by Radha Vatsal
“You will be happy to know that I spoke to Miss Busby’s physician, and he told me that she would need plenty of rest, as well as complete peace and quiet for the next four to six weeks in order to recover. In the meantime, I will take over as Ladies’ Page editor.”
“Yes, Mr. Hewitt.”
“As such,” he went on, “I require an assistant who is able to work long hours on short notice.”
“I understand, Mr. Hewitt.” Kitty noticed that he hadn’t invited her to pull up a chair.
“You see, I warned Miss Busby when she hired her apprentice to pick a workhorse and not a thoroughbred, but she wouldn’t listen. And she’s paid the price. Thoroughbreds look pretty, and they do a few things well, but they’re fussy. They don’t stand up to everyday use. You may as well know that Miss Williams applied for your position when it was announced.”
“I see,” Kitty said. No one had told her that. Not Miss Busby, not Jeannie, nor any of the other girls.
“She was my first choice, but Miss Busby rejected her. She said that you had something none of the other applicants possessed.”
“May I ask what?” Kitty hoped to hear something complimentary, like intelligence or eloquence, but right now, she’d settle for good penmanship or a mastery of grammar.
“Miss Busby told me that she wanted someone with class, someone who dressed well and spoke well. It didn’t trouble her that you had never worked before, either at a newspaper or anywhere else.”
Kitty staggered as though she’d been punched. How could she have flattered herself that Miss Busby had seen some latent merit in her, some untapped potential?
“It’s not my fault,” she protested. “Miss Busby didn’t allow me to do any heavy lifting. It’s only recently that she gave me any freedom—”
“That’s exactly my point.” The editor sounded firm. “This isn’t about you or your talents—such as they may be. It’s about work. Hard work, day-to-day work. The ability to churn out paragraphs day after day on any subject, for any reason.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much patience for thoroughbreds. I have enough on my plate as it is, and what I need is a workhorse. Miss Busby is free to hire you back once she returns.”
“Please, Mr. Hewitt,” Kitty begged. “Give me one more chance.” She didn’t offer any excuses since she didn’t think he would care to hear them.
The editor pulled a stack of files toward him. “I suggest, Miss Weeks, that you think long and hard about whether you are suited to our profession. I think you’re unhappy because humble Miss Williams has displaced you. After some time, you will realize that today was a blessing in disguise. And if you don’t”—he opened one of the folders—“well, that’s not my problem.”
Kitty returned to her desk—or, rather, Jeannie’s desk. “Did you know about this?” she demanded.
“I’m sorry, Miss Weeks.” Jeannie stood to allow Kitty to collect her things. “If I thought that it would end like this, I would never have agreed to help yesterday.” She sounded contrite, but her wisp of a smile revealed the pride she felt in her promotion.
Kitty swept her few personal items into her purse: a pen, a rabbit’s foot good-luck charm from a school friend, and a pocket dictionary.
“I hope you can forgive me,” Jeannie said. Kitty’s Anne Morgan interview sat on the desk, neatly corrected in red ink.
“Good luck, Miss Williams.” Kitty hurried away before she said something she might regret.
She had been ousted by Jeannie Williams, a girl she hadn’t even perceived to be a threat. She had been found lacking, not because she had disobeyed Miss Busby and gone off on her own, but because she didn’t work hard enough or—and perhaps this was the same thing—for enough hours in the day. Miss Busby had hired her not because of what she could do, but because of her breeding.
None of the typists batted an eyelid as Kitty left the hen coop. As she made her way through the cavernous hall for the last time, it seemed that the music from their machines swelled to a crescendo.
It was her send-off, Kitty thought, trying to stifle any feeling of self-pity: a screeching symphony of metal against metal that produced nothing but line after line of black type against white paper, each and every day.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kitty couldn’t believe that all her efforts had been for nothing: her meeting with Mrs. Stepan, the interview with Anne Morgan, the months of drudgery leading up to it. None of it mattered, and worse still, Mr. Hewitt believed that she wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.
A newspaper boy shouted, “Harry Thaw to Know His Fate Tonight!” Streetcars clanged noisily. Elevated trains clattered in the distance. Whoever said that New York was a great city had blundered. It was mayhem, a place where a million and a half souls feverishly pursued their business without regard for any niceties.
Kitty walked back home. There was no need to take a cab, because she wasn’t in a hurry. She recalled the questions Miss Busby had posed to her when she came in to apply for the position as her assistant. They had been lifted straight from Journalism for Women, although Kitty hadn’t realized that at the time.
“Are you seriously addicted to reading the newspapers?” Miss Busby had said. “Does the thought frequently occur to you, apropos of incidents witnessed, that this would make fine copy for a story? Do you have the reputation among your friends for being an excellent letter writer?”
Kitty had replied yes to each question. She read the newspapers—not necessarily the political stories, but those with human interest.
“Quite right.” Miss Busby had nodded.
“And I do see things I would like to know more about.” Kitty had several questions about the city and how society functioned. “And I think my friends enjoy my letters.”
