I SUPPOSE I OUGHT TO WARN YOU at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: my little story has become your history. You won’t really understand your times until you understand mine.

You must try to feel the hope and amazement of those years. Anything seemed possible—the end of ignorance, the end of disease, the end of poverty. Physics and chemistry, medicine and engineering were breaking through old boundaries. In the cities, skyscrapers shredded clouds. Trucks and automobiles were crowding out horse-drawn cabs and drays in the boulevards below. The pavement was clean: no stinking piles of dung, no buzz of flies.

In 1913, America had a professor-president in the White House—a man of intelligence and principle, elected to clean up the corruption that had flourished in the muck of politics for so long. Public health and public schools were beating back the darkness in slums and settlements. The poor were lifted up and the proud brought down as Progressives reined in the power of Big Money.

In the homes of the middle class, our lives ticked along like clocks, well regulated and precise. We had electric lights, electric toasters, electric fans. On Sundays, there were newspaper advertisements for vacuum cleaners, wringer-washers, and automobiles. Our bathrooms were clean, modern, and indoors. We believed that good nutrition and good moral hygiene would make us healthy, wealthy, and wise. We had every reason to think that tomorrow would be better than today. And the day after that? Better yet!

The Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning.

Imagine: around the world, millions and millions and millions vital and alive one day, slack-jawed dead the next. Imagine people dying in such numbers that they had to be buried in mass graves dug with steam shovels—dying not of some ancient plague or in some faraway land, but dying here and now, right in front of you. Imagine knowing that nothing could ensure your survival. Imagine that you know this not in theory, not from reading about it in books, but from how it feels to lift your own foot high and step wide over a corpse.

What would you do?

I’ll tell you what a lot of us did. We boozed and screwed like there was no tomorrow. We shed encumbrances and avoided entangle-ments.We were tough cookies, slim customers, swell guys, real dolls. We made our own fun and our own gin, drinking lakes of the stuff, drinking until we could Charleston on the graves. Life is for the living! Pooh, pooh, skiddoo! Drink up—the night is young!

“I don’t want children,” said one celebrated writer after an abortion. “We’d have nothing in common. Children don’t drink.”

Does such callousness shock you? I suppose it does, but you see, by that time the plain stale fact of mortality had become so commonplace, so tedious … Well, mourning simply went out of style.

And just between you and me? Even if you find yourself among illustrious souls, you can get awfully tired of the dead.

Let me count my own. Lillian and Douglas, and their two young sons. Uncle John. And Mumma, of course. Six. No, wait! Seven. My brother, Ernest, was the first.

 

I last saw Ernest in September of 1918. Slim in khaki, a mustachioed captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, my brother waved from the window of a train packed three boys to every double seat. They were headed for Newport News, where the battalion would ship out for Europe.

By the time Ernest left for the coast, five million European soldiers had already disappeared into “the sausage machine.” That’s what their commanders called the Great War. To understand why, you must call to mind some modern war. Think of the casualties endured in a year’s time, or five years, or ten. Now imagine sixty thousand men killed in a single day of combat: meat fed to the guns. Imagine four years like that.

America stared, aghast and uncomprehending, while the Old World gorged on its young and smashed its civilization to pieces for reasons no one was able to explain. From the start, there was some war sentiment in America, but it was largely confined to those who knew there was money to be made selling weapons, uniforms, steel, and ships, should America join the fight.

Reelected, barely, on a peace platform, our professor-president remained steadfast even when he was called a coward for refusing to involve us in the madness of foreigners. Then, eight weeks after Wood-row Wilson’s second inaugural, a document was “captured” and made public. In it, the German foreign minister urged the Mexican government to join Germany in a war against the United States and, in so doing, to reclaim the lost lands of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Call me cynical. I always thought that document was a fraud. And if it were genuine, why send our boys to France if the threat was on our southern border?

Of course, I was just a schoolteacher—a woman without a vote of my own, or even a husband to persuade. The men all said that document changed everything. Certainly Mr. Wilson believed it did. When he turned the ship of state toward Europe, the nation cheered and felt gratified to have exciting newspaper stories to talk about at breakfast. Those of us who saw no need for war found the enthusiasm of our fellow citizens bewildering. I read all the papers, frantic to understand why this was happening to my country and the world. To me, Mr. Wilson’s conversion was so shocking, it seemed Saint Paul had renounced Christ to become Saul once more. But there you are: the reason for going to war might be a shameless hoax, but the war itself was real and, by God, America was in it!

In fact, Mr. Wilson informed the nation, the Almighty Himself no longer wanted America to stand aloof from the slaughter in the Old World. “America,” the president declared, “was born to exemplify devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.”

By turning the other cheek? I wondered. Silly woman …

No, exemplifying righteousness required America to fight a war to end all wars, a war so brutal and ruthless that war would never be waged again. Mr. Wilson assured us that this crusade was God’s will and God’s work.

If Abraham Lincoln had erred in allowing the press to criticize the government during our Civil War, Woodrow Wilson vowed, “I won’t repeat his mistakes.” The president didn’t repeal the First Amendment; he had, after all, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution. The press could print what it liked, of course, but the post office didn’t have to deliver it. The Wilson administration ordered the confiscation of anything unpatriotic, which is to say anything critical of his administration. Total war demanded totalitarian power, Mr. Wilson told a compliant Congress. “There are citizens of the United States,” the president thundered, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed.”

Anyone who protested, or even voiced reluctance, was called a traitor. Mr. Eugene Debs was sentenced to decades in prison. His crime? He said that a war abroad did not excuse tyranny at home.

Mexico was all but forgotten in the excitement.

That’s why, by the summer of 1918, a million American men had been mobilized to fight—from career officers like my brother, Ernest, to draftees straight off the farm. Ernest’s train left Cleveland carrying nearly 250 soldiers, including a boy from Wooster who seemed to have a dreadful cold. When the troops arrived on the Virginia coast two days later, more than 120 of the soldiers already had the flu. Sixty others were ill within a day or two.

In Ernest’s last letter home, he confessed that he was afraid he’d miss the war. He was so eager to embark! I doubt he mentioned his headache to anyone else. The next letter we received was from a friend of his. Ernest had been buried at sea before the boat was halfway to France. Later we learned that most of his battalion had sickened. Many died while standing on a French dock, awaiting orders in a chilly autumn rain.

In October, the military finally canceled leave and liberty, but it was too late to make a difference. Railways had distributed the influenza with the same swift efficiency that carried coal, wheat, and livestock to and from every corner of the continent. Within weeks, the flu was everywhere.

People spread the disease before they knew they had it, got sicker, brought it home, and died. Fiancées, parents, brothers, and sisters: kissed good-bye at train stations. Ambulance drivers, stretcher bearers, doctors, nurses: working until they died on their feet. Trolley conductors, shopkeepers. Teachers.

Waves of influenza broke across the nation and all the while, the war ground on in Europe. Cleveland sent forty-one thousand boys “over there.” One of my students came to see me before he left—a boy named for the great Italian patriot Garibaldi. Gary, we called him at school. He was a good student. Arithmetic was his best subject, as I recall. Off he went with the Fifth Regiment of the Ohio National Guard, to revenge bleeding Belgium and rescue poor brave France, to make the world safe for democracy and kill Huns for Mr. Wilson.

