As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  He heads back to resume the work we were doing when the doorbell rang, but I want to fling open the door and run across the boulevard to the accounting office. I want to tell Jamie. Because this is what lovers do. When something good happens, and even when something bad happens, you want to share it with the person who holds your heart.

  I will help Papa move the deceased woman into the parlor. I will make sure she looks as peaceful as a dreamer. I will position the flowers so that she will appear to have merely been found napping in a garden among the butterflies, and then I’ll run across the street to Jamie. When Willa comes home from school I’ll tell her that Alex is coming back to us, and maybe she will at last let go of the anger she guards like a prized possession. And when Evie comes home tonight, I will tell her, and I’ll ask how her grand experiment is going so far.

  I don’t know what Alex’s return will mean for me and Jamie. Who can ever say to the letter what the future holds? It is the same with Evie and this man named Conrad whom she loves. We are all doing the best we can with what life hands us. That’s all we’ve ever been able to do. This is how we live our story.

  Papa and I move the deceased woman into place. I look down at the body in the casket and tighten a curl on her forehead, straighten a fold, reposition a hand. There.

  She is ready.

  CHAPTER 68

  • February 1926 •

  Willa

  I set Mama’s hairbrush down on my dressing table as I stare into the mirror at my fifteen-year-old self. Fifteen! Finally. I used to think the space between the beginning of a year and the end of it stretched across time as far as one end of the sky to the other. But here I am, saying hello to fifteen, and it seems like just yesterday I was turning fourteen. I remember Mama saying to me once, when I told her everything took too long, that there’d come a day when I thought time went by so fast, I could barely catch my breath.

  I didn’t believe her then, but I’m beginning to think maybe she was right. The new year is only a month old, and already it seems like it’s a vast improvement over the year we just had.

  For one thing, Alex is back where he belongs. And not only that, but Ursula lives with us now, too. When Papa told me he was going to invite her to come take Evie’s room, my first thought was I didn’t want to have to share Alex with her. She is his actual sister, after all. But Papa said—and Evie and Maggie agreed—that Ursula had suffered too much in the past to be stuck with Rita and Maury in New Jersey all by herself. They’re not even related to her. The whole point of reuniting Alex with his family was to reunite him with her. And so it just made sense to ask her if she wanted to come live with us, too. And of course, Ursula did. She came two days after he did. And now that she no longer must work for a living, she’s not somebody’s maid anymore. She’s back in school. She’s way behind, though, so she’s in the same classes with me, even though she’s a year older.

  Truth be told, I like Ursula. She’s kind of like Maggie, only not as bossy, and kind of like Evie, only not as smarty-pants. Since we have the same classes, we can study together, and she can help me with geometry, which I hate, and I can help her with French, which she’s terrible at.

  And Alex? He’s just so happy to be home and to be Alex again—not Leo—and to have Ursula right next door in Evie’s room, and to be able to go across the street to the Sutcliffs’ for banana pancakes on Saturdays. He sees his father on Sundays, sometimes for overnights. His stepmother’s name is Trixie, which is a pretty fun name if you ask me, but she’s shy and quiet. I don’t think she knows what to make of all us Brights. Still, her and Cal’s baby is adorable. His name is Steven. I thought seeing Alex go off with Cal on weekends would make me mad, but it doesn’t because he always comes home to us.

  Maggie and Jamie are courting now, which would have been weird when she was thirteen and he was twenty-one. But now that she’s going to be twenty-one in May and he’s already an old man at twenty-eight, no one cares. I can see why she loves him, though. He’s nice to her and Papa likes him. I think Papa likes him better than Palmer. Poor Palmer. Maggie broke his heart like you wouldn’t believe. Good thing there are plenty of eligible girls in Manhattan to help him forget her. Maggie feels bad about hurting him; I asked her if she did. But she told me it would have been more cruel to marry him when she loved someone else. I think when Maggie and Jamie marry, they will get their own place, but it won’t be far. Like maybe just down the street. I don’t think Maggie can be happy without Alex around. He’s more than just the baby she found all those years ago. He’s the proof that out of a great pile of ashes you can still find something that the fire didn’t take.

  Evie just got married to that man whose first wife was a patient at the asylum. It was the shortest, quietest ceremony ever. Evie and Conrad just showed up at the courthouse in some new clothes, said their vows, and voilà, they were married. But first Conrad had to go all the way to Mexico to get a divorce so that he could marry Evie. His first wife, Sybil, is as crazy as they come. I’ve met her. Evie—if you can believe this—takes care of her when she’s not working at the asylum. In their house. Do you understand what I’m saying? Sybil, the first wife, lives in the house, too. Right there with her former husband and his new wife, who is Evie. Sad, pathetic Sybil sleeps down the hall from where Conrad and Evie sleep, in the room that used to be her bedroom. But Sybil is so far gone, she doesn’t care. Can you imagine? She is like a walking paper doll. She’s flat and empty.

