Louise's War (7 page)

She shrugged, not rising to the bait.

I opened my mouth to speak again, but Joan noticed and gently nudged my foot. Okay, so I had asked Dora enough questions at the funeral home. I wished she would be more specific. I wanted to know exactly who had gotten to Holman’s office when, so I could figure out who might have seen the Bloch file.

‘I believe I’ve had enough gin for this afternoon,’ Charles said. ‘Can I get myself some water, Joan?’

‘Of course,’ Joan said. Charles sauntered over to the sideboard as if he owned the place and poured himself a glass of water from a cut-glass pitcher. He didn’t ask if we wanted any, but we were still working on our highballs.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, when he returned, scanning the game board. Dora had acquired the most property, with Joan a distant second. I’d landed on both the income tax and luxury tax, not to mention going to jail twice, so I might as well be living in a Hooverville. Charles still had lots of cash, which was a good thing since he would need it to pay Dora’s exorbitant rents.

While Charles pondered his strategy, Joan casually asked Dora the question I’d wanted to earlier.

‘The newspaper said Mr Holman’s office was a mess.’

‘It looked like a tornado had struck it,’ Dora said. ‘Mr Holman didn’t die tidily. He must have pulled the desk over, and he was face down, spreadeagled on the floor. Papers everywhere.’

Dora had us beat at Monopoly, and we all knew it by now.

Charles’s failure to trounce us embarrassed him.

‘Well,’ he said, scanning the board. ‘You girls aren’t bad at this game. I should have been playing closer attention.’ As if Charles lost because he neglected to play to his usual manly standard, the jerk!

Dora ignored him, quietly sorting her stacks of money and returning it to the Monopoly box.

The afternoon had passed comfortably, and now the sun angled low in the sky, pouring intense light into the room. Joan pulled the curtains closed to keep the glare out of our faces. Charles leaned back in his chair and took a cigarette out of a chased silver case. Dora fumbled in her purse for her packet of Lucky Strikes, and Joan reached for her cigarette box on the coffee table, but Charles insisted they each take one of his. They were elegant, quite long, with gold-wrapped filter tips, Sobranies, I think. He offered me one, but I demurred.

‘Quite wise,’ Dora said. ‘Nasty things. Can’t be healthy.’

Charles held his lighter for Dora first, then Joan. In that instant I saw Joan look at Charles with an interest that he didn’t notice, much less return. I realized that Dora and I were there to chaperone Joan and Charles, without Charles’s having a clue, and I felt sorry for Joan.

‘Must go,’ Charles said. ‘The baseball game should be over, and I can return to my apartment and read the Sunday paper in peace. I’ll have to find supper somewhere, unless one of my room-mates decides to scramble eggs. I don’t know how to boil water, myself.’

‘I’m going to order supper from room service,’ Joan said. ‘You could stay and eat with me.’

Charles shook his head. ‘Thanks, ducks,’ he said. ‘But I must go. Work tomorrow.’

How humiliating for Joan, I thought, that Charles would rather read his newspaper and eat eggs with his room-mates than have supper with her. She was a lady, though, and gave no indication that he’d hurt her feelings.

Charles said goodbye to all of us and pecked Joan on the cheek at the door.

‘I must be going too,’ Dora said. ‘Gail always cooks a big meal on Sundays and she’ll be expecting me.’ Gail must be Dora’s room-mate? Lover? What?

Pretty soon I’d be so darn worldly and sophisticated, if the folks back home could see me they would shake their heads behind my back, and talk about how I was putting on airs. But maybe they wouldn’t be too surprised. I’d always been different. Peculiar, my mother said. More interested in reading than was healthy for a young girl. I remembered well my Great-Aunt Edna, who found me holed up in my room, reading
The Age of Innocence
, instead of outside at a family picnic pitching horseshoes like the rest of the kids. She’d rested her fists on her ample hips and shook her head. ‘You’re not like the rest of them, are you?’ she’d said. I assumed she was being critical of me, until after she died leaving me a small bequest designated for my college tuition. Thanks to the Depression the money shrank until I had enough for just one year.

Joan hugged us both goodbye, but I could tell the afternoon hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned.

Outside the hotel we found Charles waiting for us. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the sidewalk with his shoe.

