The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  Mary Helen ignored her and glared at Finn. “I just wanna know one thing. What would your mother think if she knew you were friends with a filthy Hun, ’specially with your older brother over there fighting to keep you safe?”

  Pia bounced to her feet. “Take that back!”

  Mary Helen’s head snapped around and she gaped at Pia, shocked to hear her standing up for herself. “What’d you say?”

  “I said take it back!”

  Mary Helen held up her bony fists. “You want a fat lip to go with that stink-eye, scaredy-cat?”

  “Jaysus,” Finn said. “In the name of all that’s holy, shut up, Mary Helen. You’re not gonna fight.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mary Helen said. Suddenly her hand shot out and grabbed the front of Pia’s dress. She yanked Pia forward and pushed her contorted face into hers, the stench of garlic and onions wafting from the bag around her neck almost making Pia gag. Thinking only of escape, Pia grabbed Mary Helen’s wrist with both hands and tried to pull her off. A quick stab of pain twisted in her chest, sharp and immediate, and she gasped, unable to get air. She let go of Mary Helen’s wrist and tried to step away, suddenly disoriented and dizzy. Finn pried Mary Helen’s fist from Pia’s dress, moved Pia behind him, and stood between them. Pia sat down hard on the ground and tried to catch her breath.

  One of the teachers hurried over. “What in heaven’s name is going on over here?” she said. It was Miss Herrick. She towered above them, willowy as a flower stem.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” Mary Helen said. “You must be balled up. We were just playing a game.”

  “Well, it doesn’t look like a game to me,” Miss Herrick said. “You and your friends run along now, Mary Helen, and leave Pia alone.”

  Mary Helen harrumphed, but did as she was told. The other girls followed, their faces pinched.

  “Are you all right, Pia?” Miss Herrick said. She bent down to help her up, reaching for her arm.

  “Don’t touch me,” Pia said, louder than intended.

  Miss Herrick gasped and clapped a hand to her chest.

  Pia instantly regretted her outburst. The last thing she needed was to get in trouble at school. Mutti would never understand. She got up and brushed off her dress. “I’m sorry, Miss Herrick,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I was frightened, that’s all.”

  Miss Herrick sighed. “That’s understandable, I suppose. I know Mary Helen likes to start trouble, and everyone is feeling anxious these days, but are you sure you’re all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  Pia mustered a weak smile. “I’m fine. Thank you, Miss Herrick.” She wasn’t anywhere near fine, but how could she explain to the teacher what she’d felt when she grabbed Mary Helen’s wrist? She’d think she was crazy.

  The next day, Mary Helen was absent from school and Selma Jones fainted while unpacking her sandwich during lunch. Miss Herrick rushed over to Selma and shook her while the class watched, mouths agape, but Selma didn’t move. Miss Herrick ran out into the hall yelling, and two teachers carried Selma away. Beverly Hansom’s mother pulled her out of class shortly afterward, scurrying into the room and wrapping a protective arm around her daughter, her face pale. On the playground that afternoon, the teachers spoke in hushed voices behind their hands, their brows lined with worry. Rumors flew that Mary Helen and Selma had the flu and Mary Helen was already dead.

  After the last lesson of the day, Pia hurried out of the building and started for home, her books held to her chest, her head down. Normally she would have waited for Finn on the school steps, but she had to get away from there. She needed to go back to her family’s rooms, where she could close the door and hide from everyone and everything. A block from the school, a Red Cross ambulance sped by, and a man on a bench was reading a newspaper with the headline: ALL CITIZENS ORDERED TO WEAR GAUZE MASKS IN PUBLIC. On the streetlamp above him, an advertisement for masks read: “Obey the laws and wear the gauze, protect your jaws from septic paws.”

