The Orphan Collector: A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

With her wrists tied to the sideboard in the back of Miss O’Malley’s wagon, Pia tries to shout for help, but Miss O’Malley whips her with a riding crop. Pia sees two policemen and calls out. They stop the wagon, and Pia begs them for help finding her brothers. Miss O’Malley explains that Pia is being transferred to the orphanage, and they let Miss O’Malley drive away with Pia.

At the orphanage, Mother Joe greets Pia coldly. The nun explains that life here at the orphanage will be easier if Pia behaves herself and doesn’t complain. On the playground before supper, Pia meets the other orphans. A young girl named Gigi quickly takes to Pia and crawls into her lap. Pia is taken aback but doesn’t want to let this girl down like she let down her brothers, so she rocks her. Another girl, Jenny, greets Pia and introduces a few of the other orphans. Jenny explains that many of the orphans have been separated from their families and that they are “throwaways—no one cares what happens to them” (136).

Sister Ernestine collects the children for dinner. The orphanage is old and dark and “smell[s] of urine and bleach” (134). The food is unrecognizable, and when a child refuses to eat, Sister Ernestine pinches her nose and force-feeds her. At bedtime, all the girls pair up, leaving Pia to sleep with Gigi, who routinely wets the bed. Pia asks to sleep on the floor, but Sister Ernestine forces her to get into bed. Before leaving, Sister Ernestine threatens the girls that if they speak, “the devil will come for [them]” (143). After Sister Ernestine leaves, the girls question Pia about her name and where she came from, and what it was like to find her mother dead. Jenny then explains that if Sister Ernestine hears them, she will whip them with a leather strap.

The next morning, Pia wakes covered in urine. Sister Ernestine tells her to strip the bed and calls Gigi to stand in front of her. Pia takes the blame for wetting the bed, so Sister Ernestine hits Pia with the leather strap; afterward, she explains that Pia was punished for lying.

The next morning, Pia is assigned to help in the baby ward. She hopes that Ollie or Max might have been brought in, but she doesn’t see them. Sister Agnes is overseeing Pia and comments on “how lucky her brothers must have been to have her to take care of them” (152). Pia believes that if Sister Agnes knew the truth—that Pia left her brothers—she would not praise her. Pia asks Sister Agnes if Mother Joe could find out what happened to her brothers or whether her father has returned, but Sister Agnes explains that they do not have the resources or time to do that.

Pia tries to fit in at the orphanage, but after admitting that she doesn’t like being touched, she is treated like an outcast. Every time a new baby comes in, she hopes it will be one of her brothers, but it never is. Pia is still overwhelmed with grief at the loss of her family and stunned at how quickly her life turned into a nightmare. One Sunday, after communion, Pia notices that the window behind the altar is open. After everyone leaves the room, she tries to crawl out the window. Mother Joe catches her and asks her why she is trying to escape, so Pia explains that she needs to find her brothers. Mother Joe agrees that after the flu passes, she will help Pia leave. Pia is overwhelmed with gratitude, but Mother Joe says that she still needs to be punished for lying; she locks Pia in the basement, which is wet and smells of mold and urine. Scared and alone, Pia focuses on Mother Joe’s promise.

In December 1918, the city is slowly coming to life. Bernice and the twins have moved to a new space, and she has befriended Mr. and Mrs. Patterson, an older couple next door who care for the twins while Bernice is at work. Bernice tells them that she is a war widow and nurse trying to start over. She has renamed the twins Owen and Mason, which she thinks sound “strong and solid and true, like real American names should be” (166). Sometimes, Bernice feels guilty about the nurse she killed. She also can’t bear to think about leaving Wallis’s body in her apartment but finds comfort in the idea that they will reunite in heaven.

To make money, Bernice impersonates a Red Cross nurse. She wears the nurse’s uniform and goes door to door asking for donations to help the less fortunate and the overcrowded orphanages. Sometimes she agrees to see sick patients, hoping to catch their illness and die so she can see Wallis again. Those families often give her the largest donation. After all that Bernice has been through, she feels no guilt about what she is doing.

Bernice finds a seven-year-old boy named Nelek and takes him to St. Joseph’s Orphan “Asylum.” They take him in, and when Bernice leaves, she wonders if he has a family. Bernice decides that she has done nothing wrong because his parents should have thought about how they would care for their son before they came to America.

Near Christmas, Pia is working in the baby ward when Sister Ernestine asks her to follow her. Hopeful that Sister Ernestine has news about her brothers, Pia does. When Pia sees a nurse holding a baby, she rushes toward her. The nurse backs away, and Pia realizes the baby is not her brother. She is confused and angry, thinking the nurse is playing a trick on her. The nurse, who introduces herself as Nurse Wallis, is appalled that she was greeted like this when she was just trying to bring in an orphaned child. Sister Ernestine apologizes, and Nurse Wallis suggests that Pia might be better off in a psychiatric hospital. Pia is taken aback that Nurse Wallis is so hostile toward her.

