by Amy Stewart
Which one am I? I don’t have cooties, I’ll tell you that.
Last night began exactly as I predicted. May Ward did not return for her thirty-minute call, nor was she present when the show was to have begun. We’ve kept a crowd waiting for as long as an hour before without any difficulties, but this time the stage-hands and camp commanders and other powers that be were entirely unwilling to delay. The soldiers had been brought in—rather perfunctorily, I thought, no eager crowd, this—and were growing restless. None of them were particularly starved for the sight of a lady, either, as there are ladies on stage almost every night here.
When five minutes had passed with no movement of the curtain, the men in the audience started to wander out. That is apparently their right—so much for strict military order—but the parties in charge didn’t like it and told us to go ahead with our show before we lost any more.
The trouble was that we weren’t just missing our cherished leader. We were also missing Bernice.
How could we have lost one entire chorus girl, you ask? It’s easier than you might think. The auditorium here at Camp Pike is equipped with three small changing-rooms. May Ward and Her Eight Dresden Dolls should, as you’ve no doubt calculated, allocate three girls to each room, except that Mrs. Ward requires her own room and won’t let any of us use hers—even if she’s on stage, even if she’s out signing autographs, and even if she’s absent entirely.
That leaves two rooms for the eight of us, and three costume changes a night. We tend to run back and forth in a panic, searching for lost stockings and begging to borrow a hairpin. You can see how any of us might think that if we were in one room, Bernice could be in the other.
And where would she have gone, and when? The theater’s only just across the way from the Hostess House. We aren’t allowed to wander the camp on our own and, anyway, it’s nothing but mud topped with muddy wooden walkways. The boys in khaki make for nice scenery, but Bernice is the oldest and wisest of us all. She wouldn’t be so captivated by them that she’d strike out on her own.
Regardless—there we were. No May Ward, no Bernice, and a stage manager tapping his little foot with all the impatience of a train conductor whose passengers are too bumbling and slow-witted to disembark according to his time-table.
What could we do but put on our show? We didn’t want to report Bernice missing and set off a camp-wide alarm. Thinking she might be ill, or detained at the Hostess House over some other calamity, Charlotte ran back to look for her while the rest of us went on with our first number. There isn’t a song in our program that Mrs. Ward hasn’t missed at least once, so we know how to manage. One of us takes her part, the chorus rearranges itself, and the show goes on.
Eliza took Mrs. Ward’s place for the first number. (There’s no more singing of “The Bird on Nellie’s Hat”—all they want any more is “Off for France” and “Pack Up Your Troubles.”) At the end of it, Charlotte reappeared and let it be known that Bernice wasn’t to be found at the Hostess House.
The girls agreed—with hardly more than a whisper and a nod to each other as we cavorted around on stage between songs—that they would all dash off together to decide what to do about Bernice, and leave me on stage by myself to sing a solo.
This, I am sorry to say, is where my share of the trouble began.
There’s nothing unusual about one of us singing a solo. Sometimes it has to be done to pull off a costume change. The solos, of course, go to May Ward when she’s here, but when she performs one of her disappearing acts, the privilege might fall to any one of us.
What I should’ve done was to lead the boys in a round of “My Old Kentucky Home” or some other number that they can all holler along to. It makes the interlude go faster and takes the strain off my voice.
But there was something about the piano player last night. He was too good for an Army camp, and too good for the likes of us, so spirited and—well, I don’t know how else to say it—frisky, if you know what I mean. I just knew he wanted to have a little fun.
And so did I. Every eye in the place was on me. Oh, Helen, forgive me for loving that as immodestly as I did! I was as drunk as Mrs. Ward probably was at that moment, only I was drunk on the gaze of seven hundred men in khaki.
I walked across that stage like I owned every man in the room. I leaned over to the piano player, counted off, and burst out with the first line of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” It didn’t take him more than a measure to catch up with me. The next thing you know, the two of us were making some magic happen.
