by Amy Stewart
“Well, I’m in jail,” Beulah said. “Nobody sees me now.”
“They don’t?” He reached into his pocket and unfolded a page from the Richmond Times. “You’re on the front page, girlie.”
There she was, a full quarter page of her, in a ridiculous ruffled bonnet and a blouse with a sailor collar. She remembered the picture: she’d had it taken at a makeshift studio at a carnival a few years ago and gave it to Meemaw on her birthday. How did the papers get hold of it?
Even worse was the headline: “The Other Woman in the Richmond Murder Case.”
She slapped it down on the table, shocked. “I’m not in the Richmond murder case! I’m not in it at all. I knew the man, but that doesn’t put me in the case. Half the girls in Richmond knew him. I don’t see them here in jail with me.”
“Well, that’s your side of the story,” he said.
Beulah was infuriated. “Yes, it’s my side of the story! Why isn’t my side of the story printed in this paper? Nobody talked to me. Whatever they said, they must’ve made it up.”
“And that’s just why I’m here, miss. To make sure that your side of the story gets in the paper, too. You need someone to speak on your behalf, don’t you see that?”
“What I need is to get out of this jail. What are you going to do about that?”
“Don’t you have a lawyer?”
Beulah patted herself down, as if to check her pockets. “Do you see a lawyer?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Well. Then you’ll need one, and you’ll need some way to pay his bills. Has your daddy offered to help?”
“I don’t hardly know my daddy.”
“Anyone else? Your mother? A grandfather? A kindly uncle? A sister or a brother?”
She shook her head. “Even if a single one of my relations had any money, I don’t think they’d spend it on me. Not after this.”
“Well, then. Here’s what I propose, Miss Binford. I’ll handle the reporters. I know how these people work. I speak to the press every day, all the New York papers, the Washington papers, everybody. I’ve helped many a vaudeville actress through a scandal. Names you’d remember. Good girls who didn’t deserve the bad press they’d been given.”
“But why? Why would you do that for me? I can’t pay you.”
“You won’t have to. I’ll even find a lawyer down here and pay him out of my own pocket. You won’t owe me a thing. After this is all over, it can just come right out of my fees.”
“Your fees? Fees for what?”
The guard came back just then. Their fifteen minutes had ended. The man stood to go. “Your career on the stage, Miss Binford. Don’t you see? You’re famous now. You’re going to go for your stage tour as soon as this trial ends, and you’ll be a very rich girl.”
The guard heard that last part and snorted. “Visitin’s over,” he said.
The man handed Beulah his calling card. “At your service. If you need anything, you can reach me at my office.”
The guard led him away and left Beulah locked in the interviewing room. She turned the card over and ran her finger over the engraved letters.
FREEMAN BERNSTEIN, it read. ENTERTAINMENT AND MANAGEMENT.
30
“VANQUISHING THE GERMANS with Precision Bed Corners,” Fleurette said. “I can’t believe we’re to have a course in making up a bed.”
“You’ve never made up a bed in your life,” Norma said.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know how.”
Constance stood outside the mess hall, ticking names off a list as the girls went inside. Scientific Bed-Making was a required course at camp, at the insistence of the Red Cross. Each camper was expected to make up a bed three times in rapid succession if she hoped to graduate. The difficulty with this requirement was the short supply of beds with which to practice. Only four metal beds had been delivered, and they would be picked up at the end of the week, as soon as the course was complete. To accommodate all two hundred campers, the course had to be held twice a day, every day.
“Where’s Roxanna?” Constance asked as Norma, Fleurette, and Sarah passed by.
“She’s been in the infirmary all morning,” Norma said. “I went over there just now. Nurse Cartwright says it’s dyspepsia.”
“It was awfully kind of you to look in on her,” Sarah said.
“I wasn’t intending to be kind.” Norma sounded alarmed at the prospect. “I was trying to get her into class, where she belongs. Nurse Cartwright is our instructor. You’d think she’d want everyone in attendance.”
