As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  Maggie is holding the basket Mama had prepared that morning and Mama holds something else. They both turn toward me and I see that Mama holds an infant in her arms, wrapped up in Maggie’s coat. It’s whimpering, and the little voice is hoarse, like this child has been crying for a very long time and no one has cared. For just a second I forget what sent me careening down to them.

  “What is it, Evie?” Mama says, and I realize I must have fear in my eyes.

  And then I remember. “It’s Willa.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Maggie

  For a couple seconds Mama just stands there frozen with the baby in her arms. It’s as if she hasn’t heard Evie say that Willa is running a fever and we had the aspirin with us, and that she tried to bring the fever down with a cool rag but it’s not working.

  But then the moment passes, and something big and fierce rises within Mama. She turns to me. “Put that basket down.”

  When I do, she hands me the baby.

  “Don’t bring this child near Willa,” Mama continues, speaking to Evie and me like we are soldiers getting our marching orders. “Warm some milk in a pan and see if you can get him to take any. Squeeze it into his mouth with a dropper if you must. Then wash the filth off him. Maggie, you run over to the church when he’s fed and cleaned up and ask for Mrs. Arnold. Tell her what’s happened. And tell Uncle Fred he needs to go to the police and tell them we have this baby in our care. I don’t want us all getting arrested for kidnapping. See if he can get one of his doctor friends to come look at him. And don’t forget what I said. Don’t bring him anywhere near Willa’s room.”

  And then she picks up the basket and races up the stairs with it.

  Evie watches her go and then she turns to me. “Who is that?” she says, looking at the baby.

  “He’s an orphan. We don’t know his name. I found him. He hasn’t been fed or changed in who knows how long.”

  Evie stares at me for a second. “How do you know all that? How do you know he’s an orphan?”

  I hesitate and she notices.

  “His mother was dead in the next room,” I finally say.

  Evie looks both horrified and doubtful. “Are you sure?”

  A warm ribbon of shame wraps itself about me, but I shake it off. “After all that’s happened, you really think I don’t know what a dead person looks like?” I drop my coat on the floor and bring the naked baby close to my body, making my arms his blanket. He tries to squall, but he can barely make a sound now, he’s so weak. I move past Evie to go into the kitchen to warm up the milk.

  “And you just took him?” she says, following me.

  “What else could we have done?” I open the icebox and pull out a bottle of milk.

  Evie’s brow is creased with consternation, but she says nothing.

  I look down at the baby in my arms, whimpering and rooting at my chest for nourishment and comfort. “Does Willa have it?” I ask. “Does she have the flu?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Her words settle around us both as she takes the milk bottle from me and pours some in a pan. Then she lights the stove and puts it over the tiny flame.

  “What was it like down there?” Evie says as we both stand there, looking at the baby.

  “It was awful.”

  “He needs a diaper.”

  I think of the clothes and diapers that were Henry’s and that are now folded and tucked away upstairs in Mama’s cedar chest. Evie is thinking of those things, too. I know she is because when I say, “Mama won’t mind, will she?” she just says she’ll go get a diaper, a blanket, and something for the baby to wear.

  “We’ll need to put some cornstarch on that rash,” Evie says as she turns to go upstairs.

  When she comes back a few minutes later, her arms full of everything that had been Henry’s, my throat swells a little, and I must look away. The milk is warm now, and I blink back my tears as I take the pan off the stove and turn off the gas.

  “Let’s put the milk in a bowl and dip a cloth in. Maybe he can suck the milk off that,” Evie says. “You can feed him while I clean him up. Maybe he won’t mind so much then.”

  So that’s what we do. We spread out one of Henry’s soft blankets on the kitchen floor and put the baby on top. He screws up his little face in protest, but he doesn’t have the strength to fight much. I dip a cloth into the warm milk and put it to his mouth and it doesn’t take long for him to figure out if he sucks the cloth, he can get the milk. While I feed him, Evie washes his red and blistered private parts with cool water and cotton wool. Then she sprinkles cornstarch all over the redness and puts one of Henry’s diapers on him. Once he’s diapered and has a little milk in his tummy, he lets us wash the rest of him. As he is drifting off to a contented sleep, Uncle Fred comes in from the funeral parlor, probably to get some lunch. He sees us there on the floor with the baby now lying silent and unmoving on the blanket. He no doubt thinks someone has used the front stoop to drop off an infant dead from the flu.

  “What’s all this?” he shouts, yanking down his mask.

  I tell my story all over again, and this time when I get to the part where I say the baby was alone except for his dead mother, the ribbon of shame doesn’t feel as hot. As I repeat the same things that I told Mama and Evie, I become even more convinced that he is without a doubt a child without parents and a brother to a dying sister.

  But having heard the story a second time now, Evie has another round of questions.

  “Was there no neighbor you could have asked?” she asks. “Other tenants in the building? Nobody on his street knew if he only had a mother and no one else?”

  “His house wasn’t on a street. It was in an alley, and I couldn’t recall which one it was when Mama and I went back. There are a lot of alleys and the houses all look alike.” The lie is easier to say. It is getting easier all the time.

