Louise's War (12 page)

All the women’s magazines told us women war workers that we must be willing to take on men’s work until the end of the war, then gratefully return to our true calling, caring for husbands and children and homes. Funny how all those magazines were edited by men. And they didn’t bother to tell those of us who weren’t wives and mothers what we were supposed to do when peace returned, once we weren’t critical to the war effort any more.

I was glad when my wait for the French–English dictionary was over.

I used it under the watchful of eye of the reference librarian, who kept checking her watch. Under those circumstances I didn’t get through much more than the titles of Bloch’s journal reprints. In French they were ‘Gyres en Mer Méditerrannée et en Algérie’, ‘Un tourbillon en mer ouverte dans le bassin algérien’ and ‘Subduction sur le front Alméria-Oran’. It was a struggle, but I managed to translate them as ‘An Open Sea Eddy in the Algerian Basin’, ‘Subduction at the Algerian–Oran Front’, whatever that was, and ‘The Mediterranean Sea and Algerian Whirlpools’. At least, the closest I could come to the French word ‘gyres’ was ‘whirlpool’, although I suspected there was a better scientific term for it. Boring as the articles sounded to me, it was clear that Gerald Bloch was an expert on the Algerian coastline. His information could be crucial to the Allies’ landing on the North African coast. This gave me, I reasoned, a legitimate reason, not only a personal one, to continue searching for Bloch’s file.

The librarian had her hand extended for the dictionary before I’d finished closing the book. I handed it over to her and went outside into the heat.

When I got home the house was quiet. Dellaphine and Phoebe must have been napping through the hot hours of the late afternoon, resting up before the dinner rush began. I felt deliciously alone. I decided to sit out on the porch with my book and relax. I was worn out, and wanted to forget about Rachel, Claude, and Gerald and their fate for a while.

I went into the sitting room looking for
Five Little Pigs
, and found Joe napping on the sofa. A book with Cyrillic letters on its spine lay open across his chest.

His glasses lay on the floor where they’d dropped from his hand. I bent over to retrieve them. Then, with the curiosity of all nearsighted people who want to know how blind someone else is, I held Joe’s glasses up to my face and looked through them. The lenses were clear.

ELEVEN

J
oe’s eyeglasses didn’t alter my vision at all. My book forgotten, I carefully laid the glasses across his chest and tiptoed straight upstairs to my room.

I closed the door softly and lay down on my bed to think. Okay, so Joe didn’t teach at GWU and he didn’t need glasses. He wasn’t who he said he was. So what? Half the people in Washington had cover stories. None of my fellow boarders knew I worked for OSS. I was a government file clerk, one of thousands. Henry’s job was equally vague. He’d been a reporter for a Chicago newspaper, so I figured he worked for one of the black or white propaganda agencies.

Wearing glasses with clear lenses wasn’t much of a disguise, when you considered some of the lengths our agents went to change their appearances. Maybe Joe wanted to look different, older, for personal reasons, not wanting to be recognized if he crossed paths with someone he once knew in London or Prague. He might have friends or family still in Czechoslovakia.

The staff from the Axis embassies were under guard somewhere until our government could figure out what to do with them, some people said living it up at a resort hotel in Virginia, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of Nazi spies in Washington. One couldn’t be too careful. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ screamed at us from posters all over town. Blowing cover, your own or someone else’s, was the worst sin an OSS employee could commit. Out in public, if I saw a familiar face from work, I kept my mouth shut. That person could be shadowing a foreign agent, or making a dead drop.

I knew what I needed to do. I wouldn’t break Joe’s cover. No questions, not even one. As of this moment I was uninterested in his past or what he did when he left the boarding house for ‘work’.

Any thought that Joe was other than a refugee teaching Slavic languages somewhere in the city was ludicrous.

Joe Prager opened his eyes and lifted his glasses from his chest, shaking his head. He slipped them back on. So stupid. He’d objected to the eyeglasses from the start. From experience he’d learned that the most convincing disguises were the unobtrusive ones. The beard, the books and papers, the worn, vaguely European clothing were simple to tack on to his public persona. But he’d never in his life needed eyeglasses, and now he had to remind himself constantly to wear them or carry them around. It wasted his concentration.

