As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

“We can take care of him,” I blurt.

  Mrs. Arnold stops fiddling with her hat pin. “Think so? Did your mother ask you to tell me that?”

  I shrug like it is the most natural thing in the world for the Brights to take in a stranger’s child. “We have the room. It’s a big house. And Mama loves babies. We all do.”

  “Well, that would be very nice if you could, I’m sure. I can put your mother in touch with the authorities who are looking for foster homes for all the children without parents now. You wouldn’t believe how dire it is.”

  A man in a gray suit appears in the hallway. “Ah, Ambrose. There you are,” Mrs. Arnold says. “This young lady and I need to go to South Street.” Then she turns to me. “But first we will stop at the funeral home. I want to see this child, and we need to let your mother know where we are going.”

  Mrs. Arnold’s automobile is a shiny red Ford that probably sits in a carriage house all the time. Either that or Mr. Ambrose is polishing it every second when he isn’t behind the steering wheel. Every inch of it gleams.

  It doesn’t take long to get to the funeral home. As we pull up I wonder if Mrs. Arnold will take the baby away from us if she thinks Willa has the flu. I frantically search my mind for a good reason as to why she doesn’t need to see my mother as we climb the front steps. I don’t want her to know that Mama is upstairs nursing my sick sister.

  We step inside the house, which is as quiet as a library. I lead Mrs. Arnold to the sitting room and am about to excuse myself to run upstairs to my room to get Evie and the baby when I see Evie rise from Uncle Fred’s big armchair in the corner. The baby is swaddled in her arms, and his sweet face looks like that of an angel.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Arnold says softly. “What a little cherub. Poor, sweet thing.”

  Evie looks at me.

  “Mrs. Arnold is going to take me back to South Street to see if I can find the house where the baby was,” I say.

  “Of course.” Evie’s face is expressionless. I can’t tell what she is thinking.

  “Yes, I’ve a driver, and we can get down there and back again in good time,” Mrs. Arnold says, gazing adoringly at the baby. “I’m sure we’ll find the place where he lived.”

  “I see.” Evie is still looking at me with that blank face.

  Mrs. Arnold glances up from the baby, and her gaze spins around the room. “And where is your mother, Maggie? I would like to ask her permission to take you back there.”

  “My mother?” I echo her, sounding like a child.

  “Yes. Is she upstairs? Can you fetch her for me?”

  Evie turns at last from me. “Our mother is indisposed at the moment. But Maggie can get our uncle Fred for you, instead, although he’s very busy in the back as you can imagine. Perhaps I can just relay the message to Mama?”

  Mrs. Arnold thinks on this for only a second. “All right, then. Tell her we will be back before dark.”

  I don’t want to stare in admiration at Evie as we leave, but I feel certain that she, too, didn’t want Mrs. Arnold snatching away the baby because of Willa being sick. My sister had come up with the perfect excuse for why Mrs. Arnold couldn’t speak to Mama. Mama is indisposed. Whatever that means.

  It takes a few minutes to get to South Street, but it isn’t nearly enough time to figure out how I am going to avoid running into someone who knows the baby and his dead mother and sister. Mrs. Arnold asks which of the four addresses on the list Mama was at when I found the baby, and I say it was the first one. She tells Ambrose to turn up the street past the barbershop and soon we are at the curb where I’d seen that cat.

  “All right, then,” Mrs. Arnold says. “Which direction from here?”

  Once you start getting the hang of not telling the truth, it not only gets easier, but you can think up lies quicker. I no sooner open my mouth to answer her than I realize all I have to say is that I walked up the street, not down it. Just up from that first building that Mama went into are more alleys, on both sides of the street.

  “It was up that way,” I say, “but it’s hard to remember which alley it was.”

  Mrs. Arnold pats my arm. “Take the first one to the right, Ambrose,” she says. He does and we stop at the first building on the corner. It might have been the one where I found the baby, except it isn’t.

  “Perhaps this one?” she says.

  And I say, “Maybe.”

  “You said you heard the baby from the street, so it couldn’t have been farther up the alley than this, right?”

  I can only nod.

  A man comes out of the building then and Mrs. Arnold pokes her head out the car window. “You there! Sir! Might I have a word?”

  The man just stands there, like he can’t quite believe she spoke to him. He has bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache. He holds a faded tweed cap in his hands, thready in places.

  “Yes. Might I have a word? It will only take a moment.”

  The man comes toward the car cautiously.

  “Do you happen to know if there is a young mother in your building sick with the flu? A mother with a young baby? On the first floor?”

  He just blinks and stares.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Little.” It sounds like leetle.

  Mrs. Arnold repeats her questions slowly.

  “Yes. Many sick inside,” the man answers.

  “A young mother with a baby, though. We’re looking for a young mother with a baby. And the baby’s father.”

  “I—not—marry,” the man says, like he just learned those three words that minute.

  “No, I don’t mean you. I mean, is there a young mother on the first floor who has the flu?”

  “Many sick for flu. Many. I have job. Good-bye.” The man turns and walks away, fitting the cap to his head.

  Mrs. Arnold sighs loudly and looks at me. “Wait here.”

