A Star for Mrs. Blake (28 page)

He came out of the
métro
station and walked toward rue de Berri, where the paper had recently moved into a modern nine-story building. Walter Marley emerged from a wooden door in a glass-partitioned office. He was about forty, wearing a blue three-piece suit, with an old-fashioned watch fob at the vest. He had wire-rimmed glasses and was not balding gracefully. Living in Paris seemed to have had no effect on his American vulgarity. He shook Reed’s hand, and then asked him to leave.

Reed held out his work.

“You’re not even going to read it?”

“Nope.”

“You said you wanted to see it.”

“That was yesterday.”

“Okay, things change—”

“Some things don’t.”

“This is a story readers want to hear.”

“Maybe, but I ain’t buying. Nice to meet you.”

“Just hold on.”

“We’ve got nothin’ to talk about.”

Reed studied Marley’s wary eyes. He knew the type. Marley was a small man who belonged in a small town, where he could act like a big man. He was like the guy who owned the only auto repair shop for miles. If your car broke down, he’d have you by the nuts. Marley was the kind of newsman who went for headline stories, easy and quick. He had the bullishness of the news business, but not the heart. Not the feeling for its subjects.

“What’s the deal?” asked Reed, not budging. “You have someone else on the story?”

“Well, I did until you cold-cocked him.”

“Clancy Hayes?”

“Who do you think?”

“Since when does Hayes work for the
Herald
?”

“Since he got fired from AP.”

“For what? Drunk and disorderly? When was this?”

“Couple days ago.”

“He’s let go from AP and you hire him? That’s slick, Walter.”

“I can’t discuss company policy. Be a good kid and take a walk.”

Reed had a finger pointing close to Marley’s chest.

“Get this straight. Hayes manhandled a grief-stricken woman in order to get her to cry for a cheap photo. He was drunk and way out of line. That’s the guy you hired.”

“Step back, fella.”

Reed did not step back. “What’s your beef?”

Marley raised his chin and looked at Reed through the bottoms of his glasses. “You can’t go around clocking my reporters.”

“That’s crap,” said Reed. “You don’t give a damn about Clancy Hayes. You don’t even know him. You don’t know my work and you don’t know me. Or is it that you just don’t like my face?”

“Christ,” said Marley, truly shaken, which was Reed’s intent. “Look, we all feel for what you went through—And what … how hard … I’d like to help, but—”

“Come on, Walter. Spit it out.”

Reed peered at him directly through the mask with luminous eyes that had seen hell, and Marley crumpled.

“Okay, I’ll level with you. I was interested in what you had to say, which is why I called you in. Then I got the word to kill it—directly from New York.”

Reed was confused. The
Herald Tribune
was owned by the
New York Times
, but why would they bother with a small overseas matter like hiring a local hack?

“I had to clear your story, and the New York office wasn’t buying. It’s not from editorial,” Marley added quickly. “They know you’re good.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m the best thing since sliced bread,” said Reed impatiently. “So?”

“It came from the board of directors.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s the kid’s father, okay? Gerald Hayes. Clancy’s father. He’s one of those East Coast movers and shakers, politically connected, on the board of the
Times
. Hell, he owns the paper’s fucking bank. Clancy doesn’t like you, so he poisoned the well. What can I say?”

Reed just laughed. “Not a thing, Walter. Not a thing.”

“You don’t deserve this—”

“Tell it to the judge,” Reed said, not looking back.

As he walked out the door, Marley called after him, “Skip the wire services, too.”

An hour later Reed was in the offices of the French daily
Le Matin
. They bought “An American War Mother’s Story” for five francs but wouldn’t pay for a translator, so he had to sit there and translate his own words himself.

At a wooden table piled with old bundled newsprint, dictating to an overeager secretary with curly black hair and body odor, he consoled himself that at least
Le Matin
was a major newspaper with national distribution in France. Tomorrow morning, office workers in Lyon would be moved to tears over their café au lait. And you had to appreciate the irony. He’d survived a hail of German bullets to be blacklisted in the English-speaking press by some little pisser who had to run to his daddy. The secretary was waiting for his golden sentences, fingertips on the keys. He had to get on with it. The piece had to run somewhere, and soon—even if it ran in French. The story possessed a certain shelf life and beyond that, it would spoil like curdled milk.

The morning of the visit to the cemetery, Lily was still in foggy twilight when she came down to the breakfast room, wearing her white uniform and feeling like hell. She hadn’t slept all night, wrestling first with guilt about David back home and then with indignation about where things might have led with the general; whirling thoughts she couldn’t contain, like moths flying out of a cupboard. She was going to die today in a thousand ways. She’d been warned by her supervisor in New York that this would be the most trying time of the tour and that the ladies were going to need all the comfort she could provide. She wished she could find some comfort herself.

To her annoyance, Hammond was as enthusiastic as ever. He had wrangled an omelette and bacon from the skinny little maid, and was loading his plate with everything on the sideboard.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked.

“Lousy.”

“You turned in early.”

“Didn’t help.”

She reached across him for a cup. The hotel’s weak coffee would have to do.

“Why are you in such a good mood?” she muttered.

“I know it will be difficult for them, but frankly, between you, me, and the lamppost, I’ll be tremendously relieved when we deliver the mothers to their destination. This trip has been a bear.”

Lily thought about what Perkins had told her as they’d walked to the river—how he’d been put to work at the age of five stacking tobacco leaves on the family farm, won a scholarship to the University of the South, served as first lieutenant in a war she’d never heard of, thirty years ago in the Philippines. In a soft voice he described burying
his first dead comrade there on the beach, and giving his first order to execute the man who’d shot him, a Filipino rebel, by a strangulation machine called a
garrote
.

