A Star for Mrs. Blake (16 page)

Hearing this, Hammond cast a panicked look at Lily, but she was chatting with Minnie about the effectiveness of castor oil for digestive problems. He hoped that Cora Blake could live with Mrs. Russell’s idiosyncrasies. It was too late for him and Lily to admit they’d known all along she was a mental case. His military history professor had been fond of quoting Julius Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon:
“Iacta alea est”
—The die is cast.

The first thing you saw when you entered Cora and Wilhelmina’s first-class cabin were the sunflowers. They smiled at you from a silver vase on a round table covered by a linen cloth, which was set beside an armchair. Two beds on either side of the room were made up in baby-blue blankets topped by throws of white rabbit fur. On one wall between them was a sink with glass shelving, on the other a dressing table with a mirror and space for hanging dresses. There was a water closet and shower behind a hidden door. The walls and headboards were covered with continuous gray felt, which rendered the room soundless. It was cleverly lit by recessed lamps that sent pools of light just where you’d want them. The only way you knew you were on a ship and not in a luxury hotel were the chrome rails around everything and two imposing steel portholes with no-nonsense bolts, but even they could be eliminated by a pull on a pair of maroon drapes.

They divvied up the shelves and drawers and made small talk as they prepared for bed, undressing by turn in the narrow WC. Wilhelmina tied a scarf around her fading blond hair and massaged her face with cream. Cora used soap and toweled off quickly.

“It’s too bad that you never got my letters,” Cora said.

“It’s not your fault. In the hospital you don’t always get your mail.”

“Oh, were you sick?”

“On and off,” Wilhelmina said. She spooned some powder from a jar into a glass of water and it fizzed. “Nervous headache,” she explained.

“Would it be better if we turned out the lights?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The smooth, fresh sheets felt wonderful after the long march
down the pier to the ship and the excitement of boarding. They each touched a switch near their bed and found themselves floating in heavy darkness.

After a moment Cora said, “What do you do down in Prouts Neck?”

“Work on my tennis game. We live at the country club.”

“I didn’t know people could live there.”

“My husband designed and built it, so they gave him a cottage. He’s an architect, you see. He owns a firm in Boston. We met on the tennis courts at the club. He’s not a player, but I was there one day with my dad, who was the caretaker, and they’d just finished building brand-new clay courts. We couldn’t resist. I was hitting with my brother when Warren—who I had no idea would be my future husband—came storming out and ordered us to get off. Then he saw I was a pretty good player and sat down to watch. I was sixteen, he was twenty-four. We were both prodigies in our fields.”

Her voice in the dark was strangely muffled in the soundproofed room.

“I always had athletic talent. I could have played any sport, but my father decided on tennis. He trained me from the time I was eight. He’d put a quarter down on the court and I had to keep practicing until I hit it three times in a row. I won everything. I was state champion.”

“Really?”

“Nineteen sixteen. Then they canceled all the tournaments because of the war.”

“What about after the war?”

Hesitant silence.

“I didn’t go back.”

Cora said, “When Sammy died I couldn’t do anything for months. I didn’t even have the strength to read—and I’m a librarian.”

“I still play sometimes,” Wilhelmina reflected. “My father said the trouble with my game was that I was too strong. He said I played like a man and should rely more on strategy and finesse. I only had one way, and that was power.”

“Why did you stop playing?”

“I was having spells. The doctor said that tennis made it worse.”

“Isn’t that too bad?”

“I still play,” Wilhelmina repeated, her voice growing tired. “When I’m well enough.”

Cora waited but there seemed no more to say. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Except there were the sunflowers. The flowers in the vase seemed to glow in the dark. That’s because they always grow in sun, Wilhelmina thought, like the hot sun on the tennis court. They had big yellow faces on tall thin stalks. Taller than Bradley. Bradley, her middle child, was strong and took to the sport. She dressed him in miniature whites with the yellow and green stripes of the club. He’d climb up on the referee stand and watch her hit. He’d go into the sunflowers and retrieve the balls.

