Louise's War (14 page)

‘Not at all,’ I said, glancing at Joe, who was filling a glass with water at the sink. ‘Just a friend who needs an escort.’

‘Think of all the famous people you’re going to meet!’ Madeleine said. ‘Promise to tell us all about it?’

‘I’ll take notes,’ I said.

A bit annoyed that Joe hadn’t said anything to me, I went up the hall towards the sitting room to wait for Don. Joe followed me and we were alone for a minute.

‘You do look nice,’ he said, which meant more to me than all the grands and swells I’d accumulated so far.

The doorbell rang, and I went into the hall to answer it. But Madeleine pushed by me, and with her fingers to her lips, motioned me back into the sitting room. ‘I’ll get the door,’ she whispered. ‘You wait.’

I stood awkwardly inside the door of the sitting room and listened to Madeleine speaking to Don. Joe drew on his pipe to hide a smile.

‘Let me see if Mrs Pearlie is ready,’ Madeleine said to Don. She left the door and poked her head into the sitting room. ‘Stay here for a minute,’ she whispered. ‘Keep him waiting.’ She lingered in the hall before returning to the front door.

‘Come in,’ she said to Don. ‘Mrs Pearlie is in the lounge.’

He’d brought me flowers, a big bunch of flamingo-pink dahlias. The only flowers I’d ever gotten before were the tiny daisies Bill had brought me, picked from his mother’s garden, on our wedding day.

‘These are beautiful, Don, thank you,’ I said.

‘You’re more than welcome, and you look lovely,’ Don said. Men had given up dinner jackets for the duration of the war, but Don was handsome in a dark double-breasted suit.

‘I’ll put these in water, Mrs Pearlie,’ Madeleine said, as she took the flowers from me. Don extended his arm, I took it, and we left. I had no chance to glance at Joe again.

Don’s car was a black Cadillac coupe with big bullet-shaped front and rear fenders and a chrome egg-crate grill.

‘What a beautiful car,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ Don said, ‘it’s one of the last ones that came off the line. My old bucket was running okay, but I figured I’d better get a new car now, Lord knows when they’ll be available again.’

And spent around $4,000 for it, if I remembered the newspaper ads correctly.

Don opened the passenger door for me before getting in the driver’s side. So he had good manners, too. Don would be a catch, like Betty said, so why wasn’t I infatuated with him instead of Joe, the mysterious foreigner? It made no sense, but I postponed worrying about all that for another time. Instead I settled back to enjoy an evening I had never imagined experiencing, even in my wildest dreams.

Friendship House was way out on Wisconsin Avenue in the country. Built with Colorado gold money, the estate was as luxurious as any on the East Coast. I’d seen pictures of it in magazines, but I still wasn’t prepared for the excess we saw as we drove up the approach to the mansion. How did this vast lawn stay green in this heat? Where did the McLeans find the staff to tend to the greenhouses, the golf course, stables, winding walks and a selection of wildlife that included, I swear, llamas!

We drove under a porte-cochere wider than the one at the White House. Much, much wider! Don gave the keys to his Cadillac to a Negro man in blue-and-gold livery who drove it off to some out-of-sight parking area.

Don offered me his arm as we walked up wide marble steps to the veranda, which ran the length of the house, already crowded with guests escaping the heat of indoors. The veranda was lit with torches, decorated with potted palms and masses of fresh flowers, noisy with social babble and the tinkle of ice in highball glasses. Music and light streamed out of five sets of French doors that opened from the veranda into the house.

We went through a short receiving line. Evalyn McLean was wearing the Hope diamond. It was big as an egg, and dangled down the cleavage of her Hattie Carnegie dress.

After pecking our famous hostess on the cheek and reminding her who he was, Don introduced me.

‘And how is your dear mother,’ Mrs McLean said to him.

‘Fine, thank you,’ Don answered, barely able to reply before she turned her attention to the person behind him, a red-faced man sweating through a foreign uniform I couldn’t identify.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Don.

‘Archduke Otto of Austria,’ Don answered, moving me away. ‘He never passes up free food and drink.’

