A Star for Mrs. Blake (9 page)

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t you live in Prouts Neck?”

“Whose neck?”

Cora threw up her hands. “Oh, never mind! The army must have sent the wrong address. I understand there will be more than four hundred of us going on that ship. You can’t really blame them.”

Mrs. Russell objected vigorously. “That exactly what the army
do
. I ain’t hardly got any letters from my son, Elmore. And those I did receive did not arrive until a whole year after he died.”

“What a shame. Did Elmore fight in a place called Meuse-Argonne, do you know?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Sammy, too. He was in the Twenty-sixth Infantry, the Yankee Division.”

“Elmore was in the Ninety-third Division, Service of Supply,” Mrs. Russell said proudly.

“Good for him,” Cora echoed, with no idea what that meant.

But it must have meant something, because Mrs. Russell was still nodding to herself with pleasure.

“He was a hard worker and a good son. The Germans killed him with a bombshell. You just can’t keep the devil in the hole. I know that for a fact.”

Sitting down was doing Mrs. Russell good. Her wide forehead was no longer prickled with sweat. She’d accepted a glass of water and seemed to perk up. Now she was looking around with satisfaction at the grand marble columns and the mural of a lady with a whippet dog that covered an entire wall.

“This is fine,” she said.

Cora learned her companion had come north from Georgia at the age of twenty-eight when Elmore was a baby and still sewed ladies’ wraps and underwear for a manufacturer in the textile district of Boston. She was sixty-two years old and lived with her daughter and grandchildren. She said that she was glad when her son joined the army because she thought it would improve his education, and the pastor of her church preached that it was important for black people to stand up and show their patriotism. Cora had been listening with one eye on the clock and the other on the door. It was 7:10 p.m. and Katie McConnell hadn’t showed.

“I’m getting worried about Mrs. McConnell,” Cora said.

“She comin’ or she ain’t,” Mrs. Russell pronounced. “Meanwhile, we best get on that train. Now, what are those two up to? Sellin’ Hershey bars?”

Two teenage girls, almost identical, with long blond hair and dressed in green plaid school uniforms with pleated skirts, had burst into the waiting room and were scrambling about, tapping shoulders, stopping people at the sinks, cornering them before they walked out the door, and generally disrupting everybody’s business. The attendant shooed them out but instead of leaving they formed their hands like megaphones and screamed at the top of their lungs:

“Mrs. Blake? Is anyone here named Mrs. Blake?”

“I am!” Cora said, springing to her feet.

They rushed over. “Mrs. Blake? Katie McConnell said to tell you that she’s looking for ya!”

“Who are you?”

“Come on! She’s our aunt!”

“This is Mrs. Russell,” Cora said, pulling back. “She’s also in your aunt’s party—”

“You go on,” Mrs. Russell said. “It’ll take me a minute.”

“Are you sure? You can get to the train all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“We won’t leave without you,” Cora promised, grabbing the tartan bag. To the girls: “Where is Mrs. McConnell? Is she here?”

“Hurry up. She’s waitin’ outside.”

“Why outside—?”

They marshaled Cora out the door and across the main hall to where a group of people had formed an island in the midst of the flux. They were more like a tribe. The men kept guard with feet planted and arms folded, casting suspicious glances at passersby. The women huddled in threes and fours, chatting a mile a minute while their children practiced sliding across the marble floor. Except for a couple of uniformed cops, they were dressed in battered shoes and poor working clothes. Some were compact and swarthy, some thin and fair; they resembled each other in attitude more than looks. In short,
“We own this place.”
It reminded Cora of fishermen guarding their traps.

The girls broke through the outer circle shouting, “Here she is!” and Cora was somehow sucked into the center, where a tall woman wearing black was holding a struggling little boy.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Would you be Mrs. Blake?”

“Yes!” Cora answered breathlessly. “Mrs. McConnell? Happy to meet you at last!”

