I survived.
CHAPTER 49
Willa
Piano music drifts up from the grate in the sidewalk, faint and airy, as if in a dream. Someone down there below the concrete is practicing. I know the song being played. It’s “What’ll I Do” by Irving Berlin. The grate where the music is coming from leads to a speakeasy far under the city street. A vent has been left open. I crouch on the metal slats and tilt my head toward the darkness while the city’s pace at three thirty in the afternoon swirls about me. Autos, trucks, carts, walkers, strollers, cyclists, and peddlers dash and scurry past. I doubt anyone else hears the music but me.
“What are you doing?” Howie says.
He is a classmate of mine at the academy that Evie and Maggie attended and that Papa has insisted I must also go to. He and I ride the same streetcar to get to class every day, but Howie is lucky. He doesn’t have brilliant older siblings who have gone to the school before him. All right, so only Evie is truly brilliant. But Maggie was no slouch. What she lacked in outright genius, she made up for in determination, or so I hear. My teachers, when they aren’t telling me to hush and pay attention, are probably still trying to figure out how to motivate me to study.
Howie is my age, freckled and pudgy, and he adores me. He moved to Philadelphia after the flu. Several years after.
I have no idea if my voice will carry into the shadows beyond the grate the same way the notes of the piano are floating up to me. But I open my mouth to sing, and I jump right in where the lyrics speak of there being only a photograph to tell my troubles to.
The piano stops. Whoever is playing it can hear me. I look up at Howie standing next to me, and I laugh.
“Willa! Come on,” Howie implores. “We shouldn’t be here!”
He looks about, half-panicked. There are dozens of people up and down the sidewalks, some in suits and fine dresses, some in weatherworn work clothes, and some—the beggars—in rags. Most haven’t given us a second glance. The vegetable vendor across the narrow street is scowling, however—she is big and red-faced and her disdain at my bending over the grate of a speakeasy that no one is supposed to know about but everyone does is as clear as glass. A man leaning up against the brick wall of the building next to the grate and puffing on a cigar is staring down at me, too. But he looks surprised, not disgusted.
The music starts up again, slow and tentative, inviting me to join in like a hopeful partner at a dance. It pauses, waits for me. So I sing the words about being alone with dreams that won’t come true. The man with the cigar takes a step toward us and Howie grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet and we dash off, the music of the piano falling away.
We run for several blocks before we stop, breathless, holding our sides. Howie looks behind to see if we’re being chased by the police or gangsters with machine guns or the woman with the cabbages. But no one is coming after us.
“What’d you do that for?” Howie says.
I flick back a curl. What a ridiculous question. Why does anyone do anything?
“Did you hear how that piano player waited for me to keep singing?” I reply instead.
“If my parents find out I was hanging around the door to that place . . .”
Howie doesn’t finish. I don’t know what his mother and father do to dole out punishments, but Howie just shakes his head back and forth like it’s just too terrible to contemplate. If Papa found out I was singing into the grate of a speakeasy, he’d give me a stern look and tell me that’s not acceptable behavior. He might extract a promise that I never do that again even though I’m not so good at keeping promises, even to him. And anyway, I could easily make a vow never to sing at the grate of that speakeasy again and uphold it. If I wanted to try my luck at another grate of another speakeasy, I wouldn’t have much trouble finding one. This is Philadelphia. Worse than New York and Chicago, if you ask Dora Sutcliff. I didn’t, by the way; she is just always ready to tell people that.
“But how would your parents find out?” I ask as we start to walk again, and the air in our lungs is now going in and out at the regular speed.
“What if someone saw us?”
“We were just listening at a grate.”
“You were singing down a grate! And not just any grate.” He leans in close to me. “Those places are illegal.”
He says the word illegal like it’s illegal to say it.
“It’s just what they sell that it is illegal,” I offer back.
“That’s what I mean.”
“No, you said the place is illegal.”
“It’s all illegal.”
“So your father doesn’t have any whiskey in your house?” I loop my arm through his, knowing my question will make him gasp. Howie’s father is a deacon at his church and a prominent businessman. It’s unthinkable that an upstanding, law-abiding gentleman such as he would have bootleg liquor in his house, except that it happens all the time. I bet even Papa has some in his back office.
“Of course not,” Howie sputters, turning about to see if anyone on the street is close enough to hear our conversation.
“I bet he does.”
“He does not,” he growls. “And I’ll kindly thank you not to suggest that he does.”
I laugh and kiss him on the cheek. “That’s you being kind, is it? I’d hate to see you being heartless.”
He is so flustered now he doesn’t know what to think. “I’m not sure I should be walking you home from the trolley stop anymore,” he says, but I don’t believe him.
“I completely understand,” I say as piously as I can. “But I do hope you change your mind. You are very handsome when you’re being stern. Good-bye, my dear Howie!”
I turn from him to continue walking on my own, knowing he is most likely fixed to the pavement, torn between running after me and stomping off in the direction of his own house.
“So, I’ll see you tomorrow?” he yells after me.
I turn to him and wave.
