Louise's Dilemma Read online

  I took a couple of aspirin tablets and mixed myself a martini from the bottle of Gordon’s gin I kept in my underwear drawer. Phoebe didn’t allow drinking unless she suggested it, and then only downstairs. But I knew for a fact that Henry hid a bottle of bourbon in his room. And I’d caught Phoebe herself with a glass of sherry in her bedroom once.

  I’d bought a record player recently, so I slid a Carter Family record out of its sleeve and set the needle gently on one of my favorite songs, ‘Wildwood Flower’. I was the only one in the house who liked hillbilly music. With my own record player I could listen to Roy Acuff and Bob Wills whenever I wanted.

  Sipping the martini and listening to my hillbilly music, I couldn’t help but think of my parents, who would be horrified to learn that I enjoyed a cocktail almost every day. I was a bit surprised I’d taken so quickly to some of the temptations of the big city myself!

  Like not going to church. And shopping. I had my own charge account at Woody’s! Making enough money to save for my future. I bought fifty dollars a month in war bonds. I planned to use it after the war to finish college or get an apartment. That is, if I could keep working. All of us government girls had been hired ‘for the duration’.

  Last fall the government surveyed working women to see how many planned to keep working after the war. Everyone was shocked when three-quarters of the women surveyed said they intended to keep their jobs. That wouldn’t be possible. Men returning from the war would need those jobs to support their families. Most women would be discharged and sent home to keep house.

  I intended to be one government girl who didn’t get a pink slip.

  My paycheck had just gotten larger, too, now that I’d been promoted to Research Assistant. Two thousand dollars a year! Not that I didn’t earn it, mind you. I’d never worked so hard in my life, not even at my parents’ fish camp when the blues were running.

  ‘Where’s Joe?’ Ada asked.

  My pulse quickened. I so wished it wouldn’t! My attraction to Joe made my life so complicated. The man was a refugee, a foreigner, and I knew nothing about him except what he told me, and I’d already discovered much of that was untrue. Joe was worldly, educated, and to my mind handsome, in a dark, mature, unaffected way. I on the other hand was a thirty-year-old widow with glasses and an advanced secretarial degree.

  ‘Joe called a couple of hours ago and said he’d be working late tonight,’ Phoebe said, dishing up the fragrant pot roast, doling out roughly the same amount to each of us. Potatoes, onions and carrots weren’t scarce, so we could serve ourselves as much of the side dishes as we wanted. I heaped butter on my vegetables, since we still had a hoarded couple of pounds in the refrigerator. I loathed margarine.

  Dellaphine and her grown daughter Madeleine ate in the kitchen, of course, but Phoebe made sure they had the same portions we did.

  ‘This is delicious pot roast,’ I said, steering the conversation away from Joe. I was afraid someone would notice me flushing when his name was mentioned.

  ‘Yes,’ Phoebe said, ‘thank you for buying this for us, Henry.’

  Henry nodded. ‘Glad to do it,’ he said.

  Phoebe might disapprove of Henry purchasing beef on the black market, we all did, but once it was stowed in her refrigerator she was more than happy to cook and serve it!

  ‘Best enjoy it while we can still get it,’ Henry said. ‘When does rationing start?’

  ‘In two weeks,’ Phoebe said. ‘We’ll each get a little less than two pounds of beef a week, depending on grade.’

  ‘How does a university lecturer work late?’ Ada asked, returning the conversation to Joe. ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘Working with his students, I’m sure,’ Phoebe said.

  ‘Who needs to learn Czech anyway?’ Ada asked. ‘The Nazis occupy Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘We don’t know the government’s plans, do we?’ said Henry. ‘If the Allies invade through Greece, we’ll be in Eastern Europe in no time.’

  I kept my mouth shut. I was the only person at the table who knew that Joe Prager wasn’t teaching anyone anything, much less the Czech language, because he actually worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee, struggling to help Jews escape from Europe. The college professor story was his cover. Oh, he had an academic background – he’d been teaching Slavic literature in London when war broke out – but now he’d joined the war against Hitler, just like the rest of us. And I’d been attracted to him from the moment I’d met him, and him to me.

