He meant Philippe Pétain, the Lion of Verdun, who had, two years earlier, beaten back the German assault and was now commander in chief of the French army. He’d made reforms to relieve exhausted troops, promising to hold the line until more Americans were in the fight. Now Max complained, “It is one thing to visit Lafayette’s grave and say, Lafayette, we are here. But that was last summer . . . Where are the Americans?”
Our first wave of doughboys were giving the kaiser some grief, but the bulk of our forces weren’t in Europe yet. “We’re coming,” I promised, fighting the desire to kiss him. “I’m a harbinger of that.”
“How are your children? They must have been as frightened as I was to learn you would cross the ocean again.”
“Oh, they’re so big and brave now they wanted to come with me and fight!”
Max chuckled softly. “Well, I shall do my best to end this war before either of them is big enough to take part.”
“I love you for that.”
“I love you too.” He took my hands. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about where we should live after the war. New York is the best place for our children to have a fine education and develop character. We shall want one or two more, don’t you think?”
My smile wavered. He’d already dreamed up our white house on the bluff, with cassoulet in the oven—a vision about which I was dubious—and now he wanted to add one or two more children at our feet. I ought to tell him that at my age, and with the complications of my health, I was unlikely ever to have more, but now, with the thunder of the guns so near, was no time to shatter such dreams.
His hands still shook with the roar of the guns. He was beyond exhausted and dispirited waiting on American troops. My entire mission here in Europe was to inspirit our allies, and this wonderful man was mine. So I let him have fantasies—it could all be ironed out after the war.
Then I dared to kiss him, right there in the bunker.
“How long will you stay in Verdun?” he whispered.
“Just until morning. Can you get leave to see me in Paris?”
“I’ll try. It depends if there is a big push at the front.”
I buried my worry of what could happen to him and plastered on a bright smile. “Well, then, we shan’t wait for romance. We’ll make it here and now.”
In the dim light of the subterranean passages, I pulled a little table beneath the lantern and used my shawl for a tablecloth. There, we shared what he deemed a shameful pinard from his canteen and a sparse picnic of tinned beef, hardtack biscuits, and chicken noodle soup that he heated up for us on a makeshift olive oil burner. “I’ve been waiting for an occasion,” he said, adding to it a bit of saffron he’d been saving in an envelope.
I was delighted that despite the intermittent shower of dust that rained down upon us with the shelling, he was getting into the spirit of things. “Fine dining,” I said. “A dimly lit table. What next? Poetry?”
“Beshrew your eyes, They have o’erlook’d me and divided me; One half of me is yours, the other half yours, Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours!”
It was Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which I had sent him with perfumed letters, using our private code, wary of the censors he said liked to gloat over a man’s correspondence in camp.
“I memorize the passages you mark,” he explained.
Taking a spoonful of soup from his mess tin, I said, “You are really a very romantic spirit, which is rather surprising for a man who appears at first glance so matter-of-fact!”
He laughed. “Between the two of us, Beatrice, I’m not the one filled with surprises. When are you going to tell me some of those things I don’t know about you that you claim could fill a book?”
I peered at him cautiously, wondering what might be safe to confide. If we were to have a future, we ought to start on an honest footing. “To begin with, my name isn’t Beatrice.”
“Not Beatrice?” he asked with a tilt of his head. “What is it, then?”
“Minnie Ashley.” And there she was again, in the room with us, the waifish girl I was—that hungry girl I left behind. The one with the Boston accent who smiled when she wanted to cry, who learned to make people laugh to survive, who wanted more than anything to be somebody. Now her big blue eyes met mine, and this time I didn’t look away. “Minnie Ashley was a fine name for the stage, but it wasn’t the sort of name with which one could rise above one’s circumstances.”