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existence, however: my grammar school report cards, tied with blue yarn, were tucked away in a desk drawer. These, Mumma had evidently decided, were suitable keepsakes of her eldest child’s youth. And then there were the ghosts of birthdays past that she had stashed away. Dusty candy boxes filled with fossilized chocolates. Books of poetry, their spines uncracked. Heaps of unused embroidered handkerchiefs. I sometimes broke down in tears when I came across a Christmas present that I had carefully selected for her, and that she had left untouched for years at the back of a cupboard or on the top shelf of a bookcase. It’s the thought that counts, of course, but it was disheartening to find evidence of how consistently I had failed to please her.
    I suppose you find my laments self-absorbed and unseemly.
Your mother left you a wealthy woman. You should be grateful, Agnes. Many a war widow was worse off.
True enough, though in my own defense, I will point out that I was not at my best, having been so recently so ill.
    That said, I will be honest with you. I’d have traded every penny of my inheritance for the memory of one word of love, or a single fond caress.
    Like many modern mothers of her time, Mumma was much influenced by Dr. Emmett Holt and Professor John B. Watson. Young people raised in the aftermath of the Civil War were effete and flabby, these experts declared. They had been spoiled by sentimental, unscientific mothers who weakened the nation’s youth with loose schedules and sloppy displays of affection. In his manual
The Care and Feeding of Children,
Dr. Holt warned mothers that babies were not sweet little angels but small animals with fearsome appetites whose spirits needed breaking, just like those of wild horses. To rear a responsible adult, regularity in all things had to be imposed, for a well-adjusted adult was defined as one with iron habits and rigid self-control.
    Above all, mothers must avoid displays of tenderness. “Mother love is a dangerous instrument that may inflict a never-healing wound,” Professor Watson warned. Merely to touch a child unnecessarily would place at risk that child’s future success and happiness. Maternal solicitude was not merely unsavory and unwise but a corrupting dereliction of duty.
    In your time, adults strive to be “good parents,” but in my day, it was the business of children to be good and the solemn duty of parents to punish them when they were bad. In the spirit of scientific modernity, and with a calm sense of moral certainty, therefore, Mumma trained her children and her dogs with similar cool competence.
    The childhood discipline that Ernest ran from—and that Lillie laughingly evaded—I truly desired to be governed by. I might have been annoying and, too often, I asked questions before I did as I was told, but I was as obedient as I knew how to be, even when I was small. How, then, had I so signally failed to elicit Mumma’s approval and pride? Why, I wondered, had my questions rankled when Lillie’s charmed? Was it merely that Lillian was a pretty child and graceful, while I was homely and awkward?
    Like Rosie, I was a poor specimen of my breed. My wandering eye may have seemed to Mumma a constant silent accusation that she’d given birth to flawed stock. And as a toddler, I wailed so loudly when she splinted my arms to keep me from sucking my thumb that she gave in; my spoiled teeth were no doubt a rebuke to her weakness every time I smiled, but I don’t quite believe that was the whole explanation.
    You see, Mumma was easily able to answer Lillie’s questions about the Bible and God and what Jesus wanted from us, about what was good and what was sin. My questions were most often not “What?” but “Why?” Why did people think one thing and not another? Why could things not be different from the way they were? Why would God blame little babies for what Eve did? If Jesus was God, and God was going to forgive Original Sin after the