An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(27)
In Lattingtown, a memorial plaque was placed on the town library with the names of the 132 young men from the community who had fought in Europe. There was a gold star after three of those names, Teddy’s included, to indicate that they had paid with their lives. Greta and her children were memorialized, too. Just as Allene had ornamented the glory days of her daughter’s youth with flowers—wild roses for her graduation ceremony, spring flowers for her coming-out, and golden chrysanthemums for her wedding—she did the same for Greta’s death. A simple stone cross the height of a man, bearing Greta’s name surrounded by numerous decorative entwined lilies carved out of the hard stone, was placed on her grave.
Then it was Christmas in an empty, quiet Birchwood, where memories of the past, when they were all together, were almost palpable in the rooms. And a new year dawned with nothing positive to offer. No joyous births, no wedding of Teddy and Kitty. No plans, no hope. No becoming a grandmother, no longer being a mother.
Of course, other families in the United States were painfully confronted with empty places at the dinner table during the holidays—in total more than eighteen thousand young Americans had died. But it seemed that nowhere had fate so cruelly and definitively lashed out as on Allene’s happy island, which shortly before had appeared so safe.
On February 17, 1919, the biggest and most triumphant victory parade that New York had ever seen moved along Fifth Avenue. Among more than a million spectators cheering on the returning soldiers was a young F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would later describe the memorable day in an essay in My Lost City:
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn east and north towards them—this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air [. . .] We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn.
While New York was ringing in the world’s new start by drinking, dancing, and making love, about fifty miles away Allene was mourning the end of her world in the wintery silence of Locust Valley. A few days after the parade, Anson could take it no more and applied for new passports for the both of them; their previous ones had been taken away in connection with travel restrictions imposed during the submarine hostilities.
Since international travel was still limited, Anson had to prove that the journey he wanted to make was of crucial importance. His boss, the CEO of General Electric, argued in a letter that after four and a half years of war, it was essential that one of his staff go and assess the status of the company’s European interests in person and that they’d invited Mr. Burchard to do this. A comparable document was prepared for Allene, with a personal note from Anson’s boss:
It affords me pleasure to testify to the high character, loyalty and patriotism of Mrs. Burchard. She has been active in the connections with important relief work during the war period, and is in all respects qualified for the issuance of a passport.
On the photograph attached to the passport application, Allene is looking straight into the camera—still a handsome woman at forty-six years old. But there is something in her gaze that makes the spectator almost uncomfortable. Anson, in his passport photo, mainly looks concerned and very, very serious.
The application was granted, and on April 12, 1919, the Burchards boarded the RMS Aquitania for Liverpool. From there they traveled to Paris, where at least they were able to take Teddy’s fiancée in their arms again. The daughter of a famous New York book publisher, Kitty Kimball had spent most of her childhood in the French capital and had decided earlier that winter to travel to the continent that had robbed her of her future husband. She now worked as a correspondent for the American glossy magazine Victory, in which she had a column titled “Notes of an American in France.”
By then, Kitty had been able to gather more information about Teddy’s last flight. He had been shot down by Robert Greim, a colleague of the famous Red Baron. This experienced fighter pilot had gone hunting for his twenty-fifth airborne victory that fateful day in September; his exploits would earn him a military medal and a knighthood. The young New Yorker hadn’t stood the slightest chance against him. At the end of the air battle, Greim had landed to take pictures of his crashed opponent. He’d added the photographs to his logbook as proof.
Masnières, the village above which Teddy had fought his last dogfight, turned out to be an unremarkable farming hamlet on the Canal de l’Escaut of which only a collection of ruins was left after four years in the heat of battle. Allene and Anson decided on the spot to donate 100,000 francs to the community for the construction of a boys’ school that would carry the name of their late son. Not that their son had been such an enthusiastic school attendee, but his parents were still Victorian enough to be convinced of the value of good schooling for all.
The Burchards traveled across the afflicted continent for six months. They visited Allene’s parents, who had been able to continue their quiet life in Nice virtually undisturbed by the war. They visited Italy, which had suffered terribly during the conflict; they passed through countries that had remained neutral and were untouched, like Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands; and they went to Belgium, where the traces of destruction were omnipresent. In late October 1919, they returned home from Cherbourg, France, on the SS Lapland, just in time to attend the ceremony at which Harvard was granting Teddy a posthumous bachelor of science for his “honorable war service.”