I did have another physical, and a Pennsylvania doctor said I was a credit to my mother. True.
I am looking forward to learning about ambulances, but first I have to learn to march and to shoot a gun, regular soldier things. I wish they could send me to France right away.
Well, Mama, they will turn out the lights pretty soon so I will say good-bye for now.
I will always be
Your loving son,
Hilly
Every morning, until school reopened in September, Nell hurried across Main Street to the post office. While Hilly was in Pennsylvania, a brief note was waiting most days—and sometimes there was even a letter of several pages. Hilly wrote of the Pennsylvania countryside. More hills than at home: “Pretty. Still, I miss the prairie and all the little lakes, like oases.” Nell noted with maternal pleasure how accurate his spelling remained.
As summer in Harvester faded into a warm and listless autumn, Hilly wrote:
Dear Mama,
I have a good friend here. His name is Sylvester Benjamin and he’s from Dubuque, Iowa. He’s heading into the Ambulance Corps, too, and we’re hoping to team up when we get to France.
You’d like Sylvester. He’s going to be a doctor when the war is over—his dad’s a doctor back in Dubuque. The fellows here tease him about his name. They call him ‘Silly’ and me ‘Hilly.’ But Sylvester doesn’t mind. He’s a great big fellow and everybody respects him.
He says when the war is over, he’ll come up to Harvester to visit, and we should come down to Dubuque. It sounds like a nice place, right on the Mississippi River.
Until John drove us to Minneapolis, I’d never seen the Mississippi. And we live only two hundred miles west! Though that is a fair distance. Since you and Papa came from Wisconsin, I guess you saw it on the trip to Harvester. On the train to Pennsylvania, I saw the river at night, with the moon shining on it, and it made me cry. I’ve got to stop crying at things.
I will always be
Your loving son,
Hilly
The several German families in the parish notwithstanding, Father Gerrold extolled Hilly at Mass, citing him as the first boy from the county to enlist. “He could have waited for the draft to call him, but he heard the cries of the heartsick, the weary, and the wounded, and he answered their call. God is proud of the Hillyard Stillmans of this nation, and of the families who send them forth to bandage the ravaged world.”
The Standard Ledger ran Hilly’s graduation picture with an article about his enlistment. Abel Timms was quoted: “Hilly Stillman is a credit to his town and to his high school. I am proud to have been his running coach. He is an outstanding athlete and an outstanding young man—not so big or tough as some, but with more character.”
For all her pride in Hilly, Nell was uneasy in the role of the Hero’s Mother, especially when she found in the morning mail an invitation from Eudora Barnstable:
On Saturday the Fifteenth of September, at 2:30 p.m., Mrs. Edward Barnstable requests your presence at a tea to be held in your honor at 734 Catalpa Street.
Despite being an entire carpetbag of contradictions, Mabel Eudora Barnstable (she preferred “Eudora” to “Mabel,” which she claimed was “common”) reigned as the doyenne or matriarch of the village—feared, respected, and not infrequently ridiculed. She prided herself on being twenty years behind the fashions.
Adjusting her pince-nez, she informed anyone who stood still long enough, “Fashion is for fools. Quality is always in style.”
And it was economical. The town knew of the financial losses Ed Barnstable was suffering, real estate being a fickle mistress and Edward having no head for it. It was also rumored that he’d taken to the bottle.
But Nell wasn’t going to blame Mrs. Barnstable for that. And she must keep in mind that it was Eudora Barnstable who’d written a kind note after the school board to-do. And Eudora Barnstable who’d sent Hilly a lovely note at graduation.
“What’s this tea about?” Nell asked Juliet Lundeen.
“You’d have to know Eudora. Her father was English. Her maiden name was Wellington, as in the Duke of Wellington. Eudora allows people to make assumptions about that and doesn’t correct them when they do. So any friend of England is a friend of Eudora’s, and Hilly is her particular knight errant. Hence, you must be feted.”
“Feted? Oh, dear.”
The Thursday before the tea, Nell received another “Mrs. Stilman” message: “Huns gonna shoot him. Dead.” Two or three drops of what looked like blood were smeared across the paper. She had saved every note, but now she burned the packet, and knew hatred.