As I start to walk the last few blocks alone, I realize I don’t care so very much if Howie walks me home tomorrow. I’d like to swing by that grate again and listen and this time I’d rather he wasn’t beside me.
For a tiny moment there, I felt like I was the only person in the world besides that piano player. It was just me and the piano man and the music. And it was as if the piano man knew who I was, and what I’ve seen and done, and yet he wanted me to sing for him anyway.
That moment lasted only a few seconds, but I can still hear the echoes swirling inside me. When I get home, they will no doubt float away like feathers on the wind. Alex will want to play a game, Papa will want to know if I’ve schoolwork to do, Maggie will want help with supper or sweeping up flower petals in the funeral parlor. We’ve a cleaning lady now, but she comes only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. There’s always plenty to do when I get home from school. I know the spell will be broken when I open the door and go inside the house I both love and hate.
I do sometimes wonder if Mama would still be alive if we’d never come to live in that house. Papa says only God knows what would have happened if we’d stayed in Quakertown. She could have died from the flu there—people did, just not so many—or been in a terrible accident or who knows what else. We’re not like God, he says. We can’t know. We can’t live like we do know or should have known.
“She got the flu from me,” I told him once. And he said no, she did not. The flu came here all on its own like a plague of grasshoppers that had nothing to do with me. But I know the truth. I came down with it, and then she came down with it. I caught the flu from Flossie. Mama caught it from me.
The swirling echo of that moment with the piano man is starting to lift from me and I slow my pace to keep it if I can. When I get to the corner by the Weiss Bakery, I stop and look for the little white dog at the front window above the shop. Gretchen’s parents still have him, and because he’s
white, the color of his fur doesn’t tell you how old he is. I know dogs don’t live much past their twelfth or thirteenth birthdays. But I figure if Gretchen’s dog was two when we moved here, then he is only nine now. Only nine. Lots of dogs live to be older than nine. He sees me on the sidewalk looking up at him. I can’t hear him, but he is yapping fiercely while standing on his hind legs and with his front paws on the glass. And yet his little stub of a tail is wagging. He knows me now. I’ve been looking up at that window for years. I smile up at him and his little body trembles with the happy force of his barking.
If I stay too long, Gretchen’s parents will come to the window to see what the dog is so upset about, so I blow him a kiss and resume my slow stroll home.
Maybe Mr. Towlerton will be staying for supper tonight. That would make the approaching evening not so dreary. I like Maggie’s beau. Or maybe Evie will come home at a decent hour and I can get her to tell me about all the crazy people she looked after today. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories she tells when I’m able to pry them out of her.
Maybe Alex will want me to play the piano for him while he pretends to be an opera singer. It’s truly awful and hilarious when he tries to sound like a virtuoso. And maybe Papa will come in early from the funeral rooms and for once not look so sad and alone.
I start to hum “What’ll I Do” as I turn down our street. The words just fall off my lips like I wrote them myself because what I had before the flu is broken and cannot be mended.
CHAPTER 50
Maggie
The coffin is small and white with gold trim. Inside it is the body of a three-year-old girl who died of scarlet fever and whose hair I styled into corn silk curls held fast now by white satin bows.
She is such a little thing. Papa won’t need his hired man for this one. I will be able to help him move her.
Most of the time Papa relies on a fellow named Gordon Luddy, a man who delivers milk in the early mornings but who is free the rest of the day, to help him do what I cannot. Gordon helps Papa transport the caskets from the parlor to the hearse and assists him at the cemetery with getting the coffin to its place near the freshly dug hole in the ground. Gordon is not here yet, but it does not matter. I push the short casket on its cart down the hall to the rear entrance. I help Papa carry it down the four steps to the hearse’s opened back end so that he can deliver it to the church for the memorial and then to the cemetery. It is the eighth of September and the early afternoon is warm and humid as I push the hearse door closed.
“Don’t wait supper on me,” Papa says as he heads for the driver’s-side door. “And there will be plenty of people able to help me get the casket back into the hearse and out again at the cemetery. You don’t need to come down later.”
“All right.”
I watch him leave with the small casket and the little girl named Lucy inside it before I head back inside.
Preparing the very young for their funerals has been the hardest thing to get accustomed to since I’ve become Papa’s assistant. It is difficult to find a snippet of beauty in preparing a child or an infant for burial. The only word of solace I can whisper to these little ones as I cover up the pallor of death is that my mother and brother are there in heaven, that Mama is sweet and kind, and that her name is Pauline, so that if they want to, they can find her there.
“You don’t have to do this,” Papa had said when I told him two years ago that I wanted to be his official assistant.
I had been nearing my graduation from the academy, and Papa’s full-time apprentice at the time, a man named Wilbur with a pronounced lisp, had just gotten married and moved to Virginia to be closer to his new wife’s family. I’d never had the college aspirations that Evie did, and while I could easily have set my sights on a position behind the perfume counter at Wanamaker’s or courses at a secretarial school, those pursuits had never interested me. I was already doing the hair and makeup at the end of the preparation process, but Papa and Wilbur did the embalming and suturing and restoration work. They did all the important repairs. My contributions were nothing compared to what they did. I wanted to do more.
