At eight, a clock chimed. The secretary returned to the waiting room and ushered her through a tall arched door into the president’s office.
The room was spacious, as befitted a man whose employees called its occupant “Mr. President.” Tall windows on two sides allowed full morning light to filter through the room, creating a warmth not found in the waiting room of the upper hall. Priceless portraits hung on the walls; below some, university treasures beamed from antique cabinets framing a sitting area to one side. The other portion of the office was devoted to a large walnut desk. It was uncluttered, save for a fountain pen, a fat folder, and two scrolls of architectural blueprints secured with a length of black ribbon. The Persian carpet on which she was standing was rumored to be worth more than the entire Divinity School.
President Lowell had held his office since 1909, and now, in the twenty-third year of his presidency, he’d heard complaints about everything from students’ marks to the backbiting faculty, the flow of the Charles River, and many other issues in which it was clear that not all parties could ever be pleased with any outcome. For a university president in his twenty-third year, nothing was new.
President Lowell was seated at the desk, reviewing a sheaf of papers, and didn’t look up as they entered.
“President Lowell,” said his secretary in a loud voice. “Miss Helen Brooks is here to see you.”
“What? Oh, come in!” he said, his large mustache spreading over his wide face in a perfunctory smile. He pushed back his chair from his desk, stood and adjusted his wool jacket, then walked over to her, offering a large, beefy hand in greeting. He asked her to sit at a nearby table at which there were two chairs, each carved with the new Harvard crest. She sat, placing the folder Peter had given her on the table and grasping the handle of her purse in her lap.
“I’ll have to ask you to speak loudly, Miss Brooks. I’ve become a little deaf in one ear.” He leaned toward her with a conspiratorial whisper. “Well, actually it’s both ears. I never thought I should live to be a decrepit old man. And, if I had just been a decrepit young man I should be used to it by now!” he said with a chuckle.
“For all your activity, you would hardly know that age even affected you,” she said clearly. “I see you inspecting the Memorial Church each day.”
“Yes, I do. Coffee?”
“No thank you,” said Helen.
“That’s all, then, Miss Pebbles.” The secretary turned, her steps muffled on the thick carpet. Helen heard the door close.
He gave a slight cough and shifted in his seat. “Miss Brooks, my secretary tells me that you have some concerns about the fate of those young German soldiers we are not going to put up in the Memorial Room of the new chapel. It’s a very popular subject these days.”
“I do.” She nodded. “One was my husband.”
“Who?”
“Wilhelm Brandl.”
He swallowed. “Wils Brandl,” he repeated. He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said nodding. “I have heard about him. A promising student, by all accounts.”
“That’s true.”
He looked away and began to speak. “This isn’t easy. The fate of those who died was heroic. We have to go through a life that is much more continuous and complex.” As he looked back at her, his eyes seemed tired. “Sometimes I envy them. I am not one to look for controversy and I know how to make the honorable compromise. But I must be clear. I am the caretaker of a serious legacy: the memories of hundreds of Harvard men who have died in a noble cause. It’s an important matter.”
Helen straightened. “I can’t agree with a decision to divide friend from friend in a church. A church is a place of reconciliation.” As she spoke, her voice became almost confident.
“Whatever a church is, Miss Brooks, it is definitely not a place to commemorate unworthy causes. And a war memorial without a moral is worthless. This is the exact point some members of the Brooks family made after the Civil War when they sought to exclude the rebels from Memorial Hall. I’m certain there were a number of Confederate widows with your point of view, yet the Brooks family prevailed. Are you saying that your family was wrong to do that?”
She’d not thought of that. “Perhaps it’s time we reconciled.”
He gave a snort. “I don’t think Harvard will ever forgive the rebels. In fact, I agree with your grandparents. We try to encourage people to do the right thing at a school and in church. We cannot, and certainly not in a church, equate dying for a cause that was right with dying for a cause that was wrong. This is a place to learn the correct code of conduct, not just any code of conduct.”
“But, sir, the German student soldiers died before the United States entered the war.” She held up her sheaf of papers.
He shook his head. “They were part of the German army that attacked a neutral country. Should we ask the Belgian orphans how they feel about this action? Yes, indeed,” he continued. “The Germans were wrong and our allies lost a generation of men for their mistakes. Our halls were emptied of men in a way that hadn’t happened since the sixteen hundreds in the Indian Wars.”
“You need not lecture me on that account,” she said, her eyes flashing with anger. She put the papers back on the table. “But if you build this memorial to one side in a church where all sinners kneel, then you build a memorial to human frailty. Honoring only one side will set your judgment in stone as long as the memorial exists.”
He looked surprised that she was arguing. His face grew stern. She swallowed hard. “As I recall, Yale included the rebels in their war monument.”
“Has Yale ever been our standard?” he asked derisively.
She tried again. “Memorial Hall is a political monument to a triumph. Harvard chose not to forgive but to rejoice in its victory. If you make the hall a religious place I believe that fair-minded people would be right to say all should be included.”