Since finding Nelek, Bernice has placed six more immigrant children in different orphanages around town. She is shocked to see Pia at St. Vincent’s but knows that Pia didn’t recognize her; they never interacted when they lived next to each other. Bernice believes that her threat of a mental evaluation will keep Pia from approaching her again. She is happy with how well everything is working out for her and feels her plan to take immigrant children from their parents’ “bad influence” is working (181).

Pretending to be a Red Cross nurse, Bernice visits a new house and offers to bring the family food, but she says she needs the children to help carry the food. The mother ultimately agrees to send her oldest son. Bernice takes the immigrants’ son to the Orphan Society of Philadelphia, where she sees another orphaned boy being taken to the train station. When Bernice inquires where this boy is going, she learns that white, English-speaking immigrant children are being placed with farming families outside the city. Bernice then hands the boy over to the orphanage.

After learning that rural families will take in immigrant children, Bernice begins to place children on the train by luring them with the promise of food for their families.

She arrives at a new house to collect a donation and is greeted by a grieving mother who explains that Bernice is too late: Her son has just died. Overwhelmed with memories of her own, Bernice has an idea. She returns to the baby ward at St. Vincent’s (where she calls herself “Nurse Wallis”) to find a baby for the grieving couple to adopt. There, she again sees Pia and wonders why she cannot escape her.

After Christmas, Pia sees Nurse Wallis at St. Vincent’s in the baby ward. Sister Agnes praises Nurse Wallis for bringing in a young girl and for placing three of their older children with families. Pia is scared of Nurse Wallis but nevertheless approaches Nurse Wallis about helping to find her brothers. Nurse Wallis is annoyed but says that she will keep an eye out for them. She leaves with a three-month-old baby boy named Joseph. Afterward, Pia tells a girl named Edith, who also works in the baby ward, that she doesn’t think Nurse Wallis likes her. Edith assures Pia that she shouldn’t care about Nurse Wallis’s approval because Nurse Wallis is a bigot: Nurse Wallis didn’t want to adopt out the youngest baby in the orphanage because he is Turkish.

A week later, Pia and Edith are enjoying the sun for the first time in weeks. Edith asks if Pia has ever seen the boy on the swings, and Pia recognizes the red-haired boy as Finn. She runs to greet him and asks what happened to him: She never heard from him after they walked home from school the day her mother fell ill. Finn explains that his brother started coughing; they tried to take him to the hospital but couldn’t get in. By midnight, his brother was dead. Finn’s father secured a horse and wagon, and he, his mother, and his grandfather left for his uncle’s house in New Jersey. Nevertheless, the flu killed Finn’s entire family. Once the landlord realized everyone was dead, he kicked Finn out, and Finn took a train back to Philadelphia. He looked for Pia but didn’t know where she had gone. Finn was without a home until the police caught him stealing and sent him to the orphanage.

Finn asks Pia about her family and how she came to be at the orphanage, and for the first time, Pia tells the whole truth about leaving her brothers at home and getting sick. Ashamed and sobbing, she admits the situation is her fault, but Finn disagrees and explains that she was doing what she thought was best. She tells him about Mother Joe’s promise to let her leave, which she is starting to think was only a way of ensuring that Pia behaves. Finn is hopeful that the twins are still alive and assures Pia that he will help her find them. 

Standing on the porch in an upper-class neighborhood, Bernice is greeted by a white lady and a young boy wearing a yarmulke. Bernice is surprised and wonders why the boy is there before remembering that the Red Cross asked “true American women to take in children orphaned by the flu” (208). The woman explains that she has already donated to the Red Cross. Bernice, thinking on her feet, says the Red Cross has found a family member of the boy who is willing to take him in. The woman is surprised and looks sad, explaining that she adores the boy and didn’t think his family would be found so quickly. Although this was not Bernice’s plan, she can’t pass up an opportunity to send an immigrant child out of the city. She waits while the woman collects the boy’s things, and he says goodbye to everyone.

After Finn’s arrival at the orphanage in January 1919, he and Pia spend as much time as possible planning their escape. Finn searches the basement for exits and Pia checks the security of the windows.

One day, Sister Ernestine enters the recreation hall and demands all the boys line up against the wall. Nurse Wallis enters behind Mother Joe and pulls a few boys out of the line after asking their names and surnames. She says that she has good news: They have found homes for the boys. One of the boys starts to cry and asks if his brother can come too. Nurse Wallis agrees. Before leaving, she makes eye contact with Finn and falters, a “startled look on her face” (215). Pia, noticing Finn’s strange expression, is confused. She tries to get to Finn before the boys are ushered from the room, but by the time she reaches the hall, he is nowhere to be seen.

The next day, so much snow has piled up against the fence surrounding the orphanage that Pia realizes she can climb the mounds and escape. Pia is excited to tell Finn the plan, but he doesn’t join her outside. When she questions the other boys about where he is, they explain that he wasn’t in his bed that morning and didn’t show up at breakfast. The other boys think he might have been sent to the Home for Industrious Boys, which is where many boys his age go. Pia faints, landing on her elbow and breaking her arm.