He turns from me to head back into the funeral rooms. When he comes back, his arms empty, he heads into Uncle Fred’s office—his office now—and closes the door. I hear him pick up the receiver of the telephone and ask to place a call. It is urgent, he says. He has a death notification to relay.
Papa tells the operator he needs to place a call to Quakertown. I linger near the door because I know who he is calling. Not Grandad. Papa called him earlier in the day to tell him the sad news that his brother had died. He’s calling Grandma and Grandpa Adler.
“I buried your daughter today,” he says when the call is put through.
A few seconds of silence follow. I can imagine what is happening on the other end. I must close my eyes to stop imagining it.
“She died of the flu, Eunice!” Papa says, his voice raised.
More seconds of silence.
“No,youkilled her.Youdid. She’d still be alive if you had let her and the girls come.... You should have thought of that before.... How do you think they are? They’ve just lost their mother. Of course they know she had wanted to come home to you.... No... No, Eunice!Thisis what it’s like to want to be somewhere and be told you’re not welcome.”
The phone’s receiver hits the cradle and I take to the stairs to fly up them as quickly as I can.
I tiptoe into Willa’s bedroom, fully clothed, not wanting to meet Papa on the stairs and intrude on what might be the only solitary moments of grief he will have this day. I can’t think about my grandparents. I don’t want to think of them the way Papa is right now. Who can really say if we’d have brought the flu to Quakertown like Grandma Adler had feared? Was it already hiding inside Willa when Mama asked if we could come and they’d said no? No one really knows. I push away thoughts of my grandparents from the folds of my mind. I will contemplate how I feel about their decision on another day. Not this day. Not now.
I lay out a down comforter on the rug near Willa’s bed and stretch out upon it. Her bedsheets haven’t been laundered since she recovered and remnants of the flu might be clinging to them and I’ve now a house to run. I can’t run any risk of catching this sickness. Despite the ample feathers sewn inside the comforter, the floor beneath me feels hard as stone.
•••
Today, the first full day without Mama, it was announced that a Philadelphia doctor named Paul Lewis has created a vaccine for the flu. From the moment the killing influenza descended, doctors and scientists everywhere have been looking for a way to immunize people against it. In New York, another doctor has come up with a vaccine, too. And so has a doctor in Boston and a team of doctors at an army hospital in Washington, D.C. The newspaper doesn’t say if the Philadelphia vaccine works, only that a limited number of doses is available. The board of health sent ten thousand doses of Lewis’s vaccine to our local physicians. Papa took us to get vaccinated—me, Maggie, Willa, and Alex—making the case that we live in a funeral home and are daily exposed to the menace. Even though Willa already had the flu, Papa wanted her to get the injection as well in case she isn’t fully immunized. Some flu victims are having relapses.
As we wait now in the doctor’s office, I hear one patient whisper to another that he’d heard this new vaccine won’t stop the flu; it just makes people think that it will.
“What good is that?” says the other patient, clearly displeased.
“It will make you think you are strong, so you will act strong,” the first patient replies. “People who are weak fall faster than people who aren’t.”
I look over at Papa. He heard the two people talking, too. I can tell he did when our eyes meet.
It does seem too much to hope for that an effective vaccine could be ready so quickly when Louis Pasteur, for example, spent nearly a year working on the rabies vaccine. But who of us in that waiting room wants to look hope in the eye and challenge it to prove itself worthy of trust? I can see that Papa does not wish to challenge it. He wants to embrace it, frail and untested as it might be. His gaze tells me he wants me to embrace it as well.
The nurse calls our names.
Papa stands first and then we all follow.
