A Fierce Radiance (20 page)

Her mother lay in bed with the sunlight pouring over her. She wore the same clothes she’d had on yesterday, a lacy shirtwaist and a full, dark silk skirt, the fabric reflecting the sun as if in ribbons of light and shadow. She’d taken off her shoes and stockings, which were on the floor beside the bed. She hadn’t gotten under the covers. Instead she’d pulled the far end of the quilt over her legs. Her hair had come unpinned and lay in dark blond twists around her head and neck. Her angular face was pale and still, like alabaster. Like an effigy Tia had seen in her brother’s book about the Middle Ages; he’d explained to her what it was.

Tia watched her mother breathing, her chest moving up and down beneath her shirtwaist. Her breathing sounded raspy, a kind of rattling sound Tia had never heard before, as if the air were scratching her as it went in and out.

She touched her mother’s shoulder. Slowly her mother turned her head toward Tia and opened her eyes. “Good morning, Lucretia.” Her mother never called her
Lucretia
. Tia was named after a Quaker abolitionist and suffragist, Lucretia Mott, who was a distant relative of her mother’s. “What are you doing?” Her voice was soft. Tia could barely hear her.

“Watching you breathe.”

“Ah.” The skin beneath her mother’s eyes was dark blue.

“Why are you still in bed? It’s almost lunchtime.”

“I have a touch of croup. A bad headache.” She brushed her hand across her forehead, as if to push the headache away. Her fingers were bruised. How do you get a bruise on your fingers? Jamie did once, playing stickball on the street. The pitch hit his hand, but he took the base, so he didn’t care. Jamie’s bruise had been purplish. Her mother’s fingers were blue-black. “The headache is behind my eyes. Remember once when you had a headache behind your eyes? We knew you were going to get a bad cold.”

“And I did!”

“Yes, you did. Look at you, how nice you look this morning.” Weakly she made a twirling motion that told Tia to spin around, and she did spin.

“Let me give you a kiss,” her mother whispered.

Tia leaned over her, and her mother kissed Tia’s forehead. Her mother’s lips were chapped and hot, so very hot. Her mother was always careful not to let her lips become chapped. Awkwardly Tia’s mother repositioned herself, one foot coming out from beneath the quilt. The foot, too, was blue-black, with blue-black streaks up to the shin. The sight made Tia freeze in place.

By the following dawn, her mother was dead.

The next scene Tia remembered was in the evening, when the sky was already dark. Jamie and Tia stood together at their open front door and waited for the carts. The carts had been coming in the early
evening every day for a week. Jamie and Tia waited for the cart from the Arch Street Meeting—
their
Meeting, where they went every Sunday with their parents.

“St. Joseph’s, St. Joseph’s,” said the man driving the first cart. His words were muffled by his face mask.

No one called to stop the St. Joseph’s cart, even though a Catholic family, the Baileys, lived directly across the street. Tia saw her friend Mary Bailey peering out the window of the dark house. Was Mary home alone?

“Tenth Presbyterian,” called the driver of the next cart. Tia felt cold, especially her legs. She’d forgotten to put her coat on, but she didn’t want to go inside for it now.

Diagonally across the street, at the McManus house, nine-year-old Christina came running out, waving a white handkerchief, as if she were surrendering. In a moment, Christina’s father carried out a shape wrapped in a heavy blanket to keep it warm. He placed it on the back of the cart. Christina had three older brothers. And a mother. None of them stood at the door to watch.

“Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel.”

The Rose family down the block called to the cart driver and brought out their own shape wrapped in a blanket.

Tia’s father told her that Philadelphia was a miraculous place because every religion lived here in peace. As the carts passed, Tia wondered if she were witnessing a miracle.

At last, “Arch Street Meeting.”

“Stop,” Jamie called. The cart was already moving on. “Arch Street Meeting! We need you!”

“Hold up,” the man who stood on the back of the cart called to the driver. The driver shushed the horses. The cart man jumped off and approached them. Because the cart had moved on from them, and because it was an open cart and there was light from the streetlamps, Tia saw into the cart. She saw shapes piled up,
wrapped in sheets and blankets, and stacked in neat piles like cords of wood.