  “How could you not remember which house?” Evie says. “You had just left it.”

  “I told you they all look alike!” I shoot back. “And in case you’ve forgotten, I had also just seen his dead mother covered in coughed-up blood.”

  “All right, all right. Stop arguing,” Uncle Fred says. “What are we supposed to do with him? Where’s your mother?”

  “Mama wants you to tell the police what happened so they don’t think we kidnapped him,” Evie replies.

  Uncle Fred frowns like she’d just told him he is going to have to change the baby’s dirty diapers for all eternity. “Why didn’t your mother do it?”

  “She’s upstairs,” I say. “Willa’s sick.”

  Uncle Fred narrows his eyes. I see the worry there. “Sick with what?”

  “She’s got a fever.” Evie wraps the sleeping child in the blanket as she stands up with him. She turns to me. “Go on to the church like Mama said and tell Mrs. Arnold what happened.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Arnold? What am I supposed to tell the police?” Uncle Fred says.

  “She’s the woman from the Ladies’ Aid who told Mama about the sick people who live off South Street. She’s the one who sent Mama down there,” Evie replies. “And I guess Mama wants you to tell the police what Maggie told us.”

  At this she turns to look at me again, and it’s like she is giving me one last chance to make sure I’ve not left anything out.

  But I just hold her gaze and tell her that she can take out one of my bureau drawers for the baby’s bed: a little reminder that he is supposed to be taken to my room, not hers.

  Uncle Fred goes to make the call and I grab an apple and start for the front door, stepping over my coat as I give it a glance. The lining is smeared with filth from the baby. I have no idea how to clean it off or if it can be cleaned.

  “Leave it,” Evie says, nodding to my coat. “I’ll see what I can do for it while you’re gone. Take mine if you want.”

  But I do
n’t need a coat. I step outside and turn up the boulevard. In my mind, I picture that dying girl sliding off the sofa and crawling to her mama’s room to tell her that someone had come to take care of the baby, so they didn’t have to worry about what will happen to him when they die. Maybe she made it as far as the bedroom and saw that her mother had gone to heaven ahead of her. Maybe she made it only as far as the kitchen before she breathed her last. But it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She and I had looked at each other and I’d assured her that her brother would be safe with me.

  And she had died knowing that he was.

  • • •

  A few more people are out and about now that it is early afternoon, but the boulevard still isn’t busy. Not like it usually is. People peer at me as I walk past them, munching on my apple, perhaps because I’m not wearing a coat or my mask, and I’m not with Mama or some other adult. I see other children my age as I make my way to the church, but they are either in the company of their parents or looking out windows.

  Mrs. Keller, whose family owns the stationer’s, is sweeping her front step, but she stops as I near her store.

  “And where you off to, Margaret Bright?” She tries to sound only slightly curious, but it doesn’t work. She sounds very curious.

  “To the church.”

  Her eyebrows float upward. “Everything all right at home?” As in, why am I trotting toward the church when it’s closed unless something is wrong? I don’t want to think about Willa. I can’t. And the baby at the house isn’t a wrong thing.

  “Yes,” I reply, and I just keep walking. “Everything’s all right.”

  The church we attend with Uncle Fred is as big as a castle, and when you are inside it, you are like a mouse in an echoing cavern. The hymns we sing there on Sundays are the same ones we sang at the little church in Quakertown, but here the enormously tall ceiling makes everyone sound like they are trying too hard to be opera singers. Our first Sunday I found out the reverend’s name is Pope. I thought that was funny because he’s not Catholic; he’s Methodist. He looks like Grandad, and when I met him, he smelled a little bit like Grandad’s sweetest blend of tobacco, the one that reminds me of oranges and cloves.

  The week before, on the last Sunday before everything was shut down, Reverend Pope asked us all to remember in our prayers all those affected by this devastating flu. I sat there thinking that if God could split an entire sea in half so a million Hebrews could walk across dry land, couldn’t he stop a little germ? Which naturally led me to pondering again why God hadn’t saved Henry when we all prayed he would, knowing full well he could.

  “Why doesn’t God just make the flu go away?” I’d whispered to Mama that day in church, when the reverend was done praying. “He could if he wanted to.”

  “I don’t know why,” Mama had answered. She wasn’t looking at me, though. I don’t even know if she was talking to me. She was looking straight ahead at the bright altar where the choir stood in gold robes.

  It all seemed so simple to me, I remember thinking. If I were God, I’d put a stop to it. Just like that.

  But now as I step inside the quiet church, I suddenly realize sometimes things aren’t simple. Sometimes you do a bad thing for good reasons. Sometimes you do a good thing for bad reasons. The full weight of what I had done this morning seems to root me to the holy floor for a moment. I lied to Mama about not knowing which house I’d found the baby in and I didn’t tell her that a sick girl had been there with him. But what if I had? What if I had shown her the dead mother and the dying sister? What would it have changed? We wouldn’t have left the baby there. We still would have taken him. And he’d still need a home now. He would still need a family that could love him and take care of him and give him a place to grow up in. Why shouldn’t it be with us? He had been born in the part of the city where the poor lived with hardly anything to call their own. Even before the flu came, it was a sad, dirty place to live. Why shouldn’t we give him what every little baby deserves?