They tried to shake hands but the boy got in the way with all his squirming. Katie McConnell was not at all the way Cora had pictured her, dressed in a smart store-bought wool shirtwaist with the Gold Star Mothers badge on the lapel. Carrot-red hair showed beneath a black cloche hat with a rhinestone buckle. Her fair skin was lightly freckled and her front teeth stuck out just enough to give her an air of girlish abandonment.

“Say hello to Damian.”

Her little boy was a moon-faced bruiser with dark chopped-off bangs. He refused to look at Cora, burying his face in his mother’s neck. Katie laughed apologetically.

“He doesn’t want to let me go.”

She spoke with a Gaelic intonation that made everything a statement and a question at the same time. The boy kept tugging on Katie’s ear until she gave him her attention. Cora disapproved of the way she continued to hold him. He was four years old, not a baby. If she’d just put him down, he would settle. And then she did.

“Here we go,” Katie said finally. “Give Mama a rest, why don’tcha?”

The boy had a withered leg. One of the relatives produced a pair
of crutches. He greedily took hold of them and crab-walked over to the other kids.

“Polio,” Katie explained. “He got sick when he was nine months old and spent a year in Children’s Hospital in an iron lung. He’s well cured, but people are afraid they might catch the disease. We’ve been chased from public restrooms more than once, which is why I don’t dare go inside.”

Damian tried to slide on the floor like his cousins, fell down, and was picked up by an older boy.

“He seems to get on,” Cora said cheerfully.

One of the policemen interrupted. “Better get on that train, ladies,” he said in a kindly manner. He spoke with the rough clang of a born Irishman. He was a large man with a jowly face and sad down-turned eyes.

“This is my husband, Sergeant Ian McConnell,” Katie said. “I was just tellin’ Mrs. Blake about Damian.”

“He’s a fighter.” The father smiled and put an arm around his wife. “But she’s the brave one. She does the whole family honor by going on this pilgrimage. It’s far away and we’ll miss her, but I said right off it’s our sacred duty and she should do it. We’re all proud of her.”

Mr. and Mrs. McConnell kissed, and Cora remembered that Linwood had said the very same thing to her before leaving the house, while they’d stayed on the porch for a last glimpse of the harbor.
“I’m proud of you.”
It softened her heart toward him and made her regret leaving everything so unsettled. She knew Linwood wasn’t going to take the job in Massachusetts, it was just something he’d used to try to urge her along. He’d lost his wife in a terrible way, a single instant of a car going out of control—maybe he was afraid that if he pushed too hard, Cora would go spinning off as well. Leaving the island took her out of his territory; going to France, she was well off the map. But there was no harm done, not really. They’d left things open, hadn’t they? And you could say a lot on a postcard. She steadied herself by remembering that her mother and father had crossed oceans and come back. It was in her blood: the fear of it, and the thrill of going, just the same.

The entire clan accompanied them on the long walk downstairs to the track: Ian’s brother, Jack; Margaret, his wife; William and Sean, their grown sons; cousins Michael, Devora, and Allie; another Jack who was someone’s uncle; and his children, Eddie, Steve, Brooke, and Lane. Ian carried the little boy and Katie took his crutches along with her carpetbag. When they got to the first-class car, Cora looked up to see Mrs. Russell knocking on the glass, already settled in a window seat. She waved back. Party A was here!

They wouldn’t let Cora go without goodbye hugs and safe wishes from each of the McConnells. Damian was back in Katie’s arms and he was crying.

“I’ll be back before ye know it,” she said, smoothing his bangs. “What’s the matter, darlin’?”

“Mama—are you going away to heaven?”

“Oh, God, no,” said Katie. “What gave you that idea?”

But the child could not be soothed, and in the end had to be forcefully pulled away. Katie steeled herself and got on board without looking back. She’d left her mother in Ireland; she could leave her boy for a couple of weeks. Damian was handed off to the two teenage girls, who jostled him and carried him along to see the big locomotive at the front of the train. The crying ceased and he stared over their shoulders at the place where his mother had disappeared. Cora watched with stinging eyes as the somber little face became smaller and smaller, borne off to the darkness of the tunnel.

