Page 50 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Mrs. Schliemann shook her head. “Even before I had children . . . it was hard, making the men listen. I had to show them I could get in the dirt like them, dig like them, appeal to their egos, tell them the great part they were playing in uncovering our heritage. I recited Homer to them.” Her slight, ironic smile reminded Betsy eerily of the expression found on ancient statues. The archaic smile they called it. “They were less impressed by that than I might have hoped.”

“But you kept digging,” said Betsy stubbornly.

“I kept digging. It was my husband’s work—and my own,” she admitted. “I remember the day we found the side chamber of the tholos at Orchomenos. The workmen struck away some stone, and there, beneath it, was the top of a doorway, so beautifully worked you can hardly imagine. A door where we expected no door! And inside . . .” Mrs. Schliemann’s face seemed lit from within, looking at scenes Betsy had seen only in smudged newsprint and artists’ renderings. “There is nothing to the feeling of uncovering a piece of the past, bringing it back to light out of the rubble.”

Betsy clasped her hands tightly together, practically bouncing on the chair in her excitement. “That’s what I want. To uncover the past. To find those hidden doorways.”

“Then that is what you must do. But do it knowingly.” Mrs. Schliemann fixed Betsy with a serious look. “If you wish to control your own excavation, you must show no weakness, either to your men or to your peers. If you falter, even for a moment, the men will shirk—and your colleagues will say they always knew you weren’t up to the task.”

Betsy lifted her head high, thrilled by the fact that Mrs. Schliemann—Mrs. Schliemann!—had taken her into her confidence. “I won’t give them the opportunity.”

Some of the happy glow faded as she bicycled back to Academy Street. Then that is what you must do, Mrs. Schliemann had said, and Betsy thrilled to it. But how could she do what she needed to do without permits, without workmen, without being allowed to be part of a dig?

Get a husband, Mrs. Schliemann had said—and that was what Mrs. Schliemann had done, marrying a man thirty years her senior, who spun pretty fancies around her presence at their digs, turning her into something between a mascot and a heroine from an epic.

It all seemed deeply unfair, and Betsy would have felt much better if she could tell herself that was a generation ago, another time entirely, and of course things were different now. But they weren’t, were they? Yes, the schools accepted female students, which they hadn’t in Mrs. Schliemann’s youth, but they hadn’t seemed to get any further with fieldwork.

Unless they happened to be married to an archaeologist.

“How was your tea with Mrs. Schliemann?” Ava was buried in one of the anatomy books Dr. Kalopothakes had given her, studying for her first aid examination. Betsy was meant to be studying too, but there were always too many other things to do.

“It was . . . not entirely reassuring.” Betsy plopped down on Ava’s bed, as if they were back in Northampton, when life had felt so much simpler and the stakes so much lower. “When I asked Mrs. Schliemann how to get them to let me into the field, she told me to marry an archaeologist.”

Ava closed her book carefully over her finger. “Did she have one in mind or was this a general theory?”

“A general theory.” They both knew Charles was out of the running. Avoiding Ava’s eyes, Betsy said brightly, “Which of the Harvard boys should I seduce, Jenks or Wingate? Maybe that was Ethel’s strategy all along and I just didn’t see it.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” said Ava drily.

“I just don’t know what to think.” Betsy hugged her knees to her chest. “I’m not sure Mrs. Schliemann’s wrong, but . . . what if I don’t marry? Why should my being be wrapped in my husband’s? My property is my property. Shouldn’t my work be my work? Why should my work be my husband’s work? Why should I need a husband? Aren’t I enough by myself?”

“More than enough,” said Ava, with feeling.

Betsy looked at her friend suspiciously. “You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

Ava laid her medical text facedown on the bed, choosing her words carefully. “Have you ever thought that maybe it isn’t that you’re enough, but whether anything is enough for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . you’re always looking for the next challenge. By the time you’re halfway up a hill, you’re already looking for a larger, more interesting hill.”

“Are you saying I’d get bored with excavation? Or with marriage?”

“Neither!” Ava gave her head a little shake. “I just mean that anything you do will have boring bits. Bits you don’t like, but that you’ll have to get through anyway.”

“Is this about those inscriptions I was meant to be analyzing?” Betsy asked warily.

“Not specifically—but yes, maybe.” Ava paused for a moment, before saying, “I don’t think marrying an archaeologist is a magic solution—even if there were one you wanted to marry who was free to marry you.”

“It would get me to an excavation,” said Betsy in a small voice.

“But at what cost? And what happens when you get there and you have to deal with the boring bits?”

There they were again, back to the same old argument. Betsy felt on firmer ground here. She sat up on her knees. “But they wouldn’t be boring—not to me. Just the same way all that”—she wafted a hand at Ava’s medical text—“isn’t boring to you. It’s what I’ve always wanted. It’s what my father and I used to dream of together. We used to joke that someday it would be my excavation reports he would be reading—and then he could write me cranky letters about how I was doing it all wrong.”

Betsy blinked hard. He would never write those letters now. But Betsy liked to think he could still see. Her father’s version of heaven probably looked something like his study.

“I’m sorry, Betsy,” Ava said awkwardly.