  ‘Aren’t you working tonight?’ I asked Ada, steering the conversation away from Joe again.

  Ada Herman was an accomplished clarinetist who played in the house band at the Statler Hotel. She’d taught music lessons to children until the war. Now she made more money than Henry, Joe and me combined! Bandleaders paid plenty to replace their male musicians who were drafted. Americans had jobs and cash now, and they wanted to go out at night and swing!

  Ada partied most nights long after her shift ended. She was buxom, a platinum blonde from a bottle, and had plenty of beaus. She had a secret, too, a frightening one she’d confided to me months ago. One night, terrified to see a police car parked on our street, she broke down and told me she was the wife of a German Luftwaffe pilot. They’d married before the war, when he was working for a civilian airline. They’d lived happily in New York. When Hitler took power he moved to Germany to join the Luftwaffe. She refused to go with him, but was afraid to file for divorce for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. As the wife of a German officer she might be sent to an internment camp. Ada trusted me to keep her secret, and I intended to, although I was breaking the law by doing it.

  Ada shook her head. ‘The Willard ballroom’s dark tonight,’ she said. ‘No one is going out in this weather.’

  Dellaphine brought in our dessert: canned peaches with a couple of tablespoons of vanilla ice cream. I was so used to going without sugar that it tasted like peach pie to me. Even Henry didn’t grumble much any more.

  Phoebe twirled the radio dial, but we only heard static.

  ‘All the stations are still off the air, I guess,’ she said. ‘What did the evening paper say about the weather?’

  ‘No end to freezing temperatures in sight,’ Henry said. ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like for our boys off Greenland. They’re escorting our ship convoys through gales, blizzards, and ice. I don’t understand how any of our ships make it to England, what with the weather and Nazi submarines.’

  I knew, but couldn’t say, that Nazi U-boats had sunk a troop transport and two fuel tankers last week, that most of the ships’ crews had drowned amidst the chunks of ice floating in the Gulf of Greenland, and that the British had fuel oil reserves for just three more months.

  We’d gathered in Phoebe’s front room on the threadbare lounge suite she’d bought back before the Depression, passing the time before we could go to bed. Gloom kept us company, like a spinster great aunt who was always in mourning. What with the weather, and daily bad news from the North Atlantic, and the Allied invasion stalled in North Africa, the specter of Axis victory in this war haunted the country again.

  ‘Can we have a fire, Phoebe?’ Ada asked.

  ‘Yes, Phoebe, can we?’ I asked.

  ‘What a good idea,’ she said, and began to rise.

  ‘You stay there,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll fetch the wood and get it started.’

  Phoebe sat back in her chair, her hands primly resting palm down on her thighs. She’d lost weight; I could see her knees jutting through the silk folds of her fringed caftan. A dowdy crochet shawl wrapped around her shoulders. A web of blue veins marred her fine hands, and her crimped hair was streaked with gray that wasn’t evident when I moved in last year. She couldn’t be very old – her sons were in their early twenties, and she’d married young, so she must be less than fifty. She seemed older, a relic of a distant time, when flappers danced the Charleston and millionaires lit cigars with twenty-dollar bills. So much had happened in the world d
uring the last twenty years, most of it terrible.

  Henry stacked wood on top of crumpled newspaper in the fireplace and poked a flaming match deep into the pile. The fire blazed into life, its flames leaping high.

  ‘Wish we had some hot chocolate,’ Ada said.

  ‘Me, too,’ I answered.

  ‘If you find any chocolate bars, pick them up and we’ll make some this weekend.’

  Phoebe rose and went to the front window, parting the blackout curtains and looking out into the dark street. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said, saying what we were all thinking. ‘I hate to think of Joe coming home at this hour. It’s frigid outside!’

  ‘Maybe he’s staying with a friend,’ Ada said.

  ‘He would have called,’ I said, remembering the morning newspaper’s account of two frozen bodies found sitting upright on a bus stop bench a couple of days ago. ‘Is the telephone still working?’