In retrospect, her answers hadn’t been terribly compelling, but Miss Busby hired her nonetheless. Of course she had—she didn’t require an apprentice reporter. She had wanted someone with the social graces to enter any living room in town, and Kitty fit the bill exactly.
She had been a fool, Kitty thought. Naive and vain. So self-centered that she couldn’t see that Jeannie’s goodwill toward her might not have been entirely disinterested.
Kitty stopped herself. The past was the past. She would do better next time—and there would be a next time. If not at the Sentinel, then elsewhere.
The doorman at the New Century tipped his hat as Kitty entered, dusty and perspiring.
“Good morning, Miss Weeks.”
“I hope you don’t have anything for me, George.” She managed a smile.
“No, ma’am, nothing today.”
The cool foyer, which usually felt like a sanctuary from the busy streets now felt like a hotel—some luxurious but temporary accommodation from which her trunks would be shipped off to the next destination.
She rode up in the brass-trimmed elevator. Grace opened the front door when she rang the bell.
“You’re back early, Miss Kitty.” The maid took Kitty’s purse and gloves.
The telephone rang in the foyer, and Kitty picked it up.
“I’m coming to get you,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“What?” Kitty’s grip on the receiver tightened.
“Say ‘I beg your pardon,’ silly girl.”
“Oh, Amanda. It’s you.” Kitty relaxed.
“Of course it’s me. Who else could it be? I hope you haven’t forgotten today.”
“What is today, Bastille Day?”
“It is that.” Amanda paused. “It’s also the first day of the YWCA training. You promised me you’d come, Capability. I told all my friends that you would be there.”
“What time is it at?”
“Four o’clock. I’ll pick you up. By the way, Mama wants me to ask you a favor.”
“I don’t think I’m in a position to do anyone a favor
at the moment.” Normally, Kitty would have jumped at the chance to oblige snooty Mrs. Vanderwell.
“You can pay a visit to Mrs. Basshor,” Amanda said. “Poor Bessie has been reduced to a puddle of jelly over the business with Hotchkiss, and Mama thought it might help to have someone from the outside hear her out. You can tell the old dear that you will write a story about it. You don’t have to actually do anything—just tell her you might. I think Bessie would like to feel that someone cares. That someone is willing to listen to her side of things.”
The words echoed Kitty’s remark to Hotchkiss just eight days before. That she would help Mrs. Basshor tell her side of the story. It didn’t feel like eight days; too much had happened since then.
“I don’t work for the paper anymore,” Kitty said.
“You don’t? No wonder you’re home.” A pause. “Well, just pretend that you do for one more day. And, Capability—”
“Yes?”
“You do realize that this gives you one less reason for turning me down.”
“If I hadn’t realized before, I do now, Amanda.”
“See you at three thirty?”
“I’ll be ready.” Kitty hung up the telephone.
She went to her rooms and opened a black-lacquered Russian keepsake box, decorated with a painting of a young man on a horse jumping over the shining sun. It contained letters and cards from friends as well as the last letter her father had sent her. In the winter of ’13, while Kitty was still on her European tour, Julian Weeks had written to tell her that as soon as he found a suitable place for them to stay in Manhattan, she would be joining him for good.
The remaining month of her trip had passed in a haze, overshadowed by visions of their future together. The last week of her Atlantic crossing aboard the Aquitania had seemed interminable. She had flirted with a handsome young man from Virginia, but her heart hadn’t been in it. All she’d really wanted was to set foot on native soil and enjoy living with her one remaining parent. Their arrangement—him at his club, her at the Sentinel—might have continued until the day she married or the day one of them died if she remained a spinster.
Kitty put her father’s letter back in the box. Instead, it would all come to an end because of the Secret Service men and their talk of phenol and falsified passport applications.
• • •
“More than three million soldiers have perished,” the representative from the Red Cross told the audience of young women who were gathered on wooden benches, watching images flash across a cloth screen.
“I will enumerate the death toll for you: France has lost three hundred thousand men; Germany, a quarter of a million. Thirty thousand British troops have perished. Austria-Hungary has lost a million and a quarter, and Russia one and a half million.”
On the screen, helmeted soldiers, their rifles at the ready, stood in twisting gullies of narrow trenches. At some unheard signal, they scrambled to the surface, fountains of dust erupting around them, and they fell like dominoes.
The image shifted to a scene of infantrymen, cavalry, and teams of horses pulling carts loaded with cannons marching down a country road as though to take the place of their fallen comrades.
“All told, that’s five times the number who were killed during the entire Civil War,” the woman from the Red Cross continued. “In the span of less than a year.”
Kitty turned to look at Amanda, who seemed rapt in concentration. To kill more than three million men in a little under a year must require a tremendous amount of weaponry. If her father sold phenol to either side, he had a hand in the horrific death toll. She had always assumed that, like any decent man, Mr. Weeks must be against war-profiteering. On the other hand—she hated to even think this—she could imagine him saying matter-of-factly that someone would make money from the war, so why shouldn’t it be him?