“Roxanna’s obviously not well. I’ll speak to her this afternoon and put her on tomorrow’s list,” Constance said.
Nurse Cartwright arrived just then, huffing up the hill and pumping her arms. “One of yours is down in the infirmary,” she said to Constance, as soon as she came within earshot.
“Will she survive?”
The nurse grinned and lifted her hat to wipe the sweat away. “They’ll all survive. They miss their mothers, more than anything. These girls like to be tended to. They just won’t admit it.”
“I don’t suppose I’ve done much tending,” Constance said. Should she have been going around to the tents at night, soothing homesick hearts and troubled minds? Had she thought of them too much as soldiers-in-training and not enough as girls who missed their mothers?
“I don’t mind them coming to me,” Nurse Cartwright said. “I put them to bed with a cold cloth or a hot water bottle, depending on their disposition, let them tell me their troubles, and after a few hours they come out right as rain. Do you have your list?”
“I do,” Constance said. She was to take half the class and tick off each girl’s name as she completed her bed-making tasks. With everyone on the roster marked as present, she closed the tent flap and Nurse Cartwright began her lecture.
“Get yourself into groups,” she called. “It’s five girls per bed.”
The dining tables and benches had been pushed to the sides and replaced with the hospital beds. Nurse Cartwright took a folded sheet from one of the beds and held it aloft.
“The lower sheet is the foundation of a hygienic bed,” she called in a sing-song voice. “Queen Victoria insisted on having hers sewn fast every day. We might not have that luxury in a field hospital, but we can do the next best thing and tuck a good half-yard of fabric under the top of the mattress, even if that leaves the bottom short. Invalids will tend to slide down in bed and take the sheet with them. As for the upper sheet, it must be tucked well under the foot of the bed, as patients like to pull the covers up. Now, for the coverlet . . .”
She continued in this manner, lecturing on the benefits of a tightly made, wrinkle-free bed, until girls who had never enjoyed making a bed in their lives were suddenly eager to get to it, if only to put an end to the lecture. Constance watched them struggle with the sheets as if competing in an athletic event, running from one end of the bed to the other and heaving the mattress up by its corners. Under the nurse’s explicit instructions, Constance issued her check marks only after the beds had been made quickly and competently, even if it meant starting over a half-dozen times. Norma, with her penchant for military precision, passed on the first go, as did Fleurette, which didn’t surprise Constance at all. Anyone who’d spent a lifetime handling fabrics could whip a sheet around a mattress as if it were a length of crêpe de Chine around the hips.
Nurse Cartwright announced the final lesson, which was to make up a clean bed while the patient was still in it. At the start of camp, the plan had been to require each girl to complete this task three times, but there was so much mirth and antics among the girls playing the part of the patient that the requirement had to be reduced to one successful attempt per student.
“In making up a bed for an invalid,” the nurse said, “the patient must be moved as little as possible, and must be uncovered not at all. This requires you to pay as much attention to the upper sheet as the lower. Deft, rapid, and noiseless is the way to go about it.”
Some of the st
udents were rapid, some were deft, but none were noiseless. The girl playing the part of the patient inevitably gave in to laughter as her fellow students tried to maneuver her. Constance could see why Nurse Cartwright put this lesson at the end: it dissolved into a social hour, no matter how stern the lecture or how watchful the instructor.
This didn’t bother Constance, who found that in walking among them, she could learn quite a bit about what was going on under her nose.
“I heard they have chocolates over in tent fourteen,” one girl said.
“Unless they’re filled with whiskey, I’m not interested,” said another.
“The nurse will give you a little brandy in hot water if you can summon up a convincing cough.”
Constance made a note to speak to Nurse Cartwright about her reliance on medicinal spirits—this was hardly a war zone, after all—and went on down the line, where she heard this, from a group of girls from Pennsylvania:
“I heard those gunshots again last night. It was just after you went to sleep.”
Constance froze, and waited for the reply.
