“This blessed event has gobbled up all of my time and attention,” Edna said, taking a demure sip from one of my Sèvres porcelain teacups. “I am so looking forward to having it behind me. Though”—she lowered the cup to the saucer and her gaze with it—“I can’t imagine what I will do when it’s over.”
“Sleep,” I said.
“If your new husband allows that,” May quipped. We all laughed. May scooped herself another serving of sugared strawberries.
“I do mean it, though,” Edna said after a moment. She looked at me, sitting up prim as a rose. “Right now the details of arranging the wedding, ordering the trousseau, and setting up the household consume me all day,” she said. “What…what do wives do? After they are married and settled? To…to fill their time?”
As if on cue, the ormolu clock on my mantel chimed. Just beyond the tasteful wooden doors of the room in which we sat, a servant was cleaning dishes in the kitchen, and we heard the muffled sounds of the busy staff, reminding us that household chores, though seemingly endless, were certainly not among our requisite daily activities. I reached across the table and took Edna’s hand in my own. “I understand your meaning perfectly well, Edna, my dear,” I said. “Tea with you ladies is lovely, of course. Shopping on Fifth Avenue is nice. But…there’s got to be something more, right?”
A faint smile curled Edna’s lips upward. I went on: “How about this, Edna? Once you are through with the wedding and happily settled in as Mrs. Hutton, you will join me and May. We will throw ourselves into some purpose, ladies. A new hospital, perhaps? A school? There just has to be…” I glanced around the lovely room once more, heard a peal of laughter from a maid in my kitchen. “I know that we’ll find some important purpose.”
* * *
I could have cursed those words when the news ripped across Manhattan only a few weeks later: war had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the form of sinister German U-boats and an underhanded telegram to our neighbor Mexico. Armed conflict was washing ashore on American soil. And not just any war: they were calling it the Great War.
For several years I’d felt a stubborn niggling within; I’d yearned for purpose, to use my wealth to serve a cause larger than myself, and suddenly here it was—a worldwide war that had already claimed millions in Europe and now threatened to steal American lives as well. I’d craved some meaningful mission, and it looked as though the mission had come, and so I threw myself into work with a drive and a passion that surprised even me.
Overnight, America was forced to change and adapt to the overwhelming reality of war, and so the Post Cereal Company would do the same, I decided. The federal government now needed to feed and support a wartime army, and to do so, they would require much of the country’s food materials. This meant that wheat, oats, corn, grains—the very ingredients that we needed in order to make our bestselling cereals and drinks—were no longer available to us.
This was terrible for the Post Cereal Company, and either Uncle Cal or Colby Chester called me several times a week, predicting that the new rules would ruin us. “I swear, Marjorie, our storehouses will be empty by the end of the year,” my uncle declared. Rarely in my life had I heard this kindly man sounding so ruffled. He shared his brother’s—my daddy’s—optimism. But I could hear the tremor in his voice, carrying all the way from Battle Creek to Manhattan.
I frowned as I stared out my wide window, looking down at a Ninety-second Street draped in American flags. “Well, Uncle Cal, if America is changing with the war, then the Post Cereal Company will have to do the same.”
“What do you mean, Budgie?” my uncle asked, slipping in my daddy’s old nickname for me.
I smiled, pausing a moment before I answered: “We will need to try cooking with new materials. The soldiers need to eat, but America’s fields are as fertile as ever. I don’t see why we can’t make this work. Let’s get word to the board: we need to come up with new products and substitute recipes. Kafir, nuts, maize. We will raise our own storehouses and mills; we’ll grind our own corn. We won’t throw anything out or allow anything to go to waste. Stuff that can’t be used for our cereals, we’ll use it to make animal feed.”
An audible exhale on the other end of the telephone line. My uncle’s voice sounded less harried when at last he spoke: “You know something, Marjorie?”
“What’s that, Uncle Cal?”