A Star for Mrs. Blake (44 page)

The ship’s alarm sounded until Wilhelmina was spotted by some other Gold Star Mothers who had wrapped themselves in blankets and were lying inert on lounge chairs inside a glassed-in promenade,
hoping a breath of sea air would help. Captain Carlson got there first, in time to see Wilhelmina, drenched by rain, looking like a tall thin pale naked ghost, in nothing but a clinging white nightgown, hanging on to the rail as sickly green waves broke over the side.

Thinking of nothing but duty, Carlson slid the door open and took on the storm.

Outside was wild chaos. Alarmed passengers were hit by fifty-mile-an-hour winds whipping sideways, blowing sharp bullets of rain, but Carlson put her head down and ground forward, grappling toward an orange buoy secured to the ship by a coil of rope. She wrestled it from the mounting but the water-soaked hemp was surprisingly heavy and threw her off balance as the ship listed to almost forty-five degrees. Tossed onto her back, Carlson tumbled end over end down the flooded deck until colliding with Wilhelmina and together they landed in a heap against the white iron rail, half drowning in salt water. The sea inhaled before the next surge of deadly power and by then two seamen harnessed by cables were sliding toward them through the blinding squall, and the stunned onlookers who had crowded the wind-soaked gallery witnessed a dramatic rescue at sea that would be the first thing from their lips when asked about the pilgrimage.

Hammond had been miserable since Lily’s departure, and the rocky crossing kept him confined to his own despair. It was not just the loss of her lively companionship that made him want to punch the wall, but the way she’d been ripped out by the roots and tossed aside by General Perkins, and the depressing reality that the machinery of the bureaucracy would keep the commander safe from scrutiny. Stuck in a claustrophobic bunk and rolling with the storm, Hammond glared at the gray-painted ceiling twelve inches from his face, disillusioned, and at the same time trapped by the institution he had worshipped all his life.

The emergency alarm got him on his feet and out the door. He sprinted toward the shouts and commotion coming from the upper deck, tripping over floors that kept tipping like a funhouse. The ship’s doctor was already supervising Wilhelmina’s transport on a stretcher to the infirmary when Hammond appeared, and they exchanged a few words while clearing gawkers from blocking the path. Wilhelmina
looked dead but the doctor said she’d had a shot for the pain. Captain Carlson was lying prostrate on a lounge, attended to by the ship’s nurses. There was blood all over her uniform. Word was spreading fast of the incident and Hammond thought it prudent to gather the troops.

“How is Wilhelmina?” Cora asked when he called at her cabin.

“The doctor thinks it’s a broken shoulder.”

“Oh, dear!”

“I know,” Hammond said, supporting her as they made their way to Katie and Minnie’s room. “What on earth was she doing out there?”

It was purely rhetorical. No one would ever know. Minnie opened the door looking as normal as ever. She was one of the few who hadn’t become ill. Their cabin was exactly like Cora and Wilhelmina’s, and the weighted vase of flowers and jars of cosmetics kept sliding around in their trays just as they did in hers, sloshing like coins in a pocket with the movement of the ship.

“It’s a shame,” Minnie said when Hammond explained Wilhelmina’s venture.

“She’s expected to recover,” he said. “The nurse as well.”

“Will she ever be able to play tennis?” Cora wondered.

“Why is it God takes away the thing you love best?” Minnie sighed. “Beethoven was deaf, you know.”

Katie had been lying in bed, sick as a dog, one arm thrown across her eyes. “But Cora got a grandson. What do you make of that?”

Minnie thought about it. “There’s always the exception,” she decided.

“Will François visit you in Maine?” Hammond asked.

“I don’t see how, it’s so expensive.”

“You’ll find a way. Mrs. McConnell?” He tapped Katie’s wrist. “Sorry to disturb you, but are you able to sit up?”

“I can try.”

“Slowly,” Hammond cautioned.

Katie made it to an upright position and seemed surprised.

“Not too bad. I’m must be gettin’ my sea legs. Just in time to be off this mad boat.”

“I’m counting the hours,” Cora sighed.

“I have something for you,” Hammond told Katie.

She took a sip of water and rubbed her eyes. “Really? And what would that be, Thomas?”

He drew two rosaries out of his pocket.

She gawked at the sight of them. “For Jesus’s sake!”

“I believe these are yours. You left them at the cemetery.”

