Sisters of the Great War

by Suzanne Feldman

Genres: Siblings; World War I

Synopsis

Not Yet Available

Release date: October 26, 2021

Publisher: MIRA Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

JOHN McCRAE

CHAPTER ONE

Baltimore, Maryland
August 1914

Ruth Duncan fanned herself with the newspaper in the summer heat as Grandpa Gerald put up a British flag outside the house. If he’d had a uniform—of any kind—he would have worn it. People on the sidewalk paused and pointed, but Grandpa, still a proper English gent even after almost twenty years in the US, smoothed his white beard and straightened his waistcoat, ignoring the onlookers.

“That’s done,” he said.

Ruth’s own interest in the war was limited to what she read in the paper from across the dining table. Grandpa would snap the paper open before he ate breakfast. She could see the headlines and the back side of the last page, but not much more. Grandpa would grunt his appreciation of whatever was inside, snort at what displeased him, and sometimes laugh. On August 12, the headline in the Baltimore Sun read, France And Great Britain Declare War On Austria-Hungary, and Grandpa wasn’t laughing.

Cook brought in the morning mail and put it on the table next to Grandpa. She was a round, gray-haired woman who left a puff of flour behind her wherever she went.

“Letter from England, sir,” Cook said, leaving the envelope and a dusting of flour on the dark mahogany. She smiled at Ruth and left for the kitchen.

Grandpa tore open the letter.

Ruth waited while he read. It was from Richard and Diane Doweling, his friends in London who still wrote to him after all these years. They’d sent their son, John, to Harvard in Massachusetts for his medical degree. Ruth had never met John Doweling, but she was jealous of him, his opportunities, his apparent successes. The Dowelings sent letters whenever John won some award or other. No doubt this was more of the same. Ruth drummed her fingers on the table and eyed the dining room clock. In ten minutes, she would need to catch the trolley that would take her up to the Loyola College of Nursing, where she would be taught more of the things she had already learned from her father. The nuns at Loyola were dedicated nurses, and they knew what they were doing. Some were outstanding teachers, but others were simply mired in the medicine of the last century. Ruth was frustrated and bored, but Father paid her tuition, and what Father wanted, Father got.

Ruth tugged at her school uniform—a white apron over a long white dress, which would never see a spot of blood. “What do they say, Grandpa?”

He was frowning. “John is enlisting. They’ve rushed his graduation at Harvard so he can go home and join the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

“How can they rush graduation?” Ruth asked. “That seems

silly. What if he misses a class in, say, diseases of the liver?”

Grandpa folded the letter and looked up. “I don’t think he’ll be treating diseases of the liver on the battlefield. Anyway, he’s coming to Baltimore before he ships out.”

“Here?” said Ruth in surprise. “But why?”

“For one thing,” said Grandpa, “I haven’t seen him since he was three years old. For another, you two have a common interest.”

“You mean medicine?” Ruth asked. “Oh, Grandpa. What could I possibly talk about with him? I’m not even a nurse yet, and he’s—he’s a doctor.” She spread her hands. “Should we discuss how to wrap a bandage?”

“As long as you discuss something.” He pushed the letter across the table to her and got up. “You’ll be showing him around town.”

“Me?” said Ruth. “Why me?”

“Because your sister—” Grandpa nodded at Elise, just clumping down the stairs in her nightgown and bathrobe “—has dirty fingernails.” He started up the stairs. “Good morning, my dear,” he said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Uh-huh,” Elise mumbled as she slumped into her seat at the table.

As Grandpa continued up the stairs, Ruth called after him. “But when is he coming?”

“His train arrives Saturday at noon,” Grandpa shouted back. “Find something nice to wear. You too, Elise.”

Elise rubbed her eyes. “What’s going on?”

Ruth pushed the letter at her and got up to go. “Read it,” she said. “You’ll see.”

---

Ruth made her way down Thirty-Third Street with her heavy book bag slung over one shoulder, heading for the trolley stop, four blocks away, on Charles. Summer classes were almost over, and as usual, the August air in Baltimore was impenetrably hot and almost unbreathable. It irritated Ruth to think that she would arrive at Loyola sweaty under her arms, her hair frizzed around her nurse’s cap from the humidity. The nuns liked neatness, modest decorum. Not perspiring young women who wished they were somewhere else.

