Water Street (11 page)

She handed the jacket back to Thomas.

“Thanks, Eldrida,” he said as they went down the stairs.

She raised her hand. “Never mind.”

Outside, they walked along Water Street toward the bridge. “Does your mother write to you?” she blurted out.

He was running a stick over the wroughtiron railings. The clatter of it was irritating, but everything seemed too quiet when he stopped.

At first he didn't answer. That gave her time to feel sorry for asking.

“She—” He began to run the stick over the railings again. “She's very busy, but—”

They crossed the street to get closer to the bridge, and perched there on the end of a pile of wood. Mounds of debris rose around them, chunks of granite, bent nails as wide as her thumbs, and dusty rocks. They watched the barges going up the river, the froth of their wakes white and cold, and then shaded their eyes to look at the towers, one on the Brooklyn side, the other on the Manhattan side, and in between them men in their small swings, working on the cables that would hold the roadbed up.

A woman in a garnet skirt and black shawl went past, and Bird nudged Thomas. “That's the woman who's finishing the bridge. Her name is Emily, Mrs. Roebling.”

Thomas nodded. He pulled his book out of his pocket and began to write. Bird tried to look over his shoulder, but a pale sun was in her eyes. All she could see was that most
of the page was filled with his scrawl, and that her name was at the top.

She leaned closer, but he reached out and held her wrist the way Mama had a little while ago. “I'll show it to you someday,” he said. “But not now.”

For lunch Saturday they'd had boiled potatoes with snips of chives from Thomas's plant, and butter dripping onto the plate. Annie was working a half day at the factory, and Mama had left to take the trolley to visit Aunt Celia. Bird didn't know where Hughie was, but for once she wasn't going to worry about him. She had a whole scoop of time free to read.

But first she stood at the kitchen window angling her head to look at the top of the bridge tower. Even though she couldn't see it very well, she knew that the top was crowded with men—maybe seventy or eighty of them, Da said.
“It's cold up there, Birdie. And the wind! It roars across that great height.”

Mrs. Daley had had something to say about that wind, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Men have been killed that way. A shame and a waste for a bridge that will never work.”

Bird went over to the table. She was halfway through Sister Raymond's book. It was about the terrible famine in Ireland thirty years earlier. It was Mama's famine, she realized, Da's famine. She thought of Da saying,
“Ah, Bird, you'll never really know what it was like. How far we've come.”

The downstairs door opened. Bird put her finger between the pages of the book, listening to the footsteps: too heavy for Thomas's, too light for Annie's, too steady for Mr. Neary's.

The knock came on their door, more a scratch than a knock. Bird pulled it open, startling the girl waiting there. She wasn't much older than Annie, but already there was the beginning of a line between her eyebrows. She had the Viking color of the people from the west of Ireland, and Bird could hear Mama's brogue in her voice. “Are you the healer?”

Bird shook her head. “I'm sorry, she's not here.”

“You go with her sometimes, don't you?” the girl said. “I saw you last summer in the street, carrying her bag.” She leaned forward. “I know you do.”

Bird swallowed. “No, I can't.” From the doorway, she could see Thomas on the stairs looking down at them.

“I'll pay you.” The line between the girl's eyebrows deepened. “Just what we've always paid your mother. Really, I will.” The girl gripped Bird's arm so hard she felt the pain of it. “You have to come.”

“No. I can't help.” Bird raised her shoulders helplessly, her hands out. “You'll have to get the doctor.” But as she said it she could see Thomas on the landing now, shaking
his head, reminding her that they had seen the doctor driving his horses hard a few hours ago. He'd never be back in his office yet.

“They will die then.” The girl's mouth was chapped, tight and pinched, her skin dry. Mama would say she looked woebegone, but as Bird looked at her eyes, the word she thought of was
desperate.

“Bird,” Thomas said.

For a moment she looked up at him; then she asked, “Who is it that's sick?”

“Just come,” the girl said. “My baby sister—”

“But your mother … Isn't your mother there?”

“She's sick. Please.”

Bird still might not have gone, but she thought of Mary Bridget that summer day, the happiest day she could remember. And Thomas was still standing there, and she knew he wanted her to go. “Wait,” she said. “Just—”

She went to the coat stand and leaned her head against the wooden bar. She couldn't do this. She knew she couldn't. But then with her heart pounding hard enough so she felt it in her throat, she reached for her coat, her hat, and pulled open the kitchen drawer for the cure book, spilling out knives and spoons. It wasn't there.

She hurried into her room to search under the bed, and to push back the closet curtain to see if she had left it on the floor. Always missing, that book, but she told herself she knew every line of it by heart. She decided to go without it.

Thomas was at the doorway now. “I'll go with you, and wait outside.”

Thomas. Always there.

Downstairs there was a line at the bakery door. Sullivan had fresh bread, and there was a tray of Annie's cookies in the window. Bird threaded her way around the women.

It was an easy walk: three blocks down, one over, and the girl began to talk as they crossed the street. “I don't know what's the matter,” she said. “My mother is sick, my sister, my brother.”

“Three of them?” Bird's voice didn't sound like her own. “How sick?”

The girl didn't answer.

How was she going to do that, take care of three of them? She cut off the thought as the girl went on. “They have fever. They're burning up, I've covered them, kept them warm, but their faces—” She waved a chapped hand in front of her own face. “And myself—”

Bird took a quick look at her, but she seemed healthy, her cheeks rosy, her eyes clear.
Stay healthy
, she told the girl in her head.

The family lived on the first floor. As they went up the steps in front, Bird caught a glimpse of someone in a bed near the window.

