by Amy Stewart
“She says her mother’s from Georgia,” Constance said. “I suppose that might explain the accent. But have you noticed how she handles a knife and fork?”
“No finishing school,” Norma said.
“Exactly. And she doesn’t have that walk.”
“Toe-heel, toe-heel.”
“It’s a ridiculous way to walk,” Constance said. “I don’t know why girls are taught it. But they all do it.”
“It’s so they can balance a book on their heads.”
“Well, I’ve already spoken to Fleurette and Roxie. We have an understanding.”
“You always have an understanding with Fleurette. What’s called for here is a punishment. You ought to cancel May Ward’s concert.”
“Doesn’t that punish the entire camp? You just don’t want Freeman Bernstein coming around.”
“Surely he won’t show his face,” Norma said.
“It’s quite likely he will. He’s May Ward’s husband and her manager.” Constance enjoyed taunting Norma with this possibility. Norma’s grievance against Freeman Bernstein was so massive and unyielding that she could’ve built a granite monument from it.
“He won’t set foot on my campground,” Norma said.
“If it’s anyone’s camp, it’s mine,” Constance said, “and I’m not going to call off the show. It would only bring unnecessary attention to . . . a minor infraction.”
Norma noticed her hesitation: Norma noticed everything. “You were out for quite a while yourself last night,” she said.
They’d arrived at the barn by then, as had most of Norma’s students. “They’re waiting for you,” Constance said, with great relief. She wasn’t ready to make a full confession to Norma.
Hilda and Fern were among Norma’s students. Constance took Hilda by the arm and motioned for Fern to follow. They came along eagerly, obviously expecting to hear daring new plans for their after-hours target practice.
“You were seen last night returning to your tents unaccompanied,” Constance said. “I warned you to stay with me, but you didn’t. I’m putting you on kitchen duty tonight by yourselves.”
“But it takes eight girls to do the kitchen after dinner!” Hilda said.
“Won’t we miss our—”
Constance put up a hand to silence Fern before she gave everything away. “This is going to be a good lesson to you. When you go to France, you’re simply going to have to follow the rules, and do what your commander tells you, whether you like it or not. And you’re going to have to learn how to keep your mouths closed and your secrets to yourselves. Word’s already going around this morning that you broke curfew. If anyone asks, you’re to confess that you were out, and say that you’re on kitchen duty by yourselves as punishment. Don’t offer any other explanation.”
“But—”
Constance wouldn’t hear their arguments. “If you can’t obey a straightforward command, then you aren’t in any way prepared to go to war.”
That was enough to put an end to the complaining. They were good girls who understood at once what was expected of them. They each gave a silent nod and returned to the class, with Constance on their heels.
Norma’s lesson that morning concerned the method for affixing messages to the legs of pigeons, and removing those messages when they returned to their loft.
“A bird has to be handled firmly, and with authority,” Norma was saying as Constance came back around to the other side of the barn. She sat next to Sarah, who was scratching away in her notebook with a stubby pencil. She was taking the subject of Norma’s pigeons far more seriously than Constance ever had.
“If you’ve handled a chicken, you know how to take hold of a pigeon,” Norma said, to scattered laughter from city girls who had only ever handled a chicken after the butcher had plucked and dressed it.
On a hastily knocked-together wooden table next to her was a wire cage holding four birds. Norma reached in and grabbed one from its backside, pinning the wings down under the palm of her hand, and held it out for the class to see. Its feet hung down uselessly and its head bobbed up and down, trying to stay level as Norma waved it around. Several in the class cooed at it affectionately: the creature did look small and helpless in a manner that inspired sympathy.
“You’ll each take a turn at handling one before we put the bands on,” Norma said, “but we’ll have to go inside the barn and close the doors to do that. I can’t risk any of them getting away. They might take it upon themselves to fly home. I need them here.”
“They wouldn’t fly all the way back to New Jersey, would they?” came a voice from under the eaves of the barn. It was Hack, who had wandered over to watch the class.
Constance bristled at this: the aim of the camp was to put women into classrooms by themselves, where they could learn without interference from the opposite sex. But she was in no position to go against Hack. She’d only just negotiated a truce with him and didn’t know how long their fragile peace would hold.
Norma didn’t mind, of course. Her purpose in bringing the pigeons was to attract the attention of the Army. There weren’t any generals around, as she’d hoped there would be. A private was better than nothing.
“It’s two hundred and fifty miles back to Wyckoff, more or less,” Norma said. “That’s an easy flight for them. You’d know the answer if you attended class more regularly.”
Sarah fought a smile. “She can’t help herself, can she?” she whispered.
“She thinks she’s being helpful by letting him know what he missed,” Constance whispered back.
“Can they really fly that far?” Hack asked.
“They can comfortably manage five hundred miles in a day. Our national pigeon racing club has been setting records in excess of two thousand miles,” Norma said.
Hack whistled. “Well, that ought to get them across France.”
“Correct. France hardly exceeds six hundred miles across in any direction, so they won’t have any trouble with it,” Norma said briskly.
Soldiers were accustomed to gruff treatment, so Hack wasn’t put off by it. “Supposing we turned them loose at the front,” he said. “Wouldn’t the Germans just shoot them down?”
