“Lived less than two hours.” On giving him this additional blow I turned again to telephone the morgue.
“LaCastro?” the voice at the other end of the wire questioned. A short wait followed. “LaCastro, mother and baby, buried together, and four children. Yes, all buried the same day.”
The expression of that man, not his face alone, but the whole man, remains stamped on my memory as typical of the tenement-dweller before the war—his meek acceptance of conditions, his humility as he thanked me. Sometimes I have wondered if Lazarus may not have thanked the dogs that licked his sores with the same expression, Lazarus starving, with feasting and plenty surrounding him.
Another hunt on which Miss Wadley sent me had a somewhat different ending. In this case the missing person was a baby of about eleven months. The mother, after seeing her husband and five older children taken to hospitals with influenza, had finally succumbed herself. Now, after being in Bellevue some twelve hours, she missed her baby. What had become of her baby? It was up to me to find out.
There came a time when I all but gave up hope of finding out. It was near the middle of the day, after I had run down everything that had the slightest semblance of a clew. It was in a tenement below Brooklyn Bridge, one of those tall, narrow tenements, jammed between other tall, narrow tenements. Dark and smelly, with crooked stone steps and slimy stone walls. The flat in which the family lived was on the next to the top floor, and by much searching I discovered a woman who knew them, and who also could speak enough English to tell me all she knew. Having begun with this woman, after four hours’ fruitless search I came back to her.
Sure, she would show me the flat in which the Kouschmitzky family lived. She had been there when the ambulance came for the mother, and the officer had handed her the key. Having failed to learn anything by other means I thought there might be a chance of getting her to remember some fact, some clew overlooked or forgotten, by taking her into the flat.
We had hardly set foot in the rooms before her baby on the top floor began to yell. Mother-like she was out and running up the stairs before I caught my breath. Realizing that there was nothing for it but to wait, I dragged a chair to the one window showing a light nearest daylight, and sat down.
I was so tired that I must have dozed off for a second or two. Something aroused me, and listening I became conscious of a faint sound, something in the room stirring. The door of the flat was shut, the sound was between me and it. My heart in my mouth, I rose noiselessly to my feet and stood listening, listening hard.
The sound was more distinct though still faint. It was as though something, something soft was being dragged across the floor. Listening breathlessly I located the sound and turned my eyes toward the bed.
The dirtiest baby I had ever seen came crawling out. No floor-cloth was ever dirtier than that youngster’s clothes. And it was as full of chuckles and coos as its clothes were of dust. Never a cry nor a whine. It cooed when I spoke to it, chuckled when I took it up. When the neighbor came racing back and gave it a sup of her baby’s milk it gurgled with delight.