by Lia Matera
That’s how people like the Kingstons were. They thought all the world was like their happy piece of it. They didn’t understand the fuss—the strikes, the Free Speech Actions, the opposition to the draft. Things around them were good. Why should anyone protest?
Nicky used to say, it’s not enough to tell people things aren’t fine for others. Until trouble’s brought home to them, they can’t understand it. He was in Mexico now because he wouldn’t fight men who’d done him no harm in a war no one could explain. Someday soon he’d come looking for her. The Kingstons wouldn’t bother lying that they’d cared for her till the end. They’d simply refuse entry to a tattered-looking man asking after a dead servant.
Her ear on the cold sidewalk made the wagon jarringly loud, the more so because it was different from common street sounds, from the backfires and rumbles of cars, the clatter of trolleys, the staccato of women’s boots on cobbles or cement.
It stopped near the Roosevelt house. Too close. It would come for her next.
She struggled with her shroud until panic kicked her senses out from under her. When she drifted back to consciousness, she couldn’t remember why she was outdoors at night. Mrs. K was very strict about the servants coming in before dark, she wouldn’t like it. Then Ella heard exclamations, swearing, someone’s low murmur: “Ten for the both of you.”
The sound of horses, their puffing breaths as they stood idle, brought her situation back into focus. Did it cost so much, ten dollars, to have a body hauled away like rubbish?
“And not a word about it,” the voice continued.
“We’d shut our mouths, all right,” a wagon man said, “for ten each.”
After that, for a while Ella listened to the horses shift arrhythmically on shod hooves. Could they smell the dead bodies behind them? Could they smell the disease?
Time passed, maybe only minutes but they seemed like hours. The wind whistled up her nightdress but it didn’t make her cold, she was insulated in her fever. She looked through bars (how had they come to be in her sight?) as the wagon men walked past with a bundle in a sheet. It gave a jerk, like a cocoon suddenly straining to deliver a terrible moth. Were Ella’s eyes playing tricks on her? Was she seeing herself from outside her body? She watched as the shrouded person got slung onto the cart.
Next time she became aware, there was no more champing of horses, only the shuffle of dry leaves over a dusting of snow. She hadn’t noticed snow falling, or that the sky had grown pale enough for the streetlamps to go off. She saw she’d gotten free of her sheet but didn’t recall how or when. She was on the other side of the gate to the service entrance, but she hadn’t made it down the stairs. She was lying on them, the corners cutting into her chest and torso, scraping her calves where her nightdress ended. Her hands had lost all feeling, one clinging to the dirty metal of the fence, the other hooked through the bars. And she was shivering with cold now.
A voice cried, “Oh! Oh, my dear— How did you ever? Oh, my sweet Lord.”
“Cook?” Ella whispered. What was her name? Ella wished she remembered. But the Kingstons called the female help Cook, Nanny, and Maid, as if there were no more to them.
“Come, Nanny,” Cook said. “I don’t know how you lived the night out here, and look, with snow falling, too. But try to stand up, dear, and we’ll get you inside. Cut this gown off you and put you into the bath. However could they have—? The missus said you were dead. Came just now, at this hour, to tell me. I’ve had a good cry already. But let me just tie a kerchief over my mouth and nose. Get you in here before the milkman sees you, starts in all in Russian like he does. However could you survive a freezing night like this? I suppose it cut your fever—saved your life, it may be. But oh my savior and Lord, are those bites on your arm? Rat bites? Oh help us, Joseph and Mary. Come now, we’ll get you cleaned up and into bed. We’ll put you on Charles’s cot. The missus sent him away, she said. Forbid him to tell me himself, in case he picked up the sickness when he carried you out.” She made a teary gulping sound. “Heaven knows what she’ll say now you’re back. Or who’ll stoke the furnace while my Charles is gone. Maid, poor girl, already has her back half broke from washing everything in the house, every bit of the children’s clothes and bedding yesterday, in case you touched anything. And scrubbing every surface you might have breathed upon. No help from me—missus wouldn’t let near anything till she made sure I wasn’t coughing. But here I’m complaining when you’ve been in this weather all night long.” Ella saw the white cloth over Cook’s nose and mouth soaking with tears where it touched her florid cheeks.
