A Star for Mrs. Blake (25 page)

“I don’t see why anyone would
want
to fight a war.”

“Because our generation can do it better,” Hammond answered without hesitation. “And the signs are that it will happen again. There are four million unemployed in Germany right now, and by all accounts the republic is heading into a bank failure—meanwhile, the Nazi Party keeps creeping up in the vote. Europe is ripe for fascism; no matter what the isolationists say, the U.S. Army has to be ready. You understand—you’re just like me. Strong moral fiber—”

“Gosh, what a compliment!”

“Come on, I bet you wouldn’t ask anyone to do what you wouldn’t do, right?”

“Like what?”

Hammond considered the question. “What’s the worst thing you ever had to do as a nurse?”

“I’d say walking into a tenement where a family of seven was living in one room, all with active tuberculosis, two corpses in the middle of piles of trash, one of them a six-month-old baby.”

“But you stayed and treated them.”

“I stayed and treated them. But that wasn’t the worst—”

In his enthusiasm Hammond cut her off: “You see, that’s why if you believe in democracy, you have to fight for it. More than that, my father always said, it’s the responsibility of the more educated to be leaders of men. I mean this”—he gestured around the bus bumping along with its cargo of pilgrims—“this is a sacred honor. But it’s also an opportunity to prove that I can get it done—whatever’s needed. Ask me, I’ll do it. That’s the stuff that makes an officer, you get it? We leave on time, we arrive on time. We make every stop on the schedule. I will see to the comfort and safety of these ladies with the same commitment”—his fingers curled into a fist—“as you would leading troops on a march. That’s what I mean by covering your ass.”

Hammond was almost breathless when he finished and the color was high in his cheeks. His hair was all glossy black tufts from the number of times he’d exasperatedly run his fingers through it, struggling to explain.

“And I suppose I can’t help thinking, given the way the world is going, it could turn out that one day some bright young lieutenant right out of West Point might be accompanying my own mother.” His voice shook slightly. “On this same pilgrimage.”

Lily’s smile was filled with light and pity. How much she wanted to protect him then. “Okay, Thomas, you’ve convinced me,” she said. “I’ll put it in that I didn’t give them the pills,
sheesh
!”

“You’re welcome,” Hammond said, and they went back to their reports, unaware that in the rows behind them, morale was fracturing among the troops.

Bobbie was reading
Le Figaro
, Cora beside her in the window seat with the tartan travel bag on her lap like a comforting pet. She’d put the Willa Cather novel away in order to study the farmland. It was different from Maine’s. Hugely open, not bounded by wood lots. They made hay into round jelly rolls here, not square bales. They had bone-white cows. You didn’t see a soul, maybe a lone bicyclist, and Cora imagined that unlike Big Ole Uncle Percy clawing between clotheslines of perpetually damp laundry for a drunken pee off the rocks, French country life was as spick-and-span as the brick-lined streets of their perfect little towns.

Across the aisle, Minnie and Katie were arguing over how to cook a chicken.

“First you fry the bacon—” Katie was saying.

“For boiled chicken, are you crazy? A little water, a carrot maybe for color,” Minnie said. “Unless you don’t have such a good bird,” she sniffed.

“Don’t make no difference,” Katie replied tartly. “Any chicken will improve itself when it’s stewed with bacon and a good cup of Guinness.”

“I always cook my chicken naked,” Minnie declared.

Wilhelmina, sitting alone, turned in her seat, alarmed. “Don’t you wear an apron?”

Nobody reacted. They were used to Wilhelmina’s eccentric view of things. Bobbie put her newspaper down and joined in.

“My son, Henry, loved my orange tea cake. When he was in medical school, I sent it to him every week.”

Bobbie’s intrusion brought the argument to a halt. Immediately the debaters dropped their positions and realigned—Katie and Minnie, with occasionally Wilhelmina dragged along, against Bobbie and Cora—a split in loyalties that had been widening since those two had gone off on their own in Paris.

“Whose cake was it again?” Katie asked.

“My aunt’s recipe. Who knows where it came from?”

“Probably the help,” Katie said, and Minnie nodded.

Cora gave up her view through the window and leaned toward the discussion. “What’s the difference where the recipe came from as long as the darn cake got to France?”

