Outside, in the alley behind the pharmacy, my pricklies sputtered in the humid and far-too-warm-for-October afternoon. I looked to the sky, squinting to see past the dullness. I wanted to rejoin the world of light and time, feel my heart beat to a pulse growing faint. Yet my every effort fell short of my expectation. My every idea withered without exception. My every hope doused in an ever-expanding deluge of responsibility. I had to find a way to resurrect my dreams, or they would bury me in disappointment.
A newspaper page flapped against the pharmacy’s back stoop, dog-eared and damp. Beneath a listing of dead heroes was a boxed admonishment:
DON’T BE LATE.
THE HUN WON’T WAIT.
KEEP YOUR FOURTH LIBERTY BOND SUBSCRIPTION UP TO DATE.
News of the influenza again occupied a sidebar, advising the populace its spread had been “considerably checked.” In war news, American and British troops were smashing through German lines, and Italians in the Isonzo were preparing for a final push.
The Isonzo.
I knew nothing about war. My brothers’ letters always spoke of life in tents, sometimes bad weather, complaints the food was not as good as Mamma’s. I imagined them standing in files like little lead soldiers, their rifles shouldered. Somebody would give the order to charge. They would. The pieces would scatter, then everybody would pick themselves up, scrape off the mud, and head back to camp for dinner.
The paper’s dead heroes were young, often smiling, proud in their uniforms, a reason to pause for pity, to say a prayer, to bring pasta and pastry to their grieving relatives. They were dead in theory, not for real, not like my parents, cold and irrefutable and hardening under their bedcovers. And until somebody showed me otherwise, none of those dead heroes would ever belong to me.
I kicked the paper to the side and adjusted my scarf to cover my mouth and nose. Carlo still had my coat, but the stench of the fish-monger’s wash water remained, rising from my shoes, soaked into my stockings. I picked my way south through the trash heaped along the alleyway and onto a street quieter than a Sunday morning in a January snowstorm.
A confectioner across the street was closed, a notice tacked to the doorway: OPENING TOMORROW. FUNERAL. A milliner’s, a stationer’s, a tinker’s stand, all silent.
The trolley rumbled to a stop.
I shook my head, fuzzier than the air, to let the white-masked conductor know I wasn’t riding. The trolley rumbled on, the people aboard packed close as matches in a two-penny box.
Catacorner from where I stood, a bakery was closing up shop. I plodded across the cobbles, and bought two rolls.
The baker bagged them. “I’ll give you a good price on the rest.”
I thought of Etti and Fipo, and plunked down another coin. I slipped one roll into my pocket, twisted the bag containing the others into my scarf.
Down the street, the girls still jumped rope, their pace sedate, their rhythm sapped of rhyme. A few doors down, a group of boys crouched, playing marbles, coats unbuttoned and shirttails dragging on the sidewalk. Farther on, a little girl sat on a stoop and cuddled a doll.
I knew her. Grazia. The little girl who darted past me on Parade Day. I looked at her tangled hair, remembered the neat braids. Her mother must be ill. A little boy, looking enough like her I guessed he was Grazia’s brother, sat on the stoop beside her, face dirty, head resting on her shoulder. I moved toward them. I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought I would give them a roll. The little girl saw me coming. She took her brother’s hand, and disappeared inside the house.
Grazia’s mother had been so angry, though I’d saved her daughter. She likely told the girl to beware, likely told her I’d brought her a curse. The pricklies returned, poking from under my collar. I continued down the street.
A half a block on, a dog barked, then growled. Children’s voices, which I at first assumed were rising in play, turned frightened. I gathered my skirt and ran.
“Hold him. Hold.”
“Watch your hands.”
“Get it. Quick.”
Then a scream.
I rounded the corner into an alley and onto a group of boys, piled into a trash heap. A dog bounded away, something tight in its jaws. The boys picked themselves up. I grabbed the biggest by his collar. “What happened? Who screamed? Are you hurt?”
“It was in the trash.”
“What was in the trash?”
“Cappacoli. C’mon signorina, the dog had it, we tried to get it. We didn’t do anything wrong.” He thrashed under my grasp, grabbed my scarf.