“Of course I did! I meant to! What did you think?”

Hammond shrugged. “They were returned to me by the cemetery staff.”

“Did you drop them?” Cora asked.

“Not a’tall!” Katie replied indignantly. “I would not lose sight of them—they belonged to my mother and her mother, who used to get down on their knees every night in the cottage in Ballinlough—”

“Sorry!” Cora said, hoping to head off another tale of dear Ireland.

“No, of course I didn’t lose them; what I did was, I hung them up, one around Tim and one around Dolan. How’d they come to be back to me?”

“Maybe you’re not allowed to decorate,” Minnie suggested.

“I don’t know,” Hammond said, letting the beads fall into her open hand. “But here they are, for whatever reason.”

“God bless the U.S. Army.” Katie stared at the rosaries, dazed. “I suppose.”

Twenty-eight hours later the S.S.
Harding
sailed back into New York Harbor. They’d left the storms behind and it was a fair summer’s day with high clouds and blue sky when they passed the Statue of Liberty and made the mammoth approach to the pier. The hours passed slowly while they waited on board for the customs inspection, but finally they were released back down the gangway, tramping along with a crowd of other passengers eager to touch solid ground. Wilhelmina, with one arm and shoulder in a white plaster cast, came down in a wheelchair pushed by Captain Carlson, limping along despite a cast on one foot, like heroes from a different war, except there were no bands or newspapermen to make a fuss, just the usual wharf rats—a few police
officers, souvenir hucksters, luckless orphans and prostitutes, sailors on leave.

Hammond led his group, now reduced to three, toward the line of buses waiting to take several hundred Gold Star Mothers back to the Hotel Commodore. While they waited in the hot sun, a middle-aged man wearing a seersucker suit and straw boater, and clutching a bouquet of roses, came trotting down the rows of women, asking for Mrs. Russell in Party A. He was directed to Hammond and hurried over, wiping the moisture from his ruddy cheeks with a big white handkerchief.

“Hello, son, I’m Warren J. Russell and I’m looking for my wife, Wilhelmina. I hope I’m not too late and she hasn’t gone anywhere. Impossible to find anyone in this crowd. I’ve been told she’s around here somewhere, possibly with you?”

His words alerted Cora, Minnie, and Katie. They turned around to get a good look at Warren J. Russell, the architect of grand houses and the husband who had committed his wife to an insane asylum in order to run off with a secretary. He was not as superior-acting as they might have imagined; in fact he seemed disordered and all higgledy-piggledy, with his red bow tie askew, and sweating like a horse in the city heat. Eyebrows were raised among the women as all three had the same thought:
So it didn’t work out so well with the floozy
.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Hammond said, giving him the same once-over. “Your wife is right there. We weren’t told she was to be picked up.”

“It’s a last-minute surprise. Thought we’d spend a few nights at the Waldorf and take a leisurely drive up north.” He squinted at the crowd. “Where is she, you say?”

“Under that awning. You see the lady in the wheelchair with the nurse?”

William J. Russell did not recognize his wife, much thinner, wearing an unfamiliar lemon-yellow turban to cover the abrasions on her scalp and an ungainly cast that held one arm in the air. Incredibly, the nurse who attended her was wearing a cast, too.

“Good Lord, what happened?”

“We had an unusually stormy crossing. Mrs. Russell took a fall and fractured her shoulder. The doctor says—”

Warren J. Russell took off in a lopsided lope to where Wilhelmina sat, oblivious, and they watched as he embraced her, went down on his knees in front of her, and presented the bouquet of roses. She responded with the faintest of smiles.

Minnie zipped her lips. “I’m not going to say a word.”

They said their goodbyes in the lobby of the Hotel Commodore. Cora drew Hammond aside.

“I need to tell you something, Thomas. I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t believe Bobbie’s death was an accident.”

It took him totally by surprise. “How can you say that? You were there—you saw what happened.”

“I don’t mean it was anybody’s fault. Bobbie knew she was sick,” Cora said. “Maybe she realized that her heart condition was getting worse. I honestly think she was afraid that if she told anyone they wouldn’t let her go on the pilgrimage. All she wanted was to see Henry. She did say once that she’d lie, cheat, and steal if it had to do with the welfare of her children. She intentionally lied on her record.”

“You’re saying Mrs. Olsen left off any mention of heart disease?”