  Henry went out into the hall and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Dial tone,’ he called back to us as he hung up. ‘It’s working.’ So why didn’t Joe call?

  Then we heard Joe’s key turn in the front door lock and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

  Phoebe and I met him in the hall.

  ‘Well, this is a nice welcome,’ Joe said in his Czech accented English, which I found so appealing in spite of myself, stripping off his gloves and scarf. Ice crusted his dark beard, and when I took his hands they were so cold! Automatically, I began to rub them, then stopped when I remembered Phoebe’s presence.

  ‘We were worried about you,’ Phoebe said, taking Joe’s coat.

  ‘I almost stayed with a friend, but then a taxi passed by. Naturally, the heater wasn’t working.’

  ‘I’ll go hang this in the kitchen, it’s warmer there,’ Phoebe said, carrying Joe’s coat down the hallway.

  In the seconds between Phoebe turning her back to us and Henry coming out of the lounge, Joe brushed his lips against mine and whispered in my ear. ‘I found a place,’ he said.

  TWO

  My heart thrummed. Joe could only mean he’d found a place where we could be alone!

  We had no privacy whatever. We worked long hours even before President Roosevelt ordered the forty-eight hour workweek for everyone who worked in a war-related capacity, which was practically everyone in the country. We lived on separate floors in a boarding house with six other people. Neither one of us could afford an apartment on our own. Phoebe was fond of both of us, but she wasn’t a ‘modern’ woman, and wouldn’t tolerate a love affair under her roof.

  In short, Joe and I had had about as much physical contact as a teenage couple courting on their parents’ front porch!

  As much fast partying as went on in Washington these days, it still wasn’t considered appropriate for a single woman, even a mature widow like myself, to have a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Not a public one, anyway.

  ‘Joe,’ Henry said, after gripping Joe’s arm, a friendly gesture very unlike him, ‘we built a fire in the lounge. Come get warm.’

  Henry offered Joe his chair near the fire, and Phoebe brought him a shot of whiskey from her late husband’s diminishing stash. Color returned to his face and hands.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You are all very kind.’

  He offered no explanation for his late return. The fewer lies he told the easier it was for him to protect his cover.

  I arrived at work early the next morning. Joan had picked me up in her commandeered Jeep, announcing her presence with a couple of honks and a bellow.

  I’d poured myself one of the last cups of coffee from the OSS cafeteria. It contained too much chicory for my taste, but it was hot. I drank it quickly so that I wouldn’t spill it on the files and papers that crowded my tiny desk, which I swear the government had commandeered from a third-grade classroom.

  It was time to get to work on Lt. Collins’s suspicious postcard. I slid it out of its protective cellophane sleeve.

  I must have examined a hundred pieces of mail since I started my new job, and I knew the drill. First I had to verify the picture on the front of the postcard, making sure it wasn’t someplace strategic that could figure into a covert message. According to the tiny caption on the back of the postcard, the image was Rodin’s drawing of the Romanesque Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes.

  A quick check of the Encyclopedia Britannica confirmed the existence of the monastery, illustrated with the same photograph that appeared on the postcard.

  The reverse was crowded with ‘Richard’s’ message, a half dozen postage stamps hailing from Vichy France, Portugal and Great Britain, and the circular impressions of numerous postmarks and censors’ stamps. The postcard appeared to have been routed properly through Thomas Cook’s Post Office Box 506 in Lisbon, passed by both Nazi and British censors, until an American censor noticed the mark that might be an ‘h’.

  Thomas Cook Travel Agency operated an accommodation address in Lisbon so that private and family notes could be sent between residents of Allied countries and Axis occupied countries. It was expensive: about fifty cents for Thomas Cook’s service, in addition to postage. Seemed a lot for just a postcard. Why hadn’t ‘Richard Martin’ mailed a full letter?