Gary visited me again after he got home, in 1919. “You were wrong, Miss Shanklin. The Grim Reaper isn’t a metaphor,” he told me. “The Reaper’s real. I saw him. We went over the top and machine guns mowed us down, like a scythe through weeds. Row after row of us. You can’t imagine, miss.”

No, not that, but I had seen men struck down in the streets of Cleveland. They’d leave for the office in the morning feeling fine. During the day, they’d complain of being hot and achy. By evening, waiting on the corner for a streetcar, they’d fall to the pavement, already dead or near to it. Gary soon became one of them. Poor boy. He had just married his sweetheart and found a job as a bank teller. He left work feeling woozy and never made it home for supper.

Even then, before the worst of it, I wanted to escape from the sadness. I was older than the lost generation of the Roaring Twenties. I began the decade too shy to dance, too homely to imagine myself of interest even to a maimed veteran, too timid to break the Prohibition laws and risk blindness drinking bathtub gin. But in the end? I was not so very different. I, too, yearned for new sights, new sounds, new people—and, yes: a new me. I wanted to believe again in peace, and progress, and prosperity.

 

Prosperity, at least, I would have and this one certainty: of all my natal family, I would be the last to die. My brief obituary would be written by a bored young newspaperman in 1957: “Agnes Shanklin, heiress, dead at 76, after a long illness.”

That’s what they called cancer then. “A long illness.” And don’t be fooled by that fancy word “heiress.” No single estate was all that much, but taken together and added to $1,000 of soldier’s insurance from Ernest, they totaled just enough to afford me a careful independence.

Frugality I had learned at my mother’s knee. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do.” That was Mumma’s motto, especially after the bankruptcy and Papa’s death.

In the beginning, I believe, my parents anticipated something close to the ideal marriage of the nineteenth century. They met and married late, both nearly thirty and too mature for silly romantic illusions about love. When they pledged their troth in the sight of God, they did so in the hope that theirs would be a union of souls. They understood that this would demand an equal sacrifice of personal interests. Papa would lose his place in the home; Mumma, her place in the world. He would strive for material sustenance and guard the family from the corruption of the marketplace. In return for cooking and needlework, the bearing and raising of children, she would receive shelter, food, and a clothing allowance.

Such marriages always ran the risk of becoming cold but practical business partnerships. In the case of my parents, mutual admiration rested upon an economic arrangement that seemed to suit them both. Mumma was a fine seamstress, Papa a mechanical engineer. You might not think they’d have had much in common, apart from their children, but together they reasoned out a design for a sewing machine foot that would make cording easy and automatic. In the tenth year of their marriage, walking home from church one Sunday, they hatched a plan. They would take all their savings and start a factory right in Cedar Glen, just east of Cleveland. The business could provide good, honest work for the sons of slaves who’d come north on the Underground Railway. Those men would demonstrate that Negroes were capable of skilled labor, and the business would benefit by undercutting the competition on wages.

Papa’s probity and Mumma’s piety were well known in Cedar Glen. Their good character convinced several members of their congregation that they could do well by doing good, and they agreed to invest in the venture. Papa took the idea to a banker, who steered him toward a partner said to be a person of energy and vision.

To our family’s misfortune, Papa was an honest man in a time when business was increasingly often conducted between strangers who recognized no good or god excepting only Profit. In Washington and Columbus, politicians wearing masks of unctuous respectability legislated mightily to outlaw private sin and enforce private virtue, all the while accepting money to overlook the public crimes of industrialists and financiers who made incalculable fortunes by exploiting workers and swindling investors. In that climate, Papa’s trustworthiness was the very hallmark of a “patsy.” He built the factory; his partner and the banker disappeared with the money.

For Papa, it was a matter of honor that he keep his employees working and make his creditors whole. That determination left hardly any time or money for his family. Mumma soon found it difficult to hide our circumstances, but Papa steadfastly refused help from her brother, a bachelor attorney with money to spare.

“Foolish pride,” Mumma called that. “How am I to run a proper household with what you bring home?”

“Others are worse off,” Papa said, time and again. “We shall manage without charity.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mumma would mutter, and the household would go very quiet, unspoken accusations loud in our minds.

Then one day a sympathetic neighbor lady remarked, “Your poor husband, working so hard! It’s just not fair that he should have to pay back money others stole.”

Something snapped inside Mumma. I could almost see it recoil in her. “I’d rather see Howard in his coffin,” she said, “than fall to the level of the men who bilked him.”

From that day on, Mumma made every penny count and did so with a zeal that awed us. She gave up our subscription to the family pew at church, and we found cheaper seats in the back. “God will hear our praise and prayers,” Mumma told us, “no matter where we sit.” If there was no money for tickets to attend an uplifting lecture, she went to the library for a book and read it aloud in the evening. If there was not much for supper, she would pop corn for us; it was a whole grain and filling. She raised chickens and collies, sold eggs and puppies for extra income. She gardened and canned the produce. She sewed uniforms for students at the Cleveland Training School for Nurses, and used the blue-and-white-striped scraps for the patchwork quilts that kept her children warm at night. She was so thin, so weary, on her feet from dawn to dusk. It seemed to me that she was all alone and yet so brave! What if something happened to her? Something awful?

I wanted to keep Mumma safe. Young and useless as I was, I tried to help but succeeded only in wearing out her threadbare patience. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh. “It’s easier for me to do it myself than to take the time to teach you.”

Looking back, I am sad to realize that I never thought about keeping Papa safe; it never occurred to me to worry about that benign but absent figure. When at last he had worked himself into an early grave, the business was out of debt. Mumma took over, bereaved but eager to put her own ideas into play. “Your father was not a fool,” she told us children on the way home from the funeral, “but he had no head for business.” And Mumma certainly did.

Her first move was to renegotiate arrangements with suppliers. “Thank you for your consideration,” she’d tell them in her small, sweet voice. “There are those who’d be happy to take advantage of a poor widow with three children to support.” Once she’d struck a bargain, her brother, John, wrote ironclad contracts to enforce the deal. “No more handshakes,” Mumma told us grimly. “Those weasels will cheat you every chance they get.”

I gladly accepted my duties as the “little mother,” as the phrase of those times had it. I was proud to be trusted at last with household duties for which Mumma had no time. I cleaned and cooked and mended as best I could, gratified that I was less a burden to her than before and that I could sometimes make our dear mother’s life easier. If she was too tired to notice my efforts or rated them poorly done, it was only because she worked so hard for us at the factory and she had high standards for everyone.

I was the eldest child, born a year before Ernest and three years before our sister, Lillian. Of Lillie Mumma would often say, “We saved the best for last.” And who could disagree? Strawberry blond and spritely, Lillian was like fireworks: bright and quick and colorful. She was a precocious chatterbox at two, following me around the house like a puppy and talking all the while. Once, when she was not quite three, we stood hand in hand, watching Ernest burn trash out back. I remember this so clearly! Lillie pointed at the sparks that rose skyward from stirred embers and piped, “Look, Agnes! Baby stars.”

