Spanish Influenza
Sharon Ellis
Mrs. Carpetti says that if the flu is coming for me, it’s going to get me no matter what I do to stop it. She’s old and Italian, so when she’s gone from the hallway my father does an impression of how she talks. His voice goes up three octaves and into an irregular lilting singsong. He says, “A-coming for you,” and “A-going to get you,” but she doesn’t really sound like that. Mrs. Carpetti has hardly left the North End since 1891 when she came to this country, but that is longer ago than when my father came over from Ireland. That doesn’t matter to him. He swears he hears her Italian accent spread thick over every word, like butter over bread. He likes to do comical impressions of the neighborhood Italians in a loud voice, right here in my apartment when he comes to visit. The walls of the tenement house are thin, and I have to keep telling him that there are more Italians in this neighborhood than Irish, so he’d better watch his tongue.
My father can’t understand why I stay. He thinks I should move back in with him since Shane is hardly ever here. My father says that in the rare moments when Shane is here, he is nothing but a no good drunken bum, but I tell him that I can’t just pick up and leave my husband. I remind him of my sacred marriage vows and he says, “Rubbish to your sacred vows.” I recite a quick prayer to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of fathers, and my father rolls his eyes. Except to pass me to the priest through the church doorway on the day of my christening, my father has avoided all things sacred since my mother died. My father tells me that if I don’t have the sense to leave Shane, I should at least live in familiar surroundings, among our own kind of people, but I shake off his talk as foolish. I’ve become attached to neighbors like Mrs. Carpetti, and I kid my father that the Italians are not so different from us. An Italian drunk off wine is just as good as an Irishman after too many pints. “Have some respect,” he snaps. I end the discussion saying that either way, this is a good place to live, and it couldn’t be closer to Shane’s job with the distillery.
Shane works just across the street. From our small window on the second floor I can see through the shadows of the elevated train tracks running down Commercial Street to watch the men walk out into the street in the evening, on their way home for supper. That way I have a plain view of Shane’s back on the nights when he turns the other way, letting me know that he has decided to make a detour in search of gambling, or women, or drink. In all this time it hasn’t once occurred to him to glance back at my face in the window. Or maybe he is only pretending it hasn’t.
This night, my father is visiting because I have invited him to celebrate Shane and my wedding anniversary. Maybe I knew all along that Shane wouldn’t come home, and that’s why I invited my father.
Last year, on the day of the wedding, I was worried that January was a bad month to get married, but my father reminded me that he and my mother were married in June, and that didn’t stop her from dying from an infection after childbirth. “Besides,” he said, “you should be more concerned with who you’re marrying than when.”
I was in love. My father knew as well as I did that he had a better chance of stopping a tidal wave than of talking me out of marrying Shane, but that seems like a long time ago now.
Today, on my first anniversary, I think constantly about the fact that I will forever be associating my marriage with ice and snow. I worry still that I have made a dreadful mistake by getting married in the wrong month, but my father says that I shouldn’t be insulting fate by troubling myself with silly superstitions. He believes that whatever is meant to happen will happen, come hell or high water.
I usually bake cakes only for birthdays, but early on the cold morning of my anniversary I rubbed my swollen belly and told myself that the heat of the stove would do the baby good. I decided on a molasses cake, but when I had the ingredients laid out on the table with the mixing bowl, cake pan, and wooden spoon, I noticed that I was short of molasses. I went to the window and called and called for the boy in the next building who runs my errands for me, but he never came. I had my heart set on molasses cake, so for about an hour I sat at the window looking across the street at the molasses tank. It dwarfed the other buildings around it like a giant tree stump in a field of delicate wildflowers. The railway sheds, the blacksmith, the fire station, even the railway tracks and the harbor itself, seemed to be gathered around the tank at attention, as though they were waiting for it to speak.
