starting to think what they knew, what they could do. “We could ask those nice Harvard men to sing glees. Maybe you might ask them? I’m sure they would listen to you.”
“If you think it would be useful . . .” said Maud, but Emmie could tell she was itching to get out there and put her persuasive powers to use.
Emmie looked around the circle of women; she didn’t know them yet as individuals, but they felt familiar anyway, familiar as Smith women, familiar as all the committee women and settlement house volunteers with whom she had worked over the years, women who had helped her drape bunting and serve hot meals and put on comic operettas. She felt a surge of warmth for them all. “There must be other people on the boat with all sorts of talents. We could put out an open call for performers!”
“It will have to be before we enter the war zone,” Mrs. Rutherford cautioned, looking up from her notes. “Once we cross that line, there’ll be no more music after dark. That will be . . . a week from now.”
“We could call it One Last Night of Music,” suggested Miss Cooper, and then looked alarmed at her own words. “I mean, not the last night of music forever. Just the last night of music on the ship.”
“Yes, yes. Ava, if you would come with me?” Mrs. Rutherford gathered up her files, gesturing to Dr. Stringfellow, who served as assistant director of the Unit as well as their primary medical authority. “And Dr. Pruyn?”
Emmie felt her tension lighten as Julia turned to go. She loved Julia, she did. They were first cousins, practically the same age—except that Julia had been born six months earlier, first in that as she was in everything. Emmie had always suspected that she bored and frustrated Julia, but it was hard to tell. Julia kept herself to herself, twisting back her emotions as tightly and adroitly as she did the golden coil of hair at the back of her head, not a strand out of place. Julia’s mother, Aunt May, was just the same way. Emmie had always been a little terrified of Aunt May, who lived an exotic, continental existence, returning to New York every so often to drop Julia at the rambling brownstone on East Thirty-Fourth Street “to be a sister for Emmaline.”
And they were sisters—of sorts. Sisters who loved each other even when they didn’t understand each other very well, which was most of the time.
Feeling guilty, Emmie called softly, “You will sing at the concert, won’t you, Julia? No one has a voice like yours.”
Her cousin gave her a curt nod of acknowledgment before following Dr. Stringfellow out of the room.
Emmie could feel Kate looking at her. “She means well.”
“Hmm,” said Kate, which was Kate’s way of disagreeing entirely.
“Come,” said Emmie, hooking her arm through Kate’s, feeling obscurely cheered. She knew that “hmm” of old. It had been six years, but Kate was still the same Kate, and there was something reassuring in that. They said blood was thicker than water, but she had always felt more at home with Kate than with Julia, even if Julia came of the same Knickerbocker stock and Kate from what her father called “those people.” “I’ll show you our cabin. Don’t expect terribly much. It really is pretty dire.”
“It can’t be worse than my room in Boston,” said Kate as Emmie pushed open the door.
“I thought it was a very nice room,” lied Emmie, groping her way through the darkness until she bumped into a berth, sitting down with a thump that made the springs squeak. The portholes had been boarded over, casting the cabin into permanent gloom.
“It was a dreadful room,” said Kate, and suddenly they were both laughing, as if they were eighteen again, and not twenty-eight and on their way to a war zone. “Be grateful it was, or I’d never have agreed to come.”
“I’m so glad you did,” said Emmie honestly. “It makes it all feel less . . .”
“Mad?” suggested Kate, lowering herself carefully onto her own berth.
“Daunting,” said Emmie.
They were quiet for a moment, the dark room close around them. Why didn’t you ever visit? Emmie wanted to ask. Why didn’t you write?
They had never stopped being friends; they had simply stopped being friends who saw one another. She had known Kate was busy, that Kate had to get her own living, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt all