A Star for Mrs. Blake (43 page)

The woman smiled and shook her hand.

“She doesn’t speak English,” Reed said.

“Oh!” said Cora awkwardly. “Sorry. I don’t speak French.”

“She read the article and wrote to the newspaper. I just found her. Just this morning. She’s from the town of Bar-le-Duc. It isn’t far, just down the Voie Sacrée. I had to bring you two together before you left for America.”

“Why?”

“Because she knew Sammy.”

Cora gasped and put both hands over her mouth.

“How—how did this happen?”

“The Americans passed through her village. It was a supply area for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, we had truckloads going up to Verdun. The soldiers marched through the streets and all the girls fell in love with them. They threw flowers at the troops, and evidently, Mademoiselle Champaux gave Sammy a bar of soap.”

The woman smiled and said,
“Savon,”
her hands describing a bar of soap.

“You saw Sammy?” Cora cried, taking the woman’s hands in hers. “You talked to him?”

As Mademoiselle Champaux spoke, Reed translated.

“She says he had a mischievous gleam in his eye. He was beautiful. He had blond hair and smoked a corncob pipe.”

“He smoked a pipe!” Cora gave a wild laugh. “Why, that little stinker!”

“They all did, she says. They thought they were big men, you know. He was only there two days, but he told her all about you—his mother—and the village where you live.”

“He did? Really?”

Mademoiselle Champaux nodded. Her eyes welled and so did Cora’s.

“She remembers his words—‘I know my mama is angry because I’m over here but one day she’ll know why.’ She asked what made him join the army and he said because it wasn’t right that the Germans were killing people. He has in his mind the life of one child. That is why he fights. He said if one child can grow up in a free world, then it will be worth it.”

Cora was overwhelmed. Her Sammy had been enough of a man to say such a thing? She was smiling, giddy and heartbroken at the same time.

“She says that child is here, and he wants to meet you.”

“Well, that’s very nice.”

“Cora,” Reed said, “he’s your grandson.”

The boy was sitting in the shade of the tombstone that belonged to the fellow next door, leaning up against the cross. He was young, almost the same age as Sammy when he left home. He wore a soft
cotton shirt and washed-out blue shorts. His legs were drawn up and his head rested on his scabbed knees, a shock of hair over his forehead.

“That’s your grandson, Cora,” Reed said again, because she hadn’t moved.

“Dites bonjour,”
Mademoiselle Champaux urged the boy.

The boy reluctantly got up and stepped forward. “Hello,
Grand-mère
,” he said awkwardly.

His hair was dark but he had Sammy’s hooded eyes and the shape of his face. He gave Cora a quick shy hug, barely touching, as if his arms were around a barrel. She went cold down to her feet.

Reed said, “His name is François.”

François looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else, and Cora was speechless. She wondered how she’d ever learn to talk to him; she’d forgotten what to say to a young man. But as she basked in his childlike presence slowly something rekindled and began to shine. She had nothing to learn; she had it all inside.

“François,” she said, as Reed translated, “do you like boats?”

“I like boats.”

“Your father loved boats. Where I live, we have a beautiful harbor with lots of sailboats. Big ones. Would you like to come and visit?”

“In America? Yes.”

“Would you like to see where your father grew up?”

The boy nodded. Cora squeezed her eyes shut. She looked again at François. He was still there and his mother was still there—the young woman with whom her son had fallen in love for two days during the war. The sun was shining in the boy’s dark brown hair. She took him in her arms and held on tight until finally he embraced her, too, his arms firm and strong. She felt his body and the bones in his body and the life in the bones.

“Grif—” she wept, but he was gone.

In other parts of the cemetery, Katie McConnell draped her mother’s black rosary beads over Tim’s memorial and her grandmother’s rosary over Dolan’s. Minnie Seibert put three small rocks on the carved Star of David that marked Isaac’s grave, the traditional Jewish
sign that a mourner has been there; that the loved one is remembered even after the mourner is gone. Wilhelmina Russell sat in a chair under a tree from which she could keep watch over Bradley’s grave, the button from his jacket still in her hand.

Reed left François and his mother at the Meuse-Argonne cemetery with Cora and climbed back into the taxi for the ride to the train station in Verdun. They made good time until they got to the entrance to the city at St. Paul’s Gate and found it blocked by a column of slow-moving trucks piled with debris from excavated buildings. Reed urged the driver to find another way in, but he replied that it was the same everywhere. It’s like that all the time now, he complained. The entire city is a construction zone and everything stops for roadwork. But it was better in the long run, he drawled on, because the restoration of Verdun and the development of nearby war monuments would draw more visitors each year. Things were finally looking up in this battered part of the world.

As a result of the delay, Reed missed the train to Paris by eight minutes. He was forced to wait another hour and a half for the next departure, during which he sat on an oak bench in a cindery draft between the tracks. His interest in the story had flown away like the pigeons taking off on the warm air currents. He was worn out from too many rounds of morphine and his mind wasn’t working right. It was hard to concentrate on how the thoughts connected. He had a coffee but it didn’t keep him from falling asleep immediately upon boarding the next train.

When he arrived in Paris for the transfer to Calais, the numbers on the destination board were spinning nightmarishly fast. For one sickening moment he felt completely disoriented. He was in the Gare du Nord, right? He stared up at the huge glass-and-iron vault. Right, yes of course, he knew it like the back of his hand. The last train to Calais, connecting to the ferry that would take him to Dover, England, was leaving in five minutes. He calculated the chances of hoofing it to the track and buying a ticket on the train or trying for one at the booth
where half a dozen people were waiting. The man at the front of the line let him go first because he was a war vet. Reed got the last seat.

