Winds of War (97 page)

Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Mr. Maugham – if Germany attacks the Soviet Union, will England help Russia, or leave Stalin to stew in his own juice?”

The author looked at the President’s wife for several seconds. A heavy silence enveloped the table. “I-I can’t really say.”

“You know, Willis,” said the President, “a lot of folks here don’t believe the story that Rudolf Hess is crazy. They say that he was sent over to advise your people of the coming attack on Russia, and to get a hands-off agreement, in return for a promise to help you keep the Empire.”

“That very plan is in
Mein Kampf
.” Mrs. Roosevelt spoke out like a schoolteacher.

Somerset Maugham, caught in the cross-fire of crisp words from the President and his wife, spread his hands, crouching in his chair, looking small, old, and tired.

“Sumner, do you suppose we could explain it to the American people,” said Roosevelt, “if the British did not help Russia?”

“I think that would finish off aid to England, Mr. President,” said Sumner Welles. “If Hitler is a menace to mankind, that’s one thing. If he’s just a menace to the British Empire, that’s something very different.”

With a brief look at the British author, the President said in a much lighter tone, “Well! Shall I slice some more lamb?”

“I will thank you for some, Mr. President,” spoke up the crown princess. “Of course, Hitler may be massing his troops in the east precisely because he intends to invade England.” The princess talked precise English with a Scandinavian lilt. She was making a tactful cover, Pug thought, for the awkward moment with Maugham. She had not previously said anything. “You know every time Hitler starts a new campaign, Stalin pinches off something here and something there. This may be show of force to keep him out of the Rumanian oil fields.”

“That too, is possible,” said Sumner Welles.

“European politics can be such a miserable tangle,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.

“But it all boils down to Hitler’s impulses nowadays,” said the President. “Pity we must live in the same century with that strange creature. Say, we have here two men who talked at length face to face with the fellow. Let’s take a Gallup poll. Sumner, do you think Hitler is a madman?”

“I looked hard for such evidence, Mr. President. But as I reported, I found him a cool, very knowledgeable, very skilled advocate, with great dignity and – I’m afraid – considerable charm.”

“How about you, Pug?”

“Mr. President, don’t misunderstand me. But to me, so far, all heads of state are more alike than they are different.”

Roosevelt looked taken aback, then he threw his head back and guffawed, and so the others laughed. “Well! That’s something! At my own table, I’ve been compared to Hitler! Pug, you’d better talk your way out of that one fast.”

“But it’s the truth. He has a very powerful presence, sir, face to face – though I hate to admit it – with an incredible memory, and a remarkable ability to marshal a lot of facts as he talks. In his public speeches he often raves like a complete nut. But I think when he does that, he’s just giving the Germans what they want. That impressed me, too. His ability to act such different parts.”

Roosevelt was slightly smiling now. “Yes, Pug, that would be part of the job. The fellow
is
able, of course. Or he wouldn’t be giving us all this trouble.”

Rhoda blurted, “Pug, when on earth did you have a talk with Hitler? That’s news to me.” The artless injured-wife tone made the President laugh, and laughter swept the table. She turned on Roosevelt. “Honestly, he’s always been closemouthed, but to keep something like that from me!”

“You didn’t need to know,” Pug said across the table.

“C-captain Henry,” said Somerset Maugham, leaning forward, “I bow to a p-p-professional.”

The conversation broke into little amused colloquies. Roosevelt said to Rhoda Henry, “My dear, you couldn’t have paid your husband a handsomer compliment in public.”

“I didn’t intend to. Imagine! He’s just a sphinx, that man.” She darted a tender look at Pug. She was feeling very kindly toward him, and indeed to all the world, having enjoyed a moment of spontaneous success at the Presidential table.

“Pug is a fine officer,” said the President, “and I expect great things of him.”

Rhoda felt warm excitement. “I always have, Mr. President.”

“Not everybody deserves such a beautiful wife,” Roosevelt said, with a decidedly human glance at her that took in her décolletage, “but he does, Rhoda.”

With the oldest instinct in the world, blushing, Rhoda Henry looked toward Mrs. Roosevelt, who was deep in conversation with Sumner Welles. It flashed through Rhoda’s mind that there was a tall woman who married a very tall man. But Pug at least could walk. Life balanced out in strange ways, Rhoda thought; the heady situation was making her philosophical.