I adored her, but our brother was not so charmed. Lillian was fearless at four and took Ernest on in sibling squabbles, quoting from the Bible as she boldly scolded him for striking her because he simply could not think fast enough to hold his own in argument. At five, she wrote a letter to God, asking Him to take good care of Papa; her penmanship was already better than Ernest’s. She skipped first grade, sailed through second, and won the spelling bee that year, competing against her elders. When she skipped a grade again, Ernest sulked, humiliated by a younger sister who was his equal or better in all things academic, but I was grateful for her precocity. She would read aloud from my textbooks while I washed dishes or hung out laundry. Without Lillie’s help, I never could have stayed in school.

By fourteen, I could see my life laid out before me. While Mumma ran the business, I would keep house for her and Ernest and Lillie. Later, I would become the sort of maiden aunt who lived in a spare bedroom and helped in the raising of nieces and nephews.

Marriage seemed out of the question—even then, when I was so young. You see, Ernest and Lillie were handsome persons with Mumma’s red-gold hair and Papa’s bright blue eyes. I shared their coloring and—in favorable light, from certain angles—a similar cast of feature, but for me, you must imagine a young Eleanor Roosevelt: bucktoothed, weak-chinned, strong-minded, with a father’s bony angularity in place of a mother’s delicate prettiness.

But Eleanor married, you might protest. Why, her husband became president!

Add, then, my freckles, considered a dreadful defect in those days. Next, be discreetly disconcerted by my crossed eyes blinking behind round spectacles.

Ah, you think now. Ah, I have the picture. Poor Agnes …

 

In 1899, our little household changed forever. Ernest shocked us all by running away to join the army, taking with him Papa’s mechanical talent and a firm desire for the male companionship our high-pitched feminine household did not afford him. I knew Ernest was unhappy at the factory, but he was barely seventeen and I’d never imagined he would simply up and leave home. Poor Mumma was beside herself when she discovered his note.

A few weeks later, she summoned me to her office to make her own announcement. After careful consultation with her brother, she told me, she had sold our Papa’s patents and the factory itself to White Sewing Machines, a Cleveland concern with a reputation for plain dealing and decent labor policies. This decision realized sufficient profit to provide an income. There would be enough, Mumma informed me, to send both of her daughters to Oberlin College, one of the first coeducational academic institutions in America. Lillian’s fine mind had already taken in all that our small school had to offer; she would be a good deal younger than most of our classmates, but we would matriculate at Oberlin together so that I could look after her. At Oberlin, Mumma expected, Lillian would find an educated young man worthy of her.

“And you, Agnes, will need a profession.” Mumma looked toward my left eye, ignoring the right, which turned in when I was feeling tired or upset. “I have decided that you shall earn your teaching certificate. Well? Speak up. I should have thought you’d be grateful. Your nose is always in a book.”

Well, yes. I loved to read, histories especially, but I had never imagined having enough money to go to college. I had begun, instead, to dream of going to the city, of making myself useful to society.

“Mumma, don’t you remember? I—I told you I was thinking I might like to do settlement work.”

She hardly moved. “Are you telling me that you do not wish to attend Oberlin with your sister?”

“Well, you see, Mumma, Miss Jane Addams thinks that those who serve the poor do better by going directly to work with the people who need us. She thinks we should avoid the snare of endless preparation—”

Mumma folded her thin hands in her lap and looked out the window, blinking rapidly. “Agnes, I am all alone,” she whispered. “I thought when Ernest left me that I could count on you to behave.” She shrugged helplessly. “It appears that you have become more self-willed than ever. And to think that I sold the business for you!”

To this moment, I can remember the wave of shame that washed over me. “Mumma, I didn’t know you planned to sell the business! Settlement work wouldn’t require any tuition money, so I just thought—”

“You thought. You thought! Without asking anyone’s opinion, let alone approval. Oh, Agnes,” Mumma said with a gentle melancholy that froze my heart, “you are as bad as your brother. I expected more from you. What will become of Lillian if you won’t go to Oberlin with her? Is your happiness worth your sister’s misery?”

If she had shouted, it might have been different, but Mumma was so small, so fragile. I always felt that if I used my strength, I might break her. Now I, who had only ever wanted to please, had hurt her so cruelly! Settlement work suddenly seemed like a pastime for silly rich girls who had nothing at all in common with me. I swore that teaching would suit me perfectly, that it was a marvelous opportunity, that I was wicked not to be grateful right away. Nothing I said made any difference. Before I knew it, I was weeping at her knees, begging for forgiveness.

Mumma’s face remained the same: gallantly, if imperfectly, concealing her suffering as she recalled every sin, every promise broken by a tiresome, dishonest child. “Go to bed,” she said finally, and sadly, still refusing to look at me. “And in the morning, try to be more cheerful. You owe me that much, at least.”

And in the end, I was glad that Mumma’s wisdom prevailed. Studying at Oberlin College was a great opportunity, and teaching was a profession that suited me well. Indeed, everything went according to her plans for Lillian and me—with a single small detour when I enrolled in Professor Douglas Cutler’s course “History and the Old Testament.” No one was more surprised than I when Professor Cutler found something in me to admire. And no one was less surprised than I when he found even more in darling Lillie to desire.

Douglas was in his thirties, a doctor of divinity, and a match for Lil-lie’s intellect and Christian conviction. The moment I introduced them, it was love at first sight. They made such a handsome couple, full of plans and aspirations. Shortly after their engagement, Douglas informed us that he’d been offered a position at the American Mission School at Jebail, just north of Beirut in Syria, which in those days stretched all the way to the Mediterranean seacoast. Lillian’s excitement over the news could hardly be contained, but Mumma wept and pleaded with Douglas to turn the offer down. She could hardly bear to think of her favorite child so far away, she told him. She had been so happy to believe that she would have a son-in-law to count on, what with her own dear Howard dead and her wicked son, Ernest, gone. It was awful to hear her distress, but Douglas had already signed the agreement, and a contract is a contract, as Mumma understood.

As for me, well, gracious! It had long been my dream to visit Egypt and the Holy Land, and now my very own sister would be living there, as the wife of a scholar and missionary! What could be better? I would miss Lillie desperately, of course, but she promised to write home every single week and tell me all about her travels and her life.

The wedding was to be in June, a few days after graduation. Lillie insisted that I serve as maid of honor. Eventually I gave in, though I was careful to remove my glasses and keep my eyes downcast for the wedding portrait, presenting neither my profile nor my eyes to spoil the photographs.

Lillie and Douglas spent their honeymoon walking in the footsteps of Jesus, and afterward, they took up residence in Jebail. That September, I left Cedar Glen as well, moving a few miles away to Cleveland, where I had accepted an appointment with the public school system. As you can imagine, Mumma was distraught at being left all alone, so I had a telephone installed for her and made sure the billing went to me. “You can call as often as you like,” I told her.

“And let those operators listen in?” she sniffed. “No lady would do such a thing!”

She was getting on in years by then and reluctant to introduce an outlandish modernity to her home. Even so, I believe she was somewhat consoled to know that if she had a need pressing enough to summon a daughter, I was close by and lived right on the trolley line.

The district had assigned me to Murray Hill School in the Cleveland neighborhood known to all as Little Italy. The children in my classroom were mostly immigrants. Some of their fathers were quite rough, and nearly all the parents were illiterate. Few believed that education was worthwhile beyond the fourth grade.

“Pushcart Tony,” Mumma called that kind, though most of them were day laborers, not fruit and vegetable vendors. “Foreigners are taking this country over,” she’d say.

