Love and Conductivity

CHAPTER I

The course of true love Never did run smooth

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

IN 1917, THE men went away and were replaced with photographs. At the Brandenburg Boarding House, which rented rooms to women of the Oklahoma University faculty, they all had someone swept away by the draft: brothers, husbands, sons, lovers, all now smiling back from their framed perches, where they both existed, and didn’t.

Eleanor Morgan was a transplant from North Carolina and, at twenty-three, had long been accustomed to separation from her older brother, Lawrence. But it had never occurred to her to display his photo. Until, that is, she became consumed by the fear that the separation could become permanent. So there he sat, atop the bureau where she could see his dark, curly hair and the tilt of his wide, frog- like grin, which, to Eleanor, implied he’d rather be reading Elizabethan broadsides than training at officer’s camp in Texas.

Next to Lawrence’s photo stood Erwin’s, who was the younger brother of Helen Phipps, with whom she shared a room. Helen was a professor of Spanish and a seasoned woman of thirty-six. She’d been born in Turkey and had traveled the world.

In Erwin’s snapshot, taken in the garden of their home in Austin, he wore a boater hat and bow tie, eyes squinting to slits from the glare of the sun, or discomfort, or both. His worry look, Helen called it. With both Lawrence and Erwin called to duty, somehow, she and Helen felt that if they spoke about the boys in the presence of their photographs, they would remain safe. They dubbed their ritual the Brotherly Adoration Society.

Eleanor had first come to Oklahoma in Lawrence’s wake after he’d accepted a position in the English department. She was to finish her graduate studies and then consider living her own adventurous dream: to live by the sea and write, as far from North Carolina as possible. But the war had come and upended it all, unexpectedly elevating her into Lawrence’s teaching position. And amid the unrelenting tide of chaos that year, Eleanor and Helen had found a bond that felt like kinship, lit by a spirit of compassion.

“He says he expects to be sent to a school of artillery in France,” Helen said, her slender frame stretched across her narrow bed as she read Erwin’s latest letter, sent from Camp Jackson in South Carolina. He was a natural-born scientist, Helen had told her, fascinated with nature and drawn to the more dangerous aspects of chemistry— volatile substances and powerful forces.

“Artillery,” Helen repeated, glancing at Erwin’s photograph, then quickly away, a shadow of grief crossing her face. “I could just cry at the irony of it all.” She folded the letter back into its envelope. “But never mind that.” She looked over to Eleanor, who sat in their little rocking chair. “He won’t be killed in the trenches of France.”

“Certainly not,” came Eleanor’s response.

Helen smiled once more. “He will come back. And then he will find a way to convert base metals to gold.”

Eleanor laughed and rocked. She thought often of Erwin’s return, forming a picture in her mind colored by all she knew of the alchemists of yore. “And Lawrence will become the world’s next Shakespeare,” she said.

And then, one October afternoon, Eleanor found Helen in stunned silence at their shared desk, a telegram on the floor beside her reading simply, “Erwin dead.”

A scent of burning leaves hung in the air, Helen’s gaze locked with anguish on Erwin’s photograph on the bureau. Eleanor felt the stinging impossibility of this occurrence. Erwin was here with them just as he had been all year long, the worry look still occupying his face.

Eleanor had never seen Helen drop her composure. She seemed instead to slip into a groove she already knew. Incredibly painful yet familiar. This is what you do when someone you love dies.

Helen called the newspaper, bought a ticket home to Austin, and solemnly announced to the Brandenburgs that she would return in a week’s time. In silence, Eleanor helped her pack, handing her Erwin’s photo from the dresser, leaving Lawrence to hold his post alone. Helen placed it between two layers of clothes and closed her suitcase, and they cried together.

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The Daily Transcript Norman, Oklahoma

Friday, October 11, 1918

MISS PHIPPS’S BROTHER DIES IN SERVICE

Miss Helen Phipps of the Department of Spanish at the University received a message from her sister Miss Peggy Phipps of Austin, Texas, yesterday, stating that her brother, Thomas Erwin Phipps had been killed in service. The telegram was very brief and did not tell the date Mr. Phipps was killed or the manner of the death.

Before entering the service, Mr. Phipps was professor of chemistry at the University of Texas. He had formerly received an MA degree and had a distinction for accomplishment in his line of work. He was considered a man with a brilliant future.

