The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  We were used as decoys. We worked in the neighboring seaside towns of Bournemouth and Southampton. My pitch was usually Bournemouth.

  It was there that we taught future agents how to follow someone—find out where they were going, who they were seeing—without being detected. How to detect if someone were following them and throw them off. How to pass messages without any sign of recognition or even moving our lips. This took place on the beach, in the park, on benches in the town, in telephone booths, and in the tearooms above the Gaumont Cinema.

  The last exercise was reserved for those future agents whom the instructors thought might talk. Now, the instructors were with them all the time. They watched their every movement. They analyzed it all. And if they thought that they might talk, they would have a carefully prearranged setup meeting between a decoy and a future agent in one of the two grand hotels in Bournemouth.

  (Of course, if I had taken part in the earlier exercises, I couldn’t take part in that one, because they would know me, and then one of the other women took over.)

  The meeting would take place in the bar or the lounge, followed by an intimate dinner tête-à-tête. It was our job to get them to talk—to betray themselves, in fact.

  The Brits didn’t talk much. Foreigners sometimes did, especially young ones. Oh, I understood. They were lonely. They were far from their homes and their families. They didn’t even know if they would have a home, or even a country, to go back to once the war was over. And it was flattering to have a young girl hanging on their every word. Before they were returned to London at the end of their month in Beaulieu—and it was in London, in their country section, that their fate would be decided—each one had an interview with our commandant, Colonel Woolrych. (We called him Woolly Bags behind his back.) He had all the reports from the different training schools, and he made his final report that went back to London and carried a lot of weight.

  Now, if they had talked, during the interview a door would open and I, or another decoy, would walk in.

  Woolly Bags would say, “Do you know this woman?” And they would realize they’d been tricked.

  Most of them took it well. But I’ll never forget one. He was a Dane—oh, a glorious blond Adonis. I think he was rather taken with me. (At the time I weighed about twelve kilos less, and I didn’t have white hair.)

  When I entered the room, he looked at me with surprise, and then almost pain.

  Finally, blind fury overtook him. He half rose in his chair and said, “You bitch!”

  Well, no woman likes being called a bitch.

  But as Woolly Bags said to me afterwards, “If he can’t resist talking to a pretty face over here, he’s not going to resist when he’s over there. And it won’t only be his life that is in danger, it will be many others.”

  I think it was then that I realized my whole life was a lie. I lied to everybody. I had to. To those agents. To my friends. To my family.

  My mother thought I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. She died at eighty without ever knowing the truth, because all of us at the secret army were under the Official Secrets Act for sixty years, until those files were opened in the year 2000. And by then most of us were dead.

  On the eve of my nineteenth birthday, I fell madly, hopelessly in love with an agent. He was one of our best agents. A crack. He’d just returned from a very successful second mission, and he was adulated. He was a legend in the section. I’d heard all about him, but I never thought I’d meet him.

  Then, suddenly one evening, he was there. Our eyes locked across a crowded room. And it was as if a magnet drew us irresistibly towards each other.

  I couldn’t believe that he could love me. He was handsome. He was twelve years older than I. He was a hero.

  He must have met many beautiful, sophisticated, elegant, gorgeous women. (Oh, he had—he told me. But he said he’d been looking for me.) Our idyll lasted three months, until he left on his next mission.

  I was terrified. It was a very dangerous mission. They said only he could carry it off. I was so afraid. But he reassured me. He said he was a survivor. And he promised me that this would be his last mission, and when he came back, he’d never leave me again. We’d grow old together.

  The day he left, we had lunch, just the two of us, in a little intimate restaurant. We both knew that it would be many months perhaps before we’d be together again.

  We kept emotion out of our conversation. I think we were both afraid of breaking down. I know if we hadn’t, I would have broken down, and I’d have begged him not to go.

  I imagine you’ve all been in love. Can you picture what it’s like to be terribly in love, and know that all you have is a few hours, this moment in time?

  He took me back to the office, and we said good-bye at the bus stop. I don’t think we even said “good-bye.”

  As I walked through the door, I turned. He was standing on the pavement, watching me. He smiled and raised his hand to his red parachutist beret. A final salute.

  He was infiltrated that night.

  I never saw him again.

  The mission was successful, but he didn’t return. And I was left with a little cameo of a perfect love. Perfect, perhaps, because it had been so brief.

  When the news that I’d dreaded came through, they tried to comfort me. They told me I should be proud. He was incredibly courageous—a wonderful man, who realized that there was a force of evil in the world that had to be annihilated, but that freedom has a price tag. He paid that price with his life.

  But I didn’t want a dead hero. I didn’t want a medal in a velvet box. I wanted Bill.

  All those agents in the secret army were volunteers. They didn’t have to go. But they went. Almost half of them never returned. Like Bill, they gave their youth, their joie de vivre, their hopes and dreams for the future.

  They gave their all, for us.

  They gave their today, so that we might have our tomorrow.

