Four

“THIS DRESS IS SO beautiful,” Mrs. Hancock said, remarking on the delicate sky-blue silk of the gown Lottie had chosen for her rehearsal dinner. “I can’t imagine how you will be any more beautiful tomorrow.”

Lottie bit her lip to keep from snapping back that she couldn’t see what being beautiful had to do with anything. Her unease with the first parties celebrating her wedding had long ago turned to impatience, but now she was feeling an urge to dash out of the place, and it was so strong she could barely hold herself back.

Her dress was a throwback to the days before the war, with a long cascade of blue silk gores that swirled like clouds around her silver pumps. That kind of styling hadn’t been seen in years, since the war had made it so much more difficult to get the yards and yards of fabric that it required.

When Lottie’s mother had first picked it out, it had seemed like the perfect celebration dress to her, and a relief from the grinding monotony of the severe wartime designs, when all the relaxed frippery of the debutante’s dresses had suddenly been fashioned into lines as simple as those of a man’s military uniform. Her mother had planned a lavish dinner in their banquet room and on their back patio, and Lottie had imagined herself twirling the night away, under the large oak tree she’d spent so many afternoons climbing as a child, in this perfect dress.

But when she’d put it on earlier that day, she’d immediately hated it. She couldn’t even walk down the steps from her room without having to gather it up so she wouldn’t trip on it. It seemed like it had been designed to keep her from doing anything. Then it hit her. That’s the only reason you’d wear a dress like this. To show that you didn’t have to do anything.

She gave Mrs. Hancock, who was waiting for her chauffeur to bring the car around, a wan smile.

But Eugene, as he always did, knew exactly the right thing to say. “I always think she couldn’t be any more beautiful than she is,” he said with a quick peck on Lottie’s cheek. “But every day, she somehow still manages to surprise me.”

Mrs. Hancock’s face lit up as if Eugene had paid the compliment to her.

“Oh, you two,” she said as the lights of a car spun around the circle drive. “I can’t wait for tomorrow.”

“Thank you for coming,” Lottie called as Mrs. Hancock hurried down the steps.

Eugene sighed as her car slipped away into the night.

Behind them, the doors to the banquet hall swung open as a waiter hurried through. The babble of the voices of all the guests who were still milling around and chatting inside leaked out into the hall.

“Do we have go to back in?” Lottie asked.

Her mother had been the one to plan this party, the final one in the endless whirl leading up to her wedding tomorrow. And because her mother had planned it, it didn’t feature any of the ostentatious displays some of the others had: no giant towers of flowers; no flaming canapés; no live animals, like the peacocks that Anastasia Fremont had thought would lend a classy touch to the festivities at her riverside estate.

She’d been unaware, apparently, that the giant birds could actually fly, and instead of class, they’d lent a bit of comic relief when several of them wound up on the roof of the Fremonts’ carriage house. They’d then begun to dive-bomb guests, making their eerie calls, until one of them knocked off Mrs. Anderson’s wig, and Anastasia Fremont called the peacock handlers to come collect them.

But despite the simple, elegant gathering in Lottie’s own home, featuring her favorite lemon ice cream and some of their closest friends, Lottie felt a sense of dread at returning to the house.

“Come on,” she said, pulling at Eugene’s hand. They were standing beside the door to the kitchen, which a servant had just passed through and where most of the family servants, as well as a few dozen who had been hired just for that night, were busily entering and exiting, clearing the hall of the night’s plates and silver. Inside was a little vestibule, designed to give servants a place to wait for guests to arrive at the front door and then quickly disappear again while members of the family greeted the newcomers.

It had always been a favorite haunt of Lottie’s, and when they were kids, she had introduced it to Eugene as their special secret: a place to disappear for an instant when the big gatherings her family was always throwing got too boring, or noisy, or overwhelming.

Eugene hesitated. “People are waiting for us,” he said. But he gave in as Lottie pulled him into their hiding place.

Inside, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, then sank down on the little wooden bench built into the wall just inside the door.

He sat down beside her.

“So?” he said, an edge of impatience in his voice.

Lottie took a deep breath.

“Eugene,” she said in a rush. “I saw an ad for the Navy WAVES when I went to the movies. Earlier this week.”

“What’s that?” he asked. His tone was polite as ever, but she could tell he thought she was just making small talk—and barely paying attention himself.

