She is gone. Mama is dead. The flu took her just like it wanted to take Willa. Just like it took Alex’s mother and Mrs. Landry and thousands upon thousands of others.
Why, if it could let Willa go, did it not do the same for Mama? Why does it choose to take some and not others? Why doesn’t it just kill us all? I am not asking for the scientific reasons. I know those. I don’t want the medical reasons. I want to know the real reasons.
We were all in the sitting room when Papa came down the stairs several hours after we were told to say our farewells. Uncle Fred was standing by the window, looking out into the darkness. I was on the sofa and Willa was asleep with her head in my lap. Maggie had Alex in her arms, and she was singing to him even though he was asleep. When Papa stepped into the room, she stopped.
He didn’t have to say anything. We knew. Mama had left us. I started to cry and Willa stirred on my lap but didn’t wake.
“I’ll take care of her,” Uncle Fred said a minute later, his voice soft and gruff at the same time.
Papa shook his head. “No. I want to.”
“Let me do her hair,” Maggie said, and all of us looked at her.
“Maggie,” Papa said.
“Please. I want to do her hair!” Maggie said, louder this time, and Alex whimpered in her arms. “Not you, Papa. Not Uncle Fred. Me. Please?”
“I don’t think—” Uncle Fred began, but Papa cut him off.
“Let her do it, Fred.”
Uncle Fred was quiet for a moment. “You want to take her to Quakertown when we’re finished?” he said to Papa.
“Pauline stays here,” Papa said. “Her home is here. With us.” His eyes were rimmed with tears of grief but also anger.
I thought maybe he would gather us all in a wide embrace and we’d cry together for a little while, but Papa just turned and left the room. I think he wanted to be alone to cry, maybe because he wanted to be strong for us. Maybe because he doesn’t like crying in front of people.
Or maybe it was because he wanted to punish Grandma and Grandpa Adler by burying Mama here with us instead of there with them, and he wanted to be alone with those dark thoughts.
When he left, Maggie bolted out of the chair she’d been sitting in. She ran up the stairs with Alex, all the way to the top of the house and her room. Her door slammed shut. Uncle Fred turned to me. He looked so very tired.
“It’s late. You should both be in bed,” he said, nodding to Willa in my lap.
“Do you really want to talk about shoulds?” I snapped. I regretted those disrespectful words the second I spoke them. But I was seething inside. Mama should be alive. That was a should I was willing to talk about!
But I couldn’t trust myself to speak again. Uncle Fred had been so kind to me in so many ways, not the least of which was paying for my schooling and letting me—even encouraging me to—read his many books whenever I wanted. I should have said I was sorry. But I didn’t. He set his pipe in its little tray on the table by the bay window.
“I’m sorry, Evelyn. Do whatever you need to. Stay here as long as you like,” he said softly. He walked away from me, into the foyer and toward the little hallway that led to his rooms. He coughed a few times on the way to his bedroom.
Willa opened her eyes and squinted up at me. “Is it morning?”
“Shhh. No. It isn’t.”
She settled back to sleep and I let my head fall against the back of the sofa. I hadn’t the strength to climb the stairs. I hadn’t the strength to do anything.
• • •
I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I must have dropped off at some point. The next thing I know the room is suddenly bathed in ghostly light from the rising sun outside the windows.
I ease myself away from Willa and head into the kitchen. Papa is sitting at the table with a whiskey bottle and a coffee cup. The door to the funeral parlor is ajar. He’d been back there already, but I don’t want him to do anything to Mama just yet. I look at him and I’m ready to tell him it is too soon. She’s only been dead a few hours. It is too soon.
He meets my gaze and then nods toward the half-open door that leads to the funeral rooms. “Roland was just here,” he says, his voice void of strength. “Charlie Sutcliff died last night, too.”
I feel for the back of a kitchen chair and close my eyes against the assault of those words. It is too much. Too much.
When I open my eyes, I see that Papa has brought the morning paper in and set it on the table. A skinny column of type on the bottom of the front page announces the influenza is abating. The number of cases being reported is at last decreasing, and not just in Philadelphia, but elsewhere, too. But like the monster it is, the flu is madly grabbing for its last victims as it pulls away like a tidal wave headed back out to sea.
“Is Uncle Fred up?” Papa says tonelessly.
“I don’t think so.”
Papa takes a drink from his cup, grimaces as he swallows, and then sets it down. “He and I need to get started.” He looks up at me.
I know what he is saying. Mama needs to be brought down and made ready for her burial.
I shudder for a moment at the thought of this, but then I remember Maggie will fix Mama’s hair and cover the awful splotching on her skin and apply rouge to her cheeks and color to her gray lips, such that when I see my mother for the last time, she will look like herself and not the phantom I saw last night.
“I’ll go see if he’s awake,” I reply.
He nods. “I can tell him about Charlie. You don’t have to.”
“All right.”
I make my way to Uncle Fred’s bedroom, feeling numb. I hear no sounds from the other side of his door. I knock lightly.
“Uncle Fred? It’s Evie. Are you awake?”
I receive no response.
I knock again, a bit louder. “Uncle Fred?”
Nothing.