The last time she saw him was in the hospital when he’d come to say goodbye before shipping out. He had been wearing his fresh olive uniform with the stand-up collar and epaulets. Wilhelmina admired the brass buttons, fingering them until he pulled away. He knew the place well. He knew the sunroom with its row of wicker rocking chairs and barred windows, everything painted harsh industrial white. By the time he was a teenager, Bradley had seen his mother in and out of the asylum several times. It was a wrenching and unfathomable experience, because she could also be the most nurturing, attentive mother in the world, and then go out on the tennis court and be brilliant. He expected that she wouldn’t understand where he was going, about the war, but Wilhelmina was in one of her cogent states and knew from reading the newspaper what the Allies faced on the Western Front. Still, she was optimistic and promised she’d be out by the time he came home.

“When your father is bored with his hussy,” she’d said.

She hadn’t meant to, and regretted it immediately. She’d known for years that Warren was taking advantage of her hospital stays in order to chase women. She imagined he’d seduce them with tales of loneliness and the hint of marriage to an up-and-coming architect if
his wife, sadly, had to be committed for life. Somehow Wilhelmina had managed each time to climb out of the episodes of depression that flattened her, just in time to send her husband’s latest paramour scurrying back under her rock, but the back-and-forth bouts of illness, infidelity, and recovery made her relationship with Warren a wretched parody of the game she excelled at on the court.

It was a competition she couldn’t win. Repeated hospitalizations hammered at her vitality: there was the fever cure, where they exposed her to mosquitoes carrying malaria to induce infection that would purge the body; sleep therapy, which allowed the nervous system to recover by keeping the patient drugged for a week; hypothermia, whereby the body temperature was lowered almost to death by wrapping her in refrigerated blankets, with minimum nutrition supplied through a stomach tube. She could have endured everything but the look on her boy’s face just then. He hadn’t known about the affairs.

“What do you mean?” Bradley’s cheeks were flaming. “Is Father cheating on you?”

“Never mind,” she’d said, fumbling stupidly. “No. Not at all. It’s the medicine. It makes me say things I don’t mean. Your father would never—”

“Tell me,” he demanded. “I’m going overseas, so tell me now.”

“I hid it from you,” Wilhelmina confessed. “You, as well as the girls. I didn’t want my children to lose respect for their father.”

“You think we didn’t know something was wrong around here?”

“It’s because I was sick.”

“Sometimes you did have to go away, but then you came back and you were our mother. You still loved us but he always cared about his rich customers and his big firm in Boston. And his chippies, obviously.”

“I’m not going to say don’t be too hard on him, because he’s been a cad.”

“At least you’re honest about it now.”

“Don’t tell the girls.”

“Oh, Mother—they’re not babies.”

“Wait. Just wait until I’m out of here and they don’t have to worry—”

“Do you want to go home?” Bradley asked, tight-jawed. “Because I’ll get you out right now—”

“No, it’s better for me here,” she’d said desperately.

“But why? You’re—you’re perfectly normal. He’s the one who’s got a sick mind. How could he have you committed? I don’t understand.”

“Your father was worried because I wasn’t doing the housework.”

“So what? That’s why we have maids.”

“Yes, well, not fulfilling my wifely duties. It’s not fair to him.”

“How can he get away with that?” her son said, anguished.

“He’s allowed to. It’s the law.”

Bradley went down on his knees in front of her and took both her hands.

“I love you. It’s not fair what he’s done.”

“Oh, my sweetheart.” She caressed his hair. “You go on and live your life.”

“When I get back I’ll get you out of here. You’re not really sick and you never have been, have you?” He saw her unwillingness to answer, even now. “Mother, I’m going to war. Tell me the truth.”

The word
war
made her sick to her stomach. Now she was afraid not to tell him.

