FIFTY-SIX
BEATRICE
Chavaniac
July 1918
Having parted with Willie, I was now a free woman, but while the war raged on, where better to enjoy my liberty than Chavaniac? “Welcome back, Madame President,” said the castle’s steward, taking my luggage. Already I could see that the changes wrought since my last visit were nothing short of miraculous. Paved roads now led to the castle, where an entirely new wing had been constructed for the children and employees while restoration work continued in the castle proper.
A new school and medical facility could now boast of electricity and indoor plumbing . . . and though the library remained a scene of disaster, with rotted floorboards and a collapsed fireplace, the walls had been reinforced and the roof repaired. All this was accomplished in record time.
Some work had been performed by German prisoners of war—which seemed fair under the circumstances—but we were also aided by passing American soldiers, an entire company of whom were, even now, at work with shovels and pickaxes. The sight of these sturdy doughboys stirred my heart, as I imagined it might stir Lafayette’s heart too were he here to see it. These were the great-grandsons of the generation of Americans he fought beside, here to rescue Europe and restore his home to glory . . .
As a black cat wound itself around her ankles like a familiar, Clara said, “We’ve adopted some feline friends to help with our bats.”
A welcome solution. Inside the castle, the historic furniture and facsimiles thereof that I’d managed to acquire were kept free of dust by the housekeeper and six housemaids. We also had three gardeners, four teachers, and two cooks to feed the eighty-five children who now slept peacefully beneath our terra-cotta rooftops. Among them darling Marthe, who was, according to the staff, a two-and-a-half-year-old terror in flaxen pigtails.
“She has much to say,” reported Marie-Louise LeVerrier, who had dedicated her life to this place in the past year. “She’s a very bright girl and quite the mistress of this domain.”
“Is that so?”
By way of example, Clara Simon explained that on the Fourth of July holiday there’d been a scuffle between the children who had been living here and those newly arrived. We’re the real children of Lafayette, taunted the former. Which sent the latter crying to the staff to see if this were true. That’s when precocious Marthe told them they were all Lafayette kids.
Oh, how I loved this story! Eager for a reunion, I found little Marthe sitting at a picnic table in the courtyard, drawing with wax crayons under the supervision of Marie-Louise. The girl blinked up with those steel blue eyes, and as I slid into the bench beside her, I was astonished at how she’d grown. “I don’t suppose you remember me.”
The girl shook her head, cautiously.
“Well, I remember you, and hope we’ll be special friends.”
Marthe’s nose wrinkled as if she was uncertain she wanted a friend, much less a special one.
“Be nice to Madame Chanler,” scolded Marie-Louise.
But I waved this away and leaned closer to the girl. “What is it you’re drawing?”
“You can’t tell?”
I squinted, admiring the zeal of her scribbles. “Hmm, well, let me see . . .”
With one quirked brow, the little girl asked, “Is it a kitten?”
“Ah, yes, of course. I see it now. A pretty kitty!”
My enthusiasm was rewarded with a sigh that seemed to come from the center of the little girl’s very soul. “No, it’s not. It’s a piggy.”
Having been tested and bested by a little girl, I laughed until my sides hurt—as did all my friends, with whom I was so glad to be reunited. Marie-Louise had prepared a magnificent tower chamber for me with a view of the garden, where a gaggle of children played—clean, clothed, rosy-cheeked, and thriving after having escaped bombed-out towns in gas masks or having scavenged for food in the streets of Paris. Their bright laughter told me the horrors of war were beginning to fade away here in the volcanic mountains, where I could almost feel the earth’s fire warming the very soil beneath which these orphaned children would start anew. Here, after all, was a place that instilled the heart with courage and reinvigorated the spirit.
Certainly it was reinvigorating mine.
I liked my tower sanctuary. I could work here, I could sculpt here. What a peaceful studio it would make with all the light filtering in. Maybe I could even teach little Marthe how to draw a better pig. But of course, I could not stay forever . . .
“We must cherish Beatrice while we have her,” Emily warned when we took a light supper in the ancient kitchen. “She insists this is her last great adventure.”
Emily wasn’t happy about my determination to make a future with Furlaud in New York after the war, though she pretended otherwise. She was still, after all, a very stouthearted girl.
Clara, perched by the casement window, chewing licorice in an effort to give up cigarettes, guessed what Emily was getting at. “So you mean to go through with it, Beatrice? Tell me you’re not going to leave Mr. Chanler and marry your French cavalier. That’s hard to believe after the news article . . .”
“What news article?”
Clara, who devoured newspapers, fished one out of a copper vase. She’d been saving it just for me. Then she leaned back, propping her feet up until Marie-Louise gave her a harsh look as if to say, Not on Lafayette’s table! I supposed Clara had got hold of Mitzi Miller’s latest column about my labor mission. Or maybe even some feature about our work here in Chavaniac. Still, my stomach churned at the thought it might be gossip about my relationship with Maxime Furlaud . . .
“It seems you’ve been held up as an example of marital bliss!” Clara explained, spreading the pages onto the rustic table so we could read the headline in the Buffalo Times: Why the Home-Loving and Maternal Instinct in a Good Woman Is More Powerful Than Any Desire for a Career . . .
A photograph of me from another era graced the article, from which Clara read aloud, “No more practical husband lives than William Astor Chanler, explorer, author, soldier, politician, and game hunter. Mr. Chanler flung riches at his lady’s feet, but something else moved the starlet to become Mrs. Chanler and fade forever from public view—”
“Fade forever?” I tried to snatch up the pages. “I’ve never faded from anything in my life, much less public view!”
