Sixteen

NOW FRIEDA HAS SOMETHING to look forward to—and not just the bleary dream of getting out, to Felix, but something clearer, closer: Alice's return. Alice, who might make that dream real. If you want to sail away, thinks Frieda, you can't just pray for breeze; first you have to find yourself a boat.

She almost wonders if she made the whole thing up—Alice's fond candor, her forgiveness. She asks Flossie (who loathed Alice initially, back in Ayer) how her evaluation went; this time, was Alice any different? "Yeah," Flossie admits. "She's all right. Even promised to get me some new shoes 'cause mine are shot."

Sure, Frieda thinks, but did she fox-trot before you? Did she offer you a warm orb of foam? Whenever Frieda dons the frock that Alice helped her wash (the worst of the blood is gone, but a faint stain persists), she brims with a sweet secret pride. Is Alice—wherever she is, at the brig in Ayer, in Boston—wearing her own dress, with matching stain?

Frieda asks the matron when "Miss Longley" will be back, trying not to sound overeager. When the day comes at last (there's a new government study, and Alice is due to interview some girls), Frieda tries to plot out what she'll say. She won't tell Alice about Felix—not yet, not given Alice's fury at the soldiers. But Flynn—Flynn's a soldier they can both agree to hate. Flynn might be (how strange!) her best hope. I've been thinking, she might say, maybe I could identify him. Stop him before he hurts another girl. If I saw him again, yes, I'm sure I could.

Would Alice then arrange a special furlough to Camp Devens? A visit to the place where Felix waits?

Alice arrives after lunch and immediately goes to work before Frieda has the chance to see her; she's cloistered in the treatment room for hours. Angelina, Hattie, and Jo go in and out—and upon leaving, each girl holds a token Alice gave her: lavender soap, a length of grosgrain ribbon. Why isn't Frieda on the list? Is she too sick for the study? Not sick enough? Maybe she should fabricate some crisis to get in. As if just being here's not bad enough!

Finally, at six o'clock, Alice emerges. The word spreads: she's joining them for supper. Frieda importantly saves a place beside herself (for a week, she and Flossie have been sanctioned to eat anywhere, the doctor having deemed them noncontagious), but Alice sits at Mrs. Digges's table—the two of them, alone, with no patients. Intently, the women tuck in.

Frieda is despairing. She did make it up; Alice's seeming kinship was a fluke. (And why do I insist, she thinks, on pinning all my hopes on anyone who treats me better than Mama?) Then Alice, in a moment of the matron's avid chewing, looks around, finds Frieda's gaze, and rolls her eyes, as if to say Rescue me, please!

Frieda feels a wash of cool relief. You and me both, she thinks, and she sends a knowing grin. Alice's grin back looks like a promise.

***

Mrs. Digges announces a surprise after supper: Alice has brought a film, just for them.

A movie! In the flush of it, in the bustle of preparations, Frieda sets aside her need to ask for Alice's help. What could help her mood more than a movie?

There have been previous evening programs. Two weeks ago, a Salvation Army band performed (anemic marches and a final, shrill waltz) while a man called Pastor Paul gave out a pamphlet: "V.D.—U-boat No. 13!" Then came a Miss Fisk from the Watch and Ward Society; in a series of muzzy stereomotorgraph slides, she depicted her topic: "How Life Begins." ("If it was that boring," Flossie stage-whispered in the darkness, "life would end. There'd never be another baby.") But a movie! Right here! Starring Fairbanks? Maybe Chaplin? Alice knew just what they've been missing.

All the girls help to get things ready. The dining room is made into a provisional theater: tables cleared, a sheet hung on the wall, a projector wrangled into place. (Burnham, they learn, picked it up this afternoon, on his way to get Alice at the station; the machine sparkles like money, newly minted.) The dinner crew is drafted to cook pots of popcorn, and the odor—nutty, with luring hints of burn—sensually fattens through the room.

When everything is set, the girls cram onto benches. Alice stands waiting for the crowd to settle down, but the patients chatter as if at a premiere. Has Flossie perked her cheeks with homemade rouge? Even Yetta looks zippy, animated. Hattie presides over the backmost row, like a balcony where she might hide misbehavior.

