A Star for Mrs. Blake (39 page)

Hammond retrieved her remembrance book, which had fallen open on the floor. He clapped it shut but it was too late; they had all seen. Instead of a photograph of a square-jawed blond young man of Scots-German ancestry who resembled his mother, this soldier came from somewhere far away from Maine tennis clubs and shingle-style
mansions by the sea. He wore the same private’s uniform as the rest, along with a private’s beret, except that he was Negro, and his photo was inscribed
Elmore A. Russell Pvt—Yankee Division—Massachusetts
.

“Who is that? Who is Elmore Russell?” Minnie asked.

“That’s Selma Russell’s son!” Katie exclaimed.

“Good Lord,” Cora said. “Do you really think—”

“He was in the Yankee Division—”

Wilhelmina was sitting up with the help of Lily’s arm braced around her shoulders.

“Of course!” Hammond said heartily. “The papers got mixed up and she was accidentally put in our party. Nurse Lily and I took her up to Harlem so she could be with her people, and at the same time, we retrieved
our
Mrs. Russell.” He turned to Wilhelmina. “Do you remember that? When we came to get you at your other hotel?”

Wilhelmina seemed numb. Her eyes were large and watery.

“She doesn’t remember,” Cora said.

Hammond bent over so he could speak directly into Wilhelmina’s pallid face. “This is a bur-eau-cratic error. Do you understand? They’ve given you the wrong paperwork, that’s all.”

Wilhelmina said, “That’s not him.”

“We know, dear,” Lily said soothingly. “But it’s going to be fine. We’ll get you the right folder. It’ll all be straightened out.”

Wilhelmina was fingering the top button on her blouse, a habit that by now was driving everyone mad. The poor garment was gray with wear. Cora could hear Bobbie saying,
Will somebody please put that thing out of its misery?

Wilhelmina began to moan in an unsettling way. Like an old wooden cottage shifting its bones, thought Cora; like a gale building in the trees.

“What’s the matter, Wilhelmina?” she asked quietly.

The glistening eyes rolled toward Cora. “Who is in my baby’s grave?”

“Bradley!” Hammond fairly shouted with frustration. “Somebody put the wrong thing in this envelope. Your son is exactly where he should be!”

“Why should we believe anything you tell us?”

In an instant Katie’s features had been transformed—stiffened with anger, but also by the same habit of self-respect that had insisted on her being called “Mrs. McConnell” at work.

Hammond was at a loss to deflect this bolt out of the blue. “Why not?” he faltered.

“How do we know?” she demanded. “I for one am sick of it. Sick of takin’ orders, marchin’ here and sittin’ there and listenin’ to a lot of babble when all we have is your say-so.”

Cora, for whom the world had been so sadly reassuring when she held Sammy’s face in her hands, now saw reality dizzily shift, like a camera moving to the right and then swinging way too quickly back to the left.

“Maybe it’s not Bradley,” Cora ventured. “Maybe it really is the Negro boy under Bradley’s stone.”

Lily and Hammond exchanged an uncertain look. “That’s not possible,” he said.

“My son went off to do his duty,” Minnie began quietly.

A store of hurts and injustices and impotent rage had finally been loosed and the anguish poured out.

“That’s all I know. They tell me that he died in action, he’s driving an ambulance at the time. So, fine. They give me the approximate location of the incident and the number of his marker so I can find it in the cemetery when I go to France. But now, after everything we’ve been through, I’m sitting here kicking myself because I never questioned.”

“Why should you question?” Katie said. “I don’t care if it’s the army or the pope—you’re not allowed to question, not allowed to ask.”

“Who asked?” Minnie said indignantly. “Nobody asked me.”

“Thomas,” said Cora. “You have to do something.”

Hammond took in the room full of troubled faces. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. I promise.”