“If Mrs. McConnell is going to make Mrs. Olsen’s orange tea cake,” Wilhelmina explained patiently, “she will need the recipe.”

“Mrs. Olsen didn’t make the cake,” Katie corrected her. “I guarantee. Her kitchen maid made the cake. That’s the heart of the matter.”

“Not everybody has to be a baker,” Cora said.

Bobbie laid a hand on hers. “Let it go, dear.”

“Sure, if it doesn’t please ya, drop it,” Katie said.

“You’ve got that right, Mrs. McConnell,” Bobbie said, switching to the vernacular with an edge. “I did not
whip up
that cake. But Henry loved it anyway. Does that clear the air?”

“Not entirely, if you want to know the truth.”

“What are you up to, Katie?” Cora asked. “I thought we all were friends.”

“Until you two go gallivanting off.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday. While the rest of us were at the Arc of Triumph, along with the French mothers. They put on a very pretty ceremony, but you took it upon yourselves to skip it.”

At the memory of her walk in the Luxembourg Gardens with Griffin Reed, Cora’s face reddened. At the time she’d forgotten all about the ceremony, an explanation that hardly mattered now.

“I … was just too tired,” she said lamely.

“And then her ladyship arrives late, like the queen of England.”

“We were embarrassed on behalf of America,” Minnie quietly agreed.

“They’re nutso,” Wilhelmina told Cora. “Don’t listen to them.”

Bobbie pinched the inside of her wrists in order to distract herself from making a rude remark, a skill she’d been taught in boarding school.

“Mrs. McConnell, you’re going way too far. I know you lost two boys, and I’m very sorry if it makes things harder for you—”

“That has nothing to do with it! We’re here to bring honor to each and every soldier,” Katie went on. “Not to go traipsing about on our own whenever we like. The rest of us ordinary types were there.”

Cora took a breath. All the way to the back of the bus, the forty or so other pilgrims were chatting contentedly, and up front, Hammond was unpacking his banjo. They were due for a rest stop any minute. She sensed that one quick move could snap Party A back into place like a dislocated shoulder. It would require the same manipulation she used when her three nieces started to argue and fuss: put the enemies together.

She stood up and stepped over Bobbie.

“Let’s switch seats,” she said to Minnie, standing over her in the aisle. “You go next to Mrs. Olsen and I’ll sit with Mrs. McConnell and then nobody will feel left out.”

“What about me?” Wilhelmina asked.

“Shhh!” hissed Bobbie, at her wit’s end. “Listen to the song!”

Lieutenant Hammond was strolling down the aisle, playing show tunes to appreciative smiles. In the flurry of confusion, Cora was able to get Minnie to switch seats, which set the thing at rest for the moment. The pilgrims from other parties were already singing along with the lighthearted lyrics:
“Sweetheart, sweetheart, will you love me forever? Will you remember the day? When we were happy in May?”
as if to erase the language that had rent their hearts:
“Killed in battle.” “On detail and later found dead.”
But the dark days were done. It was all sorted. What the army had destroyed it had now put in order, in neat
rows in a field of honor. Soon they would be with their sons. Until then they could rest at ease in each other’s company and the headlong forward motion of the bus.

As they drove through the village of Meaux, the sun came out, warming a layer of rippled clouds. They passed the little town of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where every window had a lace curtain, and made the Montmirail rest stop at exactly 10:00 a.m., arriving at the city of Chalons-sur-Marne at 1:00 p.m. for a luncheon of
consommé à la royale
, olives, salted almonds and celery, potatoes Brabant, Brussels sprouts, supreme of chicken, mushrooms à la Sabine, Canton sherbet, Parisian sweets, crackers, cheese, and café noir, in the dining room of a large white hotel with cheerful striped canopies over the windows.

Not surprisingly, most of the pilgrims dozed through the rest of the trip, but Cora was alert, as if a tiny motor had been triggered inside, wound up with a key like a mantelpiece clock. It was thinking about Griffin Reed. He’d started something and now it was going all by itself. She noticed that the landscape was changing again. Red poppies were showing up in the weeds. The fields were wheat-colored and flat, the way Cora imagined California to be—a blank landscape with an ocean out there somewhere. The way Reed had talked about his hometown, it was sunny all the time and everyone had an orange tree and lived in the desert, where they were scalded into madness by their own greed, which made California sound like a Bible tale with a moral no one could explain. His father had passed on, but his mother still lived on the ranch where he’d grown up, in what they called the Central Valley, possibly another scriptural reference. Reed hadn’t been back since before the war. The last his mother knew, he was working for an American newspaper living the expat life in the lively cafés of Paris—happy, and doing exactly what he loved.

