276: The women’s committee ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 6 continues
THE WOMEN’S COMMITTEE of the Council of National Defense produced a long list of efforts that they considered worthwhile contributions to the war effort, but the writing of lascivious letters to soldiers was not among them. A woman in Chacallit was likely to be asked to join the Back Yard Gardeners (though the steep slope of the land in Chacallit limited the efforts of this group), the Picklers and Canners (who specialized in sauerkraut), the Children’s Bureau (which sought to “keep the living standards, spirits, and chins of the children of Chacallit’s men-in-arms up”), the Chacallit chapter of “America First” (which, lacking immigrants to instruct in English and citizenship, had cast about for another project and had been steered by Ben Piper’s original contact in Chacallit, Axel Schweib, whose wife headed the Chacallit chapter, in the direction of the Doughboy’s Dozen and so put its efforts into purchasing for departing soldiers subscriptions to the entire series of books), or the Red Cross Knitters and Stitchers (who specialized in bed socks). However, of all the kinds of volunteer work that women were doing to support the war effort, the one that most appealed to Lorna was the assembling of Red Cross Comfort Kits. In American Women and the World War, Ida Clyde Clarke describes these Comfort Kits as “bags made in three styles with pockets containing comforts, buttons and sewing outfits, games, soap, socks, and the like.” In the kits assembled in Chacallit, “the like” included money clips, cuff links, collar stays, and the like, donated by the manufacturers in town, who also donated brochures describing their other products.
Lorna was also kept busy by her duties as Herb’s representative for Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of Indispensable Information for Modern Times. These duties were sweet, for they required her, she had decided, to write to Herb more and more frequently. She began her early letters with news about the book business, as she did this one:
I finished delivering The Automobile: Its Selection, Care, and Use. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that everyone is quite satisfied with the book. Reverend Binder even stopped me the other day to say that he had been reading the chapter on “Housing the Automobile,” and that it has inspired him to build a garage. I knew you would enjoy hearing that.
Soon, however, she would turn from business to other matters:
With those deliveries finished, I will go back to my work for the Red Cross, putting together Comfort Kits. Have you gotten one of these kits? I think about you sometimes when I’m working on them, because sometimes the thought strikes me that you might get one of the kits that I put together. What do you think of that? I think it would be quite a coincidence if you did. It has become a great game among us girls to slip some personal token into a kit, just some little thing that could only have come from the girl who put it together. Some of the girls write a little note. Others put a picture in or something else. . . .
The “something else” that Lorna began putting into the kits she assembled made her a legend among the troops in France, anonymous, but the object of fantasies in miles of trenches.
One evening, when she gathered with the other women who worked on Comfort Kits, she brought with her, in a pocket that she had sewn into her skirt, a tiny ivory figure. It resembled the jewelry she carved, but this figure was not meant to be attached to anything else. It was not an ornament; it was a tiny piece of sculpture. Lorna had worked on it at home, in the evenings, alone in her room, using herself as a model, carving ivory that she had persuaded Luther to donate to the Comfort Kit effort.
She slipped her hand into her pocket and removed the carving. Working below the table while she kept up her chatter with Adelaide Hooper, she slipped the carving into a packet of tobacco. She let the packet rest in her lap until Adelaide turned away to get another sack of buttons; then she brought the packet up to the table and put it into the Comfort Kit she was packing. She couldn’t help smiling at the thought of its being discovered.
[to be continued on Wednesday, June 8, 2022]
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