‘Louise,’ he said, ignoring Dora. ‘Can I give you a ride home? I’ve got my car. Perhaps we could find a cafe and have supper?’

I was so shocked I couldn’t answer right away. The man had dismissed Joan’s invitation, and not five minutes later he was asking me out? I ransacked my brain for a civil answer. I had to be careful what I said, the man was senior to me at OSS. I was expendable, he wasn’t.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to walk in this heat. And you’ve got to eat.’

‘I’ve already offered her a lift,’ Dora said, rescuing me. ‘We live quite near each other.’

‘I must go,’ I said to Charles. ‘You know how it is. Work tomorrow.’

Dora’s car was a Model A, maybe ten years old, but it purred along Pennsylvania Avenue nicely. ‘I take care of it myself,’ Dora said, ‘change the oil, inflate the tires, everything. I hate to rely on some man at a filling station.’

‘Do we really live near each other?’ I asked.

‘You’re on “I” Street, aren’t you? Close to Washington Square? I’ve noticed you at the bus stop. I share an apartment with Gail in the Whiteville building.’

Dora and her Gail were two more women who earned enough to keep their own apartment. The place had a real kitchen, too, because Dora had mentioned cooking dinner. I swallowed my envy and changed the subject.

‘Charles is a louse,’ I said. ‘Imagine being so rude to Joan.’

‘Women like Joan grow up believing their lives are worthless unless they’re married. They imitate their mothers, learning to be deferential and self-deprecating to attract a beau who’ll become a husband. And most men behave accordingly, they can’t help it, that’s what they grew up expecting from women. Remember that remark Joan made about not wanting to watch women play sports? She was the captain of the Smith College field hockey team, for God’s sake.’

I didn’t say anything, but I thought that Dora could hardly judge Joan. Dora didn’t want a husband, but Joan did, very much. Being self-deprecating was a tried-and-true way to attract men. That and having nice legs and a deep cleavage.

SEVEN

D
ora dropped me off at my door. ‘Come across the street and visit us sometime,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sometime I will.’ And I wouldn’t care who knew it, either.

Once inside I went upstairs and changed out of my black dress into blue jeans and a red checked shirt. The usual late-afternoon clouds gathered on the horizon, and I could feel the static electricity lift my hair as I unpinned my hat. Before I left the room I lowered my windows in case it rained, leaving them open a crack and turning on my fan to draw in some cool air.

Phoebe and Dellaphine were in the kitchen at the table planning menus. Grocery-store ads clipped from the newspaper covered the tabletop.

‘Let’s have beef twice this week,’ Phoebe said to Dellaphine. ‘Henry’s been complaining. Ham once, chicken twice. Unless you see some nice fish.’

There was no such thing as ‘nice’ fish, in my opinion. They were all slimy and smelly. I’d cleaned and fried enough of them to know.

‘What should I do about dessert?’ Dellaphine said. ‘Everyone’s tired of sliced fruit.’

Phoebe flipped through the pages of her Boston Cooking School cookbook. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Any ideas, Louise?’

‘Can you find coconut?’ I said, slipping into another chair at the table. ‘It makes fruit taste sweeter.’

‘There’s always honey,’ Dellaphine said. ‘It’s too close to the end of the month to find marshmallows.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Phoebe said, ‘see what you can find, coconut, honey, maybe there will be some condensed milk, and cobble together some desserts from that. We’ll buy a real cake from a bakery on Thursday and have it Thursday night.’ She slammed her cookbook shut.

‘I wish this war was over and life would go back the way it was before,’ Phoebe said. ‘I understand that the men have to fight and girls have to get jobs until the war is over. But I hate all the rest of it. Girls wearing practically no clothes, crazy music, bad language, families living in trailers and tents, single girls living on their own, children growing up in day nurseries, no servants. It’s not civilized.’

Phoebe reminded me of my mother – Southern and traditional in her outlook on life.

I’d expected Washington to be strange, even foreign, but except for all the war activity the city didn’t feel much different from my hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. The city’s native residents I’d met drank iced tea with lots of sugar and fresh mint, ate fried chicken and ham for Sunday dinner, rocked and fanned themselves on their porches in the summer, inhaling the fragrance of wisteria and gardenia, and gossiped about politics and society with a soft drawl. I could see why, less than a hundred years after the city was founded, Abraham Lincoln stared out of his office in the White House across the Potomac into Virginia, and wondered how many Washingtonians would welcome General Lee with open arms should he invade the city.