“Someone … gave wagon men money.” Ella choked it out, her lungs tight and burning. “Twenty dollars. Take away a man. I think … alive.”
“Bad dreams, dear. You should have heard yourself yesterday. Charles says you went on about anarchists. Said if he didn’t know better, he’d suppose you were out to bomb the Palmers or the Roosevelts.” Cook’s voice was full of pity.
Ella didn’t remember going inside, but she woke up on Charles’ cot near the coal bin. Later still, again with no consciousness of having moved, she found herself in a tub of tepid water in the servants’ bathroom. Maid knelt over her with a bar of soap. Like Cook, she’d wishfully relied on a kerchief over her nose and mouth to protect her. The poor woman looked younger with her disappointed down-turned lips hidden.
“Maid,” Ella said. “Good … to me.” Her relief at having the filth from the street, from her sick body, washed away was immense. She choked back tears of gratitude because they burned her eyes worse than the coarse soap.
Cook came in, waddling as usual as if a stick held her knees apart. She helped Maid wash Ella’s hair. “Just look at those bites,” Cook said, “and no doctors to help us. To think Mrs. Kingston came to me and said Nanny had passed. Like you might say, ‘It’s snowing.’ With the nerve, on top of it, to complain it’s too cold in the schoolroom. I looked right at her: ‘Well of course it’s cold, you sent my Charles away.’ And she says, all accusing, ‘Didn’t I tell you to wear a mask? I won’t have you cooking for the children without one. I can’t have them exposed, that’s why I sent Charles away, and Mr. Kingston, too. If they’re well, they’ll be back soon enough, and in the meanwhile, I’ll have no drama about it. For the children’s sake, we can do without our husbands for now.’ Always the children, though you can’t blame a mother for that. And we all love them. But then, we’re all somebody’s children, aren’t we? So I said to her, ‘Well, it may be just drama to you, to send a husband away.’ Not as if mister and missus share a room, is it? He barely even pretends to care for her, now he’s got that fancy piece at the Decatur. But I’m newly wed. And I told her, ‘You can feel how cold it is, without my Charles. Call it drama if you will, but he’s of use to us.’ I didn’t say, ‘Not like Mr. K, who does nothing for nobody.’ The Roosevelts’ maid says Mr. K’s practice is a sham, do you know? That he keeps the office because a man can’t be seen to live on his wife’s money these days, not if he means to get ahead in politics.”
“Oh, Cook.” Maid’s eyes were wide. “What did the missus say?”
“What could she say? It’s true—whatever does Mr. K do for us here?”
“He doesn’t really have a woman at the Decatur?”
“He does. I know it because of Mr. Roosevelt, whose little Jimmy and Elliot play with our John. It was one of the nannies who told me. Mrs. R nearly left him, she said. It’s why she took the children away last month. Found love letters to her husband … from her very own secretary, who lives at the Decatur. Which is how I know about Mr. K’s fancy girl, because Mr. Roosevelt sent roses there when he was in Europe inspecting the fleet. Never mind that he’s Assistant Secretary, everyone knows he runs Navy himself, and we’ll win the war because of him, I don’t doubt. But the boy at the flower shop, when he took the bouquet, he saw Mr. K there, with his woman.”
“See if the apartment house doesn’t get a
bad reputation,” Maid said.
“Serves it right. Poor Mrs. R—they say she’s very kind to the help. And poor Mrs. K, too, if she knew. Mr. K never could go long without— Well, just say he has an appetite for the young ones. No mystery who broke the quarantine.” Cook scowled at Ella, who was shaking in the cooling tub, suddenly self-conscious about being naked under the older women’s gaze. Did Cook know what she’d done? But to her relief, Cook’s expression softened. “Whatever else I could say about Mr. K, though, I never thought he’d be one to put poor Nanny outside like that. How I’ll ever look at him again without spitting on the floor, I don’t know.”
Ella detested Charles and burned to expose him, to say it was he who’d persuaded the Kingstons to put her on the street, he who’d dragged her up the stairs and rolled her toward the curb like a sack of moldy potatoes. But she couldn’t find it in herself to upset Cook. And she certainly felt no urge to defend Mr. K.
