Baker Towers (5 page)

She’d been hungry before—as a girl of eleven, on the sixteen-day boat ride from Palermo to New York; in the first weeks of pregnancy, when her stomach kept emptying itself no matter what she ate. Yet she had never felt such appetite.

She would remember the feeling for the rest of her life, the intense
sweetness of the hazelnut torte, the tears running down her cheeks, her wild hunger and shame and grief. Later she would wonder what had possessed her. It seemed to her that Stanley was responsible, her husband who lay dead in the next room entering her one last time, to enjoy this glorious cake through her. She felt his presence inside her, his need for sweetness, the appetite she had never felt before.

She ate until the cake was gone.

From that night onward Rose craved sweets. She baked cakes and pies and ate them daily, grateful for what seemed to be a whole new sense, as essential and pleasurable as hearing or sight. She considered her new hunger for sweetness a supernatural gift, a final pleasure left to her by her husband.

Y
ears later, when her time in Washington had receded from memory, when her youth was like a faraway place she’d visited but could scarcely recall, Dorothy Novak would remember the Chinese woman.

She remembered a gray Saturday in early March: a wet breeze blowing in from the Potomac, cars crashing through puddles on Nineteenth Street, spraying water onto the sidewalk. Dorothy was heading downtown under her old black umbrella; in her pocket was a dollar she would not spend. It cost nothing to wander the department stores: Hecht’s, Garfinkle’s, Woodward and Lothrop, the brick buildings flanking F Street like majestic ships at port. Her Saturday entertainment was Domestics, Ladies’ Shoes, Better Dresses. She was no fashion plate; she simply loved touching the fabrics, the wartime rayon that felt to her like silk. She lingered at the perfume counter, inhaling Shalimar or Chanel No. 5, trying to memorize the scent. Later she’d be unable to re-create it; the fragrance would hover at the edge of her memory, just beyond her reach.

She was standing under the canopy in front of Garfinkle’s, tying a
scarf under her chin, when a limousine stopped at the curb. A driver stepped out and opened the rear door; then a woman emerged, a tiny thing in a long mink coat. Her gloves were red, her hair twisted into a chignon, dark and glossy as the mink. She wore high-heeled slippers, a strand of pearls at her throat. Dorothy hugged her old coat around her, her hair flapping in the wind, fuzzy from the permanent wave her sister had given her back home.

The woman leaned in and spoke to the driver. She paused a moment, as if waiting to be photographed, then stepped delicately around a puddle and disappeared inside the store.

Dorothy blinked. For a moment the scene had seemed orchestrated, composed like a painting: pedestrians rushing past, heels clicking on the sidewalk; the cloud of smoke rising from the car’s tailpipe; the Chinese woman standing at the center of it all, exquisite and improbable.

“What do you think of that?” she asked her friend Mag Spangler that night at the Federal Diner, where they’d each had a slice of pie.

“The Chinese embassy is close by. It must have been the ambassador’s wife.” Mag said this casually, as though she often rubbed shoulders with diplomats. In fact she spent each day typing government paychecks in a crowded office at Treasury, just as Dorothy did.

Dorothy finished her pie. They’d seen the early show at the Capitol Theater, John Wayne in
The Fighting Seabees.
Mag had vetoed
Lady in the Dark.
She considered musicals frivolous.

“A mink coat.” Mag sniffed, horselike, a burst of air through her nostrils. “It hasn’t snowed all winter, for Pete’s sake.”

Dorothy smiled. The impracticality of the coat hadn’t occurred to her; it wasn’t why she’d told the story. Since arriving in Washington she had witnessed remarkable things. Her first day in the city she noticed a Negro deliveryman standing on a street corner, singing deeply and carrying an
armload of orchids. Seeing the Chinese woman step out of the car had given her the same feeling, as though at any moment something extraordinary might happen.

“We’d better go,” she said. Customers stood three deep at the front of the diner. “People are waiting.”

They each left a nickel on the table. Mag slid out of the booth, removing the napkin from the neck of her sweater.

“A mink coat,” she said again. “For Pete’s sake.”

T
HEY WERE WORKING GIRLS
, typing for the war. Dorothy had answered an ad in her hometown newspaper. A government recruiter had come to interview girls in the junior high cafeteria. The only requirement was a high school diploma.