But, this once, her loneliness and apprehension for Hilly tempered fear of the poison pen. Instead of stiletto-sharp anxiety and hatred, she felt only a continuous, abstracted nausea.
In bed that night, she read through Hilly’s letters again, then—as nearly every night—she reached for Wodehouse, in this case, Uneasy Money. Poor Lord Dawlish, in love with Elizabeth, pursued by Claire, and in possession of Polly’s dead monkey, Eustace:
“Lord Dawlish stood in the doorway of the outhouse, holding the body of Eustace gingerly by the tail. It was a solemn moment. There was no room for doubt as to the completeness of the extinction of Lady Wetherby’s pet.”
Nell gave herself up to the story, slipping unresisting into the antic perils of a young, moneyed lord of the realm, caught in a web of complexity only Wodehouse could design. A Wodehouse plot was a wonder, the solution to each knotty problem leading inevitably to another, knottier problem. And wasn’t that always the way?
Anyone who lived in a small town knew that real life could be complicated. Maybe not as complex as a Wodehouse plot, but . . . She remembered that farmer—had his name been Wilder?—who had been fooling around with his neighbor’s hired girl. When his wife found out, she tried to hang herself in the barn. A hired hand cut her down—but in the process the wife fell and broke her hip.
The neighbor, all unaware, sent over his hired girl to nurse the wife. The women became such pals, the girl gave the unfaithful husband his walking papers.
Well, there you were.
chapter thirty-five
MOUNTING WIDE WOODEN STEPS to Eudora Barnstable’s porch, wrapped around three sides of the tall white clapboard, Nell hung back. These chattering women would want her to share Hilly. She wanted to withhold him, accumulate him, hoard him. Hadn’t she that right?
“There you are.” Eudora Barnstable held the door, her pince-nez swinging from a black ribbon pinned high on her breast with a brooch of seed pearls. “I was beginning to worry.”
“My goodness,” Juliet breathed, “are we that late?” She glanced down at her watch. “It’s just 2:30.”
“Well, now that you’re here, come in.” Eudora’s manner was brusque, her voice powerful. “Mrs. Stillman, find a seat. We want to hear all about your son.”
Nell and Juliet stepped into a broad front hall where umbrellas and parasols jammed a brass container near the door, and a wide assortment of wraps and headgear eclipsed a coat- and hat-stand nearby. Further along the hall, past the pocket doors leading to the front parlor, an accumulation of correspondence, piles of books and periodicals, and two tall lamps burdened a mahogany console table above which hung a haphazard grouping of quite good watercolors in gilt frames. An oriental carpet, soft and frayed, led down the hall to whatever lay beyond. This room bespoke a busy, headlong life.
Following Eudora, Nell and Juliet veered right, into a front parlor only a little less cluttered, with a manyness of armchairs, tables, and lamps. And books—everywhere, books. How lovely, Nell reflected, to own both so many spots for reading and so many books to read.
Guided to a chair by Marcella Kolchak, Nell sat and peeled off her gloves. The other women had not removed their hats, so Nell left hers, though the room was warm and the air thick.
Within minutes the last of the nine guests had arrived, and Eudora directed them to the dining room, saying, “I’ll be mother.” Seati
ng herself at the head of the table, she commenced pouring tea. Recalling that her own mother used that expression, Nell felt an unbending toward Mrs. Barnstable.
Beside the table, dressed in navy-blue cotton with white collar and cuffs, stood Lizzie Jessup slicing the Lord Baltimore cake. With Larry nearly grown, she’d gone to work for the Barnstables.
Still, Nell glanced at Juliet. When someone close to us dies, we are proprietary of whatever constituted their lives. Curatorship, again. Wasn’t Lizzie still part of the George and Cora museum? Not quite part of the Barnstable collection? Lizzie made her way around the parlor gathering plates and refilling teacups.
“Now, Mrs. Stillman, we all want to hear whatever you can tell us of your valiant son,” Eudora said, standing before the mantel and glancing around the room, calling them to order. “What can you reveal about his decision to enlist?”
“Not much, I’m afraid,” Nell said. “He told me on the fifteenth of July. A Sunday. Naturally I tried to talk him out of it.”
