“It must be an air raid,” said Emmie wonderingly. “I read about them, but . . .”
“But you don’t understand it until you’re in it,” Miss Patton said, staring like the rest of them, all of them craning their necks to see the marvel above.
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” said Emmie. “It doesn’t seem real somehow.”
“Oh, it’s real all right,” said Miss Englund, rubbing her ear as another siren blared out.
“Do you think they mean to drop b-bombs on us?” Miss Cooper was shivering so hard she could hardly speak, even though the August night was warm. “Do we need to do something, do you think? Or g-go somewhere?”
Kate looked down at the street. “No one else seems to be going anywhere.”
Of course, it was hard to tell. The lights were all dark in all the buildings. But no one seemed to be running for cellars.
“I think it would be zeppelins if they meant to bomb us,” said Miss Englund briskly. “And those don’t look like zeppelins. Well, if that’s all, I’m for bed. I’ve some cotton if anyone wants some to stuff in their ears.”
“Yes, please,” said Miss Patton, drawing her dressing gown more tightly around her.
“Miss Cooper! Margaret! You’re freezing!” Next to her, Emmie was clucking over Miss Cooper, chafing her cold hands. “Those pajamas feel like they’re made of paper. Come inside. Kate?”
“In a moment.” It was strangely beautiful up there, the signal lights winking red and green, some of the planes so close that she could hear the whirr of their wings on the wind, others far enough up in the sky that they looked like stars, shooting stars, bursting through the atmosphere. “I wonder which are ours and which are theirs.”
“The ones not trying to drop things on us?” said Miss Patton with a nervous laugh.
Kate ignored her, watching the lights up in the sky, the wonder of it, that there were men up there in those contraptions, making them swoop and fly through the night sky.
It might be Nick up there.
Stupid, Kate told herself. Stupid to be thinking of Nick after all this time. He probably didn’t even remember her. There was no reason he should. He was probably too busy staying alive. They said the life span of an aviator was two months. Or was it two weeks?
She remembered Nick standing behind her, teaching her how to turn the crank to start the engine on that Chalmers touring car.
“Use that strong tennis arm,” he had told her, and she had never had the nerve to tell him she didn’t play tennis, that it wasn’t something they had learned in Greenpoint, never realizing that he knew, that he’d always known she wasn’t one of them.
Just another charity case. Another hanger-on.
It was, Kate had to admit, alarmingly comfortable to be with Emmie again, to fall into the old jokes, the old patterns. Or it would have been, if she could only have stopped herself from wondering if they were friends, if they’d ever truly been friends, or if she had only been one of Emmie’s many projects. If she was still one of Emmie’s projects.
In the street, another car raced past, bugle blaring the all clear. The lights had disappeared from the sky.
Quietly, trying not to wake anyone, Kate felt her way back into the room, drawing the curtain shut behind her. All of that was behind her, irrelevant. She was here to do a job—they were all here to do a job—and tomorrow, at last, they could start to do it.
Chapter Four
You’ll be surprised to get a letter from me postmarked New York. Maud met a Montclair boy who was sailing on Friday and said he would take any mail we wanted, so it won’t have to go past the censors.
Paris is so much changed you would never know it. The lights on the street go out at nine thirty except for very small ones, and in the café where Maud and I go for dinner (we don’t dine with the rest of the girls; we see enough of them anyway, Maud says), if you dine after nine, all the lights go out and you’re left not being able to see your plate!
There is no white bread, not even those delicious crescent rolls we used to have for breakfast, and very little sugar. This morning, we were waked at eight thirty by the maid with our breakfast: a cup of poor coffee each and one slice of dark war bread—no sugar, no butter! They call the meatless days jours maigres (won’t you be amazed at how my French is improving! We’ve a sort of French teacher woman with us who gave lessons on the boat), and the jours maigres certainly are meager. When we finish a meal, we feel as if we’d just had the first course of a regular meal and not a whole meal at all.
Please send DeWitt’s crackers and Bailey’s candy.
—Miss Liza Shaw, ’09, to Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Shaw Jr.
August 1917
Paris, France
“There’s been a delay,” said Mrs. Rutherford.
“What sort of delay?” asked Emmie, trying hard not to yawn. She wondered if one became used to air raids with practice, or if one simply learned to use earplugs.
Unlike the rest of the bleary-eyed crew, Mrs. Rutherford was fizzing with energy. “Our trucks seem to have been mislaid. But never fear! We shan’t let this discommode us. We shall simply bend like the reed, rather than breaking like the oak. Please pass the bread basket.”
The bread basket was marooned in front of Maud, who was staring at it with horror. “Good heavens, what is this?”
“War bread, I think,” said Emmie. She took an investigative bite. “It’s not bad, really. Just a bit . . . grainy.”
There was even butter, which Emmie hadn’t expected. She could see Liza eyeing the butter dish and pushed it over to her with a smile.
Maud grimaced. “Is it meant to stiffen our spirits or our intestines?”
“Try it and see,” suggested Julia. Sleeplessness emphasized her excellent cheekbones but did little for her mood. “In the interest of science.”
Mrs. Rutherford, meanwhile, was eating her war bread with apparent relish with one hand and reading her correspondence with the other. “Exciting news! Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, and Le Soir all wish to send reporters to speak to us. Mr. Dewey of the Saturday Evening Post tells me that we are quite the best story of the war.”
“Really? Us?” asked Emmie, feeling an entirely unworthy flare of excitement. Others adhered to the mantra that a woman ought only to appear in the papers three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died, but her mother had made a practice of headlines. It wasn’t self-aggrandizement if it was for a cause.
She wondered if her mother would see, if one of her many friends in France would send Le Soir back to her, with a picture of Emmie in it. A picture of all the Unit, of course. But it was hard not to daydream of being singled out for some striking stroke of heroism.
“But why?” asked Miss Englund practically. “There are other women in the war, surely?”
“Not like us,” said Mrs. Rutherford. “We are not adding our efforts to someone else’s work, to a man’s work. We are, ourselves, complete and entire. Les Collégiennes Américaines.”
“Les what?” asked Liza, who hadn’t benefited quite as much as she could from Kate’s lessons on the boat, although she had certainly tried.