Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Mourning Veil and a Missing Address — After the Eastland

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 152

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In this episode, I bring to a close my journey through Edna, His Wife by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Margaret Ayer Barnes, a novel that paints a hauntingly intimate portrait of a family navigating life in the shadow of the 1915 Eastland Disaster.

This final section steps past the catastrophe itself and into the tangled aftermath: the paperwork of loss, the quiet unraveling of marriages, and the daily rituals of mourning that linger long after the headlines fade.

Through Edna’s sorrow, Barnes reveals how loss reshapes who we are, transforms our connections, and changes the very tempo of our lives.

A mysterious letter from a figure in Edna’s past, with no return address, becomes a lifeline to her former self, a reminder that identity endures despite shifting circumstances. I also explore how memory, literature, and genealogy weave together, and why honoring history through careful research is so vital.

I recount the thrill of finding an autographed copy of Barnes’ novel and reflect on the deep responsibility storytellers and genealogists share to preserve history with honesty, compassion, and devotion.

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Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 152 of Flower in the River. This episode is a continuation of the previous episode, and in that episode, I read a section from a book called Edna, His Wi, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Margaret Ayer Barnes. It is a fictionalized account of one family's experience of the Eastland disaster. I will introduce you or reintroduce you to the characters. The protagonist is Edna Lasser Jones, her husband, Paul Jones, her sister, Pearl, Pearl's husband, Shub, Jesse and Junior, who are Edna's and Paul's children. We have two old friends of the family, Susan Peebles and her husband, Elmer. There are newer friends of the family, mostly business associates of Paul Jones. That would be Dolly McElroy and her husband, Sandy. And finally, there is a mysterious person from Edna's past who pops in. So that said, let's continue and conclude the reading of Edna His Wife by Margaret Eyer Barnes. For the next three weeks, the arrangements that follow death in all well-regulated families took much of Edna's attention. You wouldn't have thought she often reflected that in the little estate of William and Jessie Lawser there would be so much to arrange. But there was William's life insurance and William's will, leaving everything to his wife and the cottage to Pearl after her death. The absence of Jessie's will. She had never made one, and the question to be discussed and left resolved as to which had survived the other. Etna settled that question by assigning Pearl her rights in the real estate, by far the most valuable asset. As soon as Paul informed her that it could so be settled, she gave Pearl too her share in her father's insurance and savings. But there was the question of the cottage itself. Should it be sold or could Shub and Pearl afford to live in it? Probably not, unless Shub soon found work. But Edna urged them to try. Paul said he'd help out by increasing Pearl's allowance, but Shub didn't think that was right, for Pearl now possessed all William Lawser's cash assets, amounting to nearly$7,000. Paul said they ought to put that aside for a nest egg and live so that they wouldn't have to touch it. Family discussions were prolonged and waxed almost acrimonious. Everyone was trying so hard to do the generous thing. Edna went into deep mourning and carried Pearl with her in an orgy of sable spending. At the double funeral in Blue Island, both women were cocoons of black voil. Paul hated black and urged Edna to take the veil off her hat. As soon as the funeral was over, he said he didn't believe an old fashioned mourning, that nobody wore it any longer, that it had gone out with the war. Over in Europe he'd heard in England anyway, women wore colours in a month or two after the death of a son or a husband, and went right on going out to parties, keeping the stiff upper lip that had made the Empire famous. I'll keep my lip stiff if I wanted it stiff, said Edna, with rare spirit. But I don't. It's only a convention, said Paul persuasively. A survival of barbarism, really. It's not a convention, said Edna. It's just the way I feel. It would do you good to go out to see people. I don't want to see them. I don't want to see anyone but Pearl and Susan. For Susan Peoples had been, as usual, a bulwark. She and Elmer had come to see Edna the day before the funeral, and since then Edna had been up to spend several days with her and with her own memories on Oakwood Terrace. Susan had loved Mrs. Lasser, but Edna's main worry was Pearl. She's not well enough yet, Paul, to do her own cooking and cleaning. I wish we had an extra room so she and Shub could stay with us. Paul shrugged off that suggestion. It was really very queer, thought Edna. He'd been so kind and so capable in the hour of tragedy, someone to depend on utterly. But now that that hour was lived through, he wanted to put it behind him. Sometimes Edna suspected that Paul would never really miss her mother and father, then banished that suspicion because she didn't like to think that he could be so heartless. But certainly he did not miss them for as, for instance, did Shub. Shub couldn't keep his mind off the disaster, but Paul rarely spoke of it. Edna could see that it annoyed him when anyone mentioned it in public. That made Edna very uncomfortable too. But her feeling could scarcely be defined as annoyance. Dolly McElroy, who called with pink roses, had inquired, but Edna, how had your parents happened to be on a boat like the Eastland? And Paul had changed the