I don’t have to tell you how that feels! Do you remember that night, way back when we were students at Mrs. Hanson’s, and you and I sang “She Pushed Me into the Parlour” as a duet and ran all over the stage, throwing props around and making the audience laugh so hard they cried?
It was like that, only these men weren’t laughing. They were falling head over heels.
I sang, You must be my man, or I’ll have no man at all . . .
. . . and oh, Helen, I sang that line like it has never been sung! The longing in every pair of eyes—I could live off that. I wouldn’t need bread or water, if I had an audience clamoring for me like that every night.
It’s wicked of me to talk like this, but you must understand just how it was, so you’ll know why May Ward threw such a fit.
Because May Ward, I discovered later, had turned up after all. She strolled right down the center aisle, just as I started singing. I didn’t see her, what with the boys all jumping off their benches in their eagerness to have a better look at the dazzling Fleurette Kopp.
If I had seen her, I wouldn’t have been able to sing that song like I did. On this tour, the stage belongs to May Ward. We’re her accessories. We’re there to make her look her best, and we all know it. When any of us are given a solo, we perform in the most straightforward manner, delivering our lines but never giving our hearts out to the audience.
It’s something you’ll understand, Helen, because you’ve been on the stage. You can give them everything—more than you knew you had, even—and they will give it right back to you, a hundred times over. Or you can simply stand on your mark, a flat-footed mortal, and do your lines.
Usually, we just do our lines. But May Ward saw me give my whole heart to the audience, and take theirs in return, and it infuriated her.
After my number, all the girls returned to the stage except for Charlotte and Eliza, who had been sent to search for Bernice. (By this time I’d almost forgotten about poor Bernice, and perhaps you had too, but hers was the more dreadful night, as you’ll soon learn.)
We continued on as usual. Mrs. Ward never did make it to the stage—and remember, I didn’t yet know that she was even in the theater. The rest of us put on a better-than-average performance after that, because the men were—well, let me just say that the men were warmed up. We all felt it.
After curtain call, we ran backstage to learn what had become of our Bernice, only to be met by a spiteful, incoherent May Ward. She’d dispensed with the soda but stuck with the brandy, and would’ve been entirely incapable of changing into a costume and joining us on stage. By the time she wheeled round to face me—and I knew, all at once, what she’d seen and exactly what she thought of it—she could hardly stand up. Nonetheless she took a swing at me and did manage a good hard slap across my cheek.
It was nothing I couldn’t bear. In fact, I was on such a high that I was ready to forgive her for it and to look after her the way I always do when she gets like this. She isn’t usually a mean drunk—she’s weepy and wobbly, and in need of cold compresses and appeals to her vanity. I’ve sat with her many a night, repairing the gorgeous gowns she treats like garbage, and feeding her aspirins and flattery.
But not last night! She spat out pure venom, and it was all aimed at me.
I won’t even write down the words she used, for fear you’ll leave this letter sitting around and one of the boys will read it. Just imagine every way that a woman can b
e degraded, and what parts of the anatomy might be involved, and the manner in which she might be paid for such an act, and how one’s own mother might be implicated, too, and you have the gist of it.
She finished with this: “I want you out of my chorus! Pack your things, and go on back to Jersey. Don’t you dare drag that filth on my stage again.”
The girls knew better than to stand up for me. There’s no talking to Mrs. Ward when she gets like this. We all agreed, by silent assent, to wait until morning to find out what, if anything, she remembered of the evening.
Fortunately, she was by then ready to drop. She took another swig from the little bottle tucked into her bosom and we let her. Sweet oblivion, carry her away! It did, soon enough.
As she was not officially in residence at the Hostess House, we couldn’t take her there. Fortunately, the man who’d driven her from her hotel was waiting around behind the auditorium with his trusty machine. We simply put her back from whence she’d come, pooled our coins to tip the fellow, and sent the two of them on their way.
That difficulty solved, at least temporarily, we were anxious to find out if Charlotte and Eliza had tracked down our mysteriously departed Bernice. For once we were glad of a chaperone, who kept the eager lads away and conducted us directly back to the Hostess House. (How I would’ve loved an evening with the eager lads, but Mrs. Ward had spoiled everything and by then we were starting to panic over Bernice.)
