A Star for Mrs. Blake (17 page)

Cora looked up from her cards, sensing someone coming toward them in the Tropicale Day Room. It was Nurse Lily, looking fresh as ever, unfazed by having had just a few hours’ sleep owing to the porthole affair.

“There you are, Mrs. Blake! I’ve been looking for you. Sorry, but I need a favor. Mrs. Olsen is in her cabin, still not feeling well at all. I’ve given her bicarbonate of soda, but it hasn’t done any good. She wanted to try your clam-water cure. Would you mind?”

“Of course not,” Cora said, rising.

“Now what?” Katie mourned. “We need another hand.”

“Join us, Lieutenant,” Hammond said with a significant smile imploring,
Help me!
Lily was uncertain where her duties lay: in the cabin with Mrs. Olsen or shoring up the others? Cora made the decision for her.

“You stay,” she said. “I’ll take care of Bobbie.”

“Okay,” said Lily, taking her seat. “But watch out, everyone. Gin rummy is my game.”

…

Mrs. Olsen’s cabin turned out to be what the cruise line called a “deluxe apartment,” consisting of a dining room, salon, multiple bedrooms, private decks, and a baby grand piano. Cora was guided by Mrs. Olsen’s personal maid—French, in uniform—through chambers with molded ceilings and wallpapers in exotic patterns, rich carpeting upon which dainty furniture rested delicate birdlike claws, chaise longues every few feet in case you needed to lie down before you got to the bedroom. The suite was done in mauve, sensual and silky as in a Greta Garbo movie, and there were pots of orchids all around. Bobbie Olsen was lying on a dark hardwood bed made up with the pink crêpe de chine lace-trimmed sheets with which she always traveled. She wore a Japanese silk dressing gown and a turban because her hair was undone. Half-finished sketches of the orchids had been torn from her notebook and abandoned on the coverlet.

The room had been personalized with silver-framed photographs of her son, Henry Olsen, M.D., from a naked baby on a bear rug to a young man in a white coat, holding a black bag. There must have been a dozen pictures with nobody else in them, just Henry. He was a serious, good-looking chap with a calm, aristocratic bearing and a thin mustache. The maid resumed her task of inserting stretchers in her lady’s shoes and placing them in rows.

“I’m sorry to make you come all the way up here, but I’m really feeling like a dog,” Bobbie said. “I can’t even draw. The room is spinning and my stomach is having fits. You said clam water—and you know, I really believe in those island remedies. There are some very dear people who are caretakers at Gilley House, and they’ve come up with cures that have saved our lives more than once. So tell me, Cora, how do we get some clam water?”

“First you have to have clams—”

Bobbie interrupted her: “Instruct Ingrid, and she’ll tell the cook. Be precise, because judging from the food last night, he doesn’t know his ass from a fry pan.”

“He’s going to take a dozen clams,” Cora told the maid. “Scrub
them and rinse several times. Then he puts them in a pot with
two tablespoons
of water. No more—we don’t want soup.”

The maid nodded. “No soup.”

“You cook them until the shells open, take out the meat, add the liquor to the water already in the pan, and strain it through cheesecloth twice.”

“Thank you!” Bobbie sighed when the maid had left, repositioning a hot water bottle on her abdomen. “Surely, if you were home, you wouldn’t throw out all that good clam meat?”

“No, ma’am,” said Cora. “There’s a hundred ways to use it.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“Chowder.”

“Are times very hard in your town? Sit down,” she said, indicating a tufted chair.

“All in all it hasn’t been that bad. I wouldn’t want to go over the same route again, but I’m not going to kick. I’m thankful we had a little bit to get along with. The kids never went hungry. They never had holes in their clothes. You know what they say—we’re not poor, we just never had money.”

“What about your husband?”

Bobbie was reclining on the soft pink sheets. Her eggshell-white skin was exposed in all its wrinkled glory, and her bright blue eyes were alert. She hid nothing, she pretended nothing. She was a cultured, very wealthy person and that was that.

