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.
WHEN DID THE IDEA of going to Egypt begin to take hold? Sometime around Christmas in 1920, I think. Certainly by February of ’21, I had booked passage and was packing for the trip. By then I’d served nearly two years’ hard labor as the executrix of three estates and had largely completed my duties. A second solitary Thanksgiving had come and gone, and I’m afraid I was feeling quite sorry for myself.
To stave off “the blues,” I set myself a task I’d put off until then as unimportant: the bundling up of hundreds of magazines for the paper-and-rags man who collected them for paper mills.
Long after she sold the sewing machine business, Mumma had continued her subscriptions to McCall’s and Vogue and Vanity Fair and, of course, she had saved every issue, “just in case.” For a whole day, I stacked them and tied them up with string, but I often paused to gaze at the Palmoli
ve advertisements on the back covers. There, the soap’s green tint was lent a foreign glamor by a slender olive-skinned girl who sat beneath palm trees and beckoned the customer toward starlit pyramids.
Another Ohio winter lowered the skies; for days at a time, noon was as dark as dusk. During the holidays, I passed many a long empty evening reading Douglas’s mission diaries about Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, or paging through Lillie’s scrapbooks of their travels. The idea of sun and desert heat began to make a compelling case as Rosie and I took our short, cold walks. Rosie loved the snow and would tunnel through it after chipmunks, digging with relentless determination until the ice balls between her toes made movement impossible and she had to be carried inside. I tried to emulate her energetic pleasure in the season but felt increasingly adrift as silent nights became dismal days.
You may be wondering why I didn’t go back to my job in the Cleveland school district. Well, at the end of the war, women had achieved the suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t carry with it the right to make a living. There were so many demobilized soldiers needing work that we ladies were often summarily dismissed from employment. With plenty of money and no family of my own to support, I could not bring myself to protest when I was replaced by a returning veteran. Even so, I missed my students and my colleagues.
Rosie was not my sole companion in those days, although she was the only one of flesh and blood. In the years after the Great War and the Great Influenza, many of us were visited by apparitions, and I saw—or, rather, heard—my share of spirits. There was no one alive to find fault with my dress or hairstyle or habits, but Mumma seemed to look over my shoulder whenever I stood before a mirror to brush my hair or put on a battered hat. Of course, in those days, I didn’t believe in superstitious nonsense like ghosts and ghouls or hauntings, but I could hear Mumma’s voice so clearly! What will people think? Land sake, Agnes! I never let a daughter of mine leave the house looking as slovenly as you do now.
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