subject before she could explain. Edna was grateful for that, of course. She certainly did not want to tell the whole dreadful story to Dolly McElroy, but she saw very clearly that Paul was yes, ashamed to have his new friends know that her father and mother were going on an excursion with the employees of the Western Electric Company, and that her brother in law was a member of the band. She didn't mind so much what Paul thought of Shub, but to be ashamed of the dead was really shameless. It made her blush for Paul. But the new friends were kind. They left cards and wrote notes, and sent flowers, and Dolly McElroy joined Paul in urging Edna to lighten her mourning. The McElroys had taken a house in Lakewood for the summer, and Dolly wanted Paul to rent a little cottage at the club. She knew a perfect one that he could get from the middle of August through September. It would be nice for the children to be with their friends, and it would do Edna good to go out to a few informal parties. Get out of herself, she said. Edna told Dolly McElroy that she simply couldn't face all those people in the club dining room. Dolly smiled sympathetically, but my dear, she said wisely, you can't keep a man like Paul locked up for months while you sit home and crape. I mean, is it fair? I'm sure I wish Sandy were more like him. He'd like me to go into perpetual mourning so he could get a rest. But Edna firmly vetoed the club cottage. Jesse went off to visit a schoolmate at a camp in Wisconsin, and Junior played rather forlornly in the deserted streets of the neighborhood. Paul stayed home, pleasantly enough on the summer evenings, reading his paper or a volume of biography at an open window, except on Saturday evenings. On Saturday afternoon, Paul always went out to Lakewood to the club. Sometimes he spent the night there and played golf all Sunday, returning for Sunday supper on Bank Street, looking tanned and rested and healthy. There were always lots of people at the club, but Paul rarely told Edna what he had done the night before, and she seldom asked him, though Dolly McElroy's warning remained with her disquietingly. She was thinking about these things over one Saturday afternoon in the Chinese drawing room, feeling rather worried and lonely when the maid brought in the mail. Edna had no correspondence, and the postman never left anything at her door but bills, invitations, and advertisements. So she took the letters listlessly. She held them up for some moments in her hand. Then her glance fell carelessly on the top one, and something about it arrested her attention. It wasn't that the handwriting was familiar, though it wakened some vague echo in Edna's consciousness. It was rather that it was different from the handwriting she was accustomed to seeing on envelopes of late. It was straggling and a little uncertain. It hadn't the brisk competence of a confirmed social notewriter, and it was obviously written with none too good a pen. The paper too was different, cheap, drugstore notepaper pulpy in the fingers. Here and there on a down stroke of the pen, the ink had run into it. It looked something indeed like one of the very rare letters that Edna had received from her father on an occasional birthday, though the writing was the rounded type of her own public school generation, not her father's sloping Spencerian hand. The envelope had been forwarded by Pearl from Blue Island. She opened it curiously. She drew out the two single sheets of lined notepaper that it contained and read first in utter bewilderment, and then in breathless excitement the lines that were written on them. Dear Edna, I read some time ago in a list in the papers that your father and mother were drowned in the Eastland disaster, and I've been meaning to write to you ever since. I was certainly sorry to hear it. You and Pearl must feel very bad about it. I remember them both so well. Your mother was always great to me, and your father used to talk to me about the Rock Island Road and tell me there was no opportunity for a young man any better than the railroads. I guess he was right. I've got nothing to complain of. I'm a conductor now on the Southern Pacific, and I got a good run on one of the crack trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It might interest you to know I am married. I have been married seven years. Nellie was a Topeka girl and I met her ten years ago when I was a brakeman on the Kansas City run. We're living in Los Angeles now and we've got two kids, Al Junior and Nell. The coast is all right, and Nelly don't miss Kansas very much anymore, but I'd like to get back east and see the old folks in Moline and all of you in Blue Island. I just wanted to send you my condolences and let you and Pearl know I was thinking of you. There's no friends like old friends. Yours truly Al Los Angeles august twenty seventh, nineteen fifteen PS Al Reimer in case you have forgotten. The flimsy line paper almost dropped from Edna's hands. She was so surprised. Al Reimer, in case you have forgotten. She was laughing a little, but she bet Al was laughing when he wrote that line. Maybe not, though. