During the showing of the films, we looked around and picked out people to have coffee with afterward. Romances began.
One stood out, flourished, for the first few weeks of the summer: Holly, a senior, tall and blond, and Alex, younger than she was, but from Yale. He was the one majoring in political science. They were the two glamorous ones. Holly, for Hollis, was graceful and Southern in a way that those of us who lived in the grass circle outside Washington were not. She had made her debut and gone to school in Paris. Her family was an old Carolina one, we heard, her father a general.
With every explosion on the screen Holly covered her eyes, and finally she looked between her fingers and said, “Doesn’t matter who’s doing it, I can’t stand it.” The boy from Yale looked over irritably but when he saw the blond hair hanging down he moved a seat and sat forward to talk to her, putting his body between her and the screen.
Holly’s loose shifts, in shades of blue and lilac, were the style of that year. On most of us these were a neutral fashion, but on her they had a slipping, mussed air; they weren’t ironed, or the armholes were big on her thin arms, or a button was missing just where the sharp shadow went down between the surprising breasts she had. “All I want to know is where somebody thin got those,” one of the secretaries said, once they knew her.
Alex was tall too, with a shaven, silken, lean-cheeked face. Their eyes fell naturally on each other. Day after day, Holly brought a little more of her dreamy attention to bear on the blue eyes behind his glasses, the tanned fingers firm on his manila folder or his book, forefinger marking the place.
“Alex is going into politics,” Holly told me. He had finished his freshman year at Yale, whose elevation above her college in Lynchburg was of no moment to her. He too was rich, we learned. His father managed a company making aircraft components.
Alex was always being called away from whatever he was doing and introduced to visitors by his supervisor, who was said to know more than anyone else in Washington about the missile gap. But when Holly walked by the door he would leave the friendly important men and rush to lean his arm on Holly’s in one of the little stand-up coffee bars.
Soon they were walking out to the parking lot and she was folding her legs into his MG after work and telling me about the horse shows they went to on weekends so his family could get to know her.
I have never seen work done with the feverishness with which it was done in the Pentagon. People say bureaucracy, make-work, nothing gets done, etcetera. But vast projects are undertaken, brought to the verge of completion, redesigned completely, completed, cancelled. Thousands upon thousands work late into the night day after day, sweating and smoking, or they did then, coughing, drumming their fingers. Hundreds come in every few days while they are on vacation, just to keep up.
Mr. Orlenko was one of those workhorses. By the time we knocked on his door he would have been reading for hours, standing up, massaging his back, a bulky man in a white shirt and a tie with a silver clip, with dark hair going gray. He would lower himself onto the straight-backed chair he had brought from home, where he would write in longhand for hours more without stopping.
He would stand too close to us and order us, in his accent at once haughty and intimate, to type his tables of figures with their crossed sevens and curled nines. Few men typed at that time. Mr. Orlenko wrote with a fountain pen, making a lacework of corrections, holes rubbed and stuck through the paper where he used a typewriter eraser with a stiff brush. “Why not pencil?” we all groaned. With this pen he also doodled trees, all over his DOD blotter and in the margins of the legal pads he wrote on, and then scribbled them out.
He never took sick leave or even his full two weeks of vacation, despite the wife. There were children but they were thought to be grown. Nevertheless, the secretaries acted them out, saying, “Da, Papa!” and banging their heels together. His fingers were a deep saffron and the thumb, too, because he curved it under and petted the end of his Camel while he was thinking. Above his heavy, carved features flew thick black eyebrows.
From his brushed hair came a breath of nutmeg when he bent over your desk. He was very clean, and that—not all that common in those from his part of the world, the secretaries said—was because of the DP camp. He would shake out a white handkerchief and hold it as he worked. He kept a drawer of them, ironed, according to the secretaries. His wife ironed the shirts he wore, of which the garment bag on the door, they said, held extras for when he worked overnight. He never appeared tired, and kept his erect posture, arrogant and foreign. When a secretary had checked our lists and we took them in to him, his eyes meeting ours never lost their intense warning, though a moment before he would have been squinting into one of his folders with a kind of tenderness.
“You know, I’m intrigued by Mr. Orlenko,” Holly said one day. “He seems like such an interesting man.” We made fun of her accent, the way she said “intrigged,” and “Mayan” for man, though indeed Mr. Orlenko was from another time. “So European,” she said. “He works so hard. The N. is for Nazar, did you know that? Nazar. Nazar Orlenko.”
Often when there is a gruff temperament in the office the gentler ones will find something touching in it, I did learn that. They will cosset a man who chews Maalox and slaps his blotter and bangs his telephone receiver. In the Pentagon we saw women attentive as mothers toward some bitter GS-9 who had to park in the farthest lot and walk in, and be spurned by the younger secretaries. But Mr. Orlenko did not have one of those office mothers, and in fact had nobody except his never-seen wife, for whom the accepted word was “pitiful.” Nobody until Holly in her freedom—as Frost tells us the lovely shall be choosers—chose him.
