Emmie felt her tension lighten as Julia turned to go. She loved Julia, she did. They were first cousins, practically the same age—except that Julia had been born six months earlier, first in that as she was in everything. Emmie had always suspected that she bored and frustrated Julia, but it was hard to tell. Julia kept herself to herself, twisting back her emotions as tightly and adroitly as she did the golden coil of hair at the back of her head, not a strand out of place. Julia’s mother, Aunt May, was just the same way. Emmie had always been a little terrified of Aunt May, who lived an exotic, continental existence, returning to New York every so often to drop Julia at the rambling brownstone on East Thirty-Fourth Street “to be a sister for Emmaline.”
And they were sisters—of sorts. Sisters who loved each other even when they didn’t understand each other very well, which was most of the time.
Feeling guilty, Emmie called softly, “You will sing at the concert, won’t you, Julia? No one has a voice like yours.”
Her cousin gave her a curt nod of acknowledgment before following Dr. Stringfellow out of the room.
Emmie could feel Kate looking at her. “She means well.”
“Hmm,” said Kate, which was Kate’s way of disagreeing entirely.
“Come,” said Emmie, hooking her arm through Kate’s, feeling obscurely cheered. She knew that “hmm” of old. It had been six years, but Kate was still the same Kate, and there was something reassuring in that. They said blood was thicker than water, but she had always felt more at home with Kate than with Julia, even if Julia came of the same Knickerbocker stock and Kate from what her father called “those people.” “I’ll show you our cabin. Don’t expect terribly much. It really is pretty dire.”
“It can’t be worse than my room in Boston,” said Kate as Emmie pushed open the door.
“I thought it was a very nice room,” lied Emmie, groping her way through the darkness until she bumped into a berth, sitting down with a thump that made the springs squeak. The portholes had been boarded over, casting the cabin into permanent gloom.
“It was a dreadful room,” said Kate, and suddenly they were both laughing, as if they were eighteen again, and not twenty-eight and on their way to a war zone. “Be grateful it was, or I’d never have agreed to come.”
“I’m so glad you did,” said Emmie honestly. “It makes it all feel less . . .”
“Mad?” suggested Kate, lowering herself carefully onto her own berth.
“Daunting,” said Emmie.
They were quiet for a moment, the dark room close around them. Why didn’t you ever visit? Emmie wanted to ask. Why didn’t you write?
They had never stopped being friends; they had simply stopped being friends who saw one another. She had known Kate was busy, that Kate had to get her own living, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt all the same. Her mother would have been so happy to help, to give Kate a job as her own secretary. They might have gone on as they had been.
But, of course, all things changed. Emmie knew that. It had been an impulse that had taken her to Kate’s boardinghouse in Boston. They needed a woman who could drive and who spoke French, and Kate could do both.
But that wasn’t the real reason. The truth was that she’d wanted Kate there because she’d felt in some obscure way that if Kate were with her, nothing would seem quite so large or terrifying. Kate would make everything all right, just as she had back in their days at Smith when nothing was so bad it couldn’t be cured with hot cocoa brewed on a gas ring.
“Do you remember the cocoa parties we used to have?”
“I doubt there’ll be much cocoa in France,” said Kate quietly.
“You’re probably right.” Of course Kate was right. She was simply making a statement. It wasn’t a rejection; it was Emmie’s own sensitivity that made it feel like one. “I heard someone asking the steward for white sugar. He shrugged and said, c’est la guerre.”
“I imagine la guerre covers a multitude of things,” said Kate. Emmie heard the springs squeak as Kate reached up to lift the heavy knot of her hair off the back of her neck. “I take it back. It is even hotter in here than in my room in Boston.”
“One of the ambulance men was telling me that everyone sleeps on deck,” offered Emmie. “He said pushing two deck chairs together makes an adequate sort of bed.”
Kate grabbed two blankets and handed one to Emmie. “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.”
It did, of course. Not that night, but the next. The ten members of the Smith Unit who had elected to sleep on deck woke to a deluge and wound up taking themselves, dripping and shivering, into the marble-floored entry hall of the ship, huddling together for warmth.
“Have you noticed,” said Miss Cooper in a small voice, hugging her knees to her chest, “that our uniforms smell when they’re wet? They do say the war zone is awfully rainy.”
“I imagine we’ll get used to it,” said Emmie hopefully.
“And it saves us having to wash our hair,” said Kate drily, loosing the tie of her braid to fan out the long, wet strands. Emmie had always envied Kate’s hair, a thick, rich chestnut, not all indistinct and flyaway like hers. Kate’s hair stayed where she put it. “Have you thought of the lunacy of us all, sitting here shivering when we all have perfectly good beds waiting for us below?”
“Yes, but it’s easier to escape from on deck.” Liza struggled to a sitting position, kicking her legs free of her sodden blanket. “You know they say that the most dangerous time is just at dawn when the sea is quiet and the submarines can see us but we can’t see them.”
“Lovely,” said Kate.
“But the ship shouldn’t list quite so quickly because all the portholes are closed,” said Liza importantly, thumping the never-sink vest she was using as a pillow. “So that should give us more time to get to the boats.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” The blanket-wrapped lump that was Maud flopped over. “If you can’t all be quiet we might as well go and smother in our cabins. At least that will be a quick death.”
“Must we talk about death, please?” asked Miss Cooper in a small voice.
“Nobody is dying,” said Emmie soothingly, but it was a lie, of course, and they all knew it. In France, ten days away, six days away, four days away, men were dying by the thousands, dying every day, dying in mud and blood and unimaginable agony. And they were going there. They had chosen to go there. What had made sense on a spring afternoon in Boston made much less sense at four in the morning, huddled under a blanket on the hard floorboards of the deck, listening to the restless pacing of those who couldn’t sleep, waiting for the torpedoes to strike.
Emmie did her best to keep busy. In the mornings, she joined Kate’s French classes, where Liza continued to struggle with subjunctive verbs and Miss Cooper spoke very carefully in her correct but cautious French. Miss Cooper had brought a little paint set with her, and while Emmie couldn’t paint anything more demanding than flowers, and not very interesting flowers at that, she could look and admire, so she admired to the very best of her abilities.
In the afternoons, Emmie stood on the deck, waving her arms about over her head and jumping up and down along with Liza, Maud, Miss Englund, Miss Cooper, and roughly eighty assorted ambulance men, engineers, and YMCA volunteers as the YMCA physical director led them in a series of setting-up exercises designed to get them into fighting shape or at least scare off any inquisitive seagulls.