CHAPTER 5
Pauline
Philadelphia has always been that faraway city at the end of a long road—distant and unknowable. It’s a place where I would occasionally step out of my everyday life to see a show or buy a wedding dress or bring a sick baby and then I’d step back.
Even as the five of us emerge from the train station onto the very same sidewalk where I’d stood a few months earlier, holding Henry in my arms, I’m struck by how immensely foreign the city’s smells and sights and sounds are to me.
I’m not thinking we shouldn’t have come, but I am overcome by the sensation that we Brights will never be from here. Fifty years from now, when I am an old woman who hasn’t been back to Quakertown in years, I will still feel like an outsider. We are to be lifelong strangers to each other, this city and I.
This is what I’m thinking as I get into the backseat of Uncle Fred’s Overland, a shining beetle black automobile that he’s only had for a week. He didn’t want to collect us from the station in the funeralcoach—thank the good Lord—and his Model T was too small for what is now to be a family of six, he says.
A family of six.
So, he told us, he sold the T and bought the Overland touring car, as though we needed any kind of explanation. He relays all this as he maneuvers his way into the commotion of just another busy day in the city. Willa, on Thomas’s lap in the front seat with her blond mop of curls springing to and fro, clings to him as Uncle Fred wildly negotiates the streets teeming with other autos, streetcars, horses, and buggies, as well as people. Maggie, with sandy brunet hair like Thomas’s, stares out a window that is half-fogged with our breath, and with the same wide-eyed expression I see on Willa’s face. Evie, golden-haired like Willa, but with far fewer coils and twists, is less astonished, as she came with me and the baby to see that specialist, but she’s never ridden in an automobile as fine as this one, and amid an endless stream of other vehicles all wanting the same bit of road. Fred is an old man at seventy-two, but he winds through the streets as though he’s been driving an automobile all his life, jauntily and repeatedly pressing the horn if a peddler or cart or pedestrian strays perilously close to the lanes of traffic, and all without losing his place in his narration.
Fred’s house, he tells us, was built in 1885 and was a banker’s home. The banker and his family had only lived there for a year when he was offered a prestigious position at a bank out west. At the time, Fred worked for an undertaker across town whose family had started out in the furniture-making business as so many undertakers had, but he was ready to strike out on his own. He convinced a wealthy friend to lend him the money to buy the banker’s house, and he opened Bright Funeral Home. He was one of the first in the city to offer funeral and embalming services at his place of business, rather than making house calls to the homes of the deceased. It isn’t always convenient to prepare the dead at home or lay them out afterward, especially when the houses and living quarters in the city are small. Fred arranged a lovelyand spacious ground-floor parlor for viewing, and for embalming to take place privately in one of his back rooms, rather than at the deceased’s bedside. The business had thrived and Fred was able to pay back his friend within three years’ time. That he had done so well was only partially due to his smarts as a businessman, Fred says. There are always people needing an undertaker, even in the best of times.
It seems we’ve no sooner gotten ourselves settled inside the Overland than the three-storied house comes into view. The main entrance is on a corner of Chestnut Street—a long, busy boulevard with tall buildings, storefronts, and other homes on both sides. A secondary entrance is located around the side of the house on a slightly less active street.
The house is dove gray stone with trim the color of cream turning to butter. Scrollwork and carvings the shade of a ripe rhubarb stalk decorate the dormers and topmost gables, and stained-glass transoms in the upper-story windows glisten like gemstones. If it had been in the open countryside instead of mere feet away from the apartment building next to it, the house surely would have had a wraparound porch that frothed with forsythia and beds of hyacinth and crocus in the springtime. The building next to it is so close, there is nary room for a person to pass in between them. As I look up at it from the car window, it is the most elegant house I’ve ever seen, even set against a colorless sky that hints of snow.
We turn the corner onto the side street and into a carriage shelter that sits behind the house. Fred parks the Overland next to an even blacker Cadillac, which seems as long as a city block. The funeral coach. As we get out of the Overland, I can see that the second entrance to the house has a smaller stoop than the front but a wider doorway. It is an odd shape, this second doorway, and I realize this is where the bodies are carted inside and caskets rolled out.
The driver he’d paid to bring our cases and trunks from the train station pulls into the side yard, too, and Uncle Fred tells him to unloadeverything on the back stoop. He explains that he has a boy from across the street coming to haul them upstairs at the noon hour.
“Let’s go around to the front, then,” Uncle Fred says when we are all out of the car. “That’s a better entrance for Pauline and the girls, and I’d actually prefer you ladies use that one.”
