Between jobs, he returned to Michigan for cotillion season, tall and striking in a dinner jacket, with or without vents, executing flashy scarlet waltzes or Viennese rumbas. His family lived not quite in Grosse Pointe, or even quite on Jefferson Avenue, but two blocks away from the Immortals, in a house not quite as fine as the rest. This left his mother eternally vigilant as to class, grace, and aesthetic choices.

Hugo was unsure exactly when he lost his fellow employees on the Belch, Slow Leak and Wheeze, though no one had appreciated the wreath of prairie roses he had braided himself and hung over the staff lockers. Even after he had explained they were created in accordance with William Morris’s principles of workplace ablative motifs, his fellow workers could not be said to embrace him. He understood and he tried to be patient, for he wanted to be helpful. But when he volunteered to while away the hours by reading aloud from John Ruskin, they asked that he no longer assist with the boiler, the wheel maintenance, the loading and unloading of baggage, but sit in the back and please be quiet. It was the “please” that killed. His rejection so complete it inspired politeness.

There, on the lonely caboose, with the last of the pages gone, and the book binding empty as a corn husk, Hugo considered whether he could at least announce he’d been reading Flaubert in the original French. He had no one to say it to, and so, instead, he let his heels smack against the car’s empty coupling until he felt the vibrations ping up his shins, and he slumped while the train found the final slow curve along the Neches River, into the disaster awaiting them at Beaumont.

If the train cut through any particular atmosphere, it was the same suspended tension throughout the forty-eight states, an indrawn breath not yet expelled. The last week’s presidential election had been fraught. There were recounts and challenges, and long days later, Woodrow Wilson was declared the winner, and the relief was palpable. America was still at peace.

But when there was a long-enough lull—all it took was another day or so, news from Europe drifting onto the front pages again—it wasn’t really silent anymore. Wayward winds blew to shore the terrible sounds of mortar fire, cries of wounded men, the lacquer tang of poison gas. America was on edge, everywhere, as if every man were glancing toward his rifle and then toward the neighboring barn, hearing cries of pain at sunset, and knowing that before morning came he was charged with the responsibility of shooting the family horse. One day—but when?—America would have to put old Europe out of its misery.