I open the door a crack. “Uncle Fred. It’s Evie.”
I peek around the door. Uncle Fred is still in his bed, eyes closed, his skin a dull gray.
“Uncle Fred?” I hear a tremor of fear in my voice. He is not moving. There is no rise and fall of his chest. He is as still as stone.
For a second I can only stand there in disbelief.
And then my feet carry me to his bedside and my hand, seemingly of its own will, reaches out to touch his face.
It is cold to my touch.
I run back to the kitchen and Papa turns from the sink where he is rinsing out his cup.
“What is it?” he says.
I can barely squeak out the words. “Uncle Fred is . . . He’s gone.”
Papa doesn’t understand. He thinks Fred has left the house. “Gone where?”
“He’s dead, Papa!”
My father brushes past me and I follow him to Uncle Fred’s bedroom.
Papa calls Fred’s name, feels for his pulse, bends down to listen for the sound of a beating heart.
But there is no pulse, and Uncle Fred’s heart is not beating.
“What happened? Was it the flu?” I ask, remembering how he coughed last night on his way to his bedroom.
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Papa says in a shallow voice I’ve never heard from him before. “I don’t know. He was old. He was exhausted. Perhaps it was all those things. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I lean into my papa and put my arm around him, much like he might have done for me. He looks so empty and weak as he stands there staring at Uncle Fred, and it’s as though if I don’t hang on to him, he might disappear like a vapor. My father loved my mother. Deeply. They were modest and quiet about their love for each other in front of other people, but I could see the depth of their affection for each other in so many little ways, even in the way they held hands when grace was said at suppertime. And Uncle Fred had been as kind to Papa as Grandad—his own father—p
erhaps even more so. And now both of these people had been taken from him.
And from me. My father seems to realize this at the same moment, and his arm comes around my middle like mine is around his. It’s like we are each holding the other up.
We stand silent that way for a moment. I can see in Papa’s dazed expression that it has not yet occurred to him that the funeral business, the house, everything that Uncle Fred owned, is now his. Or maybe the dazed expression is there because this thought has occurred to him, and that now Mama won’t be here to share in the joy and responsibility of that ownership.
“I’ll go get Roland to help me,” Papa finally says. “Close the door.”
Papa leaves me to fetch our neighbor.
After my father is gone, I stand over Uncle Fred’s body, serenely posed in the guise of sleep. “I’m sorry I was short with you last night,” I whisper to him. “I should’ve said so when I had the chance. Please forgive me.”
I begin to cry for him, for Mama, for Charlie, and for every single future moment they should have all been granted.
Death doesn’t ever look at shoulds, though, does it? Death looks at nothing. It just does what it’s meant to do.
CHAPTER 37
Willa
When I woke up this morning, I found out Mama had gone to be with Henry.
I got very angry when Papa told me this. I was already not in a good mood because I’d woken up on the sitting room sofa and nobody was around, and when I tried to get up, I fell. Evie and Papa heard me and came into the room. That was when Papa sat me on the sofa and told me Mama isn’t with us anymore. She is in heaven with the angels. And Henry.
I don’t like it one bit that Mama is with the angels. I know about heaven. I know if you go to heaven you don’t ever come back to earth. Ever.
Mama is supposed to be here. Mothers aren’t supposed to leave their children. Doesn’t she know that?
Papa was sitting next to me. In front of us was an empty candy dish on a table. I grabbed it and threw it as hard as I could and it broke into a thousand pieces. I wanted Papa or Evie to yell at me for doing that because that’s what grown-ups are supposed to do. They were both right there and neither one did. And that scared me a little. I had my eye on the china ballet dancer on the end table next to me and I was about to grab it and hurl it, too, when Papa put his hand over mine. He didn’t slap it like I wanted him to; he just covered it.
“Breaking things won’t bring her back,” Papa said.
“What will?” I said.
He pulled me into his arms but didn’t answer me.
Evie sat down on the sofa next to us and put her head in her hands.
“I don’t want her to be in heaven with Henry. I want her here,” I said.
Papa held me tighter and still said nothing.
I heard creaking on the stairs and for just a second I thought Papa and Evie were wrong about everything. I thought Mama was coming down the stairs and she was going to come into the room and say she’d only been fooling.
But it was Maggie with Baby Alex. She had his blanket and a diaper and some toys in her arms, too. And a bottle, half-empty. Maggie’s hair was pulled back tight away from her face, and the mask she wears when she goes outside was tied loose around her neck.
Evie looked up when they came into the room. She didn’t say anything. She just held out her arms and Maggie walked over and put Alex on Evie’s lap. Then Maggie set down all the baby things on the rug by the hearth.
Papa leaned away from me but kept one arm around my shoulders. “We need your help for a little while this morning, Willa. Maggie is going to be with me in the funeral parlor. Can you help Evie look after Baby Alex for a few minutes? Would you do that?”
I looked over at Alex. He has the name I’d wanted him to have. He grinned at me. I turned from him to face Papa again because everything else about this day was starting out wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Why does Maggie get to go in the funeral rooms with you?” I said. “Maggie isn’t supposed to be in there now. Only Uncle Fred.”
“I need her help.”
