Louise's War (6 page)

The coffin was closed, which surprised me, I must say. I knew the Holmans were Baptists, and Baptists do like to wring their hands over their dead. The widow, a short sturdy woman with salt-and-pepper hair, stood next to the coffin, resting a hand on it, while she received her guests. I didn’t see Holman’s children. Maybe his widow thought they were too young to attend his wake.

The room was crowded with familiar faces, but I didn’t recognize anyone senior to our branch director, James Baxter Linney, once the President of Williams College. A scattering of army and navy officers wearing a respectable amount of chest hardware represented our agency’s bosses, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I was sure the two men standing alone near the front door were FBI agents. You could spot G-men anywhere. They wore dark suits, white shirts and ties no matter the occasion or time of day. Hoover forbade his agents to drink coffee or alcohol or to accept meals, so they stuck out like sore thumbs when everyone else in the place held a plate and a glass. One of the agents, the one who seemed to be in charge, did manage to express some individuality. A tiny yellow feather poked out from his hatband.

I saw Don across the room with Roger Austine and Guy Danielson, who for once seemed to be speaking civilly to each other, and Charles Burns, the head of the Map Division. Don looked very surprised to see me. He nodded at me briefly before turning his attention back to the other three men.

Joan and I joined the receiving line behind Dora Bertrand, an anthropologist from the Far East Division who was the only woman at the wake who wasn’t either a clerk or someone’s wife. She was the first woman I’d ever met who had a PhD.

Dora told us she’d been in the office when Holman’s wife found his body. We pried as many details as we could from her, keeping our voices lowered out of consideration of the somber occasion.

Dora whispered that she’d run down to Holman’s office when she heard his wife screaming, closely followed by Austine, Don and Danielson. ‘The four of us were reviewing a report that General Donovan wanted to read over the weekend. That’s why we were working late.’ She’d seen the corpse and everything. ‘He couldn’t have been dead long,’ she said. ‘We’d all seen him alive within the last couple of hours or so.’

‘It’s not surprising he had a heart attack, as fat as the man was,’ Joan said. ‘His face was always red. That’s a sure sign of a heart problem.’

‘I’m amazed his death got into the newspaper,’ I said. ‘What with it happening at OSS and all. You’d think the government would have suppressed it.’

‘When Mr Holman’s wife screamed, well, the best word to describe it was piercing,’ Dora said. ‘Most of the civilian staff had gone home for the day, but security came running from everywhere. Our guards arrived first, then soldiers from the bivouac on Navy Hill, then the Capitol police, then the FBI. The soldiers kept us out in the hallway, but the office door was open and we could see Holman’s body.’

‘What happened next?’ Joan urged.

‘I’m not supposed to talk about it,’ Dora said, lowering her voice, ‘but I will say that when the FBI appeared, two agents and a deputy special agent, they ran off our security and the police. In fact,’ she said, lowering her voice even more, ‘that agent over there, the one with the yellow feather in his hat band, he’s the deputy special agent who was on the scene. Roger, Guy, Don and I had to stay at the office to be interviewed. For hours, without dinner. I about starved.’

‘Was General Donovan there?’

‘Sure. And Dr Linney. Watching the G-men’s every move,’ Dora said. ‘It was quite entertaining. You’d never guess we were all on the same side.’

Dora was a socialist, but General Donovan made it clear he didn’t care what anyone’s political inclinations were as long as he or she could help defeat the Nazis. The same couldn’t be said for everyone in the office. Generally speaking the economists were Marxists, the administrators were dollar-a-year Republicans and the historians, and most everyone else, were New Dealers. The foreigners at OSS ranged from exiled European royalty to Communists. If it weren’t for the war they wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with each other.

‘Around ten o’clock,’ Dora went on, ‘General Donovan came and told us that we could all go home, that the doctor had said that Mr Holman died from a heart attack.’

We stopped gossiping as we drew near to the head of the line. When it was my turn to speak to Mrs Holman, she gripped my proffered hand firmly. She looked tired, but her eyes were clear.

‘So sorry about your husband,’ I murmured. I really was. Even though I hadn’t been close to the man. No one, especially someone with young children, should have to die in the prime of his life.

‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, but she didn’t ask how I knew her husband, and her attention had already moved on to the next person in line.

Dora, Joan and I returned to the buffet. No one ignored free food in Washington, especially on a Sunday, when many restaurants were closed and boarding houses often didn’t serve meals. Mine was an exception, but I still wouldn’t get dinner at ‘Two Trees’ that night.

Joan reached over the platter of deviled eggs for a ham biscuit. She was a big woman, over six feet tall, with an appetite to match. She had a deep, easy laugh and a jolly sense of humor, which might explain why she had lots of friends but no beaux.

Dora left us to join a group of the branch researchers across the room.

‘She has to watch herself,’ Joan said. ‘Can’t hang out with us clerks too much. Doesn’t want to be taken for one herself.’

‘I admire her so much,’ I said. ‘She’s got a real career. Of course she’s not married, she couldn’t do both.’

‘You don’t want to spread it around how much you admire her,’ Joan said. ‘You know she’s a lesbian, don’t you?’

‘A what?’ I asked.

Joan pulled me aside and explained.

‘Good God,’ I said. I knew there were men like that, but I’d never heard of a woman doing such a thing. ‘How do you know?’

‘It’s not a secret. She taught at Smith before the war. I took her class on Asian cultures. I was shocked at first, but now we’re great friends.’ I glanced over at Dora. She didn’t look like a pervert. She was a tiny woman with short coal-black hair and thick glasses, thicker than mine even, but a lovely smile.

‘I want another ham biscuit,’ Joan said. We went back to the buffet and reloaded our plates.

‘Were you particularly close to Mr Holman?’ Joan asked.

I took a chance on her discretion.

‘Not really, but I left some important information with him the afternoon he died. I’m worried about what became of it. I read in the newspaper what a mess his office was.’

‘How important is this information?’

‘It’s hard to say. Mr Holman seemed to think it should go to the Projects Committee.’ I paused, wondering if I dared tell Joan about Rachel.

Joan noticed my hesitation.

‘We can’t talk about it here,’ she said. ‘You’ll be in the cafeteria for coffee break tomorrow?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘If my girls have recovered from food poisoning by then.’

The crowd thinned quickly, but the widow didn’t seem to mind. She took her hand off her husband’s coffin and breathed a sigh of relief.

All the mourners leaving the wake murmured about paperwork they had to get back to, but I knew better. The Washington Senators and Detroit Tigers game was about to start.

‘Can you come over to my place for the rest of the afternoon?’ Joan asked me. ‘I’ve invited Charles and Dora too.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That would be fun.’

The funeral director mopped his face and under his arms with a damp towel. He was sure his shirt was ruined, the second one this week. He’d been a nervous wreck since Bob Holman’s corpse arrived at his funeral home escorted by two FBI agents. He glanced out the window. The same two agents sat in a black Packard that waited at the curb, engine running, poised to follow the hearse to the cemetery for the deceased’s burial. There wouldn’t be a church funeral as such, only a minister speaking a few words at the gravesite. It’d had been like that since the country had gotten into this war. Not enough time or gasoline to drive all over town for separate services.

He’d embalmed and arranged Holman’s corpse exactly as the G-men had instructed him, obscuring all evidence of the wound at the base of his neck. It was barely visible anyway. Puncture wounds closed quickly, leaking only a trickle of blood. He’d caked foundation a quarter of an inch deep over the mark and powdered it liberally, dressed him and settled the man’s head into the deep folds of the thick silk pillow in the coffin.

Holman’s widow was the last person to leave. The mortuary assistants lifted the heavy coffin onto a gurney, rolled it out to the curb and heaved it into the hearse. The vehicle pulled away from the curb, trailed by the G-men a few car lengths behind. He’d be glad when Holman was safely planted six feet deep. Then maybe he’d stop ruining shirts.