Cora wished she could be as honest. She was tempted to confess it all to this benevolent dowager—what it was like to raise a child alone in an isolated New England town—but got cold feet and retreated to the safety of the story that she’d always told.

“My husband died,” she said quickly. “What about yours?”

“The same. I pretty much raised Henry myself. Do you have other children?”

“No, just Sammy. My boy, who I lost. My sister, Avis, died from cholera and I’m raising her girls.”

“Are they good girls? Do they help?”

“I try to bring them up to take care of themselves. They’re
learning. Slowly. When I’m working at the library it’s their job to have the garden stuff pulled. They’re supposed to at least have the vegetables ready, but it doesn’t always happen. It’s not like when I was young. If we didn’t toe the line, we’d know the consequences. Honestly, the problem is, their mother—my sister—passed away too young.”

“Do you wish you had more of your own?”

“I wish I had my own little girl.”

“I lost a little girl when she was two. She passed in my arms. But my son was lost a million miles from nowhere; I never saw his face or hugged him again.”

Cora nodded. “All they sent were Sammy’s clothes.”

“There’s not a day that goes by I don’t feel guilt.”

“You shouldn’t,” Cora said, although she, too, lived with remorse every day. If she hadn’t been so hardheaded to think she could raise a boy alone … if Sammy’d had a father … maybe he wouldn’t have left home and everything would be different.

“Well,” said Bobbie, “when we get there, I expect to feel a great relief.”

“I hardly know what to expect,” Cora said. There was a knock on the door and a waiter entered, carrying a tray on his shoulder that held a steaming tureen. When it was uncovered, the scent of salt and seaweed filled the room. He ladled it out with a ridiculous flourish and withdrew. It’s only broth, Cora thought.

Bobbie took a spoonful. “This is surprisingly good. Would you like some? You look a bit peaked.”

“We had a rough night,” Cora confessed, and then she told Bobbie about Wilhelmina’s bad dream, and how she couldn’t wake her from it.

“Did you tell the nurse?”

“I didn’t think it was my place,” Cora said.

“If it happens again, you should. For Wilhelmina’s benefit
and
for yours. There’s no reason to put up with that; you need your strength. Look, why don’t you stay with me? It would be no trouble. I have more bedrooms here than God.”

Cora didn’t figure she could fall asleep in such a grand palace. She preferred her cozy bunk.

“That’s all right. We’ll be fine.”

Bobbie let it drop, realizing the invitation had been inappropriate. “Thank you for the soup.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yes, you know? I am!”

“Maybe you should take a nap.”

“I never nap,” said Bobbie briskly. “It only makes me tired. If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get changed.”

Bright sun hit their eyes as Cora and Bobbie walked along the main deck, where rows of lounge chairs were taken by women in every manner of dress, reading books or chatting with their neighbors, others strolling by in groups of two and three. A cloudless, sapphire sky made a sparkling backdrop for the tableau, so placid compared to the chaos of boarding the ship; everything sorted, everyone content in this artificially female world, where there was no competition for attention by children or men, and many mothers, wives, caretakers, and workers could attend to themselves for the first time in their lives, happily unburdened and alone.

But Cora’s view was darkened by the scene last night. She wondered if these tranquil pilgrims were beset with demons as frightening as Wilhelmina’s had been; if they were crouching down inside everyone, including Cora. She hadn’t seen her roommate since this morning, as she didn’t come to breakfast, and considered whether it might be best to go down to the cabin and check. Her questions were answered when they came around the bow.

There, amid the lifeboats, a group of people were playing golf. It was just a tee-off, really, from a square of carpet on the deck. Six passengers or so were standing around, relaxed, fiddling with their drivers, a few men dressed in ties and caps, two women in ankle-length skirts, one of them Wilhelmina. It was her turn to hit the ball. She placed it, eyed it, became very still, disregarded the wavy hair streaming
across her face, then executed a graceful swing, releasing enormous power with perfect timing as she struck the ball cleanly, sailing it into the air and over the side in a beautiful arc. Everyone applauded the shot. When she saw that Cora and Bobbie had been watching, she smiled and gave a cheerful wave. It was, after all, a bright and sunny day.

