CHAPTER 42
Evelyn
This time it’s true. The war has ended, three days after that first report threw us all into a whirl. At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of this eleventh month, the armistice was signed. The cessation of hostilities was declared. The Allied Forces are victorious, and Germany has been defeated.
The bells began to peal before dawn. The cover of night still blanketed the city when the news came, official this time. The clanging was joined by factory whistles and the sharp crack of small arms and the banging of pots and pans and any other noisemaker a person could fashion. In our pajamas and nightshirts we all took to confetti-strewn streets to witness the heralding of the end of bloodshed and the beginning of peace over all the earth.
The Great War is finished.
When the day finally broke a few hours later, throngs of people began to march toward Independence Hall in commemoration. School was canceled; work was canceled. Everything but the celebration of life itself was canceled.
Papa asked if we girls wanted to join the marchers. He had three bodies waiting to be cared for—only three now—but he would take us if we wanted.
Willa didn’t want to. Having been woken like the rest of Philadelphia at three a.m., she was tired and wanted to stay home—that is, unless Flossie came over and said she was going. Then she’d go. Maggie wanted to take Alex over to the Sutcliffs’ and celebrate the day there. I knew Papa would rather stay home and mark the day quietly with work. He had come home in uniform poised to join the fight in this war that had just ended, and instead he’d been made a widower. He was not in the mood to revel and so I told him I was fine with staying home and watching the people stroll by from the window.
I had no burning desire to go with the crowd. I was still getting used to the changes we’d all had to make and how different things were at school. Gilbert is gone. He died the same day Willa started to get better. One of the other boys at school, who was his closest friend, told me this. I’ve had to push away my sorrow at losing him. I don’t know what he was to me. Just a friend? Was that all he was? I feel like in time he could have been more to me, but I’m not sure, and now I will never know. I only know my heart aches for him in a wholly different way than it does for Mama, or even Uncle Fred or Charlie Sutcliff. The part of me that knew and liked Gilbert feels scraped raw.
Mr. Galway also died from the flu. And two of the girls who’d always derived much pleasure from snubbing me. The flu flattened all the differences between me and the other girls who remained, though. They sought out my friendship the first day we returned to classes and counted our number. Death had touched us all in one way or another and we now had far more in common than not.
Maggie is putting on her coat now to take Alex over to the Sutcliffs’. I know why she spends so much time over there. Dora Sutcliff, still wrapped in grief over losing Charlie, finds comfort in caring for our orphan baby, and when she is experiencing that solace with thisbeautiful child, she talks of Jamie. If I were to let on to Maggie that I know this, she would accuse me of sticking my nose into her business.
That she is somewhat infatuated with a man eight years older than she is not a concern of mine. I am far more interested in why she continues to lie about how she found Alex. I’ve no doubt most of her account of that day is true. The fact that no one ever went to the police to report Alex’s disappearance is ample proof that Alex’s mother died of the flu and there is no father or other immediate family.
I believe that part of her story.
But she is not one to forget details. Not Maggie.
She knows in which row house she found Alex. She is purposely withholding that information.
It can only be because she thinks if she were to reveal it, Alex might be taken from us.
This is not my dilemma,I tell myself.This is not my lie. If there is someone to whom Alex belongs, they would come forward, wouldn’t they?
The front door opens and shuts and Maggie heads across the street with Alex. I walk to the front windows to watch them, and confetti swirls about their heads like ash.