Charlotte was waiting for us in the room that she and I shared. We all crammed inside and did our best to speak in whispers.
Bernice, we learned, had been apprehended by one of those Protective Committee women. Just before we’d all left the Hostess House for the evening, she’d stepped out on her own, snuck around back, and lit a cigarette. As she was already in costume and looking quite lovely, she naturally attracted the attention of a few boys in khaki, who stopped to chat for only a minute or two—just long enough to share a cigarette!—and it was in that condition that Mrs. Jailhouse found her.
What you must understand is that these Protective Committee ladies aren’t like ordinary matrons. This isn’t Constance, issuing warnings and doling out demerits. These women are positively zealous. They serve a mission that they believe to be of military importance, which is to exact punishment and imprisonment upon the girls of this country in the name of moral hygiene.
Did you know that we pose a threat to the troops, and that we weaken their morals and inflict upon them crippling social diseases that make it impossible for them to defeat the Kaiser?
Well, that’s how they see it. I know all about it, because Constance complains ceaselessly about the doings of the Committee on Protective Work for Girls whenever I’m in Paterson. These ladies have been given unlimited authority, handed down directly from Washington, to lock girls away if they show any signs of degeneracy. And by lock away, I mean just that—put them into a detention home or a state home, for the duration of the war, or longer if it suits.
And apparently, it suited Mrs. Jailhouse (I can’t be bothered with her name, I hate her so) to reach into that pleasant scrum of khaki and extract Bernice, dragging her by the collar—really!—through camp, and into an automobile, where she would have been taken to some horrible old place on the outskirts of town—had the automobile not blown a tire!
It was our good luck—the only good luck of the night—that Mrs. Jailhouse had no means of repairing the tire. Bernice was then dragged to Mrs. Jailhouse’s little office at the other end of camp. If you wonder why Bernice didn’t just run off—well, where was she to go? As she saw it, she was in an Army camp, surrounded by several thousand soldiers. How far would she get, if Mrs. Jailhouse put out an alarm? There was nothing to do but to see it through. At least, that was her way of looking at it. I’m not sure I would’ve done the same.
If you’re wondering how Charlotte and Eliza ever found out what had happened, just know that the boys in this camp are heroic in ways both large and small. When Bernice was so cruelly torn away from her newly found friends, they followed along at a discreet distance, and I suppose one of them might’ve run ahead and had something to do with that punctured tire.
Another of the boys waited around behind the auditorium to tell us what had become of Bernice. When Charlotte and Eliza left in the middle of the performance to look for her, he was waiting there to tell them that Bernice was being held in Mrs. Jailhouse’s office. (Billy is his name, if you want to include him in your prayers.) Once they understood the situation, they decided that Eliza, being older, should handle Mrs. Jailhouse alone. (Eliza is twenty-five, and Bernice twenty-seven—can you imagine locking a woman of that age in a girls’ detention house?)
What sort of battle of wits ensued between Eliza and Mrs. Jailhouse? We didn’t yet know. Charlotte told us everything that she had heard, and we were left to wait for Eliza to return and tell the rest. Fortunately, it was only another hour before both Eliza and Bernice tapped at Charlotte’s window and crawled inside. (Curfew had long passed.)
Now we could learn the rest of it. Eliza, having been told by Billy where to find Bernice, went right up to Mrs. Jailhouse’s office, rapped on the door, and insisted that Bernice be released. She made it plain that she and Bernice were career women, free to travel and earn their living as they pleased, and not entirely unfamiliar with the workings of the legal system.
“If Bernice has broken the law,” she said to Mrs. Jailhouse, “would you be so kind as to summon a police officer, and put something in the way of official charges against her? That way, I can follow her along to jail, wire my attorney, and put up her bail.”
“I was the one to put her under arrest,” sputtered Mrs. Jailhouse.
“Oh!” gasped Eliza. “Beg pardon. One of our girls has a lady police officer for a sister. She carries a badge. I suppose you do, too?”