“I'll be right here, Bird,” Thomas said, sitting on the stoop and pulling out his writing book.

The apartment inside could have been the Mallons' except there was only one bedroom. The little boy and his mother were in the bed together, the boy's arms flung out, one of them across his mother's body, blotches of red across his face.

A flat rash, red. Scarlet fever. She knew it right away.
She remembered Mama at the kitchen table talking about rashes: chicken pox, smallpox, measles, ringworm.

Scarlet fever.

The mother and the boy didn't seem to know Bird and the girl were there, and even when the girl said, “I've brought help,” they didn't open their eyes.

Help. What help could she be?

She stared down at them. Anyone could see how sick they were. “Where is the baby?”

The girl turned. “There.”

The tiniest baby lay in the middle of the bed, her hair soft and fine across her head, her eyes closed, her lashes dark on her cheeks, the rash across her face. She was so still.

Bird stepped back from the bed, taking deep breaths, and even in that terrible moment, she remembered seeing Mama doing that once. She had wanted Mama to hurry, almost saying it aloud.
Hurry, Mama, open your bag, do something, Mama.

Was it possible Mama hadn't known what to do either?

The boy was nearest to her. She put her hand on his forehead, and felt the heat of it. The only thing she remembered from all the times with Mama, from all the lines she had written in the cure book, was:
Feed a cold, starve a fever.
Or was it the other way—
starve a cold, feed a fever?

Think
, she told herself, and remembered having the grippe one winter. Mama had washed her face, her arms, her legs with cold water, water that had made her shiver but had felt so good.

Bring the fever down.
Yes.

She pulled the covers off the bed, seeing their thin legs.

“What are you doing?” the girl said. “They'll freeze.”

She could see Thomas outside, sitting there. Waiting for her.

In Mama's voice she asked for clean rags and a pan of cold water, and while she waited, she stood next to the bed, her hands clenched, and she didn't dare reach out to the baby.

The girl brought everything, water sloshing onto the floor.

“Go now for the doctor,” Bird said. She wanted to do that herself, wanted to rush out of the room and down the street.
Please let the doctor be there.
She wanted to pound at his door and bring him there, and then go home, where she didn't have to think about people with terrible fevers, and a baby that looked as if she wasn't alive, her hands like stars on her small chest.
Please.

Head down, the girl glared at her.

“Do it now.” Bird felt as if she couldn't breathe.

“But the money,” the girl said.

Money. What did she care about money?

A sound came from the bed, but she didn't know which one of them had moaned, or sighed, or even mumbled something.

She tore the rag in two and dropped both halves into the water. “You don't have to pay me. Use it for the doctor.”

“We have no money. There's no money here in the house,” the girl said. “Not a cent.”

Bird began with the boy first, his forehead, his cheeks, his neck, and in an instant, the rag was warm from his skin. She dropped it back into the pan and squeezed out the other
one. She reached for his arm, pushing back the sleeve to see the rash like the patterns on the map in their classroom.

She looked back over her shoulder. “Go now.”

“I wasn't going to give you money.” The girl's eyes slid away from Bird's. “We'd bring a chicken to your mother when we could. My father works at the poultry market, and sometimes they give him one or two to take home.”

She talked fast, breathlessly, but Bird didn't have time to listen. “I don't care about money and chickens.” Her voice was hard. “Get the doctor.”

Bird looked back at the boy, and after a few moments she heard the outside door close.

On the far side of the bed, the mother moaned, so she leaned across and dabbed water on her face and neck, then her arms. As she did she thought,
What about the baby?

She didn't want to touch the baby. Didn't want to know if she was dead. But still she reached down, her arms underneath that small body, and pulled it up against her. The baby was burning with fever.

But alive. Alive!

Bird wiped her with the rag but it wasn't enough. She needed something larger, something to wrap the infant's whole body, but there was nothing in that room. She stood up with the baby in her arms, overturning the pan of water, and went into the kitchen.

With one hand, she reached under the waistband of her skirt and loosened the string of her petticoat. It dropped to her feet and she stepped out of it.

She went to the sink, so grateful that they had running water, and soaked the petticoat, then sank down on the
floor to wrap it around and around the baby, to bundle her in that wet cloth. As she did, she felt the baby shudder, saw her face contort, and knew without ever having seen it before that she was convulsing.

Did babies die of convulsions? She didn't know enough, would never know enough.

She put her thumbs into that little mouth, over the small tongue so the baby wouldn't swallow it.

The doctor! The doctor would never come. She would sit there forever, feeling the baby's toothless mouth biting down on her thumbs.

She would never leave that spot, never, never—

But he did come at last, smelling of the outside and of apples from his pipe.

She scrambled up and he took the baby from her, looking down at Bird's face, but she slid away from him and out the door onto the dark street.

And like a shadow, Thomas was there. He took her arm, and they went home together. She heard him saying, “All right, Birdie. All right.”

What had happened in there? What had it been like for Bird? Thomas didn't ask, didn't say a word, but followed her up the stairs.

Mrs. Mallon must have heard them coming, because she was standing in the doorway. “Where have you been, Birdie? Thomas? I've been worried!”

He moved around them and started up to his apartment.

“Don't go, Thomas.” Bird shrugged out of her coat, leaving it outside the door, and held her hands out so she didn't touch anything.

Mrs. Mallon's hand went to her mouth. “What is it, child?”

“Do you die of convulsions? Do you die of scarlet fever?”

Thomas remembered having scarlet fever, and the woman with the lace on her sleeves bending over him.