The End of Innocence (24 page)

“He's out there,” said Riley.

“Who?”

“Norton. Hates me.”

“He won't hurt you now.”

Riley gasped as Wils lifted him. Wils bolted up the hill, hauling his cousin back toward the German lines. He no longer heard noise, felt cold or pain. He saw nothing but the path that would take him to the first dressing station he could find.

“
Achtung!
Casualty!” he started calling. “Where is the dressing station?”

Some soldiers stepped aside, others he stepped over. An attack had begun, and soldiers were filing into the narrow trench corridors.

Wils raced on, heaving for breath as he ran.

He found an advanced dressing station and put Riley on a stretcher. Spying a nurse in faded whites, smoking a cigarette on the edge of the tent, he ran to her, grabbing her arm. He reached inside his tunic for a paper and waved it in her face.

“Nurse, the patient is the kaiser's cousin, as am I. Should he lose one more drop of blood, you will be held to pay!”

She blanched, tossed her cigarette aside, and ran to a doctor, who hustled them into the chaotic station. More German casualties were arriving. Two orderlies carried in an officer, setting him down with a thump and running out for more. The nurse pushed the officer aside to find a cot for Riley. She checked his vital signs. He had turned a pasty white, and his lips had a bluish tinge.

Wils held his cousin's hands and tried to warm them.

A surgeon ran over, short and balding, with round black-rimmed spectacles. “Table six!
Schnell!
” he called. Two burly men carried Riley's bed into the crude operating room. Wils sat down outside the tent, cold and shivering. The nurse brought him a blanket.

He was there for more than an hour. When the operation was over, the doctors came out and spoke in hushed voices as they moved Riley into recovery. Wils sat by him throughout the night, holding his hand, singing old songs to his friend, and praying.

But despite the efforts of the German surgeons, Riley could not be saved. Little by little, the breath wafting from his body into the frigid January air grew lighter and more still. After midnight, he never regained consciousness.

Wils was with him in the early dawn, when Rhyland Cabot Spencer drew his last breath. As the indigo night began to fade, he kissed his cousin's forehead and closed the lids on the green eyes that had caused so many hearts to smile. He borrowed a comb, brushing aside the brown hair Riley had tended so carefully. Wils then stepped back and put his hands to his face, bursting into tears.

After a few minutes he collected himself, tired, white-faced, and shaken. A young orderly, not more than sixteen, came to him with Riley's personal effects—his own bloody jacket. Wils could hardly speak about the burial arrangements. But the young man was patient and kind, and assured Wils that the remains would be interred as directed.

That afternoon, Wils walked slowly back to camp, mute, not bothering to notice the swarms of men moving about the post. Each muddy step was an effort.

Father Rupert immediately gave up his board to Wils, who grunted thanks. Captain Grimber yelled at him for returning late and promised him another month of wiring detail, the most dangerous post he could give him. Wils no longer cared.

* * *

The captain's threats were useless against the force that was Wils's mother. Three days later Wils received a cable. Countess von Lützow had asked the general in charge of his sector to move Wils from the front lines to Berlin. Her telegram was followed within twenty-four hours by an order from headquarters granting Wils a transfer, in three weeks, to begin flight support training. Father Rupert read it and said he would miss him. Wils wasn't certain that the rest of his company felt the same, but overall, they'd tolerated him well enough. Those who didn't were typically too drunk to bother him.

That evening he was assigned a forward position to roll wire across a stream to an observation post where they'd lost radio contact. This was the third time Wils had strung that particular wire; the last two lines had snapped under bombardment. Wils said nothing as he waited. He would be glad to be rid of the trenches.

He leaned against the wall of sandbags, listening to the soft mutterings of Father Rupert playing cards with a soldier in the dugout nearest him. After midnight, a rifleman tapped his shoulder. “It's time,” he said gruffly. “I've been sent to cover you.”

They peered over the edge of the trench. The dark made for decent cover, but the moon was full and motion would be detected. He'd not heard much fire in his sector that night, though. He took a deep breath, pulled out his flask, and emptied it of schnapps. He adjusted his crawlers and followed his guard into the icy field.

He had little problem making out the machine gun on the other side of a narrow stream. The bodies of the squad responsible for the gun littered the ground.

The young soldier's rifle was ready, and his head darted in all directions to cover Wils. He made good progress and quickly got across the stream to the observation post.

A crack rang out over Wils's head. He looked up to see his guard shot, fallen facedown in the shallow stream. As he turned, he suddenly came face-to-face with a pack of British soldiers armed with grenades.

