Conrad pulls his hand away, and before I can say another word, he has moved away from the pillar. Sybil is being wheeled toward the reception area, her expression as vacant as an empty room. A nurse is pushing her, and an orderly carries a small case of her private belongings.
Conrad doesn’t look back at me as he meets up with Sybil, and the four of them make their way toward the front door.
I can’t stay to watch them drive off. I am not supposed to be in the main entrance. Alex might see me and throw himself into my arms. It takes Herculean effort to walk calmly to the staff washroom, where I let the tears fall at last.
CHAPTER 64
Maggie
Papa is bent over a dead man, shaving the enormous pale face with a steady hand. He’s doing my job. He looks up when I step inside the embalming room.
“You don’t need to be in here right now, Mags. I can handle this.”
But I do. I do need to be in this room where the terrible things that can kill a person are covered up, plastered down, brushed away.
“I don’t want to be wandering around the house today, looking for something to do,” I tell him. I don’t need to add that Alex’s absence is everywhere inside the house, along with Willa’s ever-accusing eyes when she’s not in school.
He slides the straightedge down the man’s face. It makes the same scraping sound that Papa’s razor makes when he shaves. The dead man is huge. He barely fits on the table. “Wouldn’t you rather be planning your wedding?” Papa asks.
“No.”
He tips his head in my direction. “No?”
I shake my head.
“It might take your mind off all this.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Have you talked to Palmer?”
I’m not sure how to answer this question. Palmer and I have spoken on the phone, but he did most of the talking. Was I all right? Yes. Was I going to be arrested? No, I wasn’t. Was Alex all right? We don’t know. Either they haven’t allowed him to call or he doesn’t want to, and there have been no invitations yet to come visit him. Probably too soon, Palmer said. It’s only been five days. I had no response to this. He went on to describe his new job and the little apartment he’d found for us on the Upper West Side. He told me he’d be home in a week for a visit, and then he’d take me out and spoil me and kiss my woes away.
“Don’t worry, my sweet. I am very fond of Alex, but we’ll soon have our own children,” he’d said. And I knew he meant well. But I wanted to slam the telephone down on its cradle.
“We’ve talked,” I reply to Papa. “Let me finish with this fellow. Please? I need to stay busy.”
Papa regards me for a moment and then sets the straightedge down on a tray. “All right. Don’t try to change him into the suit. He’s too heavy. I’ll take care of it.”
I look at the dead man. There isn’t a hint of injury anywhere. “What happened to him?” I ask as I put on my apron.
“Alcohol poisoning. He drank some bad bootleg. A lot of it. It’s a shame. He’s younger than me.”
Yes, it’s a shame.
Papa pulls off his own apron as I tie the strings on mine. “I’ve got some telephone calls to make. I’ll be back in a little bit.” He leaves me to it.
I finish shaving the man and then groom his mustache and wax it into place. The family provided no photo, so I decide to part his hair down the middle and tame his stubborn curls into place with pomade. I add a little stage makeup to his face to brighten the pallor and a little rouge to his cheeks. One eye has popped open, and I am easing it back into the closed position when I hear movement behind me.
I look up. Jamie is standing at the doorway. “Good morning, Maggie.”
I haven’t seen him since Alex was taken away, and I haven’t talked to him since he and I were alone in his father’s accounting office. I should return his greeting, but I’m bewildered by his presence. I don’t know that he’s ever been in the embalming room. He seems to read my thoughts.
“Your father asked me to come over this morning to help him move this man. I knocked at the back door, but I guess he couldn’t hear me.”
“Oh. Papa’s making some phone calls in the other part of the house. I’m sure he’ll be finishing up soon.”
Jamie nods and steps in all the way. He looks at the cadaver. “You did a nice job,” he says. “He looks like he’s sleeping.”
“You couldn’t tell what killed him,” I reply, downplaying my restorative work. “I’ve worked on far worse.”
He smiles a gentle grin. “You always did like to fix things.”
I’m sure Jamie intends for it to be a compliment, but it feels like some kind of indictment. “Is that a bad thing?”
“Not at all. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about you.” He steps closer to me so that he is now standing at my side, our elbows nearly touching. “I’m so sorry about Alex. I wanted to come see you a few days ago. Evie didn’t think it was a good idea.”
A lump instantly materializes in my throat at the mention of Alex’s name while my heart begins to beat a little faster at Jamie’s concern for me. “I don’t want it to be like this,” I whisper.
“Of course you don’t.”
“No one ever came for him,” I continue, almost as if I am saying this to the dead man who doesn’t know me at all rather than to Jamie, who seems to know everything about me. “I thought Alex was ours. I thought God had given him to us in exchange for taking Henry.”
“I know.”
“I thought that girl was dying. She looked like she was dead already. I thought she’d crawled off the sofa where I had first seen her and died on the floor in her mother’s room. I didn’t want to go in and see. You wouldn’t believe what I had seen already. The bodies in Uncle Fred’s hallway and on the stoop and in the viewing parlor. Always more and more.”
