Page 100 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Betsy turned her head into the pillow and wept, which the nurse assured her was an entirely normal thing under the circumstances, and Betsy wasn’t sure if by “the circumstances” she meant childbirth or giving one’s baby away to be claimed by another.

It was not, apparently, an entirely normal thing to keep weeping for the next month. It wasn’t that Betsy meant to; it was just that she couldn’t seem to stop, as if the tears were coming out for everything, for her mother, for her father, for Charles, for Ava, for all the opportunities she’d thrown away, for the baby she’d thrown away. Ava had been right about everything. She knew—she knew—that this was what was best, that her baby was better off without her, better off being raised as Charles’s son, with a mother who didn’t sow destruction and hairpins in her wake, but she couldn’t seem to convince her heart of that or her tear ducts.

She cried and cried until the doctors came and examined her and pronounced her blooming—only they said it in German, of course, a long compound word that used about sixteen syllables to contain one thought. Betsy didn’t want to bloom. She didn’t want to be. It felt like an insult that her body should go on being healthy when Charles was in the ground and her baby in a cradle rocked by another woman.

She really ought to have just died.

She had seen so many people die. Why couldn’t she have been one of them? Why couldn’t she have died of typhoid instead of her mother? Betsy could picture their old house, the one in Yonkers, the one from before they moved to Boston, the one where she had played with the guttersnipes and picked up the infection that had killed the wrong person. Somewhere, there was another version of the story, where her mother survived and had half a dozen other children and Alex didn’t grow up angry and bitter and proper and marry that awful Lavinia and Ava had an entirely different roommate at Smith and Charles never met her and never came to Lamia and was there in Athens still, among his parquet and his porcelain, dreaming over the finds from Delphi.

But then her baby would never have been born, and Betsy couldn’t quite find it in herself to wish him away, even if she devoutly wished herself away. It was a paradox, and one she couldn’t solve.

The doctors argued over how best to treat her. Some thought she needed something to interest her, so they brought her books and papers. They found her American papers, whatever they had been able to scrounge, she supposed. It was kind of them. Kind, but pointless. Betsy had no interest at all in the fog that had engulfed New York, causing numerous rail collisions. She flipped listlessly past accounts of debates on Cuba in the Senate. She stared blankly at the ads. Lister’s Dentifrice thought she needed whiter teeth. Ogram’s wanted to make her beautiful with almond-and-glycerin cream. Hunyadi Janos wanted to help her with constipation, dyspepsia, and liver complaints.

What about dyspepsia of the soul? Where was the cure for that? No amount of dentifrice and glycerin cream were going to scrub her clean again.

When they found the papers wadded up, flung one by one across the room, the doctors decided perhaps stimulation wasn’t what she needed. She needed rest, complete rest.

And why not? That was the story, after all, the story that Aikaterini had put about. Betsy had gone to Switzerland for a rest cure. It was a very good story, in its way, combining the reality of her four months of war nursing with just the tantalizing hint of a total breakdown. People could feel sympathetic and superior all at the same time.

So Betsy rested. And she dreamed. But not of what she had seen. Not of the refugees at Vólos or the battlefield at Domokos. She dreamed of Delphi. She dreamed of Charles dying at Thermopylae, unaccountably attired in Spartan armor and his own panama hat. She dreamed of the angel on the coin around her neck appearing before her with a fiery sword and, for some reason that wasn’t entirely clear, an accordion. She had no idea where the accordion came from.

Nothing felt quite real, least of all herself, although that might have had something to do with the drafts the doctors gave her. Her mind and body felt strangely disconnected. Sometimes she imagined herself back in Northampton and woke with her feet already on the floor, convinced she was late for class.

Days drifted like the snow outside her window.

They kept sharp things away from her. Anything with a point, even a pen. Betsy could have told them that was ridiculous. She didn’t need to slice herself open; she was rotting from within. Obediently, she went with her attendants to take the waters at the thermal springs, as if the minerals might leach whatever strange toxin she carried within her that brought death to those fool enough to love her.

She’d spared her child that, at least.

Betsy knew that somewhere else in the spa, the baroness and her retinue were housed. While a nurse wrapped yards and yards of cloth around Betsy’s chest, binding her breasts tight to stop the milk, somewhere, not so very far away, a wet nurse was suckling her baby.

They caught Betsy once, in the night, creeping down the corridor, trying to find her baby, to look at him, just to look at him. She wasn’t going to touch him, hold him, lift him. Just look at him. Just once.

There was a nurse outside her room at night after that. To stop her from sleepwalking, they explained. So she wouldn’t hurt herself.

It was all very diplomatic, very tactful. She was a paying customer, after all. Not an inmate, this wasn’t that sort of place, Aikaterini wouldn’t send her to that sort of place. This was a hotel and spa where people paid exorbitant sums to take the waters and be looked after.

So she let them look after her and she slept and wept and slept again as winter softened into spring and the trees began to develop bits of green fuzz where there had only been bare branches. The fuzz turned into leaves, proper leaves, bright and exuberant. Easter came and went with church bells ringing.

Letters came to her. They let her have her letters. Letters from the Athenian society women she had nursed with, asking when she’d be back, inviting her to teas and lectures. Letters from her colleagues at the American School, tactfully not asking her whether she was coming back. Letters from Aikaterini. Chatty, gossipy, nonchalant letters.

In one, she included an announcement of birth. A son, to the Baron (deceased) and Baroness of Robecourt.

It wasn’t meant to be cruel, Betsy knew. It was Aikaterini’s way of telling her it was done, it was time to come back and move on. But Betsy couldn’t; she was stuck; she was stuck in her mind and her body; she couldn’t leave knowing that her child was still here, somewhere, and that if she listened, sometimes she could catch the faint sound of his infant cry.

Or the not-so-faint sound of his infant cry.

There, in the courtyard, there were carriages prepared for travel, carriages and servants and trunks being carried out, and, there—yes, there was her baby, wrapped in a blue wool blanket, held in the arms of a woman she didn’t know.

Betsy didn’t stop to think. She flung herself out of the room, down the stairs, into the courtyard, never mind she was barefoot, never mind it was noon and she was in her nightdress, never mind that her hair was in a braid down her back.

There was her baby and they were taking him away.

Betsy barreled through the door, ignoring the startled noises of the staff. She could see her baby, see the little round head with its tufts of fuzz sticking up out of the blanket that was wrapped around him. It might be May but there was still a chill in the air in the Alps. The nursemaid holding him joggled him up and down, making cooing noises.

The baroness, tall and elegant in a high-crowned hat and a tight-fitting velvet jacket, leaned over and tucked the blanket more comfortably around his neck.

Betsy stopped short. She stopped short there in the mud, her nightdress flopping around her bare ankles. She wasn’t sure what she’d intended to do, but whatever it was, her mind stopped and stuttered at the sight of that simple gesture.