My baby was a gorgeous little girl. She had Sam’s golden tresses, which fell in curls across her face and down to her shoulders. Her hair was light and elastic, and the curls jumped up from her shoulders and tickled her cheeks whenever she was excited, hopping around the house. But unlike Sam, she had my green eyes. They complemented her marvelously, and whenever she smiled she always looked just a little mischievous, her eyes taking everything in quickly, and analyzing the world around her. She was brilliant and beautiful.
Susan now joined me on my daily walks. Sam was very busy on the force, and had recently been promoted to Chief Detective. But Susan and I didn’t mind. We strolled together, hand in hand, down the streets of New York. I would tie tiny bows in her hair, wrapping them around her curls and complementing the color of her dress. Strangers would stop on the street to admire her, telling her how lovely she was. But she never let it go to her head. We would go to Central Park and feed the pigeons, just like Edward and I used to do, and Susan would smile graciously and tell anyone who complimented her, “thank you,” in a quiet little voice, smiling timidly and tracing circles with her softened leather shoes in the dirt.
Adelle gave her weekly manners lessons, over tea. She and John would come into town for the weekend, and on Friday mornings, she would take Susan with her to a little tea house for an hour, sometimes two, and sit with her, patiently telling her of all the polite and respectful things you had to do as a lady, but more importantly, as a person. Sam and I went to meet them one day. It was a precious sight to see. Little Susan with her legs swinging happily from the tall wooden chair perched across from Adelle, both stirring their tea while it sat in a little china cup on top of a saucer. They always had sweets, also, but no more than two. Adelle would shake her finger at me and tell me that she would not be responsible for having a pudgy granddaughter.
The summer after Susan had turned four, Sam and I decided to hire a tutor for her, in preparation for her start in primary school the following year. She loved learning, too, and we knew she would jump at the start of having her very own teacher to work with, and to challenge her supple and inquisitive young mind.
The tutor that we selected was a peculiar and inquisitive little man. His name was Mr. Brady, and he looked somewhat like a hobgoblin. He was very small, and he had a curved nose and crooked little fingers from years of arthritis. But he was brilliant. He gave lessons to all of our friends’ children in the neighborhood, and was known throughout the Upper West Side as being the tutor’s tutor. He had studied early childhood education in university, and was renowned for his work in child psychology. I was happy to learn that he had not been overwhelmingly influenced by the work of Dr. Freud, who was beginning to make his appearance quite exponentially on the American scene. He was very good with children, and Susan took to him very quickly. Sam and I were both very happy with him, and took him on full time.
Mr. Brady came over three days a week. He would crouch on a little stool next to Susan on the floor of the living room, and would teach her all of the classics. He read her literature, including ancient Greek mythologies, and taught her basic algebra—counting with little marbles and stones. He even began to teach her French, as was the way with upper middle class socialites in New York City.
“Est-ce que je peux s’il vous plait prendre un chocolat chaud, Monsieur Brady?” Susan quipped. Mr. Brady found her wit very impressive, and enjoyed teaching her. Now and then Mr. Brady would reprimand Susan for giggling too much, or for not sitting still. She would blush, very embarrassed that she had acted out of turn, and Mr. Brady would smile, acknowledging that it was alright, and that she was not at fault but should listen better next time. Susan was very astute, and behaved very well with authority figures. Mr. Brady added an extra layer of structure and rigor to her life. She became so inquisitive, that she began questioning things about her world more keenly than before, with impressive insights for just a four year old. And to her benefit, but slightly against my own intuition, I began giving her lessons, personal lessons from my own knowledge of the future.
Evenings were the times when our lessons usually happened. Sam had started staying late with the force, now that he was working as chief. I would sit up with Susan before her bedtime, and we would look out her window and gaze at the stars. Realizing that these topics could be sensitive, I gave her lessons that did not reveal anything significant, but were essential themes that would provide her with insight into the world she lived in that would expand her breadth and understanding, and would follow in sync with the curriculum she would learn in the educational institutions of the time.
Nighttime was the perfect time to teach Susan about the universe. I reached back in my mind, to my own schooling, and everything we had learned about the planets and the solar system. I didn’t tell her anything about spacecraft, but hinted about their existence, often prodding her own imagination, asking her if she thought anything like this would be possible in the future.
“Look up at the stars, my darling, do you see them staring down at us?”
“I see them, Mommy, they’re beautiful.” Her high-pitched little voice seemed to echo across the stretches of the cosmos as we stared out the window at the Milky Way and all of its components and complementing structures. I taught her the names of the nine planets in our solar system, and how the Earth and its planetary friends in our solar system rotate around the sun. I also taught her the different moon phases. We made a calendar, and would draw pictures of the moon each night that we could see it. She loved this, saying that one day, she would be the first person to go to the moon. I hugged her, and told her that she was the bravest girl I had ever met. And that wasn’t untrue.
