For nearly three years I have waited for this day, the day Tom will at long last return. More times than I can count, I have imagined the crush of his embrace as he lifts me and my feet leave the railway station platform. I have imagined him picking up Jesse, too, and swinging him in a full circle while he shrieks his delight. But in reality, Tom is a stranger to Jesse, as is Jesse to Tom.

It was early summer, the year we were married, when Tom’s battalion left Camp Niagara, where they had been training and camping out, and by then Jesse hardly showed, only a slight rise between my hips where it used to be flat. He was born in the autumn, and even after six hours of pushing and thinking I would die if the contractions did not let up, I gasped at my first glimpse of him. He was more blue than pink, and his small mouth was struggling for breath beneath a thin, slick veil. Dr. Galveston said it was nothing, only a caul, a portion of the amniotic membrane, and lifted it from Jesse’s face. Some said it was a sign of good luck. Others said it meant Jesse would have second sight. Mrs. Andrews said she mentioned it to the Polish butcher, and he said in his country werewolves came into the world with cauls. I paid little attention to the nonsense, but then a letter from Tom arrived.

After I folded the letter, I sat for a while, as I usually did, with it held in my hands. I wondered if he was still out of the trenches, which since he was an infantryman of the Third Division were his fate. He was still alive. I would feel it if he were not. For a moment I questioned whether I ought to have kept a bit of the caul and sent it to him; a talisman tucked into his pocket could bring no harm. But then Sadie’s snake analogy came to me. And its implication—that saving a caul at birth is akin to bringing into the world of the living the dead skin of a snake—made me glad it had disappeared along with the rest of the afterbirth.

This morning, after dressing, I compared my reflection in the mirror with the photograph of me on our wedding day. I wanted to know just how much the intervening years showed on my face, to see what Tom might. I suppose I am thinner, maybe not so fresh-faced as I was at eighteen or even as twenty-one-year-old girls used to be, before their beaus and husbands and fathers left, before they waited and grieved and picked up the slack at home. Still, the differences hardly show. There is no hint that I have given birth and become a wage earner and managed on my own; that the larder has never been empty, or the bank account, though Mrs. Andrews hardly charges Jesse and me full freight for room and board. It is not plain to see I can now cook a tasty meal with just a handful of potatoes and a few chicken bones, all the while a child balanced on my hip, or that I can copy any dress from a magazine, that when there is no picture, I draw one myself, often improving upon the design a woman has in her head. The wonderment that sometimes fills me as I watch our son is not obvious, or the ever-present ache called motherhood. I cannot find evidence of the wretched days that followed the news of Passchendaele, the most deadly of the battles in which Tom fought. The intervening years show only slightly, in the thinness of my cheeks, the jawline that is no longer round. Tom will not see the more sweeping changes. Or maybe I am entirely wrong and I have not changed at all. Maybe he knew I would make out all right before I knew it myself. Maybe he knew, even as he held my gaze from the window of his train departing for the war.

The railway station is imposing: redbrick and stone with Gothic windows and massive wood-paneled doors, an expense the city’s forefathers insisted upon, a first impression for the tourists coming to Niagara Falls. Though the interior of the station is warm and spacious, Jesse and I quickly pass through to the wooden-plank platform out back. While the Spanish flu has let up since its arrival in earnest four months ago, it is still upon us. And with so many soldiers coming home from overseas, there is renewed fear: Might they bring with them more of the contagion that has caused so many to die? Surely it is best to wait in the frosty air beneath the wide, overhanging eaves. Mrs. Andrews said that if I had a scrap of sense I would stay home, that it would be entirely my fault if the household began hacking up blood, but I could not bear to let Tom arrive even a tiny bit hopeful and then not find us waiting. I could not postpone by even twenty minutes the moment when he would meet Jesse.

The town has changed while Tom has been away. There is no doubt of that. If I were parachuted to Table Rock, at the brink of the falls, I would see within seconds that all was not as it once was. I would be nearly alone rather than surrounded by a gawking horde proclaiming the falls wondrous, a marvel, a sight well worth the trip. If anyone did happen to be close by, odds are it would be a woman, and more likely than not she would be striding purposefully toward some place of employment, some position that had until recently been considered unsuitable for the weaker sex, some position that she would in all likelihood have to give up with the men coming home. She might be wearing a gauze mask over her mouth and nose, as had just about everyone during October and November, when every day the newspaper reported yet another victim of the Spanish flu, when it was commonplace to hear stories of four women sitting down to a game of bridge in the evening only to be, all four, coughing up blood by midnight and then gulping their final breaths by dawn.

