Louise's War (5 page)

Ada Herman slowed her pace, pausing to check out the feature at the movie house on the corner of Pennsylvania and 21st – Walt Disney’s latest cartoon,
Kipling’s Jungle Book
– waiting for exactly the right moment to turn down the street towards her boarding house. During the week it wasn’t difficult to intercept the mail. It came on the dot of ten o’clock in the morning, when everyone else was at work and Phoebe and Dellaphine were busy around the house. Ada worked afternoons and evenings so she was free to linger around the front door until the mail dropped through the slot. She’d quickly riffle through the envelopes before depositing the stack on the hall table. Sometimes Phoebe, hearing the mail drop, would rush to see if she had a letter from one of her sons, and wait impatiently until Ada was through.

Ada had told him never to write her again, never ever, and he hadn’t so far, but every day she lived in terror that a letter bearing a foreign stamp addressed to her would arrive before she could hide it from the others in the boarding house. She endured a recurring nightmare that Phoebe, or Louise, or worse of all, Henry, got to the mail before her, and asked her why she received a letter with a return address in German.

Ada checked her watch. It was still too early. She crossed Pennsylvania and stopped at a cafe to look at the menu posted in the window. Tonight diners could choose from either fried chicken or liver and onions, with mashed potatoes and peas, and fruit salad, iced tea or hot coffee. A few people queued outside, waiting for the cafe to open.

On Saturday mail delivery was sporadic. It came any time in the afternoon when her fellow roomers tended to be in the house. She’d missed it many times, but so far her luck held. That didn’t stop her from trying to get to it first whenever she could.

Ada cut through the block by way of a vacant lot and an alley and found herself across the street from her boarding house. Henry was out in front, his suspenders hanging down his sides, flipping through the mail. She was too late. He saw her, and raised his hand.

Head swimming with apprehension, she crossed the street.

‘You need to look before you cross the street, young lady,’ Henry said. ‘You could get hit by one of these jalopies, people drive too damn fast these days.’

‘Anything for me?’ she asked.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Not today.’

I didn’t mention Holman’s death to anyone. I didn’t want to talk about it yet.

Ada returned from Jelleff’s, thrilled with Marlene Dietrich’s autograph. ‘Miss Dietrich was so elegant,’ Ada said, ‘and so sweet. Sort of reserved, though, and not as tall as I thought she’d be.’ She paused. ‘Are you all right, dearie? You’re awfully quiet.’

‘Just tired and hot,’ I said.

After dinner I skipped
The Grand Ole Opry
, pleading a headache. Upstairs in my room I stretched out on my bed to read my Christie novel, but found a few pages after I started that I hadn’t comprehended any of it. I’d have to start over again. Instead I gave up and closed the book, tossing it onto my bedside table. The brass bookmark flew out from between its pages and slammed into the cold-water pipe that led to the sink in the attic. The bookmark was a thick, heavy rectangle I received as a prize for reading the most books in the sixth grade, and I must have flung the book, and the bookmark, rather hard, because the clang of brass against iron pipe resounded like a bell ringing. I hopped off the bed and retrieved the bookmark and stuck it back between the pages of my book. A minute later, I heard the echo of object on pipe sound above me, three taps, equally spaced, like Morse code. Someone in the bedroom upstairs was responding to me, striking the pipe with a metal object. Had to be Joe, Henry would never do such a thing.

I was mortified. Could Joe be thinking I’d signaled him intentionally? Please, no! What would he think of me, that I was flirting with him? I lay back on my bed, a pillow over my face to hide the heat of embarrassment surging into my face, even though no one else was in the room.

Don’t answer back, I instructed myself firmly. If you don’t respond, he’ll know it wasn’t intentional. A few minutes passed while my heart rate slowed. Okay, I was in the clear. But then another two clangs reverberated into the room. I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed the brass bookmark and tapped back, twice. He responded, with one tap, and I echoed it, concluding our peculiar goodnight.

I was still mortified, but I convinced myself I shouldn’t be, that our conversation by water pipe was a friendly, silly gesture, that neither one of us intended it to be flirtatious. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to look Joe in the face in the morning.

I slid into bed, the worn cotton sheets soft on my bare skin. I wondered if Joe was sleeping naked tonight, too.

