by Amy Stewart
“I wish the contingent arguing against skirts had won the day,” Sarah said. “I’d rather wear nothing but pants. Even a skirt like this is a hindrance in the field.”
“They weren’t going to put us in trousers, were they?” Roxie asked. Fleurette had stitched together a fairly respectable uniform for Roxie, by taking apart a brown dress and fashioning it into a skirt, and adding a collar to one of Roxie’s dingy shirtwaists.
For a Park Avenue girl, Constance thought, her clothes were in tatters, and her story about digging them out of the mending basket didn’t hold up. They weren’t worth mending: they were too cheap to begin with. She considered the possibility that Roxie had run away from home and purchased second-hand clothes along the way, but it sounded far-fetched. It was none of Constance’s business, anyway. What concern of it was hers if the girl had a secret to keep?
Norma, having dressed first, stood at the tent flap. “One of us will have to go out every morning to pump water,” she announced, taking up the bucket that had been issued to them for that purpose. “Since none of you have given a thought to that, I’ll do it today. Roxanna will go tomorrow, and we’ll follow the alphabet from there.”
Having established a protocol and offering no opportunity for rebuttal, Norma went out with the bucket. When she returned, the five of them gathered outside, behind the tent, dipping into water to splash their faces and then drawing up cups of it so that they might brush their teeth. All around them, the girls from the other tents were doing the same. There was quite a bit of thin, nervous laughter as the light came up in the sky and revealed them, in the middle of their ablutions, in the company of strangers, out in the open air.
For just a moment Constance thought she might know something of what a soldier felt on his first day away from home, awakening with a fine feeling of adventure in the unfamiliar surroundings of a military camp. Theirs was such a smaller kind of adventure—only six weeks away, and then what? A return home, for most of them, to their familiar friends and obligations. And for Constance—what waited for her? A Red Cross course, and then back to the farm to cut field dressings?
The bugle sounded again, but this time it was first call, which was to be their summons to calisthenics. All two hundred women (two hundred and one, including Margaret from Texas) trundled off at once, stumbling over tent lines and bumping into each other in the half-dark. Taken as a group, Constance couldn’t imagine that they’d ever look like any sort of military regimen. She wondered if they’d be marching in straight lines by the end of their training, or if they’d always bumble along like children on their way to a sledding party.
In a field just beyond their little city of tents waited Mrs. Nash, a walking-stick in hand and a whistle around her neck. The sun was now up over the horizon, and it shone just enough to warm them slightly. Constance hoped Mrs. Nash would have them running relays, or hopping up and down, or anything that might bring a little warmth. Instead, the first business of the morning was to organize themselves into four companies.
Mrs. Nash blew a whistle and started shouting commands that the group was not entirely prepared to receive. The idea was to count off by fours, and then for each group to arrange itself by height, with the tallest in the back. This gave Constance no trouble as she had only to stand in the very rear of her company. Fleurette readily took her place in the front. The rest of the girls had a great deal of difficulty in sorting themselves out, with many of them perching on their toes to stand next to a friend, or taking off their hats and mashing their hair down to get closer to the front. Mrs. Nash used her walking-stick to nudge the girls into line.
“We have only half an hour for our setting-up exercises, and we’ve lost most of it already,” Mrs. Nash called, but that only encouraged the girls to delay further.
At last they were standing at attention in their rows. Mrs. Nash shouted her commands from a drill-book she carried with her.
“Right, dress!” she called. Norma stood several rows ahead. Constance could see from her vantage point in the back that Norma was one of the few who knew what to do. Had she been marching and drilling behind the barn all winter?
They spent half an hour turning this way and that, heeding commands intended to get them in line and facing the direction in which they were to march. Constance saw little point to it, as the one thing they wouldn’t be asked to do for France would be to march in formation. Women might play a role, certainly, but it would be nothing as militaristic as this. She surrendered to the deflating feeling that the camp was more of an entertainment than a practical training ground.
At last came the mess call. The companies fell apart and rushed to breakfast. They were supposed to enter by separate doors according to company and stand at attention until ordered to sit, but there was such a scramble that Mrs. Nash’s instructions, barked out over the din, went unheeded.
Constance couldn’t help but feel a little pity for her. She was trying to impose order on girls who, for the most part, were accustomed to viewing life as a series of amusements—girls who would only follow a command if it was part of a game, and then only if they felt inclined to play it.
She was glad not to be in Mrs. Nash’s position. The last time she had charge of a group of women, they were locked in their cells and had little choice but to do what was expected of them. These girls were running amok.
They descended upon the breakfast that had been set out on long tables: boiled eggs and cold potatoes, bread and butter, and shredded wheat. A girl going around with pitchers of milk and coffee announced that they should’ve had bananas, but the truck had been waylaid. No one seemed bothered by it.
Constance sat next to Sarah. Fleurette and Roxie came dashing over, and Norma made her way to them eventually. Every company, it seemed, had dissolved and re-formed according to tent-mates and other prior associations.
“Norma’s without her cabbage,” Fleurette shouted over the racket in the mess hall. “If the ground starts to shake and opens up and swallows us all, it’s because my sister has broken with her most sacred of traditions and angered the gods.”
