A Star for Mrs. Blake (38 page)

“Mom is a rancher. She’s strong as a horse. When the time comes, my sister in San Francisco will take care of things.”

“What does your sister think is going on?”

“She thinks the same thing. That I’m a war correspondent, a Parisian expat living with an artist.”

“Oh, Grif,” Cora said emotionally, “you won’t see your mother? Ever again?”

“She’s old now. What’s the point?”

“But it’s so much worse not to see your son. I’d give anything if Sammy were alive. I wouldn’t care if he were missing an arm or a leg or anything just to see him—” She stopped. She was making him feel ashamed. “Well, anyway. I guess Minnie’s waiting for me at the perfume store,” she said.

“I’d go with you, but I wouldn’t be much use in a perfume store without a nose. That’s a joke.”

Cora snorted with exasperation. “A stupid joke. I don’t even see it anymore.”

“I know you don’t.”

They were quiet. He reached across to take her hand.

“May I?”

“Yes.”

His fingers tightened around hers. She closed her eyes and took everything in. The softness of his skin. The sureness of his grip. The warmth that was passing to her.

“Grif, if you and I were ever fated to meet, it was so that you’d write to your mother.”

He laughed hard and enjoyed it. “You’re one of a kind, you know that?”

“Please don’t hurt her. Please.”

“It would kill her to see me like this, Cora.”

She tightened her grasp. “You’re her child. Your life is the most important thing in the world to her. She’ll never stop loving you. Go and see her. Think about it.”

“All right.”

She released his hand. They pushed their chairs away and left the
pâtisserie
and entered the dank air of the arcade.

“What about your plans?” he asked. “When you get home?”

“Linwood’s asked me to marry him. My family owns a farm on the island and he’s thinking we could start it up again.”

“Congratulations to the both of you.”

But Cora lingered in the busy corridor. “I haven’t said yes.”

“What are you waiting for? Don’t be a chump. You said this guy makes you happy, so grab it. I think that’s where you want to go,” Reed said, indicating a passage to the right.

Minnie was waiting outside the perfume store when Cora joined her.

“Did you go in yet?” she asked.

Minnie shook her head. “It doesn’t interest me. Let’s go back.”

“We have to at least take a look.”

“You go. I’ll wait.”

Cora poked her head in. The store was like a feminine bazaar in a city of the senses, jam-packed with manicure sets, hairbrushes and ribbons, mirrors, bracelets, washcloths, lotions and creams, stacks of perfume boxes displayed by color: red, white, purple, silver, black. The glass cases were bordered in gold. Red hearts on paper doilies adorned the walls; shimmery golden curtains hid the back rooms. Asleep on a pink cushion on the floor were two white toy poodles with pink collars.

“Come on, they’re not going to bite you,” Cora said, grabbing Minnie’s purse strap and pulling her through the door.

Instead of a counter there was a large cream-colored sideboard that might have been lifted from a palace. It had a pair of glass doors with panes that radiated from crystal hubs like the rays of the sun. There were squiggly gold-leaf motifs all over, and it had curvy legs and those strange birdlike feet. The owner of the shop was wearing a white coat like a pharmacist. He introduced himself in English as “René from Belgium,” as if not to be mistaken for German.

“Ah!” he said, admiring their badges. “Gold Star Mothers! I am honored.” He kissed each of their hands. Cora giggled and Minnie melted. “May I have the honor of finding your fragrances?” he asked.

Minnie, who usually tied her hair in a kerchief and wore men’s extra-small overalls, was dumbstruck.

“We don’t know our fragrances.”

He invited them to sit, indicating two stools with furry white cushions—last year’s dogs, Cora thought, trying to untwist her lips from a smirk. René was in his early forties and dark-complexioned, the most meticulously groomed man she had ever seen. His skin was smooth and perfect, hair slicked back, a black swami mustache wriggling above soft womanly lips.

“Do you ladies have time to hear a little story about the most sought-after perfume in the world?” he asked.