“That’s right.”

“Which is why there were no prescriptions for medication,” Hammond said, starting to boil on Lily’s behalf. She’d been right about Perkins altering the record.

Cora nodded. “I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to go off thinking you did anything wrong. It was Bobbie’s will—and you know how strong that could be. You did a fine job, Thomas. We’re all grateful. And you’ll make the right decisions in the future, I know you will.”

“I hope so,” Hammond said grimly.

“What are your plans?”

“I’ve got another tour of duty on the pilgrimages,” he said, but his mind was elsewhere.

“And then?”

“Prepare for the next war, I guess.”

“I hope not, I really do.”

“You’re right,” Hammond said, animated by a new idea. “I’m not.”

“Not what?”

He looked at his watch. “Excuse me, I have to call my father. He’s probably still at the club.”

Cora smiled, bemused. “All right.”

“I wonder what he’ll think of the diplomatic corps.”

“For you?”

“I think so, yes.” Hammond’s eyes were eager and bright. “Thank you for everything, Mrs. Blake,” he said, vigorously shaking her hand. “Best of luck to you.”

Cora knew she shouldn’t kiss him goodbye, but she did anyway, a gentle brush of her lips on the soft stubble of a manly young cheek.

Minnie planned to catch the downtown bus and go back to see her cousin Bessie, who worked at the glove factory, before going up to Bangor and her husband, daughters, and the chicken farm. When the hugs and kisses were over and pledges of lifelong friendships made; when Cora and Katie had gone up to their rooms for an overnight stay and Hammond had reported to the command center on the second floor, where he made a call to arrange dinner with his father that night, Minnie picked up the cardboard suitcase and walked across the lobby of the hotel and down a short hallway until she found the ladies’ room. She was alone. She looked at herself in the mirror. She fixed her white brimmed hat. She placed the needlepoint purse on the marble counter and unzipped an inner compartment where she’d kept her treasure, the lipstick she’d bought in the perfume store in Verdun. She carefully unwrapped the lavender tissue. Leaning close to the mirror, she colored her lips coral red, and then stood back, marveling at the way it made her whole face come alive.

Cora and Katie took the train first-class back to Boston. This time they knew the ropes and ordered oysters Rockefeller. During that
last, quiet leg of the journey, without the interference of others, they were free to speak plainly to each other with the commonality of New Englanders who, underneath it all, shared an acceptance of things. The winters did that, they agreed. You knew you were going to take a pounding and you just had to make the best of it. It was easy to talk that way with the bloom of summer going by outside the windows, but that was part of it too, the short season that brought garden tomatoes and squash at the end of it. Made you appreciate things while you had them.

When they emerged from the platform at South Station, the McConnell clan was there to meet them, and it warmed Cora’s heart to see Sergeant Ian McConnell, with tears caught in his fair lashes, embrace his wife. The aunts and cousins crowded around but little Damian couldn’t wait and scrabbled fast with crutches whirling until he was back in his mother’s arms.

Katie held her child close. “I’ll never forget you,” she told Cora.

“Come to Maine. Please, I mean it. My nieces will love Damian.”

“We will. For leaf season!” Katie called gaily, borne away by her family. “I’m so happy for you and your new grandson, Cora. Treasure him. It’s a miracle.”

On the train up to Bangor, Cora removed the Gold Star badge, glad to be an ordinary person again. She settled the tartan travel bag comfortably in her lap as her mind buzzed with all the things she had to do. It was almost the Fourth of July. The weight of the work ahead came down on her. There would be bunting to dig out of the cellar and hang—she could count on the nieces not to have done it yet—blueberries to pick, pies to bake, potholders to sew for the tourists, the garden to put in order, then before you knew it, school. Would she sell her shortcakes? The girls would be a mess. They’d need haircuts and serious baths, like dogs with brambles. Who knew where Big Ole Uncle Percy would be—hopefully not in jail. And she hated to think of the condition of the library card catalog.

She was grateful for the time she’d had with Katie McConnell. It’s funny how you can get to know a person in the most offhand way, like
sharing a train ride together after an entire transatlantic adventure. Katie was salt of the earth. She understood what it meant to do without, so when she’d said François had been a miracle, she knew what she was talking about. A miracle is something unexpected; something to be grateful for, that changes your life. The miracle was meeting Griffin Reed.