Elise, Ruth thought, as she waited for a break in the noisy traffic on Charles Street, could’ve driven her in the motorcar, but no, she’d slept late. Her younger sister could do pretty much anything, it seemed, except behave like a girl. Elise, who had been able to take apart Grandpa’s pocket watch and put it back together when she was six years old, was a useful mystery to both Father and Grandpa. She could fix the car—cheaper than the expensive mechanics. For some reason, Elise wasn’t obliged to submit to the same expectations as Ruth—she could keep her nails short and dirty. Ruth wondered, as she had since she was a girl, if it was her younger sister’s looks. She was a mirror image of their mother, who had died in childbirth with Elise. Did that make her special in Father’s eyes?

CHAPTER ONE

Baltimore, Maryland
August 1914

Ruth Duncan fanned herself with the newspaper in the summer heat as Grandpa Gerald put up a British flag outside the house. If he’d had a uniform—of any kind—he would have worn it. People on the sidewalk paused and pointed, but Grandpa, still a proper English gent even after almost twenty years in the US, smoothed his white beard and straightened his waistcoat, ignoring the onlookers.

“That’s done,” he said.

Ruth’s own interest in the war was limited to what she read in the paper from across the dining table. Grandpa would snap the paper open before he ate breakfast. She could see the headlines and the back side of the last page, but not much more. Grandpa would grunt his appreciation of whatever was inside, snort at what displeased him, and sometimes laugh. On August 12, the headline in the Baltimore Sun read, France And Great Britain Declare War On Austria-Hungary, and Grandpa wasn’t laughing.

Cook brought in the morning mail and put it on the table next to Grandpa. She was a round, gray-haired woman who left a puff of flour behind her wherever she went.

“Letter from England, sir,” Cook said, leaving the envelope and a dusting of flour on the dark mahogany. She smiled at Ruth and left for the kitchen.

Grandpa tore open the letter.

Ruth waited while he read. It was from Richard and Diane Doweling, his friends in London who still wrote to him after all these years. They’d sent their son, John, to Harvard in Massachusetts for his medical degree. Ruth had never met John Doweling, but she was jealous of him, his opportunities, his apparent successes. The Dowelings sent letters whenever John won some award or other. No doubt this was more of the same. Ruth drummed her fingers on the table and eyed the dining room clock. In ten minutes, she would need to catch the trolley that would take her up to the Loyola College of Nursing, where she would be taught more of the things she had already learned from her father. The nuns at Loyola were dedicated nurses, and they knew what they were doing. Some were outstanding teachers, but others were simply mired in the medicine of the last century. Ruth was frustrated and bored, but Father paid her tuition, and what Father wanted, Father got.

Ruth tugged at her school uniform—a white apron over a long white dress, which would never see a spot of blood. “What do they say, Grandpa?”

He was frowning. “John is enlisting. They’ve rushed his graduation at Harvard so he can go home and join the Royal Army Medical Corps.”

“How can they rush graduation?” Ruth asked. “That seems silly. What if he misses a class in, say, diseases of the liver?”

Grandpa folded the letter and looked up. “I don’t think he’ll be treating diseases of the liver on the battlefield. Anyway, he’s coming to Baltimore before he ships out.”

“Here?” said Ruth in surprise. “But why?”

“For one thing,” said Grandpa, “I haven’t seen him since he was three years old. For another, you two have a common interest.”

“You mean medicine?” Ruth asked. “Oh, Grandpa. What could I possibly talk about with him? I’m not even a nurse yet, and he’s—he’s a doctor.” She spread her hands. “Should we discuss how to wrap a bandage?”

“As long as you discuss something.” He pushed the letter across the table to her and got up. “You’ll be showing him around town.”

“Me?” said Ruth. “Why me?”

“Because your sister—” Grandpa nodded at Elise, just clumping down the stairs in her nightgown and bathrobe “—has dirty fingernails.” He started up the stairs. “Good morning, my dear,” he said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Uh-huh,” Elise mumbled as she slumped into her seat at the table.

As Grandpa continued up the stairs, Ruth called after him. “But when is he coming?”

“His train arrives Saturday at noon,” Grandpa shouted back. “Find something nice to wear. You too, Elise.”

Elise rubbed her eyes. “What’s going on?”

Ruth pushed the letter at her and got up to go. “Read it,” she said. “You’ll see.”