FIVE

I
spent a restless night, tossing and turning even after I again hung damp sheets between my bedposts and trained the fan on them, disturbed by worries more serious than what Joe thought of me. I brooded over mortality, the heartache of my husband’s early death, Bob’s heart attack, and I wondered how his wife and children would live. His wife wanted to work, and it looked like she’d get her chance. At least there were jobs for women now. During the Depression a man’s death often left his family destitute.

Finally my thoughts turned to Rachel and her family. I recalled the newspaper story about the disheveled state of Holman’s office, and I fretted over the whereabouts, in that jumbled office, of Gerald Bloch’s file.

‘We should have eaten more of the ham,’ Joe joked, as he helped himself to creamed ham and peas before passing the platter.

Phoebe Knox, from her place at the head of the table, dotted her plate with tiny servings of ham and peas, squash and sliced tomatoes. She’d left her room for the first time all weekend to go to church this morning, hiding her swollen eyes by drawing down the netting of her pillbox hat to hide her face.

‘The real question is, what’s for dessert?’ Ada asked, reaching for the breadbasket for a second biscuit. I pushed the butter dish down the table towards her without being asked. It puzzled me that Ada wasn’t fat. Must be all that late-night jitterbugging.

‘You do realize,’ Henry said, ‘that there’re no actual food shortages in the country, or gas shortages either. The government wants you to think there are, all the while using the gasoline for military purposes.’

‘It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ I asked. ‘Better the gasoline goes to the military than shipping fresh food all over the country.’

‘It’s not efficient,’ Henry said. ‘Not organized. The Democrats can’t win this war. Roosevelt will have to bring in Republicans to run the agencies. You wait and see.’

General Bill Donovan, the Director of OSS, was a Republican. I hadn’t noticed that he was better organized than anyone else. Not to mention President Hoover, who’d organized us right into the Depression.

‘I don’t mind missing dessert for years, if that’s what it takes,’ Phoebe said.

‘Not everyone is making the same sacrifices,’ Henry said. ‘That’s what I resent. I’ll bet you a dollar that roast beef and chocolate cake are on the menus at the Cosmo Club and the Willard Hotel tonight.’

‘You’re not living at the Willard,’ Phoebe reminded him. ‘We have to eat up our leftovers.’

Dellaphine shoved the dining-room door open with her hip and came in with a tray.

‘Dellaphine,’ Joe said, scraping the last of the ham and peas onto his plate, ‘dinner was delicious. And those peaches look great.’

‘Don’t be flirting with me, Mr Joe,’ Dellaphine said, holding the bowl for Phoebe to dish out the peaches into cut-glass bowls. ‘There ain’t no sugar.’

‘Not even just a teaspoonful to sprinkle over the fruit?’ Ada asked.

‘Not even that,’ Dellaphine said, the dining-room door swinging shut behind her.

I liked the peaches fine without sugar, myself.

‘So,’ Phoebe said, too brightly, ‘what’s everyone doing this afternoon?’

Henry intended to read the newspapers, Ada planned to wash her hair and take a nap and Joe said he had tests to grade.

‘I’m going to a wake,’ I said.

‘Who died?’ Joe asked.

‘A man I worked with,’ I said. ‘It was in the paper yesterday.’

‘Where is it? The wake, I mean,’ Phoebe asked.

‘A funeral home near Griffith Stadium.’

‘Good luck finding a taxi,’ Ada said.

‘I’ve got a ride.’

I still owned the black dress I’d bought when Bill died. It was quality, cotton pique with a Peter Pan collar, and I saw no need to get rid of it because I wore it to my husband’s funeral. I wasn’t sentimental that way. Not that I didn’t still get a catch in my throat when I thought of Bill. It was funny, we had been childhood sweethearts, and when I remembered him now, it was as a sunburned boy catching crabs off my parents’ pier, not as the serious young Wells Fargo telegrapher I’d married. I’d hated moving out of the two-room apartment over the telegraph office we’d shared and back into my old bedroom at my parents’ house, but there was no money left in our shoebox bank after I’d bought this dress and paid for the funeral. Now I made more than sixteen hundred dollars a year, myself, more than Bill dreamed of earning.

