They called it Spanish influenza, though it first appeared in Kansas: a soldier at Fort Riley reported to the infirmary with a fever. A few days later, he died coughing up blood, dark brown bruises under his eyes. The flu spread fast that summer through the muddy war trenches in Europe (where they called it “la grippe”), and by winter, the virus reached even Micronesia and tiny Inuit villages. Cities posted
“No Spitting” signs everywhere, and if you didn’t wear a mask, the streetcar driver wouldn’t let you board. The sick quarantined themselves indoors, and so did the well, who were so afraid, they didn’t go to parades, didn’t go to dances, didn’t go to church. If you were 5 and the only one not sick, you cooked and changed bed linens for everyone else in the house. And at the end of it all, you might be the only person left.
Here, it is October, when as many as 900 people a day were dying in New York City. These Red Cross nurses wore masks, but ambulances were on call 24 hours a day (which sometimes wasn’t enough—nurses drove patients in their own cars). During a shift, they touched dozens of sick people, moving them onto gurneys from rumpled beds. They knew: You are not safe. You are not charmed; you are not beyond harm. No one remembers this, or that a fifth of the world fell sick that year. All that’s left is a sense of quaintness. The realtor steps out the back door, gestures to the white wainscoting, the screens: an influenza porch. People imagine the invalid’s bed facing the yard, because there was no TV. And in photographs, the schoolgirls’ faces half-obscured by gauze masks seem hypochondriac or superstitious, like a Halloween costume, a little boy’s mug rubbed with charcoal for a hobo’s beard, or a black muslin suit sewn with white felt bones.