  She gets out of the car, goes inside the building, and is gone for a few minutes. Then she comes back out. “I don’t think this is the building where you found him. There are two families on the first floor who have no idea what I’m talking about. What about that building across the street?”

  I look at the shabby structure on the other side of the car. “Maybe.” I start to get out, but she tells me to stay put.

  “The flu is worse here now than it was a few days ago. Let me go ask,” she says. “I don’t want you catching anything.”

  I sit and wait, knowing she won’t meet with success. Four more little alleys and eight more hellish row houses, and Mrs. Arnold is weary of the search and clearly peeved at me. How can I not remember a place I had been to only hours before?

  “It was just so terrible,” I say. After all the lies, it is nice to finally speak the truth. “His mother was all gray and bloody. Her eyes were stuck wide open.”

  “All right, all right,” Mrs. Arnold says soothingly as she gets back into her car. “Take us back, Ambrose. We can try again tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Arnold’s driver pulls up in front of Bright Funeral Home as the sun is setting. She tells me she’ll be by in the morning after breakfast and that this time she wants to talk to Mama about our being able to take care of the child until other family members can be found.

  She drops me off and I go inside. Mrs. Sutcliff is sitting in our kitchen with a cotton mask over her nose and mouth and the baby in her arms. I quickly learn she stopped by to see if I’d heard anything new from Jamie in the last few days and was told about our finding the child. Mrs. Sutcliff then offered to run to the store for Evie to get the things we needed to care for him. New baby bottles are now boiling on the stove, and Evie is minding them with a pair of metal tongs.

  “Did you find the place?” Evie asks, but I’m sure she already knows we didn’t.

  I shake my head.

  “Then it’s a miracle you were there at just the right time, Ma
ggie,” Mrs. Sutcliff says. “Just think what could have happened if you hadn’t come across him. What a sweet little boy he is. Such a darling, sweet little boy.” Tears make her eyelids turn silver.

  “Mrs. Arnold wants to try again tomorrow,” I say. “She also wants to talk to Mama about us keeping him.”

  “Keeping him?” Evie says. “You mean for now.”

  “Maybe for always. She says there are already too many orphans.”

  “I heard that, too,” Dora Sutcliff says. “The city is begging people to take them. They can’t find enough families.”

  Evie withdraws one of the bottles and sets it down on a dish towel laid out on the countertop next to the stove. “But this baby might not be an orphan. He might have other family.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?” I reply.

  “Or what if it’s just that no one can find them?” Evie looks up from the towel.

  “Then for heaven’s sake you should take him in,” Mrs. Sutcliff says. “I would if I didn’t have Charlie to look after.” She stands and hands the baby to me. “I need to go home and get supper going. And Charlie will be wondering what is taking me so long.”

  “We miss having Charlie over,” I say as I position the baby comfortably in my arms. I do miss Charlie. Seeing his mother reminds me how much. Charlie was always in a good mood, always listened to anything I had to say, was forever willing to try my ideas for how to teach him things. And he would talk about Jamie without me having to ask about him. He would begin sentences with “One time, Jamie . . . ,” and then he’d finish with telling me how Jamie once caught a fish as big as a railroad tie or how Jamie once got a black eye playing stickball or about the time Jamie took Charlie to the circus and they sat so close to the front of the ring that they could nearly reach out and touch the elephants.

  “Yes, he misses coming here. But he’s not as careful as he should be, you know. And he seems to get sick more often than most children. I just can’t take the chance with what’s beyond that kitchen door. Listen, if you girls need anything else for the baby, you come tell me. And if your mother needs anything for Willa . . .”

  She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  “We’ll be fine, but thank you,” Evie says. “And thank you for going up to the store for me.”

  “Of course.” Dora Sutcliff caresses the baby’s cheek with a finger like he’s her own child. “So, you’ll let me know if you hear from Jamie, then?” she says to me, her brow wrinkled a bit.

  Jamie told me in one of his letters this past summer that sometimes it’s hard for him to find a suitable place to write. And sometimes there isn’t anything to say. He can’t tell me where he’s fighting or where his unit is headed or what they must do when they get there. I have been left to imagine what he’s doing and seeing. And what it’s like to be chased by the enemy and running from mortar shells and yellow gas that can kill you if you breathe too much of it.

  It occurs to me that finding the baby is already filling an empty spot inside where my concern for Jamie’s safety and my need to hear from him had been widening like a great hole in the ground.

  “Seems like such a long time since either of us has received a letter,” Mrs. Sutcliff continues, more to herself than me.

  “If I get one, I’ll bring it over,” I say.

  Mrs. Sutcliff bids us good-bye and sees herself out. The baby coos in my arms.

  Evie turns to the remaining bottles, which are knocking together in the furiously boiling water. She removes them one by one as I stand there holding the child in the failing light of day.

  CHAPTER 26

  Pauline

  No mother should ever have to hold her child in her arms, cold with fear that her baby is dying. I have already hovered in that terrible place. I made my truce there. I owe Death nothing. I should not have to remind that specter of this.

  This one is not yours, I’ve been repeating all day, while I sponge away Willa’s fever and soothe her thrashing. I have sensed her wanting to drift further and further away from me, and I have been pulling her back, pulling her back.