Louise was a smart woman. He didn’t know what government agency she worked for, but he couldn’t take any chances. When they went out Friday he had to have some explanation that would seem authentic to her, or his mission could be compromised. He’d worked too hard to allow that to happen. And he’d regret it if anything happened to her because of his carelessness.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

Conversation, and consumption, had stopped at the dinner table. Everyone stared at me. Ada was open-mouthed in astonishment. Feeling self-conscious, I lowered my forkful of meatloaf to my plate.

‘Where did you say you were going, dearie?’ Phoebe asked.

‘To a reception at Evalyn McLean’s, tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘A friend of mine asked me to go with him. My new boss at work,’ I added hastily, with a glance at Joe, who’d gone back to his meal.

‘My goodness,’ Phoebe said. ‘That’s a coup. Everyone will be there. Royalty, even. Queen Margathe, King David. I wonder if Mrs McLean will wear the Hope diamond?’

‘If she hasn’t pawned it yet,’ Henry said.

‘I heard,’ Ada said, ‘that the Saltzes, who own that swank men’s clothing store on ‘G’ Street, go to the McLean home before every party to tie the men’s ties for them.’

‘For once I agree with Roosevelt,’ Henry said. ‘That crowd is a bunch of parasites if you ask me. All they do is party – parties every damn day in the paper – dinners, luncheons, teas, tea dances, receptions and cocktail parties. Dozens on one night. They ought to spend their money on war bonds instead.’

‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘Think of the political intrigue that goes on. Wealthy, powerful people from all over the world live in Washington now. London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Berlin, they’re all occupied, or under siege. Parties give them the chance to get together and talk away from their offices and embassies. That’s why American government people go.’

‘Except for Congressmen and Senators,’ Phoebe said. ‘Can’t afford to dress themselves, much less their wives.’

‘What are you wearing?’ Ada asked me.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think it matters much,’ I said. ‘Don, my friend who invited me, says women wear anything to parties now.’

‘You must dress appropriately,’ Phoebe said, ‘I don’t care if there is a war on. There are certain standards women still must meet. Do you have a cocktail dress? Silk stockings? Jewelry?’

‘I’ve got one pair of silk stockings I’ve been hoarding,’ I said. ‘But no party dresses. I have my pearls.’

‘Pearls aren’t correct for a cocktail party. I’ll lend you some jewelry,’ Phoebe said. ‘I have some presentable pieces left.’

Ada put down her fork and wiped her mouth with her napkin.

‘Come upstairs with me,’ she said. Her tone of voice was more of a command than a request, and I obeyed.

We ran into Madeleine in the hall. Ada took her by the arm.

‘Come with us,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to see if some of my clothes fit you. Believe it or not, I was once as thin as you two are.’

Madeleine and I exchanged eager glances. Ada had beautiful clothes. Neither one of us was embarrassed at the prospect of wearing her reach-me-downs.

Ada’s room was a mess, her bed unmade, face powder and perfume bottles spread across the dresser. Half the dresser doors stood open, overflowing with lingerie and nightdresses. The only tidy spot was the corner where her clarinet and music stand stood near a window, angled to catch the light.

The single narrow closet in my bedroom sufficed to hold all my clothes with room to spare, but Ada had added a wardrobe to her room. She opened the doors and pulled out an armful of dresses.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘this should work for the McLean party,’ handing me an indigo-blue silk tea-length cocktail dress with lace cap sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. ‘And you must have these,’ she said, draping two smart suits, one a seersucker cotton and one black raw silk, both with fashionably squared shoulders, over my arm.

She gave Madeleine a topaz silk party dress with a flared skirt, a black knee-length skirt and two white blouses, and a khaki cotton suit with pink rickrack edging the jacket collar and sleeves.

‘Try these on,’ she said. ‘I want to see you in them.’

Madeleine and I didn’t have to be urged. We stripped to our cotton slips. The clothes fit us both, though mine were a bit large in the bust.

‘Stuff some tissue in your brassiere,’ Ada said to me. ‘You could use some help in that area anyway.’

Madeleine and I thanked Ada profusely, and meant it.