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was remembering well more than he had remembered. Nice of Al to write that letter. To be sorry about the Eastland. To think of her and Pearl. Lovely of him really to write like that about her father and mother. Well, they deserved it. Her mother had thought a lot of Al. Her father had prophesied big things for him, and here he had turned out just like her father said he would, conductor on a crack train on the coast, sitting pretty and married. Edna assured herself earnestly that she was glad he was married, but she wondered what Nelly was like. Married for seven years, he'd said. Edna counted on her fingers. That meant that for eight he stayed single. Eight years was a long time in a young man's heart. On the whole, Edna felt quite pleased with herself, and two kids, a girl and boy, like hers. No, referring again to his letter. She guessed the boy was the older, Al Jr. She wondered if he looked like Al. Those eyelashes were too good to waste on a boy, she thought. I hope Nell's got 'em, but maybe Nell looked like her mother. Edna summoned all the resources of her powers of deduction to picture Nelly's looks. Knew her three years before he married her, she reflected wisely. Not love at first sight. I bet her face wouldn't stop traffic. He must have learned to love her. But I hope she makes him happy. For gee, Al deserved to be happy. He was a good kid. Edna's thoughts were racing joyously in the vernacular of her childhood. My she'd like to see Al again. Some day, perhaps she would. If he did come back east, he'd find Pearl in Blue Island. How Pearl would laugh at that letter. It would do her good. It would take her back. Pearl used to laugh so much with Shub and Edna and Al. She'd certainly laugh over that in case you have forgotten. Well, thought Edna, still in breathless, happy excitement, I'll write Al right off and tell him that I haven't. I'll tell him about Pearl and Shub and about Paul and the children. Then something jolted her. She looked down at the letter. Yes. Oh dear. Al had forgotten to give her any address. Just Los Angeles, and that was a big city. Her excitement suddenly dropped. How could he have forgotten? He'd never know now how much his letter had meant to her, and that she remembered everything, but was glad about Nelly and wanted to meet her. If they ever come to Blue Island Oh, why did he forget? She thought doubtfully, I hope I might reach him through the railroad, but she wasn't sure. And then she drew a long breath and wondered if Al could have done it on purpose. He wanted to write. He wanted to remind her, but she thought of Al's reticent makeup. She thought of Nelly and Paul. Was she only being foolish when she sensed vaguely behind that omitted address a certain shy delicacy that distinguished between romance and reality, that preferred to keep the Edna that she had been distinct from the Edna she was. Maybe he didn't want to start anything, she thought. I'd write, and I suppose he'd answer, and I'd write again, and there'd be Nelly and Paul, and Paul would just think I was crazy, and Nelly'd be a wonder if she could understand. I guess I guess it's better if we leave it all in Blue Island in nineteen hundred. She sighed at the thought, but not unhappily, for it was a romantic one, and fell to thinking seriously of Al as he had been, and of herself at twenty. She thought of Paul and traced in order the procession of the years. It brought her girlhood nearer. Of late, Edna Jones seemed too far removed from Edna Lasser, who was the real Edna. But I'm just the same person, she thought, we're all the same persons, no matter what happens to us. In that reflection, in her shifting world, she found a comfortable stability. It blended too with her simple memories of her father and mother. Al's letter had warmed her heart. It recalled a day when she looked back on it now. Love had been all around her. It had done much to integrate her past and her present, and it occupied her evening, which otherwise would have been lonely, for it was one of the evenings on which Paul stayed out in Lakewood, and just before dinner, she received a telegram that informed her that Jessie was prolonging her visit in Wisconsin, and Junior went to bed early. That's the end of this section, and the book goes on, but in terms of the Eastland disaster, that portion of the story recedes and it gives way to other aspects of the life of Edna and her family and friends. And it truly is a beautifully written story. If you'd like to read the rest, the book is available through the Internet Archive, and copies do turn up on eBay, and I'll tell you in a moment about a particular copy I found. So what did we just hear? Well, hopefully you listened to the previous episode so you got the entire context. But this closing section takes us to the raw aftermath of the Eastland disaster for Edna and her family. Barnes brings us into the practical and emotional work that follows any type of loss. But a tragic, unexpected type of loss brings a lot of different emotions and activities associated with it. There are things like insurance papers, wills, property decisions, arguments that flare up even when everyone is trying to do the right thing, trying to be generous. Edna herself is consumed by mourning, wrapped in black veils and rituals that Paul, her husband, finds out. outdated and embarrassing. Their marriage strains under the weight of grief, class expectations, and the simple fact that they are not moving through the loss at the same pace. Think about that. Then, unexpectedly, a letter arrives from a guy that Edna once knew in Blue Island where she is from. It's a small bridge back to the person that she was before marriage, before tragedy, before all of this. The letter rekindles a memory of herself that still exists underneath the roles that she has taken on. There's no return address, so she can't answer it. And yet the letter does its work. It connects this present moment to a former life just enough to carry her through a very lonely evening. That is part of what makes Margaret Eyre Barnes such a remarkable writer to spend time with. Even in fiction she gives us the emotional connective tissue of catastrophe, what it feels like inside a family trying to grieve, settle in a state, and figure out who they are afterward. She understood that disasters do not end when the newspapers move on a personal note I was thrilled to find an autographed copy of Edna, his wife, signed by Barnes herself, yeah. Holding that book while reading her words felt like a small piece of cultural memory in my hands. And I also felt very connected to Barnes herself, one writer to the other. And yet for decades Barnes' contribution to the Eastland story was