“I’m building a place to show our people that we value fidelity to just causes and that we will be faithful to those who were faithful to us. I don’t mean to sound callous; I’d really like to persuade you. Let the Germans create for themselves their own memorial at their own universities. Built into the room is a clear statement that this room was for the people who fought with our allies. In fact, our donors gave money such that the Allied war dead would be honored. I cannot go back now and change the terms on them.”
“So now the donors are the reason for what we’re doing?”
President Lowell sat upright, tall and proud. “Miss Brooks, I am sorry you lost your husband,” he said.
“President Lowell, my argument is not made out of some kind of wounded sentiment.”
“Well, it actually is. Otherwise, it’s the same argument I’ve heard already from the others.” He caught himself, and then continued in a softer voice. “It doesn’t make it easier that if I had counseled our German students back in 1914, I would have told them to fight for what their conscience dictated. But it’s difficult to separate the men from their country’s mission, and that mission was wrong, even if in retrospect.”
She looked at his hard eyes, and she knew she had lost him, but she wasn’t willing to give up on Wils’s memory that easily.
“But wasn’t it found to be wrong because they lost the war? Because they were not strong enough to win? If history had played out differently, we could easily be having a different conversation, in which I’m trying to persuade you to include so many of our students who fought for our allies.”
Lowell shook his head. “It was wrong because their cause killed millions and mutilated their own country and continent, regardless of how history would have played out. I will not change my path to support the idea that it doesn’t matter what side you fight for. I don’t accept that, not even in a church where all are presumed equal before God. If I were God, I would not look to the killing of a generation of men kindly, simply for more power and territo
ry. And to my regret, that means that I cannot grant the request that you and many others have made that Wils Brandl be memorialized with the others. I am not against him or the other boys like him, just their kaiser’s cause. And I have made the argument to Dean Sperry, the entire Phillips Brooks House, and some three hundred petitioners this past spring. Your Mr. Brandl has some powerful friends on campus,” he said with a kind smile. “But the matter is settled.”
Helen looked down at her feet. What would she tell Peter or Professor Copeland? That she had walked away? She looked up at the president. “My mother once told me a matter is only settled when the opposition walks away. And with all due respect, President Lowell, while I may walk out of here now, I am not walking away from this until we have true justice.”
He gave a wan smile and they looked at each other in the bright morning light for a moment. And then, with nothing left to say, and, with all courtesy, President Lowell stood up and ushered her out of his office.
As she walked out of University Hall, instead of turning to the library as usual, she went the other way, to the church. She stepped with purpose around the boarded walks, ignoring the call of the workmen that the church was closed to the public.
She was an officer of Harvard by virtue of her employment in the library. And she was part Windship, after all. Their rules didn’t apply to her. She wanted to see the tomb.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Memorial Church
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The church was cold inside. Helen opened the door and walked down the central aisle, careful to avoid the workmen’s debris. Bags of plaster, some open and dusty, littered the floor. Scrap wood lay in a heap, near scattered sawhorses and piles of dirty cloths. Paint cans were stacked by a tall scaffolding, and brushes soaked in open jars of pungent turpentine. She could hear workmen’s saws and hammers outside as they resumed their work, thankfully not bothering her further.
She looked to the side, where large doors were closed before what she thought must be the Memorial Room. She took a deep breath, traipsed through the dust and around the scaffolding, and opened the door.
A solitary bulb strung from the ceiling illuminated the dark room. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw against a wall a heavy statue, a woman carved in marble mourning a lost crusader who lay in her arms. His feet were not crossed—a sign that he’d not reached the Holy Land.
She swallowed, catching her breath. She was not one for crying at gravestones.
Around the top of the walls was an inscription she could barely make out:
While a bright future beckoned, they freely gave their lives and fondest hopes for us and our allies that we might learn from them courage in peace to spend our lives making a better world for others.
She stepped back against the wall and stumbled over a stack of travertine panels yet to be installed. She knelt down to press her hands into the grooves of the names.
There they were.
Child upon child of Harvard who had died in the Great War, their names carved by class year into the panels and gilded with bronze. There were so many names.
She looked up at the north wall, where several classes had already had their names set in place. It was there she saw them.
The Class of 1915: Rhyland Cabot Spencer. Jackson Marion Vaughn. She looked to the later classes. No Wils. No Germans at all.
As she looked around the memorial, her rising anger was overpowered by a silent grief. After seventeen years, all of her losses were there, facing her. This was no home for her. Her heart had fallen off a ledge and been crushed when she had received the news of Wils’s and Riley’s deaths, and she’d found that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put it back together again.
In the dim light of the Memorial Room, she stood up, dusted off her skirt, and said a short prayer to whoever might be listening. Then she exited into the daylight, to the surprise of some unsuspecting workmen, who scrambled to move a pair of sawhorses so that she might pass.
New dreams, she thought. It's time for new dreams.