When I recalled the end of my brief marriage it was as if I was watching a sad movie, poignant and moving, but not immediate. In the five years since Bill died the world had become a different place, and I was a different person.

I fastened a single strand of cultured pearls around my neck. I’d bought it shortly after I’d gotten my pay raise at OSS, and I’d felt horribly guilty at the time. They’d cost eleven dollars and seventy-five cents, seven dollars less than a twenty-five-dollar war bond. But owning my own pearls meant so much to me I had to have them. They reminded me of the first time I met Rachel . . .

All thirty-seven of us, the entering 1933 class of St Martha’s Junior College, had lined up against the hallway wall, waiting to have our pictures taken. Each, as directed, wore a dark dress with a white lace collar. We’d washed and styled our hair, dusted our shiny faces with powder and gently blotted our red lips. We were like peas in a pod, with one glaring, shameful exception. The night before at dinner when the dean instructed us on what to wear for our photographs, she ended her remarks with ‘don’t forget your pearls’. Well, I didn’t have any. I was the only girl at St Martha’s who hadn’t gotten a string, symbolic of reaching upper-class womanhood, on her sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t a member of that social class. And there’d be a record of my low standing for all time preserved in the pages of the St Martha’s Junior College 1933 yearbook. All the other girls decked out in pearls, while I wore my only necklace, a silver locket. I resented being set apart, spotlighted for all time as the middle-class girl.

Not that anyone seemed to care. All the girls were chatting and primping, and included me in their silliness. If they didn’t notice, why should I? But I did. I was the one who’d look like the charity case as long as yearbook paper lasted. Not to mention the big group portrait the photographer would make up, the one with each of our pictures in little ovals, that would go in the foyer of the Main Hall.

My maiden name started with ‘S’, Rachel’s with an ‘F’, so she was done already. She leaned up against the opposite wall, chatting with the other girls who’d finished, waiting for us all to be done so we could file into dinner together.

Mary Orr went into the front drawing room, where the photographer had set up his tripod, lights and screen. I was next. And I was miserable.

Rachel appeared by my side, her own double strand of real pearls dangling from her hand. ‘Dearie,’ she said, ‘here, wear these. Then we’ll all be the same.’ She fastened the diamond clasp around my neck. The pearls, cool and smooth, rested comfortably on my skin as I posed, head up and shoulders back, for my class photograph.

Remembering Rachel’s kindness made me wonder again what had happened to Gerald’s file since Bob Holman’s death. Was it sent upstairs to the Projects Committee before he died? Was it lying on his office floor? Had someone cleaned up and taken it back to the main files? I thought I’d been so clever getting Holman to refer it upstairs, congratulated myself for helping Rachel. Now I had no idea where the file was. I had to find out, I couldn’t let it go. I owed Rachel so much, much more than the loan of a string of pearls.

I heard Joan’s car horn as I finished tilting a black straw fedora at a fashionable angle and securing it to my hair with a hatpin. I’d called Joan yesterday afternoon. She was just as upset, and all right, I admit it, curious about Holman’s death as I was. We conspired to go to the wake together and pick up as much information about his unfortunate demise as we could.

Joan Adams was one of General Donovan’s two personal secretaries. She’d graduated from Smith College, so she fit in with the rest of Donovan’s swank circle. We’d met in the security office on our first day at work, sharing a grimy towel after we had our fingerprints taken. We’d sworn the oath of secrecy together, and listened to the security officer’s lecture. ‘Remember,’ he’d said, ‘this town is crawling with spies. Anyone asks, you’re a government file clerk, that’s all. You keep your mouths shut about every single thing that goes on here, no matter how trivial, or people might die.’

Despite her family’s wealth, Joan had no pretensions. Our first week in Washington she’d invited me up to her apartment in the Mayflower Hotel for cocktails and to listen to records with her crowd. Thanks to my Southern Baptist upbringing, I’d never touched a drop of liquor before, but that afternoon I learned to like Martinis. Not that I drank them often. Too expensive. I splurged often enough to feel worldly and sophisticated.

The price of Martinis was not a concern for Joan. She got a hundred dollar a month allowance from her parents, in addition to her salary, which is why she picked me up in a green Lincoln Continental cabriolet. I’d only ever driven my parents’ Ford Model A pickup. One of my secret fantasies was to own a car one day.