Louise's War (11 page)

Inside the squat stone building it was refreshingly cool and dark. I had to wait a few seconds while my vision adjusted from the intense light outside to the dim interior. A secretary seated at a metal desk kept watch inside the doorway. She was an older woman, at least forty, with minimal typing skills, as I could see as she pecked at the antique Remington on her desk.

She tilted her eyes over her reading glasses and looked me up and down. When she spotted my OSS badge she deigned to speak to me. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

‘Can you tell me the way to Professor Metcalfe’s office?’

‘He’s not a professor,’ she said. ‘He’s an instructor. Down that hall, last door on the right.’

I saw right away why Metcalfe wasn’t in the military. He wore a brace on his left leg, which he stuck straight out along the side of his desk. Polio, I supposed, like so many. Otherwise Metcalfe lived up to my image of a college instructor. He needed a haircut, his collar was frayed, and the leather briefcase that rested on the floor was creased with wear. Metcalfe looked up from a stack of blue books when I tapped on his open door.

‘And you are?’ he asked.

‘Louise Pearlie,’ I said. Damn, I thought, should I have used an alias? I hadn’t given a cover story any thought at all. And my OSS ID tag still dangled from my collar. I was stuck with myself. ‘Sorry to interrupt you at your work,’ I said, ‘but my boss –’ that was a stupid thing to say, please God, don’t let him call Don – ‘sent me to ask you some questions,’ I said, ‘about a hydrology conference you attended in 1936, in Edinburgh?’

‘What, you people don’t have telephones?’

‘I was in the neighborhood anyway,’ I said. ‘On my way to the dentist.’ Another mistake. I should have checked to see if there was a dentist’s office nearby.

Metcalfe rolled his eyes, as if my inanity was the best he could expect from a female government clerk.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what about it?’

I was ready for this question.

‘One of our division heads died a few days ago,’ I said. ‘We found the program for a hydrology conference that took place in 1936 loose on his desk. Your name is listed as a participant. We don’t know why it was on Mr Holman’s desk, and we hoped you could tell us why it might be important.’

‘It was the last international hydrology conference held in Europe. The 1939 conference was here, in Washington. Of course there won’t be any more until this bloody war ends. Not that it matters. I have no time to work on my research, much less my dissertation, what with the teaching load I’m carrying. I sent the program to the OSS back when they asked our department for the names of important people in our field.’

‘Did you know any of the other speakers well?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got another copy of the program. Let me refresh my memory.’ He pulled a folder out of his desk file drawer, the program out of the folder, and glanced through it. ‘This Burns fellow. He’s with you people now. We shared an office one semester when he was in graduate school here. Somehow he managed to finish his dissertation before the war started. And Gerald Bloch, he’s a Frenchman, but he speaks very good English. We had dinner in Edinburgh one evening. His wife was with him. Lovely woman. Can’t remember her name. Bloch wasn’t here at the 1939 conference. Couldn’t get out of Europe, I suppose.’

‘Might his wife’s name have been Rachel?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I believe that’s correct.’

‘And Bloch’s expertise?’ I asked. ‘For our files, you see.’

‘The Mediterranean,’ Metcalfe said. ‘The North African coast particularly.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your time.’

Metcalfe withdrew several brochures from the folder. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I have some reprints of some of Bloch’s journal articles. We all exchange reprints with each other at these conferences. Do you want them?’

‘Sure.’ I stuffed them into my bag.

I left the building with my stomach knotted into a tight ball. I’d been dangerously unprepared for my meeting with Metcalfe. He didn’t seem suspicious, but if I planned to continue to investigate the missing Bloch file without OSS permission I needed to be more cautious. Ruthlessly I suppressed the apprehension that surfaced whenever I thought of Rachel and her family in peril. I couldn’t help them if I was crippled by my fear for them.

It was nearly lunchtime, and my stomach growled. When I saw the foreign-languages building ahead of me I thought of a distraction. Why not drop in on Joe? My errand gave me a good excuse to be here, and we could go to lunch. Have a meal away from the boarding house and talk without anyone else around.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Pearlie.’

