“Do you want me to continue with the story or not?”
We were quiet.
“Your grandma died. She was thirty-two, and had a new baby, my sister Claire. Claire died too.”
“And you were an orphan,” Angus added.
“I still had a father and a brother, your uncle Stephen. We had an Irish wake.” She described the wailing, the aunts sweeping in, claiming the furniture and curtains, and then how they rolled up the one good rug that had come all the way from Ireland and took it away. “We were so poor, we had to steal food from the market so we could eat.”
“Is that why you weren’t good?”
I was skeptical. Stealing food because you were too poor to eat was in every sad story I’d read. Who would quibble over an apple or loaf of bread when survival was the issue? It was a writer’s trick, a red herring she threw in to distract us from the truth. But no matter how I prodded and pleaded, she never elaborated.
“Will the flu come here?” Angus wanted to know. And every time he asked, she reassured him that it wouldn’t. But how could anyone know about the things that might happen?
I grabbed a handful of covers and yanked them away from Angus, who had wrapped himself tight like a mummy. I was sure she was leaving the most interesting part out. My mother, Elaine Fitzgerald Donnelly, had been up to something more. But the story always ended here. No family jokes, no tales about school, no faded black-and-white photos of her childhood. Beyond that point, my mother’s life was a blank.
“And then what happened? Who took care of you and Uncle Stephen?” I asked.
“We made do. When all is lost, Molly, things either die or get reinvented. There’s no in-between.”
She was obfuscating again, evading my question. I could play that game too.
“Uncle Stephen says that every story should leave room for miracles.”
“Does he?” She arched one eyebrow. “Believe me, there were no miracles recorded.”
She brushed her lips across Angus’s forehead, and then reminded me it was a school night. As if I could forget.
I crossed the hall and shut my bedroom door. Slipping my hand under my pillow, I felt for the envelope.
There may not be miracles, but there were secrets. I let the envelope rest in my hand. The contents were almost weightless. I thought of her in the yard with the clippers.
What was my mother hiding? And what would it cost to bury it?
An excerpt from Elaine Fitzgerald Donnelly’s “Hansel and Gretel”
In the dark of night, the woodcutter’s new wife whispered her plans.
“Unless you desire to watch them grow thin with hunger and then expire, we must lead them into the forest.” Her voice, when she wanted, could be honey. “It is the only reasonable choice. It offers a chance. They’re strong; they’ve got their wits about them. Here, they’ll have no chances at all.”
So, bit by bit, against his good judgment, the woodcutter was persuaded, all his arguments chipped away like flint by his beautiful new wife. He was a man who had lost his convictions to loneliness. But at night, when he watched his two children restless with hunger in their sleep, he was filled with an inconsolable sadness. How would they make do? How would they ever understand that he was leaving them open for a miracle?
Chapter Three
THE NEW YEAR
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—OCTOBER 1918
ELAINE
Bodies were stacked like cords of wood at the end of Flushing Avenue near the Navy Yard. The morgues were full that fall and there was a shortage of coffins. Elaine touched the mask crumpled in her pocket. Her mother didn’t want her out of the house without it tied over her mouth and nose, but after wearing it for an hour, it began to smell funny. Besides, it was almost impossible to tell what another person was thinking when a mask covered both nose and mouth. The mailmen, the streetcar drivers, her teachers—everyone wore them. Elaine had never noticed before just how much a quirk of a mouth told you about someone.
All spring the newspapers had been full of accounts of a new influenza. In Spain, they called it La Grippe, but in the States, it was called the Spanish flu. No one knew exactly where it originated; some people said Germany, some said Spain, and some people blamed Aspirin tablets. Everyone was scared. This flu was fast and deadly, victims drowning in their own fluids in hours, and by August it had come for New Yorkers.
