Louise's Gamble

by Sarah R. Shaber

  Ada and I often wondered why Phoebe took in boarders, aside from the patriotism of it. We didn’t think it was for the money. Mr Holcombe lost plenty during the Depression and subsequently died in an accident, which Dellaphine hinted was suicide. But Phoebe must have some money of her own, because she’d kept the house and sent her sons to college. We’d concluded that we boarders somehow took the place of Phoebe’s sons, that we filled up the house and allowed a semblance of normalcy for both Dellaphine and Phoebe. Running a boarding house kept them both busy.

  Whatever the reason, we were happy to sit down in the middle of Sunday afternoon and eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes with cream sauce, scalloped cabbage, and leftover biscuits. Dessert was cherry jello embedded with canned pineapple. When I’d first arrived here we would have had cake or pie, but those days were long gone.

  What was left of Sunday afternoon passed quietly. No matter what I did, knitting or reading, I couldn’t stop thinking about Alessa and the letter she’d given to me. I had mixed feelings about the incident. On the one hand I wanted to get to work tomorrow early, pass the letter on to Don, and forget about it. When I next saw Alessa I could tell her I’d done what she’d asked and go back to knitting socks badly. Then again I was desperately curious. I wanted to know the contents of that letter and why Alessa wanted to contact OSS.

  As six o’clock approached we drifted into the lounge to listen to the news. We settled in our accustomed seats on Phoebe’s outdated furniture with its worn upholstery. Henry turned on the radio.

  ‘I think we could all use a sherry, don’t you?’ Phoebe asked, coming into the room with her favorite crystal sherry glasses, filled to the brim, on a silver tray. Yes, we could. We sipped as we listened, first to Edward R. Murrow and then the news program on WINX. Our elation over ‘Torch’ turned to worry as we listened to the enormous scope of the invasion. A massive armada, thousands of men, countless tanks and airplanes, streamed across the Atlantic and into North Africa, and for what? To gain a foothold on a piece of land from where we might, might, be able to invade southern Europe?

  I glanced at Joe. His dark beard hid much of his face, making him look older than he was, but as he bent over his pipe to light it, I could swear I saw tears glisten in his eyes.

  ‘I hope Roosevelt has the guts to give Patton his head! This Eisenhower guy is too damn cautious,’ Henry said. ‘We could be in Berlin by spring!’

  ‘Not likely,’ Joe said, drawing on his pipe until the bowl glowed. ‘First we have to beat Rommel. There’s no guarantee we will. The man is brilliant. Then we must invade Europe and fight our way to Berlin. And we can’t get there directly from Italy because of the Alps and Switzerland. Hitler will defend every inch of territory. It will be –’ and he sought for the appropriate words in English – ‘bloody and vicious. Europe will be rubble by the time it’s over.’

  I knew Joe was wondering how many refugees his organization could get out of Europe before the next bloodbath began.

  ‘Don’t forget the Japs,’ Ada said. ‘We have to beat them too.’

  ‘Hell, of course we will!’ Henry said. ‘America’s never lost a war.’

  I hoped to God he was right. It was too horrific to contemplate, the Japanese in control of the Pacific and Hitler ruling Europe. What kind of world would that be for our children to live in?

  And then I thought of Rachel. She, baby Louisa, and little Claude had found refuge in the grotto abbey of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Hamrun, Malta. Once the allies conquered North Africa, the daily bombings of Malta would stop. Wouldn’t they?

  None of us slept well that night. I know because when I went downstairs for a glass of water I found Phoebe sipping sherry in the kitchen and saw Joe out on the chilly porch, smoking his pipe, in a worn dressing gown with a blanket thrown over his shoulders.

  FIVE

  I pushed the heavy file cart into Don’s office and closed the door behind me.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Pearlie,’ Don said, raising his eyes from the stack of papers on his desk. ‘You’re early. I’m done with those,’ he said, nodding at the table piled with files that stood under his office window.

  Don Murray had aged since taking over the Europe/Africa desk. Strands of gray streaked his hair. His eyes were often bloodshot. He carried home a full briefcase at night and was the first person in the office every morning.