A waiter balancing a tray of full champagne glasses stopped, and Don took two, handing one to me. I’d never had champagne. I took a sip. I liked it. Maybe not quite as much as a Martini, but I decided the flute was more elegant than a Martini glass. Holding it and watching the bubbles rise, I felt just plain refined.

‘So,’ I said to Don, ‘who is your mother that she knows Mrs McLean?’

‘Mother played bridge several times with her in Palm Beach last season,’ Don said. ‘When I came to Washington, Mother wrote Mrs McLean and asked her to invite me to one of her parties. Thought it would be good for my career. Give me a chance to make some connections, you know.’

Don scanned the veranda as we spoke, looking for important people. I saw my chance.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said, ‘if you need to mingle. I can entertain myself.’

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘We’ll meet up later, of course.’

‘Absolutely.’ I could think of nothing I’d like better. This gave me a chance to look for General Donovan.

So Don squeezed my arm and left my side to join a group of civil-service types talking earnestly in a corner. After setting my empty flute on a nearby table, I set out to explore.

The five sets of French doors opened into, respectively, a music room, a card room, a billiards room, a drawing room and a dining room. All those five rooms connected by way of more French doors to a ballroom, a vista of polished floor, where a tuxedoed swing band played sedate versions of ‘A Tisket, A Tasket’, ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and such. This room, too, was crowded with people, many of whom I recognized from their pictures in the newspapers. Alice Roosevelt Longworth in a dramatic scarlet ball gown, talking and gesturing a mile a minute, charmed a group of admirers at one end of the room, while another set of sycophants encircled Maxim Litvinov, the new Russian ambassador. I swear he was wearing a denim suit – how very proletarian of him.

Donovan wasn’t on the terrace, in the ballroom or in any of the other party rooms. I was disappointed, but I knew he might arrive later, so I took a break from my search to find something to eat that didn’t cluck or swim.

The buffet stretched the length of the banquet-sized table in the castle-sized dining room. It was crowded with platters of food – beef tenderloin sliced thin, shrimp, tray after tray of canapés and mounds of sweets. The sugar must have been bought on the black market for a fortune. I loaded a plate with petits fours, sugared nuts, slices of tender beef, tiny sandwiches filled with ham paste, stuffed celery, caviar sandwiches and olives. I’d not eaten caviar before, and after tasting it I wasn’t sure I would again.

‘You need something to wash that down,’ said a French-accented voice next to me. ‘Let me get you some champagne.’

A handsome man standing next to me, with his own plate and champagne balanced expertly in one hand, bowed slightly. He snagged a bubbling flute from a nearby tray and handed it to me with a flourish. ‘Lionel Barbier, at your service.’ He glanced at my ring finger. ‘Miss?’

‘Mrs,’ I said. ‘I’m a widow.’

‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘this terrible war. Leaving so many lovely women alone.’

And you’re available to comfort us all, I thought.

‘My husband died five years ago,’ I said. ‘Of pneumonia, after a bad case of measles. My name is Louise Pearlie.’

Lionel took my outstretched hand, turned it over and kissed it. I felt like I was in the middle of a silly Maurice Chevalier movie. Lionel even looked a bit like Chevalier, broad shoulders, dark hair slicked back and wide, toothy smile. He wore a perfect white flannel suit, not easy to keep pristine these days, and a green silk bow tie that matched his square breast-pocket handkerchief. He looked to be in his late forties.

‘Your accent is
adorable
,’ he said.

‘I’m from North Carolina,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Chatou,’ he said. ‘A suburb of Paris. I learned English at the British School there. The Nazis of course now occupy it.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you, it is a tragedy,’ he said, dropping his voice and glancing around him, ‘but the triumphant actors taking their curtain calls may discover a sequel is already being written, one in which their characters do not fare so well,
vous comprenez
?’

‘I do. Are you a refugee?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m on the staff of the French embassy. I’m an assistant to the cultural attaché. These days I translate the American newspapers and magazines, mostly. Not so many cultural events to arrange, you understand?’

‘I see.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m a file clerk.’

‘Ah, a government girl. May I inquire, are you here tonight alone?’

‘No, I came with a date. He’s working the crowd. Man talk.’

‘What an unromantic activity.’

I couldn’t help but smile at him. He was flirting with me so obviously that it was comical, yet I was having fun.