Elaine tucked the loaf of bread under her arm, crossed the street, and tried not to look at the flu’s latest victims waiting to be collected by a death cart or a Red Cross ambulance. If she forced herself to count to one hundred by sevens, she could distract herself from that unthinkable pile. But her eyes, with a will of their own, persisted in searching out the empty faces. All their peopleness had vanished. What was left was the afterimage: sprawled limbs, faces as empty as mannequins, and the strange formality of clothing. She grabbed the mask from her pocket and squashed it to her face, breathing fast.
Forgetting the sausages at the butcher’s, she ran toward home, her heart outpacing her legs. She skidded around the corner onto Steuben Street and stopped short, almost colliding with four little girls jumping rope. Two were the younger sisters of girls in her class. They turned the ends of the long rope in lazy arcs while the two smallest girls jumped and sang.
I had a little bird and its name was Enza,
I opened up the window and in-flew-Enza.
Elaine smashed the mask more tightly against her nose and mouth. The faces of the corpses clung like cobwebs as she stumbled up the three flights of stairs that led into the safety of her family’s flat.
Her mother, Anna Fitzgerald, looked up with swollen eyes from where she sat in the overstuffed reading chair soaking her feet in a tub of Epsom salts. The room was ripe with the smell of boiling cabbage. Elaine dropped the bread onto the table.
“What’s wrong?”
“Your aunt Ellen died.” Her mother’s voice was flat as newspaper.
Auntie Ellen was her mother’s oldest sister, who’d taught Elaine to sew. She’d watched her aunt’s hands, big and red-knuckled after years of cleaning other people’s houses, smooth fine cotton as tenderly as if it was silk. Each school year she made Elaine one new dress.
While Elaine had been out running errands, the influenza had quietly slipped under the door of their flat, changing the shape of her family.
“I saw her last night after work and she was fine.” Her mother drew a shuddering breath. “Six hours, and Tom said she was blue.” Then Anna Fitzgerald buried her head in her arms and sobbed.
She’d never heard her mother cry before, even when Anna gave birth to baby Claire six months ago. The sound found a hollow place inside Elaine and lodged there. She couldn’t move. She had no idea what to do. Pop came in from the bedroom gripping a wailing baby Claire in his thick-muscled arms. The tattoo of an American flag, inked the day he became a citizen, glistened with baby drool. Stephen followed, biting his thumb, red eyebrows drawn into a frightened scowl. Pop wandered back and forth between his sobbing wife and son making comforting noises.
“Make your mother some tea.”
Elaine opened the jar of chamomile, breathed in the grassy scent, and heated water on the stove. The faces of corpses haunted the shadowy corners of the room.
“Take your thumb out of your mouth. You’re eight, not a baby,” she snapped at her brother.
But even yelling at her brother didn’t make her feel braver.
Late in the night, she woke to the sound of voices in the main room. She’d crawled into bed with Stephen to help him fall asleep. Next to her he stirred and whimpered. He smelled like pee. She wrinkled her nose and slid out of bed. The first frost had etched the windows, and her toes curled as they met the floor.
“We have to get the children out of the city now.” Her mother’s voice was tight and sharp.
Pop answered with a deeper rumble, saying the flu was everywhere, not just New York. It was a plague of God.
He was good at making pronouncem
ents like that, and when he did, Elaine’s heart believed him.
Somehow the flu missed them. By early Christmas, the death count had slowed. Her teacher had stopped wearing a mask to school and so had the policeman on the corner. Newspapers declared the epidemic was over. Pop read that in one year, 1918, life expectancy in New York had dropped by twelve years. All that mattered to Elaine was that her own family was one of the lucky ones. They’d escaped, all but Auntie Ellen. Her nightmares of corpses slowly vanished.
Then in January, when Elaine came home from school, she found Pop at the stove boiling water. He was working evening shifts that month and should have already been gone.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Got a migraine. So keep the noise down. I sent Stephen across to the Malloys’ so she could get some peace.”
Elaine unwound her scarf. The sprinkling of snow was already melting into the dark blue wool, which just yesterday Patrick Newman had said matched her eyes. Elaine knew what to do for migraines; her mother had them often. Keep the room dark. Tea and cold washcloths.
