As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  “Mama?” I kneel to touch her shoulder, shaking it just a little.

  She moans softly and raises a hand toward me, not for me to help her get up but in protest. She is trying to shoo me away.

  “Mama!” I say again, and I put my hand to her forehead. It is hot with fever. I see no sign of her mask anywhere about her. She had been caring for Willa without wearing it.

  “She was getting up to go to make me pancakes and she just fell over,” Willa whimpers.

  “Mama?” This comes from Maggie, hovering at the doorway with the baby in her arms.

  Mama opens her eyes and looks past me to Maggie. “Go,” Mama murmurs.

  “Run and get Uncle Fred!” I say to Maggie.

  Maggie turns away without a word and I hear her footfalls fast on the stairs.

  “Mama, can you sit up?” My heart is thumping in my chest, pounding away like it is caged and wishes to be free. Why hadn’t she worn her mask? How could she have been so careless? As I lean over Mama and try to wrap my arms around her, I realize I’m not wearing mine, either.

  “Go, go!” she says, fighting me off with weak limbs.

  “Why can’t she get up?” Willa whines.

  “She’s just resting a minute, Willa. Hush now and go back to sleep.”

  “I don’t want to go back to sleep. Make her get up!”

  “Please. Evelyn. Just go,” Mama whispers.

  “Uncle Fred is coming, and we’ll get you into your bed, Mama. Just lie still.” I stroke her forehead and she turns her head away from me.

  Far below us I hear Maggie pounding on Uncle Fred’s bedroom door. Her voice carries up the stairs.

  “Mama has fallen!”

  “Uncle Fred is coming,” I say to Mama, patting her shoulder gently.

  A moment later Uncle Fred is in the room wearing his bedclothes. He has a blue plaid kerchief in his hand that he ties around his nose and mouth as he comes toward me.

  “Move out of the way,” he says, and I scoot to the side, raising my arm so that the sleeve of my nightgown now covers the bottom half of my face.

  Uncle Fred hoists Mama into his arms as if she weighs nothing. He is out the door with her in a blink, and I scurry to follow him into her and Papa’s bedroom. Maggie, who has sprinted up the stairs behind Fred, stands helplessly at the top step watching while downstairs the baby starts to wail.

  Mama hasn’t been in her own bed for three nights, and all the covers and pillows are neatly in place. I yank back the coverlet, wool blanket, and sheet, sending the decorative pillows flying. Uncle Fred lays Mama on the mattress. She curls into a ball and begins to shiver. Uncle Fred pulls up the covers.

  “You’re bleeding,” Fred says, and his voice sounds strange. He is frowning at the little cut on Mama’s forehead. It is nothing compared to the flu now furious inside her and he knows it. We all do.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” she murmurs, and then she turns her head so she can see me. “Willa needs you right now, Evelyn. She’s past the worst of it, but she’s weak. She can’t be allowed to get up yet.”

  “I’ll take care of her, Mama. Don’t worry. You just rest.”

  “Don’t come in my room again,” she continues. “Do you hear me? You girls stay out.”

  “But, Mama . . .” I can’t finish. How can we stay away when she will need care just like Willa had? Does she really expect us to do nothing for her? It is an impossible request.

  Uncle Fred doesn’t like that idea, either. “I can’t be running up here all the day to look after you, Pauline. It’s like a madhouse downstairs.” Now Uncle Fred sounds as if he is about to cry. Maybe he is. Maybe after days and days of sorting out the dead by the dozens, some of whom were friends and neighbors, he is past the point of being able to shoulder the terrible weight of the situation. Maybe what he is really saying is, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  Suddenly I understand how his occupation had a measure of sacredness to it before the flu, almost as though Uncle Fred was as much a minister to the living as an embalmer to the dead. I’d seen the way he cared for the bodies when I happened upon him as he brought a cadaver in or carried one out. He treated them as if they could still see, hear, and feel. And I witnessed many times his care over the mourners who wept in his funeral parlor: how he spoke so gently to them about the glories of heaven, the gates of pearl, and the absence of pain and suffering and tears in that bright place where their loved ones had flown.

