My mother was calling me, Amelia! Amelia!
I could feel her tracking me through the halls, her heels tapping above on the dark walnut floors, down the back staircase, and over the parquet of the parlor. Into the library and through the vestibule, I could feel her, searching.
I was in the kitchen, pouring black tea, thinking how Mother objected to my pursuits, and about how I might evade her this morning. Mary had left bread and jam out for me as she performed her morning chores, and I heard her in the garden, banging on rugs and shouting at Sophie, the day maid. I needed only two minutes more to consume breakfast, not splotching or spilling on my white uniform, before I could go. But I felt Mother would find me before I could slip out the kitchen door, escape past Mary through the garden gate.
I was just barely resigned to being discovered when I was. My mother huffed into the kitchen, trailing a scent of lavender and dust, and for a moment, my stomach turned. I knew what was coming.
She began, as always, with an accusation, There you are!—sounding shrill and harsh to my ears, even though her voice was not particularly loud. She never believed in creating scenes when servants were within earshot.
"Here I am," I said, weary, resentful she was sapping me just as I need all my strength, before I could even get a foot out the door. I knew, as she must have, what awaited me.
"And you think you're still going?" she said, diving right in it.
"Yes," I said. There was no point in elaboration.
"You're determined to kill us all, aren't you?" she cried. "What will you think, I wonder, when I fall ill, all because of you!"
I had no patience for my mother's selfishness. "You're not ill," I retorted. "You never go anyplace. Everybody else is ill." I thought of the Mandels' little girl, the Hopkins' maid. Many soldiers of the Great War.
Why, just yesterday I'd encountered our greengrocer in the third bed under the open window. He was feverish and didn't respond when I said his name. His face was mottled in a way I did not like, a shade that often preceded blue. I didn't know if he would still be in that bed when I arrived at the hospital this morning, dying in the light. Or would he have had passed in the night? Mr. Lorenzon, he was called. Austrian-not-German, he always took pains to say.
I swallowed the last of my tea, stood and picked up my cloak. It was time.
"I won't see you when you come home!" Mother screamed as I opened the kitchen door. "Don't you dare come to me!"
Making my escape, I checked my pockets for my thick gauze mask. It was secure. I'd laundered this one yesterday, not something I could ask Mary to do, not something she would do if asked. Mary, ever my mother's creature, glowered at me as I ran, waving, past her and the thick red oriental carpets hanging on the line. I worried she might strike me with her beater.
But I was well. I had stayed well all the past weeks. Mother accused me of having the constitution and silhouette of a dray horse, decrying her own lack of vitality. It's true she was a puny thing, prone to sickness and fits, aged well beyond her years.
That was never my fault.
The business with father took it out of her. When he passed last year, she'd had no word or warning about the rumors, the things father had done in secret. She had been safe and protected, my mother, too comfortable. Now she was haunted.
And I, with my father's blue eyes, thick neck, and blunt nose—all somehow handsome on him, but not on me—I was no real help to her, just a daily reminder of betrayal. No, I was no help to her at all.
But these were not thoughts for the moment. I had work to do, so very much work.
It was a sunny autumn morning, breathless blue. The street outside our embarrassingly grand home was empty, not a soul in sight. Just a month ago, I would have encountered dozens of neighbors on my short walk, going to the streetcar, visiting the shops, seeing their children off to school. Now these little responsibilities of living had been put aside in favor of the hourly douching of noses, gargling and gagging on antiseptics.
I imagined the children locked away behind closed windows and doors, ignoring their studies, tormenting their mothers—and likely fathers too!—with their new skipping song: I had a little bird, its name was Enza, I opened the window, and in-flew-Enza!
Did my neighbors shake their heads to see me coming down the street, free and easy? If they did, it was no concern of mine. I looked up at the bare jacarandas, remembering the May riot of purple. No color now, all so quiet. Only the birds were boisterous. Diving and singing, they seemed to fly lower in the sky.
I had blocks to go, and hurried on, reveling in the solitude. Past boarded windows and shuttered shops. Empty yards and deserted autos. There was no activity at the greengrocer's, I noticed, but neither were there signs of mourning.
