Louise's Crossing Page 20

  Blanche left alone, striding confidently down the dock, turning and waving before she went around the corner to the bus stop. Olive and I shed a few tears, but we weren’t unhappy; we were sure we’d see each other again. She was met by an army officer who took her case and led her to an army staff car flying red-cross flags.

  Then it was my turn. I saw a man in an American Army uniform standing on the dock holding a sheet of paper, looking up at the ship uncertainly. I raised my hand to him, adjusted my coat, the one Grace had cleaned for me, tipped my beret and picked up my case.

  ‘I’m Louise Pearlie,’ I said, shaking his hand when I reached the dock.

  ‘My name is Staff Sergeant Fretz, ma’am. I’ll be driving you to London.’

  ‘Tonight?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Not all the way. We’ll spend the night at Brampton and then finish the trip tomorrow. Have you got any more luggage?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pointing to my trunk that had been delivered to the foot of the stairs. ‘I can carry my suitcase myself.’

  He led me to the end of the dock where I saw a staff car similar to the one that had picked up Olive.

  ‘And, ma’am,’ the sergeant said, ‘another passenger is traveling with us.’

  I saw him leaning up against the car with his hands in his pockets. He looked younger without the beard and glasses that had been part of his cover in Washington, handsome in a sharp tweed overcoat and fedora. But I’d know him anywhere.

  It was Joe.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Mary Jane Mulford Barnes 1913–1987

  Mary Jane Mulford Barnes was born in a mining town in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1913. Her mother, Linna Mulford, moved west from Jamestown, New York to teach school, married a mining engineer, and then divorced him before Mary Jane was born. When Mary Jane was six, she and her mother moved to Washington, DC for Linna to become one of the first women to work for the brand new Internal Revenue Service. Mary Jane graduated from Duke University’s Women’s College in 1935 in one of the earliest classes of the Women’s College.

  Mary Jane was always eager for adventure and, although she had trained as a teacher, she took administrative jobs in the federal government in the 1930s, so she could regularly quit and go on months-long trips. She sought a job at the OSS shortly after it began, looking for a challenge. She applied for transfer to London, never thinking she would be accepted. She had one month to prepare to board ship and sail across the Atlantic. Within two months of arriving in London, Mary Jane met the love of her life, another OSS member, James Barnes. He told her four months later, before shipping off for North Africa and Italy, that he would come back and marry her. She gave him one of her favorite earrings to bring back to her (she feared she would never see it again) and he named one of his spy stations Maria Giovanni.

  Mary Jane and Jim married after the war at Duke Chapel, moved to his hometown in Wisconsin, and later settled in Athens, Georgia where he taught geography at the University of Georgia and she ran the household and volunteered with Girl Scouts, PTAs, and many other groups. They raised two daughters there. She died in 1987 in California.