But now Wilma was acting so strangely. She had transformed herself into a paragon of matronly sacrifice and wartime purpose. Writing the boys every day, knitting, writing cards, rolling bandages, attending weekly community sewing bees to manufacture Red Cross comfort bags. After dismissing the pretty maid Brita just before the boys left, Wilma had decided against hiring a replacement for her, insisting that she would have a laundress in just twice a week and take over some of the additional work herself. So the family was left with one live-in maid, plus a cook and a yard man who each worked six days a week. John started to notice dust accumulating in the corners, a little grime in the bathtub, a little dullness to the woodwork that always before had enjoyed weekly polishing. There was simply too much work for just one maid, and Wilma didn’t seem inclined to do what she had said in terms of picking up the extra housework. She was too busy with war work, from the moment she awoke at dawn until she dropped into bed late at night. She never touched her piano that he knew of.

When he suggested hiring an additional maid again, she wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, faced with the new force of her, John found himself powerless to make demands of any sort. He felt that if she would grant him the smallest thing, he would be satisfied. But when he had experimented one morning at breakfast with insisting the cook prepare a roast for dinner, Wilma had responded simply, “We’re having chicken. The soldiers need beef more than we do.” He knew then with a frightening certainty that the war had changed her, that she was not the same woman she had been. He had to wonder: Could there be something to the notion that love was not meant to prosper in that house?

He turned up Park Avenue and walked up the driveway. Rounding the corner of the carriage house, which was now home to a 1916 Model T, he was startled to see the cook’s old garden doubled in size since this morning, the exposed earth a crumbled-looking reddish-brown. And there, to his astonishment, was Wilma—in an old summer dress and high brown boots, her hair hidden under a wide-brimmed hat—smoothing the plot with a rake. Jinny and Harry were at work with hoes.

“We’re doin’ a garden, Dad!” Jinny cried, stopping her work when she saw him approaching. “‘Food will win the war!’ We’re ‘Soldiers of the Soil!’” She grinned, and turned back to her labors.

“Wilma?” John said, coming closer. Intent on her raking, Wilma did not look up until John had reached the edge of the plot and said her name again.