Sister Perpetua considered her own illness a few days later an answered prayer. Suffering the flu was far preferable to turning away the relentless flood of the sick.
Lydia inched her way toward the hospital door, careful to avoid trampling feet or fingers. She never would have imagined Brian lucky in his illness, but its early onset had at least afforded him prompt attention. On the opposite side of the door, benches and cots had been added along the walls, a narrow aisle left between them to permit passage. The only observable difference between the patients lining the hospital hall and those in the clinic was that these people had been waiting even longer.
An extra row of beds had been added down the middle aisle of the second floor children’s ward. Partitions stood between as many beds as possible, turning the ward into a labyrinth that foiled Lydia’s attempt to find Brian by memory. She discovered several unfamiliar faces before deciding to work her way down the row, screen by screen, until she found him.
The majority of beds were now filled with patients closer to Lydia’s age than Brian’s. Those who were not sleeping either looked through her with fevered eyes, or gazed with such intensity that she felt criminal for replacing their screen and moving on. She was midrow when she was yanked into the aisle.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a nurse cried through a gauze mask. When the nurse spoke, the material across her mouth billowed like a sheet on a clothesline. “You’re spreading germs, going from one bed to another like that. You think these screens are for decoration? Who gave you permission to be here?”
“I’m sorry,” Lydia apologized. “I’m looking for a boy called Brian O’Toole. I brought him last night, but I suppose he’s been moved, or his Gran took him home.”
Nurse Christine Wilson was too upset and exhausted to admit knowing the boy to whom the visitor referred.
“You’ll have to ask Head Nurse,” the woman answered, pointing toward the opposite end of the room. “The way they’re coming in it’s more than I can do just to find them beds.” Behind one of the far curtains came the sound of choking. “Excuse me,” the nurse cried and rushed off.
The sounds of the ward were made more ominous by the screens that blocked their sources from view. It was difficult not to attribute each cough to Brian. When Lydia reached the other end of the ward there was still no other nurse in sight, and it seemed cruel to allow his solitude to continue.
“Brian!” she called. She was being true to the nurse’s request—she was not peering inside the curtains. “Brian, it’s Auntie Liddie from D Street. Just make a little sound so I know how to find you.”
The noises of the room seemed to intensify. Lydia perked her ears for a moan or a cough that sounded more familiar than the rest, or a small voice whispering her name.
Sally Nichols, in Bed Twelve, took the voice for an angel’s and was comforted by the notion that her name might also soon be called.
Then the Head Nurse emerged from behind one of the curtains. “Miss, I must ask you to restrain yourself,” she ordered. “We can’t have that here.” The hollows shadowing her eyes extended below the upper edge of the mask stretching across her nose and mouth.
“Please, I’m looking for a boy called Brian O’Toole.”
“O’Toole,” the nurse echoed. “He was brought in yesterday?”
“That’s right,” Lydia replied. “Yesterday afternoon, going on evening.”
The nurse gave a quick nod. “Are you a relation?” she asked.
“A friend of the family. I brought him here myself. He’s six but small for his age—”
“I’m very sorry to tell you,” the nurse replied quietly, “but he passed late last night. The grandmother was here this morning. She has made provisions.”
At the beginning of the epidemic, Henrietta Pauling was still able to tally the number of times she had been called upon to inform a visitor of a death.
The air rushed out of Lydia’s lungs. “Are you quite sure?” she asked, the words almost inaudible. “He was very ill but the nurse said they’d look after him. She said the doctor would see to him.”
“I’m sorry,” the nurse repeated. “Once they become that ill there is very little we can do.”
“Were you with him?” Lydia asked. “When he died, were you there?” She did not mean to sound angry, but in the space of a day the world had become a place where shops closed early and children disappeared overnight.
“No,” the nurse answered. “It happened during the night shift. We lost four. Not since yellow fever have we lost that many at a time. When the duty nurse realized the graveness of the situation she woke one of the Sisters and they took turns sitting at the beds.” The nurse’s voice remained steady, and because of the mask it was impossible for Lydia to know the set of her features as she spoke. “I’m certain that one of them was with Brian when his time came.”
Brian remembers a lady with bird wings on either side of her head. He thought she was an angel, but once he could not breathe anymore he realized she was nothing at all.
The walk back to D Street was longer than Lydia remembered. The few children playing on stoops or along streets, regardless of their age or appearance, reminded her of Brian. At the sight of a small boy with auburn hair she stopped in her tracks, certain the nurse had erred. Then the boy turned toward her, and the nurse’s news reasserted itself. Lydia felt strangely relieved for Alice, who was at least spared such unwelcome knowledge.
Alice, having joined Us previously, was of course the first in her family to know.
As she reached her block, Lydia found herself studying objects that had for years evaded her notice: a streetlamp, a tree, a hydrant, the small pebbles that collected between cobblestones. She could not describe what she was looking for, only the imperative of the search. If the rules had changed, then she would learn them. If this was some new and dire season, then she would come to know its name.