  Deciding she didn’t want to walk the rest of the way alone, she ducked into a landing to wait for Finn, away from the congested sidewalks, and leaned against the doorframe, wishing she could disappear. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Two women with scarves over their mouths darted by arm in arm, walking as fast as they could without running. A gray-haired couple wearing gauze masks and carrying suitcases rushed out of a building and hailed a cab, the old man practically pushing other pedestrians aside with his cane. Even the motorcars and horse-drawn wagons seemed to go by faster than normal. A strange awareness seemed to fill the air, like the lightheartedness on the day before Christmas, or the shared excitement she’d felt before the fireworks display on her first Independence Day in Philadelphia. Except this awareness felt ominous and full of menace, like the sensation she felt at the parade, but ten times worse. And now everyone could feel it.

  When Finn came walking down the block, her shoulders dropped in relief. She stepped out of the landing onto the sidewalk in front of him.

  “Hey,” he said, surprised. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “I did,” she said. “I’m right here, aren’t I?” She started walking and he fell in beside her.

  “Ye are, but I didn’t know where you were. I thought . . .”

  “You thought what?”

  He shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Everyone’s getting sick. Remember we heard Tommy Costa and his family left town?”

  She nodded.

  “Aye, well, his best pal, Skip, said he died last night.”

  Pia stopped in her tracks. Tommy was the boy who had put his hands over her eyes at the parade. “Was it the flu?”

  “I can’t think of anything else that’d take him that quick.”

  She hugged her books to her chest and started walking again. Tommy and Mary Helen were young and strong. How could they be dead from influenza? How could Selma Jones be fine one day and fainting the next? And why had she felt pain when she’d touched them? Was it the flu she’d felt? No. She couldn’t feel sickness in another person. It had to be a coincidence. Or maybe her shyness really was starting to become a physical ailment. More than anything, she wanted to tell Finn what was going on, to ask him what he thought. But she couldn’t. Not yet.

  At the end of the fourth block, they turned left into Jacob’s Alley, a cart path lined with bakers, shoe cobblers, tailors, and cigar makers working out of storefronts in brick houses, their families’ apartments above. Some of the homes had been turned into boardinghouses, or rented-out rooms to sailors. Crepe ribbons hung from several doorknobs, black and gray and white, swirling in the afternoon breeze. Some doors were marked with signs that read: “QUARANTINE INFLUENZA: Keep out of this house.” At the end of the alley, a woman in a black dress came out of the silversmith’s shop and tied a piece of white crepe to the doorknob, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Pia couldn’t help staring, new tremors of fear climbing up her back. She knew what the different colors of crepe meant; she’d seen enough of it in the mining village after cave-ins and explosions, and during the wave of tuberculosis that hit the village when she was seven. Black meant the death of an adult; gray an elderly person; white a child. She and Finn looked at each other. A silent alarm passed between them and they started walking faster. When they turned the corner onto Lombard Street, they slowed. Dozens of policemen, all wearing gauze masks, patrolled the sidewalks, telling people to keep moving. A line of people snaked out the door of the pharmacy, holding empty glass bottles and barely speaking. Their faces were drawn by worry, their eyes hollowed out by fear. Some of these anxious souls wore white masks and kept their distance from others and the pedestrians pushing by on the sidewalk, newspapers held over their mouths. A sign in the pharmacy window read: “Formaldehyde tablets. Melt under your tongue. Proven to kill germs and prevent infection and contagion. Fifty tablets for fifty cents.”

  “What kind of medicine do you think they’re waiting for?” Pia asked Finn.

  “Anyth
ing they can get, I suppose,” he said. “But whiskey, mostly.”

  In the window of a sporting goods store next door, an advertisement for phonographs read: “This machine is guaranteed to drive away Spanish flu. Stay at home. Keep away from crowds and theaters. Doctor’s Orders. Hear the new October records on your new phonograph and you’ll never know you had to stay in nights or miss gasless Sundays.” Across the road, people holding sacks and baskets crowded around a truck with a sign that said: “Eat More Onions, One of the Best Preventatives for Influenza.” A gathering of colored people stood to one side, waiting to see if there would be any onions left over for them.