“We’re in a military camp,” Norma said. “Eat your rations.”
Years ago, Norma developed a peculiar habit of eating pickled red cabbage on toast for breakfast, and she had never since strayed from it. If the three of them had cause to stay in a hotel for a night or two, she would bring a jar of it from home and set it prominently in the center of the breakfast table like a fetid purple flower arrangement. But military order was all she cared about now. She couldn’t be bothered with her old routines.
In between bites of bread, butter, and smashed egg, Sarah said, “Are any of you taking the first-aid course this afternoon? I’d rather practice on someone I know.”
“Oh yes, I’ll be there,” called a girl at the other end of the table who introduced herself as Tizzy. “I’m to learn first aid and hospital cooking. There’s a group of us girls in my building back home who want to volunteer in the hospitals as soon as the men start coming back. A pretty face is the best medicine.”
“I’m entirely certain that medicine is the best medicine,” Norma said, “and we haven’t sent a single man overseas yet, so I don’t know why you’re already expecting them to return home injured. Isn’t there something you can do now, while the French and the British are in the trenches on their own?”
“Well, we get together once a week and do our comfort bags,” Tizzy said.
“I’ve seen those bags go out by the barrel at the train station,” Fleurette said. “I always wondered what went in them.”
“Oh, you know. Handkerchiefs and soap, toothbrushes, cards and little games. But it’s the notes from America that mean the most. We tell them that we’re proud of them for fighting, and that we admire their bravery and think of them every day. They love hearing from American girls. Some of them write back. It’s a fine entertainment to open their little notes and try to read past the censor’s marks.”
Fleurette looked puzzled f
or a minute, as if she might be trying to work out in her own mind whether anything a soldier might say about the war should be considered an entertainment.
“Well,” said Sarah briskly, “what about the Kopp sisters?”
Constance looked to Norma, who had taken the responsibility of enrolling them in classes.
“Fleurette goes to plain sewing class, of course,” Norma began, but was quickly interrupted.
“That’s a perfect waste of my time, unless I’m to teach the class.” Fleurette sounded appalled, and Constance was appalled on her behalf. What could anyone tell Fleurette about making a uniform or knitting socks?
But Norma was unmoved. She cut her toast into little triangles, buttered them along the edge, and said, “The Red Cross is very particular about its bandages. If anyone can learn them quickly and teach others how to do it, it will be you. I’ve no doubt you’ll be bored, but only after you see what’s required and settle on the best way to get them done.”
Fleurette sighed and surrendered to it. “Bandages.”
“I will take the signaling course,” Norma continued, “as it is not entirely unconnected to my work, although I hardly see the point of standing on a hill and waving flags around when we can send a bird with a message.”
“A bird?” asked Sarah, who, having only been a tent-mate of Norma’s for a night, was not yet acquainted with her ideas on messenger pigeons and was still under the impression that Norma was to teach a class on raising and dressing small birds and game.
Constance, eager to cut off this line of discussion, hastily put in, “What about you, Sarah? What do you hope to do for the war?”
Sarah looked up brightly and said, “Ambulance work. I want any kind of first-aid training, and a course on driving and mechanics.”
“Why would we drive them around in ambulances?” Fleurette asked. “By the time they’re sent home, aren’t they ensconced in a hospital and out of trouble?”
“Oh, I won’t drive it here in the States,” said Sarah. “I’m going to France. The American Field Service isn’t going to wait for Mr. Wilson to go into the war. They’re already running ambulances, and—”
“You’re going to France?” Fleurette said, nearly spitting her coffee across the table. “Right now? Before we’ve even sent the Army, or—or—anyone?”
Sarah took a little breath and touched a napkin to her lips. She looked at some spot in the air between them and said, “It isn’t true that we haven’t sent anyone. My brother volunteered in January. He couldn’t wait. He’s driving an ambulance at the front now.”
They were a little island of silence in the middle of a noisy mess hall. The last corner of toast stuck in Constance’s throat.
“He’s my twin,” she said, smiling bravely into a platter covered in broken egg shells. “We’ve never been apart. I’m going to follow him.”
Fleurette turned bright red and Roxie’s mouth formed a little oval. For once in her life, Norma didn’t utter a word.
At last Sarah turned and put a hand on Constance’s wrist. “What about you?”
“Me?” She was still imagining Sarah’s twin, slight and brown-headed and quick to smile like his sister, driving an ambulance in Verdun or the Argonne because he could not wait to go and serve. She felt very still and strange all at once.
“Yes, you. You look like a woman who has something to offer her country. What is it?”
8
BEULAH WAS REMINDED, that afternoon, of how capricious spring could be in the South: wintry one minute and unexpectedly sensual the next. The day had started with the kind of bone-chilling damp that seemed to rise right out of the ground, but after lunch, a warm breeze pushed the chill away and suddenly the air was almost tropical. Her mother used to say that those breezes came from Cuba, although what Jessie Binford knew about Cuba was anyone’s guess. Nonetheless, the temperatures rose until Beulah found herself sweating under her collar in the steamy tent where she was to learn bandage-rolling and first aid from the Red Cross.
