Shining Through (42 page)

“You’re not going. You’re not going to destroy yourself—and possibly put into jeopardy what few shreds of resistance are left.”

“I’m better than any name on that list, and you damn well know it!”

“You’re staying here.”

“
Please
. Don’t you understand? This is my war. I want to fight it. I belong there.”

Edward took a long drink. “You don’t belong there.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you’re a Jew.”

I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Please. I saw your FBI report two years ago. Why do you think you were cleared so damned fast?”

SHINING THROUGH / 313

“I’m not a Jew,” I said. He gave me one of those cool, neutral upper-class glances that still say, Yeah, sure. So I added, “My father was, but he never did anything Jewish in his life…whatever it is they do.”

“If you were to go into Berlin, if they were to find you out—and believe me, they inevitably would—do you know what they would do to you?”

“Yes. And they’d do it to me, anyway—Jew, half Jew, no Jew at all.”

“They’d do it worse to you.”

“Come on! You think I’m going to walk into Germany with a big yellow star on an armband?”

“If they captured you, do you think it would take them more than ten minutes to find out everything they could possibly want to know?”

Without thinking, I reached out and took his drink. It was only after the whiskey radiated through me that I realized what I’d done. “Excuse me,” I said, handing him back the glass. I took a minute to collect myself. “To answer your question, if I saw myself sitting under a naked light bulb in an interrogation cell, I wouldn’t be making this pitch. Okay? And if you’d let me tell you what I have in mind—”

“Sit down, please.” Edward motioned to the couch. We sat on opposite ends; his drink sat between us on the table. He cleared his throat. “If you read the editorials, listen to Buy Bonds speeches, it’s very fashionable these days to call Hitler’s regime hellish. ‘The hell that is Nazi Germany,’ and so forth.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Listen to me, Linda. It
is
hell. More than you can comprehend. It is absolute evil.” He held out the glass to me. I didn’t take it, so he did. “I’m going to tell you something only about ten people in the government know. Some…shocking news has come out of Switzerland, through Sunflower; he learned it from that disgusting little Nazi who’s treasurer of his company, Himmler’s friend.” He fell silent, as if he didn’t want to continue.

“What? What’s going on?”

314 / SUSAN ISAACS

“They’re killing the Jews.”

“I know they are.”

“No. You don’t know. They’ve started something new. Gas chambers. They expect to exterminate three to four million—did you hear that number?—three to four million European Jews in the next two years. More, if they can build fast enough and maintain their supply of prussic acid. Men, women, children.

They want to annihilate the Jews completely.” He hesitated, and then added quietly, “Your family, Linda. Your people.”

How do you react to something like that? I sat on that sumptuous couch in that rich, civilized house in Georgetown and I was numb. Not feeling numb, but as if everything inside me had frozen. My only sensation was thousands…millions of tiny prickles of horror along my skin and scalp. “Why?”

“There is no answer.”

I thought about the two old ladies, Liesl and Hannah. “I have to go there,” I said.

“You can’t stop them.”

“But I can do
something
. I can help. I can be one bullet, maybe one bomb. I can make a difference.”

“You can’t. You’d be one more dead Jew.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!”

“Linda, my dear, I am going over to the telephone. I am calling Norman Weekes and telling him to scrap immediately any plans he has involving you. I am going to stop this preposterous scheme
now
. If you don’t have the brains or the desire to stay alive, I’ll have to see to it for you.”

I don’t know how I got through the rest of that day. Edward made his phone call, finished his drink in silence and poured another. I walked out and waited in the car, staring straight ahead, at the back of Pete’s baseball cap. Edward came out a half hour later and acted as though nothing the least unusual had happened.

At five o’clock, he went off to a meeting at the White House, saying, “I should be back by seven-thirty or eight.”

SHINING THROUGH / 315

Just like that. At six, I put a flawlessly typed note on his desk.

Dear Mr. Leland
:

This is to inform you that I am hereby submitting
my resignation from the position of your secretary;
the resignation is effective as of the close of business
today
.

Thank you for your consideration and courtesy
.

