All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

What he knows is that his father doesn’t like Kirk, and Kirk doesn’t like his father, though you wouldn’t see it if you watched the two of them together, smiling and nodding and clapping each other on the back. His mother doesn’t like Kirk either, but it’s harder for her to hide what she feels. When Louise Heath is in Kirk’s presence, distaste sours her face as though she just bit down on a lemon seed. Kirk refuses to live in just any old mansion. Months go by before he finds one that passes muster. Louise slips a photograph of it into an envelope and sends it to her family in Topeka. “Mr. Kirk’s residence here,” she writes with frank sarcasm, “has only forty rooms.”