In one of the increasingly rare moments in recent memory when Shane had decided to be sociable at home, he talked about the distillery’s vat of molasses. He told me with no little amount of pride, as though he had something to do with it, that the massive cast iron tank is the largest storage tank of its kind in Boston. He said that with any luck the whole lot of molasses will be made into rum just in time, before they pass, what he calls, “the goddamned prohibition.” I asked him how they do that, make molasses into rum, but he didn’t know, so he complained about my cooking.
That night I had a nightmare about sinking into that vat and drowning in molasses, all warm and sticky. In the dream they didn’t notice I was in there, and I ended up trapped inside a bottle of Shane’s rum.
Looking up at the tank and thinking hard of molasses cake, I willed the molasses to find its way down the street and rescue me. It was a nonsensical thing to do, like hoping for time to pass more quickly, but no more lacking in sense that not allowing myself to leave the apartment for fear of the Spanish Influenza. In the end, I sweetened my cake with sugar.
Shane doesn’t come home for our anniversary dinner. My father and I both watch him turn his back and walk casually up the street away from us and out of sight. My father stiffens his lip in a gesture that is meant to tell me that he is doing me the favor of restraint, but this movement is only a disguised lecture on how much effort he has to exert in order to hold back all he has to say on the subject. I suggest to him that we celebrate my anniversary by eating the cake before our supper. My father’s expression turns itself over on its head and he forgets his opinions on Shane in his eagerness to eat dessert first.
I mention to my father that it was meant to be a molasses cake, but I couldn’t go out for the molasses, and I know right away that I have made a mistake.
He says, “Well, why didn’t you go out and get some bleedin’ molasses, then?”
I can’t explain it.
“Well?” he insists.
“You know perfectly well why not,” I remind him.
“I know why. It’s just a whole lot of nonsense. Spanish Influenza my arse,” He says.
I know that my father will never understand. He is the kind of person who will have the speed and reflexes to jump out from in front of a speeding train, where I am the kind of person who will wring my hands worrying about speeding trains with such intensity that I will not notice the roof caving in above my head. My father says I don’t make any sense, but sense has nothing to do with it.
“The longer you have that baby in you, the stranger you get,” he says.
I say, “I’ll have you know that I am perfectly normal,” but I think to myself that I am not.
At the beginning of my pregnancy I thought a great deal about what it would mean to be a mother. I thought about things I would never say out loud, like how I often believed it irresponsible of my mother to die so soon after I was born. I thought about the things she could possibly have done to prevent it. Perhaps she should have washed the birthing sheets a little more thoroughly beforehand, or taken better care of her health. In my mind there were a thousand possibilities. It made sense to me, while I sat awash in the glow and excitement of my maternal prospects, in the happy days before swollen ankles and back pain, that it was my responsibility to do everything possible to be here as long as I could, and to ensure that my child would be as well.
I heard the stories after armistice came in November. There were boys who had fought across France as heroes and were finally on their way home, but who had died on the way of Spanish Influenza. Some right here in Boston harbor, just feet from their own front doorsteps. There was talk of people in the neighborhood who were struck down with the disease at church, or at the grocer’s, and had died within the hour. This was a bad strain, people said, the worst ever. Influenza was often accepted as something only small children and old people caught, but I heard that this time it could take anyone, no matter what age or how able. I reasoned that if I stayed as close to home as possible, I could keep my baby and myself safe.
At first I kept my errands to a minimum, running out early in the morning long before even the housewives ventured out for their morning milk, and running home as quickly as I could. Soon that was not enough, and I wore a kerchief over my face when I went out. Finally, I gave in to the pull of the safety of my stuffy little one-roomed home and paid the neighbor boy a few pennies a week to do my shopping for me. Shane yelled at me on and off for two days over the extra expense, but finally caught himself up again in his other activities and forgot all about me and my fears.
I fully realized how little sense it made to think that by staying home I would be immune to disease. I was willing, on milder winter days, to cast open my window and share the air with the outside. I stood face to face inside the apartment with whoever decided to visit, but I had it firmly planted in my head that as long as I remained within the four walls of my own home then no harm, no Spanish Influenza, could come to me.
