Emily took a deep breath. “I don’t know whether to be terrified or exhilarated. I’ve never been without money a day in my life. Have you?”
I was nearly upset enough to tell her the truth. Fortunately one of Willie’s friends at the embassy recognized me and waved us to the front. But even when I was at the head of the line, Miss Sloane’s question still echoed in my mind, dredging up memories I’d taken care to bury.
“Name?” asked the officious clerk who was typing up information for the emergency passports. The question seemed simple. But names had never been a simple matter for me. I was still Mrs. William Astor Chanler—but after my confrontation with Willie in his hospital room, I was more aware than ever that it was yet another name that could be taken from me.
“Beatrice Winthrop Chanler,” I said. It still sounded as nice as the day I made it up.
The clerk suspected nothing. He didn’t even look up from the typewriter. “Birth date?”
I was tempted to say, Just see Who’s Who. I’d gotten away with that before, but given the serious circumstances, I chose a date close enough to the truth not to shatter my vanity. “May 7, 1883.”
Then the clerk asked, “Occupation?”
And that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Perspiration pooled between my shoulder blades as I wrestled with an answer. I wasn’t a stage actress anymore. And since Willie and I didn’t live together, I couldn’t say I was a housewife. Perhaps I was simply a mother, but at the moment, my boys were too far away for me to comfort them, and I felt rather a failure at mothering too. Truly, I hadn’t expected an emergency passport application to bring about an existential crisis, but how precisely was a woman in my circumstances to answer such a question?
The clerk blinked vapidly. “Most women leave it blank.”
“Oh, do they?” I held the brim of my daisy-ornamented picture hat against a growing wind. “I daresay women keep ourselves more occupied than most men. I’ll have you know that I am a sculptress.”
It wasn’t the only thing I was, and certainly not the only thing I wished to be, but at the moment it was the only identity to which I could proudly lay claim, so I said this with the greatest hauteur of which I was capable . . . which made it more irritating when the visionless functionary simply granted the emergency passport with a stamp.
That errand complete, I wanted to set out straightaway to get my children. Unfortunately, Willie was right; I couldn’t hire a motor or carriage, nor even buy one. Even the bicycles were gone. Everything had been requisitioned. Everything. Worse, all the lines to the northern shore had been cut, so I couldn’t get a call through. In the space of days, my concerns had gone from marital trouble and idle matchmaking to worrying that my shy, stuttering, ten-year-old Billy and my precocious seven-year-old Ashley might be trapped between advancing armies. The fear was eating me alive.
Barging into my husband’s hospital room, I demanded to know, “What’s America going to do about this?”
“Nothing,” Willie said. “President Wilson just declared neutrality. He could nip German aggression in the bud—make America a real player and save lives—but he’s a lickspittle.”
I shared his opinion but didn’t have the chance to say so, because he fumed, “I told you not to come back until I was on my feet. I was quite explicit with my orders against hovering at my hospital bedside.”
My husband’s leg was now in a wire cage, and he looked feverish, so I dabbed at his forehead with a cold cloth. “Fortunately for you, I’m not a soldier to be ordered about.”
“Wives are also supposed to obey. It was in the vows.”
“Oh, are we going to be sticklers about our wedding vows now?”
He flushed, probably thinking I was referencing the forsaking all others bit, but I was thinking more about until death do us part . . .
“What do you want, Beatrice?”
“I’m worried about the boys.”
“Then you shouldn’t have brought them into a war zone.”
I scowled. “It wasn’t a war zone when I brought them here, and you shouldn’t have told me to send them to the beach. I’m not leaving until you think of a way to get them back. Because if you can’t rescue our boys, William Astor Chanler, then there’s really no point in being you.”
It took him two weeks. Two weeks in which he pointedly did not wish to discuss our marital situation. Two weeks in which he revealed to me a certain fatalism that he said he’d picked up fighting with Arabs. He spoke of unavoidable destiny—but I’d always made my own fortune. So I took to sketching him in his hospital room, portraying him as two-faced Janus, one half light and the other dark, until the morning he tossed a letter into my lap. “Here. Take this to the embassy. I’ve called in a favor to get the boys.”