“They didn’t sail on the Mayflower,” I’d answer, “but they came here as soon as they could.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Mumma always said.

This remark was never capitulation, you must understand; nor was it ever an admission of ignorance. You’re wrong, she meant, but I don’t care to argue about it.

“And don’t think I haven’t noticed—that school is right next to a settlement,” she let me know. Alta House wasn’t really a settlement, of course. It was more of a community center with a playground and a gymnasium with a swimming pool. It was named for John D. Rockefeller’s daughter Miss Alta Rockefeller, and it really was quite respectable, though Mumma never entirely believed that.

Each year, I am proud to say, there were two or three children who truly blossomed in my classroom. Often these were the most resistant in September: cocky little boys who wanted to look tough and were afraid to fail, or awkward little girls who hardly dared believe that they’d be good at anything. With no children of my own to love, I had to be careful about letting my emotions run away with me. If my affection and attention were noticed, the boys and girls I liked best would be called “teacher’s pet” and there’d be trouble for them on the playground. I quickly learned to be evenhanded in the classroom.

And I worked hard to expand all my students’ horizons beyond Mayfield Road and Little Italy. We took field trips to the art museum, for example, and whenever a building was going up downtown, I’d try to get the architect to visit us. All the children were excited to see the postcards and letters I received from Lillie, and I organized Old World geography lessons around her mail. Each week, the student whose marks had most improved from one examination to the next would be rewarded with a postcard or a carefully loosened stamp from one of Lillie’s envelopes.

When the war in Europe began, geography took on a different importance. The Ottoman Empire seemed likely to collapse at any moment, throwing the Middle East into turmoil. Lillie and Douglas came home, of course—they had their two boys to think of. Douglas, stoutly middle-aged by then, was awarded a full professorship at our alma mater, Oberlin.

When the war ended in November 1918, our family seemed to have reached a safe harbor, apart from the loss of poor Ernest to flu in the autumn of 1918. At thirty-eight, I believed that all the big questions of my life had been answered. I would never marry. I would earn my living as a teacher. When the time came, I would move back to Cedar Glen and care for Mumma in her old age.

And yet, I will confess to you, from time to time I envied my youthful self—that girl who could still dream and want more, who could still imagine someone who had never materialized, except during those brief weeks before Douglas fell in love with Lillie. However briefly, Douglas had seen my true self, and he had not laughed or sneered or sighed. He was only being kind, I suppose. But kindness is so important, wouldn’t you agree?

 

It was early March in 1919 and I was correcting a pile of arithmetic papers when my landlady, Mrs. Motta, called me downstairs to receive a telephone call that changed my life. I expected to hear Mumma’s voice, but it was Lillie on the line, and she was so excited! “Agnes, do you remember Neddy Lawrence?”

I racked my brains but no one came to mind, so she reminded me of her letters from Jebail. She’d written of an archaeology student, a British undergraduate who planned to tramp around the Middle East alone, photographing crusader castles for his thesis. He and Lillie had become great friends as he studied practical Arabic with her colleague at the mission school—a young Christian lady whose name was Fareedah el-Akle.

“Neddy’s grammar wasn’t strong, but his memory was excellent and he absorbed Arabic vocabulary very quickly,” Lillie recalled. After her return to the United States in 1914, she and Neddy had exchanged letters, the most remarkable of which was his request that she purchase for him a Colt .45 automatic pistol, which he meant to carry into combat. “Handguns are difficult to obtain in England,” he wrote in explanation.

“We lost track of him after that,” Lillie told me, “but he not only survived the war, he’s become a hero! We called him Ned, but his name is really Thomas Edward Lawrence. Lawrence, Agnes,” Lillie repeated, exasperated. “Doesn’t that ring any bells?”

Frankly, it didn’t, not then. In those days Colonel Lawrence was just on the cusp of the international celebrity that would soon be his. And in any case, I was distracted by how expensive this telephone call would be; Lillie never seemed to worry about things like that.

“There’s a sort of Chautauqua lecture about him at the Palace on Thursday evening,” she said. “We’ll swing by to pick you up—”

“Lillie, no! Friday is a school day. I can’t—”

“Oh, Agnes, you must come. It’ll be wonderful!”

Lillie had a way of saying wonderful. Her tone carried the thrill of the word, its element of marvel and surprise.

“It will be like visiting the Holy Land,” she said, “and you can tell the children about it in class. Anyway, we’ve already bought your ticket, so don’t argue, darling. Just be ready at six forty-five.”

And she was right, of course. It was a splendid evening. Truly unforgettable, for so many reasons.

She and Douglas drove in from Oberlin and left their boys with Mumma before picking me up at Mrs. Motta’s. Lillie was like a school-girl—so excited and full of chatter—and she gave a little shriek when we saw the theater marquee.

LOWELL THOMAS presents

With Allenby in Palestine

and with Lawrence in Arabia!

Douglas left us girls in front of the theater and rattled off to park their ancient electric car. He kept talking about replacing it, but an Oberlin professor’s salary was not quite up to one of the newer gasoline models. A light drizzle was falling, and we hurried inside to wait for Douglas in the lobby. By the time he arrived to escort us to our seats, the theater was almost full.

You might have thought we’d all had enough of war, and that was true in some ways. No one wanted to think about the horrors of the trenches, or those poor Romanov girls, or the ugly revolution in Ireland, but this was different. This was the rousing story of General Al-lenby, the modern Crusader, and his conquest of the Holy Land, and a glorious tale about the young man Mr. Lowell Thomas called “the uncrowned king of Arabia.”

The presentation had received rave reviews in London. Drawn by the biblical setting and the tour publicity, Americans had flocked to the lecture in city after city. Now it was Cleveland’s turn, and goodness gracious! Didn’t we see a show!

Pots of incense were set alight; a captivating musky fragrance pervaded the hall. As the house lights dimmed, there was a swell of organ music, which resolved into a haunting Levantine melody. Mr. Thomas stepped onto the stage and into the spotlight. With a magician’s flourish, our host proclaimed an irresistible invitation: “Come with me to lands of history, mystery, and romance!”

The curtains swept back to reveal the Nile awash in artificial moonlight that faintly illuminated distant painted pyramids. For the next two and a half hours, Mr. Thomas took us to places in Arabia that no Christian among us had previously seen, and he did so with the world’s first aerial motion photography. Gasping, we viewed the pyramids—from above! We felt vertigo when “our aeroplane” banked and flew along the very roads upon which had marched the armies of Godfrey de Bouillon and Richard Coeur de Lion, eight centuries before. Hands at our lips, we felt we witnessed with our own eyes a thrilling charge by the massed cavalry of the Australian Light Horse and Imperial Camel Corps.

Lillie loosed a tiny excited squeal at the first image of the slim young Englishman she’d known in Jebail. She held my hand while Mr. Thomas related his own first glimpse of “Shareef Aurens,” the boy my sister knew as Neddy.

“My attention,” Mr. Thomas recalled sonorously, “was drawn to a group of Arabs walking in the direction of the Damascus Gate. My curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin who stood in sharp relief from his companions. He was wearing an agal, kuffieh, and aba such as are worn in the Middle East only by native rulers. In his belt was fastened the short, curved, golden dagger of a prince of Mecca.”

