In the Shadow of Blackbirds (38 page)

“Oh, you silly, naive men.” I shook my weary head and genuinely pitied their ignorance. “You’ve clearly never been a sixteen-year-old girl in the fall of 1918.”

WITH MY HEAD SHROUDED IN BANDAGES AND MY LEGS
shaking from lack of use, I wandered with my black bag through the shivering, rasping bodies toward the hospital’s exit. The tangy sweet smell of the doctors’ celebratory champagne drifted above the fetid stench of fever surrounding me on the cots, and my heart ached to see people still suffering when one half of the nightmare was ending.

“Get better,” I told them on my way through the white corridors. “Please get better. The war is over. It’s done. Don’t miss this. Keep fighting.”

I reached the last hallway and came to a stop. I recognized the face of a patient sitting on one of the cots on the right-hand side of the corridor.

She was eating a bowl of soup, her legs nestled beneath a patched-up green blanket, and I would have missed her if she
had been facing the opposite direction. Her blond hair had turned pure white.

“Aunt Eva?” I ventured closer to make sure the hazel eyes and bottle-cap lenses were truly hers. “Oh, my goodness. Aunt Eva. It is you!” I threw my arms around her bony shoulders and squeezed her as hard as I could without hurting her. “You didn’t die. Your feet weren’t black after all. I could have sworn they were black.”

“Mary Shelley …” She breathed a relieved sigh into my hair and clutched my head against hers. “They told me you were in here, fighting the flu and recovering from a concussion. I’ve been so worried about you.”

“A doctor just released me. Oh, I’m so glad you’re not dead.”

We held each other close for a good minute or more, sniffing back tears, ensuring neither of us was about to disappear.

“I buried you in onions and nearly went crazy with worry.” I dropped to my knees beside her cot. “And I was so certain it had been for nothing. Your face was brown, and some man from down the street helped me get you into an ambulance. He carried you like a hero.”

“Which man?”

“Well … he’s already married.”

“Mary Shelley!” A weak blush rose to her cheeks. “I wasn’t asking to hunt down a husband. I want to know whom to thank.”

“Oh. I’ll show you where he lives when we’re both home.”
I grabbed her cold hand. “You are going to be able to come home, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She steadied her soup on her lap. “The fever’s gone. I just need to regain some strength. I feel like a train ran me over and left me on the tracks to die.”

“I completely understand. I think I must have lost at least ten pounds. Just look at my blouse.” I tugged on the loose fabric gapping above my waistline. “I look like a scarecrow.”

“But your beautiful hair is still brown.” She ran her fingers through my mess of tangled tresses. “Mine’s white … isn’t it?”

I sank my teeth into my bottom lip. “It might be temporary. It’s a striking color, actually.”

“It might fall out, like Gracie’s. I’ve seen some clumps.”

“It might not.”

“And to think I was so worried about my chin-length hair before.” She clamped her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook as if she were either laughing or crying—or both.

“Shh.” I helped her stabilize her sloshing bowl. “It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful because you’re breathing. And you’re not purple—I can’t believe you’re not purple.”

Aunt Eva wiped her eyes behind her glasses. “When I heard you had a head injury, I worried you’d gone to save your ghost. I kept dreaming about Julius shaking you in my living room.”

“I did save Stephen. And he saved me. He’s at peace now.” I swallowed. “We let each other go.”

“Oh.” She gave a small nod. “I’m glad.” She directed her
eyes toward her soup with a weighty sigh. “Oh, Mary Shelley. I hope I can be strong enough to take care of you.”

“You will be.” I rubbed the remnants of her mighty shipyard biceps. “Soon enough you’ll be back at home, putting up with me dissecting your telephone and arguing my way through everything again. You’re stronger than you think you are, Aunt Eva. You’re my battleship-building aunt, after all.”

The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. “Thank you.” She wiped another tear. “Despite everything, I’m glad I’ve had you by my side these past weeks. You may have driven me to the edge at times, but you excel at fighting to save the people you love.”

“So do you.”

She nearly argued that point, but she closed her mouth and seemed to accept my words.

“Keep eating and resting for now, OK?” I grabbed the handles of my black bag. “Keep getting better and stronger. I need to go fetch something at the post office, and then I’ll put my things away at home and come straight back to be with you again.”

“Don’t tire yourself out.”

“I won’t. I promise to take good care of myself.”

“Ah …” She nodded. “Now
that
sounds like your mother.”

“My mother took good care of herself?”

“She did. She really did.”

“Then maybe I’ll start giving that a try.” I kissed her forehead. “I love you, Aunt Eva. Thank you for living.” I squeezed
her hand, scooped up my bag, and left the hospital to rejoin the world outside.

MY FINGERS SHOOK AS I SLID THE GOLD KEY INSIDE A
lock on the austere brass door of Stephen’s safe-deposit box. Inside, I found a black leather case engraved with silver letters that spelled out
SEE
—Stephen Elias Embers’s initials. A fitting companion to
LOOK INSIDE.
I slid the case out of the receptacle with care, and right there on the cold post office tiles, I snapped open the latch and met Stephen’s treasures.

In sepia-hued and color-tinted images, his view of the world unfolded for me across glossy photographic paper. Golden clouds rolled in from the ocean’s horizon at the brink of sunset. Sandpipers waded in foamy seawater that looked as frothy as the top of a lemon meringue pie. California missions stood against a backdrop of clear skies, their adobe walls cracked and crumbling and faded with time. Fields of wild poppies brought beauty and life to the dry desert floor. Biplanes glided over the Pacific, casting wrinkled shadows across blue-tinged waves.