  Seeing the onion truck, Pia thought of what Mutti had said that morning—they were short on supplies and she needed to go to the market but didn’t want to have to take the twins, so she might wait until Pia came home from school. Hopefully Mutti had stayed home. Pia needed to tell her it wasn’t a good idea to go out, not until things returned to normal.

  A streetcar rattled past and stopped a few yards away. Two men in black bowlers hurried toward it, one wearing a mask. The conductor, also wearing a mask, came to the door and pointed at one of the men.

  “You’re not getting on without a mask,” the conductor said. He let the other man on, then blocked the maskless man from boarding.

  Anger hardened the man’s face. “I have a meeting and I can’t be late,” he said. “I insist you allow me to get on.”

  “Sorry,” the conductor said. “Those are the rules.”

  A policeman approached, one hand on his billy club. “You heard him,” he said to the man. “No mask, no ride.”

  The man cussed and stomped away. The policeman waved the trolley on, but before the conductor could climb back up, a woman screamed and the passengers scrambled out the door onto the street, nearly knocking the conductor over and running in all directions. Pia and Finn stopped to watch. The policeman clambered up the trolley steps, then jumped back down. Two more policemen appeared and spoke to him. One hurried away while the other turned to face the gathering crowd.

  “Stay clear!” he shouted. “We’re sending for the coroner!”

  When Pia saw why the passengers were in such a hurry to get off the trolley, she gasped and put a hand over her mouth. A man sat slumped over in his seat, his forehead against the window, a stained mask ripped and dangling from his chin, his face a strange mixture of gray, blue, and red. Blood spilled from his eyes and mouth and nose, smearing the glass with dark clots. Horror knotted in Pia’s stomach. She started walking again, as fast as her shaking legs could carry her. Finn followed.

  “Finn?” she said, breathing hard.

  “Aye?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  They strode in silence for another few minutes, then Finn said, “Have you gotten any more letters from your father?”

  If she hadn’t been so terrified, she would have smiled at him. As usual, he was trying to distract her from her distress. That was Finn, always thinking about other people. She wanted to hug him, now more than ever, but at the same time, now more than ever, she was afraid to touch anyone. “No,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything from him in weeks.”

  “Ye will soon, I bet.”

  She nodded. “Mutti... I mean, my mother says we should, any day now. I wish he was here now.” Her chest tightened and she blinked back a sudden flood of tears. If Vater were here now, maybe he’d know what to do. Maybe he’d take them out of the city, away from what was happening. Because for as far back as she could remember, he’d always been their protector. Like that time a sudden lightning storm hit while they were on a Sunday picnic and he’d herded her and Mutti into a cave. Or when she accidentally knocked a hornets’ nest out from under the front porch and he picked her up, covered her with his jacket, and raced her inside their shack. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything about the flu, but just having him here would have made her feel safer.

  Finn glanced at her with concern. “Try not to worry too much, lass. It takes a long time for a letter to get across that great ocean.”

  She nodded again, thankful for Finn’s kindness but unable to speak around the burning lump in her throat.

  After turning left on Broad Street, they made their way toward the congested maze of alleys and gritty blocks of row houses they called home—the section of Philadelphia labeled the Bloody Fifth Ward because of the area’s violent reputation. In the last week alone, two men on their block had been murdered—one shot and the other stabbed—and a colored man was beaten and left for dead in an alley behind a warehouse on the corner. Other than the ever-present Home Guard, whose job was to spy on German immigrants, it seemed like the only time the police came into the neighborhood was to raid the speakeasies, arrest women for vagrancy and “night walking,” and apprehend men for gambling, assaults, and drunkenness. Some people said crime had heightened because of the growing number of immigrants and colored who’d moved in looking for work since the start of the war, but Finn said the streets of the Fifth Ward had always been dangerous. He told her stories about a colored rights advocate being murdered, a church being torched, and a number of homes being destroyed during race riots. Pia and her family had only been there a few months when a policeman was shot and killed during a heated race for Select Councilmen, when eighteen men called the Frog Hollow Gang came all the way down from New York to attack one of the candidates.

