I stepped down the path. “Where’s the doctor, anyway?”
I turned, silent.
“Since when does the palace hire mutes?” he asked.
How could I not answer? “Next to the sweetshop,” I said.
Tatiana reached for Olga’s hand, her face ashen. Why had I spoken?
“Hold it right there,” Stas said. “Get back here this minute.”
CHAPTER
30
Eliza
1917
By May of 1917 the polio epidemic slowed for the time being, the daily newspaper updates showing a few cases per month. Many young Southampton men enlisted as the war raged on but somehow the colony felt immune to the struggle and resumed their favorite time-worn, daily cycle: golf, lunch, tennis, and a dip in the ocean. It seemed selfish to ignore the suffering overseas and while Mother worked for Belgian war relief I plunged into my Russian committee efforts and helped Princess Yesipov gather food and small comforts for those Russian women not yet placed, still living at the boarding house.
One Sunday evening I said goodbye to Mother and Caroline as Thomas drove them to the train, city-bound, Caroline laden with a book bag full of Chapin schoolbooks. When he returned I asked him to drive me to the Meadow Club, one of the few remaining clubs to which Mother and I still belonged, which advertised itself as “A place for manly exercise and innocent recreation, with twenty-five tennis courts and telephones in every room.” Perhaps they could find a way to employ a few White Russian women? With Henry gone, my standing at the club was certainly diminished since he was the member, but surely I still had some pull there. Father, who built our cottage in 1890, had been one of the first and most devoted members. Though neither Mother nor I said it, as widows the club was our lifeline.
It was always casual at the club on Sundays and Joseph, the cook whom I’d known since I was a child, would fix me a plate. Would he think it funny that, due to the war, suddenly anything German was being renamed? Sauerkraut was “Liberty cabbage.” Even dachshunds were renamed “Liberty pups.”
What harm would it do to step out and see some of Henry’s and my old set? Maybe talk about the war news, stir the membership to support my Russian émigrés? Of course, there was the danger that Electra, terribly fond of racquet sports, might be there, but as much as I hated to admit it, I was lonely.
I dressed quickly to get it over with, still wearing black. How I ached to wear soft fabric, in any color but black. With war deaths mounting, mourning rules had been relaxed to spare the families of the dead the additional sorrow of seeing so many in black. Many women in mourning wore no sign of it at all. But giving up black meant giving up Henry.
Young Thomas drove me to the club, his chestnut hair smoothed under his chauffeur’s cap. His scent of shaving cream wafted to me in the backseat of Mother’s car. Had it really been five years since Henry had hired him? The sun set as we drove along the beach road.
“I’m signing up tomorrow,” Thomas said, smiling at me in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, I’m so proud of you, Thomas. But what will we do without you?” Tears stung my eyes when I thought of him in uniform and of his mother, probably worried sick about her only son leaving.
“You need to learn how to drive, Miz Ferriday.”
I smiled at that and settled in for the short trip. My stomach growled. What would life have been like if Henry had been alive and the war had never started? Sofya and Luba would be safe and we’d still be on our trip. In India? I relived it so often in my mind, shopping the bright Bombay markets, the sultry air ripe with cumin and saffron, Caroline and I wrapped in soft saris of turquoise and lime green. I imagined lunching with Henry on crimson curry and fried flatbread in the dining car of a Himalayan Railway locomotive car. We’d thrust our heads from the window as we climbed higher into the emerald mountains, headed for the fragrant tea fields of Darjeeling.
Thomas turned into the Meadow Club, tires crunching the crushed-shell drive, the place understated as always, bearing no sign. The clubhouse with its weathered gray shingles and crisp linen white trim loomed large in the dusk.
I wandered through the dining room, the dull thud of distant waves crashing on the shore mixed with the sounds of