The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  Like they’d done outside the hospital, the newcomers crowded around the market stands in their odd clothes, holding up checkout lines because they couldn’t speak English. Bernice could hear her father’s voice now: “This is America, they need to learn our language or go back where they came from!” Even the editor of the newspaper had expressed his opposition to “the flood of undesirables from the darker sections of the Old World who are arriving in the United States with no conception of American ideas.”

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the heavy aromas of their peculiar cuisine stank up the hallways—boiled lamb, paprika, curry, and peppered cabbage—and children of all colors filled the alleys and streets, shouting and playing games in strange languages. Even the number of homeless had increased since the waves of peasants arrived. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the flu started with them. After all, everyone knew migrants brought disease across the nation’s ports and borders—the Irish brought cholera, the Jews brought tuberculosis, the Italians brought polio, and the Chinese brought bubonic plaque. She and some of the other women in her prayer group had often discussed the personal hygiene habits, unhealthy tendencies, and questionable morals of foreign-born people. And they all agreed the “Don’t Spit” signs should have been printed in all languages, not just English.

  Why weren’t their children dying? Why had her son, a true American, gotten sick and passed away? It wasn’t fair.

  As soon as the thought crossed her mind, a rush of guilt twisted in her chest. She had seen the immigrant mothers at the hospital with their sick children. She had seen the anguish on Mr. and Mrs. Yankovich’s pale faces when they brought out their dead daughter, how Mrs. Yankovich had nearly collapsed and her husband had held her up. She had seen the white crepe on the Costas’ door after little Tommy died. Deep down, she knew all mothers loved their children and grieved the same way, no matter their nationality, race, or religion. And yet... and yet it seemed as though the newcomers always had three or four offspring to replace the children they lost. She only had one. And he was gone.

  No one was immune to getting sick.

  Except, it seemed, for her.

  After the lady in the babushka disappeared into the row house, a low, lone voice echoed between the brick buildings, and the dry creak of wagon wheels drew closer and closer. Bernice craned her neck out the window to see. Two men on a horse-drawn wagon moved along the alley toward her building, both wearing masks.

  “Bring out your dead!” one of them called out. His voice sounded weary, yet indifferent, like a newspaper hawker on an empty street corner.

  Bernice pulled her head back inside to watch. She couldn’t help but remember the stories she’d heard about the yellow fever, when the rush to get victims in the grave had resulted in some people being buried alive. Was that happening during this epidemic too? According to radio newscasts, there’d been over five thousand flu deaths since the parade. Embalming students and morticians had come from hundreds of miles away to help take care of the victims, but it wasn’t enough. In the last newspaper she’d read before Wallis got sick, the daily notices of death from the flu filled an entire page—along with those killed and missing in the war—seven columns of small print with a repetitive litany: Cecil Newman of pneumonia, age twenty-one; Mavis Rivers of influenza, age twenty-six; William Flint of influenza, age fifteen. Another article stated trucks were being used to carry bodies from the morgue to potter’s field. Corpses were tagged for later identification before being buried in a trench dug by a steam shovel, and the men filling in the mass graves were falling sick. On the radio, the Pennsylvania Council of National Defense explained: “It is doubtful that the city of Philadelphia has, at any time in its history, been confronted by a more serious situation than that presented in connection with the care and burial of the dead during the recent epidemic.” With everything going on, people being buried alive was certainly a possibility. Just the thought of it made her shiver.

  Down in the alley, the driver slowed the horses, pulled to a stop outside one of the row houses, and tied the reins to the wagon. Three bodies wrapped in dirty, bloodstained sheets lay in the wagon bed. The driver and the other man climbed down, went over to the front stoop, lifted a sheet-draped body from beside the steps, and piled it on the back with the others. Then they returned to the steps and picked up another body, this one smaller than the first. With the wagon loaded, they climbed back on and moved closer to Bernice’s building, continuing the call for people to bring out their dead.