Very truly yours
,

Linda V. Berringer

Then I walked out of Edward Leland’s office for good.

When I thought about it—and I now had plenty of time to think—the idea of my going underground and surfacing in Berlin seemed right.

Sure, when I thought: Hey, I want to be a
spy
, the actual word would make me feel all fluttery. Worse than that: agitated. I’d pace from room to room, grab a sponge and wipe around the faucets for the twenty-seventh time, open the refrigerator and check if the peaches were too soft since I’d last looked, fifteen minutes before.
Spy
. Inspecting the bathroom to make sure we hadn’t run out of toilet paper. I could almost hear the creepy music they play in movies when the secret agent walks down a cobblestone street and fog swirls around his feet.

But when I’d said to Edward, This is my war, I’d meant it.

Okay, it was just something I’d blurted out because I was so unhappy, so frustrated, but there’s value in misery. It’s a test.

When you’re so oppressed and depressed by your life, you can cave in and show the world you’re the sucker they’ve always thought you were, or you can finally come out fighting and say: Listen, you bastards, this is unfair; I won’t put up with it. I’m entitled to…And whammo! Out pops what you really want. Out pops the truth. And the truth was I 316 / SUSAN ISAACS

wanted to fight just as much as every eighteen-year-old boy who’d up and enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor.

Why not? I was as American as apple pie. Okay, the way I talked, no one would say, Wow, you must be from Nebraska!

But there’s apple pie in New York too. A little more mushed up, a little spicier, but still apple pie.

There can be more than one truth, though. I was all-American, but not all American. I’d grown up in a house with two women, where English was the language of dopiness and German the tongue of whatever intelligent thought there was. It was my mother’s “Linda, angel, what would
you
call this nail polish—cor-al or salmon?” versus Olga’s “Do you think the Dawes Plan will really help the German economy?”

Okay, there was my father too. He was almost like me in that he spoke English and German with almost equal ease, but although he was smart, the fact that he was fluent in a foreign tongue meant zero to him. He could have been speaking Pig Latin for all he cared about Germany. He could talk about the Dodgers or Herbert Hoover or his chance of getting a raise down at the sausage plant in either language, but his life was purely American.

But maybe because my parents were so busy with each other, they didn’t have a lot of time for me. So I’d listened a lot to my Grandma Olga, who’d reminisce when she was waxing the floor or stuffing cabbage leaves or cutting out a corn plaster. The old country was her life, and I guess in a way it became mine; I’d always been fascinated with Germany—and especially Berlin—because she made it sound like a fairy-tale place, the Enchanted Kingdom. The longer she stayed in America, the greener the German countryside became, the more graceful the boulevards of Berlin, the more glamorous and cultivated and merry its in-habitants. Maybe that’s why when Hitler rose to power, she thought of him as a disagreeable quirk of history; he was a blot on her dream of perfection, and she figured it was only a matter of time before the neatest people in the world cleaned up their blot.

SHINING THROUGH / 317

But as far back as 1923, when I first heard about him and his NSDAP party, I knew he was dangerous. I was a girl raised on fairy tales—not Cowboys and Indians—and so I’d learned there was more to life than good guys and bad guys. In every enchanted kingdom, there are monsters. When I heard Hitler’s speeches, his combination of hysteria, hatred, pride and vengeance all tied up into a package with the gaudy ribbon of Germanic myth, I knew that here was one doozy of a monster.

And just as Cinderella and the fairy godmother had always struck a chord in me, I knew Hitler and his gods would strike a chord in the German people. Oh, they would snicker at his accent and maybe cringe at his rantings, but deep down they’d say,
Ach!
He know
just
what I feel!

I guess I was too true-blue American to ever really have confidence in the basic goodness of foreigners.

And so Hitler’s rise didn’t stun me. Actually, neither did Pearl Harbor. Did it surprise me? Sure. I never thought the Japanese could fool us
so
bad.

But although I followed the fighting in the Pacific conscientiously, it wasn’t my war. My war wasn’t the good guys against the bad guys. My war was against the monsters.

And damn it, I was finally ready to fight.