When I reached the crossing near the hospital, I spotted Dr. Fein on the corner. Dr. Fein was a bit older than me, perhaps 30, so clever and lively with his sparkling dark eyes. I loved him because he seemed to depend on me, privately calling me the most capable of all the lady helpers. He might have said this to everyone, I couldn't know, but he alone called me Amy when I told him I preferred it to the fusty Amelia.
My admiration for Dr. Fein—evolving over the past months, since before our current troubles—was not accompanied by expectation. I knew what I was. Mother would continually remind me of my meager appeal and advancing age. She had only recently stopped trying to lure suitors to the house. The last had been called Walter, a distant cousin's boy, paying respects, he said, after father's death. I was made to help Mary serve out the meal, wearing the gathered silk frock Mother said brought out the blue of my eyes, and that though they were too small, like Father's, the color was nice. Walter was skinny and proper, fastidiously attired, though not well-to-do. He simpered at me. In his eyes I saw want without desire.
My work at the hospital had helped relieve me of scenes like this, cotillions and teas into the bargain. So many idle places I could never belong. Now I knew how to wash a wound, apply a bandage, take temperatures, change sheets, mop brows, and I knew when to run and seek higher advice. I was useful now, and as a result, Mother said I was almost too willful to bother about.
On the street, Dr. Fein stood with his back to me. He seemed watchful, perhaps hesitant. I wondered what, or whom, he might be waiting for. He was leaning on the handle of a long, folded black umbrella. Unaccountably so, for there was not a cloud in the sky.
I donned my mask and snuck up behind him. "You await the flood?" I said, in a booming voice.
Dr. Fein turned and smiled, showing his full white teeth. "A deluge more like," he said, inclining his head towards the towering stone bulk of the hospital in the near distance. He also covered his face, and we walked companionably the remaining way, keeping just far enough from each other that we could be heard, though we did not speak much.
As we approached the entrance, he turned to me. "Sometimes I dance with it," he said, holding up the umbrella. "In my office. When the doors are shut."
"You like dancing," I said. I tried to hide how much this charmed me, Dr. Fein stealing brief respite from his pressing and often tragic rounds, dancing to music only he could hear.
He rolled his eyes dramatically. "It is something my fiancée enjoys," he said, "so it is something I will learn to love." A slight shock I felt at that word, fiancée, but it was no real surprise, not with a man so full of life.
I made myself smile, crinkling my eyes, as we climbed the stairs of the hospital. It was quiet, echoing and cold in the halls. A smell of iodine and sickness. I knew what I would encounter when I entered the flu ward, bed upon bed of woe, more being filled each hour.
Matron glanced at me as we walked in. I was a dilettante lady with no real training, but I knew she was grateful to see me, for just yesterday, two nurses had declared they would never return. Others had been deployed to help the Navy on ships in the harbor—influenza was the greatest threat to our sailors now. Matron had no time for small talk and immediately set Dr. Fein in motion. Dr. Kent was leaving for the day, and several new patients needed examination.
Then she called me over, pointing far down the ward towards the rough-hung sheets that separated the corner where patients "from the Spanish persuasion" were bedded. "There's a few sick ones there to sit with," she told me. "A girl who came in last night, in particular."
I found her in the darkest part of the ward and moved a chair to sit beside her. She was asleep, my age or near to it. I glanced at her chart; her name was Lupe, and despite her discoloration, I could see how beautiful she had been. It was in the structure of her bones, her smooth skin, in the unruly tangle of her black hair. I took up a cool cloth and mopped her brow gently. As I did, her eyes opened, and she gazed up at me. I could not tell what she saw, if she could focus.
Seeing someone beside her, the woman became agitated and began to thrash in her bed. She struggled for breath, opened her cracked lips, trying to speak. I could not understand her. I thought her to say hi-me, hi-me, until the nurse Angelina, working at changing bedding on the other side of the curtain called out to me. "Jaime," she said, "Spanish for James." That had been my father's name.