The members of Party A had been given their own compartment. Here the velvet seats were patterned with businesslike checks and the glass doors finished in walnut. A painting of an English landscape was nailed to the wall. When Cora climbed in, Kate and Mrs. Russell had already introduced themselves and were commiserating over Damian.

Despite her resolve, Katie’s eyes were red and she was blowing her nose into a handkerchief. “I don’t know what came into my head to bring him.”

“Shame about the polio,” Mrs. Russell clucked. “We got a lot of that down South.”

“We count it a blessing.”

“That so?”

Katie folded her hands in her lap. “He’ll never go to war.”

The train continued to move through the tunnel a long time before breaking daylight. The summer sun was going down over the church steeples and triple-deckers of South Boston when the conductor who had boarded them opened the door to the compartment and smiled at the three unlikely occupants—a grandma from the South, black like he was; a mom from the big Irish family with the crippled boy; a nice lady on a through ticket from Bangor, Maine—who already seemed to have much more in common with one another than just their Gold Star badges.

“Welcome to the
Mayflower
line, Boston to New York City,” he said.

They smiled back pleasantly enough. Of course they didn’t know it, and the conductor was not about to tell, but there had been some trouble with the lady from down South. He’d had to call in the supervisor to override objections by certain passengers about her sitting up front with the whites. Negroes were not usually seen in first class, except if they were famous entertainers, but it irked him that her being a war mother and the fact that her son gave his life for this country didn’t make such a thing automatic. The supervisor settled it the smart way. He said as long as Mrs. Russell had a government-issued ticket with her name on it, she was entitled to be there.

“What can I do for you, ladies?”

Cora spoke up confidently. “A table for three in the dining car, please.”

“It will be my pleasure,” the conductor said.

General Reginald Perkins had taken over the grand ballroom of the Hotel Commodore, which was just across from Grand Central Terminal on Forty-second Street, and turned it into a war room. A fashionable location for society weddings had been converted into a command center, alive with urgency and pinpoint purpose. Beneath the tiered chandeliers were thirty-six metal desks manned by ranks of secretaries, and the vaulted ceilings echoed twelve hours a day with typewriters clacking out reports in sextuplet. Army officers in olive green uniforms strode to and fro, pushing tackboards with maps of the European battlefields. Telephones rang. Orders were issued. The only remnant of civilian life was a grand piano in the center of it all, incongruously poised on a platform draped with blue silk.

General Reginald Perkins was fifty-six years old, a big-shouldered Kentuckian with thick silver hair and bushy, theatrical eyebrows. He had the set mouth and perfect posture of a horseman. Just like clearing a jump, he used to say, the trick in life was to use your heels and keep your eyes fixed on where you wanted to go. He came from a lineage that proved it. His father had fought in the Mexican War. His grandfather was a general in the Confederate army. Young Perkins abandoned the family tobacco business to attend Virginia Military Institute, where he was trained as an engineer. He served five years in the Philippines before commanding the 104th in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of 1918, for which he received the Distinguished Service Medal.

Back in the States, he was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps, which combat types might deride as a bunch of glorified supply sergeants, but it suited Perkins’s acerbic blend of meticulousness and hunger
for power. Small victories could build a career. He’d revamped the Graves Registration Service and received high marks for coming in on budget for the construction of depots and army hospitals. Two years before, when Congress passed the American War Mothers Act, which inaugurated the Gold Star Mothers’ tours, Reginald Perkins was the obvious choice to tackle the logistical mess of transporting, accommodating, feeding, and medicating almost seven thousand mothers and widows from all over America to and from Europe—many of them over the age of fifty and therefore, by the army’s calculation, in a state of physical exhaustion. But now, from a balcony above the grand ballroom where he had built the perfect machine, General Perkins looked down at his creation and thought,
Balls!