A Star for Mrs. Blake (15 page)

“And Mrs. Blake, I think you’ll be comfortable with Mrs. Russell.”

This was a surprise as well, but Cora saw no reason not to like Wilhelmina, so she smiled at new her roommate, who absently smiled back.

“And if anybody’s worrying about Mrs. Olsen,” Lily added, “don’t. She’s taken a private suite.”

Any further conversation was drowned out by another warning blast from the foghorn. The crowd jolted and hurried forward. Then they saw the source of the problem: General Perkins was at the foot of the gangway making a speech into a microphone held by a radio man:

“As these fine ladies board the ship, we are reminded of the sacredness of their pilgrimage. For every cross in the American cemeteries of France … a boy. And for every … boy … a mother.”

“Hold on to your hat!” said Wilhelmina, pressing hers to her head.

“Stay together!” Hammond ordered.

Flashbulbs exploded. Black bubbles floated across their vision, and then Party A was pushed onto the ship and up against a railing, where
they were told to stay and watch the departure. The steward marched along, hitting a gong and shouting, “All ashore that’s going ashore!” and some very drunk young people scrambled down the steps from the top, laughing and waving bottles of Champagne. Streamers were thrown from the decks. The foghorn sounded three more times and imperceptibly they began to move.

Katie, Cora, Wilhelmina, and Minnie stood side by side as they rolled in stately measure past the Statue of Liberty. Her face seemed to loom very large and close, as if she were following them with her huge eyes.

“She’s very beautiful,” Cora said.

“Like a madonna,” Katie agreed.

“I remember when I came here,” Minnie said. “My father sent for us from Russia. It was the first time we saw Papa in three years. We stayed with his brother on Houston Street. My uncle gave us bananas and we thought they were the worst thing we ever tasted.”

“We were on Canal Street,” Katie remembered. “You and I were neighbors and we didn’t know it.”

“The Irish and the Jews weren’t such great neighbors,” Minnie murmured.

Wilhelmina announced, “I was always here,” which sent them into gales of silly laughter. Then, reverently, the four members of Party A watched the skyline slip into the mist, followed by a dilapidated boat called the
Lightship Ambrose
, which marked the last point in the New York Harbor channel.

That night at dinner in the formal dining room, well after everyone was seated and noisily attending to the honeydew melon appetizer, Mrs. Genevieve Olsen made a grand entrance. It was a white-tablecloth-and-armchair room, with gilded paneling in a chevron pattern, a small stage in the middle. She created quite an impression walking down the Persian-carpeted stairway on the arm of Lieutenant Hammond. Despite the difference in their ages, Hammond and Mrs. Olsen seemed a matched pair, each of them having come from old families whose roots in the military elite and the railroad industry
mingled in the enriched soil of East Coast society. He wore a tuxedo and she a dramatic floor-length metallic gold lace evening gown with a plunging back, complemented by a spectacular diamond necklace and matching drop earrings.

“Ooh la la,” Katie said behind her hand. “Here comes Mrs. Somebody.”

As Mrs. Olsen approached the table, the others were simply struck dumb. Her gray hair was curled in perfect waves. She had a pleasant face with a too-wide nose, and a habit of tilting her head with the gamine smile of a boarding school queen. Her skin was snowy white and her eyes lively blue. She was not a beauty but had excellent carriage, and at age sixty-five a strong and confident bearing.

“Which of you is Cora Blake?”

“That would be me,” Cora said.

“Get up so I can give you a proper greeting,” Mrs. Olsen said with throaty vigor. “So wonderful to meet you at last. You’re as lovely as your letters.”

Katie watched from her seat at the table as the two stood there embracing like long-lost sisters. Decades of preparing meals and cleaning bathrooms for lesser women than Mrs. Olsen caused her hackles to rise like a mongrel dog looking for a fight. She was the one with the muscle when it came to running a household. But obedience was expected of Katie, by her employers as well as the church, and so she settled into a familiar resentment, as worn as the shiny spots on the Oriental rugs she vacuumed over and over.

