“Ah, flattery . . .” Hands behind his back, Max bounced on his heels. “What are you working on now?”
I glanced proudly at the page. “A letter to procure a doctoresse for the children at Chavaniac—one Dr. Alice Barlow-Brown, who has just been refused for the American military medical corps on account of her gender.”
Max leaned against the doorway. “I begin to suspect you’re a suffragette.”
“You’re only now beginning to suspect?” I asked, grinning.
I liked the relaxed slant of his shoulders and the softness of his blue eyes when he asked, “What else don’t I know about you?”
“What you don’t know about me could fill a book.”
We were flirting. This was dangerous. Unfortunately, it seemed I now loved to live dangerously. And I was tempted to find that our connection was still a very live thing, growing in strength.
“Did you always admire Lafayette?” Max asked. “I cannot decide if you’ve given yourself over like a nun to the religious order of his memory, or if you simply decided his name was the most obvious one to invoke for your charity.”
“It can’t be both? Though I daresay no one has ever compared me to a nun before!”
It was so good to laugh together again. To feel appreciated and admired, and not always on my guard for a barbed comment or flare of temper. How nice to converse with a gentleman who wasn’t drunk or drugged or hurling artificial legs across a restaurant. How nice to know we were on the same side.
I somehow found myself telling Max about one of the few happy memories of my childhood: climbing the rooftops on Tremont Street to watch fancy ladies in their fancy hats promenading down the row of stately elms that led to Lafayette Mall at the Boston Common. “Those hats, I thought, were the difference between people that mattered and people like me. On hot days, I’d splash in the frog pond near all those Revolutionary monuments, and they seemed to whisper, Even if you’re a hungry urchin now, you could be a person of significance someday.”
“So then, you’re the very embodiment of the American dream.”
“It shouldn’t just be an American dream,” I said, altogether too earnestly. “After all, Lafayette was a chivalrous knight-errant like you, who spent his life trying to secure that dream for everyone.”
“Oh, you mistake me. I’ve no taste for chivalrous adventure. I was drafted into this war, and after three years of being shelled, I want nothing more than to return to the peace and quiet of office life.”
I couldn’t blame him. I’d noticed the way his knuckles went white around the handle of his coffee cup at every far-off rumble of the guns, and I remembered how he’d once said, You’ve rescued me from the despair of this war.
A despair I was soon to experience firsthand.
In Ypres, the hospital had been deliberately targeted. Bombs had blown out buildings in such a way as to leave walls standing, and I walked through the rubble of what seemed like dollhouses, paintings still hung, toys in cribs, plates set out on tables for abandoned meals. What happened to the inhabitants here—gassed, buried, shot—I didn’t want to guess. The wind whistled and howled through these haunting structures. Guns thundered not too far off, battle fire lighting the sky like bolts thrown from the hands of Zeus. And my mind reeled to think, Little Marthe was found in a place like this . . .
The next day I saw a tank for the first time, and great guns painted in harlequin colors. I plucked out of the rubble two helmets—one British battle bowler and one piked German Pickelhelm—to preserve in our museum after the war. After we’d won.
The busy officers deposited me in the relative safety of Poperinge, less than three kilometers from the fighting, where I made careful note of the men returning from the trenches worn and bedraggled, others sitting out with the smoking kitchen on wheels, carts filled with provisions and tents. All this gave me an idea of what organization was necessary to carry on a great war, though I felt a frisson of fear to see a long line of lorries with munitions, realizing that a single bomb dropped from an aeroplane might send us all up in a fiery apocalypse.
I didn’t know if any of these details would prove useful to the embassy or to American commanders, but I recorded them dutifully and tried not to get in the way. This was especially so when warning of a new bombardment came—and the sirens went off with warnings that the entire hospital must be removed. Never would I take up space in an ambulance meant for one of the wounded, so I was left stranded.