I tried and failed many times to explain this to my father.
“What if my baby turned out to be a boy,” I said carefully to him one day, “and he was destined to be a great man, but I went out one day to buy eggs, and the man at the grocery was carrying the Spanish Influenza but didn’t know it, and as a result I died with the little one still inside me? I would have forever robbed the world of the great man my son could have been.”
“Well, if he’s never born I don’t suppose he’s destined to be much of anything.”
“What if it’s my job to save him?” I ask.
“Believe your old man for a change when I tell you that if God wanted the child saved he would find a way to do it.”
“What if he’s meant to be a great president who will stop all of the wars in the world?”
“Ha!” my father laughed. “An Irish president? Not likely! It’s not too long ago, I’ll have you know, that an honest Irishman was hard put just to get work in this city. And you talk of an Irish president!”
I had heard this lecture before. I sighed and told him he was missing my point.
On the night of my anniversary my father and I finish the cake quickly, and he gets up soon after for his long walk home. He hugs me in the doorway and says that one of these days I’ll want to come back home without Shane, and when the day comes he’ll be there waiting with open arms. I’m glad the hall is dark enough that he can’t see me crying.
Shane comes home so late that night that I have already been asleep and can’t guess the time. He has the sweet-stale smell of hours of drinking, which almost hides the stinging scent of cheap perfume.
In the morning I make Shane’s breakfast without a word. He eats and leaves the apartment equally silent. I stand with the door to the hall open and lean on it while I listen to Shane’s steps fading away down the stairs. Mrs. Carpetti is there in her doorway, but I hear her before I see her and she startles me.
“You are such a nice girl. Why don’t you get out of this house and find a nice Italian boy who will take good care of you?”
I shake my head and smile at her as I always do when she calls out her advice.
The day is warm for January, especially compared to the stinging cold of the days before. My feet and ankles are swelling with the change in temperature, so much so that by mid-morning I feel as though they are ready to burst and I have to sit down by the window and prop them up on the other chair.
I breathe in the breeze from the harbor and feel grateful. My apartment may be small and dark, but the window is a luxury that makes all the difference. I know that the Carpettis don’t have one, and neither do two of the four families upstairs. I have asked Mrs. Carpetti a hundred times to come and sit by the open window with me, but she says that she has too many things to do to sit around sniffing at the air. I know she is proud and thinks of my offer as charity. Mrs. Carpetti sees herself as the kind of woman who gives charity, not the kind who accepts it.
I pass the rosary through my fingers and the baby rolls around in summersaults. I listen to the sounds of the street. I hear the horses’ hooves and their drivers yelling to each other. The tracks of the elevated train hum and clang with each passing car.
As it gets close to noon the workers begin to straggle out into the street, looking for a nice place to eat their lunches outside on a rare mild January day. I hear one man say to another, as he pulls a hard-boiled egg out of his lunchbox, “It’s nothing but luck to have a day like today, and that’s for sure.”
His companion says, “I would say it could be almost as favorable a day as when the Red Sox won the World Series.” The first man nods so hard in agreement that he almost drops his egg.
I wonder how long it will take for them to forget about that victory. It’s already been four months.
I am sitting and listening for so long, and with such concentration, that I barely notice my water has broken. When I finally do feel it and see it, I look out into the street and see that the men eating their lunches have vanished. I call out a feeble and tentative, “Hello?” to the street from the window, but there is no answer. I shuffle to the doorway with my knees together in an effort to slow the inevitable, and call down the empty hallway to Mrs. Carpetti. Nothing.
I drop my rosary and I am out in the street in a housecoat and stockings. I have no fear or thought of Influenza, and think only of finding help. A wagon rolls by, but the hooves of the horse pulling it pound the snowless pavement with such force and speed that the driver cannot hear or see me as he rolls past. I think that I must find Shane, but I am turned around in pain and urgency, and before know it I am running in the opposite direction from Shane and the molasses tank. All I can think to do is climb the hollow steps up to the train tracks, looking for help.