Frieda slips onto a bench near the middle, next to Jo, who stares down, elbows on her knees—the only girl who doesn't seem excited. Ever since the fox attack, Jo's been almost shell-shocked—flinching at the smallest sounds, at silence—and Frieda wants to help her back to normal. Also, though, she wants to hear what happened today with Alice. What did Alice want? What did she pledge? Jo's the girl whom Frieda can ask without feeling awkward, Jo with her own awkwardness so blatant. (Does Frieda hope that Alice protects everyone equally or hope to learn that Alice likes her best?)

Frieda pats Jo's knee and is set to ask her questions when the matron demands immediate silence.

"Girls, enough," she says. "Give Miss Longley your attention. Girls!" She claps her hands twice.

"Thank you, but it's quite all right," says Alice. "The quickest way to quiet is through quiet." She offers this observation at a confidential volume, and, sure enough, the room falls to a hush; the girls cock their ears for something missed. "There. That's more like it," Alice tells them.

Her dress's high collar, Frieda thinks, seems too snug. It looks as though the lacing might soon burst. Alice has a body that repudiates containment—that's why Frieda knows she can trust her. That's why Frieda's sure she'll lend a hand.

"I know you're all itching to see this picture," Alice says. "And with good reason—it's been made just for you. The name of it is The End of the Road. Girls in your position all across the whole country will be watching it in the coming weeks and months, the hope being—"

"Our position?" mimics Yetta, eyes narrowed. "Locked up with no rights? Not even hearings?"

"Yetta!" says Mrs. Digges, and warns her to mind herself, or this privilege will be rescinded for them all.

"Hear that?" Melba seconds. "Shut your trap."

Further calls are made to "quit your yapping." Yetta shoots them icy glares but quiets.

Alice uncrosses her arms and gathers breath with what appears to be incipient acrimony, but when she speaks she sounds curiously chastened. "As I was saying, our hope—the government's hope—is that you girls might find this motion picture useful. A lesson to help you, once this all has passed." She dips her head in a dutiful sort of nod, and then, before Yetta or anyone else can speak, signals for the lights to be dimmed. She retreats to the back of the room.

With the urgent fup-fup-fup of a mallard taking wing, the projector reel spins into action. Light, like something breathing, ebbs and swells. "Two Roads There Are in Life," the first frame reads. "One reaches upward toward the Land of Perfect Love. The other reaches down into the Dark Valley of Despair where the sun never shines."

The heat of bodies pressed up tight in lulling, comfy shadows. Popcorn's salted, smooth, addictive tang. Frieda can almost think that she's sitting in the Bijou, watching the new Anita King adventure.

The film follows two girls, Mary Lee and Vera Wagner, who flee home for the twinkle of New York. Mary's fair, Vera swarthy; they're seventeen.

"So young!" Flossie says. "Wike widdle Fwieda."

The girls twitter, until a shh from Mrs. Digges.

In the city, resolved to do her part to win the war, Mary enrolls in nursing school. Vera finds work in a sleek department store, where men ogle her across the glass-topped counter.

The depiction of the store, Frieda thinks, is quite good: wares arranged dynamically, as they always were at Jordan's, and a floorwalker resembling Mr. Crowley—the same mousy, slightly wet mustache. Suddenly, stabbingly, she longs for her old life—even for Mr. Crowley, even him! (If Frieda had the chance again, she'd never disregard him; she'd show him due respect for all his rules.) And Lou. She's so lost without Lou. When she and Lou would catch matinees on their day off, it thrilled her to sit beside her pal in silent union and to know precisely what Lou felt and thought. After, they'd confirm their identical reactions. ("And that part—?" "When she grabbed the steering wheel—" "Fantastic!") What shows does Lou watch these days, and with whom? Does she ever wonder where Frieda's gone?

The projector tuts scoldingly as the first reel runs out. Frieda turns and watches Alice change it. Surely Alice didn't mean to stir such painful thoughts. Or did she?—to inspire Frieda, to remind her what awaits, if only she can get out of this place. (The very day she's freed from this prison, Frieda vows, she'll treat herself to the newest picture show. With Lou—or no, with Felix! Beside him in the dark. She's never even seen a movie with him!) Alice sees Frieda watching, and she pauses to gaze back. There's her private grin again: her promise.

In the second reel, Vera meets a cad and carries on, staying out all night, playing loose; Mary, in the meantime, keeps at bay her beau, an AEF soldier bound for France. Though the soldier begs for a memory that he "can never lose," Mary demurs and sends him packing. "I know how hard it is to think of consequences," she says. "Unless we do, we shan't find happiness at the end of the road."

