NEW YORK CITY, 1918
The city room was at about the same strength as it had been for the past month. Newmark had failed to report to work at the beginning of the week, but he hadn’t been any help for days anyway. He’d gradually given up any pretense at sobriety and had started openly drinking in front of Green, who’d strangely decided to ignore him. On Wednesday, Bernstein, who’d been gone for two weeks, had shown up, a pale shadow of himself
One goes, one comes back, Duffy thought. Life goes on. or does it? he wondered. The epidemic was raging. They’d stopped trying to keep up with the death notices. Families had stopped complaining if the death of their nearest and dearest wasn’t included in the paper. In some cases whole families seemed to go in a single day. And still there were no headlines. Health bulletins were buried on the back page.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Green said, holding up the paste-up of the day’s paper. The headline screamed: TURKS SURRENDER! WE’VE GOT THE HUN ON THE RUN. He grinned.
“Doesn’t that have a rhythm you can sing to?”
“You want to sing?” Duffy replied. “How about:
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza,
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.”
“That’s not in very good taste and doesn’t even rhyme very well.” Green sniffed. “People don’t want to read about the flu. People want to read about kicking the stuffing out of the Hun. You’d better get busy with more dispatches from the front. The great American public is starving for news about the America Expeditionary Forces.”
Duffy plowed through the reports. Most dealt with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but he noticed a small item buried under Other Dispatches. Pershing requests additional 1,500 Army Nurse Corps.
Either the fighting was not going as well as the people at home thought or something terrible was happening over there. Duffy’s thoughts were interrupted by the copy boy, who had managed to stay healthy so far. “Man to see you, Mister Duffy.”
Duffy looked up and spotted Sam Lovett waiting in the reception area. He hurried over.
“Lovett, what brings you here?” he called. His throat felt constricted and his heart thumped in his chest, threatening to tear from its moorings. “What’s wrong?”
Lovett reached over and grabbed Duffy’s hand. “Not a thing,” he answered. “You never called. You’ve never given us a chance to thank you properly. Now you’ll come tonight. We won’t take no for an answer.”
Duffy reeled. The memory of seeing Mary threatened to tear him in half. On the one hand he’d tried his best to put her out of his mind, but now that Lovett was standing in front of him he realized that he could hardly restrain himself from rushing to her side to see if she was as beautiful as he remembered.
“There’s no need to thank me,” he mumbled. “Really there isn’t.”
“For saving my wife’s life? I’ll not be content until you break bread with us. Do you still have our address?”
Duffy nodded.
“Seven o’clock, then.”
Duffy knew he should plead a prior engagement, but his tongue seemed like lead in his mouth. To see her again, to see that alabaster curve of her neck, those gleaming tendrils of red hair clinging to her cheeks, it was more than he could bear. He remembered his mother, in the heat of the kitchen, her auburn hair clinging to her cheeks as she prepared the evening meal. He blushed. Self-knowledge came in a blinding flash, every bit the equal of the morning’s first shot of rye. His mother’s wedding picture, lost in a fire years ago, could have been Mary.
Then he pulled himself together and prepared his excuse, but the words that came out of his mouth were, “I’m looking forward to it.”