Mag had come to Washington two years earlier and had acquired a jaded air. Dorothy hadn’t known her back home—in school Mag was several grades ahead—but their mothers were acquainted; Mag’s father owned the hat shop in town. In the way of small towns, their mothers had put them in touch.

When Dorothy arrived in Washington, Mag had come to meet her train. Dorothy recognized her immediately on the crowded platform—a sturdy girl with a wide bosom and a determined mouth, the type who’d always seemed older than everyone else, like a chaperone at a dance. She wore stout boots and a brown tweed coat, a hat Dorothy recognized from the Spanglers’ shop in Bakerton. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Mag had said, leading her through the crowd: soldiers in uniform, WACs and WAVEs in their navy blues. “Leave everything to me.”

She took Dorothy to Straub’s, a women’s boardinghouse on Massachusetts
Avenue: a shared room, breakfasts and dinners for ten dollars a week. (Mag paid nine dollars for a similar room across town; but such bargains were a thing of the past, she assured Dorothy.) At one time Straub’s had been a showplace. Now the upper floors were divided into tiny rooms, just big enough for two twin beds. Each floor had a bathroom; every morning a line formed at the door, girls waiting with towels and dishes of soap. Meals were served downstairs—most nights, potatoes with stew. Breakfast was half a grapefruit and a bowl of oatmeal. On Sundays they each got a strip of bacon.

Mag walked Dorothy to work her first morning at Treasury. She pointed out the watercooler and powder room, and indicated with a look which girls Dorothy should avoid: the snooty ones who thought they were God’s gift, the two-faced ones who’d smile to your face and cut you behind your back. They met each day for lunch, nickel sandwiches and orange sodas at Peoples’ Drug Store. Saturday nights they saw a movie. In this way, months passed. At first Dorothy was grateful for Mag’s company. Only later did she realize that she hadn’t made any other friends. The girls at the boardinghouse remained strangers to her. She knew them by their sounds and smells: the middle-aged, slightly deaf schoolteacher who played her radio at high volume; the blond stenographer who monopolized the lavatory, leaving a trail of rose perfume and a few golden pubic hairs clinging to the rim of the bathtub.

Dorothy had a roommate, Jean Johns, a timid, dark-haired girl from Kentucky who ran a switchboard at the Pentagon. Jean slept in flowered nightgowns and was always cold. Every night after supper she’d climb into bed, pull the blankets around her and listen to the radio. They liked the same programs:
Theater of Romance
at eight-thirty,
Famous Jury Trials
at nine. At ten o’clock they turned out the lights; a few minutes later Jean would begin to snore. Eyes closed, Dorothy imagined herself back in her
own room, her sister Joyce asleep next to her. In this way she learned to ignore the traffic noise, the hissing radiator. She was not alone.

From their beds they monitored the war. Europe was quiet that March. Hitler hadn’t been seen in months, and people speculated that he was dead or dying. Reports came instead from the South Pacific, a part of the world no one had heard of until soldiers—Dorothy’s brother Georgie among them—were sent there. Los Negros, Talasea, Bougainville: pronounced, always, in the American way, in a firm male voice that made them seem familiar and knowable. Dorothy’s geography was hazy; she imagined each place the same way: a tiny verdant island, the immense surrounding sea. She had seen the ocean only in photographs. In her mind it was brilliant and calm, a vast expanse of blue.

She hadn’t seen Georgie in a year. He had missed the funeral, hadn’t even known their father was dead until several days afterward. He wrote her often, if not consistently. Once she’d received six letters in a single week. At other times he didn’t write for months. Once Jean asked what he’d written, a question Dorothy couldn’t answer. Whole sentences had been blacked out by the censors; all that remained were detailed descriptions of the weather. She didn’t mind the lack of content. What mattered was the familiar handwriting, the letters drawn by Georgie’s own hand. The sheer volume of his communication delighted her. For years—her entire adolescence—he’d seemed embarrassed by her presence. At school he’d ignored her. In the corridor, walking with Gene Stusick or another of his silent, awkward friends, he would not meet her eyes.

