Every year since November 11, 1918, in a house on New Orleans's Esplanade Avenue, Yvonne St. Amant lights a candle for her husband, lost in the Great War. Then on this same day in 1933, a young woman brings a baby to Yvonne's door before shortly disappearing. The baby, nicknamed Bing, grows into a thoughtful, precocious woman whose life intertwines with many of the biggest events of the twentieth century: World War II, an outbreak of polio that leaves...