In Frost’s poem, the lovely woman is punished. When he wrote “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost was living in a world in which there was an audience presumed to believe, however mistakenly, that beauty conquered all. It may be the Kennedys didn’t know the poem and really thought the lovely were choosers and that was that. We’ll never know. Maybe they were not concerned with Frost’s zeal to show them the bitter lot of beauty, or with anything except “The Gift Outright,” in which there is the line about “many deeds of war” being the deed to the country.
The three of us, Holly and Alex and I, were traveling the outer ring of the Pentagon on our lunch hour, talking about Alex’s future. He was going to run for office as a Democrat. He would start locally. The Secretary of Defense was coming toward us, surrounded by men with cameras on their shoulders and strings of spiral cord looped around them, and he was laughing, not exactly heartily but not with the craven note, either, of a man who would live to write a book about how bitterly mistaken he was in this period. He was not much further along than the interns, it turned out. He, too, had a lot to learn. “Hello, Alex,” he said.
“Is that somebody?” said Holly.
“That was the Secretary of Defense,” said Alex in despair.
“No, really?” Holly said. “Why don’t we have one of those chocolate milkshakes instead of coffee.” In the Center Court she sat down on a bench while Alex went to buy the famous double-chocolate milkshakes of the Pentagon concessionaire. Pressing my hand Holly said, “I have something I want to tell you. It’ll surprise you, I bet. It’s a little bit bad, now.” I said, “Tell me.” But Alex was already handing her milkshake over her shoulder from behind us. “Well, we’ll talk later, hear? I need to. Alex, now you brought me—this can’t be double chocolate, is it? Well! I remember it as so very delicious the last time.”
A few days after she told me, I knocked on Mr. Orlenko’s door. After a second he said harshly, “Come in.” None of us sat down in that office, but Holly was sitting in the chair in which Mr. Orlenko seated his superiors, with their strange deference to him. She sat with legs crossed, in her lilac shift and the rope sandals she had started wearing to make her less tall, frowning, as if she had not been fervently talking to me in the bathroom half an hour before while she ran cold water on her wrists. Ordinarily Mr. Orlenko l
iked me; he explained my tasks to me with that exaggerated foreign intentness and then stood back satisfied to see me read what he had written. But he looked at me now as if I could be loathed as thoroughly as Khrushchev. I thought in surprise, almost in fear: Holly told him. She told him she told me. And I looked back at him as innocently as I could.
They both lit cigarettes as I recited my message and held out my document. “Put it with the rest!” he said with a jerk of his arm, hitting his t’s hard and striking his knuckles with the cigarette on the side of the safe. He tore off his glasses and massaged the black eyebrows.
Then I saw them in the hall of war paintings. This was a still, wide gallery of a corridor, with tall doors bearing teak plaques. Hundreds of paintings. Cannon, trenches, foot soldiers of the Spanish-American War, the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. Torn sketches taken from the pockets of the dead. Orlenko was stiff-armed and wore his sinister look, Holly was the one leaning and pleading. I saw her put her hand out and hook her long fingers with their oval nails in his belt, and then rudely, no longer pleading but with force, pull him against her.
That was what I saw. But a secretary who dared to open Orlenko’s door when he didn’t answer her knock saw more, and the story raced out, a spark along a fuse. The thing that lit it was this particular secretary’s choice of the word “astride.” Astride. Without that word the story might have died away. Somebody else repeated it. “She was right there, astride him in the chair.” “Astride of him” were the actual words. Of course that was something you could not help picturing. Her long legs, her blond, hanging hair, his arrogant face thrown back, the chair.
No longer did Holly pause outside Alex’s office and lead him off alone under the eyes of his supervisor. “Come with me,” she would say to me. “Alex will chase after me if you don’t.” She no longer liked to be sent around the miles of corridor with documents, she liked to stay in our hallway, smoking dreamily in the ladies’ room, drifting to Orlenko’s door. She would knock a music of three knocks and then one, soft yet urgent, and lead him away. She concealed nothing; she liked to smile into everybody’s eyes in a blinded way.
Orlenko began to take a lunch hour. His phone would ring, and at the nearby desks we could hear his chair scrape back, his terrible sighs, his scrabbling in the drawer for his Camels. Then he would come out, close his door, and go.
Alex would come up out of his chair and be at the door of his tiny office—he had been given an office—if he saw me walking with Holly. He would start right in signaling me to leave him alone with her, but Holly always said to me, “Come on, you promised.” Holly walked ahead of him while he whipped his thigh with the manila folder. Then he began to hiss at her. “Why, Holly? Why?”
Late in the summer we were sitting in the Center Court, where the paved walks wound in and out of tended rosebushes. There were traveling clouds, an intense four o’clock sun in the hedges of arborvitae planted in half-circles around the stone benches. Someone tended them. Someone worked to keep aphids off the roses, as had been decreed by the landscape designers for this building, the Pentagon.
None of this was mystery, to me. “Leave something to learn later.” That’s what Frost said.