I held tight to the guaritrice’s teas. The rolls went tumbling. The children fell on them. And scattered.
The boy stopped struggling. He looked after his departing friends and let out a wail, then raised a dirt-streaked face to mine. “Do you have more?”
The boys had been rummaging in the trash for food. They were hungry. Their parents were sick, and there was nobody to care for them. I imagined their apartments, piled in dishes and dirty clothes, overflowing basins and snot-filled hankies. Imagined the children pawing through empty iceboxes, empty canisters.
It’d been more than a week, days and days. Pay packets would be spent, rent due. Appeals to relatives would go unanswered because they would also be sick. Within my bubble nobody died, yet children cowered in corners while their parents vomited all they tried to eat, coughed to exhaustion, and burned under the fever.
My feet got numb, like they weren’t connected to my body. My head grew heavy. I twined my fingers in the boy’s collar, needing something steady and sure, something familiar with which to connect. “Take me to your house.”
Worse than the worst the Lattanzis’ had ever been. Every dish crusted, every cloth soiled. The boy’s parents coughed in their room, his brother curled into a corner, thumb in mouth. Like Etti.
I picked up a bowl, and put it into the sink. Picked up another and did the same. I ran the water. Cold. I thought of the Lattanzis’ furnace, wondered who was responsible for making sure the one in this house stayed lit. Did they even have coal?
Outside the bubble, time had become precious, each second lasting no longer than it should, the moments which happened between them impossible to retrieve. Inside, the suffering never ended. I was one girl. One confused, dejected, and exhausted girl.
Stinking of fish.
I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief. The last of the baker’s rolls tumbled out and fell to the floor. The boy turned around when it hit. His brother pulled his thumb from his mouth. They fell on the roll.
Like dogs.
I walked out of the kitchen, out of the house. I closed the door behind me.
A long, long quarter hour later, I turned the corner onto Ninth Street. “Fiora.”
The doctor. White-masked. Wan. Heading my way. He had the old man on his elbow.
My pace picked up, along with my heartbeat. “What happened? Is he all right?”
The old man didn’t look happy to see me. “Where have you been? Where’s Carlo?”
All the umbrage of the past few hours flew forward and knocked my conscience into the gutter. I lied. “He had work to do. I went looking for Signora Lattanzi’s sister.”
The doctor shook his head. “I saw the signora’s sister this morning. She will not survive the day.” He nudged the old man. “Get him upstairs. Find his pills. His heart can’t take this.”
The old man shrugged him off. “I have my pills. They’re on the shelf.”
“They should be in your pocket.” The doctor handed me a booklet. “For you. For the pregnant girl. In case her time comes and you can’t find me. I have to go. And for God’s sake, that scarf won’t work. Get a mask.”
He was off.
The old man held on to my shoulder and let me walk him a painful step, then another. People gathered, sideways glances cast my way.
The old man told them not to worry, told them he was fine. “Fiora will see me home.”
But the men insisted. Two formed a chair with their arms. Two others lifted the old man and sat him between them. They trudged together through the thickness which now defined our world, trading stories and jokes.
I trudged behind. This is how regular people talked. People whose mothers were not the neighborhood fortune-teller. Easy and friendly with one another, containing a lightness which defied the bubble’s growing density, their words allowed to exit unmeasured, unexamined. Unnoticed.
They knew the old man, knew he knew things. Yet they treated the old man with respect and remembered my mother with fear.
It wasn’t fair.
The old man made the men leave him at the stoop. “Go,” he told them. “Fiora can help me from here.”
They slid caps from their heads, each backing up a step with a deferential nod. Then they turned, replaced their caps, and were gone.
The old man took his time taking the stairs. In the apartment, he took his place at the table.
I rummaged among the canisters on the shelves. “Where are your pills?”
“The doctor gave me one.”
“Then where are they in case you need another?”
“By my cot.” He reached for a leather punch. “What did the doctor give you?”
The booklet. I pulled it from my pocket. It was in English and titled Childbirth in the Home. I paged through, blushing at the illustrations, at anatomy the nuns told us we should keep to ourselves, appalled at the apparent physical impossibility. “I can’t do this.”