  This one is not yours.

  The hours I’ve spent in this room are already a blur, but I dare not leave Willa’s side. I must win this contest of wills. I must stay vigilant until Death slithers away completely.

  This one is not yours.

  Sometime in the afternoon Fred had come up the stairs. I heard his heavy footfalls, different from those of Evelyn and Maggie. He’d called out to me from the other side of the door.

  “Don’t come in,” I told him. “It’s not safe. Do you know if a doctor is coming?”

  “I called Dr. Boyd, a good friend of mine, and he said he’ll try his best to stop by this evening, but you know there’s no medicine for this, Pauline.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t do all that we can.” I placed a cool hand on Willa’s brow and she whimpered slightly. “It doesn’t mean we do nothing.”

  He’d hesitated a moment. “Yes.”

  “And the police? Did you telephone them about the baby?” I’d heard the infant earlier that afternoon. His cry for attention had woken an ache in my breasts that nearly felt like milk would start spilling from them. I had laid an arm across my chest to stop it, even though I knew there was nothing in my bosom to nourish a child. My milk had dried up months and months ago.

  “No one’s reported a missing child,” Fred replied. “But they said they’d make a note of it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Evelyn and Maggie are with him.”

  “And did Maggie tell Mrs. Arnold what happened?”

  “She went to the church earlier like you asked and then the two of them drove down to South Street in Mrs. Arnold’s car to see if Maggie would have better luck remembering which house it was. She got back a bit ago. They couldn’t find the house, though.” He sounded like he was baffled by the idea that a stranger’s baby was now staying in the house.

  From somewhere above me I heard the infant’s lusty wail for attention. Willa echoed it with a low whimper of her own.

  “I don’t know how long the baby will be with us and we need a few things,” I said. “Baby bottles, rice cereal. That kind of thing. Evelyn will know what to get. Can you give her some money?”

  “It’s already been taken care of. Don’t fret about that.”

  “Make sure the girls stay away from this room, Fred. I will only come out when I know no one is on the stairs. Tell Evelyn to fix me a tray later and then leave it outside the door. And I’ll need some broth for Willa.”

  I looked down at my youngest child, wanting her to open her eyes and tell me she doesn’t want broth. She wants ham loaf. Why can’t she have ham loaf?

  But Willa, with her eyes closed, was silent except for her labored breath.

  “All right,” Fred said. And then there had been a pause, before he said, “Shouldn’t I call the Red Cross so that Thomas can be notified?”

  A little dagger pierced my soul. “Notified of what?”

  “That . . . that Willa has the Spanish flu. Shouldn’t he be told?”

  My youngest child trembled slightly under my hand at that moment. Of my three girls, Willa is the one least likely to throw a punch in her defense. Evelyn can wisely reason her way out of trouble, and Maggie will simply plow past it, but Willa will make friends with an enemy before realizing it desires to harm her. I hadn’t wanted to admit aloud, in full hearing of my companion, that the flu that had already killed so many raged now inside her.

  “No, Fred. Willa is strong. She is brave,” I said, wanting my little girl to hear those words and be nourished by them. “Her papa will see her when the war is over and he comes home.”

  For several seconds there was no movement outside the door, and then I heard Fred taking the first step back down the stairs.

  I must have dozed after he left
, because twilight fills the room now and I hear far-off sounds of pots and pans in the kitchen.

  Willa is moaning softly in her sleep, a dreadful murmuring that I can almost not bear to hear.

  I start to sing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to fill the air around us with a sound other than that one. She quiets and my tears tap her coverlet like raindrops.

  CHAPTER 27

  Evelyn

  Uncle Fred’s friend Dr. Boyd is upstairs with Willa now, but I doubt he will suggest anything different than what Mama is already doing. He will probably tell her to just keep applying cool compresses for the fever. Give Willa aspirin. Smear Vick’s VapoRub on her chest. Get her to eat and drink. Pray. There is no magic pill for the Spanish influenza, though everyone wishes there was one. I was on the landing earlier to leave a tray for Mama and Willa. I could hear Willa’s strange new cough from behind the door. She sounded like an old woman and it scared me.

  “Is the baby all right?” Mama asked, her voice floating out to me from the tiny seam of space between door and frame. “Did he eat something? Did you take care of that rash?”

  “Yes. He’s sleeping with a full tummy,” I said. “We dressed him in a few things that were Henry’s. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  She paused only a second. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  The baby already looked and smelled so much better than he did when Mama and Maggie first brought him home. The diaper rash was not such an angry red anymore and he hadn’t howled when I changed him the second time. He even smiled and cooed at me at one point, though mostly what he had done today was sleep.

  “He’s resting quite comfortably now, Mama. Truly.”

  She thanked me and sent me away, not opening the door for her tray until I was on the bottom step.

  After his supper, Uncle Fred came into the sitting room while Maggie, the baby, and I were playing on the floor. He decided after lunch that with the baby here and Willa coming down with the sickness, he would start eating all his meals in the hallway off the kitchen. He doesn’t know if the flu that killed all the people he has been attending clings to his work clothes. He is taking no chances.