…

The parlor was stifling; he had to get out. Without pausing to think, he walked across the lobby to the main entrance and into the rain. It was wonderfully liberating to allow himself to get soaked. He felt the strength of his legs as he strode past the ruined city blocks down to the river. The farther he got from the mothers, the more clearly he was able to see himself. He was not a tour guide, or a West Point cadet: he was a commissioned officer, like two generations of Hammond men before him. Walking in the rain along a snaking footpath that followed the Meuse, he realized that he was, almost literally, following in his father’s footsteps.

In wartime the job of an officer was straightforward. His father had pursued a twenty-nine-year career with no wrong turns. At West Point, Colonel Hammond was a mathematics whiz and star football player. He served in the Philippines, graduated from the War College in 1923, and became an instructor there. During the war he was secretary of the general staff of the American Expeditionary Forces in France and commanded the Twenty-eighth Infantry of the First Division in a legendary march to Sedan, for which he was awarded the army’s Distinguished Service Medal.

It was fair to say that the old man’s first and only true love had been the army. Retired now, he’d told his son that when he was done as a commissioner of New York City, he would build a house close to his beloved West Point, and, Hammond thought, probably inscribe over the door the Horace Porter quote he often recited like a prayer.

As the younger Hammond thrashed along, he would have liked to quash that inflated, hypocritical rhetoric the same way his boots were
crushing the black grit in the puddles that filled the shell holes gouged in the path. At the Academy he, too, had been a believer, until he’d discovered in his short time as liaison officer on the pilgrimage that holding on to your principles was infinitely harder outside those cold, gray battlements. The way they taught things like strategy, using the means to the end, like a gigantic game of chess with human pawns, had nothing to do with what he’d seen in the faces of those mothers holding portraits of their sons and looking to him for answers. Were they being told the truth or not? They were questioning the authority of the army and, for the first time in his life, Hammond was questioning it, too.

The rain came down unmercifully in the open crags of the destroyed buildings along the riverfront, running down the last dregs of wallpaper in rooms never meant to be exposed to misty air. The few small boats tethered in the Meuse took a beating. He tramped along the footpath until he came to a bridge that led out of Verdun to the high muddy fields, and then he was truly in his father’s world.

Hammond knew the facts as thoroughly he knew his math tables and Latin verbs. His father’s achievements were part of West Point lore. On the night of November 6, 1918, Colonel Hammond, then a captain, had commanded the Twenty-eighth Infantry on an agonizing trek to Sedan. Earlier that morning his regiment had attacked the French town of Mouzon in a battle that should have earned them a day’s rest, but at 2:00 p.m. they received orders to assemble. The mules were dead and so two men were assigned to carry the 37mm Hotchkiss mountain guns, which weighed more than a hundred pounds. The shells alone were a pound each. After surviving the Battle of Mouzon, with no meals and no stopping, under heavy rain, his father’s men began a torturous march over roads that had been torn to pieces by enormous shell holes. They had started out exhausted and now, without food or strength, they still had fourteen miles to go.

Young Lieutenant Hammond crested a hill and looked back at the mauled towers of Verdun. The rain slapped his face and he let it. He was breathless from the slog through heavy mud, but his heaving lungs were baby’s slumber compared to the reserves his father must
have had to call on as he walked beside the men in the dark, keeping them going with the promise of crossing the border of Germany in victory at the end. The long unbearable night was barely over at 7:00 a.m. when they finally broke through the woods south of the town of Chéhéry and climbed the last rise that overlooked Sedan, where they once again faced open warfare until the French arrived at 4:00 p.m. and the American Twenty-eighth retired from the line.

Colonel Hammond had led a thirty-three-mile march that took fifty hours, with no food, heavy fighting at both ends. As he promised, they marched into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation, and the regiment was decorated with the French Ordre de l’Étoile Noire.

That was what it took to be an officer.

Cora Blake was right. He was obligated to act on behalf of his charges—but how? All Lieutenant Hammond knew was that he was standing on a hill that had been contested by great armies where men had died whispering,
They shall not pass
. His feet were cold and his uniform waterlogged, and he had no answer as to how to be his hero father’s heroic son; the chances of that were about as likely as being hit by lightning.