“It’s what they mean by
putting the screws to you
.” He’d squeezed her neck, which made her cringe with a strange thrill. “The prisoner is put in a metal collar and a screw is driven through the collar until it snaps the spine in two.”

Perkins had said it as matter-of-factly as how to install a window or fix a lamp. It was simply what needed to be done. He was as unemotional about murder as David was passionate about saving lives—even embracing Lily’s dream of having a farm where they’d take in unwanted animals. She was lucky to have such a wonderful man at home, and relieved that the general had left for Paris that morning. She should say five Hail Marys in gratitude for never having to see him again.

And she should add a few for having a comrade like Thomas, reliable and true, wearing dress blues today, his clean-shaven face looking young and painfully sincere.

“What I’m really excited about,” he was saying as they carried their breakfast things, “is seeing the actual places where my father fought.”

The dining room was in flux as other parties came downstairs for breakfast or to board their buses. Most of their group was still at the table, except for Minnie, who had been pacing outside for over an hour, on the lookout for a bus that still wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes. Katie seemed particularly pale in the washed-out way of redheads, her features melded to an exhausted flatness against the gloomy beading on the collar of her black dress.

“Did you get any rest, Mrs. McConnell?” Lily asked.

Katie shook her head. “None a’tall.”

After yesterday’s long bus ride from Paris, the spartan hotel room had provided no consolation for Katie and her roommate, Minnie, on the night before their climactic visit to the cemetery.

“The bed’s too hard,” Minnie had complained, tugging at the thin sheets.

“Better than the kitchen floor, where I used to sleep,” Katie had replied. Her bed, too, felt like a pancake on a plank of wood.

Minnie was clearing her throat. She had a night cough just like Katie’s husband, Ian. A grating
ah–huh-huh-huh
.

“Take some water,” Katie told her, as she always told him.

Minnie obligingly drank a glass, part of a nightly routine that was exasperating but somehow soothing for both of them. In the same way, their bedtime conversations were often about things they’d endured as new immigrants. Although the stories they told were about hard times, it was calming to drift between wakefulness and sleep in a common past.

“The relatives would come over from Russia,” Minnie said when she’d caught her breath, “and stay in my uncle’s apartment on Houston Street. There were so many of us, we had to take turns sleeping under the sink.”

“I’m not speaking of first arriving here,” Katie said. “I was already a grown-up woman, a maid-of-all-work almost three years, and the kitchen floor’s where they put me to sleep. They treated us terrible, but one thing I made sure of: I never let them call me by my first name. It was always Mrs. McConnell, and I made sure that it stuck.”

Memories had been coming to Katie at night and lingering during the day, as if being on the verge of seeing her boys had triggered a desire to sum up the past—the lonely years as an inexperienced sixteen-year-old who only knew how to boil potatoes, plunked down in service to a family of five in an isolated outpost of Boston called Jamaica Plain. No church in walking distance. Her first mistress called her a “stupid Hibernian” because she’d never heard of a fancy vegetable with the puzzling name of “iceberg lettuce.” She didn’t have those problems now. Currently she worked for a banker’s family in a well-kept brownstone in the Back Bay. The wife was the nervous type who was glad for Katie to run the house; they were decent enough, but every time she went out to hang the laundry she would break out in giggles—and couldn’t help laughing now.

“What’s so funny, Mrs. McConnell?”

“I was thinkin’ of the time my husband took the boys to visit the police division on Boylston Street. Ian’s brother, Jack, was a sergeant there, and he showed them the Stanley Steamer. You heard about it?”

“Sure I have,” said Minnie in her know-it-all way. “It’s to iron clothes.”

“It’s a
car
,” Katie said, rolling her eyes in the dark. “Why would they be ironing in a police station?”

“To have nice uniforms.”

“Oh, go on. It’s a motorcar they used to have way back when Tim and Dolan were kids. There’s a regular man who drives it, and then a specially high seat for the patrol officer to see over the backyard fences. It’s the first warm day of spring,” Katie went on, “and my husband and their uncle take the boys for a ride in the Stanley Steamer. They come back and Timmy—he’s the older one, the smarty-pants—he says, ‘Papa has the best job! He drives around and around looking for ladies with no clothes!’ ”

Minnie inhaled with exaggerated shock. She felt privileged to be hearing about Katie’s boys and wanted it to continue. “Where on earth did they take them?”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” Katie agreed. “Ian says, ‘I swear, we only went to Back Bay,’ and I accuse him of being a liar, thinking him and his brother, they probably took the boys to see the seamy side of life—so he finally admits that when Tim and Dolan were up there with him on the seat, they look over the fence and see a lady in her backyard hanging laundry in the altogether! Why not? It was a warm day …” she managed, whooping.

“Then what happened?” Minnie urged her on. “Did she get arrested?”

“No, what happened was Tim decided to become a policeman on the spot and Dolan says he’d drive him! And every time I go out in the missus’s backyard I have to laugh. Oh, me,” she said, calming down and become reflective. “The army says two men from one family don’t have to go, but they both enlisted. They refused to be apart.”

“It must be terrible to lose two.”

“They’re together, like they always were,” Katie said with forced
stoicism. She wanted that to be the end of it. She shut off the lamp, but sensed there was something unfinished in the air.

“What is it now, Mrs. Seibert?”

“Your little boy with polio—” Minnie finally managed from the dimness. “Will he ever walk again?”

“He’s walkin’ just fine—” she began sharply, but put a brake on it, remembering that meekness overcomes anger, and she could use some of that. Mrs. Seibert meant the best, even if she was always, excuse the expression, putting her foot in it. “I’m sorry, Minnie, I know what you’re askin’,” she said. “He’ll likely always need his crutches, but that won’t stop him none. He comes from a fightin’ family.”