  I asked Evie, how long can she do that? Take care of that woman? Isn’t she jealous? Doesn’t she wish Conrad would put Sybil back in the asylum? Evie said Conrad’s devotion to Sybil is one of the things that drew her to him in the first place. I told her that was plain weird. And she said the little bit of Sybil that Conrad still loves is so small, it’s no trouble to love that part of her, too.

  I can tell you right now, when I fall in love it’s going to be with someone who is mine and only mine. But I don’t know if I will ever marry anyone. Maggie is always thinking only about Jamie and his happiness, and Evie’s over the moon about Conrad and his. I’d rather concentrate on my own happiness, thank you.

  The Weisses have been very nice to me since the night of the raid. And Mr. Weiss never told Papa about the Silver Swan. I don’t think it’s because telling Papa would mean he’d have to admit he was there. I don’t think Mr. Weiss cares if Papa learned he had been at that speakeasy, too. Mr. Weiss decided not to tell because he doesn’t want my relationship with Papa to suffer. He still misses Gretchen just like I miss Mama. She was their only child. I think he and Mrs. Weiss like having me over to play with Fritz because I remind them a little bit of her. Mr. Weiss takes care to remind me now and then that it’s not my fault Mama died. It’s sweet how that matters to him. Maybe he’s right that the flu randomly took whoever it wanted, no matter what any of us did or didn’t do.

  I let him say what he wants. I like going over there and Fritz loves it when I come. Louisa makes the most delicious things in their bakery, and she always gives me something yummy to take home with me.

  So I’d say 1926 is starting out rather nicely, especially when you compare it to other years. Evie and Conrad are happy, Maggie and Jamie are happy, and Alex and Ursula are happy. Even Papa seems relatively happy, though his happiness will always be a little thinner compared to everyone else’s.

  I look into the mirror again, closer this time. I may be fifteen, but I sure look the same. At least to me. No matter. I glance up at the clock on the wall. It’s getting late. Just a few seconds before midnight. Time to stop all these contemplations.

  I slip Mama’s butterfly hat pin into the knot of ribbon that holds my curls so that it looks like the little thing just landed there to listen to me sing.

  Then I step out of my dressing room at the Landmark Club, just five blocks away from where the Silver Swan had been. Lila meets me on the other side of the door. She’d made it out of the raid and wound up at
the Landmark a week after the Swan was shut down. Her new employers had heard about me. Can you imagine? They’d asked her to see if Sweet Polly Adler was interested in working at the Landmark, too. Lucky for me Alex is still a sound sleeper, so sneaking out his window is still easy. Some things just don’t change.

  “They’re calling for you, doll,” Lila says.

  I hear the patrons shouting my name as I part the stage curtain.

  The piano music begins for my entrance and I imagine that I’m not in some speakeasy owned by gangsters but in a concert hall and my papa is in the front row with Mama beside him. They are cheering for me, their heads close together. Then Mama whispers something to Papa, and he grins and kisses her temple. A smile breaks wide across my face as the curtain falls away behind me, and I step into a flood of light, bright as heaven itself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Deepest thanks are extended to my insightful editor at Berkley, Claire Zion, and literary agent extraordinaire, Elisabeth Weed, for all the wise counsel regarding both the big and little details of this story. I am also so very grateful to everyone at Penguin Random House—Ivan Held, Craig Burke, Danielle Dill, Roxanne Jones, and Fareeda Bullert, to name a few—for coming alongside this book so enthusiastically. Thanks also to my mother, Judy Horning, for careful proofreading and unflagging affirmation and for just being my mom; to the Free Library of Philadelphia and specifically map curator Megan MacCall; to the staff of the Kimpton Hotel Palomar, the Philadelphia History Museum, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the kind citizens of Philadelphia for always being ready and willing to answer my questions. And thanks are extended to everyone who, when I said my next book would be set during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, told me about the long-ago aunt or cousin or great-grandfather whose life was irrevocably changed because of it.

  I read a great many articles, books, and excerpts as part of my research for As Bright as Heaven, but I could not have written it at all without the following resources, and which I recommend for further reading: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (Viking, 2004) by John M. Barry; American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Oxford University Press, 2012) by Nancy Bristow; America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) by Alfred W. Crosby; and Embalming: History, Theory, and Practice, Fifth Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2011) by Robert Mayer.

