And besides, unlike in Greenwich, in Manhattan I was beginning to enjoy the warmth and favor of friends of my own. Edna Woolworth Hutton had become a dear friend. May Carlisle and Alice Roosevelt had become regular companions for tea and gossip. Even the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt ladies—perhaps remembering that their own clans had been dubbed “new money interlopers” just a few decades prior—consistently offered me their steady, even if a bit reserved, esteem when I saw them about town, which was often.
* * *
—
Though the Great War had already encroached on our lives through the changes we’d weathered at the Post Cereal Company, and through the volunteer work I’d taken on with the Red Cross, it touched us even closer to home when Eddie got called up. “France,” he said, his features ashen as he broke the news to me. It was a clear spring afternoon, and I’d been surprised to see my husband return home so early from his office. He had heard just hours earlier: he’d be heading to the European front.
I shuddered as I absorbed the news. I’d read about the horrors of the French battlefields. Total war, they called it. Battles in far-off places with foreign names like the Somme, the Marne, Verdun—conflicts that had resulted in little land gain for either side but death tolls too staggering to fathom. I could not envision Ed in a filthy, rat-infested trench. I reached for him and took his hand in mine, noting, as I did so, that it felt cold. We may not have enjoyed the most tender of affections in recent years, he and I, but he was still my husband. Father to Adelaide and Eleanor. And now we would be forced to send him off to war.
Ed would go quietly and dutifully, that much I knew, no matter how he felt inwardly. He didn’t share his private thoughts or feelings with me in the weeks leading up to his departure. But for as long as I’d known him, Ed Close had been a man who minded above all else how things were done. And when war broke out, able-bodied young men were called up to serve, and they went. That was how things were done. So that was what Edward Close would do.
* * *
—
I was almost envious that my husband had been called to the conflict. Not of the rat-infested trenches, the thickets of barbed wire. But I did still feel that unquenched yearning within, that pull to do something more. To feel that I had some worthy and guiding meaning to my life. I’d felt this way for a while, but now, with the war on and my husband bound to join the effort, the feeling piqued with a new potency: there had to be more to life than redecorating a drawing room and fitting my daughters for expensive new riding skirts. It rankled, equal parts restlessness and a vague droning of guilt; I saw myself as energetic and capable, and yet useless.
Daddy had never raised me to believe that, because I was a woman, my life would simply be that of a society hostess, with a prize opera box and a full dance card at the most exclusive galas. In fact, he’d always made it clear that he had quite the opposite in mind for me. And yet here was the plain truth of it: I couldn’t enlist; I couldn’t vote; I couldn’t even run my family’s company. But there had to be some way that I could use my energy and my wealth for good.
So I marched to the Midtown Red Cross office and declared myself ready to assist their efforts in a larger way. “What do you most need?” I asked.
I saw the head nurse’s eyes go wide, first with excitement and then with relief. “Hospitals,” she declared after a brief, thoughtful pause. “We are in desperate need of hospitals, Mrs. Close. Not here. But over there.”
I swallowed. She wished for me to go to Europe?
“Not that you need to be there,” she hastened to add, perhaps reading the confusion on my face. “But you could support the medical care.”
I drew in a breath, relieved that Adelaide and Eleanor would not need to bid farewell to both their mother and their father. And then I nodded. “Well then, let’s get to work.” I resolved, with the Red Cross’s input, that I would finance a hospital close to the worst battlefields—in France, because that was where so many of our American soldiers were being sent, including the father of my two daughters.
Chapter 19
New York City
Summer 1917
It was a cloudless, stifling-hot afternoon in late July, and I stood with my two girls on the dockside of New York Harbor, Eleanor and Adelaide huddling close to my skirts as so many uniformed men shuffled past. Eddie’s massive transport vessel bobbed before us, its exterior painted in blue gray to camouflage its passage through German-patrolled waters. Eddie would be crossing the Atlantic to France aboard the SS Saratoga, and so would my new traveling hospital and its fresh staff, a venture that had cost me nearly $100,000. I was funding not only the facilities and medical equipment but also the personnel, and so scores of nurses, physicians, and other staff were boarding the SS Saratoga along with my husband and the troops.