One exploded to his right. Wils was hit with such force that he fell back across the water, his head resting on the muddy bank. He dropped the wire as he fell, one arm in the stream.

His hand went numb as he gasped for breath. In the dark he heard the rumble of feet around him and the staccato crack of rifles. The British turned and fled. Boots and men began pounding from behind him, running over the stream and disappearing beyond the bank.

But the noise began to fade. He was vaguely aware of Father Rupert praying above him. As he closed his eyes, he thought of Helen and his mother, of Riley, and of his little dog, Perg, running madly around his house. He could smell the lilacs wafting from Helen's hair.

The water from the stream welled around him, tickling the edge of his nose. In the darkness his face twitched in a half smile.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

March 1915

On a frosty day in early March, Helen walked into the main entrance of Longworth Hall, back from morning classes. She looked at the counter. She had patiently lived through so many achingly dull moments that the mail had become the most wonderful moment of any day. Even if there was no note, there was always the hope that one would come tomorrow. She read each one a thousand times if once.

And today there was a letter. Just one.

The girl behind the counter gave her the mail—a thin letter bearing the address of the Spencers in London.

The Spencers had never written
, she thought, picking it up nervously. She swallowed hard and walked swiftly to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She could hear her pulse beating in her ears.

She fumbled with her mittens and jerked off her coat. With trembling hands, she pulled a chair close to the light of the window by the radiator and opened it. Spreading open the two fragile pages, she spied a government signature. Her hand went to her mouth as she read:

COPY

5 March 1915

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Spencer,

I regret to inform you that we lost your son Rhyland Cabot Spencer. He went missing on 27 January. It had been his idea to fire a twenty-one-gun salute in honor of the kaiser's birthday. The Germans waved a large flag each time we missed. Riley, on the eleventh shot, was able to knock the flag down, much to the enthusiasm of our troops.

It was after that sally that he left on a day's pass to volunteer with the ambulance corps. When he did not return by nightfall, we feared the worst and we deeply regret to inform you that his death has been confirmed.

Riley was immensely popular and a fine soldier. Not being able to find him inflamed our men, leading to a victory a week later, when we briefly overran the German position, breaking in as far east as Fromelles Road.

The soldiers who overran the enemy's headquarters found, just beyond the hospital, a small cemetery. We assumed it was for German dead. Yet we found a newly dug grave, with the enclosed identification disk—Rhyland Cabot Spencer—draped over a white wooden cross.

The cross read, in English, “Rhyland Cabot Spencer. Son of Laughter. 1894–1915.”

Officers often bury those from the other side, as death, we believe, does not distinguish between nations. Yet I know of few such instances in this war where a British soldier has been treated with such kindness by the enemy. Riley inspired such devotion by foe and friend. He was a gentleman and when he expired, he was buried as such.

Your son and I arrived to our duty with the Second Wiltshires at the same time in Belgium, and it is my sad duty to write this letter. Please be assured his personal items left at the camp will be sent home and are now in transit. As I had been instructed, I have informed his wife, Mrs. Edith Spencer. He also asked if I would pass on to you a request to inform Miss Helen Brooks about his passing. For your records, her address is Radcliffe College, Longworth Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

With my sincerest regrets at our loss, I am

Yours,

Capt. Aubrey Tomkins

Riley's parents had also enclosed a letter of their own. They'd been notified that their nephew, Wilhelm Brandl, had been killed near the French border. Helen reeled.

* * *

Ann heard Helen's cry from the next room and ran into her bedroom. She saw the letter on the floor, with its telling government signature. Helen looked up at Ann and gasped for breath.

Ann rushed to her friend's side and pulled her close. She ripped open Helen's white lace collar, pulling apart her top shirt buttons, allowing her to breathe. Straining to reach a rocking chair, Ann pulled it over by the window and struggled to bring Helen into it. And there Ann held her, rocking gently and soothing her until the bitter sobs grew fainter and fainter, and then, exhausted, her dear friend fell into a troubled sleep.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

October 1915

Dearest Wils,

Today my studies are difficult and tedious and my heart cannot be found in any book. I write and rewrite my essays a dozen times, asking you out loud whether you'd use this word or that. Ann no longer listens to me. She is still here at school while Peter works for the Navy in Washington, DC. They've decided to marry once the war is over, a ceremony we shall attend together at Appleton Chapel.

I walked outside this evening and looked up at the night sky. It marks a year since you left; a year since we exchanged our vows. The stars—the Pleiades, the Hyades, Orion—were in the sky when you left and then again in March when you died. They've returned, and you, somewhere in the cold ground, will have seen them too.

