The Orphan Collector. Ellen Marie Wiseman
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While the dead backed up at mortuaries and pressed into undertakers’ living quarters, hospital morgues overflowed into corridors, corpses at the city morgue spilled into the street, and Pia struggled to keep herself and her brothers alive inside the dim, cramped rooms of their apartment on Shunk Alley. Before making the decision to leave, she had suffered eight days of increasing anxiety, with no idea when—or if—it would be safe to go out again. She did her best to make sure their meager supplies would last as long as possible by rationing the Mellin’s Infant Food and adding spoonsful of porridge, soft boiled eggs, cooked potatoes, and mashed carrots to the boys’ diet. Wishing she’d paid more attention when Mutti made their meals, Pia tried to duplicate her lentil soup, but the lentils turned out either half-cooked or too mushy, and the soup tasted like chalk mixed with paste. She forced herself to eat it anyway, so she could save the rest of the food for the twins. She hated the taste of her mother’s Postum but drank that too, despite the fact that she didn’t even like real coffee. It didn’t matter if her stomach cramped with hunger or she longed for something to drink besides fake coffee and water, Ollie and Max came first. Anything that could be made soft enough, she fed to them. Anything that was hard or distasteful, like crusts of bread or lentil soup, she kept for herself.
When she wasn’t busy feeding, changing, or trying to get the twins to sleep, she checked out the window to see if people were coming outside yet, if the nightmare was going to end. She hoped against hope to see her father in his uniform, returning home from the war in time to save them. But he was never there. Every so often neighbors hurried out of their homes, their pale faces lined by sorrow and fear, to leave bodies wrapped in sheets on the steps. Otherwise, the alley was empty. She wondered briefly if she should put Mutti outside, but didn’t think she could carry her down three flights of stairs on her own. Besides, she didn’t want to leave her out on the street. It wouldn’t seem right. For reasons she couldn’t explain, it felt better having her mother there, in the apartment with them.
Remembering the wakes she’d attended in Hazleton, she’d done her best to honor Mutti by carefully brushing her hair out of her face, sweeping it back on the pillow, and decorating the pillowslip with paper flowers made out of pages torn from her schoolbook. She didn’t care if she got in trouble for damaging the book. Who knew if she’d ever return to school, anyway? After that, she covered Mutti with an extra blanket so she wouldn’t be cold, then tried closing Mutti’s mouth and washing the blood off her face with a wet rag, but gave up because she had to press too hard.
Every morning, she checked the clothesline for a message from Finn, but her note still hung outside his window, damp and tattered from the October wind and rain. The sight of it made her shiver. If it weren’t for the occasional muffled voices and bump and scrape of furniture on the other side of the tenement walls, she’d have thought she and her brothers were the last people left alive. Sometimes, when she heard muted anguished wails and sobbing, she imagined the flu taking them all one by one, until no one was left in the city.
Grief and despair nearly swallowed her.
By day four she stopped looking for a note from Finn. And when she opened the bedroom door to look for warmer clothes for her brothers, she recoiled and clamped a hand over her mouth. She’d never smelled anything so horrible—a pungent combination of dead animal, the inside of an outhouse on a hot day, and the strange, cloying scent of old perfume. Vater had found a dead rat rotting under the stove the day they’d moved into the apartment, and that had made Pia gag, but this was worse.
She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway, holding her breath and fighting the urge to vomit; at the same time, she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the sight of Mutti on the bed. Her body had started to bloat, the thin skin of her face stretching as if about to burst. Somehow, more blood foamed from her eyes and nose and mouth. Forcing herself to enter the room, Pia grabbed the rest of the boys’ clothes from the dresser, hurried back out, closed the door, and leaned against it, breathing hard. But the horrible smell seemed to cling to her, gluing itself to her hair and caking the inside of her nostrils. She threw the clothes on the table, hurried over to the wash bucket, scrubbed her hands and face with the last sliver of Ivory soap, and ran her soapy fingers through her hair. It didn’t help. She grabbed diapers and rags from the clotheslines above the stove and shoved them under the bottom of the door, tears burning in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mutti,” she said. “I know it’s not your fault.”
The first time she saw men with carts picking up bodies, she’d thought about calling out the window to ask if they had any news, if things were getting back to normal or the doctors had found a cure for the flu. Then she realized drawing attention to herself was a bad idea. The men might call the authorities. Then the police would come, find Mutti dead, and take her brothers away. She’d probably never see them again. No, she couldn’t let that happen. It didn’t matter that she was only thirteen, she would take care of Ollie and Max until their father came home. She had to. There was no other choice.
Despite her best efforts to keep her brothers clean, dry, and fed, it seemed like they cried day and night. On the rare occasion they were asleep at the same time, she rushed down to the fenced yard to get water and use the outhouse, praying the boys wouldn’t wake up or start crawling while she was away, and that she wouldn’t run into anyone, especially old Mr. Hill. Mutti used to carry the twins down the four flights in cloth slings strapped to her waist, then carry them back up again—along with two buckets full of water. But Pia didn’t think she was strong enough. Plus, taking the twins would have slowed her down. Sometimes she used the mop pail as a toilet so she wouldn’t have to leave, emptying it in the outhouse when she went down to the yard, but when it came to getting water, she didn’t have a choice. And they needed lots of it—to mix with the Mellin’s, to soften food, to wash dishes and baby bottoms and diapers. Loads and loads of diapers. She used as little Borax in the washtub as possible, but they were running out of that too.
Whether Ollie and Max cried more because they missed Mutti or because the sudden change from breast milk to Mellin’s and real food upset their bellies, she wasn’t sure. But there was nothing she could do about it, anyway. Maybe they sensed that their lives, like hers, had been horribly and forever changed. Maybe they were getting sick. No. She refused to think that way. If they hadn’t caught the flu by now, she convinced herself, they probably wouldn’t. Besides, they couldn’t get sick. She wouldn’t let them. And yet, when she picked them up to change or feed or comfort them, she held her breath, terrified she’d feel the same thing she felt when she touched Mutti the day before she died. So far she’d felt nothing worrisome, but the fear sat like a boulder in her stomach, heavy and solid and unmoving.
If only she could send a telegram to her aunt and uncle in New York. Maybe they would come to Philadelphia to get them. She doubted anyone on Shunk Alley owned a telephone, and she wasn’t sure where the nearest one might be. But her aunt and uncle probably didn’t have one anyway, and she didn’t know their number if they did. Their return address was on letters sent to Mutti and Vater, but she didn’t dare go to the post office twenty blocks away. She couldn’t leave the boys that long, and she couldn’t take them with her. If the post office was even open.
When the eggs and fresh vegetables ran out on the sixth day, she fed Ollie and Max old bread soaked in water and canned applesauce from apples bought at the farmer’s market last fall. Two days later, she gave them the last of the porridge for breakfast, then sat on the bed to watch them nap, fighting against the weight of despair. Even in sleep, misery pinched the twins’ faces and furrowed the smooth skin of their small brows. Their eyes darted back and forth beneath their lids, chasing bad dreams. Seeing them that way broke her heart—struggling to find comfort, not knowing or understanding why their stomachs hurt or where their mother had gone. She missed Mutti too, more than she would ever have thought possible. She could almost feel her brothers’ pain, their intense aching for Mutti’s gentle snuggles and warm kisses, her lavender-and-lye-scented skin, her soft hair that always smelled of baking bread. Grief twisted in Pia’s chest and she hung her head.
Through everything their family had endured, the move from Germany when she was four, the seemingly endless journey across the Atlantic Ocean—which Pia barely remembered—the transition