The scarcity of tourists and men seems of little significance when considered alongside Sir Adam Beck’s mammoth undertaking here. Two years ago he had the possibility of a powerhouse at Queenston put to a vote and I agonized over how to mark my ballot, but not because what was best for Niagara Falls, or even all of Canada, was unclear in my mind. As things stand, we need more coal to heat our homes, to cook our meals, to light our rooms so that we might extend a December day beyond five o’clock in the afternoon, and there is a limited supply. To argue differently would be to claim ignorance of lit rooms inexplicably flickering to blackness, machinery suddenly grinding to a halt, windows frosting over when the coal wagon fails to make the rounds. And such occurrences have become regular events.

One afternoon a while before the vote, I was walking through Queen Victoria Park, just opposite the falls. The mist was thick, raining down, and I was doing my best to keep myself dry. But then a moment later I was at the brink, standing there until I was soaked through. I remembered Tom saying if the power companies had their way, Niagara Falls would be reduced to a heap of spent coal. But as I stood there, it seemed he was entirely wrong. What I saw was water and more water, never-ending water tumbling over the brink. It was not a bit like coal. Coal clawed from the earth would never be replaced.

I thought of Isabel, too, swept over the brink, hurled to the plunge pool far below. I knew from Tom it could have been worse: a bloated body trapped behind the falls for days or months, on occasion forevermore. Or worse still, a mangled corpse pummeled by careening water upon the rocks at the base of the falls. Plenty of folks said, “Best not gaze too long,” and there were tales of those who had not heeded the bit of advice and, unable to resist, waded into the treacherous current of the upper river. And for a long moment, I stood there at the brink, shivering and afraid, thinking a whole lot less water suited me just fine.

And while the wartime shortage of men had meant nearly any fellow left behind could choose where he worked, I knew even as I cast my ballot that one day the munitions factories would close, some permanently, others for extended periods while they were retooled. Unemployment and the unrest that comes with it would skyrocket as ever more men were shipped home. It would be the same the country over, from Victoria to St. John’s, unemployment everywhere, everywhere except Niagara Falls. And while I knew the Hydro-Electric Power Commission would never be Tom’s first choice, it was comforting to think of employment there as a safety net of sorts.

I wrote to Tom before the vote to say as gently as I could that it seemed to me the bounty of the river might be twofold. There was the beauty of it, also its usefulness. I carried the letter in my handbag for a week before mailing it, hesitating each time I passed the post office. Might the letter distract him? Might it cause him a sleepless night? In the end, I sent it. I could not stand that the post might find its way to his company at the front without a letter from me, and it seemed entirely wrong to substitute a different letter, one that did not mention the vote.

I thought for a long while about the river and the falls and awestruck passersby, and a few days after reading the letter, I even said to Father, “What about the wonder so many feel at the brink?”

“What about it?” he answered back. “We were given the river, also the ingenuity to harness it.”

Despite Father’s dismissal, despite the many arguments in favor of the project, I agonized over the ballot; marking it as I knew I would seemed traitorous to Tom.

The people of Ontario gave their approval, overwhelmingly, and just as Father had predicted, Beck’s initial concept of a powerhouse producing one hundred thousand horsepower had grown. He promised a scheme that would eclipse any hydroelectric powerhouse already built in Niagara Falls and be larger than any even contemplated elsewhere in the world.

Construction began the spring of 1917, and ever since the landscape of Niagara Falls has been marred. It started with a narrow belt of cleared earth that was soon enough hollowed out to a partially dug canal lined on either side with excavated rock waiting to be hauled away. And then, with the summertime heat, came a new scar, a scar that now seems as permanent as the canal. Quickly and quietly, Beck’s Hydro-Electric Power Commission bought the Ontario Power Company and laid a third conduit from the intake gates at Dufferin Islands to the powerhouse. Left as it was in an open ditch, the conduit was an eyesore. Yet I was thankful for the slapdash construction. When I wrote to Tom, I was able to say it really did seem the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was being truthful in saying the new conduit was temporary, an emergency measure made necessary by wartime manufacturing. Slapdash or not, there was sorrow and anger in his reply.

