Birdie’s headache was pounding harder than a hammer beating out a sheet of tin. She’d even be tempted to take her mother’s laudanum, it was that bad. The cresting fever began to draw perspiration to her upper lip. Wooziness occupied the inside of her skull and was growing worse. She had to get home soon. Every step filled her head with agonizing pain. When she finally found shelter beneath the glass-and-metal awning of the Twenty-Third Street elevated station, a train was rumbling to a stop above her, but she ignored it; she would catch the next one.
Her hand gripped the iron railing. Looking left and right and seeing no one, she forced a finger into her mouth, wiggling it between her cheek and teeth, and pressed at her gumline where the pain was most excruciating. There would be no dentist because there wasn’t enough money. And she didn’t have time to lie in bed, head bound with ice and a scarf, hoping for the pain to go away.
She pushed and pushed harder. She pulled her hand out and dried her fingers on a handkerchief, then went in to grip the offending tooth, which was surprisingly loose in the socket. The gum where it was embedded seemed spongy, all too willing to release the molar’s roots. Tears squeezed out of the side of her eyes, and a crunching noise reverberated inside her skull. She pulled hard with a grunt and a strangled cry, and as the tooth came out, her mouth filled with the salty foulness of infection and the iron tang of blood. Birdie spat out a mouthful of blood and pus, along with the rotted molar. The tooth bounced onto the sidewalk and tumbled into the gutter.
She wiped her mouth on the last clean corner of handkerchief and went home.
The swelling in her cheek went down in the next two days, to the point where it was only a slight rise. Birdie wondered how much Allene and Jasper had told everyone of their suspicions, but there was no use wondering. She would find out soon enough.
On Friday, the day of the funeral, the swelling was hardly noticeable. While Holly and her mother slept, Birdie dressed in her best stockings and shoes, a faded black velvet hat with a drooping brim, and a black dress of stiff silk that belonged to her mother and smelled vaguely of sweat and spirits.
The day after the morgue visit, she had informed the manager at the factory of the funeral and her coming absence. He’d frowned at her second indiscretion of the week, but Mr. Murphy, his supervisor, once again stepped in to quiet him. Birdie suspected that Andrew had influence here but didn’t ask. Feigned ignorance was a friend.
But Andrew would be at the funeral with Allene by his side. Her tongue would go numb in their presence, and her burning cheeks would give away the generosity he’d shown her the other day. And the fact that he wanted more.
She remembered her promise to herself.
Get in Allene’s good graces. Make a future for Holly, somehow, out of this mess of a situation.
And then she remembered: she’d left Allene, blue-blooded to the end, alone on the Lower East Side with nothing but a nickel.
She bit off a smile before it could form on her face. Sometimes Birdie was entirely stupid and stubborn.
She gave a good-bye kiss to her slumbering mother, in her syrupy, narcotic dream world. She woke Holly, washed and dressed her quickly, and dropped her off with the landlady, paid twenty-five cents to watch her for the day. Holly immediately went to play with a beloved collection of wooden trains belonging to the landlady’s grandson.
Before long, Birdie was riding the subway, hardly noticing the scrubbed tile and mosaics that rushed by. By nine o’clock, she was walking up to the triple-portal facade of the new Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue and Fifty-First Street.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?”
The voice spoke almost in her ear. She turned to see Ernie Fielding. He looked grave in his mourning clothes. He looked odd. And then she realized: she hardly recognized him without the perpetual smile.
“Indeed, it is. She was so young.”
“No, not that. It is sad, of course! But sad that no one’s really upset that she’s gone. Look.”
He was right. People milled about, entering the church, but there were no tears. She even saw smiles between friends and family members. The lack of grief stunned her.
Ernie was soon drawn away by some relations who shooed him inside the church. Birdie shivered and looked around. Left and right, people in black hats and suits hovered by the grand bronze doors and Romanesque columns of swirling green and gray. Sprinkled amidst them were dabs of white handkerchiefs that were held but not used. Someone touched her sleeve.
“There you are. Isn’t this a swell lot of fun? I feel stiffer than Florence right now,” Jasper whispered. He wore a celluloid collar that endeavored to bite into his neck. He glanced about irritably, but when his eyes settled on Birdie, they softened, and one corner of his rakish mouth lifted. “Well, you make drab black look good as gold, don’t you?”
Birdie ignored his words. “So have you seen Allene?”
“No.”
“Did you tell that doctor fellow about the cyanide? About what we found the other night?”
Jasper’s face fell. “No.”
“Well, what the dickens—”
“I’ll tell you later.”
Somber organ music began to play from inside the church, and they strode forward, tight lipped. They were shown to a pew seat in the back. Good. Birdie had already spent far too much time in close proximity to Florence, dead and alive. Words swam in her head from their childhood, when Florence had taken every opportunity to put her in her place.
That cast-off Cutter dress looks splendid on you.
I ate all the cookies, Birdie. Why don’t you be a good scullery maid and make some more?
Go fetch my new ermine coat, Birdie. You’re so good at fetching things.
And yet she felt only sadness for the lack of generosity in Florence’s heart. That would make her grave all the colder.
But as the program began, an isolated sob interrupted a pause in the prayer. She saw Florence’s mother sitting stoically in the front pew, but on her right, Mr. Waxworth shamelessly wept into his handkerchief. He was the only one who did.
Birdie wondered: When she died, would her mother weep for her? She wasn’t sure. Lately, Mother’s heart seemed pickled by laudanum, with hardly any true sentiment to spare for Holly or herself. It was Holly whom Birdie’s absence would wound, profoundly and permanently. She thought of how Holly crept into her bed every night and snuggled close to Birdie’s center, wrapping her arms around her body, as if she could absorb all the goodness and warmth of the world in one night’s sleep. That would be gone. All gone.
Birdie began to cry.
Her small sounds were enveloped by the quiet around her. She was almost angry at Florence for bringing her to this place.
“Funerals always make me happy,” Jasper whispered to Birdie. He handed her his handkerchief because hers was already dampened through.
“You,” Birdie whispered back through a sniffle, “are a monster.”
“I’m not happy she’s dead. Not by a darn sight. But a funeral reminds you to be alive, doesn’t it? It slaps you across the face and points out that there’s still warm blood doing a jig in your veins.” Jasper’s hand fell to Birdie’s pale forearm, and he put his two fingers on her wrist, where her pulse was. It was a clinical gesture, cold, if not for the warmth of his fingertips. Oh, she was alive all right. Stubbornly living, despite everything. She withdrew her hand and bowed her head.