If my memories of the influenza epidemic could all end as my search for that baby did! There would be no long line of coffins before a church in the tenement districts waiting for burial. Neither could I call to mind a closed door, leading to the front room, the one room in the flat in which there was outside air.
The mother had died in Bellevue, two small children were still there. The two older girls—both had been working before stricken down by the “flu”—refused to go to the hospital, stubbornly remaining at home. It was my second visit—made not because it was part of my work, but on my own initiative, in the hope of persuading them to go to a hospital. Failing in this, I asked:
“Why don’t you girls go into the front room? The windows open on the avenue; you’d get outside air. That court is no wider than a well.” I waited. Both girls cast down their eyes. Then I added: “I can get the woman next door to help me move your beds.” I made a move toward the entrance-door.
The elder of the two sisters threw out her hand. There was an expression of desperation in the gesture that brought me quickly to a halt.
“Father’s in there,” she said, in a soundless sort of tone.
“Your father?” I questioned, and for a moment fancied she had gone mad, for I distinctly recalled that they had told me of their father’s death, how he had insisted on going to their mother’s funeral and, catching more cold, had died that night. “Your father?” I repeated.
“It was Bridges, the undertaker,” the younger girl whispered. “He laid father out, and—and when he found that—that we didn’t have enough money to pay for a funeral, he said—he said he wouldn’t do no more.”
After all, is it more heartless to refuse to put a dead person in his grave when money is lacking to pay for a funeral than it is to put living persons out of their home when money is lacking to pay the rent? Many, many families were dispossessed in the tenement districts of New York during and immediately after the influenza epidemic. There was a great to-do made about undertakers taking advantage of people’s misfortunes. How about tenement landlords? I have seen enough of tenement conditions to know that the landlords, as a class, are better off in this world’s goods than the tenement undertakers as a class.
I am grateful that as an inspector of dog licenses for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals I saw the tenements of New York under more normal conditions. Though I remained in this work more than two years, and came to know my district about as well as the average New Yorker knows his back yard, there are houses the door-sills of which I dreaded to cross: the house in which I found a dying mother trying to suckle a dead baby; that in which I struggled with another mother, driven mad by fear for her children when her husband lost his job as a street-car conductor; and yet another in which I witnessed the return of a father from prison to his shattered home—his flat stripped of all that could be sold or pawned, his two children in Bellevue, and his wife and newborn baby on a bed loaned by a neighbor, both dying.
Did Dante picture a blacker hell than the slums of New York City during the influenza epidemic? In all those months of dread, suffering, despair, and death never once in those tenement districts did I meet or hear of a Protestant minister of the Gospel.