  The Nantes’s postmark read January seventeenth, 1943. Nantes, occupied by the Nazis in 1940, was on the Loire River, just upstream from Saint Nazaire, the base of operations for the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy. Saint Nazaire had been firebombed and burned to the ground by the Allies on January fourteenth, just a few weeks ago. The heavily fortified U-boat submarine pens had escaped damage, their thirty-foot thick concrete walls impenetrable to Allied bombs. The U-boat Wolf Pack couldn’t be destroyed when docked in the pens, and in the open sea the submarines were impossible to locate.

  Mailing a letter or postcard through Cook’s neutral mail service was an expensive process, and the message seemed inadequate to the complicated process of sending it. Of course, I didn’t know Leroy, Richard, or Anne, did I? Perhaps it was life and death to them. If the postcard was innocent, the sooner I finished with it the sooner the Martins would receive it so I could get back to my real job.

  My main work now, and the work of most of my colleagues in the Registry, was to index the vast amount of raw intelligence OSS received so that it could be accessed quickly. We analyzed cables, telegrams, maps, charts, and other documents, and summarized the contents on detailed index cards, sometimes as many as eight per document, so that the material could be retrieved when needed. Only when index cards were completed could materials be filed.

  Before Lieutenant Collins enlisted my help yesterday I’d finished typing an index card description for an intelligence document I’d reviewed. The card read:

  Report from captured personnel and material branch, giving information from captured German troops and officers about German suffering on the Russian front, about Russian hatred of the English, about the failure of the Germans to complete their only aircraft carrier, the Graf, Goering’s addiction to drugs. A small Paris prison is kept for wives of industrialists; there were corpses in it! Also R. G-2. 4 pp., 2/18/43.

  Our indexing system was invented by Wilmarth S. Lewis, a private scholar at Yale. Being a private scholar meant he was wealthy and could study any subject that took his fancy without having an actual position at the University. I’d seen Mr Lewis once. He was a dandy in tweeds who smoked a meerschaum pipe. According to rumor Lewis once wrote ‘nothing is better reading (except a good index) than footnotes’.

  Mr Lewis’s life’s work was collecting and publishing the letters of Horace Walpole. In order to keep track of the thousands of letters he kept in a dedicated library on the grounds of his estate in Connecticut, he devised a filing and indexing system to help him retrieve any letter he wanted. Lewis was recruited to the Central Information Division by his friend Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, to organize the filing system at OSS. Which is why the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, had adopted a filin
g system based on one designed to keep order in the personal papers of Horace Walpole, an eighteenth century art collector and novelist. Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto, the British gothic novel which influenced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I had never heard of Walpole before joining the OSS, and I had no plans to make his acquaintance.

  My job title was Research Assistant, however, so in addition to cataloging and indexing intelligence reports, I had research duties. Which is why Lieutenant Collins requested my help with a puzzling postcard flagged by the U.S. censor’s office.

  I found Olga Albright hunched over one of our microfilm readers, a big grey machine with a lighted screen that would ruin your eyesight in no time. Olga was, like me, older than most government girls. She was a third generation German-American who had taught French and German at a private girls school here in Washington. Now she spent her days combing microfilmed German newspapers smuggled out of Europe by Allied spies for any hints of Nazi troop movements or casualties.

  ‘Olga,’ I said, touching her shoulder to break her concentration, ‘I need your opinion on something.’

  Olga looked up from an obituaries page in Das Postes. ‘Of course, dearie,’ she said, taking off her thick glasses and rubbing bloodshot eyes. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Look at this,’ I said, handing her the postcard and indicating the mark wedged between the ‘n’ and the ‘a’ in ‘Leonard’. ‘Do you think that’s an “h”?’

  ‘Let me see,’ she said, directing her desk lamp on the card. ‘Well, perhaps. I assume you are wondering if the writer is a native German speaker? That he might have written ‘Leonard’ as ‘Leonhard’ and then tried to erase it?’

  ‘Is it possible?’

  ‘Of course. But,’ she said, peering at the postcard, ‘it’s not clear to me that this isn’t just an ink blob, or some kind of stain.’

  I agreed with her. After all, the card had gotten through the Vichy French, Portuguese, and British censors before our zealous American censor questioned it.