• 8 •

BEULAH WAS REMINDED, that afternoon, of how capricious spring could be in the South: wintry one minute and unexpectedly sensual the next. The day had started with the kind of bone-chilling damp that seemed to rise right out of the ground, but after lunch, a warm breeze pushed the chill away and suddenly the air was almost tropical. Her mother used to say that those breezes came from Cuba, although what Jessie Binford knew about Cuba was anyone’s guess. Nonetheless, the temperatures rose until Beulah found herself sweating under her collar in the steamy tent where she was to learn bandage-rolling and first aid from the Red Cross.

She’d never been good at sitting in a classroom, although she hadn’t had much of a chance to practice. Her grandmother couldn’t see the use of schooling except as a means of keeping her out from underfoot. Once Beulah was old enough to roll out biscuit dough on her own or to operate the mangle on washing day, she was welcome to stay at home and help her grandmother to do exactly what Beulah herself would be doing, as far as either of them could guess, for the rest of her life. There would always be a washing day, and a day for bread, and one for scrubbing floors. Nothing they could teach in the classroom was going to change any of that.

Beulah fidgeted in the Red Cross tent as Nurse Cartwright delivered her first lecture, but the words wouldn’t come together in Beulah’s mind to form any definitive picture that might tell her how to take a man’s temperature or dress a wound. When each girl was given an instruction manual to read and memorize, she paged through it and looked at the diagrams, and wondered how she might trick Fleurette into telling her what it said without coming right out and admitting that she couldn’t quite follow it.

This was not a promising start. No mention had been made yet of shipping off to France, apart from Sarah’s admission at breakfast, and it had not yet been explained what each girl would have to prove she could do before she was allowed to go. In fact, her classmates seemed to find the classes amusing, and at times a bit dull — but didn’t treat it as preparation for work they might soon have to carry out on their own.

They were younger, Beulah had to remind herself. Most of them were only eighteen or nineteen and had never worked a day in their lives, apart from helping in their mothers’ kitchens. Plenty of them hadn’t done that much. They had servants. The purpose of a paid staff was to render the children of the house useless, or at least to make their contributions more of a sentimental nature than a practical one.

Beulah couldn’t imagine a life like that. She was pretending to be twenty but she was twenty-four, and had already done every sort of work. As she watched the other girls in class, whispering when the instructor had her back turned and drawing silly pictures in the margins of their books, it occurred to her that perhaps she shouldn’t expect the others to take their lessons so seriously. She’d been out in the world, surviving on her wits, and they had not.

That night, after dinner, the entire camp was at its liberty until curfew at nine o’clock. The balmy weather held and made for a pleasant evening to be out among the tents, mingling and laughing with the other girls. Beulah allowed Fleurette to make a few small changes to her improvised uniform — it was satisfying to be fussed over, and Fleurette had a way of understanding just how a body wants to move inside its raiment and to make it do so with grace. Once they were satisfied with their appearances, they went out together into the purple night.

Lanterns glowed orange from the tent flaps, and a few small fires were lit in improvised pits of river rock, giving the place the appearance of a gypsy caravan come to rest for the night. It was lovely to walk among the tents and hear the idle chatter of so many girls at their leisure. Freed from the strictures of the lives they’d left behind — parents, teachers, tutors, bosses if they had them — and without a man in sight apart from Hack and Clarence, who patrolled the perimeter but otherwise stayed away, there was an easy camaraderie among them. With no one watching, they could let their hair down, as a manner of speech but also as a practical matter. It was a great relief to pull out pins, untie ribbons, and shake combs loose.

Fleurette hopped around in the kid slippers that she’d changed into — against camp regulation, Beulah had to admire that — and spun around in the grass to see if her skirt would fly up, which it did.

“The pattern called for a flat skirt that hangs straight,” she said, “which is good enough for Constance and Norma, but we need a little life in our wardrobes, don’t we?”

“Did you say you live out in the country with your sisters?” Beulah asked. “On a farm?”