‘I’m sure you’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘Mr Prager teaches Slavic languages here. He’s Czech, has a dark beard, medium height. Wears a gold pocket watch.’

The secretary, younger than the watchdog at the geography department but no less authoritative, closed her notebook with an impatient slam.

‘There is no Joseph Prager working here,’ she said. ‘Not in foreign literatures, not in languages, not in the day or the evening colleges.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Perhaps this fellow fed you a line,’ she said, as only a twenty-year-old blonde wearing a fraternity pin could say to an older woman with no ring on her most important finger and thick eyeglasses. I couldn’t think fast enough to reply with equal condescension, and wound up leaving the building with a flush creeping up my neck.

I took refuge in Quigley’s Pharmacy at the soda fountain. I ordered a grilled-cheese sandwich and a Coke, which was exempted from sugar rationing because the government considered it indispensable to the war effort. Right now it was indispensable to me. The ice-cold, sweet surge of flavor braced me to mull over what I’d learned.

So Joe didn’t teach at George Washington. Why did I think he had? He said very little about himself, and he’d never mentioned his job directly. He talked about his students, read Czech books and wrote lectures, and I’d seen him grading papers. But, I realized, he’d never actually mentioned GWU. We all assumed he worked there, since our boarding house was so close to the university. Well, he must teach somewhere else. Perhaps Georgetown? But he’d let us all assume he taught at GWU. Which he might do if he needed cover? That had to be the answer. He must teach at one of the government or military language schools, and, like the rest of us working for the government, couldn’t talk about it. Of course that was the explanation.

I relaxed and finished my sandwich. It was energizing to be sitting in a soda shop on a college campus, where students talked about books and classes instead of stuck in an office going deaf from the din of clattering typewriters and mimeographs, when a successful day was marked by a tiny dent in a mountain of paperwork. I let myself feel sorry for myself for a few minutes, before I reminded myself that I was doing crucial war work.

The other girls and I joked sometimes, calling ourselves ‘secretaries of war’, but really, the most massive army in the world would be helpless without the information we gathered. Besides, it could be worse. I could still be living in Wilmington, gutting fish and frying up slimy fillets in my parents’ fish camp, putting in the same hours as my salaried brother, for room and board at my parents’ house and two dollars at the end of any week the till wasn’t empty, thankful for a roof over my head after my husband died.

When men began to leave their jobs to join the military, I got my chance to escape the fish camp. Oh, I didn’t think of it that way at first. I was doing my patriotic duty, taking the place of a man who’d become a soldier.

I was one of the first girls in Wilmington to get a defense job. Since I had a junior-college business degree I had my pick of positions. I ran the office at the Wilmington Shipbuilding Company, and as long as I live I’ll never forget my first paycheck. Ever. I went right out and cut my hair into a soft shoulder-length style and got harlequin-framed eyeglasses to replace my steel spectacles.

My standing rose within my family, too. I gave part of my salary to my mother for housekeeping expenses. And because of the importance of my job we got ‘A’ gasoline ration coupons.

I was very good at my job. Which meant not only running the office, but also keeping secrets. My company built ships for the navy. Any number of foreign governments wanted to know its business. But not one peep about my work escaped my lips. My mother didn’t even have my office phone number.

My boss was a simple man who tended to say the same things over and over, just in case you didn’t grasp his meaning the first few times. ‘Louise,’ he would say to me, ‘you ain’t like most women. You know how to keep your mouth shut.’ I could have reminded him that the last three employees we’d fired for talking too much had been men, but I knew how to keep my mouth shut about plenty that had nothing to do with military secrets.

My competence, and reticence, impressed a naval officer who visited the company shortly after Pearl Harbor. He voiced his regard to a friend who was an OSS scout, and I went to Washington soon after the Coordinator of Information became the OSS. I rode north by train sitting on my suitcase in the aisle the entire way, absorbed in my Esso map of the city, the address for ‘Two Trees’ safely tucked into my pocketbook.

I became the chief file clerk at my section within three months. My paycheck was so much bigger than anything I was accustomed to that I didn’t tell my parents about it. I was independent for the first time in my life.