She’d never been good at sitting in a classroom, although she hadn’t had much of a chance to practice. Her grandmother couldn’t see the use of schooling except as a means of keeping her out from underfoot. Once Beulah was old enough to roll out biscuit dough on her own or to operate the mangle on washing day, she was welcome to stay at home and help her grandmother to do exactly what Beulah herself would be doing, as far as either of them could guess, for the rest of her life. There would always be a washing day, and a day for bread, and one for scrubbing floors. Nothing they could teach in the classroom was going to change any of that.
Beulah fidgeted in the Red Cross tent as Nurse Cartwright delivered her first lecture, but the words wouldn’t come together in Beulah’s mind to form any definitive picture that might tell her how to take a man’s temperature or dress a wound. When each girl was given an instruction manual to read and memorize, she paged through it and looked at the diagrams, and wondered how she might trick Fleurette into telling her what it said without coming right out and admitting that she couldn’t quite follow it.
This was not a promising start. No mention had been made yet of shipping off to France, apart from Sarah’s admission at breakfast, and it had not yet been explained what each girl would have to prove she could do before she was allowed to go. In fact, her classmates seemed to find the classes amusing, and at times a bit dull—but didn’t treat it as preparation for work they might soon have to carry out on their own.
They were younger, Beulah had to remind herself. Most of them were only eighteen or nineteen and had never worked a day in their lives, apart from helping in their mothers’ kitchens. Plenty of them hadn’t done that much. They had servants. The purpose of a paid staff was to render the children of the house useless, or at least to make their contributions more of a sentimental nature than a practical one.
Beulah couldn’t imagine a life like that. She was pretending to be twenty but she was twenty-four, and had already done every sort of work. As she watched the other girls in class, whispering when the instructor had her back turned and drawing silly pictures in the margins of their books, it occurred to her that perhaps she shouldn’t expect the others to take their lessons so seriously. She’d been out in the world, surviving on her wits, and they had not.
That night, after dinner, the entire camp was at its liberty until curfew at nine o’clock. The balmy weather held and made for a pleasant evening to be out among the tents, mingling and laughing with the other girls. Beulah allowed Fleurette to make a few small changes to her improvised uniform—it was satisfying to be fussed over, and Fleurette had a way of understanding just how a body wants to move inside its raiment and to make it do so with grace. Once they were satisfied with their appearances, they went out together into the purple night.
Lanterns glowed orange from the tent flaps, and a few small fires were lit in improvised pits of river rock, giving the place the appearance of a gypsy caravan come to rest for the night. It was lovely to walk among the tents and hear the idle chatter of so many girls at their leisure. Freed from the strictures of the lives they’d left behind—parents, teachers, tutors, bosses if they had them—and without a man in sight apart from Hack and Clarence, who patrolled the perimeter but otherwise stayed away, there was an easy camaraderie among them. With no one watching, they could let their hair down, as a manner of speech but also as a practical matter. It was a great relief to pull out pins, untie ribbons, and shake combs loose.
Fleurette hopped around in the kid slippers that she’d changed into—against camp regulation, Beulah had to admire that—and spun around in the grass to see if her skirt would fly up, which it did.
“The pattern called for a flat skirt that hangs straight,” she said, “which is good enough for Constance and Norma, but we need a little life in our wardrobes, don’t we?”
“Did you say you live out in the country with your sisters?” Beulah asked. “On a farm?”
“Yes, and it’s just as awful as it so
unds,” Fleurette said. “I’d live there forever if they had their way. But I intend to take a room in town as soon as I can put a little money together. What about you? You must live with your mother and father, if you’re up on Park Avenue.”
“It isn’t so bad,” Beulah said noncommittally. “I’m left to my own devices. Which one of you had the idea to come here?”
She was learning to turn the conversation away from herself. The fewer questions she answered, the fewer lies she’d have to keep track of.
“It was Norma’s doing,” Fleurette said. “She has an attachment to those pigeons that no one else can fathom, nor do we want to. She thinks they’re going to be of use in the war, but Constance and I both know that the Army won’t have anything to do with Norma and those ridiculous birds. We only put up with them because they keep her amused. She’d be ordering us around if she didn’t have the birds to keep her busy.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of marrying her off?”
Fleurette groaned. “Who would marry Norma?”
“Are you the only marriageable sister of the three?”
Fleurette looked at her curiously. “Why would you say that?”
“Well, Constance seems awfully . . . imposing. To a man, I mean. She must’ve towered over them at dances.”
“I don’t think she went to many dances. She didn’t want to marry and keep house. She’d rather work.”
Beulah pounced on that. There was something unusual about Constance, something that suggested that she had a life that she was keeping hidden. “Why doesn’t she have a career, if she wants one? She’s old enough to have had two or three.”
“She’s forty, but don’t tell her I said so,” Fleurette said. “Ask her yourself if you’d like to know.”
It was quite apparent to Beulah that there was more to be said on the subject of Constance, but Fleurette wasn’t going to tell.