‘Can your date wait a bit longer?’ Lionel said. ‘Do you like jazz? I’d like to take you where, shall we say, the party is a bit livelier.’

I was instantly on guard.

‘Don’t be so wary,’ he said, ‘there’s a house party at the estate behind this one, a party with a more colorful assortment of guests, but not at all disreputable, I assure you. I think you would enjoy it. The music is more modern. It’s a short walk from here.’

If I hadn’t had two glasses of champagne I would never have accepted.

‘Why not,’ I said. Lionel offered me his arm and off we went.

We followed a stone path lit by torches down a hill behind the McLean house. Where the torches ended the path became gravel, but I could see more lights glimmering ahead of us. We came to the end of the track behind another estate, not nearly as opulent as Friendship House, but grand nonetheless. The house was dark, but that wasn’t where the party was.

A huge swimming pool designed like a grotto nestled in a natural hollow behind the house. Candles in glass bowls and magnolia blossoms big as dinner plates floated on the water. More torches lit a stone bar where colored bartenders mixed highballs and Martinis as fast as they could. A stone patio crammed with dancing couples circled the pool.

‘You see,’ Lionel said, ‘the people who own this house, they are away in the Catskills. Their son has his own circle of friends. While his parents are gone he seizes the opportunity to entertain them.’ He nodded toward a young man lounging on the bar, talking to a pretty girl in a flared skirt, and gesturing widely with his Martini glass. Our host was dressed in baggy white trousers, white shoes and a red-and-white-striped shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and hanging from his wrists.

A dance band made up of six Negro hepcats played on a stage in one corner of the patio. Their leader, a big man wearing a porkpie hat and a zoot suit, dangling a cigar from his mouth, pounded on a piano.

An acrid smoke, not cigarette, not cigar, hung in the air.

‘Do you smell that funny odor,’ I whispered to Lionel. ‘Do you think something’s on fire?’

‘My dear,’ Lionel said, smiling at me. ‘That’s hashish!’

‘Really!’ I said. I sniffed expectantly. I felt nothing, and none of the other guests displayed the symptoms of reefer madness, described so colorfully in
Crime Detective Magazine
. I was a bit disappointed.

I was a world away from the veranda and Mrs McLean’s upper-crust guests. These people were having more fun.

It was a sophisticated crowd that I was sure wouldn’t be welcome at Mrs McLean’s, or at any of Washington’s established restaurants and clubs. I noticed several couples where one of the pair wasn’t exactly white. I’d never seen a mixed-race couple before, but I reminded myself that I was a modern girl and I didn’t stare.

Then, as the band played the sultry sound of Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’, I saw two men dancing together, arms around each other’s waists. I drew my breath in so quickly I choked on my champagne. Lionel handed me a cocktail napkin.

‘Americans,’ he said, ‘you are so, what should I say? Naive?’

I hastened to assert my sophistication. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I had a catch in my throat.’

‘Those two,’ he said, nodding toward the male couple, ‘one of them is Sir Julian Porter, personal secretary to the British ambassador, the other is a trade attaché for the Portuguese. The homosexual, he is many important people in the European foreign services, they are the most efficient underground network in Europe. If you want to get anything done quickly and efficiently, you ask a three-letter man to do it.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘You seem to know everyone. How long have you been at the embassy?’

‘Since 1938.’

So Lionel was working in the French embassy when France fell. It must have been an excruciating experience for him, watching his country conquered by Germany. The embassy staffers ‘welcomed’ the new Vichy ambassador, Henry-Haye, when he arrived in Washington to take control of the French embassy. He must have sworn allegiance to Vichy and Marshal Pétain through gritted teeth. Most of those loyal embassy staffers, even the janitors, proceeded to feed Vichy secrets to the Allies as fast as they could smuggle them out. I suspected Lionel was of the Gaullist persuasion, and wondered what kind of secrets he had access to. Lionel might be a useful person to know. I caught myself in mid-thought. What was wrong with me? I was a file clerk obsessed with a folder of missing papers. I didn’t require a contact at the Vichy French embassy.

Lionel pulled me onto the dance floor, and I soon found myself happily jitterbugging away to ‘C Jam Blues’, followed by ‘All That Meat and No Potatoes’.