These days, with the influx of politicians, soldiers, refugees, diplomats and ‘businessmen’ any Southerner would straight away spot as carpetbaggers, the city’s Southern hospitality was stretched to the limit.

I wandered into the lounge to listen to the radio. Ada stood at the window, peeking outside from behind the dim-out curtain.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

Ada jumped, placing her hand over her heart.

‘You startled me,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Soldiers across the street. Parked in a Jeep. They’ve been there for half an hour. What do you suppose they’re doing?’

I glanced out the window. ‘Smoking a cigarette, I expect, before catching the bus to Fort Myer.’

‘They don’t need the bus. They’ve got a Jeep.’

‘Maybe they’re drinking beer. They can’t once they get back to base. Why?’

Ada drew the curtains closed. ‘I hate seeing so many soldiers in the streets. It seems like—’ She stopped short and glanced at me nervously. ‘It’s like living in an occupied country.’

‘It’s just because of the war.’

‘I know, but how can we be sure, well, that things will go back to normal someday? I mean what if Roosevelt doesn’t ever want to give up the Presidency? All these soldiers are used to taking orders from him.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, though I wondered myself sometimes. Roosevelt had already won a third term. What was to stop him from running for a fourth? ‘Come and sit on the porch with me. It’ll be nice and cool once the rain starts.’

‘I’d rather stay inside,’ she said. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?’

I went out onto the porch alone to watch the sky light up and blamed Ada’s nerves on the dropping barometer.

Once tucked into bed that night I had nothing to distract me from my fears for Rachel. I’d have given anything to know how she was.

‘We must do this,’ Gerald said.

‘I understand,’ Rachel answered.

‘I know what it means to you.’

‘It’s just a piece of furniture.’

Rachel couldn’t remember a time that her great-grandmother’s sideboard hadn’t stood in her home, crammed with a couple of generations of family treasures. The treasures were long gone. She’d sold the Germaine monogrammed silver, the antique Limoges china, and the rest of the family
objets de valeur
for a pittance to buy food and fuel.

Gerald slipped the crowbar under the edge of the sideboard lid and leaned his weight on it. Old glue and dovetailed joints split with a crack, and he pried the heavy mahogany top from its base.

They worked by candlelight. Claude slept soundly through the racket in the bedroom they all shared. They’d stripped the extra rooms in the flat of furniture to sell, besides, she rested better with Claude beside her. They’d have the new baby in its basket in their bedroom too, squeezed between the suitcases they kept packed and Claude’s cot.

Two nights ago a brick had sailed through their front window, and last night’s sniper fire sounded closer to their street than ever. ‘We have to find a way to bar the door,’ Gerald had said. He constructed notches for the bars from the thick stretchers of an Empire daybed. Only the sideboard was long enough to furnish the wood for bars.

Gerald laid the heavy sideboard across two chairs and Rachel held it steady while he sawed it lengthwise into three boards, one bar for the door and two for the front windows. The other windows had heavy shutters he’d nailed shut days ago. Rachel didn’t miss being unable to look out over the Old Port to the Mediterranean. Nazi gunships filled the harbor and blighted the view.

Monday morning, the office buzzed with talk about Bob Holman’s sudden death. The girls lingered longer than usual in the ladies’ restroom to gossip while the men stood around the halls in little groups, smoking, no doubt speculating about who would get Holman’s job. But there was a war on, so by mid-afternoon talk turned to the shocking news that had greeted us all in the morning newspapers – the arrest of a group of Nazi saboteurs at, of all places, the Mayflower Hotel.

My clerks had returned to work, thank goodness.

‘Would you believe,’ Betty said, throwing back her typewriter return with a clang, ‘the U-boat that dropped those Germans off, it was only three hundred yards off the Long Island coast. Makes me shiver to think about it.’ She stopped typing long enough to reapply bright-red lipstick and check her matching painted fingernails for chips. Betty was boy-crazy, or as they said these days, khaki-wacky, but I tolerated it because she was an excellent typist.