permanent grave: Plot C, Row 44, Grave 16, Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Meuse.
She’d felt an ironic liberation from knowing exactly where he was.
In that same folder, in a cabinet of folders, in a storeroom in the Adjunct General’s Office in Washington, D.C., was a carbon copy of Cora’s application to join the American Gold Star Mothers, a national organization that had been chartered by Congress the previous year. It was open to mothers of sons or daughters who served in the Allied Forces during the World War and died as the result of that service. Cora had typed her answers to their questions on the library Remington: natural father of veteran (“Curtis Blake, deceased”); cause of death of veteran (“Killed in action”); remarks (“Meuse-Argonne, France. Cited for gallantry in action and especially meritorious service. The local post is named in memory of him”).
When President Herbert Hoover signed the Pilgrimage Bill in 1930, assigning five million dollars for the government-sponsored pilgrimages, those folders were opened once again, and the status of the mothers and wives of American soldiers buried overseas was reexamined. Cora Blake was found eligible to go. In February 1931 came the confirmed date of her trip—June 2, 1931—in the letter she had been so thrilled to receive in the dead of winter at Healy’s cannery.
At that point it was no longer grief that pushed her, it was pride, and she was surprised by the force of it. She supposed that she had reconciled those feelings long ago, but they must have been slowly uncurling in her mind, like those coils of dry kindling in the kitchen stove, because with one hot breath they burst into a ball of fire.
The moment she read that letter—that she was really going!—she’d felt deep kinship with thousands of women she’d never met. They were from different parts of the country and all walks of life, but what they had in common was this: they had each gone to the front window and taken down the banner that showed a blue star set in a field of white surrounded by red borders. The blue star symbolized hope and pride, one star for every family member in military service. Most likely they’d hung it up in private and taken it down in private; most likely they’d made it themselves, of cotton or felt, or crocheted it, maybe with tassels and colored cords. Then one day they accepted the lonely task of replacing the blue star with one of gold. Gold meantsacrifice to the cause of liberty and freedom. It meant they were now Gold Star Mothers. They hadn’t asked for this, nor did they have any say in how it happened, but they been given to bear the most violent and dark cost of the nation’s war. Each one shouldered this responsibility without protest, as stoically as her child had rested a rifle against his chest. More than 100,000 American mothers lost their cherished sons. Each had been alone; but they were alone no longer.
Cora had straightaway written to the president of the New England chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers, offering to help. She was experienced in running things, she’d said earnestly. Aside from recruiting high school girls (“—and you know how lazy they can be”) to clean out the library from top to bottom, she was president of the Student Health Council, where parents volunteer to keep the records for school physicals and vaccinations. Even when she no longer had a child in school, she emphasized, to show her dedication, she’d kept the position to this day. (Unsure if they would consider this a plus or a minus, she did not add that she was unable to get anyone to test the urine samples, and so she did them herself.)
The answer she’d received was a surprise.
The reply had come from Mrs. Genevieve Olsen of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was written in midnight-blue ink on ivory Crane’s stationery embossed with
Olsen Railroad & Co
., making no secret of the fact that she was
that
Mrs.