“You should have seen the missus’s face just now,” Cook continued, pausing malevolently, “when I told her I’d brought Nanny back in. She took it very bad, and I stood there not even pretending to be sorry. No, I smiled. I did. I said, ‘Praise God Nanny survived, and no thanks to any in this house.’“
“Cook!” Maid sounded shocked but even with her mouth hidden under her apron, it was clear she was grinning.
“Not as if she can fire me,” Cook said. “Find a good cook today, with everybody dropping like flies.”
While the women finished helping Ella, they listed all the dead from the neighborhood. Ella watched Cook, her bushy brows beetling over small eyes, her nose making a too-wide bump in the kerchief tied over her face. Charles called her a hag, a sow, said he’d married her only because at her age and with her prospects, she’d do things he had to pay extra for if he went whoring. And poor Maid, a skinny woman of thirty, her back hunched from bending over laundry, had as usual failed to achieve an old-fashioned Gibson Girl, her rolled stocking showing beneath lank hair. But to Ella at that moment, both women seemed luminously beautiful.
“Maid, go up to my room and fetch one of my gowns.” Cook’s eyes filled with tears when she added, “God forgive us, Nanny, but they had Charles burn yours. The missus worried they’d have some sickness in them. But we’ll share clothes with you, won’t we, Maid? You’re such a tiny thing, but maybe with belts and darts? You said you were a seamstress once?”
“Shirt factory,” she managed. Since she was thirteen. Her lungs had only begun to feel completely clear of cotton dust after two years here. At first, the children often left her winded and wheezing, and it had been a challenge not to show it.
“Nasty places. Well, you weren’t there for long, at your age.” When Maid left the bathroom, Cook added, “Don’t tell me you didn’t lie to get this job. Twenty-five! Why, I doubt you’re twenty yet, as womanly are you are.”
Cook flushed scarlet then, perhaps remembering nights Charles had come upstairs to Cook’s bed while Ella was in it. Ella had a sudden wish to take little John, a boy with a streak of harmless mischief and a grin to melt her heart, away from this house full of men who were no better than beasts.
The next thing Ella was aware of, she was again on Charles’s cot near the coal bin. Nearby, Maid was sobbing. Ella struggled onto her side, her limbs twisted up in Cook’s huge gown.
“Maid?” Ella coughed, the exertion draining her so she dropped her head back onto her pillow. But the coughs were no longer like hot knives between the ribs, they were barely worse than when she’d worked at the factory.
Maid was in a wingchair that had a loose arm, making it unsuitable for upstairs. The cracked glass shade of a table lamp cast a homey glow that kept the wood pile and coal bin (and Ella) in shadow. It was nighttime now, it seemed.
“Maid, what’s wrong?”
“It’s baby Annie,” Maid said. “Cook’s taking her out.”
“Out where?”
“To the street. For the wagon.” She continued to weep. “The missus has gone half mad. Didn’t want us to do it. She said to call for the ice man, ice to keep the baby from— Oh, I can’t think of it, it’s too horrible. And not a funeral home in a hundred miles that will answer its telephone. We couldn’t convince her till she saw Muriel … The little dear’s too young to understand, she kept sneaking in to the baby to hold her. When Mrs. K saw that … Oh Nanny, you can’t imagine.”
Ella could hardly force herself to breathe. “Mr. K? Knows?”
“His club says he’s not there. Never arrived at all. I suppose Cook’s right, and he’s with that woman. But how to tell Mrs. K? We said we left a message at the club, and we did. If only we knew where to find Charles, we’d send him to the Decatur. But it wouldn’t be decent, Cook says, for one of us to go. Too much talk. If the mister didn’t fire us for it, the missus would.”
Ella watched her weep. She felt as if the news were doing to her heart what the flu had done to her lungs. Baby Annie, with her sweet little fingers and toes, her pretty new curls, the way she repeated buh-buh and puh-puh for ten minutes at a time, as serious as a professor delivering a lecture.