"We shan't," comes a broad, mocking voice from the back row, and a salvo of popcorn flies forward. "We shan't find happiness with scoundrels!" Two kernels hit the sheet on which the film is cast, and everything is suddenly in ripples: Mary and Vera viewed through troubled waters.

The matron says, "Hattie! Put the kibosh on it. This instant!"

One more floaty white grenade is lobbed, followed by a smattering of snickers.

Frieda doesn't join in all the horseplay. She's rattled, offbalance, pondering the roles: it's obvious that she's supposed to think herself like Vera, but Felix isn't anything like Vera's heedless cad, even less like Mary's nagging soldier (better than both, handsomer, more true). How, then, will her future be: like Vera's? like Mary's? like something else entirely her own?

Mary becomes a nurse and assists a famous surgeon, Dr. Bell, as he operates on patients: women with disease-ruined wombs. "This is the operation," the film explains, "which every year, hundreds of thousands of women must undergo because of some man's criminal folly."

Vera, in the next scene, has contracted syphilis and slinks to a dispensary for treatment, her face a contortion of dishonor. Close-up photos flash upon the screen: a lesion leaking pus; a twisted arm; discolored skin; a woman with her nose flesh eroded.

Frieda pictures the dump heap in the alley next to Slotnik's: carrion gone to gray, then maggot-pale. Lately, her own body has seemed practically fine—the syphilitic chancre shrunken to a pip, no more sense of never-ending leak—but now she feels a momentary relapse, all her flesh putrid, full of burn.

Gasps fill the room, a bedlam of revulsion. Jo holds her stomach with one hand, her mouth the other, and Frieda hears the labor of her gulping. "Okay?" asks Frieda. Jo stares weakly.

Leaving private practice, Dr. Bell sets off for France—accompanied by Mary, his best nurse. They brave shells and shrapnel, they bandage soldiers' wounds. Soberly, they trade their wedding vows: Mary is now Mrs. Richard Bell.

A hiss, a click, and then the screen goes blank. The film spins wildly on one reel. It sounds as though a child is being spanked.

"Lights," says Mrs. Digges. "The lights."

A flip is switched. The room burns with a stark, reproachful glare.

The projector stands abandoned. Where is Alice? Did she leave to miss the film's grotesque end?

"Somebody," says the matron, "shut that off."

Warily, Flossie sidles up to the machine. She studies it, fiddles with one knob and then another. At last she turns the right one. All goes silent.

Mrs. Digges hurries to the front of the dining room. "As you can see, Miss Longley must ... must have stepped out for a moment. Perhaps she had to visit the facilities." She shifts from foot to foot, clears her throat.

How will she find words, Frieda thinks, for all those photos?

Next to Frieda, Jo looks as pale as dead skin. The pressure of held breaths is stifling.

"Well, shall we discuss the film without her?" says the matron. "I'm sure you were all as ... engaged by it as I was." Her voice bucks, but she reins it in, goes on. "The lesson," she says flatly. "The lesson, as I see it, is that every action has its consequence. Did the end come as a surprise? Of course not. Each girl got her just deserts."

Frieda studies the matron, trying to gauge her true feelings—she who insists on happy endings. Is that what this ending was meant to be? Happy? Frieda tries to imagine Dr. Slocum—or Miller—asking for her hand as he probes. Wider, please, and will you be my wife?

"...is what separates the child," the matron is saying, "from the adult. We've all seen a bleeding toddler fight the doctor's needle, even though the stitches might well save him. That's instinct. It fights against pain. But the adult has intellect to overcome his instincts; he knows the pain will help him, so he bears it. Or to think of it another way: Intellect is riding instinct's horse. If the rider can't control it, the animal is a danger—not just to herself, to everyone. With sex-crazed girls, like Vera, that's the problem. They fail to restrain their appetites."

"Why not men? Why not their appetites?" It's Yetta, in her terrier-tough voice.

Mrs. Digges takes a step back. "Well, you see, we're not ... just now, we're not talking about men. After all, this is a room full of—"

"But we never talk of men. We never do. It's always 'sexcrazed girls,' evil whores. How many whores would there be without the men who hired them?"

"Yetta. So smart! Should know better." The matron speaks in niggardly, clipped fragments, her bosom a jut of sanctimony. "Men are ... they have needs we don't. It's instinct."

