“I keep thinking about that night in Amiens.” Emmie looked up at Kate, struggling to put her emotions into words. “You remember. That horrible cellar, with the bombs falling and falling.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Kate with feeling.
“That was the first time I really thought we might die—actually die, not just talk about it. Those bombs didn’t care who we were. It didn’t matter to them that we were Smith girls or les dames Américaines—they were just falling anywhere they landed, obliterating everything in their paths. We might have been anyone. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I don’t think my mother has ever, in her whole life, been somewhere where she’s been just anyone. All those railings she chained herself to—no one was ever going to arrest her, not really.”
The police were never going to haul Mrs. Livingston Van Alden off to the Tombs or beat her with a nightstick, not when she was the niece of a senator and second cousin to a former president.
“I know that doesn’t make it a sham, precisely,” said Emmie slowly. “None of it changes what she’s done—we probably wouldn’t have the vote in New York now if it weren’t for her, and if we ever get to vote nationally, it will owe something to her, so I suppose she has done more good for more people than I ever could, but . . .”
“But it doesn’t seem quite so heroic anymore?” offered Kate.
Emmie nodded. All her life, her mother was the model she’d striven to follow. She was Lady Liberty and the entire pantheon of Greek goddesses all rolled into one. Emmie had tried so very hard to contort herself into what her mother wanted her to be, to follow her mother’s example.
Emmie looked down at her unwritten letter, the ink blurring in front of her. “It makes me so angry that she’s trying to take credit for our work when she hasn’t been here, when she hasn’t done any of it—and it’s nothing to take credit for. It was just surviving. The things that we did that were good, the things that matter, those are the things she doesn’t care about. Like getting pumps for the villages and making sure there were enough combs to go around. And teaching the children to play again. Those were the things that mattered. And that’s what no one seems to care about now.”
“You could always write her that,” said Kate.
“She’d never read it.” Emmie was fairly sure her mother had never read any of the letters she’d written home from Smith. “And I’d just feel silly and petty for writing it. We’re meant to be keeping our end up.”
“I don’t think keeping our end up means pretending everything is wonderful when it isn’t,” said Kate. “It’s a war. It’s meant to be awful.”
Emmie managed a wobbly smile. “I just—I hate the work we’re doing here. You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t hate it, no. Not the way you do. If we’d done this from the beginning, I’m not sure I would have minded it so much. But I feel like Grécourt spoiled me for other things.”
“I know this is what’s needed. But—it’s just so disheartening. I keep thinking of all our people and wondering where they are now and whether we’ll ever be able to keep our promises to them.” It had all seemed possible in Montdidier with the mud of Grécourt still fresh on their boots. But that had been in March, and now it was May, and the Germans still pressed on. The idea of going back, rebuilding, seemed impossibly remote. “Sometimes I wonder if there was any point in it. We worked so hard and then it was all swept away again.”
There was silence for a moment as the wheels of ambulances rumbled by on the street outside, bringing more wounded, always more wounded.
“If we had never come,” said Kate, “hundreds of people would have died this winter. They may have lost their homes again, but they’re alive. They can go back. We can go back for them.”
“Can we? The new girls have no idea—they seem to think this is what the Unit is for. Nursing and canteen work.”
“But we know what it’s for,” said Kate, and Emmie had never been more grateful for Kate’s determination, that streak of mulishness so entirely at odds with her fine-boned delicacy. “Florence would go back in a moment. She’s held on to the cows and goats for just that purpose. She takes it as a personal affront that she wasn’t able to finish the planting. And Liza too.”
“Liza?” Emmie looked up at Kate in surprise. “But she always wanted to do canteen work.”