The hotel had a new man at the desk. Hired for the tourist season, he was better-looking and more educated than the owner’s hopeless offspring. After politely inquiring as to the acceptability of the stay, he told Mr. Reed that he’d had another letter.

“It came this morning,” he said, crisply producing an envelope with a local stamp.

It was in French with a return address in Bar-le-Duc, a river town to the south. He handed it over with the rest of the mail. Just as Reed was leaving the front desk, Hammond came in from the rain.

“Who dragged you through the mud, soldier?” Reed asked.

“Any number of people,” Hammond said, watching Reed flip through a dozen envelopes. “Aren’t you a popular fellow?”

“It’s a result of the story that ran in
Le Matin
.”

“Must have hit a nerve,” commented Hammond.

“They’re all from French war mothers,” Reed said. “First the editor didn’t want to buy the damn thing, but now they’re clamoring for a follow-up.”

“Congratulations.”

“I wish I had something more to say, but frankly, I’m burned out on the subject of war mothers.” Reed gave him a droll look. “I hate to sound like one of them, but you should get out of those wet clothes.”

Hammond didn’t move, apparently lost in thought.

“You’re dripping,” Reed reminded him.

“Sorry,” said Hammond, snapping awake. “I’m in a bit of a muddle.”

“Can I help?”

Hammond told Reed about the mix-up between the two Mrs. Russells and their packets, and the demands of Party A for proof of who was buried in Bradley Russell’s grave. “It’s gone beyond Wilhelmina Russell,” Hammond went on. “Now the rest are up in arms. They don’t know what to believe, and I don’t know what to tell them.”

“How can you tell them what you don’t know?” Reed responded. “Ask General Perkins.”

“Ask him what?”

“Do what you’re supposed to do—be their liaison. Tell him they want to be heard.”

Hammond nodded slowly. “It would be the most direct way.”

Reed watched him for a moment. “If you do it, I want to be there.”

“The general might not like that.”

“He’ll like it fine, if he has nothing to hide.”

Reed could almost see Hammond puzzle it out. Poor kid:
Whom should he trust? How much could he risk? What was Reed getting out of it?

“Having you there would be a tremendous boost,” Hammond finally decided.

“Are you sure?” prodded Reed, just to seal the deal. “It could be risky business for you.”

“Let them hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

“Frankly, you’d be helping me out. It’s a hell of a lead,” Reed mused. “If it’s true the army jumbled up the remains of a black soldier
and a white soldier who both died serving our country—with their mothers looking on—that’s the kind of thing that warms an editor’s stone-cold heart.”

Hammond said he’d let Reed know the arrangements, and the two shook hands.

Perkins agreed to meet with the women. He considered it the soft but necessary part of his job, like attending luncheons for army wives in Washington—a piece of cake. Hammond was glad to make good on his promise to Cora Blake, but later that afternoon, when he called at the general’s suite to escort him downstairs, Perkins was in a touchy mood. He’d been summoned from his midday meal for another demanding phone call from the ambassador in Paris. Through a fellowship of “friends,” meaning fellow homosexuals in the State Department, the ambassador had been able to stave off the news of the lady billionaire’s unexplained death on a government-sponsored program abroad so that it didn’t cross the threshold of the White House, but that situation was severely time-limited and about to expire.

Perkins snapped back that he was handling it, when in fact he had nothing at all. His aides had driven overnight to Paris and returned with sacks of documents on the members of Party A. They’d helped him lay everything out on three card tables pushed together in the living room of his suite. For hours the general had pored over fragile carbon copies on onionskin and inky cables fresh off the Teletype from New York, looking to pin this on someone or something. Mrs. Olsen’s general health. Her behavior. Who she got along with, who she provoked. The food she ate, complaints lodged with the nurse, her nightly shot of whiskey. The medical form itself was simply a row of ailments to be checked off by the pilgrim. “Yes” to headaches, she had indicated in blue ink, frequent colds, arthritis, eye problems, and allergy to bee stings, but no red flags that would point to a heart condition.

Nevertheless, when he strode into the parlor where the women were assembled, he seemed confident as ever.