---

Ruth made her way down Thirty-Third Street with her heavy book bag slung over one shoulder, heading for the trolley stop, four blocks away, on Charles. Summer classes were almost over, and as usual, the August air in Baltimore was impenetrably hot and almost unbreathable. It irritated Ruth to think that she would arrive at Loyola sweaty under her arms, her hair frizzed around her nurse’s cap from the humidity. The nuns liked neatness, modest decorum. Not perspiring young women who wished they were somewhere else.

Elise, Ruth thought, as she waited for a break in the noisy traffic on Charles Street, could’ve driven her in the motorcar, but no, she’d slept late. Her younger sister could do pretty much anything, it seemed, except behave like a girl. Elise, who had been able to take apart Grandpa’s pocket watch and put it back together when she was six years old, was a useful mystery to both Father and Grandpa. She could fix the car—cheaper than the expensive mechanics. For some reason, Elise wasn’t obliged to submit to the same expectations as Ruth—she could keep her nails short and dirty. Ruth wondered, as she had since she was a girl, if it was her younger sister’s looks. She was a mirror image of their mother, who had died in childbirth with Elise. Did that make her special in Father’s eyes?

An iceman drove a sweating horse past her. The horse raised its tail, grunted and dropped a pile of manure, rank in the heat, right in front of her, as though to augur the rest of her day. The iceman twisted in the cart to tip his hat. “Sorry, Sister!”

Ruth let her breath out through her teeth. Maybe the truth of the matter was that she was the “sorry sister.” It was at this exact corner that her dreams of becoming a doctor, to follow in her father’s footsteps, had been shot down. When she was ten, and the governess said she’d done well on her writing and math, she was allowed to start going along on Father’s house calls and help in his office downstairs. Father had let her do simple things at first—mix plaster while he positioned a broken ankle, give medicine to children with the grippe—but she watched everything he did and listened carefully. By the time she was twelve, she could give him a diagnosis, and she remembered her first one vividly, identifying a man’s abdominal pain as appendicitis.

“You did a good job,” Father had said to her, as he’d reined old Bess around this very corner. “You’ll make an excellent nurse one day.”

Ruth remembered laughing because she’d thought he was joking. Her father’s praise was like gold. “A nurse?” she’d said. “One day I’ll be a doctor, just like you!”

“Yes, a nurse,” he’d said firmly, without a hint of a smile. It was the tone he used for patients who wouldn’t take their medicine.

“But I want to be a doctor.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t sounded sorry at all. “Girls don’t become doctors. They become nurses and wives. Tomorrow, if there’s time, we’ll visit a nursing college. When you’re eighteen, that’s where you’ll go.”

“But—”

He’d shaken his head sharply, cutting her off. “It isn’t done, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

A decade later, Ruth could still feel the shock in her heart. It had never occurred to her that she couldn’t be a doctor because she was a girl. And now, John Doweling was coming to town to cement her future as a doctor’s wife. That was what everyone had in mind. She knew it. Maybe John didn’t know yet, but he was the only one.

Ruth frowned and lifted her skirts with one hand, balancing the book bag with the other, and stepped around the manure as the trolley came clanging up Charles.

CHAPTER TWO

That evening, Elise was hunched over the motorcar on Charles Street where the engine had conked out. Father had come home irritated and sent her out after supper to fix it, or retrieve it, or something. Just have it ready for calls the next day.

With her stained blue mechanic’s apron covering her long dress, Elise peered around, expecting the stares of passersby—a woman working on a car? She was used to the scorn. Once, while she was driving, someone’s snotty brat had thrown a rock at her, missing her, but leaving a little dent in the shining black body of the car. Here, so close to the university, the least she expected was mocking comments from passing fraternity boys. That’d happened more than once. In her experience, though, the women were the worst, with their silent, judgmental eyes. Elise could almost read their thoughts—almost. When they stared at her, she felt accused of something—taking a man’s job? She wasn’t sure. The women put their noses in the air and hustled their children along, as though just the sight of her working on a car would somehow scar them for life.

At this point, it was so late, hardly anyone was on the street. There were no hecklers, so she focused on the engine again. Smelling of gasoline, black with oil, it was barely visible in this dark space between streetlamps.

She found the fuel line by touch—where the problems with the motorcar usually began—and was just detaching it, when a shadow fell over the already shadowy engine. She looked up and found herself staring into the amused eyes of a man in a pin-striped suit.

“Do you need help, miss?”

This happened all the time, too. Men who knew nothing about engines were always ready to dive right in, assuming she was a damsel in distress.