  As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see that there are a handful of other people in the sanctuary. They are scattered across the pews, bent over in prayer, doing what the reverend asked us to do. I ease my way to one of the rows and sit down. I look up at the altar, shimmering in the half-light, and I clasp my hands together. I keep my eyes open as I whisper my prayer to God.

  “I don’t know why you took Henry,” I say. “You shouldn’t have. He was just a baby. But you gave us this child now. We’re going to give him everything we would’ve given Henry. I won’t be mad at you anymore after this.”

  I start to say, “Amen,” but then I add that he needs to keep Willa safe as part of the deal. I close my eyes at that part because it seems the right thing to do.

  I get out of the pew and go to the front of the church. A door to the left of the big altar leads to a hallway where all the church offices are. A woman in an emerald green dress is coming through it just as I get close.

  “Can I help you?” she asks.

  “I need to find Mrs. Arnold. It’s important,” I reply.

  “I don’t know if she’s still here, but we can check in the kitchen.” She asks my name and I tell her.

  I follow the woman down a long hallway and then through the meeting hall to a large kitchen that smells like grease and soap and lemons. Two women in aprons are drying soup pots and a third woman is talking to a man holding a box of jars with towels in between to keep them from jostling. This third woman is tiny, like a little bird, but her voice and mannerisms are quick and purposeful, as though if she really did have a beak, she’d know how to poke you with it.

  “Those are all for Chinatown,” the birdlike woman says. “Make sure they understand the jars need to come back tonight so we can send them out again tomorrow.” She opens a door for the man, and sunlight spills into the room as he turns and heads outside with the box. “And do be sure not to let the jars knock into each other and break!” she calls out after him. The man grunts something I can’t hear.

  “Mrs. Arnold, I have a young lady here who needs to see you,” says the woman in the green dress.

  Mrs. Arnold the Bird turns to me.

  “This is Maggie Bright,” says the woman who’d brought me.

  “Good heavens!” Mrs. Arnold blinks at me wide-eyed. “Is your mother finished already? She didn’t have to send you over with the jars. Did your mother not remember that? I have Mr. Porter coming around later today for all of them.” She looks at my empty hands. “Where are your jars?”

  “We didn’t get the chance to finish handing them out,” I reply.

  “We? Did your mother take you with her?” Mrs. Arnold says.

  “I just kept her company while she walked down there.”

  “Well, what happened? Why couldn’t your mother deliver the soup? Were the jars broken? Did the driver break her jars?”

  “No,” I say. “I . . . We found a little baby near one of the houses on your list. His mother was dead inside his house. He’d been lying in his dirty diaper and crying for a long time. We brought him home with us because there was no one else there. Mama asked that I come tell you.”

  “A baby? Land sakes, is your mother home with him, then? Did you notify the health services people or the Red Cross or the police?”

  “I think my uncle told the police.”

  “Did you show them where you found him? Do they know there’s a dead mother there?”

  “I . . . uh . . . no. I came here to tell you.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear. Come on, then—let’s see if we can’t find someone who knows who the child belongs to.” She brushes past me and speaks to the woman in the green dress. “We need to find my driver, Heloise. I need to get back down to South Street lickety-split.” She motions for me to follow her.

  “I think he’s an orphan,” I say, rushing to keep up with them. “I don’t think he belongs to anyone.”
/>   “I assure you another orphan is the last thing the city needs right now,” Mrs. Arnold says, glancing back at me. “He’s bound to have other family. Is his house off South Street?”

  “It’s in an alley. I couldn’t remember which one when we went back.”

  Mrs. Arnold stops and I nearly run into her. “What do you mean, when you went back?”

  My heart skips a beat. “I mean, I’m the one who found the baby. I picked him up and took him to my mother, who was on another street visiting a lady on your list. We went back, but I couldn’t remember which alley it was. They all look alike.”

  She stares at me for a second. “You found him?”

  I nod.

  “And how do you know he was alone in the house? How do you know his mother is dead?”

  “Because I saw her.”

  “Go fetch Ambrose,” Mrs. Arnold says to Heloise, who is also listening to my story. She walks away quickly. Mrs. Arnold pulls me into her bird-wing arms and hugs me. “You poor dear. We’ll figure out which house it was. Not to worry.”

  “But . . . but I already tried. All the buildings look alike.”

  She releases me but keeps one arm around my shoulders as we move out of the kitchen into a smaller hallway. “Yes, but not all of them have a dead mother inside, right? It’s important we let the officials know which house it is so they can take care of the body.” She takes a coat and hat off a row of pegs where other hats and coats are hanging. “And if we can find that mother, then we can see if there’s anyone nearby who knows if there are other family members, like grandparents or siblings. Maybe there’s an aunt or uncle who can take the child.”

  But he’s ours! I want to yell. I want to scream it. You promised, I silently remind God even though I know deep down he hadn’t promised anything.

  I say nothing.

  “There are so many orphans in the city right now, and it’s such a pity,” Mrs. Arnold goes on as she places her hat on her head. “They certainly won’t know what to do with another one.”