Down on Track 12, it looked like the beginning of a mass exodus from Europe. The conductors were motioning everyone to move along. Reed clutched his ticket at the end of a long slow line of passengers. When he finally got on board he found himself in a third-class car filled with Jews and other émigrés from Austria and Poland, surrounded by bundles they had brought of all shapes and sizes—feather beds, teapots, musical instruments, and umbrellas, tied on with rope. Many wore their heavy winter coats although it was hot and close. Women wiped their children’s tears with the corners of their shawls, while the men kept their heads in religious books. In the babble of languages, Reed could make out talk of a plague of consumption in Belgium. He was feeling weak himself from ducking through the crowd in the great hall of the station, and could not catch his breath until he made it to the second-class coach and finally threw himself into his window seat. A few minutes later a large Frenchwoman with painted nails and a loud dress sat down beside him, a little white dog on her lap. He looked at his watch as the train pulled out. Two hours and fifteen minutes to Calais, where Florence would be waiting with a fresh supply of drugs, then across the Channel to London and the end of pain under the chill embrace of anesthesia, and then waking up to a new life.

More passengers kept cramming onto the train. Second class was filled with people standing in the aisle. Reed listened to the conversation of the couple across the aisle to keep his mind off the cramps in his legs. They were an English family who had rented a summer place in the south of France. Weary from caring for the children without a nanny, they were happy to be going home. They exchanged sections of the newspaper and talked about the possibility of another war.

“We’ll have to fight it all over again,” said the wife.

“Not at all. Nobody can afford a second war. The powers that be will never let it happen,” pronounced the husband. He had a weak, whiny voice and seemed to work in finance. “Shall we find the dining car?”

“I don’t think we should risk it. Someone might take our seats,” said the nervous wife. She wouldn’t let the boy and girl pet the Frenchwoman’s dog.

Eventually the husband got up and came back with bags of chips for the children, complaining that there was nothing else. Reed couldn’t think about food, although he realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. His fingers were stiff and a strange bluish mottling had appeared on the backs of his hands. He swallowed the last dose of laudanum and listened to the wheels of the train and took comfort in their drumbeat, counting the minutes away. It was a long time since he’d smelled sea air.

Two hours later the train pulled into the station on schedule at the port of Calais. All the passengers stood at once, grabbing for their luggage. The English couple woke their children. The loudly dressed lady’s dog was making high-pitched yelps. Griffin Reed’s lifeless body had slumped on its side against the window, the mask halfway fallen off. The aisles were already crowded with emigrants pushing forward, dragging unwieldy packages and heavy suitcases, and everyone got all bollixed up as they slowed at the sight. Some picked up their solemn-eyed children and turned them away. Some knew what he was and lowered their gaze. Behind them still were boxcars of passengers anxious to make the last boat to England. Alarmists shouted, “Where is the conductor?” and there was shoving to get off.

The French lady had gotten up in shock. Clutching her dog, she quickly wedged her body into the human river. The English children scrambled out of their seats in her wake. One of them spotted a letter near Reed’s outstretched shoe and reached across the forbidden territory of the filthy floor to snatch it.

“What have you got there?” asked the husband. The girl handed it up.

“What is it?” asked the wife.

“It’s a letter addressed to Modesto, California, U.S.A. ‘The Circle R Ranch.’ ”

“How American.”

“That poor man must have dropped it. Did you see him?”

“Yes, and I was hoping the children didn’t.”

“We should give it to the porter.”

“God knows where the porter
is
,” said the wife, straining to look over heads.

“Well, we can’t just leave it here.”

The crowd was pushing forward. Afraid to be separated, they picked up the children and carried them.

“We can’t go back, we’ll miss the boat.”

“Never mind, I’ll post it myself,” the husband said.

“You always say you’ll do things, and then you never do,” the wife remarked. They were almost to the platform between the cars. Outside it was cold and dark. His wife was always accusing him of falling short. It was true he hadn’t served during the war and he’d always felt lesser for it. This letter, which had somehow come into his hands, would be his redemption. As if to seal the promise, he cast a quick look back at the man who’d done it; made the sacrifice. A kind person had covered his face. Helping the children off the high steps of the train, the Englishman distractedly slipped the letter Griffin Reed had written to his mother into his pocket, with every intention of mailing it from London.

The weather on the westward voyage was severe. A swarm of gales pursued the ship all the way across the Atlantic, one after the other with no calm in between, and as a result, everyone on board was constantly sick. The dining rooms were empty. Stewards delivered meals to cabins, where they were rarely touched. The infirm were told to stay in their rooms and not attempt to walk the shifting corridors.

The new nurse assigned to Hammond’s party was Captain Jane Carlson, R.N., from North Carolina, in her forties, a thickset spinster with a friendly face and short dark springy curls she did up every night with pins, who was not a contract worker for the War Department like Lily Barnett, searching out and trying different ways, but career army; Captain Carlson was done and settled and knew what she was about. She liked to say that after twenty-two years in the military, nothing could surprise her, and by entering that restricted world at an early age, she’d made sure of it.

Captain Carlson was the perfect person—and something of a hero—to have been the one who rushed after Wilhelmina when Cora awoke from a groggy nap to find the bed across the cabin empty and her roommate gone. The gray felt soundproofing and the tempest’s roar had prevented Cora from hearing Wilhelmina’s departure. Staggering along the passageway, knocked from wall to wall, Cora called out to the nurse, who was finishing her rounds, and found herself forcefully about-faced, escorted back to the room with a viselike grip around the arm, and ordered to stay inside.