Louise's Dilemma (4 page)

‘Thanks,’ Collins said. ‘This is enough. Since Anne Martin is foreign-born she comes under the authority of the Foreign Nationalities Branch. We can make further inquiries.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘Send someone to interview the Martins,’ he answered. ‘I expect that this will turn out to be a postcard clumsily written in English by a French relation, but we need to follow it up, anyway.’

So ended another glamorous day spent in the files of the Oh So Secret, Oh So Social, Office of Strategic Services! Tomorrow would be just like it, and the day after that, and the day after that, until the war ended.

I leaned into the chill wind as I left the office and headed toward the bus stop. WWDC was back on the air today, and supposedly extra buses were running to compensate for the still sidelined streetcars. There were no buses in sight, though, but there were hundreds of cold government employees lining the sidewalk on ‘E’ street, in the dark, hoping to get home at a reasonable hour.

I found the corner where Joan had picked me up yesterday, but her Jeep was nowhere in sight. She must have been working late.

What I wouldn’t give for a martini right now! Served somewhere warm and cozy and bright!

I heard a familiar voice call out to me, and the honk of a car horn, but it wasn’t Joan. Joe pulled up to the curb in Phoebe’s car and leaned out the window.

‘Want a lift?’ he asked, smiling.

‘I am so glad to see you!’ I said.

Joe hopped out of the car and went around to the other side to open the door for me. I slid in, so glad to feel the heater blasting away.

Joe returned to the driver’s seat and pulled away from the curb. I felt a bit guilty as we drove past the crowd of cold commuters, but Phoebe’s car was a two-seater and we couldn’t possibly pick up another person.

‘I’m delighted to see you,’ I said, ‘but what’s going on?’

‘I came home early,’ Joe said. ‘Finished my current project.’

That meant a boatload of Jewish refugees had left a neutral port in Europe, probably Lisbon, and were bound for safety somewhere else in the world. Joe looked happy and relaxed, but it wouldn’t last. Soon he’d be scrounging money for escapes, travel, and ship berths again.

‘I want to celebrate,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out to eat somewhere we can talk. Is O’Donnell’s all right? I know you don’t like fish, but they’ve got lots more dishes on their menu.’

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘Can I have a martini?’

‘Of course. You can have two, in fact.’

I felt the crick in my neck subside. An evening alone with Joe, where we could talk for a couple of hours without worrying that someone would sense our relationship, with martinis, and heat, sounded like pure heaven.

Joe stopped at a light and turned to me, his eyes crinkling. ‘Best not to be home tonight for dinner anyway,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Guess what Dellaphine has fixed for dinner.’

‘What?’

The light changed, and Joe changed gears, driving more slowly as we went past the White House, where the streetlamps weren’t lit and government buildings were blacked out.

‘Bologna casserole,’ he said. ‘I understand it’s layered bologna and potatoes, dotted with bacon fat.’

‘How awful!’

‘You should have heard Dellaphine! “I never would have thought that someday I would serve such trash at Miss Phoebe’s table,”’ he said, mimicking Dellaphine’s accent.

‘I can imagine what Henry will say!’ I said.

We turned into O’Donnell’s Sea Grill and parked, Joe leaning out the open car door and peering at the ground so that he could see the white lines of the parking space.

Inside, the large restaurant was warm and bright behind its blackout shades. The dining room was already packed, but there was room for us at the long bar counter and the two of us slid onto stools at one end of it.

‘The lady would like a martini,’ Joe said to the bartender.

‘With just a dash of Taylor’s vermouth,’ I said, ‘and no olive.’

‘A pint of whatever beer you’ve got on draft,’ Joe said, ‘and a menu.’

The bartender brought our drinks, and we sat at the bar sipping and chatting.

‘You haven’t said anything about what I told you last night when I got home,’ Joe said. ‘If you’ve changed your mind …’

‘No,’ I said, squeezing his hand, ‘I haven’t, of course not!’ So why had my stomach cramped into a tiny ball? ‘Tell me all about it.’