Holly was not sitting up straight. Her hair was tied back with a scarf as if to expose her two pimples and the darkened skin under her eyes. The scarf went halfway down her back, a relic of her stylishness. Alex couldn’t take his eyes off it. Finally he took between his fingers the tiny rolled hem of silk he had been touching on the back of the bench.
“I don’t know,” Holly said, bending her head down so that the scarf puffed off in his hand, “Oh, God, I don’t know. Nobody does!” and she jumped up, scattering the pigeons. “They don’t know where he went!” With a sob, she covered her face. Because she was beautiful, everyone out on the sidewalk turned and looked at her.
I was sad for Alex, too, as he went after her with her scarf in his hand. Myself I see crossing the little garden, looking up at the inner walls of the building and seeing movement in the windows, a uniformed back, a flash of light off glasses, and half-thinking to myself that this love triangle—all at once it was one, now that it was over—was more important than what the people in those offices were doing behind the windows. It was this that the books we carried around were about. Even if they pretended to be about war.
That was what I thought at eighteen, in the Center Court of the Pentagon, ready for some passion to overtake me as it had Holly, steeped in my right to it. I am haunted now by the thought that some page in that sheaf of papers, that endless list we ridiculed as we typed it, figured in the death of a little boy like my own, the one I would have in ten years when the war that did not even have a name that summer was dragging toward its end. I can’t remember. I can’t remember a line I typed. There we all sat, typing. There we all stood, drinking our coffee and falling in love. What was I dreaming of as I typed so fast, the Selectric ball whirling the letters off my fingers? Did they land in someone’s flesh?
At the center of that week was the safe: the failure of someone—Orlenko—to drop the rod down through the drawer handles and padlock it, his failure, one night, even to twirl the combination lock on the top drawer. Only by coincidence had the oversight been discovered and reported, by someone who stayed in the office even later than he.
“We are always at war,” one of the National Security speakers told us. “Only sometimes we allow ourselves to forget that we are at war.” Even so, the precautions were often forgotten; it happened to the summer interns all the time. In the morning you could hear the cry, “Oh no, here’s my ribbon still in the machine.”
All Mr. Orlenko had to do was make an appearance before a security board and be reprimanded. But instead he vanished. Within a week it was given out that his departure was a breakdown of a private sort. In other corridors the talk was of a college girl, a beauty, who had lured the head of a division away from his immigrant family that had lived on potatoes for three years in a camp on an unpronounceable border. And then she wouldn’t have him, of course. Her family stepped in. The father an officer. That was what was said.
Strangely enough, though for days Holly was away from her desk all day being interrogated somewhere in the building, along with her father who had been called in from his base, in our corridor everyone shielded her. We pretended that it was all a matter of wild rumors having their origin in some other corridor. People from—where he was from. They’re paranoid. They’ll bolt. The secretaries even included Holly in the talk, bringing her coffee and aspirin, soothing and pampering her.
“I got a letter.” She drew me into the auditorium and pulled the doors shut. She felt for the switch of the blue light, so that I could read it. There was Orlenko’s crested, beautiful script. “He’s gone, he’s hiding. No address. Even if I could write him a letter I couldn’t make him see it’s nothing.” She was biting her broken thumbnail. “Where can he go? He doesn’t even have his family with him. He thinks he’s running for his life, he doesn’t know what country this is.”
And what country is this? I could have said, but neither of us would have known.
“Terrible things happened to him in the war, you know. Terrible things.” Her violet eyes went black. “But he never gave in. He drew pictures. His hero was a poet, a famous poet from there—oh, I’ll get you the name—who drew pictures with a lump of coal when he was starving.” That war was only twenty years in the past, but they were our years—we were eighteen and twenty-one—and we were both gazing into a history as uninvestigated as calculus. We knew the Allies and the Axis. We were majoring in literature.
“What else does he say?”
She looked away. “My ‘beauty,’ is what he says, made him careless.” She held the envelope against her chest. I remember the crooked stamp and the elaborate capitals of her name: “Miss Hollis Baird.” It had been mailed right there in Washington. “He’s not here any more, though. I know it. He doesn’t trust anybody. Everybody over there hurt him, R
ussians, Germans, everybody. And this place, oh, God, I hate this place. These people in here. They’re the ones did it, up in Security, they’re the ones scared him.”
All the rest of the summer Alex comforted her, listened, took her coffee, walked her up and down the corridors, stood with her while she cried in the hot parking lot, until we all went back to school. “I just told poor Alex good-bye,” she said on the last day. “She’s going to marry him,” the secretaries predicted. But she did not.
She sees him now and then, just as she writes sometimes to me. She is the mother of three grown sons who attended the same private school as his two. I have read that she is a Washington hostess, though she has nothing to say in her letters about that.
For some reason she got back in touch with me, years after this. For a while, she said, she went a little wild. “God, I went through the whole thing. In San Francisco I tripped, I marched, I hung around the Dead. I told my Daddy off.” Looking back, she was glad of it all, except for what she had done that one summer, might have done, might have caused to happen—because we never knew what happened—to Nazar Orlenko. “Do you think there’s a love of your life?” she wrote.
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