It was not this person’s marvelous costume that interested Mr. Thomas. “The striking fact was that this mysterious prince looked no more like a son of Ishmael than an Abyssinian looks like one of Stefansson’s Esquimaux. Why, this chap was as blond as a Scandinavian in whom flows cool Viking blood! My first thought,” Mr. Thomas assured us, “was that this might be one of the youngest apostles, come to life. His expression was serene, almost saintly in its selflessness and repose.”

“He was a lovely young man,” Lillie allowed, sounding amused.

“But saintly?” Douglas asked rhetorically, and shook his head.

They were both firmly shushed by the gentleman who sat behind us. Mr. Thomas, unaware, continued his encomium. A brilliant young archaeologist before the war, Lawrence was “a born strategist who out-thought and outwitted the Turkish and German commanders in practically every engagement.” At the head of his troops, in the thick of every battle, Lawrence rapidly rose from junior lieutenant to full colonel. “But he dislikes titles,” Mr. Thomas told us, “and prefers to be known as plain Lawrence to general and private alike.” In fact, this modern Galahad was rather shy, Mr. Thomas confided. “Indeed, the Terror of the Turks can blush like a schoolgirl.” Those terrified Turks had put a princely price on his head, but so beloved was the twenty-eight-year-old commander, no one had betrayed him. Thus, we were told, the blue-eyed scholar became, in less than a year, the most powerful man in Arabia, leading the greatest army raised in that land in five centuries.

Indeed, Mr. Thomas seemed to have forgotten General Allenby entirely, and gave young Neddy Lawrence personal credit for the downfall of the entire Ottoman Empire. “Mesopotamia, Syria, Arabia, and the Holy Land—all freed after centuries of Turkish oppression! Why, I would not be surprised,” Mr. Thomas concluded, “if centuries from now, Lawrence of Arabia stood out as a legendary figure along with Achilles, Siegfried, and El Cid.”

Well, my goodness! You can just picture us emerging from the theater, dazzled by what we had seen and heard, astonished to find ourselves back in plain old Cleveland. Unwilling to let the evening end, little groups congregated on the street: strangers drawn together by shared experience. The earlier drizzle had turned to a cold, spitting rain, just this side of sleet, but we were so caught up in the moment! Illness was the last thing on our minds.

Go to any symphony hall, any cinema, and you’ll hear a few who cough through the event, just as we did that night. You don’t think a thing about it, and neither did we. During the 1918 influenza, some cities had passed laws requiring everyone who went out in public to wear surgical masks over the lower face. Most people refused, or forgot and left the masks at home. In any case, the epidemic seemed over and done with. It would have felt absurd to take any such precautions in Cleveland that night.

Lillie and I were nearest a man who sneezed and wheezed through the lecture, but it was Douglas who sickened first. Maybe he had shaken the hand of an acquaintance when he was entering the theater after parking the car. Or maybe one of his students was coming down with the flu and had exposed him earlier that day. Who knows?

Unsuspecting, Lillie and Douglas drove back to Mumma’s to pick up the boys after dropping me off at Mrs. Motta’s boardinghouse, on Mayfield Avenue. I myself went to school as usual on Friday, eager to share with my students what I had learned the prior evening. Instead, I shared something I did not know I had.

That afternoon, I developed an awful headache but put it down to being up so late the night before. God forgive me, I spread the flu to my students. Several died, including one of my favorites. Elisabeth Maggio. I’ll never forget that poor child’s name, but I remember very little of the days that followed.

 

Near the end of the Great War, just before he was killed, the poet Wilfred Owen provided us with a simple searing description of the damage war had done to his spirit while his men were destroyed in wholesale lots: “My senses are charred. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write ‘Deceased’ over their letters.” Later, when the fighting ended, Mr. Aldington and Mr. Graves described trench warfare with such bitter exactitude, it seemed to me a mercy that Ernest had died before he reached France, if die he must. Like the doomed Persians of Aeschylus, “he was happiest who soonest gasped away the breath of life.”

The pointless savagery of the Great War forged a generation of writers, so I’ve always found it strange that no one here at home chronicled the Great Influenza or its effects on us, although Miss Katherine Porter did write the brief and touching story of her soldier-love, who died of the influenza that he caught while nursing her. Without literature as a guide, I expect you think of the flu as a homey, familiar kind of illness, not a horrifying scourge like the black plague or smallpox. You may believe you know what the flu epidemic was like for us.

Pray, now, that you never learn how wrong you are.

The onset of the disease was abrupt, very much like that of meningitis, which is what the doctors thought it was, in the beginning. The initial symptoms were a severe headache and a high fever, followed by those of an awful cold: a terrible sore throat, an endlessly dripping nose, violent coughing. And then—

Well, I cannot make poetry of our great trial, as Mr. Owen did of combat, but permit me to act the schoolteacher and explain to you the workings of the lungs. In health, they are the lightest of all our organs. Their surfaces are a lacy gauze of fine blood vessels. Across this diaphanous borderland between the body and the world, the scientists tell us, life must be renewed each moment of the day and night by the exchange of gaseous waste for fresh, clean oxygen.

Early in the epidemic, frantic to find the cause of this vicious illness, pathologists cut open chests and discovered that those delicate soap-bubble lungs were as heavy and solid as a liver—saturated with bloody fluid, the air passages leading to the throat completely blocked. Those who died turned blue-black for want of air. In the morgues, bodies the color of slate were said to be stacked in piles “like cordwood.” In a single year, fifty million people died that way—millions more than died in combat on all sides, on all fronts, in four and a half years of the Great War, itself an orgy of killing.

My own experience was one of delirium and long nightmares of drowning. Over and over, I would slide down a thick hemp rope toward water. Hour after hour, I tried to climb that rope, desperate to keep my head above the surface. My leaden arms would fail me. I’d slip beneath the water, and then I’d awaken myself: coughing, coughing, coughing.

I, who never wished to be a bother to Mumma, called and called to her in my dreams, but she never came. Around me, fellow sufferers groaned and wept. I heard muffled voices—masked doctors, nurses, hospital attendants, I realized later. Those poor heroes and heroines must have been overwhelmed and exhausted, trying to care for hundreds of patients who were hemorrhaging from the nose and throat. It was an inferno worthy of Dante, for them, and for us.

Whenever it became clear that patients might survive, they were removed from the hospital to make way for others. “Poveretta,” Mrs. Motta cried as I was carried up to my room in her boardinghouse. “Poor little t’ing! I make a bath. You want I wash your hair?”

It was such a comfort, feeling her soapy hands gently rinse away the waxy sweat and stink of illness. That good woman nursed me with motherly tenderness, as though I were her own, but when I asked why my own mother did not come, or why I had not been taken home to Cedar Glen, Mrs. Motta never answered my questions. “You rest now,” she’d say firmly, and then she’d leave me alone to sleep.

Only when my recovery seemed assured did she hand me the stack of telegrams that had been delivered while I lay ill. Douglas. Lillie. Their boys. Uncle John. Mumma. All of them were gone.

“I’m sorry, signorina,” Mrs. Motta said, wringing her hands as I read the messages, one after the other. “I’m real sorry.”

When I laid the flimsy yellow sheets aside, Mrs. Motta handed me a business card. I recognized the name. Mr. James Reichardt was a junior partner in Uncle John’s law firm.