Above the street, on the platform along the tracks, I find a moment of calm between contractions. When I look down there is Shane below me in the shadows behind the blacksmith’s, throwing dice. Instinctively, and without thinking that he cannot see me, I wave and call his name, but I cannot even hear my own voice over the sound of the train approaching from Battery Street. In the second before the boom, I think Shane sees me and I wave harder.
There is a loud dull noise. I think at first that the vibration coming up from my feet and through my whole body is the train, but when the train is just past me the rumble grows stronger, not more feeble, and I know it must be something else. The ground seems to growl. Down below, Shane has a look of surprise on his face. I laugh for a second at his confusion before the scene sinks in. Shane disappears beneath the tide of the sticky river that rushes past me only a moment later, under the tracks and trellises beneath my feet.
The thin winter sunlight grows momentarily thinner, and everything is sucked from sight by the force of the brown and bubbling beast. The firehouse is pushed towards the water, and pauses at the edge as though it is trying to decide if it will go in for a swim. Not far away from me there is a crash, and a nearby building is tossed towards me, riding high on a thick wave. It smashes into one of the tall legs of the elevated track, which buckles, bends, and breaks. The train grinds to a halt and stops just short of careening headlong into the street as the track ahead of it sinks down to the ground like a sapling under heavy snow. Horses and men shift and sink in the wave below me. I don’t know what is worse: the ones that scream as they are pushed and pulled by the boiling mass, or the ones who are sucked under quickly and silenced. Machines, homes, and hardware bob and dip below me until it all grinds slowly to a stop and all that I can see of the city is suffocated. When it becomes quiet, the unmistakable scent of molasses comes up to me in a thick and overpowering swell.
People try to climb out and away, only to be sucked back down the more they struggle. The rescue squads come, but lose their boots and socks to the bog of molasses now settled silently on every street. The rescue men have to rescue each other when they struggle to walk through the mess. Horses yell and strain to move from their sticky prisons. They are quickly put down in favor of ending their pain. I watch for as long as I can before a policeman sees me and knows that I am only minutes away from parenthood. He breaks me from my trance by carrying me away in his arms as fast as he can. The baby comes only seconds after I arrive screaming at the hospital.
The damage is devastating. Twenty-one people are dead, and dozens of others are injured. Tumbling metal and other debris have crushed and broken what is not smothered with molasses. When I go back to see it days later they are still hosing off the street with gritty salt water pumped in from the harbor. I stand in the sand they have spread on the street in front of my old building and look up at what I once thought of as the safest place in the world. All the windows below the third floor have been smashed in with the force of the tidal wave of molasses. I look at my window, which has been sliced in two by a long, arced piece of jagged metal. Through the hole the metal has made in the window and wall, I can see that it goes all the way back inside and is held aloft above the street by its own weight, anchored to the back wall of the room.
I find Mrs. Carpetti with a neighbor. She cries when she sees me, and tells me that the day of the molasses flood she was six blocks away in her church, praying for the healthy birth of my baby.
Shane is not found until the week after the accident. When they recover him they tell me that I am better off not having to see him “like that,” but I hear rumors later that when he was found both his fists were clenched tight. One held dice, and the other held a half-filled flask of rum. My father and I bury him quickly and quietly.
There is ample blame after that, but nobody wants to take responsibility. The distillery blames the collapse of the vat, and ensuing flood of more than two million gallons of molasses, on sabotage, or the stress of quick changes in weather. The inspectors point to the company, and the company points back to the inspectors. Although I will later be counted among the survivors to seek and receive compensation, I never think anyone could truly be found culpable for such a thing. It seems too big a mistake to be human.
Sometimes since then, on hot summer days when I walk hand in hand with my son in my old neighborhood, I can smell the distinct, sweet odor of molasses. When the familiar scent hits me I look down at my perfect son and think of one of the few things I know now for certain: if God wants a tide of molasses, he’ll have one.
