A Star for Mrs. Blake (26 page)

The front door to the hotel opened and General Perkins stepped out, startlingly alive against this dreary backdrop. He wore a peaked
hat, riding breeches, and an olive tunic with bars on the chest and gold on the shoulders. His boots and belt were as polished as the tack on a champion dressage horse, and he held himself tall, collected, and alert. All in all, a stallion.

Hammond hurried up the steps and saluted.

“Lieutenant Hammond, sir. Liaison officer of Party A.”

“Fine job, Lieutenant. Right on time.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Everything all right?” he asked. “Nobody sick on the bus?”

“No sir. Everybody’s fine thanks to Nurse Barnett,” he said generously.

Perkins peered down at Lily, who was waiting at the bottom of the stairs to lead their party into the hotel, looking like an innocent out of a modern fairy tale, strawberry-blond curls falling on the shoulders of the navy cape, a pure white dress.

“That nurse must be you,” he said.

“Second Lieutenant Barnett,” she said. “An honor to meet you, sir.”

Since she was not commissioned, she was not required to salute.

“Keep up the good work.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do my best.”

The tired crow’s-feet around the eyes and windswept creases in his cheeks attested to the gravity of his duties. He was a soldier through and through, not a figurehead for show; you knew he’d been in the crux of war, the real bloody, awful thing. It was awe-inspiring and a little bit scary just to be standing close.

“Let’s move this along,” Perkins said.

Hammond stepped to. “Right away, sir.”

As the pilgrims filed into the hotel he stood erect and shook the hand of each and every one, looking into her eyes and asking where she was from and where her son had served. Each loss was his loss. And he meant it.

The hotel owners, a family originally from Germany, had tried to pump some life into the enterprise by transforming it into a pretentious Normandy castle. They’d put in a false beams-and-stucco ceiling
with a heavy iron candelabra. Flickering electric torches cast yellowish figures on the fake stone walls. There was a huge walk-in fireplace with long-handled copper pans hanging off the mantel. Ornate wood-carved chests, heavy as frigates, were tucked into every corner.

“Isn’t this attractive!” Bobbie exclaimed, to head off any accusations of snobbism.

“I’m pleased just to be off that bus,” Katie remarked.

“So am I,” Bobbie agreed, sinking into the closest armchair.

“Are you all right?” Cora asked.

“Just catching my breath.”

“Should I get the nurse?”

“No need. I’m ready for a whiskey,” she said, patting her chest.

The lobby was filling quickly with American women and their luggage as pilgrims streamed off the buses parked in special spots outside. The owner of the hotel was a scowling older man with some kind of a disfiguring disease that had crippled his fingers. He sat in a wheelchair behind the desk, giving orders to his middle-aged son, who wore a beard and a breezy attitude, ignoring his father’s constant harangue. The owner’s wife cowered near the cash drawer, afraid of him, but you could tell she was mean to the penny. Hammond was arguing with the older man in French.

“What’s he saying?” Lily asked.

“He claims to have only four rooms available, although the reservation for Party A clearly states seven,” said Hammond, glancing fearfully at the door. “Perkins will have my nuts.”

“Don’t worry,” Lily replied calmly. “The general is still outside, meeting and greeting.”

“He’s trying to gouge us. You watch, Perkins will come in and miraculously he’ll have seven. ‘But it’ll cost, monsieur—’ ”

“Pooh on that,” Lily said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take the four rooms and double up the mothers. I’ll bunk with Mrs. Russell.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I can handle her,” Lily said.

Hammond felt a rush of gratitude that Lily could be so practical and would have told her so, except at that moment Perkins did enter
the foyer, causing a stir of interest among the women waiting for their rooms.

“Meet you here,” Hammond said in an urgent whisper. “In the lobby. After they’re asleep.”

“Later, alligator,” Lily promised.

Hammond’s eyes rose over her head. “Oh good Lord,” he murmured, as Wilhelmina Russell walked up to him with a wide, vacuous smile, a scarlet parrot perched on her wrist. She looked quite rumpled, as she’d refused to wear anything but the pink blouse she’d had on since New York.

“Isn’t he magnificent?” Wilhelmina said. “He was sitting there in the parlor, all alone.”