“I can take care of her if you’ve got to leave.”
Her father nodded, and Elaine poured the tea in her mother’s favorite china cup with blue forget-me-nots. She balanced it in one hand as she opened the bedroom door.
“Mom, I’m home. I’ve brought you some tea.”
The curtains were drawn, and the room was dim with a single light burning. Her mother moaned her thanks. As Elaine approached the bed she heard a strange whistle. Claire was lying next to her mother.
“You want a cold rag on your forehead?”
What’s wrong with Claire? She set the tea on the bedside table and leaned closer. Her mother turned toward her and exhaled a sour cloud. White specks flecked her lips.
“Mom?”
Elaine touched her cheek. The skin was cold and clammy.
She reached for Claire, who was still making the same shrill whistle. The baby arched her back as Elaine lifted her. At the base of her throat, a hollow deepened with every breath. Bubbles burst on her lips.
“Pop!” With Claire in her arms, Elaine dashed from the room, knocking the teacup to the floor.
Later, what Elaine remembered were the sounds and the silences: the teacup smashing on the floor, steel-toe work boots pounding into the bedroom. The whistling stopped. Baby Claire never cried at all.
The new year, 1919, was one month old when the Fitzgeralds held a wake for two.
Chapter Four
AFTER
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—JUNE 1919
ELAINE
After the funeral, Pop reverted. That’s what her mother called it when he went on one of his drinking binges. He’d disappear for a day or two and then show up unexpectedly in the middle of the night once Elaine had finally gotten Stephen back to sleep after a nightmare. She’d stopped going to school weeks ago; someone had to take care of things. When the front door creaked open, she sat up in bed and smelled him enter, a mixture of whiskey and tobacco. The floorboards squeaked. He swayed in the doorway.
“Get up.”
“Shh. I just got Stephen to sleep.”
“Get up and make me some food.” With one arm he steadied himself against the doorjamb.
Dragging herself out of her bed, she glanced toward her brother. If Stephen was awake, he was smart enough to lie perfectly still.
There was only one way out of the bedroom. Pop always bragged that he had fast hands. Darting through the doorway, she ducked her head as she passed him. But his hands were faster. Grabbing a hunk of hair with one fist, he pulled her head back. Fumes of whiskey and sweat rolled over her.
“You’re growing up. You look just like your mother. Soon the boys will be swarming all over you.” His hand splayed. Her neck snapped forward.
Keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t acknowledge. She crossed to the stove.
“God did this to me. He killed her and left me with two kids.”
She cut two potatoes into thin slices, then sizzled lard in the cast iron skillet. Grease spattered her arms as she dropped in the slices. Behind her a kitchen chair crashed to the floor. When she jumped, the skillet seared her forearm. This had been Mom’s job, to come between Pop and the kids, to stand like a fence that couldn’t be crossed. Now it was hers. She was the fence; she couldn’t let him break her.
“Food’s ready in a minute.” And still she didn’t turn.
“Where’s my son? Stephen!” Pop bellowed. She heard him lurch back toward the bedroom. Elaine ran. But he’d already ripped the sheet off her brother, who lay curled tight as a sow bug.
“Get the hell up and show me what you’re made of!”
“Your tea’s ready!” Her voice came from a deep place. It was iron; it was steel.
Bloodshot eyes circled in her direction and then rounded back on Stephen. He was sitting up now, sheet reclaimed and pulled up to his chin. His milk-pale face soft and trembling.
Pop yanked him from bed by one arm. Stephen stumbled and slid to the floor.
“A man knows how to fight. Are you going to grow up to be a man?”
Pop feigned a punch at Stephen’s chin. “Come on, fight me. Show me what you got.”
“He’s only eight!”
The smell of hot grease choked the air. The pan would catch on fire. She ran back to the stove. What was she thinking? She was no fence of protection.
Pop danced on the balls of his toes, making air jabs around Stephen’s head. Play him, she willed. Jab back at the air, laugh. Instead, tears leaked from Stephen’s eyes and dripped off his chin.
