Her mother was put to taking care of the remainders alone. Evie helped out some with the sewing. She learned to cut cloth precisely and stitch with a treadle machine. She went to school when her help wasn’t required. As the youngest she got more schooling than her siblings. The high school was integrated there in Topeka; it always had been. That was where she met boys, and not just those from her neighborhood. Rich and poor weren’t so segregated then either. Evie met lots of boys she wouldn’t have otherwise.
“That’s all they wrote for me,” she tried to explain. “You know how it is. A girl is either nice or not nice. That determines everything. A nice girl sits in the parlor with a boy who visits. A not-nice girl is snuck out the back door. We didn’t have a parlor in our house. We had sewing tables and wire mannequins. We had customers. Our parlor wasn’t a frivolous place. You couldn’t even pretend it was. Not that I ever dreamt of bringing boys there to see my mother.”
It was near morning by the time they went to stand. Half-asleep in the chair, awake only by the sheer will of talk. Jake couldn’t get up when he went to. He staggered and fell back. She had to help him make it to bed.
Nobody would ever figure out how the Spanish flu began, or why the virus transformed the way it did, but they knew that recruits at Fort Riley, Kansas, were the first to come down sick. When Fort Riley doughboys were shipped abroad, they took the bug with them. A plague like this never would have spread around the globe if it wasn’t for the war. Americans brought it on transport ships, in their uniforms and sputum, and gave all of Europe the bug. From there to Australia, Egypt, Turkey, Siam, Russia. Nobody then knew much about what would become Spanish influenza. In the next two years over fifty million people would die of this flu that didn’t act like the flu. The young became deathly ill, while the old and frail were spared. It would take down hale men and vibrant women in their prime in a matter of days. They’d all know somebody who would have it happen like that. Starting Monday morning normal and cool, by Wednesday the same person would be burning out through their skin in an infirmary, quarantined by public order. By Friday there’d be a funeral. Not that you’d risk going. Nobody would understand how that happened. Streetcar drivers and nurses would wear white surgical masks to protect themselves from the vibrions. It would be a plague covering the earth—something biblical—and at the same time the whole world was at war.
The way Jake moved in and out of tenements, he was bound to catch something. That March, he did. It was up to Evie to care for him. She fed him broth and brandy, left the radiator open to keep the room hot, hoping to melt out his bile. She stripped him naked because he sweat so much then covered him in blankets when he complained of the cold. He ranted and raved. Didn’t know what was going on, gripped in fever and fatigue, still half-drunk. She was half-drunk too and couldn’t figure out what to do. Should she send for help? Should she call the gamblers and ask them? His condition changed so fast she didn’t know what to say. Jake had a hacking cough and spit up blood. Then all of a sudden his skin turned blue—dark blue, like he’d been dipped in ink. She had no idea what to do about that. She didn’t know what sickness turned a man blue, as if suffocating, except he wasn’t. Jake looked like he was from another planet with his blond hair and blue complexion. Despite all outward appearances, maybe he wasn’t breathing. She worried he might die. But then his skin turned back to normal. Not normal exactly. He was a feverish red, but at least he wasn’t blue! Who would believe that?
The spot of blood on his pillowcase was what caused Evie to seek help the next day. The blood came from his ear. Evie corralled a boy on the street and sent him to fetch Maria Eigler.
Maria thought she was up in a palace at first, being in the district. She asked who the madam of the house was. “These are my rooms,” Evie said. “It isn’t like you think. Me and Jake. We’re friends.”
Maria knew what it said about a woman who had rooms furnished like this down on the lower River Ward. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “I’m here for Jake. That’s that.”
She carried a basket with raw eggs inside. She cracked them into a glass Evie fetched and made Jake down the yolks and whites. She fed him pieces of raw onion and strung a bag of camphor around his neck. He calmed down then. He slept.
It must have occurred to Evie that she could leave. Maria would take over—a car could be arranged to take Jake to a hospital. Evie didn’t have to suffer his illness. Yet she felt something change inside. She wanted to stay. She had to. Jake needed her.
“I’ll take care of him,” Evie announced. Maria hesitated, thinking it over before she went. She left behind the eggs. “He must drink one every hour. Keep up his strength.”
Word reached Tom Dennison that Jake was sick up in a girl’s room. Dennison came personally in the evening to see for himself. He brought a bottle of Irish whiskey and a physician and peeked in the bedroom to have a look. The bottle was inside the sleeve of his overcoat, his massive hands palmed around the base, as the doctor listened to Jake’s chest with a stethoscope.
Evie hovered in the kitchen doorway to hear what Tom Dennison would say. He didn’t say anything. He waited for the doctor’s verdict then tossed the bottle to the bed, where it submerged in the blankets. Dennison was only there a moment, to see Jake for himself, to hear the doctor say Jake was going to be fine. “It’s only the flu,” the doctor said—a comment that became rare the next couple years. He left a roll of surgical gauze at the bedside for when the bleeding came back, along with a case of capsulated powders. Something to bring down the fever and a purgative.
Dennison stopped on his way out. He took off his hat. “Some of the boys didn’t believe Jake was really sick. They said he faked so he could stay with his girl instead of working.” Dennison looked Evie up and down. “You’re the girl?”
Evie nodded. She’d met Billy Nesselhous before but never Tom Dennison.
He left without saying another word.
In moments of lucidity Jake acted ashamed about being laid up. He begged Evie to not look at him. She shut the curtains and dampened the lamp until it was too dark to see much except the warmth of the sunset around the windows. Jake was embarrassed, but he needed her. When his fever grew worse, as it did in cycles, or when his throat tore raw from hacking, it did him good to see her rushing to douse a handkerchief in camphor. He drifted in and out during the worst of it. Each time he woke up the first thing he’d see was Evie in the corner. She made sure of this.
He went into panics about footsteps from the hallway, the sounds of neighbors coming and going. In his fever people paced around him. He pleaded with her to keep his persecutors out. She had no idea what he meant. He talked about the crab louse, about pick handles and tools ripping at his body, about a child buried alive. He ranted in German half the time. She’d never heard his whispering, guttural, sometimes plaintive German voice. He relived arguments with his brother, with his father, with folks she’d never heard of. He apologized profusely, guilt ridden in two languages. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We buried her.”