"Oh, that's right: 'Instinct is a horse...' So men just get to gallop all around? Girls are being jailed left and right for no good reason, but soldiers—is a single one detained? It's like mopping a flooded room, and mopping it and mopping, and never thinking to shut the faucet off."

Yes, thinks Frieda, yes, and she turns to look for Alice—Alice, who argued the same case. She's still not to be found at her post by the projector, but Frieda well imagines her return: how she'll burst into the room, her voice surging in alliance. ("Thugs is what they are! It's sickening!")

"What we all need's the same," Yetta says. "A living wage. A girl can earn five times as much by picking up men as by slaving in some wretched factory. Tell me why the girl's the one to blame."

"What I'll tell you," the matron says. "What I'll tell you is, you're making no sense, Yetta. You're mixing up—just mixing it all up. Men have," and she falters, holding her sides, as though against a flare of indigestion. "Men have certain organs. Organs that need ... exercise, like muscles."

"Please! What a stinking heap of shit!"

The sound of sudden breaths suggests that something has been punctured. No one speaks to Mrs. Digges this way! Beside her, Frieda feels Jo cowering.

Mrs. Digges demands, "What did you say?"

Yetta sits tall, a shrewish angle to her shoulders. "I said," she starts, then seems to reconsider. Or maybe she's just marshaling her anger.

Again, Frieda wonders: Where's Alice? No one else but Alice has the starch to bolster Yetta—not Hattie, who sits docile, her blue-black skin gone ashen; not censured Flossie; not herself. Impatiently, she cranes her neck to peer behind the crowd, and there, like an answered prayer, stands Alice: in the doorway, twisting pale and flighty hands. She sends Alice a grin of confederacy—their grin—but if Alice receives the message, she doesn't show it. Stony-faced, she crosses silently to the projector and busies herself packing up the reels.

"I'm waiting," says the matron. "Did I hear you incorrectly? Yetta? Have you anything to say?"

Yetta blinks. She tips her chin back.

"No. I didn't think I was mistaken." Mrs. Digges speaks surely now, her confidence regained, standing on the firm ground of scolding. "In that case, I don't want to see your nasty face. Go up to your room and don't you leave!"

Alice, at the back, seems painfully quiet, her face cast down in effortful disinterest.

Defeated, shaking, Yetta stands and scuffs away.

"Wait," calls Frieda, blazing to her feet. She wants to follow Yetta, pull her back.

"Will you make trouble, too?" asks the matron.

"No, but," Frieda says, and scans the patients for support. Flossie stares straight down. So does Jo.

Mrs. Digges threatens, "Want to join her?"

At last, Frieda finds a kindly presence: Alice, who is vehemently shaking her head no, making gestures of containment with her hands.

From the hall, Yetta's footsteps peter out.

"No, ma'am," Frieda murmurs. She sits down.

"Thank God for small favors," says the matron. She turns with a conniving pout toward Alice. "Apologies on the girls' behalf for this bother, Miss Longley. The film struck too close to home, I think."

"No, please," Alice says, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take so long in the bathroom."

"In your absence, I tried to get them talking about the picture. But maybe you'd like to add your own thoughts?"

Alice's posture seems an arrangement of concerted decorum, her hands by her sides, her shoulders squared. "I'm afraid that I missed," she says, "most of your discussion. But you did, I think, compare a man's ... his intimate equipment with muscles in need of exercise?"

Mrs. Digges gives a grandiose nod.

"It's not an apt analogy," says Alice.

And the matron's head freezes in mid-assent.

"If those organs were like muscles," Alice says, smirking, "then the miserable twelve-year-old boy who flogs them daily would be the greatest Don Juan on the planet. Girls, do you know any boys like that?"

This last line Alice hams up with a comic mug, and the patients come gibbering back to life.

"A better comparison," she goes on, "is the tear glands. Even if a man hasn't shed a tear in ages, he can always, when the need arises, cry. It's the same with ... with those other, lower glands."

The phrase sparks a laugh that inflames the whole room. Flossie grunts, jiggles her fist obscenely.

"Necessity," Alice concludes, "is a myth!"

The girls, amid their mirth, trade apprehensive looks. Expectantly, all turn to Mrs. Digges.

"Well, I don't know such a lot about the science," says the matron. "I'm not so up-and-doing as you professional ladies." Her face rucks up with constipated pride. "All that I can say about men is what I learned by myself, in my years of being married."