After reading the letter, I sat thinking about my last months at Glenview, the months after Hilde and Bride had been let go. There were hours lugging coal from the basement, loading it into the stove, coaxing it to the right heat. And then there was the soot, the ashes, the scorched biscuits, the hours in an endlessly heated kitchen on a summer’s day, all to be erased by the magic of a waterfall.

Mrs. Andrews and I had grown into a habit of reading each other bits from the newspaper. Not long after the armistice, it was a piece arguing Canada was changed forevermore by the war. I read, both of us nodding our agreement with the claim that our country had outgrown the nest of the British Empire and become a nation in its own right on the battlefields of Belgium and France. Our troops had proven themselves, fighting valiantly at the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele, and like everyone else at home, Mrs. Andrews and I had heard stories of the Allies leaking it to the Huns that they would be meeting up with the Canadians at such and such a battle, even when it was not true. “Puts the fear of God in them,” Tom had written, “the idea of coming face-to-face with a man who’d once spent his days chopping down the wilderness and wrestling grizzly bears to the ground.”

When I got to the bit about the outrage the entire country felt when Canada was not offered a seat at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war, Mrs. Andrews said, “The Brits couldn’t bring themselves to cut the apron strings, even with Canada all grown up.” According to the essay, Prime Minister Borden saw his chance and pounced, arguing vehemently, playing his trump card—the fact that we had lost a far greater chunk of our population than the United States. In the end Britain relented. The United States finally gave in. And Canada sent a delegation to the talks.

Finished with the essay, I set down the newspaper and began threading my sewing machine. “That’s it?” Mrs. Andrews said, flicking the newspaper hard enough to send it careering to the floor. “All this talk of nationhood, but what about French and English Canada hating each other like never before?”

She had a point, and I nodded, my face growing hot as I remembered a comment I had made about French Canada not pulling its weight when it came to sending men overseas. I had used the term shirking Frenchie frogs, and it had caused Mrs. Andrews to lift her foot from the treadle of her sewing machine. Enough days had passed since Vimy Ridge to lessen the odds of a dreaded telegram; still, I was agitated to the point of having bitten the inside of a cheek raw. “I suppose you’d march off to fight for some country your ancestors didn’t come from,” she said, “especially if that country spoke a language that wasn’t your own and you were told by the higher-ups they had no intention of setting up a company of men you could exchange a few words with. You’d be taking orders in a new language, too, the one all the officers spoke.”

The sentiment seemed dangerous, a way of thinking that could undermine Borden’s efforts to steamroll ahead with an act allowing the conscription of men countrywide, and a new wave of men to replace those fallen at Vimy Ridge was the surest bet of Tom ever coming home. I shrugged, and she said, “Faut se mettre dans la peau de quelqu’un,” before returning her foot to the treadle.

I remembered her maiden name then—Lambert—written on the backside of an old photograph, and I knew the correct pronunciation was lambair, rather than as I had assumed. Even so, I got up from my sewing machine and stood over her with my hands on my hips. “If you had someone over there, you wouldn’t think any differently than the rest of us.” Then I strode off, slamming the door as I went.

I was facedown on my bed, weeping into a wet pillow, when Mrs. Andrews put her hand on my back. “He’s fine, Bess,” she said. “I know he is.” Her kindness made me bawl all the harder. I was tired and ashamed and sick to death of the war, wreaking havoc from four thousand miles away.

Conscription became the issue on which Borden’s reelection hinged, and, never mind that French Canada teetered on the brink of mutiny, he was doing whatever he could to make sure it went his way. He gave the vote to the overseas soldiers, who could only see conscription as boosting their odds, and mandated that their votes could be scattered among the electoral districts as he saw fit. He abolished the notion that all women were unfit for the broils and excitements of a federal election and replaced it with legislation that gave those with husbands or sons or brothers fighting in the war the right to vote. As final assurance, conscientious objectors and immigrants from enemy countries were told they no longer had a say.

