Irrepressible (14 page)

That letter was more than enough for Decca, who felt it was finally time to force the issue of whether she would join him in England. Perhaps Esmond simply wanted Decca to relieve him of making the decision. For the first time in her letters, she admitted it was demoralizing

Esmond replied: “I am pretty well settled now . . . and have found out that if you were able to come over, this would be nice to know.” Very soon afterward, he sent a telegram asking whether Decca had made any plans for traveling to England. She wrote by return post:

On November 8, Decca cabled him: “Good possibility ship transport . . . but will come only if you are 100% pro.” “Yes,” he wrote on November 11, “more than anything else in the world.” He had only wanted to spare her whatever hardships might be ahead in England, and had come to realize finally what was most important was that they should be together for as long as it was possible. Whatever hesitation he had felt was in the past; he had only wanted to be sure. But suddenly, the need was urgent. Four of his
friends had died that day in a plane crash. He just returned from a mission to recover their missing aircraft. The night was damp and freezing. He had a crushing toothache. He wrote: “It isn’t only that I can see that you will be really happy over here in spite of all the factors I mentioned and irrespective of myself. It is also that I am being utterly selfish over the whole thing and want to be with you again.”

Over the next week, Esmond went on two missions. He wrote to Decca again. The subject this time was Dinky. Perhaps they ought to leave their child in Washington? That might make it easier for Decca to participate more fully in the war effort, as he knew she had been wishing to do. From the time they were in Florida, Esmond had understood that a person needed to be completely immersed; otherwise, “the whole thing is utterly bleak and pointless.” Decca contemplated leaving her daughter with the many friends clamoring to care for her, but not for long. She had made her decision; they would be traveling together.

Finally, there was good news in the world again. The Red Army had recaptured Rostov in the first general offensive of the war in the Ukraine. The Russians had turned the tide of the war. She sent Esmond a cable on December 1, 1941:

On December 2, Decca was home with Dinky in Alexandria. Virginia and her children had gone up to New York, where Cliff was scheduled to give a speech. Decca planned to spend two days in New York with the Durrs before boarding a ship with Dinky on December 5.

She spent the morning packing. Downstairs the doorbell rang, and she heard some murmuring, then quiet. Mrs. Foster was crying again. Decca descended the stairs to see Virginia’s mother holding a slip of paper. A telegram had come addressed to Mrs. Romilly.

She grabbed up Dinky and ran to the house next door. The information had to be a mistake. Someone had to check the facts, make some calls for her. Her neighbor Mary Walton Livingston telephoned Virginia at their hotel in New York, and the Durrs immediately came back to find Decca “absolutely desolate.” Decca kept insisting to Virginia that he must have been rescued by a ship or submarine—that he was somewhere a prisoner of war. The Durrs questioned everyone they could find in the Canadian Air Force and the British Embassy. They learned that Esmond’s plane had crashed into the North Sea on its return from a bombing mission over Germany. A rescue mission had determined that there were no survivors.

On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the United States finally entered the war. Winston Churchill came to Washington during Christmas week to confer with Franklin Roosevelt, his cabinet, and the Pentagon. On Christmas morning, the White House telephoned to invite the young widow to attend church with Churchill (who was a distant cousin of the Mitfords as well as Esmond’s uncle), the president, and Mrs. Roosevelt. Decca accepted the invitation, but when two Secret Service men arrived to escort her to Foundry Methodist Church, no one could find her. Perhaps she just stepped out for some fresh air and a cigarette. Waiting for her return, Virginia broke the gloom and announced, “It will take more than two men, to get Decca into church, even for the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States.” Later that morning, Decca met up with the president and company. She was sure there was more to be learned about Esmond’s accident and knew that her Cousin Winston might have access to more detailed information, which she imagined, could offer hope for Esmond’s survival. Attending the Christmas church service was the price
she would pay. As it turned out, the prime minister had launched a private investigation. He invited Decca to meet with him in a week’s time.

On New Year’s Day, friends Michael and Binnie Straight drove Decca and her daughter to the White House, where Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting for them, “gracious as she always was.” Churchill was just waking from an afternoon nap as Decca was escorted “to his bedroom. He embraced her there. He had nothing on, save for a loose dressing gown.”

Decca later told Virginia that “Churchill had got in touch with the commandant and the land crew that dispatched Esmond’s plane to Berlin and the one that guided the plane back, and there was no doubt that Esmond was dead.” When she left his room, Churchill sent his secretary after her with a gift of five hundred pounds. It was an enormous sum, which she needed but would not cash for some time, calling it “blood money.” Eventually, she would give part to Virginia’s daughter Ann, so that she could buy a horse.

In the weeks that followed, Virginia would hear Decca in her room awake and weeping at night. “I would go in there and she would say, ‘Oh the water was so cold. The water was so cold.’” After a time, she began to accept the idea that Esmond was dead, but claimed that she would never return to her “filthy fascist family,” and held them all responsible.

R
OBERT TREUHAFT, CALLED Bob by his friends, arrived in Washington in 1939, the impeccably educated son of worldly Brooklynites. He had moved from New York City to take a job with the Securities and Exchange Commission then transferred to the Office of Price Administration, where he and Decca would meet three years later.