“Hey, kids.” The man was short and broad shouldered, like a wrestler. He wore a cap and, like all the men on all the carts, a white face mask, which muffled his voice. “Who is it?”

“Our mother,” Jamie said.

“Oh, sorry, son. Sorry. Where is she? You’re supposed to bring her out to us. We don’t have time to go inside every house to get people.”

Jamie inhaled, put his arm around Tia, and stuck his fingernails into Tia’s shoulder, hurting her. They were supposed to bring her out. How could they bring her out? Jamie was fourteen. He couldn’t lift her alone. Tia wasn’t big enough to help.

“Hey, Mike, what’s the trouble here?” A man who’d been sitting in the front of the cart next to the driver joined them. He was taller but less muscular than Mike and better dressed.

“They didn’t bring her out. Their mother.”

“Look, we got blocks and blocks to go. We’ll get her tomorrow. Bring her out later, kids. Wrap her up good. Go slow, take your time. We’ll pick her up tomorrow. She’ll be all right, one day, it’s not too hot, leave her on the porch, she won’t start to—”

“You kids alone here?” Mike interrupted.

Jamie didn’t answer.

“You don’t have face masks? You should have face masks.”

Again Jamie didn’t answer.

“We’d give you face masks, if we had any,” Harry said. “But we ran out.”

“Come on, Harry, let’s just go and get her,” Mike said. Now Tia recognized them from Meeting. Harry and Mike were the men who took care of the lawns and flower beds around the Meetinghouse and swept the autumn leaves off the paths.

“It’s getting late.”

“It’s their mother. They’re just kids.”

“All right, if it means that much to you. But you can take the blame if we get behind schedule.” They came in.

“Stay here, Tia,” Jamie ordered, and she obeyed. Jamie led the men upstairs. When they came back, they’d wrapped Tia’s mother in the quilt. Mike held her shoulders, Harry her feet.

“Don’t look,” Jamie said. He turned Tia around and pushed her head against his chest. His shirt was soft flannel. He’d grown so tall so fast that his body hadn’t had time to catch up with his legs, their mother said. He was skinny. Tia felt his ribs pressing against her cheek. He held her while the men went by, carrying their mother. Because Jamie told Tia not to look, she didn’t. She heard the horse cart begin to pull away, the driver clucking his instructions to the horse. “Okay,” Jamie said, releasing her.

She stood beside him, and he kept his arm around her. Together they watched the cart drive away. Apart from the cart, the street was empty of traffic. The only sounds were the calling of the driver, and their neighbors, one by one down the block, calling for the cart to stop. Six Quaker families lived on their block. Mr. Yard at the end of the block brought two wrapped bodies to the cart, carrying them one by one. At the top of the pile of bodies in the back, the white quilt that covered their mother seemed to Tia to glow, calling to her.

In the morning, they packed a few things in Jamie’s school book bag. Jamie told Tia to dress up, to put on her Sunday Meeting clothes, and he put on his, too. He wore knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket. Tia wore a white pinafore with eyelet lace over a blue plaid dress.

Jamie searched their parents’ room for valuables. He found some paper money in the back of their father’s shirt drawer and some silver in their mother’s reticule. Almost ten dollars. A lot. More than enough. When they left, Jamie carefully locked the door behind them and tested it.

Only years later did Tia realize how beautiful her house was, how
exquisite her block, the loveliest in Philadelphia. Delancey Place between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. An enclave of peace and tranquillity. They walked into a gorgeous autumn day, the trees a parade of color.

Jamie led her up the block. Every house was large and well cared for. Every house had an arched doorway, and wrought-iron grilles at the windows for holding flowerpots. The street was quiet. Not simply today, but any day. Every day. The week before, when Tia and her father had walked down this block together, her father had said, “On Delancey Place you don’t even know you’re in a city.” And it was true.

Jamie and Tia turned onto Nineteenth Street and walked to Rittenhouse Square. Tia was confused. The square, which she’d visited for as long as she could remember, looked like a place she’d never seen before. Garbage was strewn in the gutters and along the paths. The sidewalks were sticky from pigeons and dogs. There was no traffic around the square. No horses. No carts. No automobiles. Instead there were kids everywhere, boys playing stickball, girls jumping rope on the grass. Their clothes were dirty, their hair a mess. There were no parents in the park, no nannies keeping order.