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Eleanor read aloud from the newspaper, her voice breaking at the last sentence. Helen was typically the one to read to the breakfast table at the Brandenburg house; her measured manner of speaking could dull the sharp edges of even the most horrific news reports, allowing the women to take in the day’s information and get on with their lives. But Helen was gone, and Eleanor found herself, in the face of her sorrow, unequal to the task. There was a terrible finality about it, reading Erwin’s death in print. That any man so alive could be blown out like a match. A silence fell across the room as Eleanor laid the newspaper back on the table and tried to regain her self- possession. Helen would be arriving at her home today, she reassured herself, to the comfort of her family.

Mrs. Brandenburg broke the silence. “Such a pity,” she said. “Helen adored him.”

Eleanor’s thoughts flashed on one of the stories Helen loved to tell about Erwin as a small child, gone missing one morning from their new, sprawling farm property in Tennessee; she and Peggy searched for him frantically amid the pastures and timber, Helen calling out until her voice nearly gave way, fear rising with each passing minute. And then she happened upon him, finally, under a willow tree at the bank of a small pond beyond their land, carefully studying every little thing within his reach—the flowers and rocks and insects—blissfully unaware of any sense of danger whatsoever. He’d simply wandered off, she said, enraptured by nature.

And Eleanor could see from Helen’s face when she told that story that this was the essence of the Erwin that she loved. And Eleanor had thought that this was the very thing she longed for in life as well: to wander off and indulge her own curiosity about the world. And that here was a man she might be able to talk to, as she talked to Lawrence.

But now, it would never be. And she must press on. She had to muster the fortitude to carry on with her responsibilities. And that morning, it meant her work with the Food Administration, preaching “the gospel of the clean plate,” as Hoover called it, so more resources could be sent to the men overseas.

The telephone in the front hall began to trill, and with a scrape of her chair, Mrs. Brandenburg rose to answer it.

Mrs. Dungan, the piano teacher, retrieved the newspaper from the table and scanned it, her eyes alighting on one of the advertisements. “Now they’re urging us to begin our Christmas shopping,” she said. “Can you believe it? Begin your shopping very early, it says, so as not to clog the nation’s war business!”

“That doesn’t sound very merry,” said Miss Green, an instructor of economics. “I suppose they’ll suggest next that we all gift each other war bonds.”

An air of amusement returned to the table as Mrs. Brandenburg reemerged with an expression of shock. “That was Reverend Phipps.”

Eleanor seized with alarm for fear that Helen, too, had met with some unfortunate fate.

“He’s just received word from the major in charge of Erwin’s battery,” she said. “His death report was made in error. He was terribly stricken with Spanish influenza, but the major says he’s now expected to make a full recovery.”

Eleanor launched to her feet immediately, propelled by a burst of sweetness and light in her heart. Her grief transformed to joy at the news, realizing that Helen would be regaled with this same happy news upon her arrival home. That she, in turn, would come back to Norman and reinstate Erwin’s photograph next to Lawrence on the bureau. And this would all be another story to tell someday.

“Oh, how wonderful! I’ll call up the newspaper,” she said as her mind eagerly formed the words of the conversation.

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The Daily Transcript Norman, Oklahoma

Monday, October 14, 1918

MISS PHIPPS’ BROTHER NOT DEAD, AS REPORTED

The report of the death of Thomas Erwin Phipps, brother of Miss Helen Phipps of the University faculty, was unfounded, according to word received in Norman Saturday. Mr. Phipps was said to have been killed at Camp Jackson, SC, but the facts are that he was critically ill with influenza and is now improving. Miss Phipps went to her home in Austin, Texas, upon receiving the first message.

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CHAPTER II

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

Received at: NORMAN OK 1918 DEC 15 AM 9 45 To: MISS HELEN PHIPPS

DEPARTING MUSKOGEE WILL PASS THROUGH NORMAN AT 1: 50 PM CAN INTERRUPT YOU FOR 6HRS AND RETURN FOR NIGHT TRAIN THROUGH TO HOME

YR BRO ERWIN

ERWIN SENT THE telegram and bid goodbye to his older brother, Foster, with a boyish cuff to the ear as he did. When he boarded the train bound for Austin, he became possessed by a thrilling sense of starting over. The war had ended, and the world he left behind and was coming back to was both familiar and unfamiliar. Foster was now a father, with a home of his own, a respectable position as an assistant US attorney, and a neatly trimmed mustache. At twenty-three, Erwin could only wonder what the future now held for him.

In 1917, when the draft had come calling, he’d just been accepted into Berkeley’s doctoral program of physical chemistry. His plans were to settle in California and finish the program as a scientist. But the war had upended all of that. His dreams of research and invention were replaced with foot drills and cannoneer rolls, and here he was a year later, a lieutenant but not yet a scientist. He was eager to resume that life but apprehensive over whether it still existed.

