“Oh, Emily,” I said, reaching for her hands.
She wore a fractured, watery smile. “After all these years, she didn’t even recognize me.”
How ghastly. What kind of woman doesn’t know her own child? My heart broke for my dear friend, though I didn’t understand what this could possibly have to do with her resigning. “I realize that seeing your mother must have given you—”
“Perfect clarity, actually. All these years, she’s lived entirely for herself without a care for those she left behind. I’m not sure she even knows what love is. I finally do. That’s why I have to go back to France for the man I love.”
“What could you do for Amaury de LaGrange that you can’t do here?”
“I could marry him.” Now, before he’s killed in the war, she meant. “It can’t wait. Not even for my father’s permission—if he doesn’t give it, I’ll elope. I don’t care if we’re the only two people in the chapel. I have to go back straightaway on the first ship that will take me.”
She’s leaving me, I thought with a selfish pang, and came up with a way to change her mind. Emily was filled with fire, but I knew how to douse it. I’d remind her of the needs of her aging father, who was no doubt smarting from this encounter with his estranged wife too. I’d remind Emily of all the work she’d be abandoning at the Lafayette Fund! If I had to, I’d even remind her of her commitment to help me sell all those dolls, without which maimed French soldiers and their children would freeze this winter, and possibly starve.
Did she want that on her conscience?
Unfortunately, the irritating truth about abiding friendship is that it fills you with an overwhelming desire to be worthy of it. I couldn’t be the one to hold Emily back. “The Espagne sails from New York on September fifth . . .”
Emily’s tears finally did come, and she sniffled into a handkerchief. “I’ll make it up to you someday. Somehow. I’d have wanted to ask you to be my maid of honor, but I know you’ll be with me in spirit . . . I thought you might ask Mrs. Chapman to take my place at the Lafayette Fund.”
“A wonderful idea,” I said, a little weepy too. “Elizabeth needs something to take her mind off her worries for Victor.”
My nephew had finally joined the elite American flying unit that would come to be known as the Lafayette Escadrille—and had already written to us in poetic terms about his first bombing raids.
You can’t imagine what it’s like to see the forest below with its edges as though cut by a scissors—
—seeing our faint shadow on the filmy veil of moving clouds surrounded by sometimes one, often two, rainbows.
One gets such an enormous feeling of space—
So many of my loved ones were at risk now, in the zone of danger without me. On the day Emily was to set sail, the Germans torpedoed another civilian passenger liner, and I knew my heart was going to be in my throat until I learned of her safe arrival. Still she insisted on going. In parting, she gave me a dizzying report specifying the number of kits, ambulances, knitted goods, rain ponchos, and arctic shoes for the troops that we’d sent in the past year. Seeing it all itemized gave us both an enormous sense of accomplishment. From a fly-wisp idea shared by two high-society ladies aboard a steamship, we’d forged the Lafayette Fund into a fine-tuned enterprise that was making a real difference.
“I’ll still work on the other side of the ocean,” she promised, but of course, I knew it wouldn’t be the same. She also promised to visit Victor now that he and Lieutenant LaGrange were both pilots. “Since I’m taking my nurse’s training, I’ll visit Mr. Chanler as well—perhaps I’ll patch him up after the amputation and ship him back to you.” I laughed, imagining that if anyone could manage Willie, she could. “And if—well—if I should happen to cross paths with Captain Furlaud, is there anything you should wish me to say?”
What could I possibly say to Max? He’d given me a few weeks of joy. Now that was gone, and in its place, guilt had seeped past my brave mask like chlorine gas. I’d asked him not to write, and he’d honored my request. Perhaps he didn’t even think of me now, and that would be for the better. But I still worried about him every day. “Tell him only that Marthe prays for his safety.”
Thereupon I presented Emily with a hatbox. “Wear it on your honeymoon. Or your wedding. Something borrowed and something blue . . .”
She hugged me. “I’ll wear it with pride at the wedding, which is to be a small affair at the Ritz. Nothing to write home about.”