I could see his methods were suspect, but to my mind the end—the landslide victory he won—justified the means. After I cast my ballot, my heart was light. It took at least half the walk back to Mrs. Andrews’s house to work out the reason why: At long last I had made Tom’s future more certain, if only by a single vote.

His letters arrived in fits and starts, though seldom did more than a fortnight pass without some news from him. But then in the autumn of 1917, the newspaper confirmed the rumors we had been hearing for weeks and his correspondence altogether stopped. Our boys had moved on to Passchendaele.

The battlefield of Passchendaele was a dreary wasteland, a swampy marsh of mud and water even without the rain that had not let up all fall. There was no relic of civilization, only shell holes and charred trees and decomposing bodies, or so said Mrs. Mitchell at the post office one Thursday afternoon. She had heard it from a cousin, who was back from the front by way of Wandsworth Hospital in London, where he had a piece of shrapnel the size of peach pit wrenched from his eye and caught an earful from an Aussie fresh from Passchendaele. “The boys use duckboards—something like ladders but laid on the ground—to keep themselves from drowning in the mud,” she said. “If a fellow takes a hit and goes off balance, well, that’s pretty much it. He’ll get swallowed up.”

Hearsay abounded; the worst of it, too disheartening to be allowed in the newspapers, arrived in Niagara Falls via some route just as circuitous as Mrs. Mitchell’s. Plenty of it reported the near annihilation of the British, Australian, and New Zealand divisions our boys were meant to replace. And there was a retired colonel in Queenston who insisted the high ground of the town of Passchendaele was in no way worth the bloodbath capturing it would mean.

Still, on a Monday in early November the Evening Review headline read OUR BOYS TAKE PASSCHENDAELE. The account that followed trumpeted the victory of the Third and Fourth divisions, which had captured the town of Passchendaele and hung on to it by the skin of their teeth, and the First and Second divisions, which had come to their aid, finally forcing the Germans ringing the area into retreat.

Other versions came quick on the heels, littering the glory of the newspaper account like an ash bin emptied onto newly fallen snow. Our dead were three deep in places, many sunk too deep in the mud to ever be found. As for how many Canadian soldiers were lost, there were the old-timers who endlessly plotted the war on the maps laid out in the rear of Clark’s Hardware, and a few had made extrapolations using the list of casualties from the newspaper and estimated it at fifteen thousand or more. I made the mistake of speaking to milky-eyed Mr. Chapman one afternoon while waiting for Mr. Clark to package up another round of heating coils for Tom. Once I had confirmed that, yes, Tom was in fact an infantryman in the Third Division, he shook his head. His calculations pointed to as many as four-fifths of the fellows in Tom’s boots having fallen by the time the reinforcements arrived. As I stood there, numb, he misjudged me for someone eager for more. “Near as I can figure Passchendaele cost the Allies half a million in casualties, including upwards of a hundred thousand dead. With the five miles the boys pushed back the front, works out to three inches for every man lost.”

All this, and not a word from Tom for forty-one days, twenty-nine since the headline in the Evening Review.

Home from Clark’s Hardware, I put Jesse in his high chair and set a dish of cold macaroni from the supper before on the tray. When I noticed my hands shaking, I lifted the teapot from the cupboard, thinking a cup of chamomile might calm my nerves. It was then that I saw the boy who delivered the telegrams pause at the far end of the front walk. He flipped through the papers in his hands, looked up at the house and then down again. I closed my eyes, pressed my face against my palms, and with every ounce of will I could muster wished away the boy and the telegram addressed to me.

When I looked up again, he had wandered on, to some other address, some other widowed wife, some other fatherless child. I touched my fingertips to the teapot and circled them twice around the lid. Then I lifted that teapot and hurled it with all my might. I moved on, to a wool skirt for Miss Bingley, pressed for a final time earlier in the day and folded on the ironing board, and tried, unsuccessfully, to tear it from the waistband clear through to the hem. Jesse watched from his high chair, eyes wide, a spoon clenched in his tiny fist. When he threw that spoon toward the cupboard beneath which the rubble of the teapot lay, I was immediately upon him. “How dare you!” I spat the words, my arm jerking upward in preparation. Then Mrs. Andrews was there, her fingers tightly wrapping my raised arm, her body pushing mine from the kitchen as Jesse began to wail.