“Yes, and it’s just as awful as it sounds,” Fleurette said. “I’d live there forever if they had their way. But I intend to take a room in town as soon as I can put a little money together. What about you? You must live with your mother and father, if you’re up on Park Avenue.”

“It isn’t so bad,” Beulah said noncommittally. “I’m left to my own devices. Which one of you had the idea to come here?”

She was learning to turn the conversation away from herself. The fewer questions she answered, the fewer lies she’d have to keep track of.

“It was Norma’s doing,” Fleurette said. “She has an attachment to those pigeons that no one else can fathom, nor do we want to. She thinks they’re going to be of use in the war, but Constance and I both know that the Army won’t have anything to do with Norma and those ridiculous birds. We only put up with them because they keep her amused. She’d be ordering us around if she didn’t have the birds to keep her busy.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of marrying her off?”

Fleurette groaned. “Who would marry Norma?”

“Are you the only marriageable sister of the three?”

Fleurette looked at her curiously. “Why would you say that?”

“Well, Constance seems awfully . . . imposing. To a man, I mean. She must’ve towered over them at dances.”

“I don’t think she went to many dances. She didn’t want to marry and keep house. She’d rather work.”

Beulah pounced on that. There was something unusual about Constance, something that suggested that she had a life that she was keeping hidden. “Why doesn’t she have a career, if she wants one? She’s old enough to have had two or three.”

“She’s forty, but don’t tell her I said so,” Fleurette said. “Ask her yourself if you’d like to know.”

It was quite apparent to Beulah that there was more to be said on the subject of Constance, but Fleurette wasn’t going to tell.

At the edge of the campground, Fleurette spotted Tizzy, the girl who’d spoken to them at breakfast about putting together comfort bags for the soldiers. From her tent came the faint scratchy sound of a phonograph.

“Did you naughty girls smuggle in a Victrola?” Fleurette squealed, rushing over to have a look.

Tizzy was out of her uniform: she wore a peacock-blue kimono with silk knickers underneath, and had stepped out to smoke a cigarette attached to a long ebony holder. “Oh, it’s just one of those little portable affairs,” she said languidly, blowing out the smoke. “Come and have a look. You’re Florine, is that right?”

“She’s Fleurette,” Beulah said. “I’m Roxie Collins.”

That was better. Her new nickname slipped right out, in one long easy breath: I’m Roxie Collins. Roxie Collins, how do you do? She’d been practicing it silently all day. The practice paid off.

“Well, come on in, Roxie.” Tizzy lifted the tent flap. “Girls, meet the girls.”

Inside was a tent equipped like no other. Atop the dusty wooden platform was an Oriental carpet, the kind that wealthy people kept around long after it had been worn through in the middle, for garden parties and barn dances. Every cot was outfitted with a matching brocade coverlet, obviously sent from a household overrun with such things, and topped with feather pillows. None of the girls wore their uniforms: they were attired as if to be arrayed around a swimming pool at a house-party, all in loose silks and scarves and beaded slippers.

Tizzy said, “You might’ve met one another in class today. I’m Tizzy Spotwood, over there’s Dorina Bingham, that’s Ginny Field, this is Liddy Powell, and of course Ellie Duval.” She said their names as if they meant something, as if they had weight and import that Beulah ought to understand. She tried to act as if she did.

“Pleased to meet you,” Ellie said, rising and giving them a little bow. She seemed to be the royalty among them. She was the prettiest, in that fragile, carved-from-ivory way that wealthy girls could be pretty. Her nose turned up at the very end, and when she smiled, the corners of her mouth lifted beguilingly.

Fleurette hardly saw her. In the very center of their tent, against the tent pole, was a phonograph player the size of a hat-box.

“Isn’t that the most cunning little rig!” Fleurette gasped, rushing over to admire it. “Does anyone sing?”

The girls all looked up from their cots at once with expressions of bemused fatigue.

“After all those years of music academy, who can help it?” said Ginny. “But I’m finished with all that. I told Father that I can’t be bothered anymore.”