One by one the women of Party A squeezed into the
thomp-thomp
of the revolving door of the Ambassador Hotel, clutching their handbags as if it would eat them alive. Spit out right into the middle of busy Boulevard Haussmann on their first day in Paris, they quickly became panic-stricken. Massive buildings eight stories high, with strange Egyptian motifs and Greek pillars, stretched on for miles, while traffic barreled in both directions; no one spoke English and everyone else sounded as if they were gargling mouthwash. They huddled together on the sidewalk like puppies who were hoping somebody would round them up and put them back in the basket.

If their gauche assortment of ready-made dresses, unfortunate hats, and lace-up shoes didn’t mark them as American, the white satin sashes across their chests that read
GOLD STAR MOTHER
surely would. Out of nowhere, a middle-aged, well-tailored Frenchwoman sprung forward, gripping Katie’s hand in both of hers and murmuring incomprehensibly before shaking her head in some kind of distress and hurrying on.

“What did she say?”

Bobbie translated: “She’s thanking us for our service to France.”

Katie blinked back tears. “Jesus Mary.”

After that, the little entourage marshaled its pluck and began to walk together, four across, no longer worried about their small-town airs in this headstrong city. The exception was Bobbie Olsen, on her own, erect and commanding, wearing that day an oatmeal-colored linen suit and carrying a bag made of alligator skins, as smart as anything on two high heels tearing up the dirt to get to the stores at Galeries Lafayette. She knew how to
faire une balade
—saunter along,
taking everything in: the café smells of cigarettes and coffee and beginnings of a chicken stew, or a peculiar three-sided clock high up on a pole so it could officiate over all sides of an intersection. You got the impression that Bobbie Olsen presided over every boulevard on which she strolled.

“Everyone says he was a genius,” Hammond was confiding to Lily, “but personally, I can’t stand these big avenues by Haussmann.”

“Why? They’re just streets.”

She paused to adjust her army beret in a shopwindow. It was part of the nurses’ travel outfit, which included a white poplin dress covered by a long navy cape. Hammond wore olive drabs, and although the ladies were dressed in ordinary clothes, the sashes across their chests made the group unmistakable, especially since the tours had been widely covered by the French press. In their excitement and awe, the pilgrims scarcely noticed that people were stepping aside to allow them to pass.

Hammond watched Lily in the window, noticing what a striking figure she made in the white uniform and cape, the epitome of American pride, and that together they were a natural pair, even though she was entirely different from the girls he’d dated in Washington—either high-strung debutantes with whom you had to tread as carefully as steps in a French quadrille, or hard club women as competitive as men. He’d experienced true love only once during his teenage years, and that was with Carlota Rio Branco, petite, with Gypsy-dark hair, the eldest daughter of the Brazilian ambassador, who was stationed at the embassy office in the Wardman hotel.

Carlota was exotic. She claimed to have noble Spanish blood and could act as spoiled as the rest, but the freshness of the country girl was still in her, and she loved to break the rules. They conspired to get both families to spend a weekend at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, where they snuck away one night and lost their virginity together on the golf course under a crescent moon. He gave her a paper cigar ring. They were just seventeen when they were cruelly pulled apart by suspecting parents, and Carlota was sent back with her mother to Brazil. She was devastated when Hammond refused to fight
it. At seventeen, people married in her country. But he followed his ambitions, withstood the deluge from all sides, and applied to West Point. In retrospect, he’d let Carlota go too easily. He’d never met anyone as solid and soft at the same time—until Second Lieutenant Lily Barnett. Like Carlota, she was a girl who knew what she wanted, and was as temptingly off-limits as the ambassador’s daughter.