Uncle Fred says this kindly enough. He is, in fact, a genial man. I’ve met him only twice before; he came to Quakertown for Thomas’s and my wedding, and he came again some years later when Thomas’s mother died. I could tell both times that he dotes on Thomas, and Thomas has always spoken tenderly of his uncle. I think by the time Thomas came along, Fred figured he would never marry, and he decided he’d heap any affections he might have had for a family of his own on his brother’s youngest child. As I see the two of them now walking side by side, there is a resemblance between uncle and nephew that I had not fully appreciated until today. Both have high cheekbones, a slender nose, and coffee brown eyes, just like Thomas’s father, Eli—Fred’s younger brother—has. Fred is slightly taller than Thomas and Eli but not by much. My husband could easily pass as Fred’s own offspring, and that must be a comfort to Fred now that he is in his twilight years. Thomas is a fair representative of what could have been had Fred married and fathered a son. Eli said as much to Thomas when he told his father we were leaving. Though he would miss us, Eli was happy not only for us, but also for his older brother, Fred, who would live out his remaining years with family all around him.
I’d always been able to picture Fred expertly handling the delicate affairs of the bereaved with his low, comforting voice and a gray beard that is more curls than wires. Yet now I see by the way he said what he did about the two doors that despite his affection for Thomas, he thought long and hard about offering his nephew this position. Fred had decided that while his house is indeed going to be our new home, there will be restrictions for the girls and me with regard to the business. The bit about the doors is perhaps just the first one to bementioned. As we follow him to the front of the house, I sense within me an immediate uneasiness about these restrictions. Fred wants to isolate the girls and me from the necessities and peculiarities of his job. I want the girls to have that kind of protection, of course, but I myself don’t want it. I can’t have it. The main reason I have come here is to shuffle Death back to the place where it belongs. That won’t happen if I never get to tangle with it. I must find a way to insert myself into the goings-on at the back of the house.
Six marble steps lead from the boulevard’s sidewalk to the entrance. A gilded sign fringed with tiny icicles and bearing the inscriptionBright Funeral Home,Frederick Bright, Proprietorhangs on a brass plate from the stoop’s roof, which is a decorated affair with more of the rhubarb-colored curlicues and carvings. Just below Fred’s name are the wordsDeliveries to the Rear.
We step over the front door’s threshold into a foyer with a high ceiling, electric lights, a slightly faded wool carpet, and woodwork free of dust but in need of polish. A staircase carpeted in a deep scarlet leads to the second story. Double-door entrances to larger rooms beckon on either side. The foyer is warm despite the chill of the day.
“The rooms here on the right side are private, just for us,” Fred said. “And all the rooms upstairs are yours.”
He motions us to a sitting room on the right with upholstered sofas and armchairs in celery green, sturdy oak bookshelves that Evelyn takes immediate interest in, a fireplace framed in marble and wood, lamps with cut-glass shades and etched metal pedestals, and a game table with a jigsaw puzzle of an African plain half-done in the corner by the window. A phonograph with an enormous fluted horn sits in the back on a carved table next to an upright piano. The room is clean but void of any decoration, save for a ballet figurine made of porcelain that sits on an end table. I wonder if Fred hired someone thirty-two years ago to purchase all the furniture and accessories and to place the pieces in the room and then he just left them that way. He had no doubt done the same when the house was wired for electricity.Someone else chose the lamps, arranged them in the house, and he’d simply paid for them.
On the other side of the staircase is a little hallway that leads to Fred’s office and bedroom and a little privy, all of which he says we’ve no need to trouble ourselves with, not even the privy, as there is a very nicely appointed bathroom upstairs. His housekeeper, Mrs. Landry, takes care of these rooms as well as the rest of the house, he says.
We make our way into the dining room next, which is dusted and free of cobwebs, but boxes and books and stacks of newspapers clutter the corners and chair seats and even the dining table. There is no place to sit and eat a meal.
“Does Mrs. Landry also take care of this room?” I ask, and Thomas shoots me a look. I don’t care. If we are to live here, we need a table at which to dine. Any family of six would.
Fred views the room for perhaps the first time in a long while. “Oh. I’ve been having League meetings in here. But I can move all that to my office.”
“League meetings?” I say.
“I serve in the APL. My chapter meets here sometimes.” Uncle Fred starts for the doorway to the kitchen.
“What’s the APL?” Evelyn asks, ever the inquisitive one.
Fred turns to us countryfolk with a raised eyebrow. “The American Protective League, of course. We keep an eye out for German sympathizers, slackers, shows of antipatriotism. That sort of thing. It’s important work.” He starts to turn back around as though that is all the answer anyone should ever need about his volunteer work with the League.
Maggie tugs on Thomas’s sleeve. “A German what?” she asks softly.
“Sympathizer. It’s someone who sides with Germany about the war,” Thomas says, but Fred apparently doesn’t think that is enough of an answer.