Clara kept the paper out of my grasp, her voice lilting with amusement. “Mrs. Chanler has never spoken of the happiness which is hers, but it is mutely expressed in the perfect life that has marked the union.”
Having just ended things with Willie, I was actually pained by this, but Clara unwittingly plunged on. “Minnie Ashley had eight years of public worship, when along comes the practical husband offering nothing but home and himself. And with a smile she pushed aside the wreath of fame and took instead the veil, which spells happiness and all things worthwhile.”
“What a silly article,” I said. It vexed me. And not only because it dredged up my stage name. Or at least what I claimed was a stage name. The more upsetting matter was that I was very much not a woman for whom marriage had spelled happiness and all things worthwhile. Though I hoped for happiness, at least, with Max, and I was angry that an article like that should make me doubt it. I wondered what sorts of hats I would wear as the wife of a French banker. I didn’t think any of the ones I owned would suit!
Still, all this was to think about after the war . . .
Of course, I’d given up guessing how much longer the war would last, now that the Allies were beating the Huns in the trenches, crippling their naval yards, and smashing their air force. Since the arrival of the bulk of American troops, Maxime wrote, The advance is now so swift I sometimes sleep uncovered on the cold ground, there being no time to pitch a tent and take it down again.
He was predicting the war really could be over by year’s end.
In the meantime, we were overrun by displaced children—starving, wounded, diseased, seemingly from all corners of the earth. Unable to build fast enough, we’d rented space in structurally sound but abandoned buildings not too far from Chavaniac. We delivered ten little girls to a nunnery in Le Puy before taking four boys back with us to Chavaniac.
All sons of fallen soldiers. Among them a brown-skinned French-Algerian boy named Samir Bensaïd, who couldn’t sleep without his gas mask. A roguish little Auvergnat named Henri, whose widowed mother was too sick to care for him. And a pale, freckle-faced English boy named Victor, who had fallen ill on the journey, coughing up blood.
Tuberculosis, the doctoresse said, warning me away. The Red Cross personnel should have caught such an infectious disease and prevented him from coming here, where we had only rudimentary medical care. Now it was too late to send him back, and soon we despaired of his life.
I couldn’t bear that this little Victor should suffer the way my nephew had, without comforting arms around him. I couldn’t bear to lose another Victor to this war. Thus, in our makeshift hospital, I sat by his bedside in the days that followed.
With gasping breaths—before it became too difficult to speak—the boy told me how the Germans had forced him to drive cattle for them, making him sleep in the stable without a blanket and promising to shoot him if he ran away. But he ran away anyway, and said he was happier to die in Lafayette’s castle.
Which is what he did not long after.
I held his body for a long time, sobbing, and Emily had to gently coax me away. “He needed you before, but now he must be buried . . .”
He needed me. But I couldn’t save him. And now other children needed me too. It was the worst time to find myself overcome with exhaustion, unable to rise from bed. Sick and sad like a blackness had descended over my soul. Emily feared I’d contracted tuberculosis from the dying boy. But when I complained of aching joints, weakness, and lost appetite, our doctoresse feared it was the deadly Spanish flu, which was now sweeping across continents, heaping more misery and grief upon a world already filled with it.
It was only when she discovered my lowered heart rate that I revealed my lingering illness, the thyroid and cardiovascular abnormalities. Ailments that reminded me of my mortality and how much I still wanted to accomplish in a life that might meet an early close.
It was Emily who tended me until I was well enough to sketch again in my turret. I drew the dead boy because I felt that some memorial ought to be made for him. Meanwhile, Emily was trying to soothe her eighteen-month-old daughter, who wailed inconsolably in her mother’s arms. “I’m afraid Anna is happier with her nurse than with me. Either that, or she’s determined to make me pay such a price for my neglect that I never leave her again.”
Emily said this in a humorous vein, but it was true that Anna was as sunny a child as ever lived except in her mother’s arms. Why, I’d even seen her playing happily in the courtyard with pigtailed Marthe, who tugged her around in a red wagon. Still, Emily’s sigh was so disconsolate that I hurried forth to reassure her, “That just goes to show you that you’re going to have a spirited daughter—the only kind any mother should want.”
Emily only sighed again. “I missed Anna’s first words. Her first steps. We know now that gas from the trenches leaked into Motte-aux-bois—my mother-in-law is being treated. What if Anna has poison in her lungs too?”
“Then she wouldn’t be wailing with such vigor,” I said, wishing to put a halt to this litany of self-recrimination. “No more of this. Last year, we both did what we felt must be done.”
It was a good thing too. Thanks to Emily and Amaury de LaGrange, America now had an incipient air force that was bombing the Germans to bits. Still, my friend simply could not reconcile her good service with the fact that she’d left her infant daughter. I’d seen Emily hold up in blood-soaked infirmaries, in air raids and hard winters. She’d never complained of being a pilot’s wife or the hardship of leaving her family and country behind. No adversity of this war had broken her, but guilt at having left her baby was smashing her stout heart to pieces.
And her anxieties for her husband—like mine for Max—were keen. It would be tragedy enough to lose a loved one to war; nearly unbearable to lose a loved one in a war’s closing hours, when the illusion of freedom is so tantalizingly near.