* * *
As she walked to the library, images of her mother standing before City Hall came to her mind. The newspapers. An idea began to form that perhaps publicity wasn’t always a bad thing. Newspaper pressure had certainly helped her mother’s cause in the end. Perhaps it would here too.
No, she thought, shaking her head. This had been in the papers before and caused no such change in policy.
She pursed her lips, arguing the case with herself. The president’s reputation had been badly tarnished for what was considered a case of class loyalty over fairness in the 1927 Sacco–Vanzetti anarchy trial review. It was beginning to be said, in some circles, that the president had not outwitted his enemies but outlived his friends, including his wife of fifty-one years who had recently died. Perhaps at this late date, pressure could be brought to bear on him such that he would bend.
But who could affect him? The back room was where the Harvard Corporation sat, the only ones with real influence over the president at Harvard, and she could not influence that table.
Some yards down the broad path, she saw a sign tacked to a freestanding bulletin board. “Copeland in the Yard at Sever Hall. Introduction by President Lowell. Seating limited to first five hundred.” She stood looking at the flyer and her eyes widened. She turned toward Hollis Hall.
She walked up the steps to Professor Copeland’s door and knocked.
“I’ve no appointment at nine twenty—” came a thin voice from behind the door.
“Professor Copeland,” she called in a loud voice. “It’s Helen Brooks. I must see you at once, appointment or not.”
“Have you found your courage?”
“I spoke with President Lowell and he has denied the Germans inclusion in the war memorial.”
The heavy wooden door squeaked open on its hinges a crack. She saw one of his eyes blink at her from behind his thick glasses.
“But I’ve a plan,” she continued in a loud voice. “It requires that you humiliate the president.”
The door opened immediately, and he bade her come in.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Lowell Lecture Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts
November 1932
On an evening in early November, Professor Copeland puttered over to Sever Hall. His assistant, Thomas, a young man with a mop of brown curls, walked in tow with his water glass and book. As they passed in the shadow of Memorial Church, looking to Sever Hall’s brick arches, they saw an unusually large group assembling. They made an attempt to wade through the crowd, but the throng of students prevented them.
“Thomas, you see what all the ruckus is about. I’ll wait outside,” Copeland said, sitting down on a step. It was too loud inside.
Thomas came back a few minutes later, his face ruddy. “The crowd—they’re waiting for you,” he said breathlessly.
Copeland’s face brightened.
“Not knowing if you’d die or something and this would be your last reading.”
Copeland began to scowl, but checked himself upon seeing President Lowell coming up the path, his hair flowing out from under a black fedora.
“Copeland!” called the president with a smile and a wave. The balding Copeland had long been jealous of Lowell’s thick gray hair. He didn’t deserve it.
“So I hear this may be the last one,” said the president in greeting.
“I can’t get into the classroom,” Copeland returned loudly.
“What? Oh, yes, I see,” he said, looking through the glass around the doors at the crowd in Sever. “No problem. Just move it to my lecture hall.”
“The new lecture hall?” Copeland said, raising his eyebrows. “I read in Sever Hall,” he said stiffly.
“Is there a problem?” asked Lowell, bowing his head to hear Copel
and over the voices of the students pouring from the hall.
“I read in Sever Hall,” he repeated into President Lowell’s good ear.
“Now, now, Charles, I know it’s not like old times. But they want to hear you. Come on, now, we’ll walk over there together.”
“Boy!” Lowell beckoned to Thomas. “Go tell the students that they will see Mr. Copeland at the new lecture hall.”
As Lowell turned, Copeland said quietly, “Thomas, make sure Miss Brooks and the others we need in that room know about the new room.” And he left to accompany the president to the clean, shiny, newfangled lecture hall.
* * *
The new hall was located beyond both the Memorial Church and the large Victorian Memorial Hall, to the north of campus. Built in Lowell’s favorite Georgian brick, it looked like an elegant box on the corner of Kirkland and Essex streets, and sat nearly one thousand students.
By the time Helen arrived at the new location, the president had already begun his introductory remarks—a eulogy of sorts.
She entered the room from the back. Copeland, she saw, was still fiddling with his lamp and his water glass. Lowell concluded his remarks and went to sit in the front of the room, his hand cupped behind his good ear. The room was filled, except for several seats around the president. Students did not wish to get too close, it seemed.
She caught Copeland’s eye. He nodded at her, peering above the rims of his spectacles.
“Lock the door against the latecomers!” he said. The student ushers promptly got up to do his bidding.
“Wait!” came a voice. Helen turned to see her brother and Ann enter, followed by four elderly men. Helen’s heart gave a leap: they were four of Harvard’s richest donors and their fortunes were known to have weathered the crash. Peter and Ann had persuaded them to attend tonight to support Copeland’s and her cause. Helen saw Dean Sperry and members of the Phillips Brooks House Association there too, a charitable student group that had been vocal supporters of Copeland’s in the attempt to change the memorial plans to include German students.
The End of Innocence Page 28