Cora tried to picture René in an undershirt sitting down to supper in an overheated kitchen with an ordinary wife, but it only made her almost laugh out loud and want to pee.

“We really have to get back to the hotel,” she said, but to her surprise
Minnie, who had been too shy to enter and tried to escape, was now completely mesmerized.

“We have a minute,” Minnie said, so Cora sat down on the poodle fur.

René’s white teeth flashed as he told of a rare flower that bloomed in the Arabian Desert with an essence that drove men mad—so potent that this particular flower had been the object of wars and intrigue since the Middle Ages. He claimed there was a painting of it hanging in the Vatican.

“A famous sheik gave this precious tincture to me.”

He took out a box made of ivory and removed from a velvet inlay a round glass flask no larger than a silver dollar, took out the stopper, and offered each of them a precious sniff. It was unusual, all right. More like cinnamon than roses, with a hint of thistle, Cora imagined.

“Somewhere in the world there exists a special fragrance for every woman,” he murmured. “But if one is to discover this treasure, one needs a guide.” He began to assemble bottles and spritzers on the curvy counter. “You wouldn’t go into a dark, scary cave all alone, would you?”

Minnie shook her head, wide-eyed, and for the next quarter hour they got drunk smelling extracts of citrus, gardenia, oak, honeysuckle, lilac, moss, grass, vanilla. But when René from Belgium presented the perfect scent for Millie in a red-and-white candy-striped box, and one for Cora in a curved purple flask with a gold tassel at the neck, the prices were so outlandish that they jumped off the stools.

“For what’s in that box I could buy a refrigerator,” Minnie said.

René seemed poised for this response.

“I completely understand. How about a more petite souvenir?” he said, and slid a rack of lipsticks under their tired noses. “This is the number one lipstick in France. You cannot get it in the United States. I sell a lot of these. And for Gold Star Mothers there is a very special price.”

Minnie was as enchanted as a child by the untouched tongues of color in their movie-star gold cases and kept screwing them up and down saying, “I haven’t worn lipstick in years. My husband doesn’t like me to. He says it’s a bourgeois indulgence.”

René’s expression became stern. “Beauty is not an indulgence. Beauty is a force of life, but it must be cultivated. Forget your husband. You owe it to yourself.”

With much coaching, Minnie finally decided on a bright shade of coral.

“And for you, madame? This one called Jolie would look beautiful with your eyes.”

Cora told René no thanks. She’d spent her souvenir money on trinkets for her nieces and a cigarette lighter for Linwood.

“Next time,” promised René, and they watched as he tenderly wrapped the lipstick in lavender tissue paper and slipped it into a dainty bag and handed it over.

“No, wait—put it on,” Cora urged.

Minnie took the package. “I’m going to save it.”

“What for?”

“A special occasion,” she decided.

“Just in time,” Hammond said when they got back to the hotel.

Wilhelmina, Lily, and Katie were waiting in the lobby when Cora and Minnie arrived from the indoor market. They shook out their umbrellas and gathered curiously around Hammond, who was going through a pile of sturdy, oversize brown envelopes bearing the seal of the quartermaster general. He read from the instructions:

“These packets are for your final visit to the cemetery tomorrow. They contain mementos provided for your comfort and to create lasting memories.”

He distributed them, quietly putting aside the one for Bobbie. Inside each envelope was an American flag and two dowels that screwed together to make a sturdy post, a Bible, an eggshell-blue box, and a leather-bound folder. Cora opened the blue box to discover a beautiful medal by Tiffany’s jewelers on a luxurious red, white, and blue ribbon, meant to be worn around the neck. It was made of brass, heavy in the hand, and depicted a cruise ship breaking the surf between the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. The words
GOLD STAR MOTHERS TOURS TO EUROPE
were inscribed below, and a golden star was embedded above the ship. She enfolded the medal in her fingers, grateful to the artist who had understood the weight and heft of their loss.

Minnie was the first to discover a small canvas pouch in her packet.

