He was reading in his room when the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The siren from the power plant blared the moment news was wired from France, at 2:20 a.m. General Foch met a delegation of German officers and politicians in a private railcar in the Forest of Compiègne to sign at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The generalissimos maintained their flair through it all. Four years of industrialized warring, genocide, and slaughter, sixteen million deaths worldwide. Jake later read of great bonfires in Omaha that were lit to celebrate the Armistice that night. An effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm burned in Farnam Street outside the courthouse. The dummy was carried in a coffin through the streets, then laid out to be plugged through with rifle shots by the Omaha Gun Club before being set ablaze. The big whistles of the Union Pacific repair shops blew the moment it was known that Germany had come to terms with surrender. The celebration in Lincoln was more subdued. With Spanish flu at its devastating height, most people stayed home rather than risk infection dancing arm in arm with a yawping celebrant. It was much the same through the holidays. There were no Christmas pageants. Stores were mostly empty. Mail was still delivered, streetcars still ran, although all postmen and trolley drivers wore surgical masks while they worked. Some nights Jake had the run of the city.
He didn’t do much. He saved money and planned what would come next. He thought of carrying through on his plans to run, sans Evie. To California or Texas, wherever he wanted. In pamphlets and travel books he learned about the interesting life one could have in places other than Nebraska. It was all just dreaming. Jake didn’t have the money to leave. He’d been sending half of what he saved each month to Dennison’s office in Omaha. Not to make it up to Tom, nothing like that. Jake just felt it was right to send the money. He felt bad having stolen. A guy like Billy Nesselhous might think something like this was pathetic, but doing the right thing was important to Jake. Eventually, at least.
Jake thought about how things had been in Omaha.
Sometimes Evie had betrayed herself by saying she knew Jake would hurt her someday. She was afraid he’d leave, and she’d be stuck alone. “That’s the way it is,” she said, “for a girl kept in her rooms.”
Most nights he tried to be happy his plans didn’t work out. So many things could have gone wrong if they’d eloped to San Francisco. What did he know about marriage? This was a rational tack, one he rarely convinced himself of. When he was lonely, on the other hand, when he woke in the middle of the night, Jake felt different about him and Evie going separate ways.
Nights in Lincoln left ample space for regrets. Jake saw how much of his life had been blind luck. All he’d done was make an awful mess of what he’d been given.
Anna quit asking about Karel after her first year at the state sanitarium. The grounds were a few hours northwest of Omaha, but a train came through the town, Heller, to drop off passengers midmorning and returned in the evening with the reverse heading. Herr visited often, as did Maria. When they came to catch her up on news from the neighborhood, Anna stopped them if they talked about Karel, rare as news about him was anyway. “I don’t care,” she’d say. She’d carry on without him. Women from a local Presbyterian church brought string and canvas to work with. There were lunches and teas and other sick girls. Anna had all she needed to keep herself going.
The state sanitarium wasn’t so bad. She had friends. She had teachers. She had treatment. What the doctor prescribed at the home wasn’t all that different from what Maria tried already. A steady diet of cod liver oil, fresh dairy milk, mushrooms of three seasons. Anna pursued this diet in earnest at the country home, a prickly nurse pacing over the girls’ shoulders during the four daily meals to ensure they cleaned their plates and downed three pints of whole milk. No girl was allowed to leave dinner if even a single morsel was uneaten. The most notable change was an order to take three hours of sunlight in daily absorption sessions. That was what made the difference for Anna. The air on Clandish was too clogged up with industry and had only been worse in the Bowery. Anna’s illness first appeared when the Miihlsteins arrived from overseas, although insufficient nutrition on the ship over was partly to blame, Dr. Emmett surmised. Secreting Anna away in the attic had only made her symptoms worse. “Proper nourishment. Fresh air and sunlight,” Dr. Emmett told her. “That’s the only cure.” And it worked, over time. Her case of rickets wasn’t such a bad one. Under the care of a capable physician who had a sound, rational mind and was aware of modern science, rickets was usually overwhelmed.
Dr. Emmett kept up a competent, starched front. In his black suit and prim Windsor knots. His bushy white mustache waxed so it extended outside his cheekbones, with matching white hair combed to the right. He kept a big office at the southeast corner of the building, what they called the lodge, furnished with varnished birchwood pieces, where he signed papers most of the day. His Model A was kept in front until he drove home in the afternoon, the residents wishing him off from their lounging chairs as they sunbathed on the lawn. Dr. Emmett sometimes gave girls rides around the grounds after lunch, particularly on icy winter days when he could make the Ford fishtail, four girls clinging to each other in the back and screaming for joy. Emmett bouncing along in his own seat up front, laughing just as loud, just as joyously, throughout what he called his automotive treatment. He claimed to have patented the technique.
A day went by fast at the home. There was so much for Anna to do. Wall-to-wall activities, the grounds to explore, a red oak forest, a stream. The absorption sessions on the lawn. The treatments and meals and chewing mint leaves if she felt nauseous and lining up to sip cod liver oil off the tablespoon a nurse held and the long soaks in zinc bathtubs. All required by Dr. Emmett. Add on what the sanitarium teacher demanded. Lessons assigned for the girls’ benefit (and mandated by the state) in the chalk-dusty classroom on the third floor of the lodge, across from where the girls slept. Elocution. English, French, and Latin vocabulary. General Math. American History. Typing. Biology and Social Problems. The girls loved speaking French after a mademoiselle from the town came to school them. Mademoiselle, not much older than the girls, married a doughboy and came over with him. After she came to teach, for the next week at least, the girls practiced their nasals nonstop, proud of the way they sounded, and tried to sway their hips like the mademoiselle did when she sauntered the halls of the girls’ sanitarium.
There was the gymnasium, built in an annex to the back of the building, where girls learned to heave a basketball toward its hoop. There were social clubs led by girls, in cliques of different ethnic groups, where cooking, sewing, and domestic science were emphasized. There was the art club, whose leaders swore in Anna as a member during her first meeting with them. In the art club’s charter was a line about “imitating and emulating great European masters,” added at Dr. Emmett’s behest, but this dictum wasn’t strictly adhered to. They gathered around tables in the cafeteria three afternoons a week and broke open crates where the supplies were stored. Oil pastels and India ink and aluminum cans of shellac and a glass jar of acetone begged off the groundskeeper and blocks of clay and wire gouges to slice the clay. Balls of yarn and twine and oddly angled patches of fabric that were donated by the Lutheran women.