This past year my letters have become my uncomfortable comfort. I summon your presence, I kiss your thoughts, I repeat your words. I write to you every day in my mind. I've written to your family and to your uncle in London, and to your school in Prussia, and your pastor, but they all say you have died. So I no longer talk to them. I speak, in my mind, to you.

I fear this is how madness takes hold. We talk to the dead instead of the living. But there are no others living with whom I would wish to speak.

I have heard the news that Jackson Vaughn was killed in a plane crash over France. Perhaps in Heaven he finds the balm he sought here to no success. I never understood his love for Jenny McGee; I ridiculed it, but now it comes back to haunt me twelvefold, and will until I see your face again.

I have tried the experiment of living, only I found too late that once we relinquish our books and soft carpets, we have no armor to combat the ravages of separation. I have tried to make my life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of my most elevated and critical hour. In this I know I have failed, and I now renounce all philosophy as ideals I cannot attain. I count myself among the poor in the world. For I have chosen to fetter myself to a ghost who once walked along the Charles River, and now walks beyond my reach. You were my courage, my strength, the color in my heart.

I strive to live where the claws of fear cannot find me, but I have found no antidote that helps me in these pages nor have I in walking around my beloved Walden Pond, should I walk there a thousand times.

They say you are dead. I seem to know this fact now. I used to wake up having forgotten it, but I accept that you are no longer alive. But my love for you is not dead. I won't wish it away. You died without me, but I will not leave you. I cannot bury you twice.

God loves forever, and so will I. It will be this straw at which I grasp, with arms that clasp the air in reaching for you. I would give my life if only I could see you one more time.

Instead of burying you, I will keep these words from a hymn and bury them in my heart:

What language shall I borrow

To thank thee, dearest Friend,

For this, thy dying sorrow,

Thy pity without end!

O, make me thine forever;

And should I fainting be,

Lord, let me never, never

Outlive my love to thee.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

New England knows

A deeper meaning in the pride

Whose stately architecture shows

How Harvard's children fought and died.

—Christopher Pearse Cranch
, The Harvard Book

The killing thing in life is a sense of loneliness.

—Harvard Professor Willard L. Sperry
, Rebuilding
Our World: Sermons in the Harvard Chapel

Lexington, Massachusetts

October 1932

The Great Depression had not spared the wealthy in Boston society. The stock market crash of 1929 sent some of the families into bankruptcy. Others, such as the Brookses, found themselves at the edge of financial ruin. Two-thirds of their own family's trust had been lost between the collapse (a risk they had attempted to mitigate) and the run on several Boston banks (a risk they had failed to predict). The remaining third of the fortune, while substantial, could not support three empty country mansions and two Boston homes.

Their parents now dead, Peter and Helen were saddled with estate taxes on the three properties that were too high for them to pay. They tried to sell the New Hampshire and Maine estates but could not find buyers. Few were able to afford luxury homes anymore. The only path to avoid foreclosure on all of their property was to sell Merrimack Hill in Lexington, a place where buyers were to be found.

It took nearly two years to find a family to purchase the estate, but at least they found one. During this time both Peter and Helen overstretched their finances to pay the taxes. They'd auctioned off furniture, paintings, rugs, the wine cellar, and even a large number of their father's beloved books for which they had no longer had room.

The price the buyer was willing to pay was a deep discount from what the property was worth, but at least it would be bought. There was talk in Lexington of tearing down some of the mansions, as no buyers could be found and the cost of repairs and taxes were now out of reach for the owners. Debt was an unsentimental business.

Helen wore her navy jacket, three-quarter skirt, and a silk rose at her throat to pay her final respects at Merrimack Hill. Peter picked her up from Harvard's library, where she worked in the rare books room, and drove her out that October Monday.

The sun was bright that day, and the light seemed to make the house diminish. Now that Merrimack Hill was emptied of furniture and paintings, the rooms seemed sterile. Plaster and a fresh coat of paint in each room hid the holes where family portraits, now in storage or auctioned off, had hung. The dark ash patina covering the bricks of the study's fireplace had been scrubbed away, revealing red brick. The books on the shelves, once stacked in the alcoves by the old bust of Edmund Burke, were all gone. The models of ships had been given to the Geographic Society as a bequest of her father's will.

The garden had gone to seed. They'd only halfheartedly tended to it since Mr. Brooks's death in 1928 due to a massive heart attack. He'd died six months after they'd lost their mother to cancer.

As Helen walked into the study, she noticed it no longer smelled of leather and tobacco. It smelled of nothing.

She heard footsteps echo from the hall.

