“They told me you wouldn’t miss your old dad’s birthday!”
Edna turned around and found herself nearly in the arms of Dewey Barnes. She stumbled on the porch step, and he laughed and caught her by the elbow. “I never swept a girl off her feet before,” he said, a little too loudly, in the manner of someone hoping to be overheard.
Edna righted herself and stepped back to get a look at him. He was a man of soft features: round, unsuspecting eyes, a bulbous nose, wide lips, and a dimple on his chin like a finger pressed in dough. He was not an altogether unpleasant-looking man, but he didn’t make much of an impression.
“Hello, Dewey. How good of you to stop by.”
“You’re awfully formal, Miss Edna.” He leaned over to place a kiss on her cheek, but it landed awkwardly near her eye and Edna had to resist the urge to wipe it away.
“Your brothers invited me,” he continued, as if nothing strange had happened. “I wouldn’t miss a good Sunday dinner.” He reached around and knocked on the door, settling the question of how Edna was to gain entrance.
Because they walked in together, her brothers had the idea that they’d arrived as a couple, and treated them as such.
“There they are!” Charlie called, jumping to his feet and pumping Dewey’s hand. “We wondered where you two had gone off to.”
Edna wanted to correct the idea that she’d been anywhere with Dewey, but everyone was talking at once and she couldn’t. All four of her brothers were crowded into the parlor, which seemed so small now that she’d been away. Her father sat happily among them, wearing a silly crown of crepe paper that the boys must have forced on him.
Only her mother stayed quiet. She hovered uneasily around the edge of the room, darting in and out of the kitchen at intervals. Edna knew that she was expected to disappear, too, and help tend to the roast or peel the potatoes, but she didn’t. She settled right between her two eldest brothers, and joined into their talk of work and war.
“They finally gunned down a zeppelin,” her father said. “Can you believe it? They were firing from an automobile.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could take a zeppelin down with a bullet,” said Fred, one of the twins.
“Oh, they didn’t,” Edna said. “They have a special sort of shell that explodes against the aluminum. They held enormous searchlights on it the entire time. It came right down in the countryside, and every single bomb it was carrying went off at once in a farmer’s field. But it didn’t get to Paris, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
The men in the room looked at her in astonishment. Her younger brother, Davie, said, “You haven’t taken up with a soldier, have you? That might come as news to old Dewey here.”
Edna’s brothers had been teasing her about marrying Dewey for years. He’d been at school with the twins and hung around the house with them on Saturdays, and seemed to act as though a match with Edna were a foregone conclusion. And what was wrong with that? He was one of those perfectly dull, solid, mild-mannered men who would ask nothing more of a wife than a comfortable chair and a newspaper to hide behind. He would go unquestioningly to his office, his club, and his church every week, and to his mother-in-law’s house for Sunday dinner. A fishing camp along a river would be his idea of an adventure, but even that would lose its appeal after a few years, and he would spend his Saturdays in the garage, tinkering with an automobile or an old clock.
Edna could see Dewey’s entire life written across his placid face. Maybe at one time she had encouraged him—just a little—but now it was glaringly apparent that he had nothing on offer that Edna wanted.
“I haven’t taken up with anyone,” she said, avoiding Dewey’s eyes. “I read the papers, that’s all. We make some of those bullets and bombs up at the powder works. Why shouldn’t I want to know about it?”
Her father reached over and patted her knee. “That’s just fine. You’re doing your part. Be sure to carve your initials in one or two of those bullets, and maybe your brothers will see them in France.”
Mrs. Heustis had been coming down the hall from the kitchen as he said this. She gave a little sob when she heard him and ran back to her oven. Edna had no choice but to go and comfort her, and to roll out the biscuits and put the potatoes on. No one else was going to do it.
She didn’t say a word to her mother, or to anyone else, about the Women’s Preparedness Committee recruiting volunteers to go overseas. It was one thing for her to do her duty in a factory; it was another entirely to board a ship to France. But the notion was gaining traction with Edna. She hadn’t said a word out loud to anyone about it, but already the possibility had turned into a plan, and the wild idea had hardened to resolve.
23
FLEURETTE BOUGHT HER TRAIN ticket at the station agent’s window. She had to fight the urge to lift it to her lips and kiss it.
I did it, she thought. She’d found the money, she’d contrived a reason to send Norma to town (Constance seemed to be very busy on a case and hadn’t been home at all), packed her trunks in secret, and bribed a man from the dairy to take her to the train station. She managed every bit of it so beautifully that it was a wonder she’d never run off before.
Now there was nothing to do but to wait for May Ward and her troupe, who would be boarding in Leonia, down south. She was to join them when the train stopped in Paterson.
Fleurette had seen no reason to tell her sisters that she was leaving. She was tired of having her whereabouts always known. She wanted very much to be out of sight of her family, to be on a train or in a hotel or on a sidewalk in some distant city, so that no one who knew her—not a single soul—could say, with any certainty, exactly where she was or what she was doing.
What a novelty it would be! Imagine walking into a shop where she’d never been seen before, and having her own money to buy things, not an account under Constance’s name. Imagine sitting in a lunchroom on her very own, with the rest of the world around her, people whose lives held secrets she couldn’t guess, people who spoke languages she couldn’t understand, people whose afternoons rolled out before them, filled in whatever manner that other, more interesting people filled their days. Fleurette would never know until she left home to find out about them.
Even if May Ward wouldn’t let her on the stage—and she would, she would, once she saw what Fleurette could do—at least she had a ticket out of town.
Mrs. Ward had been delighted with the idea of a full-time seamstress to travel with the company and put her wardrobe in order—it was such a bother, she said, to send things out at the hotel—but Freeman Bernstein insisted that it couldn’t be done. It would be impossible, he explained, with lighthearted regret, to add the expense of another girl to a tour already settled.