Once I regained my composure, which took the better part of the afternoon, even with the rocking chair Mrs. Andrews insisted upon, even with the milky tea she brought, even with the wool blanket she smoothed over my thighs, I told her about the boy pausing at the end of the walk, but her jaw was firmly set and did not change.

“Your father will be arriving on the ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll be taking you back to Buffalo for two weeks.”

She laid a hand firmly on the wool blanket and did not shift her gaze from mine, even as tears welled in my eyes at the idea of having to explain myself to Mother and Father, even as it occurred to me there was nothing left to tell. “Jesse?”

“It’s just a bit of a holiday, for the both of you.” She smiled then, her eyes as soft as I had ever seen them, the backs of her fingers stroking my cheek with a tenderness I had guessed at but never seen.

I thought then of Mrs. Doherty, with her six children and livelihood of folding boxes and husband already shot full of holes. “I’m so ashamed.”

“It’s dances and pretty dresses that girls your age ought to be worrying about,” Mrs. Andrews said.

Waiting for Father at the train station with Jesse good as gold on my knees, I thought about my raised arm, whether given another moment I would have followed through. The odd passerby noticed my wet cheeks and smiled kindheartedly, lingeringly, and a gentleman with a cane even patted my arm. The kindnesses were not the standard fare from before the war, the usual “Sorry for your troubles, miss.” No, those concerned folk assumed the boy at the end of the walk had not ambled on after checking Mrs. Andrews’s address against that of the telegram in his hands.

The three rooms Mother and Father let in Buffalo were on Jewett Avenue, an address that implied the prestigious neighborhood of Parkside, though they were in fact a good mile from Delaware Park. The bedroom, parlor, and dining room, where they ate whatever Mother rustled up on a hot plate, were crowded with the best pieces from Glenview: three bureaus; a four-poster bed; two chesterfields; a club chair; a mahogany table with matching china cabinet and sideboard, crammed with the usual silver and crystal but also with books. With six carpets, all overlapping, and Mother’s cleverness for decorating, the rooms appeared studiously disheveled, pleasingly so.

By the time Father, Jesse, and I arrived, the dining room table had been pushed into a corner and two cots set up in its place. On the train there had been no mention of the episode behind my visit, only delight that he and Mother would have Jesse and me to themselves. Mother followed suit, though she smoothed my hair, put a hand on my shoulder, stroked my forearm, every chance she got. I told myself the tenderness was only concern over my fragile state, but with each touch there came an awful moment when it seemed she was convinced of my widowhood.

The first evening Father talked about an order the tannery had been given for ammunition pouches, fifty thousand of them all told, and the expansion he had had the good sense to undertake in just the nick of time. Mother said, “It’s all working out wonderfully well,” and I thought better than to ask why, then, was she wearing the same lovely dress she had had on when she last came to Niagara Falls, why then, had Father decided on a trolley rather than a hack from the train station to Jewett Avenue when there was a fair-size valise to be carried, also Jesse, who was sound asleep.

Two days later I woke to Mother scrubbing away at handkerchiefs and stockings and underclothes a few feet from my cot. “Rise and shine,” she said, with enough vigor to make it clear she did not consider languor a cure for losing heart. “Your father’s long gone, and Jesse got up an hour ago.”

“You don’t send the laundry out?” I said, once I was awake enough to be sure of what I was seeing.

“It’s only a few things.”

“But where do you hang the clothes to dry?” Bewildered as I was, the question had somehow risen to the top of the list.

“I’ve attached a few lines to the underside of the dining table.” She looked up from the laundry tub and smiled as though I ought to be impressed with her ingenuity.

I shifted to sitting on the cot. “I thought Father was as good as running the tannery?”

“He’s earning plenty,” she said, “more than enough.”

I nudged the laundry tub with my toe and turned up my palms.

She handed me a basket of wrung-out bloomers and camisoles, and a tin of clothespins. “Would you mind?” she said, pointing toward the table. “It’s his latest mania. Saving.”