The more boisterous of the uniformed men in the train car banded together, singing, “There’s a long, long trail a-windin, Into the land of my dreams, Where the nightingales are singing, And a white moon beams.”

The long winding road they had all apprehended for themselves not so long ago had seemed immeasurable, with only the reflection of hope in those songs to sustain them. And now, however improbably, the train lurched each of them, finally, to the trail’s end. Erwin joined in the song that had become so familiar, his voice booming like it hadn’t back when he enlisted: “There’s a long, long night of waiting. Until my dreams all come true; Till the day when I’ll be going down, That long, long trail with you.”

He hadn’t seen Helen for nearly two years. And he knew that if he didn’t see her today, another two years could well pass before he had the chance again. If the previous months and years had taught him anything, it was that people could disappear in the blink of an eye. And then there were no more chances. In a different reality, just inches away, it seemed, he was being returned home to Austin, not among the singing soldiers clutching their discharge papers but in a wooden box in the baggage car.

As much as he foolishly wanted it, he knew there would be no easy picking up of life where he’d left off, as if the war had never happened. It was easier to imagine himself a Rip Van Winkle, the world to which he returned a blank slate. Foster had not been carried off by the war. And as grateful as Erwin was for that, he had been taken by surprise at feeling a yearning, a pang of jealousy, for the start Foster had made. For his lovely home, which rang with the laughter and joy of a brand-new life. Erwin had been afforded a second lease on his, and he could thrill at such novel possibilities were it not for the debilitating regret he felt at having caused his family the pain of his death report. He felt he needed to make amends to Helen before he could press forward and truly clean his slate.

As the train’s wheels screeched to a halt at Norman, Erwin nudged his way through the car to the vestibule and searched the faces of those gathered on the station platform. He leaned over the rail, jockeying for position among the jumble of fellow soldiers, hurriedly glancing around until he spotted her at the back of the crowd, bespectacled and clutching tightly to her hat: Helen. He waved high, his heart filling with euphoric gratitude.

“Sis!” He leaped from the vestibule to the platform, pushing through the crowd.

“Erwin! My dear!” she exclaimed and opened her arms wide. “What a lovely, lovely surprise.” She tightly embraced him, and amid the scent of rosewater and the warmth of her body, he realized how long he had missed such basic human contact. A lump rose in his throat. He made up his mind to say something right away. To tell her how sorry he was for bringing her pain, for amplifying her duty to the rest of the family again. “Sis,” he started.

Helen pulled back, a gaze instantly familiar, maternal. “You’re back from the dead,” she said in a wry manner and sent up a hand to smooth his forehead.

Erwin let out a huge breath and laughed. He knew then that he didn’t need to apologize, that just like that, they’d communicated all.

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Helen walked him through the campus, on a whirlwind tour of the University, and then to the Brandenburg house, where, she said, she wanted to introduce him to her “Norman family.”

“And you’ve arrived just in time,” she said with facetious air as they approached the front porch. “We’re having tea to celebrate Mrs. Dungan, the teacher of piano. She gave an extraordinary performance in Oklahoma City yesterday.”

Erwin stopped. He hated tea parties. And he didn’t want to sign up for an evening of polite chattering. He’d endured a lot over the previous year, but still, anything but that.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Helen. Isn’t there some kind of loophole to exempt me? I’m neither properly dressed nor prepared for such a thing.”

“Tea parties are eternal, dear brother.” Helen pulled at his arm. “Even after one comes back from the dead, even after war and pestilence.”

Erwin shot her a look.

“Well, whether you think so or not, they’re good for us,” she said decidedly. “They force us out of ourselves and into the lives of others. We need that.”

“Isn’t that what books are for?” he muttered. He didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t give one.

They were alike in so many ways, but this is where they had always differed. Society was a place where she could forget life’s cares and feel rewarded and energized. Erwin believed that a good, long hike through nature could achieve the same effect without all the accordant fuss. If anything, being in society produced the opposite effect—exhausting him. Being so focused on surfaces, nobody could see each other anyway, and that put him on the defensive. Tea battles, he’d come to call them.

“And in regard to your uniform,” she continued. “‘Good humor may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear.’”

Thackeray. Erwin shook his head and started walking again. Helen had already put him in the best humor he’d enjoyed in a long time. And he was the one interrupting her life, after all. He would put up no more resistance. For her, he would subject himself to the tea battle.

“Just please don’t tell me there’ll be singing,” he said.

“Well! One can never be sure of that.” Helen suppressed a grin. “The singing mood can strike at any time.” They approached the door. “In any event,” she said, “you can meet Eleanor. She hates tea parties too.”