overlooked. I can't see where it was picked up after 1938 or so. The fact that a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist wove this tragedy into the fabric of American life with care and precision. And yet her work faded from the conversation not because it wasn't interesting, but because well the research research is slow and it's not glamorous. The deep digging that was happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s around the Eastland disaster gradually gave way to repetition branding and the same handful of stories told repeatedly as if all of the stories of people of the Eastland disaster could be contained in just a handful of stories. They could not when you only explore the surface of a historical event you lose the depth you lose the heart and you lose the messiness too and the complexities and that is the human condition. Research does require love not the sentimental love but love for history for heritage for people for process and for the long game. When you realize what you're doing today is going to affect someone else's life maybe 50, 100 years from now, you want to be careful you don't want to hoard you don't want to remove essential information. You want to follow the one thread until it leads to another and I'll admit having done this work for over two years now myself understanding it takes a while sometimes months sometimes years. And breakthroughs well I actually have been very lucky with finding a lot of wonderful undertold or untold stories but also a lot of breakthroughs they're not always this sudden. They arrive after persistence, after diligence and after a mindset that says look, I care about you. I want to make sure that your stories are told and the only way to counter careless history is with good practices, documentation, transparency, but it is meaningful work. When the past and the present and the future can be connected through telling a story that's incredible. When the motivation is remembrance I've seen it with other genealogists and historians the work gives way to additional work and research. And that brings me to something else something that genealogist Hank Z. Jones has often said the dead want to be found. They do. Many of us who do genealogy or history have experienced that firsthand. Many are reluctant to talk about it but fortunately enough people do talk about it and it isn't so much a belief as it is a lived reality a lived experience. For example discovering my family's connection to the Eastland disaster in the late 1990s literally changed the course of my life it opened a door that I couldn't close. And after I got a little more comfortable with it a little more familiar with how it worked I would never want to close that door this work is a privilege. We're the caretakers and these people of the past are the very ones who made our existence possible honoring them is not a burden. It's an inheritance and also I want to say that genealogy is the connective tissue between past and present. It empowers us by reminding us that those who came before us also faced unfairness, uncertainty, hardship, cruelty and unfinished endings their power, their strength can become part of our own lives now finding not just the book Edna His Wife by Margaret Eyre Barnes, but finding an autographed copy of the book that was really amazing. It felt in its own weird way, like an affirmation of that idea. Who knows how long it sat on someone's shelf before making its way into my hands that book has its own history its own journey and now it continues forward again. We are also living through history right now. As I said I live in Minnesota and let me tell you living through history is very different than reading about something that happened 110 years ago. When you're inside it you only see your portion of the landscape even with social media and everything else that we have nowadays it still takes a while to comprehend what's going on and perspective for all of us will come later. Frameworks will come later but what we can do now and in the future is document faithfully and tell the many stories with care. This is part of our heritage whether we want it or not such as the Eastland disaster was for my family. Yes, in my own family a simple ticket exchange in the summer of 1915 changed the course of everyone's life my grandmother gave her Western electric picnic tickets to her younger sister at the last minute because she wasn't feeling well. Her nineteen year old sister boarded the Eastland and did not return. And because of that ticket exchange I'm here telling you this story those who come after us will inherit not only our DNA but our narratives storytellers hold enormous power in families so tell the story faithfully document it thoroughly and pass it intact. So for now this is where we will close and if I uncover more literature connected to the Eastland you know I'm going to share it with you. But next week we'll return to individuals whose names have never appeared in any retellings but who were part of the Eastland disaster story. And I was also given a research challenge around that recently and I'm happy to say I was able to meet it. Whew that always frightens me but I love a challenge so send them my way I'll see if I can find your person or persons and you'll hear about that as well. So in the meantime do take care of yourselves and this is not just a nice little closing I mean a take care of yourselves and check in on one another. Goodbye for now and I'll talk to you next week that's it for this episode and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes and for more information please go to my website that's wwwflowerintheriver.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover because I still owe people money and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now

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Natalie Zett

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