  While I endeavored to stick to the facts wherever I could, I made use of literary license with regard to a few details. There is no Broad Street Methodist Church, but there is a beautiful Gothic Revival–style church on South Broad Street that was known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Chambers-Wylie Presbyterian Church, and which is now the home of Broad Street Ministry. I wanted to be able to control the particulars regarding where the Bright family attended church and thus invented one for them, but I patterned it after this one. The asylum where Evelyn works in the later chapters is also fictional, but loosely patterned after Dr. Thomas Kirkbride’s Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, which in 1918 was located along the north side of Market Street at Forty-ninth Street. Lastly, while in the story Evelyn and Conrad traveled by car to Camden, the bridge that spans the Delaware River and connects Philadelphia to New Jersey did not officially open to traffic until a few months later, in the summer of 1926. The day-to-day details of the pandemic as it swirled about Philadelphia in the fall of 1918 are as factual in the pages of this story as I could make them. The official count of Philadelphian lives lost to the Spanish flu is 12,191.

  You might be wondering what prompted me to write a novel with the Spanish flu pandemic as a backdrop. As a lover of historical fiction—both reading it and writing it—I am always on the lookout for untold stories from the past that reveal the resiliency of the human spirit despite incredibly difficult circumstances. In 2016, I began to study the 1918 Spanish flu as a possible setting for a novel, as I was aware its centennial was fast approaching. I realized rather quickly this historic pandemic is an untold story. It is millions of untold stories. Until I started researching, I had no idea how globally devastating this event was and how much it changed the human landscape of the entire world. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was arguably one of the deadliest diseases in history, second only to the Black Death, yet few people living today are aware of its impact. Fifty million people worldwide are estimated to have died from Spanish flu. That’s a staggering number, far more than the number of lives lost in World War I. This pandemic is more than just a sad moment in history; it is the untold stories of people just like you and me—and our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children. It is millions upon millions of stories of people just like us.

  I could have chosen any number of American or European cities in which to set the story, and I likewise could have given the setting to a variety of individuals. This flu killed the poor and the affluent with equal indiscriminate force. I selected Philadelphia because it was one of the hardest-hit American cities, with more than twelve thousand dead, and I chose to give this story to the wife and daughters of a newly installed undertaker because theirs would be a unique perspective on a world turned upside down by such a cavalier killer.

  Death comes for us all in one way or another. It is a certainty. Our lives will one day end, and most of us never know when. Interestingly enough, it is our mortality that gives our existence its value and beauty. If our days were not numbered, we probably wouldn’t care how we spent them. How does this knowledge that we are mortal affect our choices? The risks we take? The risks we don’t? These were the questions I wanted to explore as I wrote this book and that I wanted you to ponder as you read it. We are, all of us, living out the stories of our lives. Each of our stories will end, in time, but meanwhile, we fill the pages of our existence with all the love we can, for as long as we can. This is how we make a life.

  I would love to hear from you via e-mail or via one of my social media platforms after you’ve read this book. Tell me your thoughts and insights, dear reader. You are the reason I write. . . .

  As Bright as Heaven

  Susan Meissner

  Questions for Discussion

  What do you think it would be like to live in a city experiencing a pandemic, as Philadelphia did with the flu? Do you think the Bright family made the best choices for their survival? Would you have handled things differently?

  How do you think the fact that the Brights were living in a funeral home changed their experience of the flu and the way they reacted to it?

  How would you describe the family dynamics among the Bright sisters and the rest of the family before the flu? How about after? Do the Bright sisters remind you of people you know?

  How did the Spanish flu pandemic shape the Bright sisters’ adult lives? Did you experience a life-defining event in your childhood? How did it affect you?

  Would As Bright as Heaven be a dramatically different story if it were from the point of view of only one character instead of four? How?

  Could you relate to Pauline’s relationship with Death after the loss of her infant son and the move to Philadelphia? Why or why not?

  Discuss Maggie’s actions on the day she found the baby. How did her choices affect her family? Do you empathize with her decisions?

  Why do you think Maggie decided to take on Pauline’s work at the funeral home after her mother died? How do you think that work changed her as she grew up?

  Why do you think Evie chose to become a psychiatrist?

  What do you think of Evie’s final solution to her dilemma regarding Conrad? What would you have done?

  Why do you think fourteen-year-old Willa was drawn to the speakeasy?

  Forgiving Pauline’s parents wasn’t easy for Thomas Bright. Do you think what happened to Pauline was their fault? In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of forgiving someone?

&nb
sp; Pauline imagined her mother telling her, “The heart always does what it needs to do.” Do you think that is true?

  The subtle presence of butterflies recurs throughout the book. How many references to them can you recall? What do they signify?

  Has this novel changed you or your perspective on life and death? Did you learn something new about yourself or the way you think?

  Photo by Amber Dawn Photography, 2008

  Susan Meissner is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper and an award-winning columnist. She is the award-winning author of A Bridge Across the Ocean, Secrets of a Charmed Life, A Fall of Marigolds, and Stars over Sunset Boulevard, among other novels.

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