Dreamers of the Day Page 3

  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 h
ealthy 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: unlooked 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.