The Little Book (22 page)

Duty and Purpose

It was late fall of 1939 before Dilly Burden got to London, a navy lieutenant fresh out of Harvard Law School. The British and French had declared war on Germany in September, after the invasion of Poland, but no hostilities had broken out across the Rhine, and the English waited. Dilly, who had received his commission as a naval officer a few months after law school graduation, was assigned by the War Department to work informally and secretly with the British Admiralty on a program of arms and munitions sharing that would eventually become Lend-Lease. Dilly was attractive to the War Department because Americans who spoke both French and German were a rare commodity. It didn’t hurt that President Roosevelt, a proud Harvard man, called him “someone admired by all,” and wrote him a personal letter of introduction to his old friend Winston Churchill, who had just been appointed lord of the Admiralty. And England was attractive to Dilly because he could continue his studies of medieval cathedrals, which had been a lifelong fascination.

There was an uneasy calm about the city when he arrived and settled into the apartment the Admiralty office had arranged for him near Piccadilly Circus. It was not until a few months later that he arranged a day off and took the train out to Coventry to see the cathedral. Not giving much thought to it one way or the other, he wore his military uniform because the train fare was free.

Gothic cathedrals were one of his specialties, and he had been to most of them in Britain and Europe, but for some reason Coventry had always been his favorite.

“You just like the thought of the Lady’s bare bosom,” his old friend Brod Walker had accused when they visited the summer during their Harvard College days. It was through the streets of Coventry in the eleventh century that Lady Godiva rode naked on a white horse, to protest her husband’s cruel taxation of the peasants. Although not indifferent to the subject of bare bosoms, it was one in which Dilly had had, in spite of his other rather remarkable accomplishments, very little practical experience. In poking around old cathedrals he was a master, and he had poked around extensively in the one at Coventry—that college summer and then more extensively the year he spent at Oxford, his second year of law school.

Dilly was down in the crypt, reading the inscriptions on the stones when he saw a rather pretty English woman on her knees making a charcoal rubbing on a large sheet of butcher paper. Actually, “stunning” was the word he used later, obviously a bit carried away, seeing her in the Gothic half light of the vaulted underground chamber. She had dark hair, pale skin, and “something of an eye-catching bosom” herself, he would tell her later. Her hands were small and deft with the stick of charcoal. She was so immersed in her work that he watched her for a long while before she looked up and he saw her intense dark eyes. “Oh,” she said with a start, giving him and his uniform a quick once-over, trying to ignore the absolutely smashing presence it gave him. “An American warrior.”

“Hardly,” Dilly said. “Just another tourist.”

She went back to her rubbing. Dilly Burden was used to a lot of attention. It was nothing he coveted or sought, just something he had gotten used to, and a pretty woman showing absolutely no interest proved suddenly unsettling, not to mention challenging.

“You don’t usually see people down here,” he said, pretending to be reading an inscription in Latin. She gave no response, but kept working on her rubbing. “I guess it is too cold and dark. Most people associate the crypt with death. They prefer the lighter stuff up with the stained glass.” Still no response. “A lot of people don’t realize that the crypt was the first part built and often served as the church in the early years of construction. ”

She had both palms flat on the stone floor when she looked up at him finally. “You might not have realized that I am ignoring you.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “My heavens, you are.” She was back at her rubbing. “Looks as if you have about twenty minutes left, and then”—he looked at his watch—“it will be tea time.” There was an old oak bench against the wall. He sat and crossed his legs. “I’ll wait.”

“Don’t bother,” she said without looking up.

They had tea in a sunny courtyard across from the cathedral. “You might think I don’t like Americans,” she said, savoring a last bit of scone. “Actually I like Americans. I don’t like warriors.”

“I’m not really a warrior,” Dilly said. “I just graduated from law school and needed something to do.”

She gave him a look that registered somewhere between total scorn and pity. “That is the worst kind. At least warmongers are honest about it.”

