“How did she do it?” Minnie wanted to know. “Was it a church that offered to take her?”
The girl in possession of this story, who everyone called Red although it was not her name, shook her head. “It was a lady policeman just like the one who brought you. She knew a group doing good work out West and arranged to have a few girls sent there. But they all ran away, and that put an end to it.”
Minnie couldn’t imagine Deputy Kopp sending her out West to be a missionary, but there was a nugget of an idea in there. In the days that followed, as Minnie scoured pots and ran bed-linens through the wringer and waited in line for her soup, she worked over the possibility, rubbing it down and polishing it smooth, like a stone between her fingers.
52
EDNA RARELY SAW RUBY and her friends at the Red Cross classes. Several of them already knew how to speak French and didn’t need to learn to count and name the parts of the body: un deux trois quatre cinq, main jambes oeil épaule pied. They dropped in on the cooking classes only sporadically, claiming that anyone could follow a recipe, although Edna found the lessons on toast water and onion gruel to be a fair reminder that cooking for invalids and soldiers would require inventiveness and practice, and that family dinner recipes might have little to do with it. One night they boiled down a restorative jelly of port wine and cloves meant to warm a soldier drained of blood, and on another night, they baked sea-pies in mess tins, so that they might be carried to the front and eaten later. They learned how to cook without utensils, and how to wrap meat in clean grass and roast it in a clay pot.
The exact circumstances under which those dishes might be served, or those rudimentary French words spoken, were difficult for Edna to imagine, but she did what she could to commit each evening’s lesson to memory. There was something bracing about being in a classroom, even if the church basement was nothing like the school-rooms back in Edgewater. She liked the daily practice of learning something new. It gave her a sense of forward movement, even if she wasn’t yet going anywhere at all.
Most days, she wasn’t sure that she ever would go to France. She never did confide in Ruby the impossibility of raising the funds for her passage, but Ruby guessed at it soon enough. The wealthy young women who organized this endeavor had already secured pledges for more than they needed and persuaded a few of their donors to redirect their contributions to Edna. When Edna protested that she didn’t want to accept charity, they were quick to remind her that the charity was directed at war relief, not at her. For that reason she agreed to the donations, but they weren’t nearly enough—a dollar a month here, three dollars a month there. She persisted only because she couldn’t think of a single other thing to do.
One night, after a course on purifying and storing river water, she was surprised to come home and see Dewey Barnes waiting on Mrs. Turnbull’s porch.
“I hope you haven’t been out here for hours,” Edna said. She fumbled for her key and stood a little apart from him. He seemed to belong to some other epoch in her life. She feared being dragged back into it if she stood too close.
“I went to the train station and found a bar that was just a little more welcoming to a male clientele,” Dewey said. “Your landlady told me you’d be back from your church meeting around now. I didn’t mind waiting.”
He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. She couldn’t invite him in and wasn’t sure she should ask him to sit down. There was only a single bench, damp and dirty, and she thought it might give the wrong message if they sat together.
He coughed into a gloved hand and said, “Now listen, Miss Edna. I didn’t come all this way to stand on your porch at ten o’clock at night. I’d been hoping to take you for a little supper and speak to you privately, but they tell me you’re away most every night at that church. I suppose you’re lonely, is that it?”
If she told Dewey, he would tell her brothers. She still had the vague idea that someone—her parents, the lady deputy, perhaps even that judge back in Hackensack—could stop her from going to France. So she told no one.
“The church does good work for the war,” she said. “Knitting and bandages.”
He nodded eagerly. “That’s fine, that’s good.”
There came another terrible pause. Edna couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
Dewey pressed on. “Yes, well, I know you’re missed back in Edgewater, and I suppose I came to ask if you’ve given any thought to when you might be coming home.”
She looked up at him and met his stare for the first time. She took in his flat, friendly face, his wide and unsuspecting eyes, and the easy, complacent smile with which he greeted the world. Dewey Barnes, at your service. He would be forever at the service of the woman who would have him.
The question hung in the air a little too long, and Dewey’s expectant features fell. Still Edna felt obliged to answer him squarely and not leave him guessing.
“I don’t believe I am coming home, Dewey.”
“But—you can’t stay here forever! Pompton Lakes is nothing but a factory with a few boarding-houses around it. I should know—I’ve had time to inspect the premises. There’s no future for you here. Unless—but surely you haven’t—I mean—you haven’t taken up with one of those factory boys, Edna?”
She turned away and looked off across Mrs. Turnbull’s porch railing and down the narrow street, which ended in darkness. With Dewey standing before her, offering warmth and good cheer and his constant, sturdy presence, she felt more alone than she ever had. What was she rejecting, and why? The idea of going to France had made the world seem so vast, and her own life so limitless. But now she saw that world shrinking again. There was only the factory, and the chores at the boarding-house, and the courses on war-work in the stuffy dark basement. None of it seemed as if it would actually take her anywhere.
And now—did she really mean to send Dewey away? With him standing in front of her, offering himself to her, she softened toward him a little. Dewey Barnes would take her to the pictures and on picnics in the summer, and quietly endeavor to make her life as agreeable as it was within his power to do. Wasn’t that a way forward?
But she’d been silent too long. Dewey took it to mean that she had, in fact, fallen for someone at the factory. He ducked his head down, pushed his hat on, and turned to go.
“It isn’t another man, Dewey,” she said. That was enough to make him stop on the porch steps. “Only . . . I’m sorry, but there’s just nothing between us. I didn’t mean for you to ever think there was.”
It stung her right through the chest to say it, but she couldn’t think of any other way. It wouldn’t be fair to make him wait or let him hope.
Her words had the effect she intended. He looked her over one last time. The depth of sorrow in his eyes took Edna by surprise.