Shining Through (27 page)

Well, I had to admit it; they were gorgeous. All glass. Big, small, clear, frosted, etched with angels, embellished with hair-thin silver designs. “I don’t want them,” I said.

“Linda, I appreciate how you feel, but you’re being—”

“It’s half my tree. If you want to put your ex-wife’s stuff up on your half, that’s fine with me.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little unreasonable?” He was being tolerant.

No, I didn’t think so. The apartment wasn’t big enough for three people, but I couldn’t get rid of Nan. I slept on her pillowcases, ate from her soup bowls, looked at her paintings. Now I was supposed to ooh and aah over her glass balls. What I really felt like doing was to take a running jump, land smack in the middle of the carton and hear a loud, glorious, soul-satisfying crunch.

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“What do you think I’m going to do? Go out and buy orange plaid reindeer?”

“Not at all. It’s just that these ornaments happen to be very beautiful. It would be a shame not to use them.”

“Maybe what I would buy would be beautiful too.”

“I’m sure they would.” I wanted to say, Oh, come off it! “But these were very expensive. Wouldn’t it be foolish to go out and buy others?”

“I could learn to live with it.”

He smiled and lifted the carton. “Come on. Let’s get the tree up.”

Sure, I could have another big confrontation: You still love her. You can’t let her go. You won’t give me money for new towels because you want
pieces
of her in the house. And so forth. But how many times can you accuse your husband of desiring another woman when—if pushed—he’ll willingly plead guilty? Did I really want to hear: “Yes, I love Nan and I love her glass dingle-dangles that make crystal music”?

Next year, I said to myself, next August, I’m going to Tiffany’s or Bergdorf Goodman or whatever is the ultimate glass-ball store and pick out—

The bell rang. “Damn,” John said, and then added, “You get it.”

I was wearing a yellow fleece bathrobe, and I hadn’t combed my hair. “You get it.”

“I have a carton,” he said.

“Put it down.”

“Damn it, Linda, just get the door.”

The bell rang again. John carried Nan’s carton into the living room. I stomped, barefoot, into the entrance hall and yanked open the door. And standing there, right before me, homburg in one hand, the other poised to ring the bell, was Edward Leland.

“Merry Christmas, Linda.”

“Merry Christmas,” I managed to say back. I stuck my hands in my pockets, so I wouldn’t start patting down my messed-up hair.

SHINING THROUGH / 199

“John!” Edward’s deep voice was full of holiday warmth. I turned. John had come up behind me; the look on his face was astonished and overjoyed, as if Santa Claus had truly come down his chimney. “Sorry to drop in on you unannounced, but your doorman seems to have been enjoying his eggnog. Nodded off, so I slipped by.”

“Please, come in,” John said. I bet his jaw was hanging open.

“We were just putting up the tree.” He turned to me. “How about making us some coffee, dear?”

“Sure!” I said, like I couldn’t wait to dash to the percolator.

Actually, I needed a few seconds to get over the surprise of Edward’s visit and the shock of my husband’s calling me “dear.”

They moved off to the living room. I hung up Edward’s coat, put away his hat and went into the kitchen.

Being two classy men, they spoke in what they’d call hushed tones, but I could hear almost all of it, except when I rattled the pot and banged a closet door to show how absorbed I was in being a hostess.

“Forgive me for the intrusion, John.”

“Not at all.”

“Obviously this is something best not discussed in the office.”

Maybe it was going to be about Nan; my hand must have shaken, because a scoop of coffee was suddenly all over the sink. “And I’d rather not use the phone.”

There was a slight pause, probably John nodding.

“I’ll be as direct as I can,” Edward continued. “Lend-Lease is going to pass.” In a press conference a few days before, FDR

had put forth a plan that England could get all their war matériel from us now and pay for it later—in effect, a giveaway.

I put the coffeepot on the stove and lit the gas. “And Donovan’s done a complete turnabout. He’s all for it now.”

The Donovan Edward was talking about was William Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer from O’Brian, Hamlin, Donovan

& Goodyear, who’d gone on to become head of the COI, the Office of Coordinator of Information, which was a typically overcomplicated, lawyery way of saying U.S. espionage headquarters. Unlike Edward, who clearly preferred 200 / SUSAN ISAACS

private meetings and secret missions, Donovan was a much more public man, a diplomat—or politician. He was known for being outgoing, congenial and very, very clever.

