The first three nights, Wilma refused to sleep. She stayed downstairs in the kitchen, winding balls of yarn. Each night, Harry sat with her very late, leaning forward in the chair next to her with his elbows on his knees and her skein of yarn around his wrists, while she rolled and rolled and rolled the yarn into ball after ball after ball. “The kid’s exhausted, Wilma,” John told her, when he came down for a glass of milk. “Why don’t you let him go to sleep?”

“I’m not chaining him here,” she snapped, not looking up.

Wilma had insisted they not tell anyone in town about the telegram. “Not until we know for sure,” she had said, that first night, after Dr. Seguin revived her. But with Dr. Seguin, the folks at the bank, and George Schwartz down at the cemetery office, word got around. Casseroles, breads, hams piled up outside the door. When after some days their neighbor Mrs. Fryt knocked with a freshly baked pound cake, saying how sorry everyone was to hear about Chase, Wilma snapped, “Thank you, but I don’t believe he’s dead,” and shut the door in her face. Mrs. Fryt proceeded directly to the bank and left the pound cake with John’s secretary, Florence, who came right in to tell John what had happened.

“Mr. Mickelson, sir,” Florence said, in her gentle Southern accent, “I know it isn’t my place to say so, but don’t you think your wife needs you a sight more than this bank right at the moment?”

Florence had been with him only since the previous October. She had been the most experienced of the applicants for the position, having been business assistant to her husband until his death in December 1916. But because this experience led her to think she knew something about local commerce, and because she had a tendency to say exactly what she thought, she could be an exasperating employee. Whereas John’s previous assistant had taken dictation with a near-scientific exactness and a clipped “yes, sir,” Florence would offer accent-honeyed criticism: “You might ought to say ‘diligent’ there; ‘hardworking’ sounds trite.” The first weeks of her employ, John was (in his recollection) constantly on the verge of terminating her—the unabashed way she corrected him, as though she were the one who had been in banking her entire adult life!

So it was little surprise that she would march right into his office and tell him what he needed to do for his wife.

“I’ll handle her in my own way,” he told her, not looking up from his papers.

“Handle her! Begging your pardon, sir, but she isn’t a horse! And she’s just lost a son.”

“I’m well aware of that fact,” John said, and looked up to fix her with a stare.