‘A friend of mine at work, he lives on a houseboat on the Potomac. In the channel off Maine Street, a few docks south of the Yacht Club. Every few weeks he goes into Baltimore and spends a weekend with his mother. He said I could borrow the boat when he’s gone!’ It was Joe’s turn now to squeeze my hand. He leaned in toward me, and we almost kissed, but then the bartender slid a menu under our noses and we remembered where we were.

We collected ourselves and scanned the menu. Joe wouldn’t allow me to pay for myself when we were out, and he hated it when I picked the cheapest item on a menu, so I settled on something in between.

‘I’ll have the oysters and Virginia ham Norfolk,’ I said, ‘with a beer.’

‘Don’t you want another martini?’ Joe asked.

‘Beer sounds good,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll have the Virginia crab cakes with French fries and another pint of draft beer.’

The bartender went away to deliver our order to the kitchen, and Joe and I found ourselves leaning towards each other again.

‘We’ll have to leave the house separately,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll go one way, and you’ll have to go another.’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think Phoebe would mind us having an affair as long as she doesn’t have to admit she knows about it.’

An affair! I’d said the word out loud! Joe and I would be sleeping together. Without being engaged, without wanting to be engaged. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to remarry, ever! I felt a flood of emotion, almost a river of feeling, pour through my body, and suddenly Joe’s voice seemed very far away.

‘It won’t be this weekend. Maybe the next. But we can go see the boat, would you like that?’

Not this weekend! Thank God. But if I wanted this so badly, why was I relieved?

I felt my body regain control of itself. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’d like to see it.’

‘If it’s not so frigid this weekend we’ll go,’ he said.

We drove home in the crisp cold moonlight and said goodnight to each other in the hallway. Ada and Henry were still in the lounge, so we couldn’t kiss. But it wouldn’t be long before we would be spending the night together. Something I still could hardly imagine!

‘S
o, Mrs Pearlie, I see that you have field experience.’

Lawrence Egbert was the Assistant Chief of CID and my boss. He was one of the few men in the Research and Analysis Division with military experience. Most were academics or civil servants. He’d been in the U.S. Naval Reserve since 1918 and was an instructor in nautical astronomy.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

Egbert referred to the file in his hand. My personnel file, I assumed. What was this all about? A new assignment? Please God, let me escape this prison built of file cabinets even for a day!

‘Your case officer was Colonel Melinsky. He’s given you the highest commendation. And,’ he said, leafing through a few more pages, ‘you’ve been to the Farm. And passed all tests.’ He closed the file and tossed it on his desk.

‘Foreign Nationalities Branch has requested that you be temporarily transferred to them, under the supervision of Lieutenant Arthur Collins,’ he said, ‘to investigate a suspicious communication from France to an American in Maryland. We cannot spare you. We are seriously understaffed.’

Damn it!

‘But,’ he said, ‘so is every division of OSS. The Head of FNB assures me that he’ll need you for just a few days. So consider yourself transferred.’

‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir,’ I said.

‘You may report immediately,’ he said.

I floated out of his office, passing by my desk long enough to collect my coat and pocketbook before I found my way to the Foreign Nationalities Branch.

On my way out I passed Ruth, filing, of course. I’d worked with Ruth before. She was once a hoity toity Mt. Holyoke graduate. Now she spent her days filing like a machine. Her fingers were double-wrapped with first-aid tape.

‘You look pleased,’ she said.

My training kicked in. I couldn’t tell her any details about my assignment. ‘On an errand for Egbert,’ I said. ‘Might be out of the office for a couple of days. If someone asks where I am …?’

‘I’ll take care of it,’ she said. ‘Have fun.’

‘Fun’ was a completely inappropriate word to assign to an OSS assignment, but I was already enjoying myself! A break from the tedium of office work was just what I needed.

Collins offered me his chair and perched on his desk, one of a dozen squeezed into an office in a corner of the building that housed the Foreign Nationalities Branch on the OSS campus.

‘Cigarette?’ he asked, pulling out a packet of Luckies and holding the package out to me.

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

Collins extracted a cigarette from the packet with his lips and lit it, striking his match across the wood of his desk, already deeply scarred. He inhaled deeply, and I noticed his shoulders slump with relief.

