Dreamers of the Day (3 page)

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 schoolgirl—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 Allenby, 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.