Lydia expected the same heavy silence that had greeted her on her first return from the hospital. She was not prepared for shrieks, and her throat clenched at the intensity of the sound. Anguish verged on overwhelming the very medium that carried it, perhaps causing the air to bleed black ash or gray dust. It was a sound that only ever meant one thing, conveying that meaning to all who heard it even if they had never heard it before.
The cries were so sense scrambling that they were at first difficult to pinpoint. Lydia assumed they emanated from the upstairs apartment until she opened the door to her family’s flat. Her next thought was that Mrs. Feeney was downstairs, but instead there was her mother bent over the couch, raw sound pouring from her open mouth and from the mouths of her brothers and her father. None were standing or sitting; they were crouching like animals. And as much as Lydia wished it could be true, she knew it was impossible that they would cry like this for poor Brian.
INFLUENZA NO MATCH FOR THE ARMY
New influenza cases are falling off at Fort Devens where Major General Henry P. McCain, commander of the Twelfth Infantry Division, asserts that despite the massive influenza outbreak, his men will be ready to disembark to France on the schedule called for by Generals Grant and Pershing.
Though over 10,000 men have thus far been stricken, and 66 have died, numbers of new influenza cases are falling off due to the “tireless efforts of our doctors and nurses, who have been working day and night to bring the epidemic under control.”
“I made a promise that I would have the Twelfth Infantry Division ready to face Gerry by the month’s end and I don’t intend to back out on that promise now,” McCain told officials. “It will take more than influenza to stop our fighting men.”
What do you call it again?
QD Soda, sir.
But last week you said it was a tonic.
Oh no, sir, that was something else. This you can sell right along with your lemon-lime and your orange and your rickey, something with a new taste all its own. A soda, not a remedy.
In case you didn’t notice, we’re standing
at a counter here. I don’t sell soda in bottles.
I’ll sell you the syrup, then.
I don’t know.
Honest to Abe, sir, you’ll be letting your customers down if you don’t. They’ll start going over to Klyborn’s on Revere or Pinkney’s on Allen.
Are you telling me those fellows are carrying your syrup?
Here, taste a bottle for yourself.
Hmm … you know, you might have something here. What did you put in there—chicory? A little anise maybe?
It’s a taste that people will come back for.
Give me a half gallon and we’ll see how it goes.
I only sell it by the gallon, sir.
Well, if you want my business you’ll sell me half a gallon and check back with me next week.
You won’t be sorry, sir. If you like, I can give you a sign for your front window, absolutely free of cost, of course.
Young man, it’s a little early to be talking windows. Come back next week and I’ll let you know whether or not you’re wasting my time.
My Dear Boy—
Though you have been gone awhile now there are mornings I forget. By the time I am putting up the coffee I have remembered and I am embarrassed that I forgot to begin with. You might think that being alone is protection against embarrassment, but it is not. Solitude is the biggest embarrassment of all.
I could name a few girls here who have made it clear they would be happy to bear the burden of my company, but you will be happy to know I have given up on all that. I have come to realize that I am no longer the sort of man a good woman comes to. I have not been that sort of man for some time now, not since your mother. I used to think that if you and she had lived I would have turned out differently, but I have given up on that as well. All my life I have prided myself on being a self-made man and a self-made man has no right to blame anyone but himself for the way he turns out.
And just how has your old dad turned out? Though I never ranked longevity among my ambitions, I seem to have achieved it anyway. I am not proud of being old. I do not feel that I have had much to do with it, considering how much trouble I made over the years for my gut and my liver and the rest of the scrapple I am carrying around inside my skin. I suppose I would be grateful if I were not so goddamn bored.
Forgive me for talking to you this way, but it is time I stopped thinking of you as a little boy. You have not been a little boy for a very long time. Not a day goes by when I do not think of you.
Love,
Your Father
The drays were clattering down Third Street as if nothing was different. Lydia had forgotten what it was to be hauled from oblivion into a world she had disowned, but now her skin weighed on her body like the pelt of a lifeless animal, and she remembered. For a moment she was confused: in the early days of mourning Henry she had often garbled time and so for one sharp inhalation of breath she thought she was still a new widow. Then came the exhale and her realization that this was something else, something that defied description. There was no word for a sister whose brother had died. This simple, callous fact of language extinguished her desire to speak.
Michael’s last letter had mentioned a flu, but in spite of all that had been happening, she had not recalled that remark until she was told he was dead. This lapse lodged itself alongside her failure to call an ambulance in time for Henry, and became its twin—indictments too tenuous to survive exposure to air, but incontrovertible within the confine of her body.
Her mother was the first to rise when the sound of the drays subsided. Mrs. Kilkenny pulled a dressing gown over her shoulders and shuffled from the bedroom to the kitchen. From her pallet Lydia heard the icebox door open and close. A pan clattered against the stove. Then came the sizzle and aroma of cooking fat, a scent that this morning turned her stomach. To distract herself she stared at the window, but the blueness of the sky made her angry. She turned her head toward the wall.