Her next words sounded urgent: mees-neenyos, mees-neenyos, again and again. Then, her eyes rolling back, she spoke the last word I expected, a great huff that took all her breath. My own surname. The shock of it sent me back hard against my chair.
I knew her now. She was not as I expected; she was gasping and disturbed, but I knew her. This was the lady of the rumors. A dusky girl, a dusky family, hidden across the river in undeserved comfort. A love match, some implied.
Mother had taken to bed for weeks after father died, when the talk began to reach her. And I pictured Father on his deathbed, the color of his waxy face against the fresh, white linen, gasping my name. Amy, my favored name.
Still reeling, I sought to remember the little I'd been told. I knew Mother had dealings with the attorneys, but she would never speak of it with me. Nor, in my grief, had I sought to learn more. I did not know if money had exchanged hands with the woman. I did not know where she had gone. I did not know with any certainty whether I had a young sister or a brother. In truth, I had not wanted to know.
Now, as this lady reached for me, rasped my father's name, as grief engulfed me again, it seemed I could avoid the truth no more. She still spoke wildly to me, more words I could not understand.
I called to Angelina, asked her to interpret. She bent closer so she could hear, and a long minute passed as she whispered and listened, with me standing anxiously by. The lady, Lupe, was speaking of two children, Angelina said, twins. Lupe was not sure what had happened after she had passed out. She was sure her brother must have brought her to the hospital. Her children must be with her brother now.
"Children," Lupe gasped from the bed as if in confirmation, then she fell limp, utterly spent, but breathing still. Angelina was looking at me with confusion, even suspicion. "She said she wants you to go see her children," she said.
My mouth dropped open, and I began to gulp for air. I could not explain to Angelina why this stranger would ask such a thing of me. I could hardly understand it myself! Lupe must have known of my existence, and Mother always said I was the spitting image of my father, but how could that account for this? I stammered what came to my mind, that my patient was delirious, or that she had mistaken me for someone else—this almost seemed true. I thanked Angelina for her help, though she looked unconvinced. When she left, I sat shakily down by my father's mistress, wondering what to do. Twins! She wanted me to go to them, but I didn't know what she expected of me. Would I go? And where?
My eyes fell on Lupe's chart hanging from the bedframe. I grabbed for it and began turning its pages. In her admission notes, I saw scrawled the name of a man, Juan Carlos, and an address wholly unfamiliar to me. I felt lightheaded thinking about finding this place.
Where did Lupe's people live? Was it east, as they said, across the river?
The streetcars were a mystery to me, and I had no hope of stopping a car in my sickroom uniform. Mother had spitefully refused to maintain, and then sold, Father's auto, the one he'd used to visit his derricks and explore the city. Perhaps she was terrified I would learn to drive it and do the same.
I'd heard from Dr. Fein that he sometimes saw patients over the river. He knew Spanish. He had modestly let it slip he treated a good many poor people for free, and his generosity had only deepened my admiration. I wondered if I should call on him for help. But asking would involve the telling of my family's shame.
Well, I thought, suddenly resolved, people may have their pride, but there comes a time to put it aside. So I found myself, stricken, in a quiet hospital corridor, unburdening myself to Dr. Fein. I told him the secret of my father's other family, revealed only after his death. How Mother had refused to tell me anything about them, how I had not asked. That I had no idea how they lived, if there had been any provision for them in the will. (Knowing Mother, I doubted it.)
I said perhaps I should leave intact the separation, the abnegation, my mother and her lawyers had forged. But now that I knew, it was my shame, too, to think that these children—my family—might be alone or even sick in God knew what circumstances. I'd seen enough now to know their mother, Lupe, was in grievous danger, and she might never return to her children.
Dr. Fein listened quietly and carefully as he always did. I always loved to see him with patients, speaking in a manner so kind and forthright, it would calm them somehow, even when the news was dire.
"I know this street," he said, looking at Lupe's chart and fluidly pronouncing its Spanish-sounding name. "I can take you tonight."
I ought to have said no. Most would say, reasonably, that I ought not go at all. But he would be taking me on the streetcar, all through new parts of the city, and despite the somber nature of our mission, I was thrilled.
