A Star for Mrs. Blake (4 page)

She’d felt an ironic liberation from knowing exactly where he was.

In that same folder, in a cabinet of folders, in a storeroom in the Adjunct General’s Office in Washington, D.C., was a carbon copy of Cora’s application to join the American Gold Star Mothers, a national organization that had been chartered by Congress the previous year. It was open to mothers of sons or daughters who served in the Allied Forces during the World War and died as the result of that service. Cora had typed her answers to their questions on the library Remington: natural father of veteran (“Curtis Blake, deceased”); cause of death of veteran (“Killed in action”); remarks (“Meuse-Argonne, France. Cited for gallantry in action and especially meritorious service. The local post is named in memory of him”).

When President Herbert Hoover signed the Pilgrimage Bill in 1930, assigning five million dollars for the government-sponsored pilgrimages, those folders were opened once again, and the status of the mothers and wives of American soldiers buried overseas was reexamined. Cora Blake was found eligible to go. In February 1931 came the confirmed date of her trip—June 2, 1931—in the letter she had been so thrilled to receive in the dead of winter at Healy’s cannery.

At that point it was no longer grief that pushed her, it was pride, and she was surprised by the force of it. She supposed that she had reconciled those feelings long ago, but they must have been slowly uncurling in her mind, like those coils of dry kindling in the kitchen stove, because with one hot breath they burst into a ball of fire.

The moment she read that letter—that she was really going!—she’d felt deep kinship with thousands of women she’d never met. They were from different parts of the country and all walks of life, but what they had in common was this: they had each gone to the front window and taken down the banner that showed a blue star set in a field of white surrounded by red borders. The blue star symbolized hope and pride, one star for every family member in military service. Most likely they’d hung it up in private and taken it down in private; most likely they’d made it themselves, of cotton or felt, or crocheted it, maybe with tassels and colored cords. Then one day they accepted the lonely task of replacing the blue star with one of gold. Gold meant
sacrifice to the cause of liberty and freedom. It meant they were now Gold Star Mothers. They hadn’t asked for this, nor did they have any say in how it happened, but they been given to bear the most violent and dark cost of the nation’s war. Each one shouldered this responsibility without protest, as stoically as her child had rested a rifle against his chest. More than 100,000 American mothers lost their cherished sons. Each had been alone; but they were alone no longer.

Cora had straightaway written to the president of the New England chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers, offering to help. She was experienced in running things, she’d said earnestly. Aside from recruiting high school girls (“—and you know how lazy they can be”) to clean out the library from top to bottom, she was president of the Student Health Council, where parents volunteer to keep the records for school physicals and vaccinations. Even when she no longer had a child in school, she emphasized, to show her dedication, she’d kept the position to this day. (Unsure if they would consider this a plus or a minus, she did not add that she was unable to get anyone to test the urine samples, and so she did them herself.)

The answer she’d received was a surprise.

The reply had come from Mrs. Genevieve Olsen of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was written in midnight-blue ink on ivory Crane’s stationery embossed with
Olsen Railroad & Co
., making no secret of the fact that she was
that
Mrs. Olsen, granddaughter of the tycoon who made his fortune in railroads and the fur trade. She had married a cousin, Franklin Olsen, and when he died, she was left one of the wealthiest philanthropists in America. She had built a wing of a hospital in Boston and served on the boards of museums and charities. She was known to give exclusive dinner parties that drew all sorts of smart people, at which she wore unabashedly eye-popping jewels.

But the war had leveled certain things. Like Cora, Genevieve Olsen was a widow who had lost her only child. Dr. Henry Olsen, a surgeon, had been killed in a German attack on a dressing station during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the same battle that had taken Sammy. He, too, had been in the Twenty-sixth Infantry, or Yankee Division, which included all the New England states, and from which
their group, Party A, would be drawn. Such is the democracy of death that a plainspoken librarian and a sophisticated socialite could become warm correspondents and eventually close friends.

“I look forward to you joining our pilgrimage to France,”
Mrs. Olsen had written to Cora.
“You write of the difficult decision about Samuel’s final resting place. For us it was simple, as Henry had been a student in France when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and we spoke French at table. Have no fears—I am certain that when you enter that beautiful field of honor peace will come to you
.

“Remember our purpose. We go not only to be reunited with our hero sons, but to promote peace and goodwill among nations. We must continue to press Congress for increased monetary compensation, so no Gold Star parent will ever be without a roof over his or her head, nor without food for sustenance, nor be an object of charity. In the words of our charter, which always bear repeating: ‘To unite with loyalty, sympathy and love for each other, mothers whose sons or daughters had made the supreme sacrifice.’ ”

In response to Cora’s imploring letters, Mrs. Olsen finally offered her the position of member coordinator for Party A—a job that she’d made up specially to accommodate this “determined gal from Maine,” as she remarked to her niece at dinner. The organization needed more staunchly devoted members like Cora Blake.

Late evening in early spring. The tide was out, the harbor calm under a cold mist. The shops were closed. In the stillness every sound was magnified. You could hear a ham-handed guitar and bursts of male laughter coming from Lester King’s shop at the end of the wharf, where lobstermen gathered to trade insults and give Prohibition a kick in the pants. Up in the village there was just the ticking of the rain.

The only light still burning on Main Street was in the library. It was past closing time but Cora was still at work. The library was her second home; she knew every creak in the planks. It was a cottage of white clapboard with a sweet wraparound porch built by a reverend and his wife a century ago. Most recently it had served as a millinery shop with a dentist’s office on the top floor, where the children’s reading area was now. The rooms were tiny, every surface worn to smoothness like a good old rowboat that’s seen its day.