“Uncle Fred won’t let her go in there.”
Papa looked down at the floor and then up at me again. “Uncle Fred went to heaven last night, too, Willa. And Charlie across the street.”
None of this was making any sense. Why was this happening? I had the flu. I didn’t go to heaven. Why was everybody else?
Maybe I would, though. Maybe later today I would or the next day. Or maybe I’d wake up tomorrow and the whole house would be empty because Papa and Evie and Maggie and Alex would have all left for heaven without me.
“I don’t want to be here alone!”
Papa pulled me into his arms again. “You’re not alone. Evie will be right here. Maggie and I will just be in the other room.”
“Don’t go without me!”
“I’m not going anywhere without you. I just need to take care of Mama and Uncle Fred and Charlie. And Maggie is going to help me. Evie and Baby Alex will be right here with you.”
I knew what he meant then. He was taking Mama into the Elm Bonning Room.
“Is Mama a dead body?” I could barely say those words. But I had to know.
“No,” Maggie answered before Papa could say anything. “You can come and see her when we’re done, and I’ll show you that she’s not.”
Evie looked up at Papa like she wasn’t sure Maggie had given me the right answer.
“That’s right,” Papa said, so I guess she had. “When we’re done, we’ll show you.”
“Uncle Fred and Charlie, too?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Evie laid Alex on the blanket by the hearth, and Papa stoked the fire that had gone out. I lay back down on the sofa, tired already. Then Papa and Maggie left. Evie went out of the room for a minute, too, but it was just to get a broom and a dustpan. When she came back, she swept up all the pieces of the candy dish.
You can’t even tell that I threw it unless you notice the empty spot on the table, and that it looks like something that belonged there is gone.
CHAPTER 38
Maggie
Papa and Roland Sutcliff move the other bodies that were already in the embalming room into the casket closet, and they lay out Mama, Charlie, and Uncle Fred, side by side by side on three tables. While they are doing this, I fetch Uncle Fred’s church clothes out of his wardrobe and Mama’s prettiest dress—the white lace one with yellow ribbons. Before Roland Sutcliff returns home, he leaves Charlie’s best suit with us. Papa tells him that Mama, Uncle Fred, and Charlie are going to be honored the way the deceased used to be, before the flu.
The city has said there can be no more public funerals, no more viewings, no more careful readying for satin-lined caskets.
Remove the dead as quickly as possible from your homes and get them into the ground. That’s what the city leaflets said.
But that’s not what we’re going to do for Mama, Charlie, and Uncle Fred.
“When we’re all done here, we’ll take them into the parlor,” Papa says. “And we’ll honor them.”
Roland Sutcliff nods and says nothing. But in his eyes I see that he likes this idea very much. When he leaves, Papa tells me he’s not going to use the tank with the foul-smelling formalin. He’s not going to make the cuts and insert the tubes. He is going to leave the blood inside Mama, Uncle Fred, and Charlie because they will be buried this very day.
I reach for Mama’s apron on a hook, but Papa lays a hand on my arm.
“I need you to leave me while I dress them in their burial clothes. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for you to come back.”
I blush slightly and wish I could rub the color out. I won’t look at Uncle Fred’s and Charlie’s private parts, if that’s what he’s worried about. I can look away. “I’m thirteen,” I begin, but Papa
cuts me off.
“It’s not that, Maggie. Their bodies are becoming stiff. You’ll think I’m being too rough with them. I don’t want you to see what I might have to do.”
I open my mouth to protest that I am not afraid of what happens in the embalming room. I’ve never been afraid. But I don’t get the chance to say this.
“Do as I say, Mags. Now.”
I turn for the kitchen.
I stand at the sink for what seems like a long time. I can hear Evie reading a story to Willa in the sitting room, and Alex cooing. I imagine he is cuddled against Evie’s chest as she reads, trying to make sense of the pictures in the book she holds.
When Papa finally calls for me to come back, he looks tired and worn out even with half his face covered behind his mask. It’s as if the effort to make the bodies obey has exhausted him. Mama and Uncle Fred and Charlie are now lying clothed on the tables. Their nightclothes are in a heap in the corner, ready to be burned, no doubt. The vents in the room are fully open and the room is chilled like it’s a huge icebox.
This time when I reach for the apron, Papa doesn’t stop me. I pull my mask out of my skirt pocket, tie it on, and join Papa at Mama’s side.
“Are you sure you want to be here?” he asks in a weary voice.
“I do. I know what to do, Papa. I know how to do the hair and cosmetics. I watched her do it a dozen times before the flu came. I know how to do it. I want to do it. I can take care of Charlie and Uncle Fred, too.”
He nods and then reaches for the canister of flesh-colored paste on a cart with all the other items he uses to fix and preserve the bodies. There are horrible berry-colored stains on Charlie’s and Mama’s faces. The flu somehow did that to them. I watch Papa for a few moments as he works to cover up the stains on Mama and when I ask if I can take care of Charlie, he extends the canister to me. I use a little wooden stick to get the paste out and then I rub it onto Charlie’s face and hands with a small sponge, the way I saw Mama do it. The skin on his face feels strange under the sponge, like a mask made of cold leather.
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