Jamie puts an arm around me, like we are comrades on the battlefield, like he knows exactly what I mean, because surely he does.
But he hadn’t lied like I had.
“I told my own mother that I didn’t remember where I had found him,” I say, my voice breaking and hot tears filling my eyes.
“Yes,” he says.
“I lied. To Mama. To Papa. To Evie and Willa. To Mrs. Arnold. The police. I lied to everyone. And look what my lying has done. I can’t fix this. There is no fixing this.” A sob escapes me.
He turns me around to face him. “Look at me, Maggie.”
I swallow a sob and force myself to meet his gaze.
“It is being fixed. Slow but sure, it’s being fixed, right now, right as we’re standing here,” he said. “It won’t happen in one day or one week or even one year. I’ve learned that in my years away. I came back from the war wanting everything to go back to the way it was before I’d left, the very moment I got home. But the war was real and terrible, and I was swept up into every ugly aspect of it. It is now a part of the story of my life, just like finding Alex is part of the story of your life, as is having to give him back. You want to fix what hurts the moment it starts hurting, but this time you’re going to have to embrace the slowness of healing. You’ll never be able to live with this part of your story until you realize you must make peace with what happened to you and your part in it. And that takes time.”
I know he is right. I know he is speaking to me out of his own experience, which was surely far more hellish than my own. But I don’t know how to go slow. I see something shattered and I want to glue it back together this second. And I don’t know how to accept my own part when it caused so much suffering.
“But what I did . . . ,” I begin, but I can’t continue.
“What you did may have had consequences that pierce you now,” Jamie says, “but just think for a moment what might have happened if you hadn’t found Alex that morning, if you had stayed home instead of going with your mot
her.”
“I don’t know. No one knows!”
Jamie tips my chin up so that I must look into his eyes and hear his words. “Isn’t it possible, even probable, that Alex would have died? Isn’t it likely he would have caught the flu from Ursula? Who would have come to his house that day if you hadn’t? Not the father—he was away at the war. Not the grandparents—they were estranged from their son and his family at the time. Not the dead mother’s extended family, because she didn’t have any. Evie told me this is how it was. I don’t think anyone else would have come that day.”
I had to ponder this a moment. I had saved Alex. Perhaps he was alive today only because I’d taken him back then. Perhaps, for now, the knowledge of that would have to be enough.
“You see?” Jamie said. “We only see a little bit of our stories at a time, and the hard parts remind us too harshly that we’re fragile and flawed. But it isn’t all hard. Your story isn’t all hard parts. Some of it is incredibly beautiful.”
He’s looking into my eyes now, and his hand is still on my chin. I can almost taste his lips on mine. When he doesn’t move in, I do. I bend toward Jamie to kiss him, and when I am mere inches away, he turns his head.
“You belong to another,” he says hoarsely, as though it hurts him to say it.
This time I turn his head so that he must face me. “I’ve only ever belonged to you,” I say, knowing without a speck of doubt that it is true. It’s always been true. “I’ve only ever loved you, Jamie. From the very first day I met you, and all the years you were away. I wanted to learn how to love someone else. I thought maybe I’d figured out how I could with Palmer, but I knew the moment you returned home that there will never be anyone for me but you.”
His gaze is tight on mine as he considers this, and then he finishes what I started. He kisses me in the embalming room with a dead man at our side, and I begin to believe he may be right about parts of our stories being incredibly beautiful.
CHAPTER 65
Willa
The Silver Swan is packed. Through the haze created by smoke and stage lights, I can see that people are lined up against the wall in the back, sipping drinks that they must hold in their hand because the tables are all full. Albert at the piano leans toward me and tells me I sound particularly beautiful tonight. He points to a couple people wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs after I finish singing “Danny Boy” and he says, “And they’re not just drunk.”
“Sing it again,” someone yells, and then others call out. So I do. And this time, when I sing about the summer ending and all the flowers dying and that the one I love must leave and I must stay, I think of Alex—gone from us for a week now—and tears are soon slipping down my face, and the room full of people is silent as I start the second verse.
We’ve heard nothing from Alex. Papa told me the child welfare people have said it will be easiest for him if we leave him be to get to know his family. Evie said if we were to see or talk to him now, it would be like starting all over again for him. It would be too cruel.
There is a man at the back who’s staring at me now like he knows me. But it’s shadowed where he’s standing, and I can’t quite make out his features. Albert told me if I ever saw someone I recognized in the audience, I should let him know so that he can be ready to pay that person to keep his mouth shut about me, but I’m not entirely sure I know this man.
I continue to sing, despite the tears that have fallen, and when I am done, the place erupts in applause. I take my bow and step off the stage. A man in a tuxedo with gold cuff links declares that drinks are on him, and there is more cheering. I part the beaded curtain that leads to the backstage area, and Lila meets me on the other side. She’d been listening.
“Damn, you’re good,” she says. “You had them eating out of your hand, doll.”
“Thanks, Lila.”
“Were those tears real?”
“Aren’t all tears real?” I answer, and she smiles and takes a puff on her cigarette.