From the high librarian’s desk Cora commanded the front door, which opened with a pleasant tinkle meaning,
Here comes someone to talk to
. She’d look up with an eager smile that launched a thousand conversations—on wholesome and intellectual topics, no doubt, but shot through with satisfying gossip like fat through bacon. She liked that, being in the center of things; it was an antidote to the aloneness. She made it a point to notice what everyone liked and she read a lot herself, even stuff she didn’t care for, so she could find the right book for the right person. If all the other responsibilities she took on for the church and school weren’t enough to fill the need, there would always be someone stopping by to ask about a book.

Tonight she wasn’t there on library business. Yes, she was hoping Linwood Moody would drop by. He was a lot of fun to be with, and
had promised to bring materials for his talk that weekend, “Precious Stones of Maine”—she’d set out the easel and arranged the chairs—but mostly she wanted her mind to be clear in order to figure out what to do about the letter from Mrs. Minnie Seibert.

Mrs. Seibert was one of her Gold Star Mothers in Party A. Cora had to put the letter off because the storm kept bringing people into the library, but what it said had worried her. Minnie Seibert desperately wanted to make the trip to France—but her husband wasn’t letting her go.

Cora was orderly. That’s the way you solved a problem. She’d made three neat stacks of envelopes and tied them off with ribbons—red, white, and blue. Red was for official correspondence from the government, white for the general public, and blue for the ladies in her group. Aside from Mrs. Olsen’s only Minnie Seibert’s letter was in the blue. Although she’d gone to the post office every day, neither of the other two—Mrs. Katie McConnell of Dorchester, Massachusetts, nor Mrs. Wilhelmina Russell of Prouts Neck, Maine—had replied to her cheery note of welcome.

Minnie Seibert had made up for it with three pages of remorse for the way her life had turned out—having to flee for her life from the Russian pogroms, her tyrannical husband, Abraham, and the loss of her son, Isaac.
“My only light.”
They were educated people who moved from a small Jewish neighborhood in Bangor to the rural countryside in order to become chicken farmers, of all things. Minnie explained that since Jews couldn’t own land in Russia, her husband was overjoyed at the opportunity. They wouldn’t need anybody else, he said—not the synagogue, not the state—which Cora thought was a bunch of hooey. Having grown up on a farm, she was pretty sure you couldn’t get along without neighborly kindness, but it seemed this Abraham would have none of it. He refused to take even a bag of beans from “the capitalists,” which had left Minnie and the children (two older girls plus the youngest, a boy) isolated and poor. He sounded like all he wanted was to tear everything down.

“Abraham is on the difficult side,”
Mrs. Seibert wrote.
“I’m his wife, I know what he’s like. I have to be on my best behavior. Isaac always stood up
to him. My husband forbade him to join the army, but Isaac said
, I am an American,
and he joined. It’s been very hard for me.”

Rain beat down on the library. Cora picked up a pen. She wanted to tell Mrs. Seibert that she understood—it had been the same with Sammy. It broke your heart but what could you do? They were already men. Sadness overcame her, and without knowing it she put the pen down, rested her cheek in her hand, and stared at a blur of bookshelves in the dark pool of the room. It was the way Sammy had left without a word. Maybe he’d known that if he’d come back to say goodbye she would have broken down. Then he might have, too, because he was a feelingful boy, a son who was not ashamed to love his mother, just as she was openly devoted to him. What if he couldn’t face her tears and backed out on the promise he’d made to his buddies? The other boys must have been just as scared, because one night they had all gotten stinko and gone up to Portland, and by morning they were in.

Cora had almost lost her mind with worry. It wasn’t until three days later that she received a postcard:
“Dear Ma, I joined the Army to fight the Germans. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon. Your son, Sammy.”
He was sixteen and lied about his age in order to enlist. But things didn’t really seem that bad. It was late in the war. Everyone thought it would be over by Christmas. Sammy was an excellent shot. As a boy he could bring down a deer that would last them the winter. He became a marksman assigned to clear a French village, but his scouting party was ambushed by German machine guns hidden in the trees. It was October 22, 1918, a scant month before Armistice. He was the only island son who died in the war.

The whole town mourned. There were two separate services that filled the Opera House on Main Street—one official, one religious. They named the American Legion Post after him. In the Fourth of July parade, the oldest member carried a flag in honor of Samuel Blake. His spirit, what he stood for, carried on. In the tawny light of the library lamp, Cora gripped the pen and bent closer to the papers on her desk, looking for words to convince a perfect stranger to defy her husband and come with people she’d never met to a far-off place that nobody could pronounce.

“These boys couldn’t have been heroes if their mothers lacked courage,”
she began.

The wooden door to Lester King’s shop swung open and Linwood Moody stepped out smartly. Very smartly, so he wouldn’t fall. He made sure to shut the door firmly, so they wouldn’t be shouting about losing the heat. He had the chart for “Precious Stones of Maine” wrapped in newsprint under one arm, and he was grinning like an idiot, happily full of rum and Cokes, as he ambled down the wharf in the rain toward the darkened town. He could still hear the stomping of boots behind him, and a deep-chested chorus:

He started laughing all by himself. The policy at Lester King’s was men only allowed. No woman in her right mind would go there, anyway. It was hot as a sauna and stank of cigars and smoke from the woodstove. The walls were covered with naked pinups along with citations for fishing violations that Lester King proudly ignored. The floor was covered with nets, buoys, coils of rope, traps stacked up to be repaired. A half dozen lobstermen would squeeze themselves inside, chewing tobacco and enjoying their cocktails. They wore blue jeans with splatters of paint and tar and ripped sweaters and soiled caps over greasy hair. Their beards were hoary and wild. Most of the older men were overweight, some hard of hearing due to the roar of the diesel engines, and many faces were veined and red and spotted with cancers.