“He come round here twice, for to see you,” Mrs. Motta told me. “He say dere’s a ’heritance, signorina. And he wanna know, what you wan’ him-a do wit’ dat dog?”

 

Over the years, Mumma had raised and sold generations of puppies: first collies, then cocker spaniels, and finally dachshunds—all long, benchlike dogs, decreasing in size as her stamina declined.

“The dachshund is a perfectly engineered dog,” Ernest once observed. “It is precisely long enough for a single standard stroke of the back, but you aren’t paying for any superfluous leg.”

Perhaps it was the dachshund’s economy of material that appealed to Mumma, but her timing with the breed was unfortunate. She had tried to popularize the long-haired variety, believing its temperament was better, but people preferred the familiar short-haired red. Later, when the war started, no one would buy anything remotely German. By 1918, Mumma was practically giving the pups away. She decided to sell the breeding stock and get out of the business entirely.

As luck would have it, I was present for the final whelping. The last to emerge was a black-and-tan female with a badly kinked tail and an unattractive blue dapple splattered across her back and face. These were defects that doomed a puppy to a quick end. Mumma kept a bucket of water in the kennel for just that purpose. You may think her harsh, but it is a conscientious breeder’s duty to be critical. Mumma had tried crossing dapples in the past, and the results had sometimes been disastrous. This little female might be healthy enough, but her own offspring could be born eyeless, or earless, or brainless. Mumma had never worked out a way to predict when or why that would happen.

“No sense exhausting the bitch’s resources on a pup that shouldn’t be bred,” she said briskly.

“Wait!” I said, and stayed my mother’s hand when she reached for the dapple. “I’ll take her.”

Mumma stared.

I dropped my gaze, ashamed of my wayward eye, but I couldn’t stop myself from arguing. “You always say I don’t get enough exercise. Walking a dog will be good for me.”

Mumma couldn’t dispute the principle, but picked up the puppy anyway. “Well, you don’t want this one. You want the sable.”

All my life, Mumma had told me what I didn’t want. “Oh, you don’t want those earrings,” she’d say. “They’ll draw attention to your eyes.” Oh, you don’t want that dress. It will make you look like a stick. Oh, you don’t want eggs for breakfast. You want oatmeal. It’s better for you in cold weather. Well, I didn’t want oatmeal. I never wanted oatmeal. I hated the stuff, but I choked it down, all winter long, because Mumma put it in front of me and told me that was what I wanted.

Suddenly, and I cannot tell you why, a determination came over me like I don’t know what! I did not want that puppy’s perfectly lovely red sister or her handsome sable brother. No, I wanted the defective little black-and-tan. I wanted her ferociously, indignantly, unbendingly—blue dapple, kinked tail, and all.

Mumma was just as determined to save me from my own bad judgment. “Agnes, you’re not making any sense” became “This is a mistake. That pup is inferior” and finally a tearful “I am only trying to guide you, Agnes. There’s no reason for you to speak to me in that tone.”

Nevertheless, and for the first time in my life, I dared insist and I got my way. I named the pup Rosie. Before the day was over, I was so in love, it was difficult to leave her, even to go to sleep.

The plan was for Mumma to raise Rosie until she was housebroken. (House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological insults. Rain, for example, or a startling gust of wind.) I always visited Mumma on weekends, of course, but knowing Rosie was waiting for me would make the routine a treat. When the school year was over, I would return as usual to spend the summer in Cedar Glen, helping Mumma with the garden and the canning. In autumn, I would take Rosie back to Cleveland with me. Either my landlady would agree to this, I decided, or I would just have to find a new place to live.

Mumma had the satisfaction of being right about Rosie in some ways. My little pet was indeed a poor specimen of her breed. She matured to sixteen pounds—on the awkward border between the miniature and the standard for the breed. Her coat grew in long but thinnish. She was timid as well as unprepossessing, and spent her puppyhood hiding behind boxes in the kennel, darting out to steal food or toys from the stronger members of her litter.

“She’s sneaky,” Mumma would report whenever I telephoned to check on her and Rosie. “She plots and she schemes.”

“She’s clever,” I’d reply, “and resourceful.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.”

Those were the last words Mumma said to me, in life, a few days before the influenza swept my family away.

Weeks later, when Mrs. Motta handed me all those awful telegrams, I hardly reacted at all. I was so … depleted, I suppose, that I simply did not have the energy to weep.

In fact, I did not cry at all until I was strong enough to meet the lawyer at my mother’s house. You see, Mr. Reichardt brought Rosie with him that morning. She remembered me. And she came to me when I called.

 

Well, three times out of five, anyway. Dachshunds have their own agenda and can be stubborn about seeing their plans through to completion. What Rosie lacked in consistency, she made up for in enthusiasm. Most of the time when I called her name, she sprinted back, her long ears cocked and flying like a little girl’s pigtails. Each encounter was a glorious reunion, even if we’d been parted for only a minute or two. I had never felt so beloved.

She went with me everywhere, and there was so much work to do! Mr. Reichardt took on as much as he could of this necessary tidying of lives cut short, but he had many such estates to settle, so a great deal fell to me. The probate courts were jammed. Rosie and I spent hours waiting in queues that often turned out to be the wrong ones. More than once, someone in the line fainted, sending panic through the room. Since we’d been caught out by the second wave of influenza, illness was never far from our minds.

Douglas and Lillie and the boys had lived on the campus in a house provided for them by Oberlin. The dean told me that I could take all the time I needed to vacate the premises, but then he checked my progress every day, and frowned significantly when a bare week had passed. Not wanting to be a bother, I had their belongings boxed for transport and delivered to Mumma’s house in Cedar Glen. I turned next to Uncle John’s estate, hoping it would be relatively simple. He was a bachelor lawyer who had left his affairs in good order. Even so, there were many accounts to process and outstanding fees to collect, and his apartment to clear out, on top of the legal mechanics of settling any estate.

I was beginning to realize that a surprising amount of money would come to me eventually, but in the meantime, ready cash was in short supply. I hoped to raise funds by selling Uncle John’s furniture, but with so many estate liquidations, secondhand dealers had more stock than they could handle and paid just pennies on the dollar. And there was no market for anything Victorian anymore. Brash confidence might rule the business day and boozy flamboyance might dance through the night, but when people left the speakeasies? They wanted to go home to cozy houses filled with brand-new suites of “colonial” oak or the awful stuff that people of taste called “Flapper Phyfe.” As the weeks dragged on, the final expenses of three households piled up. The costs of caskets and burial plots had been added to all the usual bills: electricity, coal, telephone; grocery accounts, department store purchases. My salary from Murray Hill School had ceased the day I fell ill, and I fretted constantly about how long I could put off creditors while the estates were in probate.

Then, while I was going through the contents of my brother-in-law’s files, a small miracle was revealed: Douglas had carried a life insurance policy. Though it was meant for Lillie and the boys, I was listed as contingent beneficiary, so the money would come to me: un-looked for, unwished for, but welcome all the same.

My financial worries were allayed, but there was still the physical labor of sorting through the entirety of other people’s things. Minute by minute, I made thousands of little decisions: what to keep, what to sell, what to give away, what to have hauled to the dump. Until you’ve done it, you have no idea how draining that can be.