  I unloaded my trolley and stacked files on to his desk in a pile so high it teetered, then emptied his OUT box of an equally towering mountain of paper. When I returned to my office I’d sort through the mountain and either file all that paper or redirect it to other crowded desks.

  ‘Mr Murray,’ I said, wiping my hands on the damp cloth I kept on the trolley, ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘What is it, Louise?’ he said, slipping into using my first name. We’d dated once before his promotion. ‘I’m awfully busy. And I don’t see how I can get you another clerk. State and the War Department are sucking up all the manpower in the District.’

  ‘I’ve been contacted by a floater,’ I said. ‘Floater’ was spy lingo for a civilian who becomes part of an intelligence operation.

  ‘What?’ he said, taking off his glasses and leaning back in his chair. ‘Who? How did he know you work here?’

  ‘She.’

  I sat down at his desk and told him the entire story. After he heard me out he scanned the page of Italian I’d given him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘interesting. But I doubt this will amount to much.’

  I’d learned from the time I was a little girl that I couldn’t say out loud much of what crossed my mind, if I wanted to keep a job or a man or my good name. But I could think whatever I liked, and did. Of course Don assumed Alessa’s information was insignificant. I was a file clerk. Alessa was a penniless female refugee. We’d met at a knitting circle. This was all Don’s male mind needed, to conclude that Alessa’s letter would turn out to be insignificant.

  ‘I’ll have this translated,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, when do you expect to see this woman again?’

  ‘Friday evening. At our knitting circle.’

  ‘I’ll brief you on how to handle the contact before then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I’m sure you will.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Pearlie,’ Don said, dismissing me, already settling his glasses on his nose and opening another file.

  I was the Chief File Clerk of the Europe/Africa Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. Which was an impressive way of saying that I was responsible for all the paper the section generated. And did we ever generate paper, tons of it when multiplied by dozens of offices like mine scattered throughout the OSS compound. Nine hundred people worked in the old apartment house that held R&A. Most of our scholars/spies were renowned academics – economists, historians, anthropologists, linguists, and scientists – recruited from American universities, mostly Harvard and Yale. Some were foreign experts who’d fled their countries ahead of the Nazis. Our researchers studied everything from covert intelligence gathered by agents all over the world, to muddy underground newsletters picked up on the streets of occupied foreign cities, to National Geographic maps, to decades-old tourist guides, to interviews with expatriates. Many camped at the Library of Congress, scouring it for usable information. The rest of us, the file clerks, all women, typed, filed, sorted, and distributed the material generated by this army of eggheads.

  The operational branches of OSS, the glamour boys and girls, called us the ‘chair borne brigade’, but without the information we analyzed, our spies in the field, and the armies that followed them, would have been deaf, dumb, and blind. It was because of our work that they landed on foreign soil with current maps, phrase books, enemy positions, and resistance contacts.

  Which is why I’d expected the news about Torch we’d read in the newspapers yesterday. For months we’d been typing and filing reports on everything from how to greet a Mohammedan mullah to the track gauges of Tunisian
railways. During our busiest weeks we soaked our overworked hands in hot water and Epsom salts every night. And we couldn’t nearly do it all. At night the researchers sneaked in wives and girlfriends to type and collate. We’d find neat stacks of reports outside our door every morning.

  I shoved open my office door with my hip and pushed the heavy file cart inside, where Ruth, my filing whizz, was alphabetizing an armful of brown file jackets.

  ‘I need that cart,’ she said to me, before even saying hello.

  ‘It’s all yours. And Mr Murray is done with these folders,’ I said. ‘They need to be returned to the files.’

  ‘And these,’ she said, nodding to another stack of files. ‘I think they’ll all fit.’

  We loaded up the file cart, and she was out the door.

  Ruth may have once been a spoiled Mount Holyoke deb with a wardrobe of silk dresses and two strands of pearls, but now she wore trousers and twisted her hair up off her face. She could file faster and more accurately than any of us. I expect she dreamed about the alphabet at night.