“I’ve never fired a gun in anger or swung a sword.”

“And what will you do, sit in a war room and push little models of human life around a map?” She was looking down into the tea leaves in her cup.

Dilly paused. He loved snappy dialogue, but suddenly he did not want to be trivial. He stared into the young woman’s face until she looked up. “My name is Dilly Burden, by the way.”

“Dilly.” She mused on it, her hostility arrested for a moment. “What a lighthearted name.”

“It’s from grammar school.”

“Somehow I don’t see it going with all the killing.” It had been a false armistice. “I would think Taras or Vultan would be better suited.” She opened her purse and searched for money.

“Someone named Vultan would probably insist on paying for your tea and scone.”

“Someone named Betty or Sue would probably let him.” She withdrew a coin from her purse and dropped it on the table. He looked at his watch.

“I suppose if we rode back to London together on the five-forty train, you might tell me your name.”

“You are only interested in me because you have never seen an English Jewish pacifist doing an Anglican brass rubbing.”

Dilly appraised her for a long moment. “I caught the English part immediately, ” he said with a look of concern. “I’m good at that, but the pacifist Jewish part escaped me.”

“Well, then, now you have it all.”

“It must be hard.”

“What? Being a Jewish pacifist?” She was keeping it light.

“No. Being a pacifist with all this horrible violence going on. I’d like to hear more about that.”

She was a good five paces from the table when she turned back to him. “Please don’t count on it,” she said before seeing the look of earnest concern on his face.

The outskirts of the industrial Coventry passed by the window of the London train. “Do you think he would approve of all the factories ruining his countryside?” he said.

She had been doing her best to look unencouraging. It was clear from the start that he might follow her all afternoon and onto the train, something she admitted later to hoping for, along with hoping against hope that no one she knew would see her sitting beside a military man, and a handsome American one at that. One of the main reasons for war, she once conjectured, is that ordinary-looking men look handsome in uniforms, and handsome men ravishing.

“Who?” she said, trying to look preoccupied by the crossword in the
Times
.

“Lord Godiva.”

That brought an involuntary smile. “That’s clever,” she said without a hint of sarcasm, and then allowed a pause. All right, if she was going to smile she might as well be cordial. “My name is Flora Zimmerman,” she said. “I am single—obviously—I have a medical degree, I am Jewish, and—” She wrote a word in the squares. “I am a pacifist.”

“I picked that up,” Dilly said with that disarming earnestness he had. “I want to hear about the pacifist part.”

“I thought you were teasing.” She stopped writing and looked up. “You are serious.”

“Dead serious. I don’t know many pacifists, just Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw.”

“Well, there are more of us than you think.”

“It must be very hard right now.”

“That’s very disarming, you know.”

“What is?”

“Wearing that very attractive uniform and saying you are really and truly interested in hearing about pacifism.”

“Well, I am, really and truly. Tell you what,” he said, looking at his watch. “I won’t wear my uniform at dinner.”

“It’d take away half your charm. And besides—” She had gone back to her crossword puzzle. “I’m busy for dinner.”

The restaurant was near the British Museum, only ten tables and a French menu. “I realize war is atrocity,” he said. “But what do we do about what is going on right now in Poland?”

“There are better ways of dealing with the situation than fighting,” she said. She was just beginning to realize that Dilly—now dressed in a blue blazer and crimson tie, which looked even more dashing than the uniform—had retained his look of concern. She realized she was having trouble concentrating. “All I’m saying is that if everyone understood from the start that there would be no violence, if it were absolutely forbidden, like incest or drinking strychnine, we would find the better way.”

“Do you think that ‘better way’ would stop Herr Hitler?”

“How did we get into this mess in the first place? By thinking war was the solution. Now, how do we think we can get out of it? Have another war.”

“But suppose,” Dilly said, his tone calm and reasoning, “suppose war comes to you. And there is no way you can avoid it. What then?”