Mumma’s death seemed only half real to me, surrounded as I was by her possessions. Even before I shipped Lillie’s things home, Mumma’s house—mine now, I slowly realized—was jammed with a half century’s accumulation, and there was no inch of it that did not speak to me of her.

Her desk, a massive rolltop in a makeshift office, was formidably well organized, but the sheer volume of paper was daunting. There were yellowed newspaper clippings about dog shows, records of bloodlines, AKC registrations. Feed supplies and veterinarian bills. Records from the sewing machine business: accounts receivable and accounts payable, employee pay stubs several decades old. Mail of all kinds, each item read and returned to its carefully slit envelope, dated, and filed, “just in case.” Everything had to be opened, read, and dealt with.

Mumma had lived through lean times: nothing potentially useful was ever discarded. Old clothes, old shoes, old handbags. Empty bottles of all descriptions, washed and stored in a closet. Bits of string— short lengths tied end to end, wound like yarn into balls. There were oak-slat baskets in every corner, filled with quilt pieces and rag rugs in progress; cigar boxes held skeins of ribbons, hoarded buttons, and wooden spools of thread. She kept the empty spools, as well. Just in case.

As her only heir, I would benefit from Mumma’s parsimony, and from the carefully conserved proceeds from the sale of the sewing machine business, but I simply could not think in those terms, not yet. Overwhelmed, I often wandered from room to room, helpless in the face of it all, alone but surrounded by the dead, for every flat surface was peopled with framed studio portraits. Ernest and Lillian as children. Lillian and Douglas at their wedding. A series of the two boys, almost growing up. A stranger might have thought Mumma had only two children, but pictures of me were nearly always disappointing, you see. Why pay a photographer for something that wouldn’t bear looking at? I understood this, even as a child, though I won’t deny a lingering sense of invisibility.

I found other evidence of my existence, however: my grammar school report cards, tied with blue yarn, were tucked away in a desk drawer. These, Mumma had evidently decided, were suitable keepsakes of her eldest child’s youth. And then there were the ghosts of birthdays past that she had stashed away. Dusty candy boxes filled with fossilized chocolates. Books of poetry, their spines uncracked. Heaps of unused embroidered handkerchiefs. I sometimes broke down in tears when I came across a Christmas present that I had carefully selected for her, and that she had left untouched for years at the back of a cupboard or on the top shelf of a bookcase. It’s the thought that counts, of course, but it was disheartening to find evidence of how consistently I had failed to please her.

I suppose you find my laments self-absorbed and unseemly. Your mother left you a wealthy woman. You should be grateful, Agnes. Many a war widow was worse off. True enough, though in my own defense, I will point out that I was not at my best, having been so recently so ill.

That said, I will be honest with you. I’d have traded every penny of my inheritance for the memory of one word of love, or a single fond caress.

Like many modern mothers of her time, Mumma was much influenced by Dr. Emmett Holt and Professor John B. Watson. Young people raised in the aftermath of the Civil War were effete and flabby, these experts declared. They had been spoiled by sentimental, unscientific mothers who weakened the nation’s youth with loose schedules and sloppy displays of affection. In his manual The Care and Feeding of Children, Dr. Holt warned mothers that babies were not sweet little angels but small animals with fearsome appetites whose spirits needed breaking, just like those of wild horses. To rear a responsible adult, regularity in all things had to be imposed, for a well-adjusted adult was defined as one with iron habits and rigid self-control.

Above all, mothers must avoid displays of tenderness. “Mother love is a dangerous instrument that may inflict a never-healing wound,” Professor Watson warned. Merely to touch a child unnecessarily would place at risk that child’s future success and happiness. Maternal solicitude was not merely unsavory and unwise but a corrupting dereliction of duty.

In your time, adults strive to be “good parents,” but in my day, it was the business of children to be good and the solemn duty of parents to punish them when they were bad. In the spirit of scientific modernity, and with a calm sense of moral certainty, therefore, Mumma trained her children and her dogs with similar cool competence.

The childhood discipline that Ernest ran from—and that Lillie laughingly evaded—I truly desired to be governed by. I might have been annoying and, too often, I asked questions before I did as I was told, but I was as obedient as I knew how to be, even when I was small. How, then, had I so signally failed to elicit Mumma’s approval and pride? Why, I wondered, had my questions rankled when Lillie’s charmed? Was it merely that Lillian was a pretty child and graceful, while I was homely and awkward?

Like Rosie, I was a poor specimen of my breed. My wandering eye may have seemed to Mumma a constant silent accusation that she’d given birth to flawed stock. And as a toddler, I wailed so loudly when she splinted my arms to keep me from sucking my thumb that she gave in; my spoiled teeth were no doubt a rebuke to her weakness every time I smiled, but I don’t quite believe that was the whole explanation.

You see, Mumma was easily able to answer Lillie’s questions about the Bible and God and what Jesus wanted from us, about what was good and what was sin. My questions were most often not “What?” but “Why?” Why did people think one thing and not another? Why could things not be different from the way they were? Why would God blame little babies for what Eve did? If Jesus was God, and God was going to forgive Original Sin after the Crucifixion, and the whole Trinity knew that was going to happen, why did Jesus still have to die on the cross? It didn’t make sense to me.

Once, I remember, we were walking home from services on Sunday, and I was terribly upset about the sermon. “I don’t think God’s being fair,” I said. “Asking a person if he wants to spend all eternity in heaven or hell is like asking a little boy like Ernest what he wants to be when he grows up. We can’t understand infinity. Why would God punish a little finite person forever? And what could a finite person do to deserve an eternal reward?”

Alone, in what I still thought of as Mumma’s house, I could hear echoes of her exasperation with such questions. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh. “The things that pop into your head and out of your mouth …”

And that would be the end of that.

 

The estate work seemed endless but, through it all, Rosie was nearby and her company made the tasks more bearable. Dachshunds like to burrow, and Rosie would scoop out a cave in a basket of quilt scraps or crawl under an errant sweater. She could be content for hours, fast asleep, but if I sat back in my chair or laid my head in my hands as melancholy or exhaustion overtook me, she’d hop right out, and I’d feel small, soft paws go pitty-pat on my knee.

Pay attention, Rosie tapped in dachshund Morse. You aren’t alone. I’m here.

I’d pull her up into my arms. She was the size and weight of a four-month-old baby, and it was comforting to hold her against my chest until I’d recovered my composure. “What do you think, Rosie?” I’d ask her then. “Shall we go for a walk?”

At the sound of the word “walk,” she’d hurl herself off my lap with a steeplechaser’s leap, then pirouette at the doorway, delicate pointed nose tossed repeatedly in the direction of the road. As I put on my hat and gloves, she’d spin again to register her approval. Good girl, Agnes! Yes, yes, yes! Most certainly! Time for a walk!

Outdoors, she was joy embodied, trundling cheerily at my side, or veering off to track an elusive chipmunk, or falling behind to investigate some loathsome reminder of another animal’s passage. If you’d seen us, you might have rolled your eyes and thought, How pathetic. An old maid and her spoiled little dog. But Rosie was less a pampered pet than a prizefighter’s trainer, insisting that I do my roadwork twice a day, always pressing to go a bit farther.

