Louise's Dilemma (2 page)

Dellaphine lifted the whistling kettle off the range and poured steaming water into the mixing bowl, quickly dissolving the Epsom salts mounded in the bottom.

I waited for the water to cool, spending the time peeling bandage tape off my fingers after stripping my mittens and gloves from my aching hands.

‘Best wait longer, baby,’ Dellaphine said, but I ignored her and shoved my sore fingers into the hot water, massaging the pain away. Flipping through index cards and file jackets all day every day caused more pain in my hands, arms and shoulders than anyone who’d never done it before could possibly imagine. And then there was the typing. By the end of a workweek my hands and fingers felt like they barely belonged to my body.

‘Better?’ Dellaphine asked.

‘Much,’ I said, drying my hands on a dishtowel. I’d feel even better once I got upstairs to my bedroom and applied my own home remedy.

‘So how was your day?’ Dellaphine asked. Which was a rhetorical question, seeing how she had no idea where I worked. Few people in Washington were free to share any information about their jobs. I was a government girl, just a file clerk, one of thousands jammed into office buildings all over the city, typing and filing endlessly. It was a miracle the city didn’t slide into the Potomac from the weight of all those file cabinets!

I was different from most government girls, though. I worked for the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, created after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I had real secrets to protect. I had even more to keep my mouth shut about now that my job had changed from supervising a branch clerical office to analyzing and cataloging intelligence. This was a big career jump for me. Most of the female analysts in the Registry had college educations from places like Smith or Vassar. I had a junior college degree in business – code words for advanced secretarial studies.

‘My day was the same as always,’ I answered. ‘Typing, filing. How was yours?’

‘I queued at the Western Market all morning and ironed sheets in the afternoon,’ Dellaphine said. ‘I reckon my feet are sore as your hands.’

Dellaphine was Phoebe Holcombe’s colored housekeeper and cook. She and Phoebe managed the boarding house on ‘I’ Street where I lived. ‘Two Trees’ had been Phoebe’s home since she was a young married woman with children. Somehow she had hung on to it despite the Depression and her husband’s death.

‘At least when we get our ration books everyone will get their fair share without having to get up at the crack of dawn to wait in the cold all day,’ I said.

Dellaphine opened the oven door, and the savory aroma of pot roast wafted into the kitchen.

‘Is that beef?’ I asked. ‘Where did you find it?’

Dellaphine rolled her eyes. ‘Mr Henry,’ she said. ‘He bought it out in the country over the weekend.’

Black-market beef. Purchased directly from a farm instead of through a butcher or a grocery store in town, where shortages drove up the price.

‘It’s supposed to be Grade A Prime. It ain’t, I know grass fed beef when I see it,’ Dellaphine said. ‘But we be eating it anyway. I’ve cooked it long and slow. It should be tender enough even for Mr Henry.’

‘Henry will be lucky if he doesn’t wind up in jail,’ Phoebe said, coming up from the basement. ‘Dellaphine,’ Phoebe said, ‘the towels are washed, and I hung them on the clothes line near the furnace. I don’t know if they’ll dry any time soon, but they’re clean.’

‘It’s been over a month, Phoebe,’ I said. ‘If Henry was going to get arrested they’d have come for him by now.’

In January Henry had asked Phoebe if he could borrow her car. She agreed. She didn’t drive much herself and the car needed to be driven. Henry was gone a long time; he’d gone over a hundred miles away, because Joe had checked the car’s odometer after he’d returned. Henry returned from wherever he went with jerry cans of gasoline packed into the trunk and the back seat. Without saying a word he’d unloaded them all and lined them up against the back wall of the garage. We didn’t say anything to him either. What could we do? Clearly, he’d bought them on the black market. If we reported him to the Office of Price Administration he’d be arrested, and none of us wanted to be a part of that. I wasn’t without guilt myself. I bought sugar on the black market; I couldn’t learn to drink coffee or tea without it.

We just prayed that no one from the Gas Rationing Board or the Tire Allotment Committee decided to inspect Phoebe’s garage. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we had plenty of gasoline!

The comforting warmth of the cozy old townhouse vanished as I climbed the stairs to my room. All the radiators upstairs were shut off to conserve fuel oil. For about an hour before bedtime, Phoebe, Ada and I would cheat, pulling the rug off the floor vent in the hall to allow some heat to rise from the first floor so that we could sponge off and get ready for bed. A real bath was out of the question. Which was why we didn’t need Phoebe’s clean towels anytime soon.

Henry Post and Joe Prager, our two men boarders, had slept downstairs in the lounge the last few nights. Their third floor attic bedroom had gotten so frigid that frost settled on their bedcovers.

I was willing to tolerate the chill for the chance to be alone and quiet for a time at the end of my workday. Thank God I had my own room. Most government girls had at least one roommate, but Phoebe wasn’t in the boarding-house business for the money. She opened her home to four boarders out of patriotism, and to help keep her mind off her two sons, who were stationed with the Navy in the Pacific.

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 during 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!’