“Ready, Helen?” asked Peter. She turned to look at him. He looked stouter in his dark suit, now that he was almost forty. Wrinkles lined his eyes, and his hair was thinning. The financial shock of the past few years had given his voice an edge, and he had little patience for sentimentality. “I'll need you to sign these papers. We'll leave them and the key in the mailbox.”

She nodded and turned her back on the empty rooms and the wild garden. There was no point in foot-dragging. It was like when they had buried Father. Her brother had insisted they do it quickly and with little fanfare, and what was the point of the fanfare anyway? There was no one for her to commiserate with. She signed the papers and then walked outside.

Helen locked the door, placed the key in the envelope, and walked to the mailbox while he drove the car around. She frowned to find a letter in it, one with several bright stamps and
Par Avion
in blue letters. Peter was supposed to have made sure that the mail was being delivered to them, and no longer to this box.

The color drained from her face as she read the address twice. It was from Rhyland Cabot Spencer Jr. and postmarked September. She nervously opened it.

Highgate, London

September 1, 1932

Dear Miss Brooks,

I am writing in hopes that you might help me as a favor to my father, Rhyland Cabot Spencer, and to my uncle, Wilhelm von Lützow Brandl. My own name is Rhyland Cabot Spencer Jr., and I am, at present, seventeen years old. I am Rhyland's son and my beloved mother was the Baroness Edith Kinnaird. She died shortly after my birth and I have been raised by my Kinnaird family. They show me every kindness imaginable and now support me in my efforts to commemorate my father's war service at the Imperial War Museum.

I have recently been asked by members of a committee at the museum to donate a narrative of my father's life and other materials from his war service to the museum. I am most excited to help them and am contacting those who may have known him or recall him with some degree of fondness.

As part of this effort I am going to visit Boston in December, in order to visit my father's college, take some photographs, and speak with a few of his former friends. My father wrote three letters to my mother while he was at war. In one he referred to you as my uncle Wilhelm's wife. I did not know anything really about my uncle, including that he had married, and by the time I thought to ask there was no one who knew how to contact you. Wils's own mother, my great-aunt, had long since died and their estate had been confiscated and sold by the new government to pay for war reparations. A Professor Copeland gave me a list of names of my father's classmates to contact, and I saw your name on the list.

I have little to work with. However, if you did know my father, I write to you in hopes that I may pay a call on you when I am in Boston. I am making inquiries here in England to find any of my father's other letters or possessions, and hope, if you have any, that I might persuade you to donate those as well to the war museum's efforts.

I hope that my visit would not rekindle painful emotion. I simply wish to commemorate the noble service of my father. I feel I have little past, as I never knew my parents, and thus this is an opportunity to learn about a man of whom I have little knowledge but deeply admire. And, as a man of seventeen, I feel it is now my place to do so.

Please let me know if I might call upon you.

Sincerely,

Riley Spencer Jr.

She folded the letter silently. It threatened the frail grip she had on self-composure.

“Did you know Riley Spencer had a son?” she asked Peter as they drove in his black 1929 Cadillac out from Merrimack Hill.

“Riley Spencer,” he said, his jowls sagging. “I'm surprised he didn't have a dozen natural sons the way he—Well, he did have any number of liaisons and I cannot assume they were all chaste. He did marry, though, you once said.”

“Yes. Edith. The baroness.” She told him of the contents of the letter and of the expected visit.

“That was his child?”

“Apparently so.”

“That liar!” he said, shaking his head. “He denied both the engagement and that the child was his, all in order to try to seduce my sister.”

“It wasn't his best moment.”

“He was a liar.”

“Peter, perhaps he didn't know what made a child. That was Mother's whole point back then, if you recall. Such lack of information and understanding on the part of women and men.”

Peter shook his head. “He was a philanderer of the first rate and can't be surprised if we doubt the dubious contention that he was ignorant of what activities might lead to children.”

“He's dead, Peter. Isn't dead enough for you?”

“Ask his son. When Junior finds out the true nature of what we think of his father, then he might be sorry he didn't leave the past alone.”

“You will say no such thing,” she snapped. She turned to look out the window. Peter was just as cross as she. But he had no right to be. It wasn't as if he'd ever cared about the house or Riley and Wils. He had his future: his wife, a house, and children. In fact, he'd made fun of her some years past—he'd thought her marriage to Wils a sham and had told her as much to her face when she'd refused an invitation to a dance or any of the men he and Ann recommended she speak to.

Yet his bitterness toward the events of the last few years came through in caustic talk or a wall of silence. She preferred his silence.

And that is what she got. They drove without another word back to Boston and Beacon Hill, where she now lived. When she was about to get out of the car he cleared his throat.

“One last thing. I know this will do no good, but Ann told me President Lowell just hired a new engineering professor: Robert Brown.”

“Robert Brown of Lexington?” She'd not seen him in years.

“Yes. The one who everyone wanted you to marry.”

“But he did marry and move to California after the war.”

“Ann said his wife died a few years ago, and that President Lowell persuaded him to move back. Ann thought perhaps we should pay a call on him. Unless you wish to sabotage this meeting like you have the others.”

She ignored him as she got out of the car.

“Helen, Ann says he was wounded at the Somme, and by his wife's death.”

She straightened her shoulders. “I'm certain Robert doesn't believe in second marriages, and I don't either.”

“Then he would be a perfect friend for you.” He shook his head and drove off without another word as she turned to her house on Chestnut Street.

* * *

Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill was a good part of Boston for a woman of thirty-five to live by herself. The spinster figure was a welcome staple in those parts. Helen's town house was situated up near its peak, across from the bustle of the Boston Common, near the State House, and most importantly, close to her beloved Boston Athenaeum. Proximity to this private library had kept her from her brother's mistake of moving onto Commonwealth Avenue, a commodious and crowded boulevard designed to look like Paris's Champs-Élysées.

Boston was not Paris. It was a city for insiders, the insiders felt, and the concept extended from the private gardens, drawing rooms, libraries, and clubs for the rich to the narrow, twisting, one-way streets. Ample space was provided for the public weal: a symphony, library, garden, and common, as well as numerous churches and sports venues. Yet the heart of Boston could not be broad avenues attempting to imitate a city known for frivolity and light. Her father had never understood why Peter and Ann would choose the inconvenience of Commonwealth Avenue, no matter how many crystal chandeliers one could stuff in a mansion. He never could quite shake the feeling that the tenor of the town had shifted toward the commercial and trivial since the war. In her father's eyes, that was a loss for Boston and, thus, a loss for mankind.

Her father had relented on her desire to move to Beacon Hill when he was faced with the Commonwealth Avenue alternative, or worse, near the student tenements in Cambridge. Before his death, he'd made clear that he approved of her residence only in the nearby allure of 10½ Beacon Street, the home of the Athenaeum. In a library members weren't supposed to talk, so his daughter would not be bothered with the frivolous social diversions he so disliked.

She'd spent many days in the Athenaeum's reading room, working, researching, and, at times, pretending to read while looking out against the tall bank of windows overlooking the Granary Burying Ground. From her chair she could watch the tree leaves spend the summer and fall on the graves of Paul Revere and John Hancock. In the winter the snow would outline the trees' dark and wet branches. The shrill wind was kept out by the length of buildings along the burying ground's two sides, creating a quiet haven in the center of the city. It felt so familiar that it was sometimes hard to believe she was not back in Lexington in her father's old study, looking up from a manuscript and into his garden.

After she was through, she would walk to her house on Chestnut Street. Hers was in the middle of a row of brick town houses that sat across from a nearly identical row of town houses on the other side of the street. They had flat roofs and three narrow floors, black shutters at each window, and doors painted black. Flower boxes were in a few windows, and slender trees punctuated the walks—chestnut, linden, honey locust.

Helen found her neighborhood met every need she had. It was neither overwhelming nor too small. It was not too public nor too private. It was just right.

Each evening as she returned she would check for her mail in the polished brass box, unlock her door, and enter into her spotless parlor. She'd walk to her kitchen and sit at a small table, reading her mail while eating the meal she'd picked up at the grocer's on Charles Street—boiled beef, some carrots, an apple, and a glass of milk. Then she'd retire upstairs, unpinning her dark hair, brushing it out, and changing into her nightgown with the long lace cuffs.

Before she went to sleep, she'd often open a drawer beside her nightstand and touch a packet of yellowing letters. It was just a fleeting touch, more a vestige of a prior time than anything else. The addresses, the ink from the censor's marks, and the coloring on the stamps had faded.

She touched the letters or sometimes just looked at them. That small sacramental act at times used to calm her. But its impact had faded just like the ink. After so many years, Wils Brandl was more a hazy memory than a real person. One could not survive on memory alone.

Or anger. She'd been quite angry. They'd had such promise—the stupid German kaiser had kept Wils from keeping a sacred promise! Helen knew this fury was not rational. Nor was her guilt—could she have prevented him going? Both the anger and guilt had lasted a few years, during which time any number of suitors Ann and Peter suggested were unthinkable. Eventually her grief became lethargy. She was tempted at points by young men in her path, but she never had the energy to risk her heart again. Peter said she was a keen saboteur. She didn't care.