The Orphan Collector. Ellen Marie Wiseman
home. She would take him home and they would die together.
Except she didn’t die. She didn’t even get a fever. She didn’t have a cough or as much as a tickle in her throat. The only thing she had was a headache, which always happened when she was distraught.
Wallis, on the other hand, had died the next morning.
She’d never forget the last minutes and seconds of her baby boy struggling in her arms, the fear and panic in his innocent eyes, the way he’d gripped her finger in his little hand as he fought for air and life. After a while, his face changed and grew gray, then got darker and darker. Blood seeped from his nose and rimmed the lower lids of his eyes. Then, with one final gasp, his tiny body shuddered and went slack. His hand loosened around her finger, and his eyelids drifted partway closed. She held him in her arms and stared at his face for what seemed like forever, then got up, laid him in his crib, and collapsed on the floor, shrieking over and over until she tasted blood. When she finally stopped screaming, the world started to close in around her like a curtain being drawn. Certain she was dying of a broken heart, she welcomed the relief. Finally she would be at peace, blessed with the knowledge that she would be with her husband and son. She felt like she was floating in a pool of liquid silver, and a smile played around her lips. Then everything went black.
She had no idea how much time passed before she came to, but the room was getting dark, the grayish light of dusk sliding down the bedroom wall. At first she thought she had fallen asleep and it was all a horrible nightmare; then she bolted upright and looked over at the crib, her heart roaring in her chest. Wallis lay where she had left him, wrapped in his favorite blue blanket, his face the color of a storm cloud, his nose and mouth smeared with dried blood, his eyes swollen shut.
Dead.
Her son was dead.
She covered her face with clawed hands, her mouth twisting in agony, her mind screaming. He can’t be dead! Not my baby! Not my little boy! She pounded the floor with her fists, cursing God and howling, then crumpled forward, still on her knees, slumped over like a rag doll. She cupped her swollen bosom in her hands, her throbbing breasts engorged with milk her son would never drink, her own body betraying her with a painful reminder of all she had lost. She squeezed her breasts and screeched in pain, punishing herself for letting Wallis get sick. She had seen the signs and read the warnings. She should have stayed home until the danger was over instead of going to the parade. She should have kept Wallis safe, away from the man selling balloons and the mobs of immigrants on the sidewalks. She should have shoved the dark-skinned boy away from Wallis’s buggy and told him to keep his filthy fingers away from her son when he had dropped his miniature flag on Wallis’s blanket and reached in to pick it up without asking. It was her fault. Her fault Wallis got sick and died.
Then, after a few minutes of anguished sobbing, she pushed herself up on her hands and knees, swayed upright, and sat on the bed, her mind reeling. How was her heart still beating? Her lungs still drawing air? She picked up her son with gentle hands and kissed his cold forehead, his tiny lips, his miniature fingers, and prayed that her bleeding, shattered heart would kill her and put an end to her suffering. Then she lay on her side on the mattress and cradled him to her chest, hoping her mind would shut down and release her from the pain. She closed her eyes and willed her lungs to quit working, her blood to stop moving through her veins. She cursed God for taking her child, for deserting her in her hour of need. Then she begged Him to take her too. Her prayers went unanswered.
That was three days ago.
Now Wallis lay like a stone in his crib while she stared out the window, trying to figure out how to end her life. The radio said the city’s funeral homes were overwhelmed, but she wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to take him to the undertaker anyway, to hand over his tiny body to be embalmed, to be laid in a tiny casket and buried in the cold, hard earth. She couldn’t part with him. Ever. The only thing she wanted to do was to join him.
Down in the alley, a woman in a red babushka and tiered skirt pushed a wicker pram with wobbly wheels past the row houses. Then she stopped, lifted a baby from the buggy, and entered one of the buildings across the way. Bernice clenched her jaw in frustration. What was that immigrant woman doing out there when the city was under quarantine? And with a baby no less! Was she crazy or just plain ignorant?
Seeing the woman made her think of the immigrants at the hospital, trying to get help from doctors meant for Americans instead of turning to the witches and wizards they believed could heal them through some kind of sorcery. Wallis might have lived if it hadn’t been for them. Then again, it seemed like the entire neighborhood had been taken over by migrants and Negroes since the war started, all of them looking for work in the shipyard and munitions factory. They weren’t like her and her family, whose relatives had lived in South Philly since the 1830s, when her grandfather had moved here from Canada to work as a stonemason. Now the entire city was teeming with large ghettos housing every type of foreigner she could think of, and they were stealing jobs from real Americans, like her late father, who had worked at the shipyard for over forty years until a German who lived across the way, Mr. Lange, was hired to replace him. Just six days after he was let go, her father had died—liver failure, the doctors said. But losing his job to a foreigner was what killed him.
Like they’d done outside the hospital, the newcomers crowded around the market stands in their odd clothes, holding up checkout lines because they couldn’t speak English. Bernice could hear her father’s voice now: “This is America, they need to learn our language or go back where they came from!” Even the editor of the newspaper had expressed his opposition to “the flood of undesirables from the darker sections of the Old World who are arriving in the United States with no conception of American ideas.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the heavy aromas of their peculiar cuisine stank up the hallways—boiled lamb, paprika, curry, and peppered cabbage—and children of all colors filled the alleys and streets, shouting and playing games in strange languages. Even the number of homeless had increased since the waves of peasants arrived. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the flu started with them. After all, everyone knew migrants brought disease across the nation’s ports and borders—the Irish brought cholera, the Jews brought tuberculosis, the Italians brought polio, and the Chinese brought bubonic plaque. She and some of the other women in her prayer group had often discussed the personal hygiene habits, unhealthy tendencies, and questionable morals of foreign-born people. And they all agreed the “Don’t Spit” signs should have been printed in all languages, not just English.
Why weren’t their children dying? Why had her son, a true American, gotten sick and passed away? It wasn’t fair.
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, a rush of guilt twisted in her chest. She had seen the immigrant mothers at the hospital with their sick children. She had seen the anguish on Mr. and Mrs. Yankovich’s pale faces when they brought out their dead daughter, how Mrs. Yankovich had nearly collapsed and her husband had held her up. She had seen the white crepe on the Costas’ door after little Tommy died. Deep down, she knew all mothers loved their children and grieved the same way, no matter their nationality, race, or religion. And yet... and yet it seemed as though the newcomers always had three or four offspring to replace the children they lost. She only had one. And he was gone.
No one was immune to getting sick.
Except, it seemed, for her.
After the lady in the babushka disappeared into the row house, a low, lone voice echoed between the brick buildings, and the dry creak of wagon wheels drew closer and closer. Bernice craned her neck out the window to see. Two men on a horse-drawn wagon moved along the alley toward her building, both wearing masks.
“Bring out your dead!” one of them called out. His voice sounded weary, yet indifferent, like a newspaper hawker on an empty street corner.
Bernice pulled her head back inside to watch. She couldn’t help but remember the stories she’d heard about the yellow fever, when the rush to get victims in the grave had resulted in some people being buried alive. Was that happening during this epidemic too? According to radio newscasts, there’d been over five thousand flu deaths since the parade. Embalming students and morticians had