“You did?” Eudora was surprised.
“Heavens, yes. Who would send their son to war?”
“But such a just and critical cause . . .” Eudora murmured.
“Hilly is all I have.”
“Well, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing he’s protecting something worth protecting. Civilization,” Eudora went on, placing the pince-nez on her nose as if better to note the group’s response. “I’ve been reading that if the Kaiser wins, all of Europe will be in Germany’s control. Our Navy alone isn’t big enough to take on the Hun. We’ll find him on our shores. Look at the trouble the Germans tried to stir up in Mexico! I shudder.”
A few of the women looked nonplussed and stared into their teacups, unsure what the Mexican “trouble” had been.
“What was Hillyard’s . . . aim in enlisting? What did he hope to do?” Eudora pressed.
“He wanted to save lives,” Nell said, aware that “save lives” was terribly noble sounding. But then, Hilly was noble, wasn’t he? Sensing that Eudora wanted more, Nell added, “In high school he was a runner, you know.”
“Won every race he ran,” Marcella Kolchak put in.
Nell smiled at Marcella. “After the Lusitania was torpedoed, and George and Cora were lost, I think he became preoccupied by what was happening and how he could be useful. He’s not an aggressive boy, so he considered his running and how that might fit in.”
Nell paused. She was saying more than she had intended, giving away bits of Hilly—bits she had meant to store up against winter, one might say.
“Put it this way—I lost him. He was determined.” She shook her head in pain and disbelief.
“And you’re very proud of him,” Eudora prompted.
“Of course I’m proud,” Nell said. “But imagine. Each of you has a child or probably will have. Imagine losing that child to a war that shouldn’t have taken place. Pride can’t bring him back.”
The room was silent.
“Well, I still say to be proud.” Eudora was standing her ground. “There are plenty of sons out there who ought to come forward like Hillyard.”
Could she be thinking of young Gus Rabel, Nell wondered.
Eudora wrung her hands together. “I fear they don’t know the gravity of the situation.”
A flutter of consternation ran through the party. “Do you really think the Germans could win?” Mrs. Doctor Gray asked.
Eudora leaned heavily against the mantel. She seemed to be feeling the unusual September heat, compounded now by her own high fervor. Slipping a handkerchief from her cuff, she blotted her temples and cheeks.
“I know everyone laughs at my pride in being English—well, of English descent. Juliet calls it gilt and varnish. And you probably think it’s why I’m so keen on fighting this war.” Her shoulders heaved as she dragged forth a deep breath. “We all have our follies, but I am truly frightened. I’m not horridly anti-German. There are no dearer people in this village than Bertha and Gus,” she said, nodding at Mrs. Rabel. “But this war is different from other wars. This is a world war. Think of that.”
Nell was concerned for Mrs. Barnstable. The woman’s color was too high, and her voice too strained.
Lizzie Jessup slipped into the room, setting a tray of small glasses on a table.
“Lizzie has brought us sherry,” Eudora said, handing the glasses around. “I hope you’ll all join in raising your glasses to Nell and Hillyard.”
“We’re all insane in our own way,” Juliet observed as she and Nell drove home through streets littered with fallen leaves, the perfume of bonfires hanging in the air. “Eudora’s insanity is a little more apparent than most, but I salute her for that. She wears her heart on her sleeve.”
“Yes.”
“You were uncomfortable being the center of attention. She didn’t notice, I’m sure. She’s not cruel. But she’s intense. Headlong.” Juliet turned the Ford onto Main Street.
“In her defense, she accomplishes a great deal,” Juliet continued. “You’ve seen how she’s organized the women, rolling bandages, assembling toiletry kits, even writing letters to orphan soldiers. She doesn’t spare herself.”
chapter thirty-six
EARLY 1918 SAW HILLY IN FRANCE. For Nell, it was excruciating to wait through the school day before stopping at the post office. His letters, notes really, felt like a shared lifeline—a buoy he threw to her and that she threw back to him, their mutual assurance that each would survive.