“Cook’s gone mad with it, too, Nanny. Imagine if you had to wrap up that darling little child and put her— She and the missus both, gone mad. Why look, Nanny, what Cook gave me.” Maid dug into the pocket of her apron, then held something between her fingers. “A ten-dollar coin! Says Charles had a pocketful in his pants, left by the washer when he changed clothes to leave. If it’s what Mrs. K gave him to get lodging, then how’s he paying for it now? I asked Cook, but she got angry, saying, is it so hard to think her husband left it for her? And I said, ‘But he wouldn’t want you giving his money away.’ And she said, ‘You’d do the same for me if you had two people’s wages to live on, and I had one. And better if there’s less for Charles when he gets back.’ Meaning he’d take it and get into trouble. They’re not supposed to serve liquor down at Murder Bay, now the District passed that law, but he always finds some, doesn’t he, if he has the extra coin?”
“If he has more … he’ll be out …” She didn’t have to say whoring.
“Oh no, he swore off it, Nanny. I heard him myself. Him and Cook one night in the kitchen, didn’t see me at the door. She had her knife right through his vest and shirt, clear to his skin. He pushed her back and pulled up his clothes to show the mark she left. Said if ever he had the means to buy it ten times a month, he’d leave her. But as long as he didn’t, she was a fool to worry. While he could get it for free, she’d be right to kill him for wasting the money.”
“Do you think … could he have stolen from Mrs. K?” They all knew the missus kept a strongbox of coins. She doled them out to Cook and Maid to settle with the chicken man and fish man and the dressmakers, now that they all came here so no one left the house. “When Mrs. K paid Charles to go find lodging? If he saw where she kept them?”
Neither of them said more, but it was easy to envision Charles changing his clothes in a rush, forgetting the few coins in his pocket because he had a boxful under his arm.
“Muriel and John?” Ella asked, finally.
“Asleep, Nanny, and what a chore today, keeping them away from you. It’s their instinct to come to you in need. Not that Mrs. K doesn’t dote on them, but with you it’s not so much fuss. And now, well … poor missus is half out of her mind. I put out their color crayons and said to draw pictures of their daddy, to give him when he comes home. But Mrs. K flew into the schoolroom, screaming at me. It scared the little ones, you can imagine, the state she was in. She said I mustn’t go near them now, after nursing you.” A flash of fear twisted her face.
Ella wanted to take Maid’s hand, squeeze it to show she understood how brave it was to care for her this way.
As if reading her thoughts, Maid said, “The newspaper says it’s moving across the country like a grass fire, and no outrunning it. They say men boarding at Union Station are dead before the tra
in reaches Chicago. Why, you went down as fast as anything, and this morning baby Annie was so pink and bright, just a little colicky how she gets. And now … We’ll none of us survive it, Nanny. I’ll be next, I know it.”
“If you are, I’ll take care of you,” Ella vowed. “Nurse you like you nursed me.”
The next time she awakened, Ella found Maid slumped in the broken wingchair, too ill to make it to her tiny attic room. Ella sat up, her head throbbing and her chest on fire, determined to make good on her promise. But it took a long time to help Maid up the dark, narrow servants’ stairs. They had to pause every few steps. Ella had no strength, it felt as if her bones were hollow, as if her marrow had died away from fever. And Maid suffered wave after wave of dizziness and nausea. On the third floor landing, Ella spotted another ten dollar gold piece. She thought it Maid’s, fallen from her apron pocket, but when she went to put it back, she saw it was a second coin. It was baffling, something to puzzle over while she got Maid up to her attic cubby. She put her into bed with the last of her strength. But when she staggered toward the room she shared with Cook, she knew she’d get no rest there. She heard Cook’s wracking cough.
By midday, Cook and Maid were dead. They had bathed Ella and cared for her, and for their trouble, she had given them the influenza. She had killed them.
She went slowly down the narrow staircase to the third floor. She stood facing the door leading to the children’s rooms and Mrs. K’s suite. She didn’t want to open it. She didn’t want to break the news. And what if she learned that she’d infected Muriel or John? No, she couldn’t go in there, not yet. She sank to the floor, back against the door. She closed her eyes, never imagining she could sleep, not with this grief, this apprehension, inside her. But when she next opened her eyes, it was dark on the landing. Pushing herself up, her hand encountered a divot in the wood, new and frayed with splinters. As she pulled one from her finger, she saw that it was smeared with something rusty brown. Dried blood?