CHAPTER 17
Evelyn
I’ve never seen so many people in one place at one time. Broad Street, which stretches as far as I can see in both directions, is a sea of faces on both sides. I can’t even guess how many people are lined up for the Liberty Loan Parade. Uncle Fred told me when we first moved to Philadelphia that more than a million people live here, but I have never been able to grasp what even a percentage of that number looks like—until today. The newspaper predicted two hundred thousand will come out to watch the parade. Even the late-September sun seems determined to break through the clouds and attend.
The spectators are all packed onto the sidewalks like dominos, waving little flags and cheering. A dozen warplanes are flying overhead, the pilots pretending they are in battle, and everyone sings victory choruses as they swoop past. On the other side of the street, a man with a megaphone is asking women who’ve lost their husbands and sons and brothers in the war to speak to the crowd the names of their dearly departed. And then we are told that these women gave their all. And asked, what will we give?
Floats bearing cannons and massive guns and the skeletons of ships have passed us. Troops have marched by, and a truck filled with shoes has followed them bearing a sign that announces that every soldier needs a pair of new shoes every month. On what are they marching that they use up a fresh pair of boots every thirty days? I want to know. But today is not the day to ask questions. Today is only about taking out coin purses and checkbooks and breaking open piggy banks.
Parade organizers want to raise millions of dollars today to pay for the war—and the shoes. That’s why we’re all out here. It would be unpatriotic not to attend, disloyal not to give. Uncle Fred is planning to hand over a wad of money, but he’s not his usual jolly self. He’s been in and out of the city morgue all week, getting called in at all hours to undertake the final affairs of sailors who came to the Philadelphia Naval Yard last week from Boston with a killing influenza hiding inside them and who are now dead. Everyone is calling it the Spanish flu, even though it didn’t originate in Spain. No one is sure where it came from. Spain has been the first to speak openly about it in its newspapers. Spain is also neutral regarding the war, Uncle Fred told me, so it has nothing to lose by being candid about how many of its soldiers and citizens are sick or dying. That openness has saddled Spain with the name of this terrible sickness.
“This is not the kind of busy I like,” I heard him say to Mama yesterday. “These were our brave soldiers! These were the young men who were to defeat the Kaiser and end the bloodshed. We cannot spare them to this infernal disease.”
Mama doesn’t want us anywhere near the embalming room now, not that I have much notion of going in there. This influenza is apparently highly contagious and travels seemingly as easily as a housefly alights on one person and then another. Uncle Fred is not entirely sure if the flu victims in his embalming room can pass the disease on to one of us, since the deceased are no longer breathing, and that’s how the virus travels—in the breath and spittle of the one who has it—but he is taking no chances. He wears a mask and keeps the connectingdoor from the kitchen to the funeral parlor locked so that none of us can accidentally expose ourselves.
A few days ago, the newspaper said there were six thousand cases of influenza at Camp Devens in Massachusetts and sixty-six soldiers have already died from it. That’s not where Papa is, but that doesn’t comfort Mama or me. The flu is wherever there are soldiers and sailors, so it’s there at Fort Meade, too, she says. There is a professor from Harvard and doctors from New York who are working together to see if they can figure out how to create a vaccine, but the paper didn’t say how far along they are.
I heard Uncle Fred tell one of his APL friends yesterday afternoon that the situation at Camp Devens is deplorable. The base hospital can only accommodate twelve hundred soldiers, but six thousand have the flu, so there are sick men lying in all the corridors and on the porches, coughing up blood everywhere. And there aren’t enough nurses because half of them have the flu, too.
I don’t know if Mama heard this conversation, but this morning she asked if we should all stay inside the house and listen to the bands from the upstairs windows. Uncle Fred might have actually let us, but Willa didn’t want to be indoors with all the fun happening a few blocks away. Maggie and I didn’t want to stay inside, either. We aren’t near any of the soldiers or sailors and we’re outside, so Uncle Fred doesn’t think we need to worry. They would have called off the parade if it wasn’t safe. But Mama has asked us to stay on the steps of the milliner’s store and not go down onto the sidewalk.
Easy enough. There are so many people that there is no room on the sidewalk for us.
But I worry about those soldiers at Camp Devens. And I worry that Fort Meade is just like it. Papa is training for the field medical corps, but if the base hospital there needs help caring for soldiers with the flu, won’t they bring him in from training to lend a hand? If half of Fort Meade’s nurses end up with the flu like the nurses at Camp Devens did, will he be called in to assist?
I know this is what Mama worries about, too. She doesn’t think Papa is safe at Fort Meade. She is waving her little flag, but I can see in her eyes that she is not thinking about the parade.
She is wondering, just like I am, what the future truly holds for us. When we moved here to Philadelphia, Mama and Papa both thought they knew, but even I can see that they were wrong. None of us really knows.
