day there. I knew Papa would rather stay home and mark the day quietly with work. He had come home in uniform poised to join the fight in this war that had just ended, and instead he’d been made a widower. He was not in the mood to revel and so I told him I was fine with staying home and watching the people stroll by from the window.

I had no burning desire to go with the crowd. I was still getting used to the changes we’d all had to make and how different things were at school. Gilbert is gone. He died the same day Willa started to get better. One of the other boys at school, who was his closest friend, told me this. I’ve had to push away my sorrow at losing him. I don’t know what he was to me. Just a friend? Was that all he was? I feel like in time he could have been more to me, but I’m not sure, and now I will never know. I only know my heart aches for him in a wholly different way than it does for Mama, or even Uncle Fred or Charlie Sutcliff. The part of me that knew and liked Gilbert feels scraped raw.

Mr. Galway also died from the flu. And two of the girls who’d always derived much pleasure from snubbing me. The flu flattened all the differences between me and the other girls who remained, though. They sought out my friendship the first day we returned to classes and counted our number. Death had touched us all in one way or another and we now had far more in common than not.