  NOREEN RIOLS was born in Malta of English parents and lives with her French husband in a seventeenth-century house in a village near Versailles. After the war she joined the BBC, where she met her husband, a journalist with the World Service. She is the author of eleven books, published in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Norway, and the United States. She has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles and for several years contributed features from Paris to Woman’s Hour. She is an experienced public speaker with an impressive list of credits to her name and has also broadcast on radio and television programs across the world. She was awarded the Médaille des Volontaires de la Résistance, and on July 14, 2014, France’s National Day, she was awarded a medal making her a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. Her tenth book, The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish, was published last year to great acclaim. Her eleventh book, Autumn Sonata, has been published as an ebook.

  This story was told on August 28, 2014, at Union Chapel in London. The theme of the evening was Eyewitness. Director: Meg Bowles.

  I grew up on Long Island, in the town of Syosset, which some of you may know by its Native American name: Exit 43. But the summer I turned fifteen, which also happened to be the summer that Richard Nixon resigned, I was sent to a camp in the Berkshires, and it changed my life.

  I’d been to summer camp before, but at those other camps we made lanyards, and we had really aggressive color wars, and we sang those corny camp songs:

  “Make new friends, but keep the old,

  One is silver and the other gold.”

  Sound advice.

  But at this camp we sang Mozart requiems in the morning, and we did a lot of batik. Now, there’s a word you don’t get a chance to use in a sentence very often—batik. And we also acted in experimental plays in which invariably someone was supposed to go mad onstage and go running out through the audience.

  I loved it there.

  I wanted to act more than anything, and I’d been studying my favorite actresses all year. I’d been looking at Eli
zabeth Montgomery and her stirring portrayal of Samantha Stephens. Karen Valentine in Room 222. And perhaps the most moving of all, Susan Dey as Laurie Partridge.

  But here’s the thing: when I got to camp and stood up onstage—I, this little Jewish girl from Long Island—I talked in a voice that I can only describe as my Katharine Hepburn voice.

  “Muh-thah, where are you? Where are you, Muh-thah?”

  I don’t know where it came from.

  It’s sort of the acting equivalent of the poetry voice. You know what I’m talking about?

  “I—am a woman—who lives—in Red Hook.

  Here—are the keys—to my—apartment.”

  But there was one girl at camp who was really, really good. Her name was Martha, and she had long brown hair with little wildflowers sprinkled in it, and she wore long summer dresses. And whenever she spoke, little woodland animals gathered at her feet, and songbirds came down and sat on her shoulders and tilted their heads to listen.

  At the end of the summer, we were given yearbooks, and all these boys wrote things in Martha’s yearbook like, “I never told you this, but I was in love with you all summer.” And those same boys wrote in my yearbook, “You’re so funny.”

  Now, the campers weren’t the only ones who were taken with Martha. Our acting teacher was, too, in a different way. She was this really distinguished woman who taught theater in Greenwich Village and had taught some of the great legends, and she sort of looked like Isak Dinesen’s stunt double.

  And when Martha got up to do a monologue, Cora—that was her name—Cora would say, “Oh, Martha, that was so wonderful, the way you did that Edward Albee monologue. In fact, I’m going to call Ed tonight and tell him that I have seen the definitive version.”

  Martha would say, “Thank you, Cora.” And the songbirds would say, “Thank you, Cora.”

  But when I got up to act, no matter what I did, I could not please this woman. She tried to help me, but I was all over the place, and she would say, “Meg Wolitzer, discipline yourself. Pipe down. Be still.”

  All these things? I couldn’t do any of them.

  And one day in class we were doing an improv, and I think we were supposed to be shell-shocked World War I soldiers. And I was laughing and laughing.

  And she looked at me, and she said, “Meg Wolitzer, you are being ridiculous. Ridiculous!”

  This was not the same as being funny. I was so ashamed. The heat rose to my face, and all I could do was keep laughing. It was horrible.

  And she said, “Go. Just go.”

  She sent me off, and I staggered out onto the lawn, really kind of like a shell-shocked World War I soldier. And I sat down on the hill, and I kept laughing. What was wrong with me? I was such a freak, but I could not stop laughing.

  None of the other kids would’ve done that. I loved these kids; they were so interesting. We talked about music and French films and art, and we even talked about sex.

  Now, Martha had become my really good friend. She and I had been sitting on that hill just the day before, and we were talking about our boyfriends back at home.

  I had a boyfriend who…I don’t know, our relationship was a little bit stormy. He was going for a Cat Stevens look, but it doesn’t really work when you have a retainer. He also had a tendency to refer to me as “Milady.”

  But Martha and her boyfriend—I pictured them being so sophisticated, wearing matching berets and sort of passing a Gauloise cigarette back and forth, and I wanted to know what their relationship was like.

  I said to her, “Like, when you’re with your boyfriend, how far do you go?”

  She said, “What do you mean?”

  I said, “Well, like, do you give him a blow job?”

  She looked at me, and she said, “Oh, Meg, dear Meg—we call it making love.”