  The flu had taken all that from him. He was at the moment charged merely with getting the ghoulish victims into the ground as soon as he possibly could.

  “I don’t need you to look after me,” Mama replies, but she barely whispers this. “Just bring up the aspirin bottle and some water. And then leave me. All of you.”

  She closes her eyes and is asleep in an instant. I motion for Uncle Fred to follow me.

  “Maggie and I will find a way to take care of her,” I say, when we are on the landing outside Mama’s bedroom. “And we’ll be careful. You don’t need to worry about this.”

  But Uncle Fred points a finger at me and works his brow into one long line. “Don’t tell me what I don’t need to worry about,” he growls, but his voice is riddled with emotion, not anger. “You girls don’t have any idea what you’re dealing with.” He moves past me but turns his head in my direction when his foot is on the first stair. “You need to get that baby out of this house. He never should have been brought here. I’ve got more bodies piling up beyond the kitchen door than I know what to do with and you girls bring home a baby!”

  Deep down I know he is probably right. I think I have known since the moment the child arrived and Willa was already sick that our house isn’t safe for a baby. But I shout something entirely different as Uncle Fred takes the first step. “What else could Maggie and Mama have done?” I say.

  He starts down the rest of the staircase and I follow. Maggie is at the bottom step with the crying baby in her arms, a look of dread on her face.

  She’d heard what we’d both said. The thought of sending the baby away is a crushing thought. He’s only been with us for four days, but already he has woven himself into my soul. Maggie’s, too. He is, at this moment, our only thread of evidence that the entire world isn’t collapsing into itself in ruins. This child is perfect and beautiful and innocent and fully alive. In the middle of all the death surrounding us, he seems our last grip on life.

  As Uncle Fred passes Maggie at the foot of the stairs, he again says, this time to Maggie, that the baby needs to go.

  “But the orphanages are full!” Maggie protests.

  “That’s not my problem,” he says as he heads toward the small hallway that leads to his rooms. “This is a funeral home. And we’re in the middle of a plague.”

  “But he has nowhere to go,” Maggie implores as she follows him, with me right behind her.

  Uncle Fred stops and turns to us. “This is not the place for an infant,” he shouts. He sounds mad, but I see the shimmer of tears in his eyes. “You know it’s not.”

  He is right, he is right, the voice of reason whispers to me.

  “But he has nowhere to go,” Maggie says again, her voice softer this time. She, too, is on the verge of tears. Uncle Fred doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have an answer for any of our problems. A second later he turns for his bedroom. He closes the door, no doubt to dress for another appalling day in a funeral parlor that is more of a mausoleum now than anything else.

  My insides feel like they are being pulled in all directions. Our house, filled with the dead and now the flu itself living here, clearly is unsafe for the baby. But are there completely safe places anymore? And who else can take a helpless orphaned child? Dora Sutcliff could probably care for him for a little while, but she already said she didn’t think she could care for a baby along with Charlie. The thought of handing this child over to some stra
nger—even only temporarily—fills me with dismay.

  Maggie looks at me with pleading eyes.

  “We can’t just think about what we want,” I tell her, knowing what I will have to do. I will have to go across the street and beg Dora to take him.

  I brush past my sister to go into the kitchen and start warming the milk. “Maybe Mrs. Sutcliff should take him for a while,” I say as I take a bottle off the draining towel.

  “I don’t want her to,” Maggie mutters.

  The baby is now fully distressed at the delay in getting his breakfast. Maggie is cuddling him close and bouncing up and down to distract him. “We can keep him safe here. I won’t take him upstairs anymore. At all. I’ll sleep on the sitting room sofa. I won’t take him anywhere near Mama and Willa. Or Uncle Fred’s bodies. I can keep him safe!”