The old man stopped working. He gathered a hammer and a few tacks. “Come with me, Fiora Vicente.”
He opened the door to my attic and mounted the stairs. He took it slow, his feet landing with a soft thud on each tread. I followed, shutting the door behind us. His hand grazed the bedpost, then the back of the padded rocker. He ran a finger along the brim of the gigantic flowered hat, then took a seat. It seemed the chair enveloped him, as Mamma’s curtain did me. He sighed and his shoulders slumped, and it became clear why these items were up there and not downstairs where they should be. “You miss her.”
“To have someone to miss is a blessing to be embraced.” He gazed at the projection of an upside-down market moving five minutes ahead of us across the far wall, at shuttered stalls and streets emptier than I’d ever seen. “But I do not think it is bad to sometimes wish to not be so blessed.”
He pulled the curtain aside. The market bleached out. He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a pamphlet, not so thick as the doctor’s booklet, but larger in dimension. He handed it to me. “Unfold it.”
The pamphlet was a map of Philadelphia, south of City Hall, extending west to the Schuylkill and east to the Delaware River. Somebody had traced a series of concentric circles to the right of Broad Street, centered on the old man’s apartment and sketched in the same red color as the dust in my vision.
The old man took back the map and laid it on his lap. He traced the innermost circle. “This is the morning I noticed the wind had stilled.”
He looped through two more. “This is the day you were too modern to be polite to Carlo.”
He spiraled onto the fourth. “This is the day you brought the boys to the market and left them with Signora Bruni.”
The fifth. “This is the day you distributed my wife’s needlework over the apartment.”
He traced three more spirals. They tracked the pattern of red Xs Tizi had spiraled around the map tacked to the wall behind her mother’s counter. With each spiral, the old man described that day’s arguments and discourtesies, misunderstandings and failings, and plain old stubborn refusals.
He moved to the outermost spiral. “And this is today, the most important of days, for this is the day you again disobeyed me and returned to visit with the guaritrice.”
He stopped spiraling. “How did you get in? I ringed the pharmacy with verbena, stuffed your pockets full. Where is your coat? I sewed a layer into its hem.”
He’d sewed verbena into the hem of my coat? “I wasn’t wearing my coat. It stank. Carlo has it.”
“Carlo was there.” The old man looked alarmed. “Is he all right? Where is he?”
“Home I suppose. He didn’t stay.”
The old man looked like he was undecided about that answer. “Tell me everything she said to you.”
“Why do you need to ask?” I tapped under my eye. “You know everything I do. You’re like my mother.”
He tapped his ears. “Signora Lattanzi’s is not the only wagging tongue in this neighborhood.” He put out a hand. “Whatever the guaritrice gave you, give to me.”
I stepped away, aware of the bags stuffed within my bodice. “She gave me nothing except advice. About Carlo. About you. That you’re men and men always want to tell women what to do.”
He eyed me. “You went all the way to the pharmacy for advice?”
“I went for something for the Lattanzis, for the agita. All the druggist could offer was Chiclets. The Lattanzis would only throw them up.”
The old man pushed up from the chair, his eyes shadowed. He splayed the map across the ceiling slope, dead center, and tacked it to the wall.
“Every day I mark the map.” He retraced the outermost spiral. “And here is as far as I can mark. My heart is too weak. It is now your penance to keep track. Your bubble is growing, and you need to keep a record.”
“Of what?”
“Of all the might-have-beens that may never be. When your bubble collapses, many people will need help. Signora Bruni will need it first.” He picked up the booklet and shoved it back into my hands. “You should check on the Lattanzis.”
Everything collapses, buildings, roads, mountains, even people. It is the way of the world. Stronger structures take longer, but eventually, everything falls apart.
I no longer had to knock. I’d found one of Signora Lattanzi’s spare keys in the finial atop the newel post. So I surprised the boys, Fipo eating cold oatmeal at the table, Etti out of a bowl atop a chair. Etti jumped when I entered, his food landing in a clump the consistency of mud patties. He squatted beside the mess, and lapped at it with his tongue.
Like a dog.