The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  Lottie thinks of what she has seen after some raids: the rank bodies, smoke and fire. For this snowy night of calm, she thanks someone—God, Papa, her soldier, she isn’t sure—thanks that tonight there are no flames and the carnage is cool. Thanks that she has her Galiano with her safe. Freya cleans another brick and sets it beside the other.

  “Mutti, why do you do that? It’s stupid.” Lottie does not desire the edge in her voice, but she is young and ardent and she plays what she feels.

  Freya shrugs. She appears to pick out one snowflake and watch it tumble. “What else can one do?”

  Lottie makes a sound with her lips, like one of the horn players limbering. There is no one else out in the snow. It is late and cold and many tables still have schnapps on them, a nightcap tipped to New Year’s Eve and another night of survival. Lottie wants to go home, but something bothersome holds her in gravity to Mutti.

  “Why did you talk to him?”

  Freya brings her look down to her daughter.

  “Because no one else would.”

  “No one should. You don’t know who he is. He could have been Gestapo.”

  “Lottie, Liebchen.” Freya laughs. “How can you have such marvelous ears and such poor eyes? Sometimes I think you’re just like that cello. You make the most wonderful noise, but I believe you’re made of wood.”

  Lottie is not prepared for Mutti to be annoyed with her. She intended to chide her mother for the breach of common sense, of security. Mutti will get herself sent to Ravensbrück if she talks to unfamiliar people once too often. She’ll get Lottie taken off too.

  Lottie hugs her cello case to her.

  “Don’t scold me, Mutti. I’m a grown woman.”

  Freya’s hand rises to the back of Lottie’s neck and combs through the golden hair.

  “Yes. I know you are, Liebchen.”

  On the ground the snow builds a quick, flimsy dressing of white for Berlin’s wounds. Lottie asks, “Who do you think he was, then?”

  Freya shoves her hands into her coat pockets. She looks like she will ignore the question and walk away. Lottie takes up the handle of her cello case.

  Freya digs a heel into the snow. Lottie stops. She waits. Mutti seems about to answer. Lottie doesn’t care enough to spend much more time in this conversation, who the man was or wasn’t. She wants only to haul her cello home and go to sleep.

  Big flakes strike Lottie’s eyelashes. Her mother still considers speaking.

  Lottie smacks her lips. She will tarry no longer, this hesitation of her mother’s is almost farcical.

  “Mutti, goodnight.” She hefts the cello. “Happy New Year.”

  But Freya pivots first in the snow slickness and with no words is gone.

  * * * *

  TWO

  * * *

  January 6, 1945, 2:30 p.m.

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  T

  he president’s hands shake.

  To calm them, give his hands something to do, he uses them to uncross his legs. He lifts the right leg at the knee and aligns it beside the other. They make a pair. He straightens the pressed seam of his trousers on both legs. He keeps his legs neat, pampers them, for they are separate, more like possessions than his own flesh. Beside the sofa in an ashtray a cigarette smolders. He takes it up and inhales. Releasing the smoke from his lungs, he lifts his chin the way he does when there are cameras about. He watches the red ash jiggle, can’t hold it still. He takes another jolt from the cigarette.

  The President hears applause. Where’s it coming from? He’s alone in his office, not on the back of the caboose, not stumping the countryside. That’s done months ago. His fourth inauguration is in two weeks. Where’s the crowd?

  It’s in his head. His pulse roars in his temples. Not applause. He lowers the cigarette. Releasing smoke from his lungs, he lifts his glass and finishes the dregs of Scotch. Straight, no ice. Standard stuff. Who just left the office? Maloney? No, he’s next. Frank O’Mahoney, senator, Wyoming, he was just here. Old friend, ally. Nice chat. Maloney is next. Connecticut.

  He stubs out the cigarette, then lays his hands palms down on his legs. He looks at the backs of his big hands, they’re thick and still powerful, though sixty-two years old, sixty-three in a few weeks. Why do they quake? They’re messing up the trouser pleats he just made neat.

  The President sits composed, balanced on the sofa. His eyes focus only a few feet beyond his long nose, at nothing. The Oval Office fuzzes, some of the colors swirl into others, and this is pleasant and soft. He’ll stay here, like a cat in a basket of yarn, for a few minutes and rest.

  The door opens. Through the haze of cigarette smoke and rushing blood a heavyset man walks in. A jocular voice says, “Mr. President. Good afternoon.”

  The man sits in a high-back chair, without receiving a greeting in return, helps himself to a cigarette from the pack on the table. The man lights up, more smoke billows into the room. The President stares into it.

  Frank Maloney, that’s who. Connecticut. Maloney says something, more smoke.

  Silence. The President’s head lowers to where his starched collar cups his chin. He wants to curl up but he is perched on his useless legs like a lamp on a table; he stays upright.

  He wants to talk with the man in the chair beside the sofa, who is it again? Connecticut something. His hands are on his rumpled legs. The eclipse in his legs, how they will not listen to him, has climbed up his quivering wrists, his arms like ladders, to muddle the rest of him.

