The Orphan Collector. Ellen Marie Wiseman

In the last newspaper she’d read before Wallis got sick, the daily notices of death from the flu filled an entire page—along with those killed and missing in the war—seven columns of small print with a repetitive litany: Cecil Newman of pneumonia, age twenty-one; Mavis Rivers of influenza, age twenty-six; William Flint of influenza, age fifteen. Another article stated trucks were being used to carry bodies from the morgue to potter’s field. Corpses were tagged for later identification before being buried in a trench dug by a steam shovel, and the men filling in the mass graves were falling sick. On the radio, the Pennsylvania Council of National Defense explained: “It is doubtful that the city of Philadelphia has, at any time in its history, been confronted by a more serious situation than that presented in connection with the care and burial of the dead during the recent epidemic.” With everything going on, people being buried alive was certainly a possibility. Just the thought of it made her shiver.

      Down in the alley, the driver slowed the horses, pulled to a stop outside one of the row houses, and tied the reins to the wagon. Three bodies wrapped in dirty, bloodstained sheets lay in the wagon bed. The driver and the other man climbed down, went over to the front stoop, lifted a sheet-draped body from beside the steps, and piled it on the back with the others. Then they returned to the steps and picked up another body, this one smaller than the first. With the wagon loaded, they climbed back on and moved closer to Bernice’s building, continuing the call for people to bring out their dead.

      She would not hand Wallis over to those men. They couldn’t take her baby. She wouldn’t let them. Then she realized they had no idea she was there, watching from her third-floor window. They didn’t know her boy was dead. And she needed to keep it that way. Otherwise, they might put him on that horrible wagon, and once they got a good look at her, they’d force her to go to an asylum.

      She had seen her reflection in the cracked mirror above the washbasin. It was that of a stranger, with dull eyes and tangled hair, sunken cheekbones and sallow skin. She looked like a woman insane. They’d think she was sick and needed help. But she didn’t want help. There was nothing they could do for her, anyway. She wanted to die. She wanted to be with her husband and son. She shrank back when the men passed beneath her window, but not before catching sight of a small, pale hand sticking out of the bloody pile of sheet-wrapped bodies in the wagon bed.

      The men stopped two more times to load dead bodies, then drove along the alley as if it were a normal routine, like delivering milk or lighting the streetlamps. Finally they turned the corner and disappeared, the low, indifferent voice calling for people to bring out their dead echoing once more in the empty alley before growing fainter and fainter. Then the afternoon went silent and Bernice was alone again.

      Seeing the men in the wagon made her think of her older brother, Daniel, how he used to shut her in a storage crate and tell her their parents were getting rid of her. He’d say the postman was coming to pick her up to mail her to a different family, or the nuns were coming to take her to an orphanage. He said orphans slept on wooden planks in cold attics, and the only thing they got to eat was cold gruel. If they were bad, the nuns beat them or locked them in closets, and sometimes forgot to let them out. The first time he did it Bernice was five years old, and she stayed in the box for hours, crying and waiting to be taken away. She finally snitched on him when she turned eight, but her mother refused to believe her precious son would do anything so horrible. Instead, she accused Bernice of making up stories and sent her to bed without supper. Then, finally, her father caught Daniel sitting on top of the crate while she wept inside, and punished him with a belt. After that, Daniel never did it again. But from that day on, after their mother blew out their bedroom lantern every night, he whispered across the room in a menacing voice that the nuns were still coming to get her. Or he crept across the floor in the dark and grabbed her ankles, scaring her so badly she nearly wet the bed. For years she didn’t dare fall asleep until she heard him snoring. Sometimes he asked if she could taste the rat poison in her oatmeal, or left a noose lying between her sheets. When he died of typhoid at thirteen, she was inconsolable. No one knew she was crying tears of relief.

      Suddenly a flash of movement caught her attention, pulling her from her thoughts. The door in the row house across the alley opened partway and someone peeked out, a small, pinched face looking up and down the street. It looked like a young girl, with blond braids and a red scarf over her nose and mouth. After checking both ways, the girl came out and stood on the stoop, her shoulders hunched as if trying to make herself smaller. She wore an oversize coat with baggy pockets over her long dress and carried what looked like an empty sack in one hand.

      Bernice couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Mr. and Mrs. Lange’s daughter, the one with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and the odd-sounding name. What was it? Gia? Pia? Yes, that was it. Pia. She remembered because she’d heard the Duffy boy calling out to her as she sat reading on the steps one day. At first she thought he was yelling in a different language, but then the girl waved and went to greet him. That’s when Bernice realized the strange word was a name. Another time at a vegetable stand, she’d heard Mrs. Lange talking to the same girl and realized it was her daughter. Neither of them paid any attention to her, but Bernice had noticed the striking color of Pia’s eyes, like the deep cobalt of a blue jay’s wing. At the time Bernice had been only weeks away from giving birth to Wallis and had almost stopped to admire Mrs. Lange’s new twins—but she kept going because Mr. Lange had taken her father’s job. Not to mention she couldn’t let the neighbors see her talking to Germans. She’d wondered briefly if she’d temporarily lost her mind, then reminded herself the twins were only babies, too young to be swayed by German views and behaviors. She couldn’t fault herself for being drawn to their sweet, newborn faces.

      Now she couldn’t imagine why Pia was leaving the safety of their row house during a citywide quarantine. Where was her mother? And what about her brothers, those beautiful twin boys? Mrs. Lange had to be out of her mind to allow her young daughter to venture out at a time like this. Pia couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. Even if Mrs. Lange couldn’t read the newspaper and didn’t own a radio, she had to know people were getting sick and dying. She had to know it wasn’t safe for Pia to leave their apartment. The thought briefly crossed her mind that the Germans had started the epidemic and Pia and her family were immune, but she pushed it away. Mr. and Mrs. Bach and their four daughters were German too, and every last one of them was dead.

      In spite of her anger with Mr. Lange for stealing her father’s job, and the fact that they were German, Bernice could tell that normally, Mrs. Lange was a good mother. If there was a chill in the air, the twins and Pia always wore warm coats and knitted hats. Whenever she came out of the building with the twins, Mrs. Lange kissed them both before putting them in their pram, then smiled and talked to them while pushing them down the sidewalk. She caressed Pia’s cheek with a gentle hand and kissed her forehead when seeing her off to school. So why would Mrs. Lange risk her daughter’s life by letting her go outside during a flu epidemic?

      Then Bernice had another thought. One that made her blood run cold.

      Maybe Mrs. Lange was dead.

      Maybe the twins were dead too.

      No. Not those beautiful baby boys!

      Nausea stirred in Bernice’s stomach, and the room seemed to spin around her. She grasped the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself, and fixed watery eyes on the body of her dead son. How was it possible that babies were getting sick and dying? How was such a horrendous nightmare allowed? And where was the God she knew and loved? The Lange boys were a little older than Wallis, but just as innocent and pure, even if they were German. Pulling her gaze back to the window, she tried to focus. Pia was hurrying along the alley with her head down, occasionally glancing over her shoulder and looking around as if worried she might be seen. Bernice couldn’t imagine where she was headed. Maybe she was going to try to find medicine but hadn’t heard that the pharmacies had run out of everything but whiskey—now that the saloons were closed, it was the only place you could get it. Maybe she was going to the hospital to look for help. But if the boys were sick, Mrs. Lange should have gone instead of sending her young daughter. It wasn’t right. Unless Mrs. Lange was sick too.

      Then Pia climbed the steps of the next building and went inside.

      What was she