“I was up long after you were, and I didn’t hear them.”
“You weren’t up after me. You were snoring. I’m telling you, this is the third time I’ve heard them.”
“It’s probably just an auto firing. What do you think, Miss Kopp?”
Constance forced herself to walk on by, slowly, as if it didn’t matter. “It’s an engine,” she said. “I’ve heard it myself once or twice.”
They’d been out three times at night for rifle and pistol practice. Norma swore she couldn’t hear them from the center of camp, but these girls were camped along the fringe, closest to the forest—and one of them had sharp hearing.
It was impossible, under the circumstances, to continue. For firearms training they’d have to go back to play-acting.
31
BEULAH WAS ALL too happy to skip the bed-making course. She allowed Nurse Cartwright to diagnose her with a severe case of dyspepsia, attributed to the heavy camp meals of beans and sausages, when Beulah was accustomed to cucumber sandwiches and light soups (or so the nurse was led to believe). She was put on a diet of salt crackers and chicken broth, which was about all she could eat anyway, as the memory of those weeks in jail kept floating back to her and turning her stomach.
There was something about the confinement of camp, and the regimented life it demanded, that recalled the last time she’d lost her freedom. In jail the guards’ eyes were always upon her. She used to wake up and see their dim silhouettes outside her cell, just standing there, breathing heavy through the bars as she slept.
That was jail: a pair of eyes always upon her. Her misdeeds—whether real or accused or imagined—were always laid bare for anyone to see. She never knew what the guards thought of her, or what fresh rumor had reached their ears the night before. She was a circus animal to them, on display to be mocked and gaped upon. The camp was starting to feel that way too, in spite of her best efforts at concealment.
It was a relief, then, to turn herself over to the camp nurse, a sturdy, wide-bosomed woman with a helmet of tightly curled silver hair around a face that could be stoic and unsmiling when circumstances called for it, but uncommonly warm when she had a patient to tend to. Beulah surrendered utterly to the nurse’s care, and allowed her to sit alongside the bed (a proper hospital bed, with two pillows and a pile of blankets, so much more luxurious than her canvas cot), and to issue, in addition to the pronouncement about dyspepsia, a further diagnosis of homesickness, for which she prescribed a daily letter home to Mother.
“I see you in the assemblies,” Nurse Cartwright said. “All the other girls are writing their letters, but you never do. You won’t miss home so much if you write to them and tell them a little about what your life is like here. Paint a picture of it for them.”
“I did,” Beulah muttered, “but that only made it worse. We only have a few weeks to go. I’ll see them soon enough.”
“That’s the spirit,” Nurse Cartwright said. “Now, how’s that cough of yours?”
Beulah had almost forgotten to cough. “It’s so much worse when I lie down,” she said. To demonstrate, she settled back down to her pillow and offered up a few convincing hacks and wheezes.
“I’ll put a kettle on,” the nurse said, and reached for her bottle of medicinal brandy. “I might feel a cough coming on myself.”
Beulah passed a peaceable day and a half in the infirmary, sampling Nurse Cartwright’s curatives and working her way happily through one tin of salted crackers after another. She accepted cool washcloths when they were handed to her, and took a hot water bottle under the covers whenever the nurse decided she looked peaked. No one had ever nursed Beulah before, and she found it delightful. Would a hospital be even better, she wondered. Some sort of minor operation, with a long period of recuperation, sounded luxurious to her at that moment.
Beulah departed reluctantly, and only when another patient came in: Ginny, from the tent next to hers, doubled over with monthly pains, which in her case were accompanied by fiery headaches and constipation of such intransigence that Beulah made haste to depart before the full explanation was proffered. With Ginny in greater need, she would have to surrender her comfortable bed and the hot water bottle tucked between the sheets, so that was reason enough to rally to full health and return to her tent.
Before she left, the nurse put her cool hands on Beulah’s neck, and then on her forehead. She did this habitually to any girl within reach, perhaps to feel the pulse and check for fever. Beulah found it marvelous.