  Now, Betty, a hare-brained blonde in search of a husband in uniform – any uniform, any rank – was my crackerjack typist. She could read everyone’s handwriting, even the foreigners’, and type accurately through ten sheets of carbon paper with barely a mistake. An important skill, because each error needed to be erased from all the copies under all those sheets of carbon paper. Although life had become easier when William Langer, our new branch director, had decreed that a few strikeouts in long single-spaced documents were permissible.

  When Brenda Bonner arrived, I’d thought she must have lied about her age to personnel. She looked like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz with her long brown pigtails and checked jumper. But she’d taken her first paycheck straight to Penney’s and bought trousers and dark sweaters, all the better to hide the newspaper ink that smudged her hands and arms black. She bandaged her right hand to keep blisters from forming as she worked her scissors all day, clipping articles from the stack of newspapers, magazines, and journals that surrounded her desk. For filing, of course.

  I reserved most of the indexing for myself. Indexing all those files was critical. Once files were stashed away in the file cabinets that crammed the building, even occupying space in bathrooms, hallways, and cloakrooms, we needed to be able to find them again.

  Every file had its own three inch by five inch index card which described the file’s location and its subject. Then there were the cross references. Say I was indexing a new file on Ada’s Luftwaffe husband. His name, Rein Hermann, would be the main title of the file. But I’d also need to add to his index card the subject titles ‘Luftwaffe’, ‘Nazis who’d lived in the United States’, the name of the civilian airline he’d flown with, and so forth. Then the index card would need to be filed properly. And finally Ruth could stow the main file in a file cabinet.

  If Ada’s husband’s name came up again we could find his file. Immediately. A misfiled document might as well not exist.

  My girls made the base clerical pay of fourteen hundred and forty dollars a year. I made a little over sixteen hundred dollars. Twice what my husband made as a Western Union telegrapher before he died; more than I ever dreamed possible. My parents wouldn’t believe me if I told them. After paying my room and board at Phoebe’s, my taxes, and buying a war bond, I had over a hundred dollars a month in my pocket. No matter what I had to do, I would never go back to Wilmington to live, war or no war. I intended to have a career and be independent the rest of my life, whether I remarried or not. I didn’t say so out loud, but I thought about it plenty.

  Betty threw up her hands. ‘Thank God, it’s done!’ She ripped the paper out of her typewriter and separated the carbons from the copies. The carbons went into the trash to be burned at the end of the day. She added the finished pages to the eight collated piles of the rest of the document and stapled each of them together with a flourish.

  She lit a cigarette and inspected her fingers. ‘My nails are a mess. I need a manicure in the worst way.’

  Ellen stopped scissoring to shake a cramp out of her hand. ‘What happens now, Mrs Pearlie?’ she asked. ‘I mean, now that we’ve invaded North Africa? To us, I mean.’

  ‘OSS will open an outpost in North Africa and handle OSS business in the region from there,’ I said.

  ‘Then what will we do?’

  ‘Begin to prepare for the next stage of the war,’ I said.

  ‘What do you think that will be?’ Betty said.

  Sicily, Sardinia, Italy. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’

  Brenda massaged her hand. ‘Go take your break,’ I said to her. ‘And Betty, when you’re done with your cigarette, take those reports to the mail room.’

  I grabbed a stack of alphabetized cards and rolled our library ladder over to the first bank of index file drawers. They were stacked from floor to ceiling, and the ceilings were twelve feet high, lining every wall of our office, a gutted two-bedroom apartment. In the main room we could barely move between our desks, the tables stacked with documents, and the massive Yale walk-in floor safe, which held our Top Secret documents.

  Our short hall once contained four apartments. A former studio accommodated our security detail: two soldiers who stood at the entrances outside, and a sergeant who checked our visitors in and out. This seemed excessive to me, since an Army squadron was camped outside our building and patrolled the OSS grounds night and day.

