Dreamers of the Day (5 page)

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.

         
W
HEN 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 Palmolive 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.

In all times and in all places, a teacher’s salary has required fiscal discipline. When I was working, my tastes had inclined toward books, not clothing. I could have afforded more now, but for me the acquisition of a new dress had always been less an amusing indulgence than a depressing chore. When I began teaching, women’s clothing was made to measure, tightly fitted around unbending corsets that wordlessly proclaimed:
This is decidedly not a loose woman.
The styles of that era celebrated an ampleness I did not possess, though Mumma did her best for me. “Oh, Agnes,” she’d sigh, gathering ankle-length skirts into high fabric waistbands to hint at shapely hips I did not have. “What am I going to do with you?” she’d mutter as she created abundantly pleated bodices to enhance what nature had begrudged. It was unrewarding work for her, and I hated every moment.

Then the war came on, and suddenly it was patriotic to conserve fabric more nobly used to clothe our boys in uniform. Skirts crept toward the knees. Pleats disappeared. Hats became smaller, with none of the elaborate wire structure that earlier millinery had required and armament factories now requisitioned. Mumma was scandalized by the new styles and would have none of them. I simply waited the war out, wearing what I had, but Lillie enjoyed the changes. She had a real knack for fashion. A professor’s wife couldn’t be extravagant, but my sister could toss an old piano shawl around her shoulders and look chic. When I tried that, I looked like a pile of rough-dried laundry pulled straight off the clothesline, and…

Well, to be honest? I just gave up.

By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.

President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”

Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had
UNITED STATES
crossed out and
NEW PRUSSIA
scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.

“The war taught us the power of propaganda,” one of the C.P.I. men said after the armistice. “Now, by God, when we have something to sell the American people, we know how to sell it.”

A few moments, it seemed, after the end of the war, “the nation” became “the marketplace” and the exalted word “citizen” was promptly replaced with the loathsome, bovine “consumer.” Women had achieved the vote just as civic discourse shifted from political rights to the “freedom” to buy ready-made dresses and lipstick and jewelry, or the “liberty” to drink and smoke and dance. With the world rendered safe for democracy, our civic duty was redefined: buy the cake and biscuit mixes, the canned meats and soups that had once fed the troops.

If the ad men had learned from the war that a good slogan could sway the masses, they learned from Dr. Sigmund Freud that people are governed less by reason than by unconscious sexual desires. “Critical eyes are sizing you up,” the advertisements warned, but Aqua Velva aftershave would make a man’s face “fresh, fit and
firm
!” All women were naturally homely and ordinary, but Elizabeth Arden and Coco Chanel could make us beautiful—for a price. Inattention to external appearance was no longer high-mindedness, a
Vogue
editorial warned; rather, it destroyed “those potential personalities that psychologists tell us are lurking behind our ordinary selves.”

It was insulting and demeaning, but if you hear something often enough and long enough? Your resistance gets ground down. Absurdities start to make sense. Yes, you start to think. How true…

Not even I could be oblivious forever to frayed cuffs, run-down shoes, and a threadbare antebellum overcoat. One dark day in late December, with nothing to look forward to as 1921 approached, I came upon a newspaper ad for Halle’s Department Store. “When a woman begins to regard her appearance as a fixed, unalterable quality, that same moment some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever.”

Agnes, I told myself, some work for immigrants is better than none at all. And if you try to repair this waistband again, you risk public catastrophe.
But you don’t want to go to Halle’s,
I could hear Mumma’s “ghost” add.
It’s much too expensive! Sears and Roebuck’s is entirely good enough for you.

I dithered another hour before telephoning the mechanic who valiantly kept Douglas’s obsolete electric running. I would be driving into Cleveland in the morning, I told Brian, and would he be kind enough to put a charge into the batteries tonight, please?

I drove as little as possible in those days, not because I was afraid, you understand, but because each outing required me to withstand another lecture on the technical and economic superiority of gasoline engines. Holding the telephone’s earpiece away from my head, I pretended to listen as Brian swore that he couldn’t keep that old rattletrap wired together much longer. It wasn’t safe for me to drive it into town. It might break down, and then where would I be? On the side of the road, freezing in this weather. Now listen here, I was instructed, just come on down to the garage and take a look. He had a used flivver that would do fine for my use. Just take a look, that’s all he asked, but he asked relentlessly, and I hated being nagged. Only Rosie’s exultation made the ordeal worthwhile. I can’t imagine anything in the wolf lineage to account for a dog’s delight in automotive travel, but Rosie loved to ride in cars.

The next day, the electric delivered me without incident to a parking spot on Euclid Avenue.
Oh, for heaven’s sake,
I could imagine Mumma saying.
You don’t belong here. Go to Sears!
And I admit that I hesitated at the sight of Halle’s liveried doorman, but once I made my mind up, I could be more determined than you might think. Clutching Rosie under one arm as though she were a furry football, I squared my shoulders as Papa used to and swept right through that door, as though my little dog and I had a perfect right to be in a place where a blouse costing less than nineteen dollars was hardly worth cutting up as a dust rag.

My spectacles fogged immediately. It’s Mumma, I thought, then told myself firmly, Nonsense, Agnes. It’s condensation.

I set Rosie down, took a handkerchief from my bag, and carefully polished the mist from my lenses. When I replaced them on my nose, my icy courage thawed and puddled under the heated gaze of three spruce shopgirls, each of whom seemed to have spent her entire salary at Halle’s.

Despite the advertised reduction in prices, few other shoppers had ventured out that bitterly cold morning. With no one else to wait on, all three girls advanced on me like an army vanguard, each wearing a combat uniform that was some clever variation on the theme of cultured pearls and a dark French frock with a white collar and cuffs.

“I only want to spend eighty-five dollars,” I told them, backing away. “I—I need clothes. And a pair of sturdy shoes. And an overcoat.”

There’s just the thing,
Mumma said when my eyes fell on a sensible brown tweed.
It will wear like iron.

The least beautiful but most confident of the three girls came straight up to me. “A dachshund!” this young blonde cried. “Oh, I love dachshunds! Half a dog high, dog and a half long—that’s what my boyfriend, Les, always says. Les is such a card! What’s her name?”

“Rosie,” I said, a little startled.

“Well, nice to meetcha, Rosie. My name’s Mildred.” With that, she snatched Rosie up with such aplomb, the dog hardly wiggled as she was lifted. “Take off your coat,” Mildred urged me, popping her gum. “Let’s see what we’ve got to work with, Miss—?”

“Um, Shanklin.”

Goodness, she’s rude,
Mumma remarked, but I soon found Mildred’s breezy cheer a welcome change from the dreary posthumous conversations I’d grown used to, all those months alone. That’s simply the way young people speak now, I told Mumma, even to their elders.

I unbuttoned my old coat and handed it over, feeling strangely liberated when Mildred tossed it aside with the disdain that it deserved, but my heart, buoyed momentarily, sank to its accustomed level while she considered the challenge before her. Familiar with the sensation of being appraised by someone clear-eyed, pretty, and remorseless, I awaited judgment like a condemned criminal.
Agnes Shanklin, I find you flat-chested, hipless, hopeless—

Mildred sighed. “You are so lucky! Miss Shanklin, you’ve got the perfect figger for a dropped waist. Perfect!”

Dumbfounded. There’s no other word for it. I was dumbfounded by the notion of possessing any sort of perfection, let alone one that was physical. When I stammered my disbelief, Mildred seemed genuinely astonished and told me in no uncertain terms that every fashionable woman between the ages of fifteen and forty-five yearned—positively yearned—for the very “figger” I’d been cursed with.