She pronounces married showily, a verbal trump card. Does she cut a glance at Alice's ringless fingers?

The air constricts with awkward, standoff silence.

Faintly, through the ceiling: Yetta's stomping.

"The film," says Alice weakly, "isn't really about restraint. It's about girls—girls making their own futures. You, too. You can choose your own road."

But not a single patient meets her eye.

"Now, girls," says the matron, as though Alice has just vanished, "we need to move the tables back to normal. And the floor is all popcorn—just appalling. I want this room clean, and in a jiff!"

A dozen girls get down on their knees.

"You just stood there! Why didn't you say something?"

"I'm sorry, Frieda. Keep your voice down."

"Sorry? What will 'sorry' do for Yetta?" Or for me, Frieda thinks, losing faith in her scheme: using Alice to get to Camp Devens.

Fierily they face off in the Home's moonlit yard, where Frieda has caught up to Alice. Frieda's agile fib—"Miss Longley dropped her pen"—convinced Mrs. Digges to let her follow.

Before them, Donald Rattigan, the loutish night watchman, grapples with the hefty film projector, heaving it into the back of the Home's Ton Truck. The accident-salvaged Ford has been parked in the yard for weeks. Frieda thought its engine was kaput, but it worked fine this afternoon, apparently, for Burnham; now Rattigan's counting on its use.

Frieda toes a divot in the driveway's hard mud. A fug of burnt horseflesh sours the air. "Don't you understand," she says, "how bad she might be punished? But no, you let the matron have her way."

Stepping closer, Alice grits her teeth. "Honestly, now, think. Don't be dim. Ever since Maude resigned, they're keeping closer watch. I've got to learn to pick my battles wisely."

"Oh, so saving Yetta isn't wise?"

A low groan from Rattigan steals their attention, and they turn to see him struggling, bent-kneed. The projector slips three inches; he regrips. "I'm fine," he says. "I've got it. Little bastard."

Alice, in the washy light, looks distant, obscured. "Yetta," she says, "is difficult. She's coarse. Nobody is ever going to like her."

"No, she's just—"

"You're different, Frieda. You'll rise above the rest. You're the one who has a better chance."

Hazy with a sudden mix of flattery and outrage, Frieda wonders why Alice would tell her such a thing. What could Alice ever gain by flattering a girl like her? She has to seek to gain something, right? But no, Frieda thinks (she wants so badly to be stroked), perhaps it's her own doubt that should be doubted. Alice wants what's best for all the girls.

Softly, Frieda asks, "A better chance?"

"Listen"—Alice leans in, checks that Rattigan's out of earshot—"has Mrs. Digges talked about the Fourth?"

Frieda shakes her head. "The fourth what?"

"July Fourth, at the end of this week. A delegation's coming to see the troops at Camp Devens. Senator Weeks, up from Washington. And from Boston, Mr. Storrow, the head of the Committee on Public Safety. A few assorted other dignitaries. They're stopping here first, on their way. To see how their money's being spent."

Frieda bristles. "Will Mrs. Sprague be there?"

"Don't worry about her. She's the lowest on the pole. These men are the big guns. Here's your chance."

"For what? What would I ever say to them?"

"Your story. How you were treated by one of their 'brave boys.' How he should be the one detained, not you."

"A senator? I can't talk to those people."

"Can, too—all that anger I heard just now, but aimed at them."

Alice puts both hands on Frieda's shoulders, leans in close. Frieda smells her warm, bewitching breath. She tries to imagine her anger shooting forth; for so long, it's been a mine submerged.

"Frieda, you can tell them," Alice says, "what I can't. That you're locked up for a germ, not a crime. That they're taking away the freedom of our own girls, like you, in the name of bringing freedom to the Belgians. Ask how that makes any kind of sense!"

"Excuse me, ma'am," calls Rattigan. "You ready?" He poses with one foot on the Ton Truck's running board. "Don't get going now, you'll miss your train."

"Yes," says Alice. "Yes, I'm coming. Thank you." Then to Frieda, in a rousing voice: "You can. I'll see you in a few days. On the Fourth." She climbs into the truck and shuts the door.

Rattigan's third try at the starter fires the engine. In a dusty cloud, the Ton Truck jerks away. Its rumble stirs a wave in Frieda's gut, a surge of power (like swerving in the Morses' Gunboat Speedster), but soon the noise dissipates and dies.