As Bright as Heaven(76)

I do sometimes wonder if Mama would still be alive if we’d never come to live in that house. Papa says only God knows what would have happened if we’d stayed in Quakertown. She could have died from the flu there—people did, just not so many—or been in a terrible accident or who knows what else. We’re not like God, he says. We can’t know. We can’t live like we do know or should have known.

“She got the flu from me,” I told him once. And he said no, she did not. The flu came here all on its own like a plague of grasshoppers that had nothing to do with me. But I know the truth. I came down with it, and then she came down with it. I caught the flu from Flossie. Mama caught it from me.

The swirling echo of that moment with the piano man is starting to lift from me and I slow my pace to keep it if I can. When I get to the corner by the Weiss Bakery, I stop and look for the little white dog at the front window above the shop. Gretchen’s parents still have him, and because he’s white, the color of his fur doesn’t tell you how old he is. I know dogs don’t live much past their twelfth or thirteenth birthdays. But I figure if Gretchen’s dog was two when we moved here, then he is only nine now. Only nine. Lots of dogs live to be older than nine. He sees me on the sidewalk looking up at him. I can’t hear him, but he is yapping fiercely while standing on his hind legs and with his front paws on the glass. And yet his little stub of a tail is wagging. He knows me now. I’ve been looking up at that window for years. I smile up at him and his little body trembles with the happy force of his barking.

If I stay too long, Gretchen’s parents will come to the window to see what the dog is so upset about, so I blow him a kiss and resume my slow stroll home.

Maybe Mr. Towlerton will be staying for supper tonight. That would make the approaching evening not so dreary. I like Maggie’s beau. Or maybe Evie will come home at a decent hour and I can get her to tell me about all the crazy people she looked after today. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories she tells when I’m able to pry them out of her.

Maybe Alex will want me to play the piano for him while he pretends to be an opera singer. It’s truly awful and hilarious when he tries to sound like a virtuoso. And maybe Papa will come in early from the funeral rooms and for once not look so sad and alone.

I start to hum “What’ll I Do” as I turn down our street. The words just fall off my lips like I wrote them myself because what I had before the flu is broken and cannot be mended.





CHAPTER 50



Maggie


The coffin is small and white with gold trim. Inside it is the body of a three-year-old girl who died of scarlet fever and whose hair I styled into corn silk curls held fast now by white satin bows.

She is such a little thing. Papa won’t need his hired man for this one. I will be able to help him move her.

Most of the time Papa relies on a fellow named Gordon Luddy, a man who delivers milk in the early mornings but who is free the rest of the day, to help him do what I cannot. Gordon helps Papa transport the caskets from the parlor to the hearse and assists him at the cemetery with getting the coffin to its place near the freshly dug hole in the ground. Gordon is not here yet, but it does not matter. I push the short casket on its cart down the hall to the rear entrance. I help Papa carry it down the four steps to the hearse’s opened back end so that he can deliver it to the church for the memorial and then to the cemetery. It is the eighth of September and the early afternoon is warm and humid as I push the hearse door closed.

“Don’t wait supper on me,” Papa says as he heads for the driver’s-side door. “And there will be plenty of people able to help me get the casket back into the hearse and out again at the cemetery. You don’t need to come down later.”

“All right.”

I watch him leave with the small casket and the little girl named Lucy inside it before I head back inside.

Preparing the very young for their funerals has been the hardest thing to get accustomed to since I’ve become Papa’s assistant. It is difficult to find a snippet of beauty in preparing a child or an infant for burial. The only word of solace I can whisper to these little ones as I cover up the pallor of death is that my mother and brother are there in heaven, that Mama is sweet and kind, and that her name is Pauline, so that if they want to, they can find her there.

“You don’t have to do this,” Papa had said when I told him two years ago that I wanted to be his official assistant.

I had been nearing my graduation from the academy, and Papa’s full-time apprentice at the time, a man named Wilbur with a pronounced lisp, had just gotten married and moved to Virginia to be closer to his new wife’s family. I’d never had the college aspirations that Evie did, and while I could easily have set my sights on a position behind the perfume counter at Wanamaker’s or courses at a secretarial school, those pursuits had never interested me. I was already doing the hair and makeup at the end of the preparation process, but Papa and Wilbur did the embalming and suturing and restoration work. They did all the important repairs. My contributions were nothing compared to what they did. I wanted to do more.

“But I want to. It’s what I want to do,” I’d said.

We had been going over the ledgers in the little office off his bedroom. He had been smoking a cigar from a box that Grandad had sent him. Business had been steady for us. More and more people had been discovering they much preferred the embalming of their loved ones to take place at the mortician’s place of business rather than the beloved deceased’s bedroom. And fewer people all the time had large parlors in their homes for viewings. We offered a homelike atmosphere for both, with all the up-to-date conveniences of a modern-day mortuary. Papa was officially a mortician now, not just an undertaker. He’d enrolled in a special school to become licensed in what he pretty much already knew how to do.