“Have you spoken with him recently?”

“I spent most of the last week with him in London.” There was the silence of John nodding again; I could almost see him, awestruck but managing to look merely respectful. I took out a fruitcake I’d baked, sliced it, and fanned out the pieces on one of Nan’s white serving plates. “He’s finally come around to seeing how vital Britain’s survival is.”

“If they’re defeated,” John agreed, “we’re next on their list.”

“Very likely,” Edward replied. I opened a cabinet, took out a tray and arranged the cake, cups, and saucers, plates, milk and sugar, spoons and forks. “Don’t forget, if Germany defeats England, they would have both the French
and
the English fleets at their command.” I folded three napkins. (Unfortunately, all our napkins had you-know-who’s monogram. I’d once said to John, All I want is to buy
plain
napkins. I don’t want my initials or anything. And John had said, It’s foolish to throw out money.

And
you’re
the one who keeps calling attention to them. I never even notice them.) “With a navy like that, Germany would strangle us in the Atlantic,” Edward was saying, “and with Japan making nasty noises in the Pacific…”

What’s the point of all this cordial, manly chitchat? I wondered. Why had Edward Leland dropped by? So far, the only semisecret thing he’d said was that he’d seen Donovan in London the week before. That information was slightly interesting, but I don’t think it would make a Nazi spy jump up and down and clap his hands.

I took the coffee off the stove and poured it into the white china pot. Once I brought everything in, I’d have to leave and go into the bedroom, and I probably wouldn’t be able to hear much from in there. Nuts, I thought, as
I
walked into the living room.

“England is the key, you see,” Edward was saying. “In more ways than one. British intelligence has several first-SHINING THROUGH / 201

rate sources within the German foreign office and the Abwehr.”

The Abwehr was the espionage and counterespionage service of the German General Staff. “The Vatican has a couple of sources too. And Donovan has one. But—” John cleared his throat as I came in. Edward fell silent. I put down the platter on the coffee table. I couldn’t believe that Edward Leland, who could hear a fly climb up a wall in the Bronx, hadn’t heard me walk into the room. And hadn’t seen me. My bathrobe was not exactly the most subdued yellow ever invented.

Both men made a tremendous fuss over the fruitcake. I didn’t know what to do next: Did I leave everything on the tray or was I supposed to do one of those sophisticated Mrs. Berringer-is-pouring routines? Neither of them leaned forward from his chair, so I quickly set everything out on the coffee table. Then I asked Edward: “How do you take your coffee?” I tried not to sound like Miriam Hopkins.

“Cream and one sugar, please,” he said.

I lifted the top of the sugar bowl, but John put his hand over mine and said, “It’s all right, dear. I’ll take care of it. I know you have more presents to wrap.”

I stood straight, but before I could go, Edward said, “John, really. Her security clearance is better than yours.” He looked up at me. “You haven’t developed Nazi sympathies since you filled out those forms, have you, Linda?” I shook my head. “Then please sit down and join us.” I waited for him to add, If it’s all right with your husband. He didn’t.

I sat across from them, on the beige couch, and went ahead and fixed his coffee, and without being asked, John’s. I served the fruitcake and tried not to stare at the men. The contrast was so powerful I had to force myself to turn away; I looked over at the naked Christmas tree.

Obviously, Edward was older than John, seventeen or eighteen years. But the age difference was just for starters: fair, dark; graceful, hulking; handsome, not; John’s blue eyes glowed; Edward’s black eyes glowered. I turned back to them. Edward held the cup and saucer in big, clumsy farmer hands; his fingers were too heavy to hold the cup

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handle properly, but—I couldn’t help this thought—they’d be perfect for choking somebody on a dark night. John laid aside his cake; the hand that did it was elegant, long-fingered, pale and tantalizing.