  She would not hand Wallis over to those men. They couldn’t take her baby. She wouldn’t let them. Then she realized they had no idea she was there, watching from her third-floor window. They didn’t know her boy was dead. And she needed to keep it that way. Otherwise, they might put him on that horrible wagon, and once they got a good look at her, they’d force her to go to an asylum.

  She had seen her reflection in the cracked mirror above the washbasin. It was that of a stranger, with dull eyes and tangled hair, sunken cheekbones and sallow skin. She looked like a woman insane. They’d think she was sick and needed help. But she didn’t want help. There was nothing they could do for her, anyway. She wanted to die. She wanted to be with her husband and son. She shrank back when the men passed beneath her window, but not before catching sight of a small, pale hand sticking out of the bloody pile of sheet-wrapped bodies in the wagon bed.

  The men stopped two more times to load dead bodies, then drove along the alley as if it were a normal routine, like delivering milk or lighting the streetlamps. Finally they turned the corner and disappeared, the low, indifferent voice calling for people to bring out their dead echoing once more in the empty alley before growing fainter and fainter. Then the afternoon went silent and Bernice was alone again.

  Seeing the men in the wagon made her think of her older brother, Daniel, how he used to shut her in a storage crate and tell her their parents were getting rid of her. He’d say the postman was coming to pick her up to mail her to a different family, or the nuns were coming to take her to an orphanage. He said orphans slept on wooden planks in cold attics, and the only thing they got to eat was cold gruel. If they were bad, the nuns beat them or locked them in closets, and sometimes forgot to let them out. The first time he did it Bernice was five years old, and she stayed in the box for hours, crying and waiting to be taken away. She finally snitched on him when she turned eight, but her mother refused to believe her precious son would do anything so horrible. Instead, she accused Bernice of making up stories and sent her to bed without supper. Then, finally, her father caught Daniel sitting on top of the crate while she wept inside, and punished him with a belt. After that, Daniel never did it again. But from that day on, after their mother blew out their bedroom lantern every night, he whispered across the room in a menacing voice that the nuns were still coming to get her. Or he crept across the floor in the dark and grabbed her ankles, scaring her so badly she nearly wet the bed. For years she didn’t dare fall asleep until she heard him snoring. Sometimes he asked if she could taste the rat poison in her oatmeal, or left a noose lying between her sheets. When he died of typhoid at thirteen, she was inconsolable. No one knew she was crying tears of relief.

  Suddenly a flash of movement caught her attention, pulling her from her thoughts. The door in the row house across the alley opened partway and someone peeked out, a small, pinched face looking up and down the street. It looked like a young girl, with blond braids and a red scarf over her nose and mouth. After checking both ways, the girl came out and stood on the stoop, her shoulders hunched as if trying to make herself smaller. She wore an oversize coat with baggy pockets over her long dress and carried what looked like an empty sack in one hand.

  Bernice couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Mr. and Mrs. Lange’s daughter, the one with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and the odd-sounding name. What was it? Gia? Pia? Yes, that was it. Pia. She remembered because she’d heard the Duffy boy calling out to her as she sat reading on th
e steps one day. At first she thought he was yelling in a different language, but then the girl waved and went to greet him. That’s when Bernice realized the strange word was a name. Another time at a vegetable stand, she’d heard Mrs. Lange talking to the same girl and realized it was her daughter. Neither of them paid any attention to her, but Bernice had noticed the striking color of Pia’s eyes, like the deep cobalt of a blue jay’s wing. At the time Bernice had been only weeks away from giving birth to Wallis and had almost stopped to admire Mrs. Lange’s new twins—but she kept going because Mr. Lange had taken her father’s job. Not to mention she couldn’t let the neighbors see her talking to Germans. She’d wondered briefly if she’d temporarily lost her mind, then reminded herself the twins were only babies, too young to be swayed by German views and behaviors. She couldn’t fault herself for being drawn to their sweet, newborn faces.