On the other hand, Cora was feeling perfectly at home. Aside from having been deputized by Mrs. Olsen as member coordinator, and privy to her private correspondence all these months, Cora was quite familiar with summer people from Boston who had homes in Maine. As a teenager she’d sold them chanterelles picked in the forest and caramel cakes her mother made, and had babysat their children. She knew their stuffiness and their generosity. Some of those old-line Yankee women could be powerhouses on their own. Mrs. Olsen seemed the type who not only moored a forty-foot yacht in a private deepwater cove, but sailed it solo.

All of which gave way, for the two women in the middle of the
grand dining room, to the kind of informality between folks of different social class on the island; as if they’d run into each other in Boyce’s Grocery on Main Street, where everyone was an equal opportunity gossip.

“You make a handsome couple,” Cora observed of Mrs. Olsen and Hammond.

“The lieutenant is the handsome half,” she replied graciously. “Now, who is this charming young lady?”

Hammond introduced Nurse Lily, who rose and shook hands.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mrs. Olsen,” Lily said. “Please join us.”

Dressed for dinner in a teal-green day dress with a rhinestone belt that emphasized her tiny waist, rose-blond hair loosely caught up in a ribbon, Lily looked the role of every soldier’s sweetheart, but steadfastly maintained the decorum of her rank. She was on duty, after all, ready to attend to the slightest indigestion, which she could see coming right up on an approaching waiter’s tray. The second course was deviled eggs with Cheddar cheese and bacon, to be followed by French onion soup.

Minnie declined the eggs.

“But they’re scrumptioulicious!” Wilhelmina insisted, stuffing one in her mouth, whole.

“She don’t eat bacon,” Katie explained.

Minnie shrugged. “I wrote to General Pershing when I got the letter asking me to come because my son was killed, and I told him, it’s nice of you to invite me to France but I don’t eat pork. We’re not religious, but still. So I’m looking on the menu and what do I see? Pork roast, pork sausage—”

“She can’t eat sausage?” Wilhelmina wondered. “What about luncheon meat? I couldn’t live without my bologna on white.”

“Nothing better than kosher salami,” Minnie said.

“Give me Irish country bacon,” Katie said.

Lily chimed in: “Has anyone here ever had real Chicago Polish sausage?”

“I don’t know about that,” Cora said, “but there’s a woman on the island named Elizabeth Pascoe who makes pork sausage with maple syrup. I walk two miles just to get some before they’re gone.”

Katie elbowed Minnie. “That’ll make a believer outta ya.”

“Not likely,” Minnie replied, fretting over what she would eat. She picked up the menu card and her eyes fell on Swedish Timbales with Chicken and Mushrooms, which sounded like a foreign orchestra, but she would try it.

On the other side of the table, Mrs. Olsen, veteran of countless dinner conversations with strangers, was asking Hammond where he was born.

“San Rafael, California. It was a romantic beginning. My parents met during the earthquake. My father was stationed at Fort Scott, helping to evacuate families by ferry to Oakland, and my mother was the daughter of a naval officer.”

“The earth shook?”

Hammond smiled. “Yes, but I also have two younger sisters born in the Philippines, where we were posted before we moved back to North Carolina and then Washington, where we lived in the Wardman Park Hotel.”

“Oh, the Wardman!” Mrs. Olsen exclaimed with a bright smile. “Do you know Colonel and Mrs. Harriman Bay?”

“They’re good friends of my parents’!”

“I thought they might be—they’ve lived there for years and have a son just your age.”

“Charlie. He played second base on my baseball team in high school. He’s on Wall Street now.”

“And Mr. and Mrs. George Swenson? She’s a dear friend from Radcliffe.”

Hammond slapped the table. “Absolutely. We’ve been out on their boat. But they moved, didn’t they?”

“Yes, to the Hayes-Adams Hotel.”

“Same architect who built the Waldman, am I right?”

Mrs. Olsen nodded, finishing a spoonful of the French onion soup while expertly avoiding strings of cheese.

“Poor Henry Waldman. He was my mother’s cousin, and such a prolific man. You know he lost everything in the crash?”

“Thirty million, according to my mother, and she knows everything. She’s in the Green Book,” Hammond added, referring to the social list of Washington with a cynical roll of the eyes.

Mrs. Olsen nodded. “Well then, you must have done cotillion.”

“Of course,” Hammond said. “Club etiquette, coming-out balls, the whole bit.”

“I’ll bet you were a popular date.”