  Had her parents been aware of the dangers of a large city when they’d decided to move here? Did they know and decide to come anyway? She wasn’t even allowed to go outside after dark anymore, which made her all the more homesick for the mountains, where she used to watch fireflies in the switch grass and search for the Big Dipper in the stars. And there was no Spanish flu back in Hazleton, she’d bet. She couldn’t help thinking how different her life would be if they’d never come to Philadelphia.

  But then she and Finn turned off the main street into Shunk Alley, and something strange happened. Whether it was the group of boys playing stickball or the little girls having a pretend tea party on a building stoop, she wasn’t sure, but for some reason, her fear seemed to lessen. No one was wearing masks or running from a dead man on a trolley. No signs on doors warned of quarantine. No new posters had been put up. Everything looked normal. When they reached the steps outside her row house, she loosened the grip on her schoolbooks, and a sense of calm washed over her. Maybe the flu wouldn’t reach their little part of the city.

  Then the sound of a woman sobbing floated down from an open window.

  Finn glanced up at the window, then gazed at her, his forehead furrowed. Clearly he was wondering the same thing. Had the flu already reached Shunk Alley? He opened his mouth to say something when his mother yelled down from the fire escape outside their apartment.

  “Finn, come quick! It’s yer brother!”

  He shot Pia a worried look, then turned to leave. “I’ll see ye later, lass,” he said over his shoulder. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

  Before she could respond, he sprinted across the street and went inside. She fixed her eyes on the door after it closed, shivering. His parting words felt weighed down with apprehension and misery, like an omen or a warning. Would she ever see him again? Dread fell over her shoulders like a heavy blanket. She suddenly wished she had told him what happened with Tommy Costa and Mary Helen, how she had felt something strange when they touched her. He couldn’t have done anything to help, but maybe sharing her secret would have made her feel less alone.

  Behind her, someone called her name. She jumped and spun around, almost dropping her books. Mutti stood in the open doorway of their building, scrubbing a calloused hand on her apron, the telltale sign that she was worried. Pia had seen her do it a thousand times—every day when Vater left to work in the mines; when the Black Maria came into the village carrying the injured and dead after a mining accident; when Vater said they were mo
ving to Philadelphia; when she thought she might miscarry the twins the same way she’d miscarried three other babies; when Vater left for the war.

  “Hurry, Pia,” Mutti said, gesturing frantically. “Come inside.”

  Pia’s heart skipped a beat. Had something happened to Vater? Or the twins? No. That wasn’t it. Fear darkened her mother’s eyes, not sorrow.

  “What is it?” Pia said, running up the steps and hurrying inside. “What’s wrong?”

  Mutti closed the door behind her, giving it a little extra push after it was shut, as if trying to keep something from slipping inside. “The churches and schools are to be closed,” she said. “All places for gathering, even the factories and moving picture houses, will not be open. No funerals are to be allowed either. Many people are getting sick, so everyone is to stay home.” She moved across the dim foyer, scrubbing her hand on her apron. Pia followed.

  “How do you know everything is being closed?” Pia said. “Who told you?” They didn’t own a radio and hadn’t gotten the newspaper since Vater left because Mutti couldn’t read.

  “Frau Metzger heard it at the butcher shop,” Mutti said. “And Mrs. Schmidt heard it on the radio.” She stopped and pointed toward the front door, her face a curious mixture of anger and fear. “Those mothers still letting their children outside? They are Verruckt!” She spun her finger near her temple. “You must stay inside until this is over, you understand?”

  Pia nodded and put a finger to her lips.

  “What?” Mutti said. “Why are you shushing me?”

  “You were speaking German,” Pia whispered.

  Mutti gasped and put a hand over her mouth. Then she glanced at Pia’s neck and her eyes went wide. “Where is your garlic?”

  Pia felt for the rank necklace, only then remembering she had taken it off and laid it on the grass during recess, like she’d done the day before when Mary Helen came over to pick a fight. “I must have lost it,” she said.

  “You must be more careful, Pia,” Mutti said. “Mrs. Schmidt was very kind to give us the garlic and I have no more.”