“No, thanks,” said Elise briskly. “I know what’s wrong with it.”

“It was an empty offer, actually,” said the man. “I don’t know a thing about motors.” He smiled at her. His lips were full and his face round. He had beautiful eyelashes. “You must be quite an expert,” he said.

Elise made herself look away, back at the grimy innards, the invisible fuel line. “I’ve been working on this one ever since my father bought it.”

“Your father’s a mechanic?”

“He’s a doctor,” said Elise.

“A doctor? Then who taught you what to do?”

Elise spared him a glance. Was he flirting with her? That would be a first. “I just watched what the mechanics did.” Should she tell him the details? The men laughing as she unscrewed the spark plugs when she was ten, and the subsequent streaks of grease on her sundress? The way Father had sold off old Bess and the buggy to the milkman as soon as he was convinced his daughter could fix the car? How the small stable behind the house smelled of gasoline now instead of hay and leather?

“Really,” she said down into the engine, “I just like to fix things.” She wished he would go away.

“How extraordinary,” said the man in an entirely different tone—sweeter, higher, utterly fetching. “Maybe you could come and fix my motorcar sometime.”

Elise looked up. At first she wasn’t sure. Then her mouth opened as she saw through the him, into the her.

His—her—smile widened, and the man—the woman dressed in a pin-striped suit—grinned. “The thing breaks down all the time. Maybe,” she said, “it just needs a loving touch.”

Elise straightened, wrench in her hand. The back of her neck prickled. The prickle shivered down her spine, lower and lower, until it ended up all funny and tingly. Elise could feel herself blushing deeply in the dark.

“Do your friends fix cars, too?” the woman asked.

“I don’t...have many friends,” Elise replied.

“And the ones you do have, don’t understand you,” the woman said. She raised an unmistakably suggestive eyebrow. “They think you’re peculiar. What about your family?”

“My—my father sent me out to fix—you know.” She gestured at the car, its open hood. “This.”

“So he at least understands.”

“Understands?” Elise asked.

“You don’t have to hide it from him.”

“Hide?” Elise repeated. “Hide what?”

The woman let out an easy laugh. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She turned and started walking away.

“Hey!” Elise shouted. “Wait! I can’t just leave the car.”

The woman beckoned, her smile wide and languid, as though every question could be answered just by following.

Elise, speechless, looked at the car, and then at the pinstripes disappearing into the night. With the wrench still in her hand, she followed.

---

Elise trailed the woman at a distance, across Charles Street, through Wyman Park, and down Howard Street, through thin crowds into a sketchier neighborhood, where she had driven but never walked. Houses around her became storefronts, then drinking establishments. Elise wanted to pause and get her bearings, but couldn’t lose sight of the pin-striped suit. Streetlamps cast hard shadows, and she hurried though them, bumping into people—women in low-cut blouses who might have been prostitutes and men who might have been their customers. Ahead of her was the woman dressed as a man, making her way down the street, strutting as though she owned it.

Elise followed until the woman stopped in front of a bar marked with a single purple musical note painted on the door. She waited until Elise was close enough to see her open the door and go in.

Elise stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, aware, finally, of her racing heart, the wrench in her hand, and her surroundings. Between her and the door were four or five couples, women in nice dresses, men in smart suits all out of place in this run-down part of the city. It took her a moment to ask herself the blindingly obvious question, and in that moment, their eyes turned to examine her. Heat rushed into her face. What did they see? An eighteen-year-old girl dressed in a mechanic’s filthy apron, her long brown hair tied back. And what did she see? For the first time in her life, Elise saw through their disguises. These people could be anywhere. Walking down the street. Driving in cars. Shopping at the market. She realized she was holding her breath—perhaps everyone was—and then one of the “men” bent to kiss one of the women on her full, painted lips. Elise let her breath out in a gasp. The woman giggled. The two of them separated long enough to stare at Elise.

“Girl,” said the one dressed as a man, in a low but distinctly female voice. “You simply must make up your mind.”

Elise stifled the blurt of words brimming in her mouth, turned and ran. She ran, not knowing if she would have spoken or screamed. Make up my mind about what? She bolted up the length of Howard Street until, panting, she had to stop and walk. She walked in the dark until she found her father’s car and hunched over the engine, breathing in its fumes.

In her heart, she knew the answer to the question, and had known for quite some time.