The Boston Girl

How do you go on after that?

Today, nobody bats an eye when you hear someone has the flu. It can still be dangerous for older people, but even most of them get well. In 1918, it was nearly always fatal, and it went after young people. More soldiers and sailors died from flu than from the war.

It happened fast. First a handful of sailors were sick, five days later two hundred men were down with it, another few weeks and thousands were dying. When it spread to the city there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to take care of all the sick people, partly because the doctors were dying, too. Not that there was much anyone could do. There was no medicine. Getting well was luck, pure and simple. Or God’s will, if you believe in a God who kills children and babies.

The flu was fast, too. Someone would leave the factory with a headache and two days later Levine would see the worker’s name in the list of flu deaths in the newspaper. There were weeks when that list had five hundred names on it.

The city sent out wagons to pick up the bodies but after a while the drivers were afraid to go inside anyplace where there was sickness, so people left corpses out on the porches and even on the sidewalk. A lot of the dead were buried in unmarked graves. It was a real plague and not so long ago.

The health department closed the movie houses and concert halls and told people to stay away from crowds. Nobody should have been out dancing, but a lot of people ignored all the warnings. My friend Rose was one of them.

Betty took Myron and Jacob out of school even before the health department closed them and she kept them inside. My mother put a red string on all the doorknobs to keep out the evil eye.

It didn’t help. One morning Myron said he had a terrible headache and couldn’t get out of bed. Levine said he would take care of him and told Betty to take Lenny and Jacob downstairs and stay there. But she left them with my mother and ran back to be with Myron, too.

We weren’t allowed near him, but I went up and left them food in the kitchen—trying to hear what was going on in the back bedroom. When I went back later, nobody had touched a crumb and I heard them in the bathroom with Myron, trying to cool him down in the bathtub. At night, I heard Myron coughing and moaning and Levine begging him to hang on.

Downstairs, Jacob was frantic and kept asking where was Mommy and Daddy, where was Myron. Lenny was quiet. Even though he was barely a year old, he knew something was wrong. No one was paying attention to him, not even my father, but he didn’t make a fuss; he just watched us with big eyes.

Papa couldn’t sit anymore and went out to find a doctor, even though there weren’t any. He was only gone an hour, but when he got back we had to tell him that Myron was gone. He was nine years old.

A few hours after Myron died, Betty came downstairs. All she wanted was to see the boys. Jacob ran to her and hugged her and wouldn’t let go. Betty picked him up and whispered, “How’s my Jakey? How’s my Jake?”

Mameh said, “They both ate a good dinner but Lenny was a little cranky so I put him to sleep in my bed.”

Betty dropped Jake and ran to the other room. She screamed, “He’s blue.”

She took Lenny upstairs and Jacob tried to follow her but I caught him and held him tight while he screamed and sobbed and finally cried himself to sleep.

Mameh, Papa, and I sat up at the table most of the night, not talking or looking at each other, listening for sounds from upstairs. When I brought hot tea upstairs, Levine met me in the kitchen and said, “He seems a little better. He took some water and smiled.”

I fell asleep with my clothes on and woke up before it was light. Lying in bed, I listened to the footsteps overhead, back and forth, from one end of the apartment to the other. They took turns. Betty walked faster than Levine, but they followed the same path, back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. It went on like that until the afternoon.

When the footsteps stopped, we all looked at the ceiling. Papa said a blessing. Mameh threw a dish towel over her head and wailed. Jake put his head on my lap.

After a little while, I tiptoed upstairs and walked through ­Betty’s apartment. In her house, it was always immaculate, nothing out of place. But with the natural order of things all upside down—­children dying before parents—everything she did to keep things in order looked wasted and pathetic.

I stopped at the doorway to the boys’ room. A breeze from the open window ruffled the sheet covering Myron’s body. In the other bedroom, Betty was curled up on the bed, facing the wall. Levine sat with his back to her, staring at the cradle, which was covered with a blanket. He looked at me with dead eyes and I could feel the sadness coming off him, like cold air on my face.

They had lost two children in two days. How do you go on after that?

—

Coffins and hearses were impossible to come by, but somehow my father managed to get both and the next day we went to the ­cemetery; me, Papa, and Levine. The city went by in a blur but we slowed down when we passed through a little town where people were pushing baby carriages under red and yellow leaves, as if it were just another nice day in October.

It seemed like we’d been driving for hours when the driver turned down a dirt road and through a field of weeds to a stand of scrawny trees that marked the cemetery—the saddest, the most forlorn place I’d ever seen. Two men with shovels were waiting for us, and two big mounds of dirt.

—

Myron had turned into a nice kid. Betty hadn’t let him get away with anything, but she also hugged him a lot. She called him Mike, he called her Ma, and did his chores without being asked. He was good in arithmetic. His top front tooth was a little crooked. He had a nice singing voice. That was Myron.

We followed his coffin from the hearse to the grave, where the men lowered the half-sized casket into the ground and waited for Levine to pick up the spade. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t. So Papa stepped forward and shoveled a little bit of dirt into the hole, but so gently, it sounded like rain on the coffin. When he was finished, Levine and my father said Kaddish.

The driver came back carrying something that, from the distance, looked like a hatbox. When Levine saw it, he made a noise like a wild animal caught in a trap.

Lenny had been born with a head of silky brown hair. He smiled at everyone and Betty joked that he was going to be a politician when he grew up. He liked peas and his first word was ball. That was Lenny.

He and Myron were like silhouette portraits cut out of black paper—like shadows of the people they might have been if they’d grown up.