It was almost uncanny how well they’d gotten along. They talked—well, she talked and he took notes—all the way back to the hotel. When he spoke it was like a gentleman, in a measured voice, in long effortless streams of thought that she found mesmerizingly close to the manner of her professors at college, who had made her feel eager and bright, worthy of their interest. How did Griffin see her?
Was she more than an ordinary person trying to raise three girls and make ends meet? Was she actually, in some way, up to his standard? Equal to Florence Dean Powell?

He did leave Florence’s house to follow her. There must have been a reason. Was it only to get her story and get his career back on track? He liked Cora’s plainspokenness, she could tell. Didn’t he say that she could “cut to the bone”? Maybe he was tired of Florence’s demands. Anyone would be. She was by far the vainest woman Cora had ever met, looking into every mirror she passed—and there were several big heavy mirrors in that house, which Griffin avoided. You could see they made him squirm, so why not take them down? Because she’d saved his life—and wanted him never to forget. Cora had the terrifying idea of pushing Florence down the stairs!

To calm herself, she thought of Linwood. Good, reliable Linwood. Linwood didn’t bother with things he couldn’t touch or see. He was content. He enjoyed the regularity of his working days, filling in the colored areas on his maps. He was the kind of person you’d ask to join a card game—easy to talk to at a church supper or social affair. Big and reliable. Not thin and driven, like Griffin Reed, with that strange magnetism, a languorous mix of sadness and desire. That was it about Reed, she thought, summoning up what she remembered from a long-ago class in English poetry—he was a romantic. Linwood was a pragmatist. He’d spent an entire summer building a wooden tower in the middle of the forest, just for the doing of it, so he could haul himself up there once in a blue moon and look over the tops of the trees. What a waste of wood! But that’s what some men do, she thought: they spend a lot of time and effort in the hope of getting above themselves.

“Ladies!” Hammond announced with a flourish of banjo chords. “We will arrive at our destination in exactly fifteen minutes!”

The peasants walking beside the road sensed the bus behind them. Maybe it was the female chorus of “Over There” coming through the open windows that alerted them, because from the way they stumbled
indecisively in their late afternoon march back from the vineyards, they seemed to have heard the English words before and knew their meaning.
“The Yanks are coming, / The drums rum-tumming everywhere …”
The men stopped and removed their caps. The boys pulled handfuls of Queen Anne’s lace from the weeds, tossing them at the bus flashing by, cheering as they hit. The adults stood at attention.
“We’re coming over, / And we won’t come back till it’s over over there!”
The flowers blew back in a wash of rubber-scented air. The animated faces of the American women and those of the solemn, weather-beaten men met, eclipsed, and passed.

Inside the bus, the banjo music carried them with a feeling of triumph to St. Paul’s Gate, a massive stone archway topped with battlements that looked like a piece broken off a castle. It marked the official entrance to the city of Verdun. But the anticipation of arriving at a charming river town lasted only as long as it took to sweep beneath the arch. Instantly they were inside a war zone, hardly changed since the battle of 1916. The raw, unreconstructed ruins of the city were a shock that broke off the young lieutenant’s song and made the busload of women gasp audibly.

Monumental walls of salmon-colored limestone blocks were all that remained on a street of bombarded buildings, standing in a row like gargantuan books of stone with the pages ripped from their spines, the knowledge they once held in wasted rubble at their feet. There were some cheap newer structures in the German style, half-timbered with brown tile roofs that stood out in the damage like bandages on a wound. The buses made their way down to a residential section near the river that had largely been spared, except for perilous cracks in some of the steeply pitched roofs. The medium-sized Hôtel Nouvel, where they were staying, had survived intact on a brick-laid street of three-story row houses with frayed shutters. Destruction was so widespread that the undamaged buildings looked out of place, as if they were really stone façades behind which the rooms would be exposed to the sky, skeletal and abandoned.