The others made murmurs of agreement. Fleurette had started to dance — she made one half-turn, quite stylishly — when she glanced around and saw the others staring at her.

“Then I suppose you all dance as well, but you can’t be bothered with that, either. I didn’t think I’d hear a single note other than that bugle for six weeks. We’ll have to bring it out to the mess hall and have a dance. We could hold one every Saturday.”

Ellie rearranged her features into a tender expression of regret. “I promised the owner of this particular machine that I wouldn’t let it out of the tent. The very thing he warned against was a loud party and lots of girls stomping around.”

Fleurette looked a little suspicious of that excuse, but said, “I suppose it’s awfully delicate.”

“It is,” Ellie said. “Do you remember the night they set one up at Sherry’s and a girl fell right into it and smashed the whole thing to bits?”

Tizzy, Dorina, Ginny, and Liddy all groaned in unison. Beulah hated them for it. Of course Fleurette hadn’t heard about a night at Sherry’s! She lived on a farm in New Jersey. These girls were practiced in the art of making outsiders feel unwelcome.

“Nobody bothers with Sherry’s anymore,” Beulah said dismissively, but it was a miscalculation. Ellie pounced.

“Oh, no? You don’t come from New York, do you? You sound like . . .”

“Of course she’s a New Yorker,” Fleurette put in. “She lives up on Park Avenue, and she’s going to have us all over when we’re back in town.”

Ellie kept her eyes fixed on Beulah. “We know everyone on Park Avenue,” she said. “What’s your father’s name again?”

“Collins,” Beulah muttered. It had seemed so aristocratic at first, but she realized now that the name sounded common. “He’s a bore, and so is New York. I can hardly wait to get out.”

At last she’d appealed to their sense of stylish ennui.

“New York is a bore,” said Tizzy. “The war’s ruined everything. There’s no one going over to Europe in the summer. You just can’t! Even the dress shops in Paris are closed. We’re expected to go around modeling hats to benefit an orphanage, when we should be in Venice for the spring balls. It’s dull and awful.”

“Then I suppose you can’t wait to get over to France,” Beulah offered.

Tizzy shrugged and blew a perfect smoke ring from her cigarette. “When the war’s over, I suppose. If they haven’t bombed the place to bits.”

“But aren’t you going when we finish our course? To help with the war effort?”

Tizzy laughed. “We’re not going to the front, if that’s what you mean. I think we’d put every one of our mothers in an early grave if we went. There wouldn’t be a Junior League left! They all would’ve died of shock.”

Dorina reached into a trunk at the foot of her cot and pulled out a box of crackers and a few tins of anchovies. “I couldn’t look at that mess they called dinner tonight. Who’s having some?”

Fleurette was distracted by all the contraband Dorina had hidden away, but Beulah was still staring at Tizzy.

“Do you mean that you’ve come all this way to camp, you’re taking all the courses, and then at the end you’re just going to tell them you’re not going?”

Tizzy looked at her, puzzled. “Tell who? Going where?”

“Tell . . . why, tell Mrs. Nash, or Miss Miner, or whoever’s going to be here to ship us off to France.”

A general shriek went up around the tent. “Mrs. Nash is not shipping us off!” Dorina cried between bites of cracker. “I’m sure a few of these girls are hoping to join up with the Red Cross or some dreadful thing, but they’ll have to get up a subscription and raise the funds to go. Their fathers won’t pay for it.”

There were nods all around. Liddy said, “The Red Cross is only taking trained nurses, and that’s a three-year course. There’s a church group on Long Island that sent a girl last spring, but she only lasted two months. My mother knew one of the ladies at that church. It cost them a fortune and the girl never got out of Paris. They decided they’d rather donate to the refugees.”

“Would your mother let you go?” Ellie asked, turning to Beulah.

The rest of them fell silent. Every eye was fixed on her. Just the word made something catch in her throat. Mother.

“Well?” Ellie asked again. “Would she?”