Bob’s parents had emigrated from Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century. Aranka Hajos, his mother, was a smart and stylish milliner. His father, Albin Treuhaft, dabbled in bootlegging and liked the company of fellow gamblers. Albin moved around the New York area, working as a waiter and sometime manager in various eating establishments, looking for his chance to buy into a restaurant. He was subject to a peculiar local myth that may have worked in his favor. Within the Eastern European Jewish immigrant communities of New York, Hungarians were rumored to make the finest pastry chefs and maître d’s.

The customary route for Eastern European immigrant Jews working their way up the economy was to start out on the Lower East Side. When the family income increased sufficiently, the road diverged. There might be a walk across the bridge to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn or a pioneering effort out in the Bronx. The next step up might be a decent-sized apartment in the two- or three-story brownstones of Bensonhurst. After their marriage, Bob’s parents lived in the Bronx, where he and his sister Edith were born. When he was ten or eleven, their family moved into half of a two-family, semidetached house in Bensonhurst.

Bob’s social circle was almost exclusively Jewish, but not religious. His only Jewish education was the result of his own curiosity. He attended a Jewish summer camp, which offered instruction and a bar mitzvah ceremony
and party at no cost to a boy’s family. The event also earned a camper status, which counted for something in the hothouse in which Bob submerged himself for many summers. His parents were also genuinely proud of his initiative. Afterward, he remained as secular as they were.

Assimilation was a creaky process. Bob’s encounters with the neighboring Irish and Italian Catholic kids were occasionally antagonistic. Stories abounded of tough streets and little kids with big glasses who lost their seltzer money on the way to the candy store. The only black people he saw were the maids, whom Aranka and Albin, echoing the casual racism of their neighborhood, called “schvartzas.” Around the time Bob began New Utrecht High School, his parents’ marriage broke apart, leaving Aranka as the only reliable wage earner. Albin had become the co-owner of a New York City restaurant, but his success was short-lived. “He disgraced himself by having an affair with one of the waitresses, financing it with some money that he took out of the receipts.” Humiliated, deeply depressed, and more or less bankrupt, Albin went out west to California, where, contemplating suicide, he bought a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy, with his children as beneficiaries.

Bob had taken it for granted that as a good student with some ambition, he would move on to one of New York City’s fine free public colleges, like Brooklyn College. He had one friend who had became obsessed with the idea of attending Harvard University, and on a whim, Bob also applied. His friend had a case of nerves and blew the entrance exam, but Bob aced his test, and that changed everything. That summer, Bob worked in upstate New York as a camp counselor, while his father returned to New York City. Albin was an ill man and, by autumn, died of cancer. The insurance policy he’d purchased in California made it possible for Bob to pay full tuition to Harvard in the depths of the Depression.

Bob was absolutely baffled by the Ivy League social script. The death of his father—at forty years old—was so recent, Bob had hardly absorbed it. He didn’t like his roommates, and he missed his girlfriend. He was surrounded by strangers, most of whom were snobs. A quick study and a lucky
guy, he went on to meet aesthetes, jocks, young politicians, poets, lunkheads, comedians, and the occasional genius. Eventually, he dated Radcliffe girls and went as far afield as Wellesley. He learned to glide, ever alert to how far and how fast he had moved away from Bensonhurst.

Politics didn’t particularly interest Bob, and though Harvard offered a thousand ways to be engaged, it was also protected by a powerful ivory-tower charm, which made it easy to stay above it all. He attended some antifascist rallies, but mainly bent his considerable energy toward earning his undergraduate nickname, “Bob, the fun-loving Rover Boy.”

After graduation in 1933, he thought he’d go on to medical school, but was stymied by the quota systems commonly used to limit Jewish applicants. Next, he tried law school and was accepted by Harvard Law. Harvard University was offering refuge to intellectuals from Germany and Spain. Refugees were trickling into Manhattan, where his mother now lived. Aranka was in contact with her family in Hungary, and the news there was never good. Through this exposure to urgent political events as played out in his own family and (to some extent) at his college, Bob gradually became more involved in left political causes, but “only in a peripheral way.” Later, he’d say, “The only people who were deeply involved or committed were the communists in those days. There was nobody else. I suppose I could have become a Party member. If somebody had asked me, I would have said probably, great, I’d love to. But nobody asked me and I didn’t find my way into it. And I think I missed a great deal by not having been involved at the time.”

In 1937, Bob traveled with a new Leica camera to the Hungarian village where he had spent an idyllic summer when he was twelve. His plan was to document in how many ways that world had changed. A magazine publisher for whom he sometimes worked had asked if he’d stop over in Germany, to find out what he might about a few photographers who had lately fallen out of contact. Even with his American passport, this was a risky proposition, and Bob had no luck finding the missing photographers. He hadn’t needed an actual dose of Hitler’s Germany to activate his antifascism, but seeing it certainly concentrated his mind.

Soon after returning to New York, he joined a labor law practice. Its clients included the Garment Workers Union leader David Dubinsky. Despite the idealism of the Popular Front (a loose confederation of antifascist organizations), non-Communist and Communist factions of the Left still disputed every inch of ideological territory. Dubinsky was a passionate trade unionist, with a horror of the Communist Party and a fondness for Leon Trotsky.