Of course, the realistic side of her brain, the side that screamed into a pillow at night, understood that he could die before her next safety line reached him. It was a mystical game that they played, but that game was more real than the chalk dust on the blackboard, more urgent than the strange lightning that split the low sky one day, in the midst of a roaring snowstorm.
“Mrs. Stillman, what is that lightning? I’ve never seen lightning in a snowstorm, have you? Could it hit us?” Imogene Weatherford, her thin back rigid with apprehension, pulled as far away from the nearest window as her desk allowed.
As though fired from a cannon, a crack of thunder shook the windows. Isobelle Schoonover screamed and laid her head on her desk, wrapping her arms over her ears.
A few seconds later, after the next explosion of thunder, Win Norton asked, “D’ya think that’s how the guns sound in France?” The treble in his voice betrayed him.
“I imagine so,” Nell told him, turning to the others. “All of you, come to this side of the room, where it isn’t so noisy. Let’s sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ Imogene, you start us off.”
And so the child sang, head high, notes clear, thin, and determined.
Not forty yards away, a bomb exploded, showering earth and metal on the ambulance. Hilly recoiled but kept his hands on the wheel, navigating the fog of debris, minus a windscreen. The glass cuts were nothing a bit of bandaging wouldn’t put right.
There was so little he could share with his mother—not even that he and Silly had been assigned to a British Expeditionary Force field hospital. There were Army restrictions, and there were also things you couldn’t tell someone you loved. It would all have to wait until the war was over.
If it weren’t for Silly, Hilly didn’t think he could handle any of this. He’d lost ten pounds, probably just from vomiting, never mind the running, lifting, and carrying. Sylvester Benjamin kept him sane. After a month they had acquired a reputation for being fearless, but in fact they were scared all the time, cold all the time, and hungry most of the time.
In some ways, Silly was an odd duck. Nineteen years old, as Christian-minded a fellow as you’d meet—yet an atheist.
“Not that I’d want the whole world to know,” he told Hilly one day. “Most folks are hard on nonbelievers. Shun us like we got the plague.”
Hilly was stunned. He considered himself a pretty good Catholic—confession and Communion once a week, Mass sometimes twice, if he could manage it. Silly knew this, yet he felt safe in his revelation.
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“Have you always been a . . . nonbeliever?” Hilly asked. It was a quiet moment, and they’d climbed down from the ambulance to sit beside the snow- and mud-clogged cow path they’d been traveling.
Tearing apart a hunk of dry bread and handing the larger piece to Hilly, Silly told him, “I had a little sister. ‘Teenie,’ we called her; her real name was Altina. Anyway, she was so pretty and good, you wouldn’t believe it. You know how some damned clucks say ‘too good for this world’? Like there is another one you can count on? Well, that was our Teenie.”
He picked a crumb from his bloodied jacket and popped it in his mouth. “She had the most delicate little face. Like somebody in training to be a queen, you know? And pretty manners. Mama taught her all the right ways to act.”
In the distance, sporadic gunfire. “But she was so funny. When she’d get mad, she’d stick her head in a pillow and swear a blue streak. I mean, like a drunken gandy dancer. She repeated every bad word she’d ever heard Dad’s patients let out when he had to stitch ’em up.
“Teenie was four years younger than me, so I was twelve and she was eight when she came down with malaria. Can you believe that? Malaria in Iowa?”
He peered off, as if to that distant Iowa.
“As soon as Dad knew what ailed her, I started praying. At church any time of the day. Beside the bed night and morning. Even if I was just sitting in the swing on the porch. I prayed till I practically didn’t know any other language but praying.
“And then she left us.” Silly had fallen silent and swiped his sleeve across his eyes.
“You don’t have to explain,” Hilly said. “You can be an atheist—or any kind of heathen religion—and you’ll still be my best friend.”
The ground was frozen, and the cold was penetrating the layers of clothing they wore. Silly stood.
“I never told this to anybody,” he said. “It feels good to say it out loud. After Teenie’s funeral, I told God he could go to hell. ‘Course, by that time, I’d pretty well decided he was a fairy tale. And, I’ll tell you the truth, nothing’s ever changed my mind.” He yanked out a grimy handkerchief and blew his nose, then held out a hand to pull Hilly up.
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse Page 16