“It’s women,” Lottie said. “Women in the Navy.”

“Women in the Navy,” Eugene mused, his tone shifting to disapproval. “It’s about time this war got over.”

“I think I could do it,” Lottie said.

“Well, of course you could, Lots,” Eugene said, chucking her under the chin. “You could do just about anything you put your mind to.”

Lottie hesitated. She’d braced herself for an objection, but his easy agreement stymied her for an instant.

But suddenly the words rose up, not out of her thoughts, but out of her heart. “I want to,” she told him. “I got an application at a recruitment office, and I already sent it in. I want to join the Navy WAVES.”

“Join the Navy?” Eugene said, sitting up so that he could look her in the eye. His own eyes sparkled slightly, as if he were already amused by whatever joke she was trying to play now.

Lottie nodded, her jaw set.

As Eugene recognized the seriousness in her eyes, his own smile faded. “Lots,” he said, taking her hand in his. “We’re getting married tomorrow.”

“But what if we didn’t?” Lottie said.

At the surprise in his expression, she gave his hand a quick squeeze. “I mean, what if we didn’t right now?” she said.

Now Eugene took a deep breath, shaking his head. “Lottie—” he began.

“No, listen,” she interrupted. “Our whole country is at war. The whole world is. Robbie’s going off to fight it. But I never do anything.”

“What about me?” Eugene asked, his tone turning sharp. “Do you think I don’t do anything?”

Lottie stopped, confused. “No,” she said. “You work for the war every day, at work.”

As she said it, she felt her certainty about that slipping away. Lottie had always thought of Eugene’s position as a clever way to keep him from the war. Mr. Grantham certainly agreed. He had absolutely forbidden Eugene to have anything to do with active duty, even though he was unquestionably of age and so many of their friends were serving now, themselves.

But this wasn’t about Eugene. She was trying to tell him how she felt, about her own life. “I have skills,” she said. “They need people. I could help. I might not be able to do much, but I could do something.”

“Skills?” Eugene repeated, raising his eyebrows.

“I can repair engines,” Lottie said. “They might need mechanics.”

Eugene played with her fingers on his knee. “Lots,” he said, “I’m not sure how many Stutz Bearcats the Navy’s employing these days…”

“You know I can repair other engines!” Lottie said indignantly. “You’ve seen me.”

Eugene held his hands up in self-defense. “I know, I know,” he said. “You got Bob Spratt’s Cadillac up and running again when it broke down after that picnic on the Rouge River.”

“And Emmeline Fairchild’s convertible,” Lottie reminded him. “When it broke down last year. And I repaired Jim Trinkle’s plane engine, remember that?”

“I remember you found the hole a groundhog chewed in his fuel line,” Eugene said.

Lottie nodded with satisfaction that he seemed to be taking her point.

“But I remember other things, too,” Eugene added gently.

“Like what?” Lottie asked.

“Remember what you wanted to be when you were ten?” he asked.

“A cowgirl,” Lottie answered promptly.

“That’s right,” Eugene said. “And so your dad got you Star, and then you begged him for Bullet.”

“Star was too short to do a real jump,” Lottie said.

“And you got good at jumping,” Eugene said.

“I won a Michigan Equestrian cup that year,” Lottie said proudly.

“I know,” Eugene said. “I was there, remember?”

Lottie smiled. He’d shown up with a bag of apples for Bullet, and it had been a trick to get the grateful horse away from him, over to the competition. “I do,” she said.

Eugene nodded. “And remember what you wanted to be when you were thirteen?” he asked.

“A nurse,” Lottie said. But this time she felt a little uneasy.

“And if I wanted to see you,” Eugene said, “I had to go over to the Grosse Point Hospital, where you were volunteering, and roll bandages with you.”

“I loved volunteering,” Lottie said. When she’d participated in the program, which brought young students into the hospitals as volunteers, it had been the first time in her life that she’d really felt anything she did might really be making a real difference.

“You were wonderful at it,” Eugene said. “I remember every time you went into a room, they always said, ‘Thank God you’re back!’ If it’d been up to the patients, they would have hired you full-time.”

Lottie smiled. Eugene was making a better case for her than she even could for herself. She’d always wanted to be part of something that mattered. And he had known that, she realized, even before she did herself.

“And remember what you wanted to be when you were sixteen?” Eugene asked.