Edward started talking again. “I was telling John that Colonel Donovan of the COI”—he waited until I nodded that I knew what that was—“has long had a source, a spy if you will, high in the German government. This source has provided us with some interesting information about the internal politics of the Reich, some of it quite valuable. And over the last year, both I and another associate of Bill’s have spent a good deal of time renewing old business friendships and cementing relationships with individuals in high circles in Germany.” He smiled. “My sources, fortunately, are fluent in English.” He leaned back. “Last week, Bill asked me if I’d be willing to spend some time in Washington—a great deal of time, actually—organizing a unit within the COI to be called the Office of Commercial Analysis.”

John began to nod, until Edward added, “A meaningless name, obviously.”

“Then what kind of office is it?” I asked. “If I’m not out of line.”

“It will be my job, and the job of my men, to corroborate what our sources are telling us, not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Much of it will be the simple checking of facts.”

“Not so simple, I’d guess,” John said.

“Not so simple is right,” Edward answered. He took a bite of fruitcake and smiled first at me, but then much more winningly at John. In fact, his attitude toward John’s observation was so flattering I figured he had to be up to something. “How do we learn the unknowable?” Edward asked. Then he answered himself: “By gathering facts—from radio transmissions we can manage to decipher, from recent refugees, especially those from Germany, from resistance organizations within the occupied countries. Then we must put all the pieces of this terribly intricate puzzle into a picture that makes sense. It
has
to make sense. Not merely for the infor-SHINING THROUGH / 203

mation itself, although that is important; you and I, John, have long agreed that our entrance into this war is inescapable, and we must know all we can. But there’s a further need for our brilliant puzzle-solvers.”

This was too interesting. I couldn’t
not
open my mouth.

Anyway, Edward had invited me to join them. “You want to make sure if what your high German sources are saying is the truth,” I said, “or if they’re”—I knew my Nazi spy movies—“double agents.”

“Yes,” Edward murmured. “Precisely.” Both of them looked surprised at my conclusion. John, of course, always looked astonished whenever I figured out anything more complicated than his checking account balance. But I was disappointed; somehow I’d expected better from Edward. “And it goes without saying, John—and that’s why I asked Linda to join us—that I’d be very happy and relieved if you’d consider moving to Washington for a time…to be my foremost puzzle-solver.”

The girl who took care of my mother had one of those Slavic names no one wants to bother to pronounce, Mrshklva or something, so she told everyone to call her Cookie. At about sixty, she wasn’t a girl, and she wasn’t such a cookie, either.

She was short, with long, skinny arms and legs and a pudgy little body, and when she moved around fast—she was never slow—she looked like a monkey in a nurse’s uniform.

Cookie hoisted my mother out of the taxi onto a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. It was a bright day, cold but without a hint of wind.

“She’s not too bad, Missus,” she explained to me, as if my mother wasn’t there, right beside her, but home in Queens.

“Except she’s hiding gin somewheres.” My mother immediately became absorbed in getting a new slant to her hat. It was an old brown felt she’d had for years, with a wide brim and a crown that looked like a huge, upside-down soup pot. But when she moved it forward I realized she’d gone out (or had sent Cookie out) and bought a holiday pin: a sprig of artificial holly, with slightly limp fabric leaves and

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berries of red beads. She was so absorbed in her hat she didn’t notice the seventy-foot Rockefeller Center Christmas tree straight in front of her nose. “I could smell the gin fumes when she came out of the bathroom this morning,” Cookie went on, “fresh on her breath, and I searched high and low, even down the toilet, but it wasn’t there.”

“Cookie smells like toilet water,” my mother announced loudly.

“
Real
toilet water. Stinky!” In the cold air, her breath came out in a weak white puff. People on the street, walking toward the tree, pretended they had heard nothing more than distant carols.

“Shut up your mouth. It’s Christmas,” Cookie said, but it was obvious she thought my mother was funny, and she might have cackled and gotten into a whole toilet tête-à-tête if I—the person who paid her—wasn’t there.

“You shut up
your
mouth, stinkpot Bohunk.” My mother laughed, a very feeble laugh, because she didn’t have the strength to do more. Her arm was draped around Cookie’s shoulder; she could no longer stand by herself for any length of time. About a month after I’d gotten married, when I made one of my twice-a-week visits to Ridgewood, I’d been so frightened by how she looked—closer to a skeleton than to a woman—that I called Dr.