They walked across the square into the commercial district. Jamie wanted to take the trolley to the train station because it was a long way for Tia to walk. While they waited at the trolley stop, an old man told them that the trolleys weren’t running. All the drivers were sick. So they had no choice but to walk. Tia held her brother’s hand tightly. She didn’t want to lose him. When they reached the train station that served the small towns around the city, Jamie bought tickets to their grandparents’ town. Although they had to wait a long time because the schedule was off, he found the right train. They disembarked at the right stop. He led her to their grandparents’ house.

Only their grandfather was home. He was upset to see them. Because the telephone switchboards weren’t operating, he’d had no idea
of their troubles. Their grandmother was nursing flu patients at the local hospital. This was safe for her, because by now everyone knew that this particular type of influenza mostly spared the children and the grandparents. It killed the people in between, the ones in their twenties and thirties. The mothers and the fathers. The ones who weren’t supposed to die from influenza.

Twenty-four years later, working as a scientist in the midst of another war, Tia shook herself back to the present. She sat up and brushed tears away. Sometimes she felt she was forever in that moment, gripping her brother’s hand as they walked through a city of death. In that one week in Philadelphia, four thousand people died from influenza, Tia learned years later. Tens of thousands were ill. The city ran out of coffins. The churches buried their members in mass graves. Tia and Jamie never knew for certain where their parents were buried. The newspapers were virtually silent about the influenza. At the end of the Great War, no one wanted to be unpatriotic by reporting on mass graves at home. As she grew up, Tia came to consider herself fortunate. Unlike many influenza orphans, she had a good home to go to, with grandparents who loved her. She had her brother. The influenza faded from memory.

Tia looked around the laboratory. The room grounded her. Gave her a purpose. In her mind, she saw her parents as she most often remembered them, reading in front of the parlor fireplace. Jamie was reading, too, while she sat on the floor sorting the bags of autumn-colored leaves that she’d collected in Rittenhouse Square.

No matter what happened in other parts of her life, she told herself, her existence had meaning, because of her work. Once more she examined the clear fluid in the test tubes. She turned to a blank page in her lab book and wrote down the results of this latest experiment. She reminded herself that most likely number 642 would prove toxic in mice. If it did, she would move on to the next substance, and the one after that. Soil samples filled her lab. She would test them all and gather still more, from around the world, until she found the breakthrough.

And yet Tia couldn’t help but speculate…number 642. Maybe she’d stumbled upon the exception to her run of failures. Maybe number 642 was exactly what she’d been looking for. What she knew was there, somewhere, waiting for her.

Yes, she took it very personally.

Her thoughts moved ahead. The protocols for human testing. Successful results in humans. The Institute filing for a patent to codify the substance’s formula, then abandoning the patent to the public domain, so the medication could be manufactured and sold at low prices—this was the idealism that had brought her to the Institute and kept her here.

A knock on the lab’s outer entryway interrupted her reverie.

“Tia?” A man’s voice, muffled by the distance. No doubt one of the physicians on call tonight. Everyone on the staff knew that she worked late and that she was always willing to discuss research questions and problems. At the Institute, colleagues shared their questions and looked to their peers for ideas. Tia had visitors several nights a week. Often more than one visitor arrived, and they had an impromptu party. She kept a bottle of gin in the cabinet and tonic in the fridge. “You still there, Tia?”

She checked her watch. 1:15
AM
. Maybe it was Nick—her thoughts went to him first, although she wasn’t certain he was in town. Quickly she pushed her hair into place, patted her cheeks to bring some color into her face, reapplied her lipstick. She hoped her eyes weren’t red from crying.

“Come in,” she called. “It’s open.” She heard the door opening. Footsteps through the outer rooms.

Sergei Oretsky was at the lab doorway. “Don’t you ever get tired?” he asked gently.

“Not very often,” she said, standing to welcome him. Well, he wasn’t Nick, but he was pleasant enough. “What about you?”

“Oh, I can’t sleep, always worry, worry. My children, my wife,
my mother. I was walking and saw your light. What are you working on?”

“Something interesting. I’ll show you. It’s nothing, probably. I’m sure I made a mistake somewhere along the way. In fact, I’d like your opinion.”