CHAPTER 41
•November 1918•
Maggie
Yesterday started out mostly wonderful and ended mostly terrible.
We thought the war was over.
Somehow all the newspapers got word that Germany surrendered and everyone took to the streets to celebrate. And I mean everyone. The last time I saw so many people all at once was that Liberty Loan Parade that brought us the flu and nearly killed all of Philadelphia. And that was only two hundred thousand people. This time it was probably a million. There were whistles and bells and cannon fire and every scrap of white paper that could be found was torn into paper snowflakes and thrown into the air.
“It’s over! It’s over!” everyone was shouting. Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliff came outside to stand with us on the street and I know Dora Sutcliff was thinking what I was thinking—that the fighting was over and Jamie had been spared.
I’d been spending part of every afternoon with her since school started up again. She watches Alex for me and I go fetch him every day when classes are over. She’d been showing me Jamie’s photographs from when he was a child, the sketches of trains he drew, and tellingme all the things he did when he was little. One time we’d gone into Charlie’s room and she did the same thing, but I think it hurt her too much to talk about Charlie the way she likes to talk with me about Jamie. It hurt me, too. So I know just how marvelous it was for Dora Sutcliff to hear that Germany had surrendered.
That was what made the day mostly wonderful. The war was over and Jamie had survived it. Something good had finally happened.
But then we heard that it wasn’t over. Not really and not yet. It was a news service that had reported the Germans signed an agreement, not the government. The news service was wrong. And that was what made the day end up terrible.
I’ve been reading the newspapers each night after putting Alex to bed—Papa had bought him a proper crib—looking for news of Jamie’s regiment, the 315th Infantry, and I know the Americans have been marching closer and closer to Germany and that the Huns can’t stop them. The Americans are near Verdun. I looked at the map in Evie’s atlas. Verdun is a city in France that is nearly all the way to Germany. That’s how close the Americans are getting. And while the paper made it seem like that was good news, Papa said just before a war ends, the fighting is at its most awful. The Germans are putting bombs in churches along the way so that when the Allied soldiers step inside to thank God for getting them so far, they’ll be blown to bits.
When I thought the war was over, I was so happy to imagine that Jamie would not have to step inside any church on the road to Germany. He could just turn around now and head back the way he’d come. Naturally when we heard that the news was not true, I couldn’t stop myself from picturing him kneeling in prayer after a long day’s march and being ripped apart as the church he was in exploded.
So now we are back to waiting and hoping.
It’s been three weeks since Mama and Uncle Fred died. I ache for Mama’s voice and her touch and just the sound of her footsteps on the stairs. Alex and I have moved into the room where she died. It’s a bigger room for us and Papa wants to sleep in Uncle Fred’s old room.When Alex is a little bigger he can share Willa’s room with her—she can’t wait—and then when he’s older still, he can have my old attic room on the third floor if he wants it.
Mama’s room will be my room now. I like having it. The bed is new and all the linens, but her things are still in her wardrobe and dressing table. And they will stay there. I miss her so very much, even though now that she is gone, I realize she was a different person after we moved here. It was like she had been keeping an enormous secret from all of us. Not a terrible secret, but not a wonderful one, either. I’m sure that secret was the reason she wanted to be in the embalming room. Papa had said Mama liked to do the hair and cosmetics on the deceased to get her mind off things, but I don’t think that was what it was. I think she was putting her mindonsomething. She was there to think about her secret, not escape from thinking. Even now I can’t explain what I mean. All I know for sure is, Mama was drawn to that room. And I find myself likewise drawn. I’m not sure I will ever know why she was, but it’s enough for me now that she was. We had that in common, and she alone understood why I wanted to be in there. In time, if the flu hadn’t taken her, Mama might have told me her secret. I have imagined that some future day she would have, and it’s made me a little sad because I know I could never have told her mine.
I don’t know if the vaccine worked or if the flu just ran out of gas, but the funeral parlor isn’t something out of a nightmare anymore. Papa still gets bodies brought to him—and still too many for one person to take care of properly—but it’s not like it was. He has caskets again. They aren’t fancy, but they are here. And he doesn’t have to worry that they will be stolen off the back stoop. The streetcars are running again, the cinema is open, the wreaths are coming off doors.
Evie says it’s like we are getting back our humanity.
That’s not how I would describe it. You don’t get back what a thief stole from you unless he gives it back. Mama, Uncle Fred, Charlie, Mrs. Arnold, Sally, and so many others—they are all still gone. And they will stay gone. And who knows now when the war will be over andif Jamie will come home? I’d rather have the people taken from me returned than our humanity.
Evie says I am wrong about that. She says the flu wanted to make barbarians of us, to have us think life is not precious and the dead are not worthy of our kindest care. Our humanity is what made what happened to us so terrible. Without it, nothing matters. Nothing is awful. But nothing is amazing, either.
The one lovely thing about our days is Alex. He is happy and chubby and is turning over now, all on his own. Everyone loves to hold him and play with him and feed him, even Papa. The day after we buried Mama I told Papa that it was her wish that we keep Alex and make him part of our family. No one had claimed him, I’d reminded him, and I knew no one would. He said he knew that had been Mama’s wish and he was going to go to the authorities to make it official but that he wanted me to remember Alex isn’t Henry.
“Of course he’s not,” I’d said. I didn’t need to be reminded of that.
Tomorrow I am going to ask Ruby if she wants to come over to the Sutcliffs’ after school with me to get Alex. Ruby seems kind of lost without Sally. They had been playmates since they were three years old. Ruby sits next to me in class now and eats her lunch by me and is never more than an arm’s reach away. I’m not happy that Sally died, but I must confess it is nice to have a close friend again.
I might tell Ruby that I write letters to Jamie Sutcliff and that I think about him all the time. That’s the kind of thing you can tell a good friend. She won’t say, “He’s too old for you.” She will look at his picture—Dora Sutcliff gave me one—and say how very handsome he is. Or she might not say anything at all, which would be all right, too.
Grandma Adler wrote us girls a letter, begging us to forgive her and telling us she misses us so much and that she wants us all to come for Christmas.
I know for a fact that Papa won’t take us there. Not this year anyway. I don’t think the return of your humanity means you forget what broke your heart.