“Your father wasn’t wrong, Bradley. When you were born I had a nervous spell so bad I burned my tennis racquets. I was too ill even to take care of you. I’ve regretted it my whole life, that I wasn’t able to hold you … that it was left to Grandma to take care of you and the … girls …”

His mother’s pale eyes were glistening with tears.

“You’re not crazy,” he said, inspecting them. “You’re just very, very sad.”

“Yes. I’m sad about this, and I’m sad that you’re going away.”

“I promise,” Bradley said, squeezing her hands. “I’ll take care of you.”

Then came the awful news that he had been killed in France by a high-explosive shell. Wilhelmina had a complete nervous breakdown. After a lengthy hospital stay, she was able to return home under the care of a full-time nurse.

By 1931, Warren J. Russell was designing libraries and municipal buildings, spending most of his time in Boston. They were still married but leading separate lives. Wilhelmina had good days and bad. A good day was hitting a tennis ball with an old friend at the country club. A bad day was disappearing with the car and getting arrested for shoplifting in another state.

Where once there had been tenderness, despite her husband’s other interests, there had been none since Bradley died—not until the very last moment before she boarded the train in Portland for New York City to join the Gold Star Mothers pilgrimage. Wilhelmina was clear-minded when she had said that she wanted to go to France to see Bradley’s grave, and Warren had been so shocked by the return of her decisiveness that he’d said yes. But when they were finally at the train station, he was less sanguine. He kissed her cheek and fussed over the instructions to the army medical staff, pinning them at the last minute to her sweater—realizing that once she was gone, he would be alone with it. The loss. Suddenly it was dangerous to let her go, into a void that was not of their making but that they had intimately shared all these years. Tears rose in his eyes as the train pulled out. Even in her illness, she had always been here, within reach, and he was befuddled and somewhat frightened that now she was not.

Wilhelmina, on the other hand, was accustomed to the hurt that came along wherever she went, like the white cardigan with the beaded pink carnation she had painstakingly appliquéd in the hospital, one tiny bead at a time.

Their first full day at sea began with fog and high seas as a result of the rough weather they’d encountered the night before. Nobody slept well, and Hammond, who’d been up half the night, now had to document it all in the daily “Liaison Report for Party A,” a detailed record required by the quartermaster general. By 11:00 a.m. the skies had cleared and most of the pilgrims were out on deck taking the sun. The Tropicale Day Room was fairly empty and seemed a good refuge from female voices. It featured bamboo chairs upholstered with palm trees
and a white piano in front of a mural of dark-skinned women selling melons. Hammond lit a cigarette, opened the file, and began to write.

He was interrupted when the very people he had hoped to avoid—Mrs. Seibert and Mrs. McConnell—entered the Tropicale Day Room, accompanied by Mrs. Blake, who was looking unusually haggard. He snuffed the cigarette and closed the file.

“Hello, ladies. Tired of the sun?”

“Will ya play?” Katie asked. “We’re looking for a fourth.”

“What is it?”

“Gin.”

Before he could reply, they’d swamped his table and produced a deck of cards.

“How is everyone?” he asked, resigned. “Sleep well?”

“Finally,” said Katie, shuffling like a professional.

“She snores,” Minnie said.

“So does she,” Katie shot back.

“Mrs. Blake? How was your night?”

“Fine,” Cora said. “Slept like a log.”

She didn’t want to say what had happened to Wilhelmina. That was private, and should not be mentioned over a card game. But in the middle of the night, her roommate had woken up screaming in the claustrophobic dark. It was a sound like nothing Cora had ever heard. Something between the crying of a wolf and the screech of a seabird—a new genus of creature imprisoned in Wilhelmina’s body and clawing to get out. She was sitting up, eyes wide open, murmuring incoherently. Cora tried to get her to lie down, but she was as rigid as a corpse. Then, like the turn of a switch, it stopped. She relaxed and lay back, breathing softly. Cora was so shaken, she sat in the armchair, knees up, hugging her bare feet, while Wilhelmina slept peacefully until dawn.