  Now she couldn’t imagine why Pia was leaving the safety of their row house during a citywide quarantine. Where was her mother? And what about her brothers, those beautiful twin boys? Mrs. Lange had to be out of her mind to allow her young daughter to venture out at a time like this. Pia couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. Even if Mrs. Lange couldn’t read the newspaper and didn’t own a radio, she had to know people were getting sick and dying. She had to know it wasn’t safe for Pia to leave their apartment. The thought briefly crossed her mind that the Germans had started the epidemic and Pia and her family were immune, but she pushed it away. Mr. and Mrs. Bach and their four daughters were German too, and every last one of them was dead.

  In spite of her anger with Mr. Lange for stealing her father’s job, and the fact that they were German, Bernice could tell that normally, Mrs. Lange was a good mother. If there was a chill in the air, the twins and Pia always wore warm coats and knitted hats. Whenever she came out of the building with the twins, Mrs. Lange kissed them both before putting them in their pram, then smiled and talked to them while pushing them down the sidewalk. She caressed Pia’s cheek with a gentle hand and kissed her forehead when seeing her off to school. So why would Mrs. Lange risk her daughter’s life by letting her go outside during a flu epidemic?

  Then Bernice had another thought. One that made her blood run cold.

  Maybe Mrs. Lange was dead.

  Maybe the twins were dead too.

  No. Not those beautiful baby boys!

  Nausea stirred in Bernice’s stomach, and the room seemed to spin around her. She grasped the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself, and fixed watery eyes on the body of her dead son. How was it possible that babies were getting sick and dying? How was such a horrendous nightmare allowed? And where was the God she knew and loved? The Lange boys were a little older than Wallis, but just as innocent and pure, even if they were German. Pulling her gaze back to the window, she tried to focus. Pia was hurrying along the alley with her head down, occasionally glancing over her shoulder and looking around as if worried she might be seen. Bernice couldn’t imagine where she was headed. Maybe she was going to try to find medicine but hadn’t heard that the pharmacies had run out of everything but whiskey—now that the saloons were closed, it was the only place you could get it. Maybe she was going to the hospital to look for help. But if the boys were sick, Mrs. Lange should have gone instead of sending her young daughter. It wasn’t right. Unless Mrs. Lange was sick too.

  Then Pia climbed the steps of the next building and went inside.

  What was she doing?

  CHAPTER THREE

  PIA

  While the dead backed up at mortuaries and pressed into undertakers’ living quarters, hospital morgues overflowed into corridors, corpses at the city morgue spilled into the street, and Pia struggled to keep herself and her brothers alive inside the dim, cramped rooms of their apartment on Shunk Alley. Before making the decision to leave, she had suffered eight days of increasing anxiety, with no idea when—or if—it would be safe to go out again. She did her best to make sure their meager supplies would last as long as possible by rationing the Mellin’s Infant Food and adding spoonsful of porridge, soft boiled eggs, cooked potatoes, and mashed carrots to the boys’ diet. Wishing she’d paid more attention when Mutti made their meals, Pia tried to duplicate her lentil soup, but the lentils turned out either half-cooked or too mushy, and the soup tasted like chalk mixed with paste. She forced herself to eat it anyway, so she could save the rest of the food for the twins. She hated the taste of her mother’s Postum but drank that too, despite the fact that she didn’t even like real coffee. It didn’t matter if her stomach cramped with hunger or she longed for something to drink besides fake coffee and water, Ollie and Max came first. Anything that could be made soft enough, she fed to them. Anything that was hard or distasteful, like crusts of bread or lentil soup, she kept for herself.