I also taught her about the dinosaurs. Luckily, this wasn’t too far-fetched. Fossils were beginning to be uncovered more regularly, and we saw them at showings like the World’s Fair, and at the American Museum of Natural History, as the creatures of the past were unearthed for the first time. Everyone found it unbelievable. I smiled, knowingly, and told Susan of all of the different kinds of dinosaurs I could recall, and their names. She was particularly fascinated with the Saber-Toothed Tiger, and began drawing pictures of it in her little sketchbook that Mr. Brady had given her for her art classes. He found the pictures amusing.
The summer was blissful. Whenever Sam had a free day, we would go to the seaside and take Susan on picnics at the beach. We loved Coney Island, and would spend some of the days there, riding the Ferris wheel on occasion, and looking out at the glow of the city lights.
For the Fourth of July, we watched the fireworks shoot over the city, and the parade that moved through the streets. Susan wore a little red, white and blue hat, and Sam got us all little fabric flags on wooden sticks that we carried with us to the celebrations. I found it amusing to see how fewer stars there were, but kept this to myself. Susan asked why there were stars on the flag, and Sam enlightened her as to their meaning and the significance of the colors in remembrance of our soldiers who had passed to protect our freedom.
But the blissful summer suddenly faded away. Susan and Sam remained wonderful, and the Sullivans came on a regular basis. This time, it was the outside world that was beginning to crumble, and my reality with it.
A few weeks after Independence Day that year, I began to fear the news headlines. Up until the point, I had understood that living in the past meant that all of the things that I had learned in school, that everything that had come before me, would eventually play out. And that all of those horrible things that had happened in the early twentieth century, I would have to live through. However, it wasn’t until that year, until the invasion of Serbia by Austria-Hungary, that I understood that all of these events were about to happen, and everything that was going to follow in the decades to come was going to be a living hell for the majority of the United States, and the rest of the world, and I could not escape it.
The day that it happened, Sam walked in carrying the newspaper. He did this every morning, but on this par
ticular day, I sensed it, almost like a venomous viper resting delicately on the breakfast table, waiting to strike at any moment. Sam shook his head when he read the headline, and sighed, walking out of the room. I couldn’t do anything but stare at it, blankly. I feared that if I touched it, everything would suddenly become real. It was as if I had officially entered the past, and that newspaper was the sudden cry of stark authenticity. I began to cry then. My shoulders shaking, and my face twisted up in fear. My cries were soft, but enough that Sam could hear then from the other room. He came in quickly, grabbing my shoulders with both hands.
“Lucy,” he asked, anxiously, “what’s wrong?” He was rubbing my shoulders, his hands strong and tense.
I looked up at him, my eyes wet with tears, and my lips quivering in trepidation. “Sam,” I said, “it’s only the beginning.” Then I stopped myself, catching my mistake, and shaking under the horror of what was to come. “I fear, it is only the beginning.”
Backlit against the morning sunlight, he held me in our little breakfast nook, rocking back and forth with my weeping. From the playroom Susan sat quietly with her dolls and watched us.
1917
This is when the fog begins to fade in and out, tearing at my insides and filling me with dread. As an inadvertent time traveler, I always wondered if there was something I could have done to prevent all of the ill events of the world. And that burden rests heavily on my shoulders, the fog creeping in to alleviate it. July of 1917 was a month that the haze forms over unless I force myself to peel back the curtain. It was a month of horror, on the beginning of the slow road down to hell, for the next decade to come. As reality set in, that I would have to live through all of the suffering and dread of the turn of the early twentieth century, I began to live in a constant state of disbelief, of the absurdity of our nation’s history, that tugged at the back of my mind, tickling my being while I meandered through daily life, and lived through history.
I never forgot the gut-wrenching knot in my stomach when the paper was delivered on April sixth in 1917. Two days before my birthday we declared war on Germany. I, above all others, knew that this was just the beginning. I was sitting in the living room with Susan perched next to me on the sofa. We were reading a book, or more accurately, Susan was reading me a book. This was her new favorite activity. She was incredibly intelligent, and all of the years with Mr. Brady had done her very well. She was reading novels now, and our weekend routine had become long hours of her choosing her favorite book, or whatever was next on her list, and reading excerpts of it to me. She was very interpretive, too, sometimes doing the voices of the characters, but now and then she would nudge me, requesting a particular character voice that she wasn’t certain how to do, such as an accent, or something. It was great fun.
All of our fun was shattered, though, when Sam came in with the morning paper. His face was white. I had known all year that the war was coming, both from my knowledge of the future, as well as the sequence of events that had been taking place around the world, leading up to what would inevitably be our American involvement in the conflict. But, from my history classes, I could not remember the date. I knew that it had happened in the spring, and I wished that I had paid better attention. And thus, when Sam brought the paper that morning I was, for once, surprised. And haunted.