“Morning,” her father said. He was looking out the window also, the word not a greeting but an accusation directed toward the sun.
Cooking smells thickened the air. “Breakfast,” her mother said.
“I’m not hungry, Ma,” rasped Thomas from the front room.
“Me neither,” echoed James.
“You’ll eat whether you’re hungry or not,” her mother explained. “We all of us need our strength.”
Moving like an old man, her da eased his legs to the floor. “You’ll do what your ma says,” he ordered. Overnight, his voice had been reduced from a bellow to something small and tinny. There was movement from the front room into the kitchen, then a sharp intake of breath.
“Ma?” she heard Thomas say, his voice tearing the last remaining barrier between Lydia and the beginning of the first full day without Michael. Henry had been hers alone and she had owned her grief for him, but Michael had belonged to all of them.
While her mother stood over the stove, intent on the simmering tea kettle, the eyes of her brothers and father were fixed on a kitchen table choked with food. There were three pots at the table’s center, one filled with oatmeal, one with gravy, and one with cocoa. The table’s six plates were weighted with double portions of biscuits. A week’s supply of rationed eggs had been fried and divided between them, each plate subjugated by the dumb cheer of runny yellow yolks.
Her mother emerged from behind the stove with the steaming tea kettle. “He always teased me about being stingy with food,” she whispered. “He said the food at Devens was no good. I was fixing to send him a package, only I hadn’t quite gotten around to it.” She sat down. “It might have saved him, that package.” She winced. “It might have helped to keep his strength up.”
“I was going to write him back,” Thomas whimpered. “I had started a letter, but it wasn’t done yet.” His eyes widened. “He was probably lying sick in hospital, just hoping for a letter to raise his spirits, and I hadn’t even written!”
Dan Kilkenny does not remember this. He wonders if Liddie is recalling the time they got the letter telling of Granny K’s death, which was troubling sad for everyone.
“There was nothing any of us could’ve done,” her father said. “Now let’s all sit. We’ll bring whatever’s left over to Malachy and the girls upstairs.”
Once they were seated, her father bowed his head. He usually only recited grace over dinner. Today, over breakfast, he bowed his head but did not speak. Lydia could not imagine words to fill the space. Yesterday she had pondered portents in streetlamps, as though the world’s transformation were a subtle thing. Today she needed to look no farther than the kitchen table.
Father O’Brian was the first person Lydia heard use the word “epidemic.” He arrived to the flat late that afternoon. In a haggard voice he explained that he had been at Carney, where the need for doctors was matched only by the need for clergy; nuns could offer solace but they could not perform Extreme Unction. Father O’Brian had been forced to cancel morning mass: all the altar boys were sick and there was too much other work to be done. Today there were three funerals to perform, all of them young people. He did not want to think about tomorrow. He felt unwell himself but there was too much work to consider resting.
According to the telegram, they could visit the grave or arrange a transfer once the camp received a clean bill of health. Father O’Brian appeared visibly relieved to learn that Michael had been buried at Devens. He led them in the Lord’s Prayer and assured them that once the epidemic had passed, Michael would receive a funeral far grander than the truncated services the current circumstances permitted.
That night, she and her brother danced, his hand large and comforting at the small of her back. Saturated with their combined sweat, the fabric of her dress formed a second skin beneath his palm. As they moved she could smell her brother’s aftershave and the pomade he used in his hair. She had forgotten these scents and was overwhelmed with gratitude for their return. The other dancers were unfamiliar save for Alice Feeney O’Toole. Her hair was woven into t
wo neat braids that lifted as she twirled.
“Mick, I knew it wasn’t true!” she murmured, leaning toward her brother’s ear. “I knew you weren’t really dead!” Her brother was smiling his usual crooked smile.
“Oh I’m dead all right, Liddie,” his voice whispered in her ear, so low it was more a vibration than words. She opened her eyes to a dark figure standing in the doorway. The sight almost made her scream.
Michael may or may not have contributed to his sister’s nightmare. We are powerless over all aspects of Our whisperings save their ceaseless production.
“There’s something wrong with Tom,” came James’s voice from the darkness. She heard the springs of her parents’ bed creak. Before she managed to pull back her blankets her mother already had leapt from bed. For a moment Lydia was able to convince herself she was still dreaming but the trick did not last. Soon her mother’s voice called from the other room. The vibration of the floor as her father jumped from bed was too small and telling a detail to belong to a nightmare. She had just managed to stand when her father returned with Thomas in his arms—a large, awkward bundle that caused him to stagger with each step.
“Get out!” her mother shrieked, appearing in the doorway behind him. “Get out!” She squeezed around her husband, grasped her daughter by the arms and pulled her from the room.
Lydia found herself standing barefoot in the kitchen with James, the cold floor sending darts of alertness up through her legs.
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