I did not think of my mother.
We left the hospital in the evening, and walked a short distance to the stop, the cold kicking in, for we were full in autumn now. I was unsure how to board the car, clumsy as always, so Dr. Fein took my arm to help me up. After we were seated, he said he had travelled this route many times before. "But you have not Amy, and I wonder how you will find it."
I thought he worried I would find it squalid, and I tried to find the words, the ones to say I'd longed to be just where I was right now, and that this longing was part of what had brought me to the hospital in the first place.
I put it badly, though.
"I have faced the Spanish and their flu before," I declared, meaning to be humorous, to appear intrepid. He turned his head away from me and almost clucked. "They say the Spanish brought the flu, but of course the people who live here are not from Spain. Nor is influenza, I dare say." How stupid I was! Of course I knew better.
I asked him where he thought it had come from, the flu, and as we travelled along, the streets becoming sootier and sootier, he talked of theories, birds, the contagion spreading with the war, and how hard the control of it was.
"I've come to see that containment, the attempted control, is as much an art as a science," he said. "Because you have to persuade people to listen, and that is where the artfulness lies." I felt indignant, imagining anyone lucky enough to receive Dr. Fein's advice ignoring him, though I had seen with my own eyes how many patients did.
"You are fortunate," I said. "You can persuade in two languages."
He looked very troubled then. "Where we are going, I am not sure how much they have been told," he said, "how much they know."
When we departed the car, I lost all my bearings. The air felt smoky and close. The street was so much more crowded than the ones I knew. People rushed about carrying packages and food. I could even hear a guitar, and it occurred to me I had not heard music in weeks.
We walked a few blocks, me clinging to the doctor's arm. I was grateful he knew where to go; I felt myself to be terribly ignorant. Father must also have known these streets, I thought.
When we arrived, there was a smell of bread and cake. A bakery.
We entered, and the yeasty warmth made me think of childhood for a moment, of an old cook who made the house smell like this each Friday. The shop was empty except for a woman opening an oven behind a wooden counter. She turned when Dr. Fein cleared his throat, and though I could see she was young, she seemed very tired. She was also, as they say, heavy with child.
Dr. Fein put on his mask and began speaking to her, but Señora and names—my own, Lupe's, and Cecilia—were the only words I could discern. I kept my eyes on the woman as she and the doctor spoke, and I could see recognition dawn in her eyes. I could see her looking between me and the doctor, perhaps wondering if this impressive man was mine.
When Lupe's name was mentioned, I could see her grimace, and I wondered how she felt about Lupe, whose relation to my father could certainly be considered shameful. I thought I saw the lady glare at me. After a time, Dr. Fein sighed, stopped and turned back to me.
"This is Cecilia," he said. "She is married to Lupe's brother. I have explained to her that Lupe is still quite ill."
"What has she said about Lupe's children?" I asked. "Are they here?"
At the word "children" the woman turned and began to call out a series of names. I heard light and rapid footsteps, laughter, and through the back door of the bakery came a stream of children. The oldest appeared to be eight or nine, a girl carrying a toddler. There were four or five in between and they ran to Cecilia where she stood in the kitchen. All of them peered at us, curious. A pair of the young ones, not much more than three or four, had eyes of a greenish hue. They looked at me, this boy and girl, in an alert way I recognized.
And I remembered it then. I remembered how my father loved little children, how he loved to play with me, teaching me cards and billiards before the nursemaid would sweep me away for bedtime. How we went for rides around the city and to the coast in that car he had. How bitter it must have been for him that there was only me, for of course, Mother's health was fragile.
I wondered how much time he spent with these children before he died, and what would happen to them if Lupe died. There were already so many children here, clean and apparently well cared for, but this bakery was humble, and the woman was expecting yet another child. I felt shamed I lived in excess, while these children might never have enough. Then I found myself speaking words I knew would enrage my mother.
"You must tell her," I said, "that if anything happens to Lupe, please, to come to me."