Madeline and Byron sat on opposite sides of the table, she between Maugham and Welles, Byron between the crown princess and a deaf, very old lady in purple named Delano. This lady had said nothing all evening; a relative, obviously, living at the White House and interested mainly in the food. Madeline was speaking first to the Undersecretary of State and then to the famous author, her face alive, flushed, and gay, her gestures quick. Maugham offered to come on Cleveland’s interview program, when she told him what she did. He said candidly that his mission was British propaganda, so why not? She was entranced.

Byron throughout the dinner sat silent, collected, withdrawn. Victor Henry saw Roosevelt looking quizzically at him. The President loved to charm everybody and to have only cheerful faces around him. Pug kept glancing at his son, hoping to catch his eye and signal him to perk up.

Over the ice cream, the President said in a moment’s lull, “We haven’t heard from our submariner here. Byron, you’re a natural for the silent service. Ha ha.” The young officer gave him a melancholy smile. “How’s the morale in your outfit?”

“Good, Mr. President.”

“Are you ready to go to war, as Mr. Maugham seems to desire?”

“Personally, sir, I’m more than ready.”

Well, that’s the spirit.”

Victor Henry interposed, “Byron was visiting a friend in Poland when the war began. He was strafed by a Luftwaffe plane and wounded.”

“I see,” said the President, giving Byron an attentive stare. “Well, you have a motive then for wanting to fight Germans.”

“That’s not it so much, Mr. President. The thing is that my wife is trapped in Italy.”

Franklin Roosevelt appeared startled. “Trapped? How, trapped?” The rich voice went flat.

Everybody at the table looked at Byron. The atmosphere was thick with curiosity.

“Her uncle is Dr. Aaron Jastrow, Mr. President, the author of
A Jew’s Jesus
. He’s had some trouble about his passport. He can’t come home. He’s old and not well, and she won’t abandon him.” Byron spoke as flatly as the President, getting out each word very distinctly.

Mrs. Roosevelt put in with a smile, “Why, Franklin, we both read
A Jew’s Jesus
. Don’t you remember? You liked it very much indeed.”

“Dr. Jastrow taught at Yale for years, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Byron said. “He’s lived here almost all his life. It’s just some crazy red tape. Meantime there they are.”

“
A Jew’s Jesus
is a good book,” said the President, bored and stern. “Sumner, couldn’t you have somebody look into this?”

“Certainly, Mr. President.”

“And let me know what you find out.”

“I will, sir.”

Franklin Roosevelt resumed eating his ice cream. Nobody spoke. Perhaps eight or ten seconds ticked by, but at that table, in that company, it was a long time. Everybody appeared bent on eating dessert, and the spoons clinked and scraped.

“Speaking of that book,” the President’s wife said with a bright smile, looking up, “I have just been reading the most extraordinary little volume -”

The door to the hallway opened, and a pale moustached Navy commander entered, carrying a brown envelope. “I beg your pardon, Mr. President.”

“Yes, yes. Let me have it.” The commander went out.

The tearing envelope made a noisy rasp. Yellow strips like telegram tape were pasted on the white sheet the President unfolded.

“Well!” Franklin Roosevelt looked around, his face all at once charged with teasing relish. “May I relay a bit of news?” He took a dramatic pause. “It seems they’ve got the
Bismarck!
”

“Ah!” The crown princess bounced in her chair, clapping like a girl, amid an excited babble.

The President raised his hand. “Wait, wait. I don’t want to be overoptimistic or premature. What it says is, airplanes from the
Ark Royal
have caught up with her and put several torpedoes in her. They must have hit her steering gear, because when night fell she was trailing thick oil and steaming slowly
west
- the wrong way. The entire fleet is closing in and some units now have her in sight.”

“Does it give a position, Mr. President?” said Victor Henry.

The President read off a latitude and longitude.

“Okay. That’s a thousand miles from Brest,” said Pug. “Well outside the Luftwaffe air umbrella. They’ve got her.”

President Roosevelt turned to a servant. “Fill the glasses, please.”

Several waiters sprang to obey him. Silence enveloped the table.