“Isn’t it nice you’ve made a friend?”

“Oh, I knew him the moment I saw him. I said, Bradley?”

Hammond peered at the black eye-disks of the parrot, roving around as if looking for the answers to many questions.

“Your son, Bradley?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Russell said. “I’m certain it’s him. But don’t tell anyone, they’ll never believe it.”

“Of course they will,” Hammond assured her kindly.

Finally a maid came to take Cora and Bobbie to their room. The maid offered to help Bobbie out of the chair, but she waved her off.

“Don’t get old,” she advised.

“You’re not old,” Cora said as they left the lobby. “Walter Conary is old. He’s ninety-two and lives in North Deer Isle. He cuts trees off his wood lot and just dug his own well. Imagine that. Digs a well at ninety-two.”

“That’s what you call optimism,” Bobbie said, with a throaty laugh.

The maid guiding them was a stick-thin twig of a girl in a uniform that would have fit a nine-year-old. All three made it into an elevator built for two. Cora wondered if she was part of the wretched family that owned the place, because she kept slavishly tidying up along the way, making sure the linen closet was locked, collecting stray newspapers under her arm, all the time chatting it up with Bobbie in French, as they made their way down an endless corridor to the last room, which had a big metal key in the middle of the door.

It was airless and smelled like someone had left cheese rinds under the beds. The maid checked the towels and tugged at the window. It wouldn’t open. She fussed with it, gave up, and left. There were two single white iron beds covered with cotton lace spreads, a desk and a chair, and a skinny white dressing table with a mirror. The wallpaper had narrow stripes and the carpeting a geometric pattern that repeated itself tediously, not unlike some of their companions, Bobbie thought. When they sat on the beds, the mattresses caved in under them.

“We could transfer to a better hotel,” Bobbie said. “But I wouldn’t want to start a class war. I hope I don’t offend you, too.”

“I don’t get offended. I get mad, but being offended? Not worth the trouble. You’ve been very nice to me from the start, when you first wrote those letters. You were the first person who really understood what I went through. As far as the others—you just have to brush it off.”

“Thank you for saying that, Cora. I’ve always believed in being who I am. When I work with the poor, I make it a point to wear my jewels.
They
are who
they
are; why should I pretend? It only makes everyone uncomfortable.” She lay down on top of the coverlet and the springs squeaked. “I’m too tired to take off my shoes.”

Cora yawned. “When is dinner?”

“Seven-thirty. But you and I are going down for that drink as soon as humanly possible. Did you see that terrible man at the desk?”

“What happened to him?” Cora asked, lying back on a lumpy pillow that smelled of hair oil. “Was it a stroke?”

“They say that man and his wife were collaborators during the war.”

“What do you mean?”

“You realize that we are very close to Germany? Just twenty miles to the border, which is why the Germans and the French have historically fought over this place. Really it was for the coal deposits. They each claimed the land was theirs, all the way back to ancient times. There are a lot of native Germans here; a large German influence. This couple who own the hotel, the Bachmanns, they lived in Verdun and they had a shop. He was a watchmaker.”

“With those hands?”

“Well, that’s
exactly
the story. Verdun was a crucial objective for the Germans. If the Germans took Verdun, it would have had a very dispiriting effect on the French—and England might have just given up the war and gone home. The rumor is the Bachmanns were sending secret information to the German high command.”

“How?”

“They hid a telegraph machine in the back room. It was inside a case that looked like a clock.”

“How do you know?”

“That little maid told me. She doesn’t like her employers, that much is obvious. When the watchmaker was discovered, he was tortured by the French army. To make sure he never did it again, they broke his hands.”

“Is it true?”

“Why not?”

“It makes you sick,” Cora said. “The whole thing. Makes you feel sick to your stomach.”

Bobbie hadn’t moved. She was still wearing her plum-colored travel suit and pearls.

“We’ll be home soon,” she sighed.

Cora’s spirit of adventure had faded to a low point. The tense bus ride and now this dreary room had briefly extinguished the joy of anticipation, which is the traveler’s spark.

“I wish I were home right now.”

“And what would you be doing, Cora dear?”

“Cooking supper. Turning ice cream. The girls love ice cream on a summer night. Except I forgot—we’re out of sugar.”