The Red Cross representative, a no-nonsense woman with her hair pulled into a tight bun, had moved on to the subject of the injured and wounded.
Kitty couldn’t bear to watch a nurse unwrap bandages from charred and oozing limbs. The images became worse: a soldier screamed in agony as a doctor sawed off his leg; another moved his hand away from the side of his head, revealing a hole in the place where his ear should have been. To Kitty’s surprise, Amanda didn’t flinch.
“Chlorine gas has been used to devastating effect,” the Red Cross representative continued, “and has killed scores of soldiers as well as civilians.”
The newsreel concluded with images of injured and crippled men recovering in a convalescent home, tended to by uniformed women in white caps.
“We need your help,” the speaker said. “This is woman’s work, and there is no one more suited to the task, but those planning to go abroad must be ready to remain calm and resourceful even under the most taxing conditions. You must be prepared to set aside all sentimental feelings and obey without question the orders of your superiors. If you are able to do all of this, then I can think of no better reward than the effect you will have on your patients.”
A round of enthusiastic applause broke out. Amanda took Kitty’s arm. “What do you think?”
The lights came back on, sparing Kitty from having to answer.
The representative from the Red Cross began to describe the training course. It would last five weeks, and graduates of the program would receive an official certificate signed by the president. They wouldn’t become registered nurses, just nurse’s aides, so they should give up all hopes of wearing the cap.
Laughter rippled through the room.
She went on to outline the course of study in further detail: mornings would be spent in lectures and demonstration, afternoons at hospitals. Fridays would be devoted to practicing invalid cookery and working on first-aid techniques using dummies.
“Registration forms can be found at the back of the room,” the speaker said. “Feel free to check with me if you have any questions.”
A trio of well-heeled girls came up to Amanda. Kitty recalled Miss Nicholls and Miss Hibben from the concert at Carnegie Hall, and Amanda introduced her to the third, Miss Amour.
“If the course is good enough for Miss Cleveland, it’s good enough for me,” Miss Amour said with a giggle, referring to the former president’s daughter, who had become a nurse’s aide.
“Mama says we can be placed with her friends, the Haywards, who have given over their country home entirely to the convalescing men,” Miss Hibben added.
Miss Nicholls turned to Kitty. “So, will you be joining us, Miss Weeks?”
Four pairs of eyes stared at Kitty. Four young women, all about her age, all the cream of society, waited for her answer.
Kitty knew that, once made, the offer would not be repeated.
“Miss Weeks?” Miss Nicholls prompted.
Kitty’s future flashed before her eyes: Arm in arm with Amanda. Working hard. Traveling to Europe. Accomplishing something worthwhile. Accepted as part of a set. And not just any set, the best one.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.” Not while so much was up in the air.
“You can’t or you won’t, Capability?” Amanda said, dismayed.
“I don’t know.”
Miss Hibben linked her arm through Amanda’s. Miss Amour and Miss Nicholls curtsied. Four backs turned on Kitty. Only Amanda looked over her shoulder, and that was just for an instant.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Aren’t you going to work this morning?” Julian Weeks looked out from behind his paper. Kitty had joined him at breakfast later than usual.
She filled a glass with water and swallowed an Aspirin for her headache. “I am.” If he could hide the truth, then so could she. After all, wasn’t she his daughter?
“This is amusing.” He sniffed and read, “‘Austria-Hungary Protests Our Export of Arms to Britain and Her Allies; Says We Have Means of Exporting to All Alike.’”
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“I don’t see what’s funny about that.” She buttered her toast with such force that the slice broke in two.
“It’s the Austrian foreign minister’s language. You can tell he’s terrified of upsetting us. Listen to how he dances around his complaint—on the one hand, he observes that the United States has been exporting war materials on a great scale to Britain and her allies, and that Austria and Germany have been almost entirely cut off from the American market. Then he says”—Mr. Weeks quoted from the article—“‘the question arises whether conditions as they have developed during the course of the war, certainly independently of the wish of the American government, are not of such a kind as in their effect to turn the Washington cabinet in a contrary direction from neutrality.’”
He turned to Kitty. “Can you decipher that?”
“I’m not sure that I care to.” She brushed crumbs from her hands.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Nothing, she thought, except that his actions had compromised them both. If she believed she might get a direct answer, Kitty would have spoken to him directly, but from experience, she knew she needed to be better informed, or else he would deflect her questions.
As if to underscore the point, his newspaper went back up, creating a wall of words between them.
Kitty finished her breakfast in silence, dressed for the day, and told her father she would take a cab to work. Instead, she walked toward Broadway.
“Miss Weeks!” She was halfway down the block when a voiced called her name. She turned around to see one of the Secret Service men running after her.
“Mr. Soames.”
“I have a message for you from Agent Booth. He’d like to meet tomorrow at nine o’clock.”
“And what if I don’t have any additional information?”
“Look, Miss Weeks.” He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “I’d have preferred to have done this some other way—but now that we’re at this point, please, do both of us a favor. Give Agent Booth what he needs, and let us move on.” His brown eyes looked sincere.