  And I realized that that was my problem in acting class: I was giving blow jobs while everyone else was making love.

  But I wasn’t the only one asked to leave the class. Sometimes Cora would look at Martha and say, “You look a little peaked. That improv exercise wore you out a little bit. Would you like to go rest?”

  And Martha would say, “Well, I am a little tired, Cora.”

  And Cora said, “Why don’t you go lie down in my bed?”

  Now, Cora had a bed in the mansion at the summer camp, and it was one of those huge four-poster things that looked like the kind of bed that Norma Desmond would’ve slept in in Sunset Boulevard.

  It had velvet blankets on it. I wanted more than anything for an acting teacher to say, “You look tired, go lie down in my bed.” I wanted to lie in that bed and make love with a boy in my acting class, and then we would turn to each other and recite Samuel Beckett lines:

  [In a very dramatic voice] “…I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

  But one day I’d been banished from class and told to go think about being serious, and Martha had been sent off to go lie down in Cora’s bed, and there I was, wandering despondently around the camp, and it was totally quiet. All I could hear in the distance was a little bit of oboe. I knew that somewhere kids were doing interpretive dance or jazz hands.

  Something brought me to the mansion. I wanted to talk to Martha. She was my friend, and I wanted to see her. I went up the stairs. It was totally silent. And there, in the center of Cora’s gigantic bed, Martha was fast asleep. I stood over her, and as I looked down, I thought, You know, here’s this girl, and she’s so different from me.

  I was never going to be that girl. I was never going to be the girl who was asked to lie in this bed—that wasn’t me.

  And I realized that the reason I’d been laughing so much in class was because I was having an incredible time this summer. I was free, and I was expressive. It was the first time I’d ever felt that way.

  I looked at Martha, and I said, “Get up.”

  She sort of rose up from a deep sleep, like a little mermaid coming up from a warm pocket of amniotic seawater, and she said, “What, what?”

  I said, “Come on, let’s go outside,” and she said, “Okay,” and together we went outside. And we went and sat on our hill, and we talked. I was good at that. There was a lot that I wanted to say.

  In fact, I’d begun keeping a diary that summer. At first I wrote so much in it because everything was happening. But after a while I was so busy that I had no time to write in the diary, and time kept passing, but I felt a little worried, because what if I became really famous one day and they wanted to publish my diaries? I’d be sort of like a lesser-known member of the Bloomsbury Circle—the Syosset Set. But my diary wouldn’t have much in it.

  So I went back to that diary, and on all the empty pages I wrote, “Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.”

  But a lot was happening that summer, and not just in me, but in the world. On August 9 we were all called into the Charles Ives Room, where a television set was wheeled in, and we watched as Richard Nixon was lifted from the White House lawn like a rotting piece of lawn furniture. Everything was changing.

  This took place forty years ago exactly this summer. Cora, the acting teacher, is long dead. Richard Nixon is long dead. (I still miss the guy.)

  Martha and I actually remain best friends to this day, and we’re totally different from each other. She’s still chic and lovely, and I’m still funny or maybe ridiculous, like tonight—I don’t know.

  But the thing is, what happened that summer: the world is always trying to tell you what you’re not.

  And it’s really up to you to say what you are. Every single thing that Cora disliked about me—my rube-ishness, my silliness, the way I put myself out there again and again—turned out to be something that I feel most tender about in myself.

  MEG WOLITZER is a novelist whose books include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, as well as a YA novel, Belzhar. Wolitzer’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. She is a member of the creative-writing f
aculty at Stony Brook Southampton.

  This story was told on September 19, 2014, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Into the Wild: Stories of Strange Lands. Director: Catherine Burns.

  It was a few minutes before 10:00 a.m. in late September 2011, when I heard the doorbell ring. I was in the attic, where I sometimes worked on movie reviews. At the time I was working as a film critic.

  I had been procrastinating on this one review, so when I heard the door, I was annoyed. But I went downstairs, and went up to the front door, and went up on my tiptoes, and peered through the glass.

  As soon as I saw them, I knew. Because we all know from the movies what it means to see two cops at your door.

  It means that something horrific has happened to someone you love.

  But I let them in. It was a man and a woman. They were kind, I remember that. I don’t remember who said what. They must have asked me my name. I must have told them. They must have asked me if I was married to Chris Ringwald. I must have said yes.

  They told me to sit down. And they said that a man had been found at the base of a hospital parking garage a mile from my home.

  I said, “Did he jump?”

  And they said, “Yes.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  And in that moment, learning of my husband’s suicide, I felt my whole world shear away from me. I felt cleaved in two.

  That day I did the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do. I told our three children. Our oldest was seventeen at the time, and on a gap year in Ecuador. Our younger daughter was a sophomore at Albany High. She was fifteen. And our youngest, our boy, was eleven. He was in sixth grade.

  That first night, my kids and I didn’t want to be apart. So we lay on the living-room floor in sleeping bags and watched Battlestar Galactica (the new one, the really good one, the reboot).