Irrepressible (10 page)

As it happened, Decca’s pregnancy became the theme of the drive out. She hadn’t told Virginia she was pregnant, and Decca knew she was there on sufferance. And though she was good-humored and an enthusiastic traveling companion, almost immediately after they hit the open road, she asked to stop at a restroom. “Thereafter,” Virginia said, “every fifteen minutes
she wanted us to stop again.” Virginia suspected that Decca was coping with something apart from a weak bladder and, at the next rest stop, found Decca throwing up: It was morning sickness. Once the secret was out, it was easier for everyone to enjoy the ride.

Along the way, Decca came to see another America. The Midwest was almost as foreign to Virginia as it was to the Englishwoman. The little towns were waking after the long decade of the Depression. The travelers would have seen abandoned homes along the roadside, the occasional hobo looking for a lift (there wasn’t room for a mouse in their crowded car), and miles of fallow fields. But there were also neat little houses, high stalks of corn stretching forever, crowded baseball diamonds, and unexpected swarms of fireflies. Their trip took them from Maryland to West Virginia, into Ohio then Indiana and Illinois. At night, they slumped on one another’s shoulders to sleep. Decca sang some bawdy music hall tunes and amused her companions with her talent for nicknaming. The baby she was carrying kicked like a donkey, and since the donkey was the Democratic Party symbol, she started calling her unborn child “dinky-donk” or “little donkey,” “Dink” for short.

In Chicago, the other two passengers went their own way, while Decca followed Virginia to the Sheraton, where many of the delegations were staying and where there would be meetings and conferences—fish in a barrel for Virginia to buttonhole regarding the poll tax legislation. The two women’s friendship had been accelerated by the compressed nature of the road trip. They had discovered, despite their first impressions, that they were kindred intellectual spirits. Decca, Virginia learned, had a great deal of curiosity and was well informed about the U.S. political scene. Virginia, Decca saw, had a soft center; she was protective and maternal, and if anything, she might be too attentive and worry too much. Decca was suddenly on her own for the first time in her adult life, without husband, parents, or sisters, and she liked the feeling. Chicago was strange, but she had Virginia Durr’s guidance.

The first person Virginia recognized in the Chicago throng was her old friend Lyndon Johnson. Since neither Decca nor Virginia had delegate
badges, Johnson made them honorary delegates of the Texas contingent. That gave them a base and seats in the sweltering and smelly throng. Virginia worried on Decca’s behalf about their distance from the ladies’ lavatories in the vast Chicago Stadium. When she confided to Maury Maverick (a congressman and delegate) that Decca was expecting and prone to throwing up, Maverick bowed and chivalrously offered his sombrero, “Madame, use my hat if you need it.”

The second day, Decca decided not to risk having to employ the congressman’s hat. She fell easily into her trickster mode, in which mild deceptions were second nature. It didn’t hurt that “by this time Decca was looking very glamorous and beautiful.” She used her accent and appeal to get closer to the floor, and the ladies’ lounge, as she later explained to Esmond in a letter: “I went up to an official looking man & told him I was lost & my friends were in a box & the policeman wouldn’t let me in; so he said I could sit in his box, & he turned out to be the Secretary of State for Illinois & I sat right behind Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in the best place of all!”

With the convention under way, Decca the Democratic functionary-in-training scouted out seats to observe the resolutions committee meeting. She found a good perch at a table in the center of the room, which confused the pages, who had to ask her to move out of the committee members’ seat. The platform plank, Decca learned, had already been hammered out in smoke-filled rooms and this meeting was more like a public performance, but she was still caught up in the atmosphere of intrigue and consequence. She felt that with the New Deal faithful, she was on the winning side. She was for Roosevelt, and her guy was unopposed.

Roosevelt had strategized that the only way to accept the nomination for an unprecedented third term would be if he were to be seen drafted “spontaneously and with unanimous support.” Just to make sure the president got what he wanted, Chicago’s Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly patched a microphone into the public address system. Decca enjoyed the display of some mild, Chicago-style chicanery when Thomas D. Garry, Chicago’s superintendent of sewers, interrupted a message from the president urging
the convention to feel free to nominate any candidate. Garry burst out with an emphatic, “No, no, we want Roosevelt!” The convention went on to nominate Roosevelt on the first ballot and Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture, as his vice presidential candidate.

Decca and Virginia were whisked around on a tour of labor-proud Chicago. Richard Wright, one of the contributors to the
WPA Guide to Illinois
, had just published
Native Son
, which Decca would later read and recommend to her sister Nancy. There were also many amazing Works Progress Administration murals, painted on the walls of schools and field houses all over Chicago, to visit. Everywhere Decca went, her Britishness became a part of the conversation. Virginia Durr was not alone in her fascination. Most Americans had never met an English person. Should the United States enter the war or not? Her husband was an airman? Brave girl! Intended or not, Decca’s presence was a case for intervention.

T
HE HEADLINE ON the
Washington Post
society page of July 27, 1940, read: “War Means Separation for Esmond Romillys.” Under the caption “Husband fights for Britain,” Decca smiles gamely. Her miniature white straw hat perched fashionably front and forward, its narrow brim tilting toward one darkly painted brow. Her hair is down, midlength—no pompadour—and the shoulders of her short-sleeved, navy blue summer frock are tailored but not overly padded. A white ruffle flounces about her jugular. For this photo, she’s buttoned up, stylish but demure, not the look of a girl who would run away to the Spanish Civil War, but more like a tourist available for a delicious cup of tea and a gossip with a congressman, or a debate with his wife at the local library on the folly of American isolationism. Twenty-three years old, so beautiful and plucky, she represented all her sisters—not just the celebrated biological ones, but all the Brits, who were just then enduring the terrible bombing in the Battle of Britain and resisting so superbly.