As Dr. Fein translated, the woman regarded me with expressions I had never before seen combined, fear along with something like relief. I wrote down my address, and the woman continued to talk. Dr. Fein told me more of the things she was saying: that she would talk to Lupe's brother when he came back from his deliveries, how they loved Lupe's children like their own but there was no room. How the attorneys had provided little for the twins, and how she and Juan Carlos had many mouths to feed... By this point, I was not following closely. I was thinking only of how I would explain all this to Mother.
We turned to leave when Cecilia suddenly went to the case under the counter and pulled two pastries off a tray, wrapping them in paper. She shoved them at me, saying something to Dr. Fein.
"These were the ones your father liked," he said. I smelled them, the cinnamon and sugar. Father always did have a sweet tooth.
We returned to the streetcar stop, the doctor and I, speaking little. All through the ride, he seemed tired and cowed, unlike himself. I wondered how badly he must be thinking of me, of my family. I tried to push a pastry on him, but he said he was not hungry. I also was weary.
We parted at the hospital, with Dr. Fein hailing a car. Then I walked the long blocks home. It was past nine, and it was cold. There was nobody in the streets.
It was quiet when I walked up the steps to our door, and when I entered, the hall was empty. I thought to talk to Mother in the morning, but suddenly Mary was upon me, and Sophie was running down the stairs. I was surprised because Sophie usually went home after dinner, but tonight, her thin face was ashen, creased with concern.
Mary, however, was florid with anger. She had tried to telephone the hospital, she said, and the physician had come and gone hours ago. I stammered my questions. What could have happened? Of course, I feared the flu.
"Her apoplexy!" Mary cried out. "Due to you! You upset her so that by lunchtime she was having fits. Then before dinner, she fell and could not speak!"
I felt my shoulders relax. Mother was all the time having fits, taking to bed. She would be up the next morning as if nothing had happened. This was more of the same, her way of repaying me.
Then Sophie piped up. "She won't wake, Miss Amy," she said, "The doctor says she's had a stroke, and he dare not send her to the hospital."
"He doesn't think she will wake up!" Mary shouted at me.
I rushed up the stairs, then, and found it as they said. My mother lay white and shrunken in her bed, unmoving. Mary had followed me and fussed uselessly at the bedclothes, pulling them up over Mother's shoulders, touching Mother's head. I would have thought my mother dead but for Mary's continued activity. I trusted Mary to confirm that life was in her still, as I found I was unable to move closer myself.
Early in the morning, after Mother had died, I came upon Mary in the kitchen putting on her coat and hat. I tried to express my gratitude, but she said not a word except to tell me her son would call for her things later.
I sat, thinking stray thoughts. I was hungry. I should telephone Mother's doctor. Also the hospital to tell them I could not come that day. There would be many things to do, and I had little idea where to start. Sophie came into the kitchen and started boiling water for tea. She cut bread, set it down with jam in front of me. I smiled at her, and she smiled back.
I ate and then called the doctor, who told me he would come as soon as he could to help file the papers, but warned it could take some time to remove the remains, for her to be buried. Having seen so many bodies leave the hospital, I did not wonder why.
I called the ward and was lucky to get Matron on the line. She was frantic, telling me Dr. Fein had fallen ill and had not been able to come that morning. Dr. Kent was on his third shift, and another doctor was starting his second. She was trying to find help. She barely responded when I told her why I couldn't come, and rung off before I could find out more about Dr. Fein or ask about Lupe.
I telephoned many more people that day, and the next. Mother's brothers and nephews. Her attorneys. An undertaker. Upstanding friends from church and tea parties. A few sent flowers, but some had sick of their own, and our neighbors feared to visit. I ate and slept little. I had no callers. I could not have done without Sophie, who helped me to persuade Mother's doctor to find men to remove her from the house. From these men, we heard about the Armistice. I had not known, being so many days outside the world.
Sophie had a quick mind and a kind heart, and as I soon learned, no family of her own to care for. I asked her to stay on in Mary's place, and was relieved when she agreed.
A week passed this way. I find it hard to remember all the things I did, but it was not as when Father had died, when Mother and Mary did it all, when there were many people about, helping—and whispering, too.