  The man in the chair rises. “Mr. President?”

  The man crosses himself, head to chest to shoulders. Fog. Thunderous clapping now.

  The man turns and heads for the door, calling out, “Someone! Mrs. Tully, his lips are blue! Someone get in here!”

  The office is empty. Roosevelt bites his lower lip hard for the splash of pain. He struggles to lift his hands to his face. He hides his eyes behind his fingers, feels their tips in his sockets, he presses his lips, which must be blue to the warm palms. Some circuit is connected when he does this, and the shaking eases. He opens his eyes behind the bars of his fingers. The colors of the room have mostly returned to their proper roosts.

  There is no more applause. A dull ache is there behind his eyeballs where the blood tide has ebbed. The room is quiet. He makes fists to test the resolve of his hands to cooperate. After a few moments, the fists become solid again, the old hammers, souvenirs of his youth.

  Roosevelt takes a few deep breaths. He restraightens his trousers. The legs must always look like any other man’s legs. He allows himself to be viewed in public only two ways: standing behind a lectern with his leg braces locked, or seated in an open car. The nation cannot be allowed to see a hint of feebleness, not in this time when strength is what the entire world demands of America. When his pants are tidy he lifts the right leg and layers it back over the left. He strikes a match to a fresh cigarette and takes a long draw. His head clears with the cloud he sucks in. He lifts his chin, waiting for Maloney of Connecticut to return. Grace Tully, one of the White House secretaries, will send him back in. She’ll tell him not to worry, everything’s fine, it’ll pass. He’s just tired, working too much, something. She’ll get him back in here.

  In a minute, the rotund senator does peek around the doorjamb, sheepish. Expecting what? A dead president? A weakling?

  “Come in, Frank, for Christ’s sake, come in! Close the door. Pour yourself a Scotch, you know where it is. Freshen me up while you’re at it.”

  Maloney approaches and asks how the President is feeling. Roosevelt fires back a salvo the senator will remember better than whatever it was he saw when he came in before. As good as any other man, Roosevelt thinks, legs and all, goddammit. Never better, Frank! Beat, what with this damn war, the election, plans for the inaugural, carrying Churchill on my back! Eleanor’s out trying to save America from itself, that’s where I ought to be but I’m stuck here with real work to do. Haw!

  He gives
Maloney a jaunty half hour. He swaps stories, chuckles, listens to a special political request, and agrees in his own fashion, which is to nod and make pleasant noises to the man’s face, disagreeing later if he has a mind to after Maloney’s gone and the subject comes up in formal fashion through committee. He has an aversion to argument and hurt feelings. He prefers to please whomever he talks to, relishes the feel of winning them over, being liked by individuals and especially crowds. He can’t fire anyone, never could. He delegates that ugly chore. Eleanor once told Churchill that when the President is saying “Yes, yes,” it doesn’t mean he’s agreeing, it means he’s listening.

  Maloney leaves. The President is certain he packed him off happy and unconcerned. Grace Tully slips in behind the senator’s ample wake.

  “Well, Mr. President, you are a charmer.”

  “Always have been,” he says, lifting his chin, cigarette clenched in his teeth. He works his jaw and the cigarette wags.

  Mrs. Tully hands him a short stack of papers. “I’ve pushed back your massage till four o’clock.”

  “Good,” he says. “Join me.”

  Mrs. Tully laughs. “Some other time.” She hands him the red top-secret folder.

  “Another love letter.” She smiles and makes to leave.

  “Grace. For happy hour today, I want Harry, Rosenman, and Anna.” The secretary waves over her shoulder on the move, she’ll take care of it.

  Happy hour is Roosevelt’s most precious ritual. It was born in his gubernatorial days in Albany and has continued without break for three terms, soon to be four, in Roosevelt’s favorite room, the second-floor study of the White House. The study is jammed full of maritime pictures, ship models, reams of paper, and worn, homey furniture. At cocktail hour, no more is said about politics beyond gossip, amusing tales, and recollections. Roosevelt uses this time to unwind, practice his self-pleasing craft of pleasing others, and experiment with strange drink concoctions of gin, vermouth, rum, and fruit juices. The participants are chosen with care. They must be abiding Roosevelt connections, the better to appreciate his stories, even the threadbare ones which the President retells but always with a new flair or mimicry to keep his audience amused. Eleanor does not attend often; the drinking offends her sensibilities, the residue of growing up under an alcoholic father. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s top adviser, is a willing laugher and a raconteur of ability, despite his ill health and ghastly thin frame. Sam Rosenman, known as “Judge” for having once served on the New York State Supreme Court, is a long-standing administration aide and speechwriter. Judge can hold his liquor and knows all the D.C. rumors. And Roosevelt’s lovely daughter Anna, his first child, who in February of ‘44 moved into the White House into Harry’s old digs in the Lincoln Suite, lives two doors away from Roosevelt’s rooms. Anna serves as de facto White House hostess. Eleanor is too occupied with her own agenda. Sometimes after cocktails are done and his audience disperses, Roosevelt sits for hours with Anna, working on his stamp collection, playing cards, reading with the comfort of having his adoring daughter nearby, or plotting with her.