Sam looked at me with dark eyes, holding the paper out for me to see. As soon as I saw his expression, I knew what the paper would speak of. I picked it up to see for myself, and it was confirmed. We were joining the war that we had long been avoiding. I knew what was to come, the toll on the economy and the propaganda, and my mind wouldn’t even let me start to think about the financial despair of the next decades, but my memories of my lessons back in school were hazy. Seeing it there in front of me, rubbing the paper between my fingers, smelling the freshly printed ink, and watching Susan tug at the corners, I could see her trying to wrap her mind around the concept. Knowing, more or less, what was to come, I felt alone, afraid, and distant.
I didn’t want to live in an era where we were at war with the world. The wars I had lived through as a child had been enough, and those were still so removed, our society didn’t seem to recognize them the way I knew we would recognize this. This war would not just be overseas; we were a part of it. The war effort was the American people.
Sam’s face was pale, and he walked into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. I’ll never forget the look of utter desolation that washed over his face. As an officer of the law, Sam had the political insight to understand the implications of the war. From that day on, I would see this face, now and again, as our country wove its way through anguish, disaster, suffering and blight over the next decades to come. I wished nothing more than to be able to wash that expression off of his face forever, to use my knowledge to make none of it so. To end the wars overseas as well as our own involvement, and protect us from economic hardship. But it could never be.
Susan poked her finger against my shoulder.
“Mom?”
“Yes, darling?” My voice was quiet, and I tried to mask my fear in the tone of my voice. But Susan was too perceptive to ignore it. She saw right through me.
“What’s war?”
My heart sank to the bottom of my stomach as the words slipped from her lips. Her eyes were so young, so innocent, and so sincere. She did not understand war. She had not learned about war. I know she had some concept of it, but not what it meant for our country to be at war. For us to be at war. She looked up at me with her deep, cobalt blue eyes. If I had tried to evade the question she would have persisted. I don’t mean to brag, but Susan was one of the smartest children I had ever met. As her mother, this made me more than proud, more than words can explain. Though sometimes, it was rather intimidating.
I put my arm around her small shoulders, brushing her hair off her neck to drape down her collarbone, tied up in a little white bow to match her dress. I looked at her and told her the truth. Not in a horrible way, but in a very realistic way, that I knew she was looking for. Susan was always searching, and I couldn’t hide the world from her. I didn’t want to, and it wouldn’t have been fair. In my mothering, this is one thing I am very proud of. Along with the wisdom I was able to share with her of things to come.
“War is a terrible thing. War is when one country fights with another country for some reason. Usually it has to do with power, or money, and sometimes countries, for example, as we are doing now, enter wars to help other countries. Or to help defend their people, to keep them safe from an enemy who is trying to do bad things. Sometimes war is necessary to protect people, or to stop destruction, but it is never good to go to war. No one wants to go to war. It puts people in danger. Lots of people die in a war.”
Susan twiddled her fingers together, taking the information in, and looking rather nervous. I reconsidered what I had told her momentarily, wondering if perhaps I had been too frank. But something else was on her mind.
“Is Daddy safe?” she asked.
I was surprised by her question. “What do you mean, Susan? Your father is fine.”
She started to blink her eyelashes, her eyelids fluttering over her irises hurriedly, fighting off little tears that were peering out from the corners of her eyes. Her eyelashes dampened, and some of them stuck together in clumps.
“When people go to war,” she said, “there are soldiers. Does everyone have to go? Do all of the men have to go? I don’t want Daddy to be a soldier, I don’t want him to go away and get killed…” She began to sniffle then, her chest tightening in sharp little breaths, and her cheeks flushing red.
I grabbed her and pulled her close to me, feeling absolutely atrocious that she would have such thoughts, and have such fears, but at the same time, I was overwhelmingly impressed at her insight, drawing the correlation between her knowledge of war and the risk that her father could be drafted. It was a risk, certainly, but as an officer of the law, Sam would be needed at home, to keep the peace here. The curtain in m
y clouded thoughts of the war and its reality drew back, and I thought for a moment about what it would be like. To really live through something like this, not to just read about it. And all of the wars to come. This was only the beginning. I didn’t know if I could take it. I shut out my knowledge of the future, hiding from the truth, though I couldn’t hide from what I knew. I looked back at Susan.
“Darling, your daddy is fine. He is not a soldier, he is a police officer, a detective, and he’s not going to war. He has to fight the good fight here, and keep us safe in our country. He’s not going overseas to fight anyone else. You don’t need to worry.”
She sniffed again, rubbing her eyes. “Promise?”
“I promise.” I smiled at her and pulled her hair back out of her face, kissing her forehead, even if I wasn’t certain that my promise was real. I knew enough about the war to come to know it was going to be bad and change our lives forever, but I didn’t know if Sam was safe from being called upon. Even so, Susan deserved the false security I was giving her, if only for a while. She was the light of my life. At least I had my family. I would be nothing without them. And despite the horror of living through everything that would come, they would make it all worth it. And I knew then, that they already had.
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