He’d been a frail child, prone to fevers. At seven he caught diphtheria and was pronounced contagious; Dorothy was forbidden to enter his room. He slept poorly; she could hear him on the other side of the wall, his feverish tossing, his guttural cough. Carefully, so as not to wake Joyce, she climbed out of bed and crept into his room. She sat at the foot of his
bed and told him a story—about what, she could no longer recall. She invented the stories as she went along, until his eyelids began to fall.

“Good night,” she whispered as she rose from the bed.

“Come back tomorrow,” he answered as she closed the door behind her.

Now she listened to the reports, her heart racing, her hands moist. The navy bombarding the Palau Islands; ships moving into Hollandia and Aitape. Whether his was among them was impossible to tell.

S
HE TYPED ALL DAY
in an office filled with women. The supervisor was a gray-haired man named Howard Leland, whom the typists rarely saw. Nearly every week a new girl came, from Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Ohio; a girl with bangs or pin curls, her sweater dyed to match her skirt. One by one they disappeared into the flock of Mr. Leland’s girls, like ingredients folded into a cake batter.

Mag disliked the new girls uniformly, without regard to their abilities or personalities, their friendliness or lack of it. “We don’t have room for them,” she complained, as if she’d been charged personally with finding them desks and typewriters. “That last one is still sitting at a card table, for Pete’s sake.”

“I suppose we need the help,” said Dorothy.

“Some help. That what’s-her-name from Youngstown types twenty words a minute.”

The quality of the new hires was a sore subject with Mag, who’d taken the commercial course in high school and scored well enough on the Civil Service exam to land what was then a coveted job at Treasury. Since then
the government had lowered its standards. The exam was no longer required. Dorothy, who hadn’t taken the commercial course, was paid the same as Mag, twenty-eight dollars a week. Feeling wealthy, she’d sent home half her first paycheck. Later she realized she’d sent too much, that she’d left herself barely enough to live on; but it was too late. She could not send less. Since her father’s death, the family got a monthly check from Social Security. In warm months it would be enough. But this was March; the jarred vegetables from last summer’s garden had all been eaten. Her mother still owed Baker for the winter coal.

At night, in dreams, Dorothy returned to the dress factory where she had worked: the gloomy, airless upstairs room, the windows covered with dark paint to keep the fabrics from fading; heat rising up through the floorboards, from the dozen large press irons on the level below. The ancient machines had malfunctioned as often as they worked; five, ten times a day her machine had snapped the cheap cotton thread, chewing the fabric into an unusable mess. When the foreman fired her she felt relief, then terror. The job at Treasury had seemed a godsend; but now her mother counted on her paycheck. She would never be able to go home.

O
NE NIGHT
she came back from work to find Jean Johns packing a suitcase.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home.” Jean tucked a flowered nightgown into the space between her sweaters.

“How’d you get the vacation time?” Dorothy had accumulated none yet, herself. She hadn’t even gone home for Easter.

Jean met her gaze. Her eyes were red. “I quit.”

There was, she explained, a boy back home. They had gone together all through high school. That morning he had asked her to marry him.

“Back home?” said Dorothy. “He isn’t overseas?”

His number hadn’t been called yet, Jean explained. It could happen any day.

“When’s the wedding?” Dorothy felt the envy in her stomach, squeezing her insides like sickness. Not because Jean was getting married. Because Jean was going home.

“As soon as possible,” said Jean. “A week or two, at the most.”

“So fast!” said Dorothy, though of course she understood. Jean’s fiancé could be called up at any moment. Naturally they would be in a hurry, not knowing how much time they had left.

“Can you imagine?” she asked Mag the next day at lunch. “A week from now she’ll be married.” It seemed an incredible feat. Washington in those days was a city of women; you could go weeks without seeing a man older than eighteen or younger than fifty. Though according to Jean, the Pentagon was different. At the Pentagon you were surrounded by men.

“He proposed in a letter,” said Dorothy. “She had a fellow all this time and never said a word about it.”

“That’s an awfully quick engagement.” Mag bit into her sandwich—the same kind she ordered every day, chicken salad on toast. “Sounds like she got herself in trouble.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.” Dorothy thought of Jean’s eyes, swollen as if she’d been crying. Then she remembered a morning when Jean had left the breakfast table suddenly, her hand over her mouth.