He shrugged. “I’ve accompanied a few debutantes. They’d rather dance with me than their fathers.”

“You’re being modest,” Mrs. Olsen said, slyly pointing with a manicured finger. “I’m sure you’ve left broken hearts all over Washington.”

Hammond laughed, enjoying the flattery. “Yes, there’s a plaque for the Hammond men at the Hayes-Adams Hotel.”

“I love the Hayes-Adams,” Mrs. Olsen declared. “We had the engagement party there for my son, Henry, and his fiancée.”

“When was this?”

“Right before Henry went overseas. He was engaged to marry a very nice girl from Smith. She was going to devote her life to poetry. Henry was a surgeon, you know; he specialized in bones, and so he was very needed in France. Well,” she said, sitting back as the waiter cleared their bowls, “he didn’t return and it was all very sad. She went on to marry someone else. When you lived in Washington, did you take advantage of the museums?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Not as much as I should.”

“I was just at the opening for an exhibit of new Chinese flower paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The imagery was breathtaking. They’re using much brighter colors and stronger lines than, say, the Qing Dynasty,” she said. “I went back twice to try my hand at chrysanthemums, but it requires such discipline and control of the brush. I’ll stick to my little sketches.”

“I didn’t know you were an artist, Mrs. Olsen,” Cora said from across the table.

“Botanist, really. Just an amateur hobby,” she replied. “Please call me Bobbie. I know, it has nothing to do with ‘Genevieve,’ but it’s always been Bobbie. My father wanted a boy.”

“We’re grateful that you didn’t oblige him,” Hammond said.

Lily suppressed a giggle. Mrs. Olsen smiled, amused by his gallantry.

“I’m looking forward to studying the wildflowers of France,” she said.

“Poppies?” he suggested.

“Of course,” she answered, lowering her eyes. “The flower of remembering. But they also have a lot of what we have—campion and bluebells and so forth.”

“Have you seen the lupine fields in Maine?” Cora asked.

Bobbie looked over with interest. “Yes, dear, didn’t I tell you we have a house down east?”

“Where?”

“Oh, a little island.”

“Which one?”

“Owl Island, outside Blue Hill Bay.”

“I know the house! There’s only one house on Owl Island, the Gilley House.”

“That’s right.”

“I think I was there a long time ago, with my father. We went to scavenge a shipwreck. There was a shipwreck, right?”

“Yes, but oh my, it must have been in the eighteen hundreds, because we bought the island in 1908 …”

After that, Cora and Bobbie talked nonstop through the Welsh rarebit, Swedish timbales, broiled quail, cauliflower au gratin, and chicory salad. But just before the parade of petits fours, almond macaroons, and Nesselrode pie, the older woman complained that she wasn’t well and would like to return to her cabin. Lily, instantly alert, jumped up from her chair and said she would accompany Mrs. Olsen.

“Are you feeling seasick?” Cora asked.

“I don’t get seasick.”

“Because I know a cure.”

“What is that?” Bobbie asked, a hand to her forehead.

“Clam water.”

Bobbie seemed to sway with dizziness at the suggestion. “I’ll just say good night,” she said swiftly, and Lily took her arm as they left.

Before the entertainment started, the waiters made sure each table was supplied with a choice of ten cheeses, three breads, raisins, crystalized ginger, and demitasse. The band played an introduction and a bald, big-eared master of ceremonies appeared on the tiny stage, announcing there would now be a talent show, starting with Mrs. Sadie Belmont of Baltimore, who would recite a poem. A skinny lady wearing glasses and a sparkly black dress was helped onstage. She stepped up to the microphone and read in a high-pitched voice:

During the applause Wilhelmina said disapprovingly, “We had better talent shows at the hospital. We put on the entire works of William Shakespeare.”

“Is that so?” Hammond said, clapping loudly so the others wouldn’t hear her. Party A had yet to be informed of Mrs. Wilhelmina Russell’s history, as had anybody else in authority. He and Lily had been keeping close tabs on their charge, which he hoped would be enough. So far she hadn’t displayed any symptoms of hysteria.

“Yes,” Wilhelmina recollected with satisfaction. “It was a regular Shakespearean festival. Mr. Grimilski played all the parts himself. When he was between electric-shock treatments. It was quite enjoyable.”