“What is this,” she asked. “A tea bag?”

“It’s for collecting earth,” Hammond explained.

“Earth?” echoed Katie.

“What am I, a geologist?” Minnie quipped to nervous laughter.

Hammond cleared his throat. “For the grave,” he said. “In case you want to take some earth from the grave back home.”

The expressions on the faces of Party A ranged from puzzlement to dismay. Cora remembered the requests she’d received before she left Maine from war mothers who couldn’t travel to bring back dirt from their sons’ graves. Forgotten until now, the names were still in her ribbon-bound packets back home in the library desk. The thought made her feel guilty and defeated. Even if she’d tried, there had been too many for her to fill.

Katie and Wilhelmina sat on either side of Lily on the settee. Vowing to fly right and finish with outstanding marks for the rest of the tour, Lily turned to Katie, who was stroking the two photographs mounted in her leather book.

“Your boys are so handsome,” she said. “They look just like you.”

“Tim is like my husband, Dolan is like me,” Katie said. “Tim wanted to be a policeman. Dolan, he didn’t know. He once said he wanted to be a baseball player,” she said, half smiling, half sniffling.

Lily nodded sympathetically and handed her a tissue.

“What about you, Minnie?” she said. “May I finally meet Isaac?”

Minnie handed over a photograph of a proud-looking young man with dark hair and a determined set to his mouth and eyes. Even in uniform he seemed more like a scientist than a soldier.

“See that? You could tell Isaac was always thinking of something,” Minnie remarked. “When he was ten he had an idea for a camera where you could see the pictures right away. I said, Why don’t you make it so you could see the future?” She laughed. “Then he tells me, Ma! I have another big idea—how to fit beer into a can!”

Lily smiled. “Just like a boy,” she said.

Cora was lost in the official army photograph of Sammy. At first there had been that jolt of recognition in seeing the face of her child, just as it had been when she’d seen him in life—even in the most mundane places—picking him out from his classmates on the rocks that formed the school playground, glimpsing him coming up from the pier—her child’s face imprinted in the deepest part of her, for which she would have run through flames.

The jolts came again and again: the hooded eyes—her sea captain father’s brown eyes—looking straight into the camera with the suspicion of a frontiersman staring down a city man; the rounded cheeks
gently shaded by the gray tones of the photograph to make it appear as if he were too young to shave. Did he shave at sixteen? She couldn’t remember. He wore no cap, just a brazen pompadour with a blond sheen.

The picture was cropped below the double pockets of his khaki uniform, which had a stand-up collar and epaulets with small brass buttons. She caressed the photograph with her eyes, touching every inch of it until it came to life, until she could feel the texture of his woolen tunic and stiffened hair. Bringing it up close to her face, she could make out
U.S
. on one of the brass collar disks, and an eagle on the other. She counted every fair hair in his eyebrows to where they faded into an unfinished bridge over the nose. She admired the finely shaped ears and the slightly full cheeks with a hint of dimple at the chin. She was amazed at the serenity he showed in facing the camera; facing the war. His half-turned smile said he still had secrets from his mother.

Wilhelmina hadn’t said a word. She held the leather book in her lap and ran a finger over the gold lettering,
Pvt. Bradley Russell
.

Lily turned to her. “Is that your Bradley? Can I have a look?”

“Sure you can.”

Wilhelmina opened the portfolio, looked at the photograph, and collapsed on Lily’s shoulder, fainted dead away.

Oh God
, thought Lily, struggling to hold her up.
Not again!

The rest of them froze, reflexively hugging the pictures of their sons. Hammond, along with other hotel guests who rushed to their aid, helped to ease Wilhelmina down on the couch.
“Get help,”
people said in several languages,
“Call a doctor,” “Get water,” “Get ice,” “Slap her face”
—while Lily scrambled for the Red Cross bag, always close at hand since Mrs. Olsen—but Wilhelmina was already awake, coughing and blinking rapidly.