“An Egyptologist,” Lottie said.

“Hieroglyphics,” Eugene said. “And pickaxes. Everywhere.”

Lottie laughed. “And you said you’d buy me a ticket to Cairo, even if my dad forbade it.”

“But I didn’t have to,” Eugene said. “Because by the end of that summer you were going to become a master jeweler.”

At this, Lottie’s heart dropped in her chest. She could see where he was going, and she didn’t like it.

“And the next year you were going to be a reporter,” Eugene said. “So you spent a summer writing society notes at the Free Press, until you got to college and took your first class on astronomy…”

“This isn’t like that!” Lottie said angrily, pulling her hand away from his.

Patiently, Eugene reached for her hand again.

This time, she let him keep it.

“Isn’t it?” he asked. “Are you sure about that?”

Lottie took both his hands in hers, kissed them, and looked pleadingly in his eyes. “What if we just waited a year?” she said. “Just a year. The war has to be over in a year. I can join the WAVES, and once it’s over, I’ll come back, and we can pick up right where we were.”

Eugene didn’t object, so she rushed on. “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “It’s just that I feel like I need to do something, to be part of something that matters. That’s all I want. Like you. You’ve already gotten to do so much.”

Eugene stared back into her eyes. “So have you, Lottie,” he finally said, quietly. “So have you.”

Lottie sighed. “If we could just…” she began again.

But Eugene shook his head, this time with a firmness that let her know she needed to listen.

“Lottie,” he said. “I don’t care what you want to do. When you wrote me letters in hieroglyphics, I got a book to decode them, hoping you might be too shy to tell me you were in love with me in regular old English.” Eugene smiled. “I drove you to every party in Detroit when you were working the society beat for the paper.” He looked down at his lapel, where a pin she’d made him from a flawed emerald glimmered. “I’ve worn this pin of yours for years,” he said.

“If I’d known you’d really wear it I would have used a better stone,” said Lottie.

“I don’t need a better stone,” Eugene said impatiently. “I only want you. And I don’t care what you’re up to next year, or the next, or fifty years from now. I just want to be part of it.”

“Well, then we just—” Lottie began.

Eugene raised his hand. “But this isn’t just another of your whims,” he said.

“No,” Lottie said, hurrying to agree.

“It’s a war,” said Eugene. “It’s something some men won’t come back from. It’s serious. And it’s dangerous.”

“I know,” Lottie insisted.

“I’m not sure you do,” Eugene said. “I’m not sure anyone does, until they’re part of it. Which I pray you never are.” He took a deep breath. “And this wedding isn’t just another whim,” he said. “At least, not for me. I’m serious about you, Lottie. I always have been. Our wedding’s tomorrow. Of course you’re going to feel some nerves. Everyone has them. That’s only natural. But it’s time for us to get married.”

Lottie felt tears spring to her eyes. A flood of emotions washed through her. Her feelings for Eugene but also a growing sense of frustration at his words.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Eugene wrapped her in his strong embrace. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Lots,” he whispered in her ear.

When she pulled away, he smiled. “You’ll see,” he told her. “All those things you want to do, you still can. We’ll just do them together.”

But not the WAVES, Lottie thought. You had to be a single woman to join them.

Eugene took a deep breath, stood, and held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’re being rude to our guests.”

Tears sprang to Lottie’s eyes. It had seemed like Eugene was really listening to her. But now she felt like he hadn’t heard a thing. “You go back to the party,” she said. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Lottie,” Eugene called, but she just pushed through the door and raced up the stairs, then down the long hall that traversed the mansion’s second floor, to her room.

When she got there, she sank down on her bed, lay there for a minute, then rolled over and turned on her bedside light.

With a gasp, she realized that one of the maids must have brought her freshly pressed wedding dress to the room while she was gone. It was hanging on the door of her closet, the hem floating several feet off the ground, so big that it felt like a stranger had stepped into her room with her.

She looked away. Outside her window, on the otherwise dark front lawn, was the American flag her father flew there proudly, illuminated brightly by lights shining up from the ground.

She didn’t have any idea how long she sat there, staring at the fluttering bands of red, white, and blue, while memories of Eugene and thoughts of the war spun through her head, while her heart tugged, restless, in her chest, almost as if it were being blown about by the same wind that caught the folds of the flag beyond her window.