  I pour the milk in the pan and say nothing. I don’t tell her that no one can guarantee anyone’s safety. Not the way death is swarming this city, this house. We can only do the best that we can at the moment we can do it.

  When the bottle is ready, I hand it to Maggie and she takes the baby into the sitting room to curl up in Uncle Fred’s big armchair and feed him.

  I fix oatmeal for Willa, of which she eats only half while telling me she wanted pancakes. I upright her fallen bedside table, pocket the bottle of aspirin, which had fallen off it, and pick up the pieces of the broken cup. I help her to the toilet and then tuck her back into bed. I assure her that Mama is resting and I tell her that when she is all better Maggie will show her the sweet little baby we are taking care of. She then drifts off to sleep.

  I leave Willa and return to the kitchen. I pour cool water into a basin, grab some cotton wool, and put on my mask before heading back upstairs. When I step into her room Mama is sleeping, which I’m glad of because she can’t command me to leave. But it also means she isn’t awake to take the aspirin. I set the bottle on her bedside table.

  I sponge away the bit of dried blood on her forehead and then I sit with her for a long while, cooling her fever with the compress, just as I had done with Willa. And just like Willa’s, her fevered skin heats the cool cloth with terrifying rapidity. This flu is like Goliath—enormous and evil and strong—and I am like David but without a slingshot, without a stone. I have only the desire to fight it and no weapon. Mama moans as if to tell me my observations are correct.

  Ours is not a safe house.

  I rise, wash my hands in the upstairs bathroom, and then head downstairs, grabbing my cape off the hook by the front door.

  Maggie, playing on the parlor floor with the baby, calls out to ask where I am going.

  I don’t answer her.

  I yank open the door and run across the street. Dora Sutcliff answers the bell looking like she hasn’t slept in a month. Her clothes are rumpled, her hair askew, and her eyes are shadowed by dark circles.

  In tears she tells me she cannot take the baby.

  Charlie has the flu.

  CHAPTER 32

  Pauline

  In my dream, I am back home in Quakertown. I am young again. Seventeen. Thomas Bright, the son of the cigar maker, is looking at me from across the straw-strewn dance floor.

  I know him from school and church socials and from the times his family has occasionally come to my parents’ restaurant. He is nice-looking. Tall. Taller than his three brothers even though he’s the youngest by five years. I’ve seen him staring at me before. He doesn’t stare at any of the other girls, only me. And that makes my heart pound a little. My friend Carrie whispers to me that I’m probably going to have to be the one to ask him to dance because everyone knows he’s too shy and quiet to come over and ask himself. She says that because she thinks I won’t do it. But I do. I walk over to Thomas Bright. And his eyes grow wider with every step I take toward him.

  “Are you going to or aren’t you?” I say when I reach his side of the barn. I look down at my clothes and I see that I’m wearing a yellow dress with tiny white flowers all over it. It’s the one I saw in a store window in Allentown and that Mama said was too expensive.

  “Am I what?” Thomas Bright says, and when I look up again, I see that he is also more handsome than his brothers.

  “Are you going to ask me to dance?”

  “If . . . if I did, would you say yes?” he asks.

  “Ask me and see.”

  He smiles at me and says, “Will you marry me, Pauline?”

  I look down at my clothes again, and I’m wearing a creamy white dress with lace trim and pearl buttons. The one I bought in Philadelphia. I have a bouquet of asters and mountain laurel in my hands. We’re not in the barn anymore; we’re in the Quakertown Community Church and Mama is sitting in the front pew with my daddy. She is dabbing her eyes with a pale violet handkerchief.

  I look up at Thomas and I say, “I will.”

  He kisses me and when his lips come away from mine I tell him Willa is going to live.

  “Oh!” he says.

  He is looking away from me now, at something in the distance.

  “Here it comes,” he says.

  And then I am awake and my body is ablaze.

  CHAPTER 33

  Willa

  I’m not allowed to get out of bed yet, but at least Maggie let me see the baby. She brought him to my bedroom door and let me look at him, but she didn’t think it was a good idea to let him get too close to me. He can’t come into my room until it’s for certain the flu from Spain isn’t inside me anymore.

