Dreamers of the Day (4 page)

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: 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.

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.