whose name is Madelon / Pours out the wine while they laugh and carry on . . .”
The troops crowded into the basement hall of the Gare du Nord banged on the tables, raising their glasses to the singer, who was belting out a popular ballad in both French and English. This was their last hurrah, one last bit of Paris to take away with them as they waited for the trains that would carry them back to the front.
Emmie hovered behind the soldiers, a tray of cigarettes in her hands, trying to figure out what she was meant to do.
“O Madelon you are the only one, / O Madelon for you we’ll carry on . . .”
There had been a comedian on earlier. Emmie hadn’t heard all the jokes—she’d been at the wrong end of the room for that—but from the way the men laughed, she’d suspected they might have been bawdy. Or maybe the men would have guffawed at anything just then.
But now the night had moved on, the wine had been poured and poured again, and the men were singing along, raggedly, singing to keep from crying.
“But Madelon she takes it all in fun, / She laughs and says, ‘You see, it can’t be done’ . . .”
There was something so terribly lonesome in that song. The room was crowded with men, hot with perspiration. Emmie wondered if each of them felt as alone as she did right now.
“You’ll come with us to help out the Red Cross at the Gare du Nord, won’t you?” Maud had asked, taking Emmie’s agreement for granted, and Emmie had agreed, not so much because she wanted to, but because it was driving her half-mad, drifting along, waiting for their real work to begin.
It wasn’t that she was idle. Seven hours a day, every day, Emmie sat in a temporary barrack in the Bois de Boulogne, making casts out of plaster of paris, ward boots, chin supports, splints. Maud and Liza had volunteered with the Red Cross; one of the other women, Miss Mills, had chosen to nurse at the Villier Fund hospital with another Smith classmate, not a member of the Unit. The doctors were away, touring hospitals in the war zone. But the rest of the Smith College Relief Unit went every day from the hotel on the Quai Voltaire to the workroom pour les blessés on the Bois du Boulogne.
The women chatted as they worked, sharing bits of themselves in the way one did when one’s hands were occupied, speaking of their families, their lives, their work. Emmie learned about Miss Englund’s brother, in the 11th Engineers, and her invalid mother, who was always having spasms; they heard a great deal about Miss Patton’s younger sister and her new husband, who had been Miss Patton’s beau first, or, at least, had seemed to be. Not that she said it in so many words, but it was clear all the same, at least to Emmie, who was used to receiving confidences and reading between the lines.
Except with Kate. The only one Emmie couldn’t read these days was Kate.
No one could say Kate shirked, because she didn’t. She turned out more splints than the rest of them put together. No one could call her unfriendly. She listened and commented and even joked, but she never, not once, shared anything about herself. Not even late at night in the quiet of the attic room. Not even to Emmie.
Emmie tried to make things better; she redoubled her attempts, falling over backward to try to show Kate how much she was still her friend, that it was all just the same as it had always been. But the more she tried to jolly her, the more Kate had withdrawn behind her eyes, faultlessly polite, the reserve that had always been part of her hardening into a wall, and Emmie hadn’t the slightest idea how to make her come out of it again.
So when Maud asked Emmie to volunteer to help with the show the Red Cross put on at the Gare du Nord for departing soldiers, Emmie said yes, just to have something to do, someplace to go—and, maybe, just a bit, so it wouldn’t look like she was quite so starved for companionship. She didn’t particularly like Maud or Liza, but they were there.
Except, they weren’t. They moved easily through the crowd, laughing and joking with the men, while Emmie stood in the back, feeling awkward and not quite sure what to