  When she wasn’t busy feeding, changing, or trying to get the twins to sleep, she checked out the window to see if people were coming outside yet, if the nightmare was going to end. She hoped against hope to see her father in his uniform, returning home from the war in time to save them. But he was never there. Every so often neighbors hurried out of their homes, their pale faces lined by sorrow and fear, to leave bodies wrapped in sheets on the steps. Otherwise, the alley was empty. She wondered briefly if she should put Mutti outside, but didn’t think she could carry her down three flights of stairs on her own. Besides, she didn’t want to leave her out on the street. It wouldn’t seem right. For reasons she couldn’t explain, it felt better having her mother there, in the apartment with them.

  Remembering the wakes she’d attended in Hazleton, she’d done her best to honor Mutti by carefully brushing her hair out of her face, sweeping it back on the pillow, and decorating the pillowslip with paper flowers made out of pages torn from her schoolbook. She didn’t care if she got in trouble for damaging the book. Who knew if she’d ever return to school, anyway? After that, she covered Mutti with an extra blanket so she wouldn’t be cold, then tried closing Mutti’s mouth and washing the blood off her face with a wet rag, but gave up because she had to press too hard.

  Every morning, she checked the clothesline for a message from Finn, but her note still hung outside his window, damp and tattered from the October wind and rain. The sight of it made her shiver. If it weren’t for the occasional muffled voices and bump and scrape of furniture on the other side of the tenement walls, she’d have thought she and her brothers were the last people left alive. Sometimes, when she heard muted anguished wails and sobbing, she imagined the flu taking them all one by one, until no one was left in the city.

  Grief and despair nearly swallowed her.

  By day four she stopped looking for a note from Finn. And when she opened the bedroom door to look for warmer clothes for her brothers, she recoiled and clamped a hand over her mouth. She’d never smelled anything so horrible—a pungent combination of dead animal, the inside of an outhouse on a hot day, and the strange, cloying scent of old perfume. Vater had found a dead rat rotting under the stove the day they’d moved into the apartment, and that had made Pia gag, but this was worse.

  She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway, holding her breath and fighting the urge to vomit; at the same time, she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the sight of Mutti on the bed. Her body had started to bloat, the thin skin of her face stretching as if about to burst. Somehow, more blood foamed from her eyes and nose and mouth. Forcing herself to enter the room, Pia grabbed the rest of the boys’ clothes from the dresser, hurried back out, closed the door, and leaned against it, breathing hard. But the horrible smell seemed to cling to her, gluing itself to her hair and caking the inside of her nostrils. She threw the clothes on the table, hurried over to the wash bucket, scrubbed her hands and face with the last sliver of Ivory soap, and ran her soapy fingers through her hair. It didn’t help. She grabbed diapers and rags from the clotheslines above the stove and shoved them under the bottom of the door, tears burning in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mutti,” she said. “I know it’
s not your fault.”

  The first time she saw men with carts picking up bodies, she’d thought about calling out the window to ask if they had any news, if things were getting back to normal or the doctors had found a cure for the flu. Then she realized drawing attention to herself was a bad idea. The men might call the authorities. Then the police would come, find Mutti dead, and take her brothers away. She’d probably never see them again. No, she couldn’t let that happen. It didn’t matter that she was only thirteen, she would take care of Ollie and Max until their father came home. She had to. There was no other choice.

  Despite her best efforts to keep her brothers clean, dry, and fed, it seemed like they cried day and night. On the rare occasion they were asleep at the same time, she rushed down to the fenced yard to get water and use the outhouse, praying the boys wouldn’t wake up or start crawling while she was away, and that she wouldn’t run into anyone, especially old Mr. Hill. Mutti used to carry the twins down the four flights in cloth slings strapped to her waist, then carry them back up again—along with two buckets full of water. But Pia didn’t think she was strong enough. Plus, taking the twins would have slowed her down. Sometimes she used the mop pail as a toilet so she wouldn’t have to leave, emptying it in the outhouse when she went down to the yard, but when it came to getting water, she didn’t have a choice. And they needed lots of it—to mix with the Mellin’s, to soften food, to wash dishes and baby bottoms and diapers. Loads and loads of diapers. She used as little Borax in the washtub as possible, but they were running out of that too.