SIX

I
’d visited Joan’s studio apartment at the Mayflower Hotel a few times before. I wished I lived there and owned everything in it, from the Pullman davenport that opened into a bed, to the club chairs slip-covered in blue-flowered chintz, to the sculpted wool rug that perfectly matched the chintz, to the mahogany sideboard that held a china coffee service and a silver cocktail set. There was even a tiny kitchenette set into an alcove. A crystal chandelier that blazed with light hung from the ceiling, highlighting ornate Federal ceiling moldings. The apartment was refrigerated, but today Joan had left the tall casement windows open wide to a view of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The bathroom looked like something out of a Greta Garbo movie. It was lined, floor, walls and ceiling, with white marble, and spacious enough to accommodate the walnut vanity that matched the dresser in the other room.

Bill and I had lived in a tiny apartment over the Wells Fargo office where he worked, but it was nothing like this, and it wasn’t really ours.

I’d been taught in Sunday school not to covet. Well, I coveted Joan’s apartment and her car. And it was clear to me that living that well depended on money. I figured that to live on my own like Joan I needed to make twenty-five hundred dollars a year, and I wondered what on earth I could do to earn that kind of dough. Nothing, I shouldn’t think. Another good argument for remarrying before I got too old to find a husband, I supposed.

Joan took my hat and hung it alongside hers on a coat rack near the door. She stuffed her pajamas, they were silk, I believe, into a dresser drawer, and rang the front desk for ice.

‘What do you think about gin and tonics?’ Joan asked. ‘So refreshing in this heat.’

‘Sounds great,’ I said.

A knock on the door signaled the arrival of the ice. I quartered limes while Joan dumped peanuts into a silver compote and wiped down the cocktail table.

Dora Bertrand and Charles Burns arrived together. Burns was a tall, handsome man with an upper-class Yankee accent like Don’s. He had a thin David Niven mustache. I’d run across him many times at work but didn’t know him well. As a division head he was senior to the rest of us.

‘Bless you,’ he said to Joan, who greeted him with a gin and tonic. ‘So nice to be here. Otherwise I’d be forced to listen to the baseball game with my room-mates. I don’t know why, I just don’t care for the sport. You ladies don’t mind if I take off my jacket, do you?’

‘Not at all, be comfortable,’ Joan said. ‘What’s going to happen, I wonder, if all the baseball players get drafted?’

‘I hear talk that women might form professional teams,’ Dora said.

Charles lounged on Joan’s davenport, and took a gulp of his drink.

‘How silly,’ he said. ‘No one wants to watch women play sports. There some things women can do adequately while the men are at war, but not that.’

‘I can’t say I’d want to watch women play baseball myself,’ Joan said.

I wondered why Charles wasn’t in the army, he looked healthy enough to me, but I decided that he might be too old. Or perhaps OSS needed his expertise.

‘What shall we do?’ Joan asked. ‘Bridge? Monopoly? Chinese checkers?’

We settled on Monopoly.

Dora and I set up the board while Charles found a music program on the radio. Joan refreshed our drinks and we settled down to while away the afternoon. When we selected our tokens I reached for the red one. I saw a bemused look flit across Dora’s face.

‘What?’ I said.

‘My dear, you surprise me. I would never have guessed you would choose red. I took you for a blue person, maybe green.’

‘Do you want the red one? You can have it.’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t give it up,’ she said. ‘Yellow is fine with me.’

We finished our drinks, had another, and concentrated on accumulating real estate. Inevitably, though, our conversation turned back to Bob Holman’s death.

‘I saw him,’ Charles said, ‘a couple of hours before his wife found him. He seemed the same as always to me.’

‘He was terribly overworked,’ Dora said. ‘He slept at the office several nights a week.’ She threw a six and moved her pawn to Park Place. ‘This is the last time you see this block without houses, so be warned.’

‘It’s a mistake to spend all your money at the beginning of the game,’ Charles said. ‘What happens if you have to pay rent and you’re broke?’

‘I always buy the purple or green properties if I land on them,’ Dora said, ‘because one always passes “Go” shortly and collects two hundred dollars. I’ll take two houses, please.’

‘Did you see the corpse?’ I asked Charles.

He shook his head. ‘No. I’d already left for the day. Read about it in the newspaper.’

‘Me, too. But Dora was there.’

‘Was she?’ Charles asked, glancing at her. Dora said nothing, counting her money.

‘That must have been a shocking experience for you,’ Charles said to Dora.