“Mania?” I said, no less confused than a minute earlier.

“First it was aluminum. Then it was rye whiskey, and now it’s saving up enough to buy the tannery.” She tossed another pair of bloomers into the basket beside me. “He doesn’t have it in him to do anything halfway. Never has.”

I knew what she meant. Always, it had struck me that he loved her, and not in an everyday sort of way but with a rapt, enviable intensity. Even so, he was not giving her enough money to run the household.

“I prefer penny-pinching to rye whiskey,” she said, clearing a stray lock from her forehead with the back of her hand.

In the evening Father came through the doorway with Sir Charles Lyell’s Travels in North America in his hand. “I’m sending it over to Tom,” he said. “There’s a chapter where he uses the distance between the edge of the escarpment and the falls, and the rate they’re eroding back to calculate the age of the Niagara Gorge.”

I knew the book. Kit had complained bitterly when Mother Febronie pitched a copy that had snuck its way onto the shelves of the library at the academy. If Lyell were right, the date of creation set by Saint Bede using the Bible as a guide was entirely wrong.

I slipped my arms around Father’s neck and glimpsed an approving smile come to Mother’s lips. “He’ll love it,” I said, squeezing him like I had not since I was a child. A book was an extravagance, something my penny-pinching father would surely not have bought if he thought Tom had drowned in the mud.

It was the next morning when Mrs. Andrews called, breathlessly hollering into the telephone that a whole slew of letters from Tom had arrived, that she had opened all of them, that the most recent was dated November 17. “He survived Passchendaele,” she said, her voice beginning to crack. And then it was some nonsense about someone at her door. She would make me wait until she had pulled herself together to hear another word.

There are plenty of fellows who will not step onto the railway station platform at Niagara Falls today, plenty of fellows who had not survived Ypres and the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele: Fred and George Anderson, whom I knew from Morrison Street Methodist; Walter Canfield and Frank Romea, who worked for Father at the Niagara Power Company; James Muir and Clement Swan and Thomas Wood, who visited their sisters at the academy; Gordon Dobbie, who delivered the flowers from his father’s shop; William Hewson, who courted Isabel for a while; 124 others, including Edward Atwell, who was once my betrothed.

His death was reported in the Evening Review. “Killed in action,” it said. I cried balled up on my bed until Mrs. Andrews brought me a cup of tea with brandy and said that Jesse was waiting in the hall, but in another five minutes she was sending him in and that it was not right for a child to see his mother carrying on so.

I sent a heartfelt condolence to Kit and did not receive a reply. I thought about dropping in on her at one of the Erie Avenue shops she now ran on her family’s behalf and had very nearly worked up the nerve when I saw her, lounging on a blanket in Queen Victoria Park, listening to the Niagara Falls Citizens Band. She was leaning against a fellow fifteen years her senior and tall with a hollow chest and a dusting of freckles and sparse, tan hair. Surely he was Leslie Scott, her husband, who had been sent home from the war early with chlorine gas—damaged lungs and then come to Niagara Falls from Toronto as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission’s chief hydraulic engineer. Midconcert I caught her eye. There was a moment of recognition, and then pursed lips and her hard gaze lingering too long before shifting from mine. Edward was not going to come home from the war and marry a pretty girl and set to work on a brood of his own. He was not coming home, not at all, and there was no hope of me becoming a mere hiccup along the way to a full life.

Boyce Cruickshank had survived the war; at least his name had not appeared in the death notices of The Buffalo Evening News, which my parents watched as closely as I did those of the Evening Review. We knew he had enlisted early on with the American Expeditionary Forces because Father had seen him in uniform a short while after the United States finally joined the Allies and began shipping ten thousand men a day to France.

“Your father ran into Boyce the other day,” Mother had said.

“Boyce Cruickshank?” As far as I knew it was the first they had seen of him since he left Isabel high and dry.

“He said Boyce cut clear across the street to speak to him. He’s got more backbone than his father. I’ll give him that.”

“Was he rude?” The more senior Mr. Cruickshank had looked the other way when he met Mother on the street and turned his back when he came upon Father at the bank.

“He hung his head and said he was sorry, that he had been a great disappointment to Isabel, that she deserved better. Apparently he was wearing a soldier’s uniform.”