The President lifted his glass. “The British Navy,” he said.

“The British Navy,” the company said in chorus, and all drank.

Somerset Maugham blinked his lizard eyes many times.

* * *

Next morning, long after Victor Henry had gone to work, when the maid came to remove the breakfast things, Rhoda asked her for pen and paper. She wrote a short note in bed:

Palmer, dear-

You have a kindly heart that understands without explanations. I can’t do it. I realize we can’t see each other for a long while, but I hope we will be friends forever. My love and everlasting thanks for offering me more than I deserve and can accept. I’ll never forget.

Forgive me,

Rhoda

She sealed it up at once, dressed quickly, and went out in the rain and mailed it herself.

That same dark and muggy morning, shortly before noon, a buzzer sounded on the desk of Victor Henry’s office. He sat in his shirt-sleeves working by electric light.

“Yes?” he growled into the intercom. He had left word that he would take no calls. The head of War Plans wanted, by the end of the week, a study of merchant shipping requirements for the next four years.

“Excuse me, sir. The office of Mr. Sumner Welles is calling, sir.”

“Sumner Welles, hey? Okay, I’ll talk to Sumner Welles.”

Welles’s secretary had a sweet sexy Southern voice. “Oh, Captain Henry. Oh, suh, the Undersecretary is most anxious to see you today, if you happen to be free.”

Glancing at his desk clock and deciding to skip lunch, Pug said, “I can come over right now.”

“Oh, that will be fahn, suh, just fahn. In about fifteen minutes?”

When he arrived at Welles’s office, the warm sexy voice turned out to belong to a fat old fright, sixty or so, in a seersucker dress.

“Mah, you got here fast, Captain. Now, the Undersecretary is with Secretary Hull just now. He says do you mind talking to Mr. Whitman? Mr. Whitman has all the details.”

“Yes, I’ll talk to Mr. Whitman.”

She led him from the spacious and splendid offices of Sumner Welles to a much smaller and more ordinary office without a window. The projecting sign over the doorway indicated a minor official in European Affairs. Aloysius R. Whitman was a thick-haired man in his late forties, indistinguishable from ten thousand other denizens of Washington offices, except for his somewhat horsy clothes, an unusually florid face, and an unusually bright smile. Several prints of horses livened the walls of the small office. “The Undersecretary sends his thanks to you, Captain, for interrupting a busy schedule to come over.”

He gestured at a chair. “Cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

The two men smoked and regarded each other.

“Wretched weather,” said Whitman.

“The worst,” said Pug.

“Well, now. The business of Dr. Aaron Jastrow’s passport,” Whitman said genially. “It’s no problem whatever, as it turns out. The authorization was sent out a while ago. It may have been delayed en route, the way things often are nowadays. At any rate it’s all set. We double-checked by cable with Rome. Dr. Jastrow can have his passport any time he’ll come down from Siena to pick it up, and has been so informed. It’s all locked up.”

“Good. That was fast work.”

“As I say, there was no work to do. It had already been taken care of.”

“Well, my son will be mighty glad to hear about this.”

“Oh yes. About your son.” Whitman uttered a laugh. He rose, hands jammed in the patch pockets of his green and brown jacket, and leaned casually on the edge of his desk near Pug, as though to make the chat less official. “I hope you’ll take this in the right spirit. The Undersecretary was disconcerted to have this thing raised at the President’s dinner table.”

“Naturally. I was mighty jarred myself. So was my wife. I chewed Byron out afterward, gave him holy hell, but the thing was done.”

“I’m awfully glad you feel that way. Suppose you just drop a little note to the President, sort of apologizing for your son’s rather touching gaffe, and mentioning that you’ve learned the matter was all taken care of long ago?”

“An unsolicited letter from me to the President?”

“You’re on very good terms with the President. You just dined with him.”

“But he asked for a report from Mr. Welles.”

The captain and the State Department man looked each other in the eye. Whitman gave him the brightest of smiles and paced the little office. “We went to a rather dramatic effort this morning, Captain, just to make sure young Mrs. Henry could get home. Literally thousands of these cases of Jewish refugees come to us, all the time. The pressure is enormous. It’s absolutely unbelievable. Now the problem in your family is settled. We hoped you’d be more appreciative.”