  Another small apartment had become Don’s office. At the end of the hall were the offices of four scholars. Dora Bertrand, an anthropologist, was the only woman I knew with a PhD. I admired her greatly, even though she was in a scandalous Wellesley marriage with another woman. Roger Austine was a French language professor from Tulane whose uncle was the archbishop of Toulouse. He was the talk of our office because he was engaged to a sophisticated mulatto woman from the French Caribbean. Guy Danielson was a conservative, almost a monarchist, and a historian from Princeton. He and Roger loathed each other. I didn’t know Jack Singer well. He was an economist who’d taken Don’s place when he was promoted.

  This pattern, a cluster of scholars supported by clerical staff, repeated itself dozens of times throughout the building.

  As I clambered up and down my ladder, I admitted to myself that I felt disappointed. Let down, even. I’d magnified what my contact with Alessa might mean, and Don’s diffidence deflated me. My adventure helping Rachel leave Vichy was terrifying, even dangerous, and I was so relieved that it was over. But I missed the excitement of it, the relief from the drudgery of the files.

  For a woman I had a good education and an important job. I had a junior college degree. I had Top Secret Clearance. I made a salary that would have been a fantasy a year ago. I no longer relied on my parents for a roof over my head. I no longer felt the pressure to remarry after Bill had died in order to get out of my parents’ house. But I wanted more. I wanted to use all my brains, not just the part that knew the alphabet!

  Dora Bertrand, who would return to her faculty position at Smith College after the war, had promised to help me finish college. I wouldn’t let her forget!

  The next morning Don met me at the door to my office.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, ‘we’re having a quick meeting in my office. Could you come take notes, please?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Let me get my notebook.’

  I threw my coat down on my desk, picked up a steno pad and pencil, and told the girls where I’d be.

  As I followed Don down the hall to his office, I noticed he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. He must have slept on the cot in his office. I wondered what was up.

  Dora, Jack, Roger, and Guy were not waiting for us in Don’s office. Two strange men were there instead. Well, they weren’t strangers, I’d seen them in the OSS cafeteria, but I didn’t know who they were.

  Both men stood up and extended their hands. The younger one shook my hand first.

  �
�Mrs Pearlie,’ he said, ‘I’m Max Corso, Secret Intelligence Branch, Italian section.’

  ‘And I’m Platon Melinsky,’ the second man said. ‘Also Secret Intelligence.’

  ‘Please take a seat, Mrs Pearlie,’ Don said.

  ‘Cigarette?’ Corso asked me.

  ‘No, thank you, I don’t smoke.’

  Corso lit his and inhaled deeply while I wondered what brought the head of the SI Italian desk to Don’s office.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie, have you heard of Operation Underworld?’ Corso asked.

  Of course I’d heard of Operation Underworld. I was well briefed on most OSS activities through my access to our section’s files and ladies’ restroom gossip. The men in the office must think the clerical staff was deaf, dumb, and blind.

  ‘Operation Underworld,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. I didn’t want to reveal how well informed I was. ‘The Office of Naval Intelligence recruited the Mafia to protect the Port of New York City.’

  ‘Through the unions they control,’ Corso said. ‘The Teamsters, the longshoremen, restaurant workers, even the stallholders at the Fulton Fish Market. Most of these union members are Italian Americans. They detest Mussolini and the Nazis. They’re watching the docks and Allied ships, eavesdropping on foreign nationals, spying on incoming vessels, even monitoring our fishing fleet. The dockyards are full of spies working for the Nazis, and only the Mafia has the resources to blanket the Port.’

  ‘The spies aren’t Americans!’ I said.

  ‘There are a few Italian Americans who support Mussolini,’ Corso said, ‘but not many, and we know who most of them are. Our real problems are the sleepers – operatives the Nazis and Mussolini planted secretly on the dockyards before the war started. We don’t know how many they are, but we do know they are funneling information to the Nazis.’

  ‘The Office of Naval Intelligence needed the unions and the Mafia to have any hope of securing the docks,’ Don said. ‘We’re talking about hundreds of square miles of piers, warehouses, and depots. Not to mention the US Naval Shipyard. So the ONI contacted “Lucky” Luciano. Cardinal Spellman was their go-between.’