“I don’t need a badge,” Mrs. Jailhouse bristled. “I’m chair of the Committee—”
“But what if you aren’t?” Eliza asked (quite sensibly, I thought). “What if you’re just—well, just anyone? You can’t simply deprive a grown woman of her liberty on the strength of your committee chairmanship. We absolutely must send for the police and ask them to settle this.”
“The police know full well—” Mrs. Jailhouse put in, but Eliza pressed on.
“I’m sure they can tell us all about the crime of smoking a cigarette in the presence of Army men. I suppose it’s a new law, just passed in Arkansas? I wonder if there’s been anything about it in the papers? Speaking of the papers, we might call in a reporter, too.”
Eliza continued in this manner until Mrs. Jailhouse was simply ready to drop from exhaustion. It was eventually agreed upon by both parties that Bernice was, in legal fact, free to walk out of Mrs. Jailhouse’s office under her own power, and that future violations of camp rules by visiting performers might better be handled by a stern warning or eviction from camp—the latter being preferred by both Eliza and Bernice, who were by then thoroughly sick of Camp Pike.
I’ve never written such a long letter in my life, but you had to have the whole evening at once, not in installments! Besides, I’m too keyed up to sleep.
I’ll put this out now for the morning mail, and you’ll just have to wait and wonder, as I am, about Mrs. Ward’s state of mind toward me come the dawn.
Yours aff—
Fleurette
P.S. The cooties! I almost forgot about them. Would you believe that in the short time Mrs. Jailhouse had Bernice in her possession, she wrapped her in a horrible infested blanket and made her wait on a nasty old bunk outfitted with the most terrible chicken feather pillow? Poor Bernice was already scratching at the back of her neck when she came home. We had to smuggle the petroleum ointment out of Mrs. Brady’s cupboard, for fear of being charged extra rent for all the unapproved six-legged visitors.
P.P.S. We’re off to Camp Funston, in Kansas, next week. If you write to me quickly at the enclosed address, I might just meet up with your letter when I’m there.
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Fleurette to Helen
August 12, 1918
Dearest Helen,
You must’ve dashed that letter off the minute you received mine, because it was waiting for me at Camp Funston, which is the next stop on this utterly mad tour.
To answer your first and most pressing question: May Ward had, in fact, forgotten about my little solo performance by morning. The trouble is that she remained dimly aware that she’d taken a dislike to me—only she couldn’t recall why—the result being that she ignores me now, and treats me with more than the usual disdain. I’m doing more seamstressing than singing, which is always the sign that I’ve fallen out of favor. At least she hasn’t sent me home. I take that as a victory.
Oh, and she never even knew about the trouble with Bernice. We managed to leave Camp Pike free of scandal—and free of cooties, thanks to a Herculean effort with a comb and a jar of ointment.
You keep asking if I’ve fallen in love yet, and I tell you, I refuse to do it! I can’t bear to have a sweet young man go off to France with my heart tucked into his jacket, only to have it (and him) blown to bits in the trenches. You might think it morbid of me to put it like that, but they bring it up first, and then we’re left with the task of consoling them. It wears on a girl.
Just last night there was a pale and frightened-looking young man sitting off by himself at the little party they threw for us at the Hostess House. The way these affairs go is that they clear all the chairs and tables and games away from the great-room, to make way for dancing. After our concert, we’re expected to remain in costume and to dance and sing and be gay for another couple of hours, just when we’d all like to disappear into our rooms and soak our feet.
But how can we think about our feet, with a war on? You see how it is.
The men are invited according to a lottery system. We’re promised no more than five men to every girl, but of course it never works out that way and each one of us is simply mobbed. We don’t dare hope for anything so civilized as a dance card—the boys cut in at will, and you might dance with ten of them before a song’s over. They wear the most enormous boots and step all over you—for once, I envy Constance and those sensible leather clodhoppers she wears. She’d probably kick a dancing partner right back and teach him a lesson. But we don’t dare. Our slippers get ruined, and we laugh and try to be pretty about it.