  He fingers the red folder. Another cable from Winston. He undoes the string bow and slides his reading glasses from his shirt pocket.

  Churchill wants another private meeting, this time on the island of Malta, a British territory in the Mediterranean. It’s on the way to the upcoming conference with Uncle Joe at Yalta in the Crimea. Roosevelt reads:

  if you do not want to spend more than one day at malta, it could surely be arranged that both our chiefs of staffs should arrive there say a couple of days before us and have their preliminary discussions. we could then proceed by air. . . .

  Roosevelt doesn’t want to convene with Churchill before sitting down with him and Stalin at Yalta. Uncle Joe is always suspicious, he’ll take the notion that, with the end of the war in sight, Roosevelt is showing his true colors, that he prefers the British to the Russians. Roosevelt doesn’t. This is something the President has tried to make crystal clear to Stalin from the beginning of the war: the postwar stage will be American and Russian. The British will have good seats.

  “Grace,” he calls out, “get Harry here.”

  Roosevelt hears her answer. He adds, “And call the Marine.”

  In seconds, a large corporal in full dress uniform enters the Oval Office, pushing the President’s wheelchair. The soldier is neat, pleated and tucked. The President rises on the man’s arm. His legs without the metal muscle of the ten-pound braces burn even from this little effort of standing from the sofa to fall back into the wheelchair. If they’re going to be this damned useless, he thinks, they could at least be numb. The braces hurt too when he wears them, can’t they make them so they don’t cut into your legs? But no, pain comes with the humiliation and disappointment. The pain never lets you forget, you never get used to it. That’s good, he thinks. Never want to get used to it.

  Being helped from the sofa by the soldier, Roosevelt is conscious of his own heft. He thinks he has got to lose even more weight. He is one hundred seventy pounds, down from the one ninety his “ticker” doctor didn’t like at all. He enjoys his new thinness, brags to daughter Anna of his “flat tummy” All his body weight is in his abdomen and shoulders; his legs and hips atrophied years ago.

  When he is moved to his wheelchair and maneuvered to his desk, the soldier leaves, never speaking. Roosevelt says, “Thank you,” and the soldier snaps to at the words and salutes. Roosevelt jiggles the cigarette still clamped in his mouth, waves the starched Marine out the door with it.

  In minutes Harry Hopkins ambles in. He slides into the room, being of almost too slight a build to make much impression with his steps on the floor. Hopkins is the President’s closest adviser, has been since the thirties with the WPA and as secretary of commerce. One night in the spring of 1940, Harry sat down for dinner at the White House and stayed for three and a half years, moving into the family quarters with his young daughter, moving out in December of ‘43 only at the insistence of his new wife. Harry is the President’s alter ego, envoy, and his most trusted sounding board. He knows when to talk around Roosevelt, when to tell a joke, and when to clam up. Now that a wife has come between him and the President, their relationship has changed, as it must. But no one has the sensitivity to Roosevelt’s moods like Hopkins, and no one else, not even Eleanor, has such authority to speak for the President.

  Harry’s health has been poor for several years, he’s been in and out of hospitals. His body cannot absorb fats and proteins. Roosevelt watches Harry arrange himself in a chair, thinks of a bag of coat hangers. Look at Harry. He’s given up on his appearance. Baggy suit, fingers nicotined from chain smoking. His damn eye sockets are like coal mines, for God’s sake. In 1939 Harry was told he had four weeks to live. Roosevelt took control of the situation personally, flying in a team of medical experts, who gave

  Harry an experimental plasma transfusion. The procedure staved off the man’s decline. Still ...

  “Harry, you look like shit.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.” Harry cracks a grin, an old friend. ”I’d forgotten.”

  Roosevelt spins the red top-secret folder through the air to Hopkins.

  “Winston again.”

  Harry scans the thin telegraph sheet. He says, “Still on this Malta business.”

  “He keeps telling me he wants to meet before the Big Three.”

  Hopkins thins his lips, disapproving of Churchill’s nagging. “Remember what he said last week? ‘I do not see any other way of realizing our hopes about world organization in five or six days. Even the Almighty took seven.’”

  Roosevelt nods agreement. He knows Winston’s insistence too well.

  Harry shakes his head. “And what was that bullshit he wrote you on New Year’s Day?”

  Roosevelt lifts a finger to claim the right: Let me do this one.

  “ ‘No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter!’”

  “Good grief.” Harry chuckles. “Jesus Ch
rist, that guy.”

  Roosevelt enjoys the laughter with Hopkins. He says, “Look, Harry, I don’t want it. I’ll have dinner in Malta, a few drinks, whatever, but no powwow. The Chiefs of Staff can meet, military is fine but nothing political. And not me and Winston, not officially. Uncle Joe won’t like it. Handle this for me.”