An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(26)
Since then, the illness had spread across almost the entire continent at an alarming rate. While over a four-year period more than sixteen million people died in the First World War, Spanish flu managed to claim fifty million victims worldwide in just half a year. It was as though nature wanted to mimic the mass murder that humans had perpetrated upon themselves. A quarter of the American population fell sick. In hastily erected encampments on the edges of cities, doctors could do no more than just watch their patients die, often without even having the time to take their temperature. Surprisingly enough, those who were the most vulnerable during regular flu epidemics, such as children and old people, had the best chance of survival. The illness hit hardest young, healthy adults with strong immune systems, such as Teddy’s sister, Greta.
Until this, Greta had experienced a safe war, first in Cuba and then in Guatemala and Vienna, where her husband was stationed at embassies. After America declared war, the couple returned home and Glenn was given an insignificant post in Washington. Greta had become pregnant in 1917 but had miscarried. She’d buried her stillborn child a stone’s throw from her family home in Locust Valley, in the pretty cemetery at the end of Feeks Lane that the area’s rich inhabitants had had designed a few years earlier by a son of Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Now she was pregnant again and, to her great joy, with twins.
But sometime in the early weeks of October, as the entire Burchard family was on tenterhooks awaiting news about Teddy, a gray shadow also slipped into Greta’s house in Washington and laid a chilly hand on her shoulder. Shortly afterward, she began to cough. She died on Wednesday, October 16. The twin brothers who would have been Allene and Anson’s first grandchildren didn’t survive.
On Friday, October 18, Allene bade farewell to her daughter. The funeral took place in the same chapel in Lattingtown where Greta, in her American bridal gown, had married Glenn almost four years previously to the day. Later that afternoon she was buried next to the place she’d earlier chosen for her stillborn baby.
That same evening, the wheels of an army jeep crunched over the gravel drive of a Birchwood already immersed in grief. There was news about Teddy. Inhabitants of Masnières had reported seeing an airplane crash on the evening of September 27 on the Chemin des Rues des Vignes, outside the village. The Germans had removed the airplane, but the pilot had been buried in a shallow grave at the site, still wearing his lieutenant’s uniform. Now his identity had been determined with certainty.
Later one of Teddy’s fellow pilots would write a melancholy poem about their war experiences, despairing that it had all been for nothing:
We flew together, in the tall blue sky
We fought together, with bombs and guns
We ate together, in the squadron mess
We danced together, to the old gramophone
We walked together, in the fields of France
We talked together, of home and tomorrow
We flew together in the tall blue sky
Many were killed. The world is no better.
Teddy, too, had flown in the tall blue sky and fought with guns and bombs. He, too, had eaten in the squadron mess and danced with his comrades to the sounds of an old gramophone; he had walked through French fields, talking about the future. But for him it was now certain that no “home and tomorrow” would come.
7
The Crippled Heart
In her later lives, after she’d changed her name, continent, hair color, and even her year of birth, Allene would almost never speak of her children, and not even of Anson. Only in passing: “Yesterday we were at Teddy’s grave. There were flowers there and so peaceful.” Or, “Anson always used to say if one was busy they did not seem to mind the heat too much.” But holding forth on sorrow or grief, on the dreams she’d had for Greta and Teddy, was not something Allene did. Indeed, most of the people she socialized with in her later years didn’t even know she’d once had children.
Clearly a child of the nineteenth century, Allene hadn’t yet been infected with the modern idea that grief was a thing that needed to be processed or could even be healed, preferably by talking a lot. For the Victorians, fate was simply something to be borne, and that is what she did, without complaining. Her situation was like that of many others who were left behind like street litter after the world war. Just as they had to find a way to get through life with their missing limbs, blasted-away faces, and fractured nerves, so did she with her crippled heart.
On November 11, 1918, the warring parties signed an armistice in the French Compiègne, and the war was finally over. Teddy Hostetter’s death was old news by then. Harvard’s secretarial office collected in a slender file the few newspaper clippings and bits and pieces—“Harvard graduate fails to return from air raid” and “sad but proud duty”—with which the Pomfret School had marked the death of its former pupil. Afterward the file labeled “T. R. Hostetter” disappeared into their archives with the accompanying note: “Death card made.”
At the end of November, when the Spanish flu had burned itself out just as unexpectedly as it had flared up and people cautiously dared to socialize again, a memorial service for Lieutenant Hostetter was held in Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. There was no coffin. Immediately after they were recovered, Teddy’s remains had been reburied at one of the improvised burial grounds established in France in those days. But Allene kept the four flags used during the service—the Stars and Stripes, the Royal Air Force’s banner, and those of the 54 and 3 Squadrons—flying for weeks afterward at the Hospitality House for Junior Officers she had helped set up on Lexington Avenue, where young officers who had returned from France cheerfully went about their business.