“You’re a good girl,” Nurse Cartwright said, “and your people back home love you. That’s why I know you’ll be fine.”
Beulah thought about telling the nurse how wrong she was, but there was Ginny with her innards in knots and she thought better of it.
AT BEULAH’S REQUEST, the nurse had refused to allow visitors. That gave her a little break from Fleurette and her sisters. She only wished the break could’ve been longer.
When she returned to the tent, she learned that Hack had gotten himself tangled up in some kind of argument with Norma over her pigeons. The woman was irrationally attached to those birds and convinced that they were capable of military heroics. The idea of a pigeon serving in the Army struck Beulah as about as comical as a chicken steering a ship in the Navy, but she kept her opinions to herself. The more she said in Norma’s presence, the more that woman’s distrustful eye would be trained upon her. In her weakened condition, Beulah might just wither under the scrutiny.
“Private Hackbush owes me five pigeons,” Norma was saying as Beulah settled down on her cot.
“They flew home!” Fleurette said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get back. You have the boys from the dairy looking after them. Hack doesn’t owe you anything.”
“I have five fewer pigeons with which to conduct my training,” Norma said, “and it’s his fault.”
“If he did bring you five pigeons,” Constance put in, obviously aiming to further annoy her sister, “would you even accept them? What if they weren’t of good stock?”
“Oh, they wouldn’t possibly be of good stock,” Norma said, dismissing Hack’s imaginary pigeons before they’d even been presented to her.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Sarah said when she saw Beulah. “Has Nurse Cartwright returned you to fighting form?”
“I believe so,” Beulah said.
Fleurette gave her a little smile and said, “You missed quite a performance. Hack said that pigeons wouldn’t fly through gunfire, and Norma wanted to prove it to him. She set five birds free, and we were all made to go out in the field with pots and pans—”
“I wondered what all that clanging was last night,” Beulah said.
“Yes, that was us, making fools of ourselves, banging wooden rifles around and smashing pot lids together and any other kind of racket we could get up.”
“How did the birds do?” Beulah asked.
“Heroically,” Norma said.
“They flew home, which is what they do if you turn them loose,” Fleurette said. “The trouble was, Hack wasn’t at all convinced. He said that gunfire is a hundred times louder, and the birds would spook.”
“Then why didn’t you shoot at them?” Beulah asked.
“Oh, you missed that, too,” Fleurette said. “Someone heard the shots from camp. Rifle practice is over.”
“What a shame,” Beulah said. Although she tried to sound light about it, she regretted deeply that there were to be no more training in firearms. Beulah had been paying a little more attention at rifle practice. She hadn’t been allowed to touch the guns, but that didn’t stop her from watching, and watching closely.
Each time training was held, she and Fleurette sat in the grass at the edge of the clearing, nearly concealed by darkness, the lanterns illuminating only the girls and their targets. Beulah loved to watch them go through their paces. The rifles practically glowed from years of enthusiastic oiling and polishing. When the girls pulled the bolts back to load more cartridges, the mechanism slid open and closed with the satisfying clang of a heavy lock. Beulah couldn’t imagine firing one herself: the rifle was almost four feet long, and the smaller girls, Fern especially, struggled to keep hold of it.
But the revolver—that looked like something Beulah could manage. From a distance it appeared to be black, but if she crept a little closer and caught it in the light, she could see a deep blue sheen to the steel. The cylinder slid out so easily that most of the girls could flip it open one-handed, a move so sharp and elegant that Beulah found herself imitating it, off to the side where Fleurette couldn’t see, in the dark.
That gun was dead simple to shoot, too. While Margaret and Sarah took great care aligning their feet just so and adjusting their stances to match Constance’s precisely, the younger girls developed a little more flair. They’d jut their hips out, put a fist against their waists, and lift their chins so high in a posture of defiance that they could hardly put the target in their sights. Constance corrected them every time—this was not a joke, this was not a pageant—but Beulah loved how brash and bold they looked.