‘Poole wants me to interview the Martins,’ Collins said. DeWitt Poole, who’d run the American intelligence network in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, was the head of the Foreign Nationalities Branch. ‘The specificity of the date concerns him. And the address, right on the Chesapeake Bay, near the Solomons Island naval base and an air base.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.

Collins lowered his voice, so his officemates couldn’t hear him. ‘It’s good that you’re coming with me,’ he said. ‘Having a woman along to interview civilians is good intelligence practice. It puts the subjects at ease.’

If a woman accompanied Collins, in other words, the Martins wouldn’t take the interview as seriously as they might otherwise.

‘I’ve requisitioned a car,’ he said. ‘We need to go today. St Leonard’s about a hundred miles away, and it will take us about three hours at the war speed limit, I reckon. I know my way around the western shore of Maryland, though; I vacationed there when I was a kid.’

A bitter wind swept the government parking lot, sending chewing gum wrappers and cigarette butts skittering along the pavement. Collins opened the passenger door of a two-door black Chevy sedan with government license plates. I stepped on the running board and slid inside. I was grateful it wasn’t an open Jeep and appreciated the blast of heat that enveloped me once the engine started.

Getting out of Washington was not as difficult as I had expected despite the icy condition of the streets. Our tires were brand new, and chains rattling on the rear wheels gave us traction. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves in rural Maryland, driving east, then south, on state roads, more or less parallel to the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

On the inland side of the road lay fallow tobacco fields, barns, and empty wood hogsheads waiting for spring and summer, interrupted by picturesque farmhouses and dairy barns. The fields were empty. In this cold weather livestock huddled together inside sheds and barns to keep warm.

On the beach side of the road, turn-offs were marked for the famous western shore beaches – North Beach and Chesapeake Beach. I wondered how these Maryland beaches differed from those lining the coast of North Carolina. Collins noticed me studying the signs.

‘I went to the northern beaches every summer when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘We camped in Seaside Park for a month. To get there we caught a steamer from Baltimore. We bathed in the ocean, rode the carousel, fished from the pier. My father would fry whatever we caught over our campfire. Sometimes we’d go out to eat dinner at a crab house and then get ice cream at Forest’s Ice Cream Garden. I thought it was heaven.’

Growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina I knew how much tourists loved summers at the shore. Those summers were much less fun for the locals. Waiting on tourists was long hard work. For me, life in a big city like Washington was heaven!

‘It’s so different in the winter,’ Collins said. ‘The campgrounds, piers and dance pavilions are closed. Even during the season there’s not much going on at night. Can’t have too much light and sound near the Bay these days anyhow.’

‘Seems a bit silly,’ I said, ‘all the paranoia on the coast when the war began, what with the fortifications on the Chesapeake. A Nazi canoe couldn’t get through. And the Nazis don’t have a single aircraft carrier.’

The Bay bristled with military bases. There was Fort Storey, Fort Custis, Camp Pendleton, Portsmouth Naval Yard, and Langley Field, all within a few miles of each other at the mouth of the Bay. They were linked to each other with gun batteries, minefields, submarine nets, searchlights, radar stations and a couple of lighthouses. Further up the Chesapeake a submarine net closed off the Rappahannock River to protect Richmond. Washington itself was circled by Fort Hunt, Fort Washington, Andrews Air Force Base, Bolling Air Force Base, Fort McNair, and the Navy Yard.

The Potomac River had its very own submarine net, though the gates were left open and the mines set on safe mode most of the time to keep our own shipping from damage.

St Leonard, where we were headed to meet the Martins, was located on a narrow peninsula bordered by the Patuxent River and the Chesapeake Bay. The Patuxent River Air Station and the Solomons Island Naval Training Base occupied the southern tip of the peninsula.

PT-boats and auxiliary Coast Guard cutters patrolled the Bay and the rivers – when they weren’t blocked by ice, that is. And the Coast Guard patrolled the beaches. The place was safe as could be.

The state road became Solomons Island Road before we got to St Leonard, a picturesque town a couple of miles from the coast.

‘We should get lunch before we find the Martins,’ Collins said. ‘It’s about that time.’

We parked in front of a shingled building that, according to the directory posted outside the main entrance, housed a general store, the post office, a library and Bertie Woods’ Cafe.