She could not remember being with a man who reasoned with her, especially on this subject. In her past, the men who met her on trains or had dinner with her—or more—either agreed with her from the start— admittedly, very few—or argued, usually the latter. And she could hold her own with both types. With this new type she was beginning to have a very difficult time.

“I do suppose,” she said softly. “I suppose every day now. I know what you think. You think we are starry-eyed utopians who need a straight dose of reality, and you see that reality arming itself right now on the other side of the Rhine. Well, we are as heartsick about it as anyone in London.” She took a sip of wine. “You’ve noticed this city. People are walking around mesmerized by apprehension. We fear just as much as they.”

“I wish we had all listened to you ten years ago.”

Flora Zimmerman looked into his blue American eyes. “Thank you,” she said softly. She had been waiting for a man to say that to her for a long time, a lifetime to be precise. Whatever it was he wanted from her, she realized right then, looking into her wineglass instead of into his eyes, he had it.

He looked at his watch. “Tell you what. On our way to the theater, we won’t mention war.”

“I’m busy after dinner,” she said, but there was no more snap left in her voice.

It was a Noel Coward play, and at intermission they shared a whisky. “I want you to know before you ask,” she said, looking a little cautious. “In case you ask.” Another weighty pause. “If we go back to your apartment—” She looked down into the ice in the empty glass. “It wouldn’t be my first time.”

“It
will be
mine,” Dilly said.

“I am in love, the head-over-heels kind,” he wrote his friend Brod Walker back at Harvard. He had never met anyone who swept him off his feet with the vitality of this Flora Zimmerman, he said. “She is witty, quick of mind, and what you would call ‘an absolutely stunning girl.’ She has delivered a devastating left hook to my chin.”

Work at the Admiralty heated up. The unrealistic calm of the winter, in which Hitler had merely revived his war machine, gave way to a hellishly tense spring as the next move became clearer and clearer to anyone with ears and an even halfway decent sense of military intelligence.

He saw her whenever he could, which ended up being two or three nights a week, and day trips by train to cathedral cities. For the most part, their relationship—in spite of its hasty beginning—was sitting around or lying around talking.

“I cannot believe you have never picked up a girl before,” she said after they had seen more of each other. “You did it so well, all smashing-looking in your warrior’s uniform.”

“I guess I have always been a little proper.”

“I am doing my very best to be an antidote to that,” she said, after they had been to each other’s apartments a few times.

As well as he knew her and as love-struck as he was, it took him a good while to shore up his own strength to ask about York. He did at the end of March.

“I’d like to go up to York, in two weeks,” he said. “To look at the cathedral and the manuscripts.” She noticed the look on his face, but at first could not trace it. She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be blushing. She had already gotten the idea that he was an American football hero. It never occurred to her he would be nervous about something as simple as asking a girl to a hotel room. “We’d be spending the night.”

She burst out laughing. “You
are
blushing,” she said. “That’s it. You
are
blushing. My military hero, veteran of a hundred campaigns in football and hockey and that baseball.”

“I’m just not used to asking young ladies to go off with me on a weekend. ”

“What were you doing all that time in Boston?”

“I guess I was awfully—” He paused for the word. “Reserved about that sort of thing.”

“You know what Dr. Freud would call it?” she said, trying to control an urge to laugh. Dilly winced, expecting something unflattering. Sigmund Freud had moved from Vienna in 1938 and had spent the last year of his life in London. Flora had become a latter-day disciple and had been part of the team that had prepared his entry and his London quarters.
“Repressed, ”
she said very distinctly, without waiting to be asked. “You have been very repressed.”

“Well, right now I am feeling very unrepressed.” Dilly still sat very straight. “Does that mean you will come with me to York?”

Flora looked at him and suddenly became quite serious. “The way I am feeling right now, it could be Borneo or Antarctica. You just have to ask.”

“York it is, then, April eighth.” He looked determined to say it as if reading a baseball score. “Overnight.”