Marjory Zaik

Four pandemic postcards

I. Dear Helen, I learned, as your daughter, that the sorrow that shadowed your beauty and light came in part from being born three months after your father, Antoni, died at age 40 of the Spanish flu, official cause of death pneumonia, in February 1920, at the tail end of the pandemic. It was said that Antoni may have built his own coffin; he was employed at a casket factory. At the time of your birth, your newly widowed mother, Josephine, had two other daughters under three, spoke no English, worked as a maid.