“Write anyway,” I commanded.
Before we exchanged our final embrace, she said, “And you must write and tell me of your next mad plan.”
* * *
—
My next mad plan was a national Lafayette Day. I announced it at the annual meeting of the Lafayette Fund in New York. “We observe Columbus Day, Washington’s Birthday, and Lincoln’s Birthday. Is it not equally appropriate that we should commemorate Lafayette, who gave so much that we might be free?”
I made up fifty thousand souvenir buttons for the children to sell. My little brigade of patriotic youngsters called themselves the Children of 1915 and adopted Roosevelt’s motto as their own: Never be neutral between right and wrong.
I had plenty to keep me busy in the course of the next year. But as time passed, only one question occupied my mind. Where was Willie?
Was it all a cruel joke . . . just a ruse to make me go back to America? Last summer, I was sitting at the edge of the ambassador’s desk in tears, promising my husband that after his amputation, he’d have a wife waiting for him at home. Since then, Willie had come safely through his surgery—and I’d told the reporters camped outside my door that Mr. Chanler was regaining his strength and would be home by Christmas. But the holiday had come and gone. Here the children and I were in Newport for yet another summer, and their father was still absent. At first, his doctors said Willie wasn’t well enough for travel. Then, of course, there were the usual worries about crossing a mine-laden sea. Maybe I was simply impatient and resentful, because I’d given up my war relief work in France, and I’d given up Max Furlaud and Emily Sloane, and I was feeling terribly alone.
I tried to sculpt, but I could not find life within clay or stone while the war was extinguishing so many real lives made of flesh and blood. Not even attending the presidential conventions in Chicago, where ten thousand women in white marched to demand the vote, had lifted my mood. I’d cheered Theodore Roosevelt for ninety-three minutes on the convention floor, knowing he was the only one who could oust President Wilson and defeat his policy of American neutrality. Still, in the end, Roosevelt declined the nomination, and I was beside myself. Was the old Rough Rider fading?
Perhaps all the giants were.
“Willie’s a proud man,” said Elizabeth Chapman, unpacking a picnic lunch on the beach while the children ran in the surf. “I’ve limped all my life, and he’s seen me as an object of pity. He’s having a hard time working out how he sees himself without a leg, and he probably doesn’t want an audience while he does the reckoning.”
Then he should tell me so, I thought. “He’s written you?”
She smiled, unwrapping Mr. Chapman’s sandwich for him. “No, but Victor has, and we read between the lines.”
I couldn’t resent Willie for confiding in our nephew. Especially now that Victor had become a national hero. His exploits had captured the attention of the public, all of whom were riveted by vivid newspaper descriptions of diving and firing through the clouds over France. My boys pored over headlines, in which their cousin was prominently featured, most recently for having fought off six German planes all by himself.
And to think I once thought my favorite nephew didn’t have the temperament for war . . .
“They say a bullet grazed his head,” Billy boasted with boyish wonder one morning in mid-June. “Victor just got bandaged up and got back in the fight.”
I took the newspaper, determined not to let the Chapmans see it—as any pride they felt would certainly be matched by terror. Meanwhile, my freckled little Ashley made figure eights in the air with his toy plane. “I hope the war won’t be over before we get our chance!”
I hope it is, I thought.
Later, their uncle Jack said, “We’d better be prepared for it to go on for some time . . .” The Chapmans were preparing for America to enter the war with or without Woodrow Wilson’s say-so. My sister-in-law was particularly active in the National Security League, serving alongside the Roosevelts, including the former president’s niece Eleanor. And at the Lafayette Fund, she was helping me prepare for the first annual Lafayette Day.
I’d arm-twisted half the nation into paying tribute.
We’d planned celebratory banquets in New York, statue dedications in New Orleans, and a memorial service in Boston. And that’s to say nothing of my forthcoming Allied Bazaar, during which I intended to raise a million dollars for the cause. I was good at this, but it wasn’t the same without Emily Sloane.