“We took care of the Germans in our second class, which you also failed to attend,” Norma said. It didn’t appear, for the moment, that she had anything else to say on the subject.
Sarah took it upon herself to rise from her seat in the back and whisper to Hack, “They can fly as high as any aeroplane. In fact, they’ve been dropped out of aeroplanes before and they do just fine. From the ground, they’d only be a little speck in the sky. Of course the Germans would get a few, but with a cart this size, you could take a hundred pigeons to the front. You’d have plenty to spare.”
“A hundred in that cart?” Hack said, walking over to take a closer look. “Can you pull it with an automobile, or does it have to go by horse? Because I don’t think we’re fighting this war on horseback.”
Norma was losing control of her class. Constance thought about interceding on her behalf, but wasn’t this what Norma wanted—to demonstrate her cart for the Army?
“It can go by horse or auto,” Norma said, “but a noisy engine has no place in the French countryside. A horse is nearly silent. You wouldn’t be noticed.”
“Sure, but a horse can spook,” Hack said. “Say, we have an auto for bringing supplies back and forth. How about I drive it over here and we take this cart of yours for a ride down the road?”
There was such a flurry of excitement over the prospect of leaving the campground that every girl in the class jumped up and started talking at once.
“I don’t suppose we’re going to get around to banding any pigeons today,” Sarah said.
“I’d better make a round through camp,” Constance said. “Keep an eye on this business for me. I don’t want a single one of them late for their next class.”
THAT NIGHT, the entire camp knew that Hilda and Fern had been punished for being caught out of t
heir tents after curfew. Great whoops of joy came from the crew of eight who’d been relieved of kitchen duty so that the miscreants could take their punishment. When Constance walked back to the mess hall after dinner to check on them, she found Sarah, Margaret, and Bernice in the kitchen as well, helping Hilda and Fern scrub pots and wash two hundred sets of dishes.
“We’re a unit,” Margaret said, when she turned around and saw Constance watching them. “We stay together.”
Constance let them go on with what they were doing. Outside, under a vast and inky sky, she thought: We might’ve just formed an army.
25
IT WOULD BE cold in the woods that night. Beulah warned Fleurette not to wear the filmy green dress she’d chosen for the evening, but Fleurette was always beautifully turned out, even when it meant sacrificing comfort. She had her sights set on Hack, the tall one, the good-looking one, if you liked a man who looked like he’d been cut out of a page in a magazine.
Beulah didn’t care for him herself. He would want something from her: men like Hack always wanted something from girls like Beulah, eventually. Soldiers in particular were a little too expec-tant for Beulah’s tastes. They made much of the fact that they might go off to war and never come back, which is to say that they wanted a little something extra from a girl purely out of sympathy. There was nothing in it for the girl, unless she could justify an act of intimate generosity on patriotic grounds, which Beulah could not. The soldiers made it sound as if they might never see a girl again once they left for France, but as far as Beulah knew, Paris was full of pretty girls. They hadn’t all been evacuated in advance of the Germans.
She liked Clarence. He was barely eighteen, and still a little soft. He wasn’t embarrassed to say that he missed his mother and his sisters, which Beulah appreciated. Any man who spoke well of the women in his family could be expected to behave honorably toward other women. It occurred to her, when Clarence talked wistfully of his younger sister, to whom he’d only just begun to give piano lessons the summer previous, that Henry Clay never said a kind word about his mother or any other woman in his family, even his wife. Especially his wife.
That should’ve been a sign.
But how different was Henry Clay, really, from any other man down on Mayo Street? Most of them were just like him, except that they never went on to do what Henry Clay had done. They lived out rather ordinary lives. They never made the papers.
Beulah shuddered. She’d managed to go years in New York without ever letting Henry Clay’s name flit across her mind, without ever summoning his face or trying to recall the sound of his voice. She wanted nothing more than to put him behind her, but something about being at this camp, within spitting distance of Richmond, brought him back.
It wasn’t good for her to relive the past like this. That’s what Mabel told her soon after they met. Beulah wasn’t as adept, back then, at hiding her identity, and Mabel quickly came to understand that Beulah had been lying to her. It took the better part of a bottle of cheap wine—nasty stuff, far worse than anything she drank back in Richmond—for Mabel to extract a full confession from Beulah. Once she did, she made it her job to help Beulah craft a new identity for herself.
“You have to tell yourself a different story,” Mabel insisted. “Every time you think about the past, put something else in your head.”
When Beulah asked what, exactly, she ought to put in her head, Mabel said, “Imagine yourself as another girl, with a different name, who had good parents and a nice apartment uptown.”
Beulah did just what Mabel told her to do, and it worked, mostly. After a while, she felt a little less dirty. A little less tainted. She wasn’t the poison in the soup anymore. She could look people in the eye, give them one of her new names, and let slip a little about an imagined past, one that held no shameful secrets. She discovered that as long as she believed the story she was telling, everyone else did, too.