Both were quiet, looking up at a silent ceiling fan. It was still very bright outside. Evening would come late.

“They were such a great distance from home,” Cora said at last.

“But, you know, at the time, nothing seemed more natural. It was a noble thing to go over there and help our friends fight the Germans … And I naïvely believed that because Henry was a doctor, he would be safe. I believed a lot of things that weren’t right—like
sending him away to boarding school. It was ‘what one did.’ Henry was so bright, I was pompous enough to think there wasn’t a school in Boston that was good enough. But you know what? He would have become a doctor anyway. Looking back, what was the point of missing all those years with him?”

Cora thought of all the missing years with Sammy and hoped Bobbie didn’t see the tears coursing down her cheeks. She flattened them with the palm of a hand.

“I’ve never seen such a depressing town,” her companion said at last. “You’d think they’d have fixed it up by now. Or at least, for God’s sake, please drive the buses around in some other direction. Seeing the results of a bomb barrage does not make a very good first impression. I’m going to talk to the general about it. He seems to be an intelligent man.” She swung her legs off the bed and straightened her pearls. “Promise that you’ll come and stay with me at the Gilley House,” she said briskly. “We’re not going to allow this wonderful friendship to slip off into oblivion when we get back home, like so many things. Agreed?”

After distributing the medication on her last round of the night, Lily came down to the lobby to wait for Hammond. She’d brushed her hair into soft waves and changed into a raspberry-colored polka-dot dress with a narrow belt. It was a little after 9:30 and she could hear music coming from the street through the open door of the hotel. She drifted into the doorway. She was in the mood for fun, and by night Verdun looked much more inviting. Where there were no lights, there was inky blackness that erased the ruins; and where there were lights, there was excitement.

She took a few steps in the direction of the music. They weren’t officially given time off, so they’d just have to steal it. She was looking forward to getting a little tipsy in a waterside café. She’d go there with Thomas Hammond. They’d smoke and drink but nothing would happen because she was in love with David Sawyers, M.D., who at this moment was probably on afternoon rounds in the acute cases nursery
of Chicago’s Presbyterian Hospital. Her nursing friends always teased her about how lucky she’d be to marry a pediatrician because he’d know how to make babies, and that they’d better save up, because any kid that came from a doctor and a nurse would be doomed to go into medicine. But she would have to quit nursing if she married David, and the picture of caring for a yowling newborn while he was gone working long hours was unsettling. Alone in the lamp-lit street, balancing in heels between the cracks of the bricks, she felt the spookiness of Verdun sink into her skin, and she had the strong feeling that deep down she did not know where she belonged. Serving the down-and-out neighborhoods of Chicago, where she was useful and free? Engaged to a doctor so that she felt protected? Halfway around the world, pretending to know what to say to these dear old ladies who were stuck in the past? God, she needed David right now. She could always talk to him. He was just two years older, but taking care of desperately ill children had given him a shrewd outlook on things.

“Nurse Lily? Could that be you?”

Underneath the lighted canopy of a neighborhood market, in between wooden cartons of produce and flowers, a couple of small tables were set out where local couples could take coffee and pastries. There was General Perkins, alone with a cigar and a bottle of wine for company.

“Lieutenant Barnett!” He waved her over. He still wore the riding boots he’d had on at dinner but the tunic was unbuttoned at the neck. “Lovely dress.” His eyes moved over her. “A damn sight better than a service uniform.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He got to his feet. “You know we are in the region of Champagne? Will you join me? I mean, not here. We’ll find someplace suitable. And oysters, if they have them.”

“I’m meeting Lieutenant Hammond.”

Perkins looked across the street at the hotel. “Then where the hell is he?”

“I’m early,” she lied.

“Let’s take a walk.” He placed her arm in his. “Don’t worry, I’ll
have you back. Just to see the Meuse River. Have you seen the Meuse River?”

She realized he was slightly drunk.

“Let’s just sit.” She pulled back toward the table. “That way when Thomas comes, we won’t miss him—”

“Who? Oh, Colonel Hammond’s son. Well, in that case we’ll be discreet,” he said, with a nudge. “Come along, you need the fresh air.”