Edward left Washington the last week of August for, as usual, places unknown. I knew he’d been planning a trip, but just to make sure, I called his new secretary and made up a story about his promising to leave me a letter of recommendation before he went away. She said, Oh, dear, he must have forgotten. And I snuck in, And he won’t be back for what—two, three weeks?

More like four, I’m sorry to say, was her answer. Boy, did she have a big, dangerous mouth, giving out information like that.

But I knew the coast was clear.

I hardly saw John. He’d called me late on the night after he hadn’t come home, six hours after the meeting where I’d volunteered to go into Berlin. I waited for him to say, How 318 / SUSAN ISAACS

could you humiliate me in front of all those people by interrupting, by pushing yourself where you
know
you don’t belong? Or: How could you suggest anything so stupid? What he actually said was, “I have to be honest with you. Nan and I still haven’t resolved matters. I don’t know when I’ll be home.” I didn’t even feel like crying. I wrapped the phone wire around my finger, tight, and said to him, “Do you think it matters?”

I made up a bed for myself in the second bedroom. John didn’t notice, because he didn’t come home for two days. I was in the kitchen when he walked in. You here for a clean shirt before you go back to talking? I asked. I was peeling a carrot and didn’t bother to look at him. Linda, he said, I know how hard this has been on you. But it will be resolved. Soon. I swear. He came up behind me and just rested himself against me. But in a minute he was rubbing and pushing me hard against the sink. His arms went around me. I need you, he exhaled into my ear. How long do you have? I asked. I’m going to stay the whole night, he replied. Oh, God, I have to have you. I peeled a long curl of carrot peel into the sink. No more, I said. Did you hear me?

Get off me! Come on, he insisted, you have to have it as much as I do.

But I didn’t! I couldn’t believe it. I turned around. He was just another pretty face. It took me a second to catch my breath.

Was this another loss? There I was, right on the verge of crying, but a second later, I found myself staring at the sink drain, trying to fight off a giggle. He was trying his Tragic Eyes routine, where dark blue eyes mist over, open wide, gaze at me; he was going to break my heart with his beautiful damp eyes, show me his infinite pain, his suffering. Except now I realized he could do it at the drop of a hat. I realized I’d seen Tragic Eyes about four hundred and seventy-two times. I glanced up. Well, I told him, if it’s true—if I have to have it—I’ll have to get it someplace else.

At first I thought it would be smart to give Norman Weekes just what he wanted—a throaty, promising voice and an even more promising dress—so he’d give me what I wanted. But in SHINING THROUGH / 319

the end I put on brown oxfords, an old gabardine skirt and a white cotton blouse that showed nothing more than how well it was ironed. I wore no makeup. I pulled back my hair into a loosely pinned mess that could barely be called a bun.

“Oh,” Norman said, as he lifted his behind from his desk chair when I walked in. I could see whatever his desire for me had been evaporating; it was a wonderful sight. “Please, sit down.”

I came right to the point. “Look at me. Do you think anyone in the foreign office would look twice?”

His eyebrows did one of those Aha! movements. “Edward has said ‘Absolutely not,’ you know.”

“I know.”

“And your husband?”

“John has never said no.”

Norman cocked his head; his mouth hung open a bit. He was obviously dying to hear more about me and John. All of a sudden, I felt queasy, thinking: Oh, God, people
know
about John and me…and Nan. The whole OSS may know, and when everyone came up to me after I got back after my mother’s funeral, offering sympathy, they were really—

Norman demanded, “I really must know. How would he feel if you put—let me be perfectly forthright about this—if you put yourself in, well, a rather perilous situation?”

“How does a wife feel when her husband goes off to war? She doesn’t want it, but she understands.”

“I see.” A bubble of saliva formed on the side of his mouth and then burst.

“And I’m sure you also see, because it’s your job to see, well, everything, that things aren’t so great right now between me and my husband. If I went off, it wouldn’t be like you were tearing apart the perfect marriage. I think John could probably learn to adjust to my absence.”

“I rather assumed…some distance…from his lack of…objec-tions when we contemplated the possibility of your working for us at that meeting. But I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”