“But I want to. It’s what I want to do,” I’d said.
We had been going over the ledgers in the little office off his bedroom. He had been smoking a cigar from a box that Grandad had sent him. Business had been steady for us. More and more people had been discovering they much preferred the embalming of their loved ones to take place at the mortician’s place of business rather than the beloved deceased’s bedroom. And fewer people all the time had large parlors in their homes for viewings. We offered a homelike atmosphere for both, with all the up-to-date conveniences of a modern-day mortuary. Papa was officially a mortician now, not just an undertaker. He’d enrolled in a special school to become licensed in what he pretty much already knew how to do.
“It’s not the most cheerful room to work in, you know,” he’d replied. “The things we do and see . . .” He hadn’t finished the thought. He was right in that we saw our share of tragic circumstances, day in and day out. There were some cadavers Papa flat-out refused to let me view. The human body is amazing and wonderful but so delicate. And there are so many ways for a person to die, especially if the death has had something to do with a crime or gangsters. There had been more murders since Prohibition was enacted. A lot more. Papa said it was because when something is illegal but people still want it and will pay for it, there are other people who will do whatever it takes to provide it. They will even fight over who is going to be the supplier. They will kill to be the one who controls the supplies. Sometimes there is not even a body for Papa to embalm. Or not much of one.
“But it isn’t all sad, what we do. Part of it is needful,” I’d answered. “Part of it is . . . pleasant.”
He’d smiled as he stroked his chin. “Now, there’s a word we didn’t hear much in mortuary school.”
“But it is,” I’d replied. “It’s the only part of death we can control. The farewell.”
He’d puffed on his cigar, thinking on this.
“You have your own life to consider, Maggie,” he’d said a moment later. “Marriage, children.”
I hadn’t met Palmer yet, and my heart was still tender toward absent Jamie Sutcliff. I had written him many times at postal boxes provided to me by Dora. One in Missouri. One in Colorado. One in California. He had never written back. I’d finally stopped writing at that point even though I hadn’t forgotten about him. And as far as children went, I had Alex. He was my brother, true, but he was more than just my brother.
“I’m only seventeen, Papa,” I’d answered. And then to put him at ease about my future, “There’s still plenty of time for all that.”
He had tapped his cigar onto an ashtray, contemplating a thought that he then voiced. “Do your peers find it distasteful, what you do?”
After changing schools following Jamie’s return and then escape, I’d been surrounded by new classmates and had to make all new friends. Evie was there only the first year, and then she graduated early and was off to the university. The next two years at the academy, I had a circle of friends who enjoyed my company and I theirs, but I spent most of my after-school free time with Ruby, who still clung to me, even though we were no longer attending the same school. She never got over losing Sally. Ruby also never wanted to hear any details about what I did at the funeral home, which didn’t bother me because there were always plenty of other things for us to talk about. I hadn’t known what my academy classmates thought about what I did because I didn’t tell them and they didn’t ask if I helped my father in his business. It likely never occurred to them that I did.
So when Papa had asked me this, I’d said that my peers didn’t care, which hadn’t been a lie.
After I graduated from high school and Wilbur left, if Papa needed help lifting someone heavier than I could help him handle, he’d call for Roland Sutcliff to come
over or he’d wait for Gordon to finish his milk route to help him. There were—and are—plenty of times he and I could handle a body just fine.
Now, three years after high school, I help Papa with just about everything. Not with the embalming so much, but with the restoration work and helping families choose a casket and getting the flowers ready in the viewing parlor and sometimes just putting an arm around a grieving widow or mother or lover and letting her cry.
Occasionally, when I’ve an arm around someone in a half embrace, he or she will ask if I have ever lost someone. When I tell them I lost an infant brother when I was a child and that I said good-bye to my dear mother in that very room, they will invariably lean into me and cry a little harder. They will always later thank me for that excruciating moment. Always. This is something Gordon cannot do for them: stand beside them—in every sense of the phrase—in their loss and grief.
Palmer isn’t put off by my occupation. If he were, he’d say so. Palmer always says what he wants to say. But I know he sees my work with my father as temporary. To him, this is what I am doing right now, not what I do. I think he might be hoping I will fall deeply in love with him and that when that happens, I will leave all this behind like it was someone else’s life.
There are times that scenario woos me. But it’s only the part about being deeply in love that has me intrigued. I could choose making a beautiful life with someone over making someone’s dead body beautiful if there were that kind of love between us.
I could leave behind the embalming room if I had that.
I do want to fall for Palmer. I do. But I also feel a tugging to stay upright, to remain where I am with my feet planted. A pull to keep from pitching forward and tumbling into a world I don’t know.
Perhaps this is how it is for everyone who stands poised to unite her heart and flesh to another. Or perhaps this is just how it is for me. I am not one to step off a ledge and trust there is a net in good repair to catch me.
As Bright as Heaven Page 24