PartTwo
CHAPTER 47
•September 1925•
Maggie
She’s the same age Mama would have been, this woman lying before me. Forty-two. Papa has already glued the eyes shut, but the photograph the family provided hints that the deceased’s eyes were the type to catch sunlight, just like my mother’s were. Mama’s were blue, like Henry’s had been.
I remove the last curling rod from the woman’s hair and position the lock with an heirloom comb before bending close for one last check on the cosmetics I applied. Papa reduced the swelling on the woman’s forehead and reshaped the delicate socket bone above her left eye. I covered the fix and the sutures from the embalming process with flesh-colored foundation. The penciled, chocolate-hued eyebrows make her look like she’s very much enjoying her third day in Paradise. There are no telltale signs of the injuries that claimed her mortal life.
“You look lovely, Mrs. Goertzen.” The rigor has finally released her after three days of stiffness, and I’m able to fold the woman’s hands across her bosom without any bodily resistance. “No one will see thatnasty bruise from your fall. And the hair comb your daughter brought is beautiful.”
I hear a noise just outside the half-open embalming room door. Alex is peering in. His coffee brown curls are tousled and his shirt untucked, and I wonder what he and Willa have been up to while I’ve been busy with the morning’s work.
“Aren’t you done yet?” All four words are laced with breathy impatience. He hangs on the door, one foot sneaking over the threshold. Papa and I have kept the same rule about the embalming room that Uncle Fred had insisted on. No children inside. I’d been annoyed with my great-uncle when we first arrived in Philadelphia and he’d been so worried about my sisters and me being in that room. I understand his caution so much better now that Alex is seven and curious about nearly everything. The world can be a dangerous place. Even so, I’d wanted Alex never to feel afraid or unwelcome to come to me or Papa while we are working back here. When the embalming room door is closed, however, it means he must knock. When it’s half-open, like now, he can hover at the doorframe as long as he wants.
“Nearly,” I answer.
“You’re taking too long. You promised we’d go to the park after lunch. I already had lunch. A long time ago.”
I glance down at the watch pendant just below my collar. One o’clock. The morning has flown. “I just need to wash up, and I’ll be right out.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The front bell rings from far down the hallway and past the kitchen, and he scampers off to answer it.
I toss the curling rod into the basket with the rest of them and push my cart with all my restorative tools to the corner of the room so that Papa will see that I am finished with Mrs. Goertzen when he returns from the cemetery. I pat the dead woman’s hand. “Nice chatting with you.”
I wash up and then hang my apron on its peg next to Papa’s. I’llgrab an apple or a slice of bread on my way to find Alex so that I can keep my promise. We’ve a playdate at the park.
Most days Alex seems as much a child of Papa and Mama as I am, and it’s not until someone says something like “Did your mother have those dark eyes, too?” that I suddenly remember he is not. It’s when I’m jolted by a random question like this from someone who never knew Mama that I’m reminded Alex had another name for the first four months of his life, and that his real mother was a European immigrant. Foreign. Croatian, maybe. Only God knows.
God knows.
I have never again gone back to that building off South Street where I found him, but I visit it in my mind now and then. The remembrance of that time in my life always leads to nightmarish images of Alex’s dead mother and dying sister, closely followed by those of my own mother. Uncle Fred. Charlie. It’s an effort to push away the unwanted visions from the last days of the flu and replace them with happier images of the heart-shaped birthmark that winked at us every time we bathed Alex or changed his diaper, or the way he’d reach for my father at the end of the workday and how we all cried when the first word Alex said was “Papa.”
I don’t know what would have become of us—of me—had we not had Alex during those first years when we were all learning how to live again. It was Alex who gave us reasons to get up in the morning, to sing silly songs and play games, to forget how the flu and the war had twisted every notion we had about the sacredness of life. When I missed Mama so much it physically hurt, Alex soothed the sting. When I wanted to run away to wherever it was that Jamie Sutcliff had escaped to, Alex made me stay. When I wanted to just close my eyes and never wake up, having Alex persuaded me to welcome each new day like a fragile blessing instead of a curse.
He was and is the only good thing to come to us after the flu and after the war. Or maybe it’s just that he showed us good things still existed. And while it’s obvious he loves us all, and Papa especially, I am still his favorite.
When he was four, I told him that he’d been brought to our doorstep like a precious gift and that I was the one who found him. We had decided—Papa, Evie, Willa, and I—that Alex didn’t need to know he’d been found a few feet away from his dead mother. It was bad enough that I still had that horrific image of her in my head, so it was my idea that he be spared the worst of the details. We’d decided when he was old enough we’d tell him his sweet mama, when she knew she was dying, had secretly picked us out special because she was certain we would love him and give him a happy, forever home.
Sometimes when I’m tucking him in, he’ll say, “Tell me how you found me.” And I’ll tell him I got up early one morning during the terrible flu, and there he was on our doorstep, all snug and warm in a basket. Willa, who sorely wanted to embellish that story, had to be told we weren’t going to be making up any more particulars than those basic ones. We were able to get our way with her when she asked if she could at least give him the rocking horse rattle that was Henry’s and tell Alex that he’d had it in his hand when I found him, and we conceded. It turned out to be a good idea, because the little rattle is the only thing Alex has of his first life—or so he thinks—and it comforts him.
He believes that rattle is something his sick mother had placed in his little hand when in tears—he’s asked if she cried when she left him and I always say that of course she did—she’d set him on our stoop and then run away, perhaps coughing into a handkerchief. Papa and the others can tell Alex the made-up story of how he came to us. Even Dora Sutcliff, who adores him, can relay the account we concocted. But Alex never asks them to retell it, only me. I guess it’s because I’m the one who found him.
For the first year and a half he was with us, he slept in a crib in my room. When he was two, he moved across the hall to share a room with Willa, but only for a year. She wanted a room of her own again when Alex turned three and she was eleven. She took my old room on the third floor. Evie’s at the university or the asylum most of the time these days, and Papa’s on the first floor in Uncle Fred’s old room, so it’soften just Alex and me on the second floor. When he has a bad dream, I’m the one who goes to his bedside to console him. I tuck him in at night. I make his breakfast in the morning. I’m the one he runs to when he’s scared or hurt. Evie is like a mother to him, too, when she’s around, but she’s not the one he calls for first. It’s my name that flies off his tongue when he’s got something important to say. Last year, when he was six, he asked me if I could be his mama instead of his sister. And it took me several seconds to find my voice and tell him that I loved him just like a mama would.
“But I don’t have a mama and I want one,” he’d answered.
“You did have one, though,” I’d said. “And she loved you very much.”
“She’s not here!”
“Oh, but she is.” I’d placed one hand over his heart. “Right there. Just like my mama’s right here in my heart.” And I’d placed my other hand over my own chest.