But now it was as if the curtain had slipped, and Beulah could see directly through a window into those old days. She couldn’t convince herself that she was Roxie Collins of Park Avenue, and she probably hadn’t convinced anyone else, either. In class, her mind tended to drift. At night she dreamt about Meemaw, and woke up wondering whether her grandmother was dead or alive. If she had died, who would tell her? No one from Richmond even knew where to find Beulah.
Sidling up to her old terrors was turning Beulah back into the fretful and anxious girl she’d once been. She’d forgotten how hard it used to be for her to eat, and how her wrists were like sticks when she came out of jail. Now she was back to her old habits, nibbling on a roll while everyone else in the mess hall devoured their rations. She could live on tea and crackers. It was the only thing that ever settled her stomach.
And she had to force herself to smile at the other girls, much less to talk to them. When she first arrived at camp, she thought she would make a sensation, with her glamorous stories and her light-hearted laugh. She expected to be at the center of the camp’s social life. It would be a game to fit in with these girls, a deceptive little entertainment that would lift her spirits after she gave up on New York.
But in fact, she could hardly stand to be around them. It was painfully obvious that she wasn’t one of them, and never would be. To make matters worse, as the weeks went by, it was ever more apparent that a voyage to France was not on offer—at least, not for her. She tried not think about what she’d do next, but the future pressed against her just as urgently as the past did. That made the present a miserable place to be.
She didn’t even particularly want to go out with Fleurette to watch Constance and the others take their target practice, but she also didn’t want to be left alone in the tent with Norma, who had a tendency to raise her right eyebrow at everything Beulah said. She’d never met such a mistrustful woman in her life as Norma Kopp. The less time Beulah spent under her wary gaze, the better.
So she waited while Fleurette put on her green dress and did up her hair. She wore most of her uniform over it—the jacket, the long skirt, the canvas hat, but she intended to slip out of it once they were in the woods.
Beulah resisted Fleurette’s efforts to dress her up for the evening. She’d taken a liking to her uniform, finding it a relief not to have to think about her style of dress anymore.
“Wear a pin, at least,” Fleurette said, and pressed a red cotton geranium into her collar.
The two of them left the tent about fifteen minutes before curfew, so they could slip away without attracting attention. It was a bright night, with a clear sky and a half moon. There were still plenty of girls going back and forth between the tents. Constance would be busy for quite a while, rounding them up and herding them all to bed.
“Oh, there’s Hack, down by the mess hall,” Fleurette said. She floated down the hill toward him, like a leaf dropped into a fast-moving river. Beulah went along. They caught up with him just as he was going into the supply shed. It was just a little wooden lean-to, knocked together when camp opened and meant to be taken down when it was over.
“You girls shouldn’t see where these are hidden,” Hack said, but he did nothing to conceal what he was doing. The guns were kept in a wooden case behind some paint cans and covered up by tarps and tent stakes. Hack hauled the case out with him.
“Why bother with the case? Don’t you soldiers know how to wear a firearm?” Fleurette asked. She managed to sound flirtatious when she said it, but Hack was taking his responsibility seriously.
“When it’s a training exercise, we keep them in the case,” he said. “I don’t recall Miss Kopp inviting you two along.”
“She told me just now that she expected us out there with the others,” Fleurette said. “She thinks we ought to have the training, too. I told her that I wouldn’t be doing anything but seamstressing during the war, and wouldn’t need to know how to shoot a German, but she insisted.” Fleurette looked almost sorrowful about it, as if she hated to sacrifice a good night’s sleep for a shooting lesson in t
he woods.
Beulah admired how effortlessly Fleurette told lies. They had that in common, at least.
She followed Fleurette and Hack—walking side-by-side, as if they were already a pair—around behind the camp and into the woods. There was no guarantee that they hadn’t been seen, but Fleurette seemed to feel that she was immune from punishment because she was Constance’s sister. Beulah decided that she, too, would be afforded some protection because of her association with the two of them.
Behind the barn, past the broken fence post, down the little trail, and into the clearing they went. Margaret was waiting for them there, as were the other women Beulah had seen a few nights earlier when she stumbled into their training session. Only Constance and Sarah were missing, but they came along a few minutes later, having finished nightly rounds together. Clarence was back at camp, standing guard.
“I don’t have to tell you how easily you can be spotted coming and going,” Constance said, once they were all gathered together. They stood in a circle around her lantern, which cast up a yellow light on their chins. From above came the thin blue light of the moon. It made for an otherworldly effect. Beulah wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had started chanting a spell.
But they all listened quite seriously to Constance. “The camp was designed to keep anyone from sneaking in and out, for good reason. But it means that we must all assume that someone will see us going in and out of the woods. To that end, I’m going to appoint each and every one of you to take up a nightly patrol as my deputy. You’ll work in shifts, but occasionally we’ll go out together. Tell anyone who asks that you’re in training to run a camp like this one someday, and that’s why I’ve put you all on duty. That way, it won’t be as obvious if you’re spotted out after curfew.”
The women seemed satisfied with that.
“Tonight we’ll go deeper into the woods and work on our stances and the handling of unloaded guns. I’ll let you each fire off a single shot, but no more. I’ve asked Norma to listen from camp and tell me if we can be heard. If we can, that’s the end of it.”