In the hall, our arms laden with our loot, I cocked my head towards my bedroom.

‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘We can do each other’s hems.’

In my room we took turns standing on a chair pinning our hems up. I had Madeline take in a quarter-inch from the bust darts of my dresses while we were at it.

‘No tissue stuffing?’ Madeleine asked.

‘With my luck, it would slip down and fall out around my shoes,’ I said.

‘Do you ever wonder,’ Madeleine said, through a mouthful of straight pins, ‘about Miss Ada? Where she lived before the war, what she did?’

‘What do you mean? I thought she was a music teacher in New York. When all the men enlisted, the bands starting hiring women musicians.’

Madeleine lowered her voice. ‘Momma said that when she signed for her room, Miss Ada spelled her name with two ‘n’s.’

Hermann, instead of Herman.

‘Momma said that when Miss Ada noticed what she’d done she got real flustered and red in the face before she scratched the second ‘n’ out.’

‘Really,’ I said. Sounded like Ada had anglicized her surname recently.

‘I told Momma that Miss Ada’s English was too good for her not to be a real American.’

‘I think so, too.’

I’d wondered about Ada myself. She spoke even less about her life before the war than the rest of us. It was queer not to know more about the people I lived and worked with. I’d grown up in a town where everyone knew everyone else and their families back years and years. Here we were all strangers, thrown together by a worldwide calamity. We could tell each other lies galore, invent life histories, and start over again more than once. Because of the war people found good jobs and had money to spend. Ada could play in a dance band, I escaped my parents’ fish camp, and Madeleine daydreamed about moving to Europe and being free as a white woman. But all this freedom was unnerving, too. What did I know about the people I met except what they told me?

After Madeleine and I finished we hurried downstairs so as not to miss
Cavalcade of America
. I joined Phoebe and the other boarders in the lounge, while Madeleine went into the kitchen to sit at the kitchen table with her mother.

Phoebe hadn’t redecorated since the twenties, the last time she had any money. The painted parlor set was chipped, its velvet upholstery worn in patches. Fussy fringed lampshades focused pools of light on the shabby cabbage-rose-patterned rug. A portrait of Phoebe in flapper spit curls and a beaded cloche hat hung over the fireplace mantel. I squeezed into the middle spot on the davenport, between Phoebe and Ada. I found I couldn’t focus on the radio show because I kept looking at Joe. Surreptitiously, of course. Not that he was doing anything anyone else but me would find fascinating. There was Joe winding his watch, Joe stretching back in his chair while digging in his pockets for matches, Joe drawing on his pipe until red embers glowed in the bowl, Joe scanning the evening newspaper during a Lifebuoy commercial. Once our glances met, and we smiled at each other, him so sweetly I thought I would melt through the davenport and floor right into the basement.

Of all the people I’d met since coming to Washington, Joe was the one person I wished I knew better, but he was the only one who I was sure had lied to me, even if it was by omission. I should have been wary of him, but I was so taken with the man that I rationalized what I was coming to think of as his ‘cover story’. After all, I didn’t broadcast that before arriving here I’d spent most of my days elbow deep in fish guts wearing a hair net to keep stray hairs out of the cole slaw.

What I did know, with a shock that felt almost electrical, was that I was content to be a single woman with a good job, that my virtue was way past protecting and that Joe and I were going to a concert together Friday night.

The sitting room grew unbearably hot and stuffy, on account of the dim-out curtains, so soon as the show was over we all got up to go upstairs to our rooms, except Henry, who went outside onto the porch. Joe and I went up the stairs together, behind the others, and at the second floor landing he took my hand.

‘About Friday,’ he said. ‘How about going to the National Symphony Orchestra with me?’ The orchestra played many Friday evenings on a barge out on the Potomac. I’d seen the photographs in the newspaper.

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘Shall I fix us a picnic?’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I want to take you to dinner.’

‘That would be lovely,’ I said.

Joe slid his hand around me, resting it in the small of my back, and pulled me to him. Then he kissed me. Tremors of pleasure cascaded down my back and settled at the base of my spine, still sparking. If we’d been alone in the house I would have headed for Joe’s bed so fast I’m sure I wouldn’t have touched the stair treads on the way up.