Amid influenza and the ballot for the power commission, amid worry and grief over men too far away or ruined or altogether lost, there has been pleasure, often short-lived, sometimes persisting for an hour or a day or a week. There is Jesse, who is happy, who claps his hands in delight when I step into a room. At two years old he is clever enough to know limestone from shale, agile enough to have scaled a handful of the boulders in the glen, spirited enough to have thrown himself into a pool at Dufferin Islands, certain that he could swim, which turned out to be right.

There is the work that has kept the two of us afloat, the needle between my fingers like a tiny magic wand. There are the dresses that cause women to marvel, the really special ones that cause me to marvel as well. I have a handful of clients who are my very own, rather than Mrs. Andrews’s with me as assistant. It began one morning with Mrs. Andrews answering the door and me in the sewing room, my foot stock-still on the treadle once I recognized Mrs. Coulson’s precise enunciation, almost British though she was born in Niagara Falls. “I’ve heard you’ve taken on Bess Cole as an apprentice,” she said. Of course Mrs. Coulson knew, her ear all but pressed to the ground. Of course she had come. She needed to see for herself what had become of the girl who had discarded the bit of advice hurled at her in the backseat of an Oldsmobile and married the likes of Tom Cole.

“I have.” I could picture Mrs. Andrews—her spectacles perched low on her nose, her chin indiscreetly inching upward as she took in Mrs. Coulson’s full height.

“I’m an old friend, a benefactor, some might say.”

“How so?”

“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

“You brought it up.”

“I was wondering whether I might order a skirt,” Mrs. Coulson said. “I’d want Bess to do more than run up the seams.”

“Why not just say you’d rather her make the skirt than me?”

Mrs. Coulson cleared her throat. “All right,” she said. “I’d rather Bess made the skirt.”

Was I wrong about her? Was it possible Mrs. Coulson was extending the favor she had shown Mother to me? To have a client of my own would be a streak of good luck. And that it was Mrs. Coulson, who had the height and curves to be the perfect model for a perfect dress, also the social connections to bring news of my old world at a time when the cocoon of just Mrs. Andrews, Jesse, and me was sometimes too snug, at least partially offset my dislike of her busybody ways.

I made the skirt, a straightforward affair, six panels, a yoke. She was pleased and ordered a blouse, no pleats, no ruffles, nothing for me to mess up. That was before I showed her a design I had come up with for an evening gown. She settled on pale blue-green silk for the main body and an ivory shadow lace for the neckline and sleeves. After that more women came to the door, saying, “I heard you sew for Mrs. Coulson.”

With Mrs. Coulson ordering an evening gown or a dinner dress nearly every month, it seemed there was no shortage of funds in the Coulson household, and it was hardly a surprise. Mr. Coulson had been hired away from the Niagara Power Company for what everyone said was a top-brass position with the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. And then, a few days after the Armistice, Mrs. Coulson confirmed he was in fact senior enough to hire anyone he pleased. I was fitting her for a velvet evening coat and had just finished adjusting the bodice darts to fit her ample bust when she said, “You should send Tom to see Mr. Coulson about work once he’s home.”

It had occurred to me that Mr. Coulson might have the clout to add another man to the payroll, and I had thought how simple it would be to ask Mrs. Coulson to put in a word on Tom’s behalf, even if it meant handing her on a silver platter the opportunity to gloat. Until that moment in the fitting room, though, I had always reminded myself that the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was not for Tom, at least not until necessity made it so, and pressed my lips shut until the notion passed. “He’ll need to find something,” I said, aiming for just enough enthusiasm to keep the Hydro-Electric Power Commission as an option. “I’ll tell him when he gets home.”

“Mr. Coulson would keep an eye on him,” she said. “He’d make sure he was treated well.”

I ran a bit of chalk along the length of a newly marked dart. “I really appreciate it, both Mr. Coulson’s help and all the orders you send my way.”

“Your father was always looking out for Mr. Coulson, and Mr. Coulson doesn’t forget very much.” She glanced in the mirror, sliding her hands from ribs to hips.