All of a sudden there is a loud noise behind us on the club floor, followed by shouts and the sounds of breaking glass and overturning chairs.
I wonder if there is a fight or if someone has fallen off the stage. I hold back a portion of the separating curtain to look, and a wall of people is running toward me like the place is on fire.
From behind me I hear Lila ask what has happened, and someone running past me yells that it’s a raid.
I am pushed to the wall and then flattened against it as patrons fly past me to get to the club’s back entrance, which we entertainers use. A man twice my size spills a drink on my head and then slams into me as another fleeing patron pushes into him. I am about to topple to the floor to be trampled when I feel a strong hand take my arm and hoist me to my feet. I’m thinking it’s Mr. Trout or Foster or maybe even Albert, but I can’t tell because the hallway is suddenly plunged into darkness when someone smashes the electric light above us so that the raiding police can’t see who is escaping out the back door.
“Lila!” I yell, but I can’t hear my own voice above the noise and chaos.
Whoever has my arm has a firm hold and is pulling me along with such force that I can’t stop to see if Lila is finding her way out, too. We are on the narrow staircase, nearly out, but not quite. I don’t know what will happen if the police catch us. I will be arrested, I suppose. Papa will have to come down to the police station and get me out of jail. I feel the color drain from my face as I picture him looking at me from his side of the bars.
“How could you do this to me?” he will say. Or, worse, he won’t say it.
For a moment, I can’t breathe. There are too many people pressing in on me and there’s too much grief at the thought of Papa looking at me that way. And then we are bursting onto pavement that is shining wet with recent rain and glowing under a now-happy moon. The man who holds my arm begins to run, like everyone else, even though at the other end of the alley, police are shouting at us to stop. He keeps hold of me, yanking me down side alleys and back streets, ever farther away from the shouts behind us. My feet and ankles are soon drenched from splashing in puddles. The baby blue dress that is Sweet Polly Adler’s signature frock is soon flecked with mud and dirty rainwater.
We round a corner, and the man stops and pulls me to the side of a building so that we are pressed against the bricks. When he turns to me I see that I was wrong. It’s not Mr. Trout or Foster. It’s Gretchen’s father, Mr. Weiss. He’s the man who’d been at the very back whose face looked familiar to me. He’s the man who looked like he knew who I was.
“What were you doing in there?” he gasps, in between breaths. His voice sounds so ordinary. All these years I expected Gretchen’s father to have a thick German accent. But he sounds just like me, as American as I am. He has the same kind of fatherly look in his eye that Papa would have, but without the devastated hurt.
“I was singing,” I said, unable to think of a better answer.
“I know that, but why? Why in such a place?” He shakes his head, incredulous.
“I wanted to.”
Mr. Weiss leans against the bricks and takes in a deep breath. “You were nearly arrested tonight.”
“So were you.”
He turns his head to look at me. “I’m not a girl who should be home in her bed.” He sounds angry. Like he’s planning to tell Papa where I was, which means I may not be on my way to jail at this moment but I am going to get found out anyway.
“I know who you are.” I don’t mean for it to sound like a threat, like I plan to see if I can get him in trouble, too. But it sounds like that.
“I know who you are, too,” he says, but not in a mean way. In an irritated way. He pulls me away from the wall, and we start to walk south toward our part of downtown. “You’re the schoolgirl who is always looking in my front window and making my dog bark.”
“I don’t make him bark!”
I snap back, but at the moment I say this, I realize he doesn’t seem to know I am the mortician’s daughter who lives down the street from him. I am just the girl who makes his dog bark. I may not be in danger of Papa finding out after all. I can’t think of anything worse than Papa having to bear another crushing blow. Not now. Not after losing Alex. I soften my tone. “I’m not trying to make your dog bark. I’m just saying hello.”
“Well, it makes him bark. Why must you say hello to him?”
“Because he was Gretchen’s dog.”
He stops and turns to look at me. In the cheery light of the moon, I can see his eyes have gone glassy. “You knew my Gretchen?”
“Gretchen was in my class at school. I used to watch her play with that dog. He was so cute and he loved her so much. I could tell by the way he’d jump and prance and play when she was with him.”
“Yes,” he says in a dreamlike voice. “He loved her.”
“And then after Gretchen died, I’d see you walking him and I wanted to run after you so that I could pet him and play with him, but I didn’t know if I should. Or if you would let me. So I never did. But I’d walk past your bakery all the time, and I’d see your dog in the window above and he’d see me. He’d bark and it was like we were saying hello to each other.”
“You’re one of Thomas Bright’s daughters,” he says slowly, as though all the details are becoming more clear to him.
I don’t say anything.
“You lost your mother to the flu.”
A hot lump immediately forms in my throat. “She caught it from me.”
He blinks. “What?”
“I gave it to her. I had the flu, too. I got better. She didn’t.”
“Who told you you gave it to her?”
“No one had to tell me. I had it and she took care of me and then she got it. From me.”
Gretchen’s father looks down at Sweet Polly Adler’s dress. At my disguise.
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