  I had the flu for three days, but I don’t remember much about them. I remember looking at Evie’s flower book on the first day and then feeling really bad and lying in my bed, hot and cold at the same time and wishing I could just disappear. Then the flu left me yesterday, but it made me sleepy. Seems like all I do is take naps. I am tired of naps.

  That sounds like a funny joke.

  I must do whatever Evie says because she’s in charge while Mama’s sick. Mama has the flu now, too. Evie’s taking care of me and Mama. Maggie is taking care of the baby. It’s better for the baby if one of my sisters takes care of Mama and the other one takes care of him. Maggie probably got the baby because she found him. He’s an orphan. That means his mama and papa are dead. Maggie says we might get to keep him because he needs a family and we have the room.

  “I told Mama I like the name Alex,” I said to Maggie, when she was standing there at the door with the baby so I could get a look at him.

  “Alexander was Henry’s middle name,” Maggie said, and I wasn’t sure if that meant she liked the name Alex or didn’t.

  “But we would call him Alex.”

  She just nodded. It was a nod that said she’d heard me, not that the baby’s name is now Alex. “We’ll see,” she said a second later.

  The baby smiled at me from the door. He’s got brown hair and dark eyes—not like Henry—but he’s still sweet as can be. I wanted to hold him and Maggie said soon. He was wearing one of Henry’s outfits. I remembered it was the one Grandma Adler had made.

  “Does Mama know he’s wearing Henry’s clothes?” I said.

  “She does,” Maggie answered.

  I wanted to see Mama then. I missed her. She had promised me pancakes with blackberry syrup.

  “I want to see her.” I started to get out of bed.

  “Not right now, Willa.” Maggie started to rush into the room even though she still had Baby Alex in her arms.

  But I was all woozy and I had to plop back down onto my pillows.

  “You’re not well enough yet.” Maggie had stopped halfway to my bed. “You need rest right now. And so does Mama. Promise you won’t try to go to her room alone, Willa.”

  Well, I hadn’t thought of that yet, but I probably would have.

  “Willa?”

  I was thinking about it.

  “Willa!”

  “What
?”

  “Promise me.”

  But I wasn’t going to promise her. “I’m tired.” I rolled over so my back was to her.

  “Mama wants you to stay in bed and rest,” Maggie said a second later.

  Baby Alex said, “Goo.”

  “I bet Mama wants you to make us pancakes with blackberry syrup,” I said.

  “Stay in your bed and I will.”

  She left without me having to promise anything.

  CHAPTER 34

  Maggie

  It’s the fourth day since Mama came down with the flu. Today she will start to feel better. This is the day when Willa woke up with cool skin and clear eyes. Today will be different. I already feel like it will be.

  I’ve been sleeping in the sitting room with Baby Alex to avoid the stairs and the second floor. Mama’s bedroom is right above me and I heard her coughing all through the hours of the night.

  But last night was still only the third full day. Today is the fourth day and today will be different.

  Uncle Fred heard Mama last night, too.

  I heard him go up to her room twice while we were all trying to sleep. The second time he said aloud to the whole house as he climbed the stairs that we girls and Mama should have been allowed to go to Quakertown when she asked. Then early this morning, when the sun was just barely up, I heard him on the telephone to Fort Meade. He said they must let Papa come home. It’s an emergency.

  It doesn’t feel like an emergency. It just feels like the fourth day. And it’s quiet now. Mama is asleep. Evie, too, I hope.

  Baby Alex slept through it all, and now he’s sucking on a bottle and staring up at me.

  Willa started calling him Alex, short for Alexander. Alexander suits him. I think Mama will like that name. She and Papa had given it to Henry for a middle name, so she must’ve liked it enough for that. Alex needed a name. We couldn’t just keep calling him “the baby,” as though he were a thing like the house or the war or the flu. So that’s what it will be.