Later, I went to the hospital for news of Dr. Fein, and though Matron had no time to speak to me, I happened upon Angelina standing outside in the cold sunlight. There had been much talk of Dr. Fein's condition, she said. "Dr. Kent thought he surely would die!" Blessedly, he had rallied in recent days, though it was unlikely he would return to the hospital. They said that when he was well enough, his fiancée and her family planned to take him out of the city to recover. Though I expressed only gladness to Angelina, I secretly wondered at my culpability in Dr. Fein's illness, forcing him into a crowded streetcar, into the Spanish quarter. I felt, with a sick jolt of loss, that I would see him no more.
Angelina told me the stream of sick had begun to wane, that there were fewer patients on the ward now. She looked exhausted, and when I inquired, could barely remember Lupe, except to say she could not recall where she had gone.
As I walked home in the crisp air, I saw elderly neighbors, the Olsons. I was certain they had seen me, but they crossed the street to avoid my path. This was not uncommon, to stay clear of others, but I thought surely they would call out to express sympathy about Mother. I still had spoken to no one from the neighborhood, and I wondered why. Did I look wild or unkempt in my mourning? Had Mary gossiped about me, said I was to blame for what happened?
At night I lay awake, abrading myself. Telling myself Mother had been right all along, that she alone had paid the price for my recklessness. Had I been shielded from sickness because I was righteous... or because I was wicked? If one was generous, one could say I hadn't comprehended. But I suspected, rather, others said I had taken no care.
They were hard, these nights. In the hallway, I might see a movement, think I feel a pressure. I might hear a sound and turn away from it, or else gaze ahead at something unseen. Mother's unhappy shade? Why should she not haunt me?
One night, soon after my trip to the hospital, a knock came on the door. Sophie was in the kitchen, so I answered it myself. A tall man stood back away from the steps, slumping. When I asked if I could help him, a ray of streetlight hit his face, and I knew him. He was darker than Lupe, a sad and haggard man.
"She died," he said haltingly. I felt he had learned to say these words just for me, but I did not know the words of his language to tell him I was sorry. He said Lupe was his sister, hermana, and that Cecilia had said he should come to me. He called behind him to two small and bundled forms.
The children came out of the darkness to face me. They looked as dazed as I felt, and clung to their uncle. After he kissed them and murmured assurances, he pushed them forward. They looked up at me, and again their uncle said this word, hermana.
Later that night, after Sophie and I had fed them and put them to bed in my old childhood room, I sat at Father's old desk, thinking. First, I thought how seldom I had been in this room since he died, and secondly, I sought answers. Was I doing the right thing? What would Father have wanted me to do? Either the answers had never been there, or I could not find them, for in all the drawers and papers, there was nothing.
I also thought about what the children would need—clothing and special foods, toys and books—and I planned to send Sophie out in the morning to find what she could. I wondered whether what I had done should be undone. After all, the money was mine now. I could insist Lupe's brother be given enough to keep the twins, that they be provided anything they needed. I thought of the neighbors and what they would say.
I thought, most of all, about what I would tell the children when we woke. Of course, they had been told Lupe had died, that she wouldn't come back. But I didn't know how much they understood of this—my mother had also died, and I didn't understand it myself!
They had been speaking to me in a pidgin sort of way, knowing words like cup and bread and bed and morning. In this, they were miles ahead of me, but it was unclear they understood who I was to them.
I did not sleep at all that night.
Early in the morning, I got up and dressed. I headed down the hallway in a stupor, stopping when I heard lively sounds. I crept quietly, closer to the door of my childhood room.
I stood listening through the door as they pretended still to be asleep. Then I knew. It would fall to me to help them understand it all. What had happened, and who I was. Why they were here. I would help them learn my language, and I would learn theirs. I would help them find their way in a hard world. A world even I could see might be cruel to us.
Of course, there was still the possibility they could be stricken by illness. Or I could be, at any time. But in the meantime, and for now, the sun had risen, autumn bright. Even the war had ended. I heard the children chirping to each other, perhaps in a game. They were clear-eyed and beautiful. They were mine now. And they were laughing as I opened the door.