I’m not sure I would have had the nerve to leave Wilmington without the self-confidence I learned from Rachel. I remembered so clearly the day we climbed to the top of the Empire State Building on my first visit to New York. Clutching Rachel’s hand I moved to the edge of the observation deck. I felt dizzy and my head swam. I’d never imagined being so high. I could see the entire city, even recognize parts of it. Ocean liners rocked gently in the Hudson River. A dirigible floated over Penn Station, off to the north. The cars, trolleys and people below us rushed around like sand fleas on a Carolina beach. After lots of encouragement I did manage to circle the deck, holding on to Rachel with one hand and the outer rail with the other.

‘See,’ Rachel said, ‘that wasn’t so bad. Besides, it’s good training for you. We’re riding the Cyclone roller coaster tomorrow.’

‘I can’t, I’m sure I’ll be too scared,’ I said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I know you can do it.’

The next day I did ride that roller coaster. Twice, in fact, the second time with my hands raised high above my head.

Rachel’s words sustained me through some tough times in later years. ‘I know you can do it.’ I could almost hear her voice.

I drained the icy dregs of my Coke and decided that my fictional toothache was a good enough excuse to take the rest of the day off. I wanted to go shopping, because I hated the hours-long wait in cashiers’ lines on Saturdays. But I was afraid I might run into someone I knew who’d wonder why I was out of the office on a weekday afternoon. While I was in Quigleys I did buy tooth powder, face cream and the quota of three Hershey’s chocolate bars from a fresh box a sales clerk had just placed on a shelf.

I decided to spend part of the afternoon at the public library, find a French–English dictionary and try to translate the journal articles by Bloch that Metcalf gave me, so I could see what kind of expert he was.

I was lucky. I caught a northbound bus right away. I got off at Mt. Vernon Square, where the vast neoclassic library building stood. Like many Washington public buildings, it mimicked a Greek temple, but one with ‘Poetry’, ‘Science’ and ‘History’ etched into the entablature instead of some stylized battle between ancient, weathered gods.

The library interior wasn’t refrigerated, but stone walls and marble floors cooled it, and I felt refreshed the minute I walked inside. I found the reading room, such a relief from the hectic pace of a capital city at war. It was a long, vaulted space with tall bookshelves and polished mahogany tables reflecting the warm yellow glow of dozens of reading lamps. The only sound was the quiet murmur of bodies shifting in their seats, turning pages and an occasional clearing throat.

Nearly all the chairs were occupied.

The reference librarian told me that her one French to English dictionary was kept locked up, like our London telephone book, and I had to use it right at the librarian’s desk under her watchful eye. Besides, it was in use, and a couple of people were waiting their turns. I could sign a request, come back in half an hour and use the dictionary for fifteen minutes. I thought of flashing my OSS identity card, but figured that might not get me any sympathy, since OSS was probably responsible for requisitioning most of the library’s dictionaries in the first place.

I slipped into an anteroom to read the latest magazines while I waited. I picked up
Life
, which fell open at a shocking scene of civilian suffering in Russia. A small child, a boy, perhaps two years old, lay frozen in death in a snow bank, an arm and leg contorted unnaturally. Nazi soldiers had flung him up against a stone wall and left him to die. His mother lay next to him, shot to death.

For a minute I thought I’d burst into sobs right there, in public, what I saw was so awful. And of course I thought of Rachel and Claude. If the Nazis were capable of such atrocities in Russia, they could perpetrate them anywhere.

I closed the magazine and did my best to compose myself. No more war news for me. I couldn’t afford to be immobilized by fear.

I reached for another magazine,
Home Companion
, I think, but I quickly tired of its gee-whiz tone. The women in its pages bore no resemblance to anyone I knew. In its cheerful stories women skipped off to work in full make-up with neatly coifed hair pulled back in colorful do-rags, carrying lunch pails full of healthy home-made food. Their overalls didn’t get dirty no matter how filthy the job. If they weren’t married with an obliging mother at home caring for their children, they were engaged to a shop foreman or a military officer. None of them were war widows or lived in boarding houses or had to park their children in crowded day nurseries.