A Cup of Tea: A Novel of 1917 by Amy Ephron Page B

other. She looked at them all for a moment, then bowed her head. The rest of them did the same, reaching their hands out to touch the fingers of the people on either side.
    When Madame Olga spoke it was with a heavy accent. Her voice was deep and guttural. “The spirits are here,” she said, “if only we can reach them…I want everyone to touch their fingers to the fingers of the person next to them. Feel…” She said the word “feel” as though it had more than one syllable in it.“…the energy from your spirit fusing with theirs…”
    Rosemary whispered to Jane across the table. “It’s a test you see to see if she can summon Philip…but so far she hasn’t been able to do it…”
    “Silence,” said Madame Olga forcefully. “I need quiet, madame, so they can break through to our space and time…”
    Madame Olga swooned her head back. “The spirits are here,” she said, “if only we can reach them. I feel that they are near us. I sense that they are near us. There is something here.”
    The chandelier above the table began to sway slightly, the candles dimmed as if they were about to go out. Jane tried to assess if there was a trick here, if the chandelier had been rigged by wires. The room felt suddenly cold.
    “They are around us…” said Madame Olga. And then her trance-like swoon was broken as the doorbell rang.
    “I’ll get it,” said Rosemary jumping up from her seat.
    Madame Olga began to mutter something under her breath in gypsy to the effect of “Fucking debutantes, they do not understand the sacredness of the moment.” But everyone in the room just thought this was part of her gypsy spirit chant.
    Rosemary walked to the front door and opened it. There was a man standing on the steps in a regulation issue army coat. He was so thin and strangely taller than she had remembered him.
    There was a soldier in an army vehicle parked at the curb. Was it possible…?
    “I seem to have misplaced my key,” he said.
    “Philip…?” And then she was in his arms, alternately kissing his face and resting her head on his shoulder, holding onto him as though she would never let him go. “Philip! Oh, my darling, you’re home.”
    She swept back into the drawing room hanging onto Philip’s arm. She was smiling for the first time in months.
    “Madame Olga,” she said, “you’re fabulous! I will recommend you to all my friends.”
    And then she turned to Jane. “Jane! Jane! Philip’s home.” But Jane had already jumped up from her seat to throw her arms around him.

 
    D id they notice right away that something was wrong with him? He was distant. They thought he was fatigued, worn down, shell-shocked. God knew what he’d been through. They were never able to get him to talk about it much.
    They discussed it the first night. Jane said, in her usually direct fashion, “You were a prisoner?”
    “I was an officer,” Philip said as though he had disdain for his own position. “I was treated better than a prisoner.”
    They all felt as if the answers they received had been rehearsed, as if he’d been through a debriefingand had been coached on what he was allowed to tell…and that there was a subtext to it all. That he felt in some way he had had more to do with the enemy than he would have liked.
    Teddy tried to make light of it. He joked, “But there was barbed wire and all that stuff, right? Torture?”
    Philip denied this.
    “Come on—did they put you in isolation?”
    Philip shook his head.
    The only one of them who seemed to have any real understanding of it was Rosemary’s father. “There’s a syndrome,” he said, “where a prisoner starts to identify with his captors…”
    Philip added, “Or associate with them and feels a certain amount of guilt about that.”
    Sarah Porterville piped in, “I have an uncle who avoided capture by taking refuge in a brothel.”
    “For a night?” asked Teddy.
    “No, three months,” said Sarah. “My aunt had a terrible time with him