I also found his older photographs from Oregon, which didn’t possess the same clarity and skill as his more recent work, but they were beautiful just the same. Mighty Mount Hood with its snow capped triangle of a peak. Portland’s Steel Bridge spanning the Willamette River in the heart of the city. My eleven-year-old head, smothered beneath one of my giant white bows, while I perched on the picket fence at the edge
of my front yard. Stephen had written one simple word on the back of my photograph—
Shell
—as if I didn’t need further explanation. I liked that. It made me feel I wasn’t as confusing and complicated as I thought.

He even included a self-portrait in his collection, taken December 1917, before his dad had died. Stephen sat on the boulders of the seawall across the street from his house and held up a sign that read
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
. Strands of his short brown hair blew across his forehead, and I could practically taste the salt on the breeze rustling around him. He smiled in that way of his that revealed the dimple I enjoyed, and his eyes looked peaceful and free.

Glass negatives also awaited inside the case, nestled in protective sleeves, as fragile as if they were his children. I imagined taking his treasures to his mother, laying them in her lap, and coaxing her back to the world through his work.

“You’re not disappearing without a trace,” I said to his face in the photograph. “Not if I can help it. Not a chance.” I ran my finger down the picture’s smooth edge. “I promise to try to stop this world from mucking up everything so badly. And you know I’m good to my word.”

I repacked his case and clicked the lid shut.

With one hand clutching the handles of my mother’s bag and the other gripping Stephen’s treasures, I left the post office and walked home through the swelling celebrations of the war’s end. Model Ts puttered down the streets, their squeaky horns honking like ecstatic ducks. Americans of all ages and
sizes and colors crept out of their bolted-up houses and remembered what it was like to smile and laugh and throw their arms around one another for a kiss. Firecrackers popped and shimmered on the sidewalks. “The Star-Spangled Banner” soared out of windows. Drivers tied cans to the backs of cars and wagons, and the air filled with the joyous music of tin clattering against asphalt.

The festivities rose out of the crematorium smoke and the rambling piles of coffins and the black crepes scarring neighborhood doors, which made the bliss of victory all the sweeter. We were all survivors—every last one of us who limped our way out to the sidewalks that afternoon and spit in Death’s cold face.

I tightened my hold on Stephen’s case of photographs and my own treasures and kept plodding forward to my new home on the edge of a city that had sheltered me during the worst of the storm. The weight of the world lifted from my shoulders enough for me to raise my chin and hold my head higher. A warm breeze whispered through my hair. My own restless soul settled farther inside my bones.

I was ready to live.

Ready to come back fighting.

I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE BIZARRE AND DEVASTATING
year 1918 around the age of twelve, when I saw an episode of a television show called
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
I learned about two girls in England in 1917—sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths—who claimed to have photographed fairies. Several investigators, including the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes’s creator) and the photography expert Harold Snelling, deemed the girls’ fairy pictures genuine, and the two cousins became famous. The narrator of
Ripley’s
explained that people believed in the photographs because World War I was so horrifying. I wondered exactly how atrocious the era had been if grown, educated people were convinced fairies could be caught frolicking in the English countryside.

As an adult, I read “The Man Who Believed in Fairies,” by Tom Huntington, an article that appeared in
Smithsonian
magazine, and I again learned about Elsie and Frances and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and grew further intrigued by their story. The article described the Victorian era’s Spiritualism craze, which had spread like wildfire across America and
Europe starting in the 1840s. Spiritualism had gained new popularity during the desperate years of the First World War.

Why was the World War I period so horrifying? For starters, innovations in war technology, such as machine guns, high-explosive shells, and mustard gas, provided new means of terror, injury, and death on the battlefields. Furthermore, the influenza pandemic of 1918 (this particular strain was known as the “Spanish flu” and the “Spanish Lady”) killed at least twenty million people worldwide. Some estimates run as high as more than one hundred million people killed. Add to that the fifteen million people who were killed as a result of World War I and you can see why the average life expectancy dropped to thirty-nine years in 1918—and why people craved séances and spirit photography.

The flu hit hard and fast in the fall of 1918, targeting the young and the healthy, including men in the training camps and trenches. The baffling illness then waned shortly after the war’s end, on November 11, leaving as mysteriously as it had arrived.

Flu vaccines were crude and scarce, so people resorted to folk remedies to save themselves from the illness. Every preventive flu measure and cure described in this book came from historical accounts of the pandemic.

The contest that Julius Embers tries to win is based upon
Scientific American’s
1923–24 offer of twenty-five hundred dollars to the first person to produce authentic paranormal phenomena in front of a committee of five. Renowned escape
artist and magician Harry Houdini loathed phony mediums and their use of magic tricks in the dark, so he helped judge the entries. No one ended up going home with the prize.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall truly did weigh dying tuberculosis patients on an industrial-sized scale in 1901 to explore the loss of the soul at the moment of death. Most scientists consider his work to possess very little merit due to the many weaknesses in his studies.

For more odd and fascinating forays into psychical research and Spiritualism, explore the wealth of information found in such books as
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,
by Mary Roach (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005);
A Magician Among the Spirits,
by Harry Houdini (Arno Press, 1972; original printing 1924); and
Photography and Spirit,
by John Harvey (Reaktion Books, 2007).

For more information about World War I’s devastating effects on the lives of the people who fought and on Americans back home, I recommend
The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–18,
by Meirion and Susie Harries (Vintage Books, 1998);
Shell Shock,
by Wendy Holden (Channel 4 Books, 2001); and
Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I,
by Frederick C. Luebke (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Be sure to also explore poems and books by such writers as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, and Katherine Anne Porter: gifted artists who were actually there.