Though she never allowed me to sink for long into discouragement or loneliness, Rosie seemed to understand when I simply had to rest. Recovery from the Great Influenza was slow. The fever broke, the aching ended, breathing became easier, but for months afterward, one had hardly any mental energy and tired very easily. For a long time, I napped every afternoon with Rosie curled beside me, warm and sweet.

There is a difference, I discovered in those shuttered hours, between mourning and grief. Mourning is soft and sad. I mourned my brother, Ernest, and Lillie’s husband, Douglas, and my two young nephews, especially. I thought of what those fine boys could no longer enjoy and of what they would never experience. To die so young—just as they had begun to fulfill their promise … My sadness was for them, but not much for me.

Grief, by contrast, is sharp and selfish. The loss feels like deprivation, as though something rightfully one’s own has been unjustly stolen away. Oh, how I grieved for Lillian! I missed desperately the elements of surprise and gaiety she so often brought to my unremarkable days.

Pull yourself together, I could almost hear Mumma say. Make a list. Get things done.

Good advice, of course. Each morning, I wrote down my tasks for the day. Each evening, I crossed some off and added others, chipping away at the mountain of responsibilities, bit by bit. It was all I could do to take care of my own small affairs at my own slow pace. As I struggled through my duties, I thought sometimes of President Wilson, who had just returned from Europe after the Versailles Peace Conference and was dealing in those same days with great affairs of state.

I was not among those who applauded the president’s decision to take us into the Great War, but I always try to be fair-minded. He and our soldiers deserved credit for hastening the conflict’s end, in the opinion of many Europeans, who had once believed their nations would be forever locked in stalemate, with the war killing mothers’ sons as steadily as they could be born, raised, drafted, and sent to the front. America broke that impasse and released them from despair, and the Europeans were truly grateful.

Mr. Wilson’s trip to England and France was, therefore, a triumph. He was showered with flowers, our newspapers reported, and cheered by throngs of admirers as his motorcade crept through the streets of London. He and Mrs. Wilson were houseguests at Buckingham Palace. At dinner that first night, King George noted that Woodrow Wilson was the first president of the United States to visit England, and he toasted Mr. Wilson as the leader of a “mighty commonwealth tied to us by the closest of ties.”

Ah, I thought, reading that. Our little revolution is officially forgiven.

The American party soon set sail for France. Mr. Wilson looked fit in photos taken as he debarked in Brest, where thousands celebrated his arrival. He received a gold medal from the city of Paris and met with diplomats to discuss the coming peace conference in Versailles. He spent a week at the American army headquarters in Chaumont but declined a visit to the cratered moonscape of the battlefields. “I don’t want to get mad,” he explained in an interview. “I think there should be one man at the peace table who hasn’t lost his temper.”

It was a noble ambition, to retain some composure on that ruined continent. Nevertheless, for all the grief it cost our country, others at Versailles pointed out that only 150,000 of the ten million war dead were Americans. Mr. Wilson might be inclined toward magnanimity; not so, the other victors. Their aim was to punish those who’d set the meat grinder in motion: to destroy forever the ability of Germany, Austria, and Turkey to wage war.

If Mr. Wilson had been one of my students, I’d have advised him to do as my students did when trying to grasp something difficult: read aloud. Hear the weight of these numbers in your own voice, sir. Ten million soldiers dead. Twenty-one million wounded. Seven and a half million men missing in action: blown to shreds, grim fertilizer for the poppies that would grow in Flanders Field and a hundred other battlegrounds.

Nor was the cost reckoned in lives alone. The total for four fiscal years of combat was estimated by Mr. E.R.A. Seligman at $232 trillion. And that, remember, was before inflation took hold in the twenties.

The youth and wealth of empires had been poured out onto bloody mud, but Mr. Wilson went to Versailles intending to ask still more of them. His Fourteen Points called not just for free seas, free trade, and arms reduction, and not only for the voluntary withdrawal of all armies from all conquered territories. Why, he demanded the end of all colonial claims! He intended to fight for the right of the whole world’s conquered and colonized peoples to determine their own autonomous development. His peace plan was simply this: America writ large.

He wished for all nationalities a nation like our own: of the people, by the people, for the people. His greatest allies at Versailles were the defeated Triple Alliance and the many small nations of the Balkans and the Middle East that had begun to emerge as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and collapsed. All of them laid their hopes for a better future on the altar of Mr. Wilson’s peace.

Now think again of those awful numbers, and you will, perhaps, understand the hatred, the rage, the thirst for vengeance among the rulers of England, Belgium, France, and Italy. From those empires, Mr. Wilson’s plan required the sacrifice not only of men and money but of importance. Who among them would willingly cede that?

Try to imagine what a miracle of peacemaking, what relentless powers of persuasion, what Herculean intensity of physical and intellectual effort such a peace would have required! And learn this, if you wish to understand the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson was hospitalized with influenza just as the Versailles conference began.

While the president lay hallucinating and delirious, representatives of the victorious empires redrew maps as they pleased and took what they wanted. Too ill to carry the day, Mr. Wilson never really regained his strength of body or mind. He left France, scorned, and sailed back to Washington, a sick and disappointed man.

While I sorted through boxes of my nephews’ toys and my sister’s letters and her husband’s books; while I cleaned my mother’s closets; while I sobbed sometimes and napped regularly; while I walked with Rosie a bit farther every day and slowly reconciled myself to a changed world, Woodrow Wilson struggled to convince his bereaved and preoccupied nation that we must make the whole world over in America’s image. To do so would require a League of Nations that could adjudicate the creation of new nations of, for, and by their people. And for that League of Nations to prevail, America would have to pledge troops and treasure to an international armed force sufficient to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of every member state. The fate of the world was in our hands.

Mr. Wilson and his eloquent pleas were ignored by heedless boys, too young to have fought, who wore raccoon coats and kept lists of bootleggers in their pockets. He was ignored by carefree girls who bobbed their hair and rolled their stockings down, and knew just how alluringly their white thighs flashed at dance clubs where cool black musicians blew hot jazz and made their cymbals shimmer. He was ignored by busy, striving citizens who had troubles of their own and who were sick of the Old World’s expensive, incomprehensible, murderous politics. He was ignored as well by contemptuous senators and congressmen, whose eyes were on their next election campaign and who cared nothing for airy-fairy ideas like the League of Nations.

Exhausted, derided, Mr. Wilson suffered a crippling stroke before he could sway public opinion. Europe was already doomed to a conflagration that would make the Great War seem almost quaint, with its horse-drawn caissons, its Christmas truce, and the chivalric notion that soldiers should fight one another instead of carpet-bombing civilians or gassing noncombatants by the trainload.

Read aloud the names of the nations and the colonies whose dreams were fired by Mr. Wilson’s promise of freedom, then burned to cinders by his fever. Germany, Austria, Hungary. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia. Kosovo, Albania. China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam. Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. The Lebanon and the Philippines, the Congo and the Sudan. Algeria, Egypt. Ethiopia, Eritrea. Somalia, Mozambique, Angola …

Or simply look at a globe, and weep.

Despite it all, there was still a chance for peace, even then, in some few places. If no single person could make things right after the Great War, young Neddy Lawrence still hoped to make them less wrong in one corner of the world. The rest of my story is a small part of his, and a large part of yours, I’m afraid.