In a flash Pop backhanded him across the face. Stephen’s head jerked, his mouth slid sideways.
“Toughen up or you’ll never be a man.” Then he pulled a small open bottle from his pocket. Reaching down, he grabbed Stephen’s chin in one hand and forced the neck into Stephen’s mouth. Stephen gagged and sputtered. Amber liquid spewed from his mouth and soaked the front of his undershirt.
Before she could think, she was across the room and circling Pop’s bicep with both hands. He rocked, stumbled, slumped as loose as mud to the floor. Rank breath watered her eyes. Yellow snot ran in a stream from his nose into the dark stubble on his chin. “God’s done this to me.”
Still in his underwear, Stephen peeked out from behind the reading chair. He made a dash to her side and clung like a monkey to one leg. Together they made their way into the bedroom. Stephen’s wet shirt pressed against her thigh.
Pop’s snores were loud and guttural. Elaine checked for the hollow place that had opened inside when her mother died. It was still there, as small and cold as an abandoned bird’s nest.
“Don’t let him see you’re scared. It just makes him meaner.” She ran a hand through Stephen’s hair. “Go wash your face.” One of his eyes was already beginning to swell. Then she grabbed a pillow from her own bed and stuffed it under Pop’s head.
Chapter Five
WALLABOUT MARKET
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—MAY 1919
ELAINE
Pete the pigeon man rested one thick leg on an empty crate. Elaine watched him watch the market: the parade of horses and wagons delivering fresh produce; the wholesale stalls selling meat and fish; Elsie the flower vendor with one short leg, who’d take your bet on the ponies when the cops weren’t around; the bald German baker offering fresh buns from his wagon and fake immigration papers on the side. Most of the time you stuck to your own neighborhood, but in the market you couldn’t escape the foreign smells or languages: Yiddish and Polish, Italian and Chinese. Elaine liked to think of the market as a crazy quilt all stitched with people’s hope for a better life.
Most grown-ups only glanced at the world; they didn’t notice the details, but the pigeon man did. And she didn’t want him noticing her today. Their plan was to steal apples. Only two—one for her and one for Stephen. It was a practice run, giving them a chance to perfect their system. Elaine didn’t normally approve of stealing things. Stealing was a backup plan to be used
when all else failed. The problem was, all else was failing.
She would distract one of the vendors with an inquiry about a job. The earlier in the day, the more distracted everyone was: vendors set up stalls, produce arrived by truck and horse cart, workers unloaded crates. Tom Dougherty’s produce stall was one of the largest at Wallabout Market. A few missing apples wouldn’t hurt him. And he was fat, Stephen pointed out, meaning he probably couldn’t run very fast if he tried to catch them.
“If we’re caught, we won’t just be in trouble. Do you know what will happen?” She needed to make sure her brother understood the risk.
“They’ll take us to jail?”
“They’ll start to poke around our business, and when the police find out Mom’s dead and Pop’s not home much, they’ll figure we’re half-orphans and send us to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Some kids never come out.”
Her brother’s face paled. That was good. She meant to scare him so that he’d do exactly what she said.
Stephen’s task was to grab the apples, but Elaine explained that he must not run. Running was a dead giveaway. At her signal, he should tuck the apples into his coat and keep walking. She would assess the situation and decide which direction they would go. They’d talked it through at least ten times. Even so, her hands were cold with sweat and her heart couldn’t keep a rhythm.
“I was wondering if you had any need for someone to stack and unload produce. Maybe to sell.” As Elaine considered Tom’s round face, his pug nose twitched.
“You don’t have the strength to lift crates.”
“I’m a hard worker and stronger than I look.” She brushed the hair from her face. That was their sign.
Stephen grabbed the two largest Pippins from the bin, one in each hand. But the apples were too big for a one-handed grip. As he fumbled at his coat, one dropped and rolled across the ground.
“Hey!” Tom called out.
Elaine’s eyes flew to her brother and then back to Tom.
Stephen ran.
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