I remembered Isabel saying Mr. Coulson was as ambitious as they come, and Mrs. Coulson, too, and the thought sent me back to her tirade in the Oldsmobile. She was a woman used to doling out orders, a woman used to having everything work out just as she had planned. She turned, suddenly, to admire her profile, causing me to stick myself with a pin.

Mother knew I was sewing for Mrs. Coulson and was always wanting to hear about whatever pretty frock I had on the go for her. Given the dearth of new frocks in Mother’s life, I tended to gloss over the imported lace, mohair soutache, and underskirts cut from the finest of silks. I kept Mr. Coulson’s workplace advancement to myself. Doing otherwise would have seemed rather like pouring salt into an open wound. Even so, it appeared news traveled to Buffalo, and one Sunday telephone call, Mother said, “You might mention to Mrs. Coulson that Tom will be looking for work once he’s home.”

“I can’t see Tom working for the Hydro,” I said, though I still clung to Mrs. Coulson’s offer to help.

“He might not have a choice.”

“As far as I know, conscription ended with the war.” My tone was unfair. She was only saying the obvious. I had thought the same thought.

“I meant it might be the only work to be had,” she said.

“We could get by on what I make.” It was not true, not unless the three of us stayed on with Mrs. Andrews for the rest of our days.

“I admire Tom’s attachment to the river, Bess. I really do. But I’m all for give-and-take, and there’s an awful lot of water tumbling over the brink.”

“I’m to drag him off to the Hydro, then?”

“You won’t need to drag him anywhere. You only need to pave the way.”

Married soldiers are being shipped home in advance of the others, and so the gathering on the platform is mostly women and children, none quite as young as Jesse. We are the lucky ones, and it seems immensely wrong of me to be waiting on the platform feeling nearly as much anxiety as joy. Our dreams have come true. The train pulling into the station, its windows full of cap-waving, cap-tossing soldiers, is about to deliver our men, the ones who have come home.

I see Tom before he sees me and watch as he disembarks in a khaki tunic and puttees, like the others, except that his cap is solemnly upon his head, causing him to look subdued among the melee of soldiers lifting children, embracing wives, clapping backs. “Tom,” I call out, raising my arm. He stands three or four inches taller than the rest of the crowd, and somehow the size of him takes me by surprise. I can see even from a distance that he is thin, that his hair has been shorn, likely to rid him of lice before his return. I lift Jesse so that he might see his father approach, so that his father might see him. Then Tom’s arms are around the both of us, pulling us close. Jesse wriggles an arm free and wraps it around Tom’s neck. “Daddy,” he says.

When Tom loosens his embrace, I pull back slightly, but he keeps his face buried in my scarf, and I hear a gasp and feel his chest heave. Sobbing is distinct from weeping, and he is sobbing. The other fellows, with wet cheeks and smiles, they are weeping, joyfully, even the one who hobbled off the train, the leg of one pant tucked up beneath his thigh.

A length of muslin painted with the words “Welcome Home” is strung across Mrs. Andrews’s kitchen cupboards. There is a ham stuck with cloves ready for the oven and peeled potatoes ready for the pot, also the lemon squares he used to love, set on a plate. And a month ago, Mrs. Andrews insisted on giving Jesse, for no additional rent, the spare room next to the larger one he and I had shared while Tom was away. “It’s unnatural,” she said, “a two-and-a-half-year-old sharing his mother’s bed.” I scrubbed both rooms floor to ceiling, cut new liners for the drawers, and replaced the lavender in the sachet I keep with my underclothes. Our bed is made up with freshly laundered sheets, the best from my trousseau. But as I stand with Tom sobbing into my scarf, the efforts seem misguided, a foolish attempt at merriment. At least I had the good sense to put Mother and Father off when they proposed coming to welcome Tom home.

When he finally lets go, he says, “It was awful over there.”

I wipe away the tear clinging to his chin. “I know, Tom. I know.”

“You don’t,” he says, “and it’s a blessing.”

I remember another letter, different from the rest, late last summer, a short while after the newspapers were full of the good news of Amiens.

He takes off his cap, and I want him to toss it into the air without a second thought to it being trampled or lost beneath the planks of the platform. But he only shoves it into the pocket of his tunic, as though he does not quite believe he is through with the war.