The rest of that day’s society page reported on bridal trips, dinners attended by generals and judges, vacation plans of senators and Egyptian ministers, and the maiden voyage of a new ocean liner christened
America
, which has “among other new features, upholstery and curtains of fireproof material. All the furniture is metal.”

On its face, this distillation of prewartime domestic celebrity was awfully sedate. The prewar city that Gore Vidal imagined in his novel
Washington, D.C.
is a wicked landscape of leathery and nostalgic mothers, beautiful and glittering social-climbing daughters, and power-hungry fathers and sons. It’s a land of insult and injury, scandal, ambition, deceit, and illusion. In the society pages,
quality
(or
tone
) is the watchword, which explains why
Decca was such a catch. Her history was already well known. Let other papers seek their celebrities in New York and Hollywood. That day, the
Washington Post
crowed, it had Jessica Mitford.

Not just anybody got this treatment. This photograph and the accompanying article composed a deluxe job advertisement (courtesy of Eugene Meyer) announcing Decca’s intention to find work in the nation’s capital. Her requirements: respectable work at satisfactory pay. Her résumé included keeping the books in Miami’s Roma Italian Restaurant, according to the “‘Decca Method,’ which she invented herself.”

Of all the millionaires and socialites she’d encountered, Decca considered Eugene Meyer the most interesting. He was a big-shot financier, a mover and shaker, and a solicitous and affectionate father to his children. He was paternal in his dealings with the Romillys, but not excessively patronizing. Though she heartily disagreed with him politically (he and his wife opposed Roosevelt), he was both “colossally useful” and considerably more amusing than anyone she had met in the Durr crowd (who deplored Meyer and his powerful Republican cohorts). Since Meyer had arranged for Decca to pose for the deluxe job ad in the society pages, she couldn’t very well refuse when he invited her to their New York estate in Mount Kisco. She’d have to sing for her supper, but who knew what doors a visit might open.

Mount Kisco indeed proved to be “an absolute riot of anti-New Dealism.” It was also a very pleasant atmosphere, full of good food and privacy. Decca was by then an old hand at negotiating varieties of experience. She and Esmond thrived on contrasts. In their first few weeks apart, their letters were one long, rolling repartee. An exchange from Mount Kisco began as Decca described (in menu-worthy prose) a luxurious summer morning, during which she woke

They both knew how lucky she was.

Before Mount Kisco, Esmond’s absence had felt exotic and temporary. Now, five months into her pregnancy, she had some new sense of what daily life without him really meant. Esmond was in Canada, enlisted to become a pilot. He was in the war that they’d talked about and seen arriving for all their youth. He was uncomfortable, bored, their two worlds forking away from one another, as must happen with a soldier and the family he leaves. It was more and more important that she write well and carefully, and she wanted to be sure to make him laugh.

WHEN DECCA RETURNED to Washington, locals were bragging about the city’s wet, buggy summertime. The capital was built on swamps. Everywhere, jocular interrogators lay in wait,
Hot enough for you?
Best to retreat to some cool spot, drink something refreshing. All good advice, but Decca had to work for a living. She counted her pennies: The bargain of sending a telegram at night “only cost 58 cents for 50 words”; the expenses of her trip to Chicago amounted to sixty dollars round-trip; but still she needed some expanding clothes. There was some good news on the financial front: Upon her return from Mount Kisco, Virginia had met her at the door to say a prospective employer had seen her photograph in the
Washington Post
and telephoned several times.

Decca hoped the job would come through. Beyond that, she would wait to hear from Esmond. If there were a way to join him, she would. Virginia, concerned that Decca was still throwing up a lot, invited her to stay on in Alexandria, “until you get over being sick.”

“My plans are completely flexible & I can use this house as a base as long as I want,” she wrote to Esmond. “However if you should return here don’t let’s stay here . . . This house is rather cluttered up with children & old mothers etc.”

The first casualty of a new dependent is her privacy. At the Durrs’, Decca slept in Clifford Durr’s study and she was rarely alone. Virginia quickly got over whatever reticence she might have felt regarding Decca’s foreignness. Virginia had a household to run and the anti-poll-tax campaign to organize. There was no time to indulge spoiled aristocrats, pregnant or not. Virginia had sympathy with the young woman’s loss and loneliness, which Decca hid well. But there was nobody to clean up after her at the Durr house in Alexandria. Decca asked the Durrs’ eldest daughter, Ann, to wash her stockings and underwear, and when Ann refused, Decca laughed and said she wouldn’t wear any. Virginia was amazed that her guest had never “learned how to make a bed, never washed stockings or underwear, used a whole box of Lux on her first time. Had absolutely not done 1 single domestic task, never had to, either didn’t do it or had servants.” But of course, Decca had—she had lived with Esmond for two years, and it fell to her to do something, because he did even less. Their domestic arrangements were typically haphazard. As a housekeeper, she did the minimum. If others were more fastidious about mess, she left them to take charge. She could at the very least make an omelet and could sew on a button.

The senior member of the household—Virginia’s mother, Mrs. Foster—ran afoul of Decca early on by criticizing her for taking an unladylike interest in food. From then on, Decca felt free to tease the older woman by “debunking the aristocratic Old South whenever possible.” Eventually Decca become a favorite of the Durrs’ three-year-old daughter, Lucy. As math and French tutor to Ann, Decca applied inimitable Mitford pedagogy. She would sit beside her pupil smoking a Chesterfield and threaten to “burn her hands with the cig or else pinch her” if she didn’t give the right answer. Decca didn’t carry out her threat on Ann, but that month, the woman was in a burning mood. She told Esmond that she had pinched and burned Virginia
with a cigarette when her hostess had carelessly revealed a secret concerning a mutual friend. There was no report of Virginia’s reaction—which must have been impressive.