by Sarah Shaber
Don sat down at the work table and went through the familiar ritual of lighting his pipe, knocking old ash into an ashtray, filling the bowl with fresh Captain Black, tamping it down, drawing his first mouthful of smoke and exhaling it slowly. He settled the pipe in a corner of his mouth and opened the telephone book.
I pushed the library ladder over to the ‘B’ index card stack and climbed to the top rung, keeping my skirt tucked close to my body. At work I wore a khaki dress with narrow lapels and no pockets, thanks to fabric shortages, hemmed at the knee. I’d heard rumors we’d be allowed to wear trousers to work soon, thank God. I already owned two new pairs I’d bought at J.C. Penney. I was used to trousers, since I wore overalls while working at my family’s fish camp, but I’d met girls here who’d never owned a pair in their lives.
My office contained a minute fraction of the acres of index files that filled entire buildings in Washington. Even so, small square wooden file drawers, holding thousands of five-by-eight index cards, climbed the ten-foot walls of my office to the ceiling, blanketing every vertical surface of the stripped kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms.
The powers that be had left us the toilet and bathroom sink, a deference to our sex that I appreciated.
Sure enough, one Gerald Bloch, a hydrographer, had an index card in our files. This meant we had a subject file on him somewhere in the building. This wasn’t as unlikely as it seemed. After the war began, my branch of OSS, Research and Analysis, asked every academic in the country to send us information on experts they knew, including foreigners, who might be helpful to the war effort. Later we collected even more names from the foreign publications our agents bought in neutral capitals like Stockholm and Lisbon. OSS had rooms full of file clerks to stow away the stacks of paper that found their way to the agency.
I paused at the door, on my way to the ‘B’ main file, and looked back at Don. He didn’t even remove his pipe from his mouth. He tapped the phone book with his pencil.
‘I’ll guard it with my life,’ he said.
TWO
Three floors up, in yet another gutted apartment, I pulled Gerald Bloch’s dossier out of a file cabinet. The Manila jacket contained few papers, and I flipped through them quickly, until I saw a Bloch listed on the program for an international hydrography conference held in 1936. Must be the same man. How many French hydrographers named Bloch could there be in the world, and what was hydrography, anyway?
Back in my office I’d barely settled down to read the Bloch file when Don closed the London phone book with a final slap. After giving it back to me he took the pipe out of his mouth and leaned back in his chair.
‘Louise,’ he said, ‘I was wondering. There’s a cocktail party at Evalyn McLean’s next week. I can get us in. Want to go?’
‘Gosh, Don, I don’t own a dress I could wear to a party like that.’ Maybe Betty was right. Don must have social connections, and money, if he could wangle an invitation to Friendship House. I wanted to go, just for the fun of it. But that might encourage him, and I didn’t want that, though I was supposed to be finding my second husband. My parents made that clear barely three months after Bill died.
‘Girls wear anything to parties now,’ Don said, ‘even Red Cross uniforms.’
‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said. ‘Depends on work – whether my girls are back from sick leave.’
I’d be thrilled to go to one of Evalyn McLean’s parties. All the rich, famous and important people in town went to her soirées. I read all about them in the society columns. Last week Gene Tierney and Oleg Cassini were in town and went to Evalyn McLean’s and then on to three more parties in one night. Of course I’d met lots of celebrities already. John Ford directed our Field Photography Unit, and I once saw Sterling Hayden in the cafeteria, eating chipped beef on toast just like the rest of us.
After Don left and I’d returned the London phone book to the safe I sat down with the dictionary and the Bloch file. I had some privacy even when my clerks were in the office. My desk, as befitted my title, which entitled me to one hundred and eighty dollars a year more than my subordinates, sat apart from the others behind a partition knocked together from two-by-fours and plywood. I could even lock my desk drawers. When the desks were delivered to this room, government workmen pried out the locks on the others.
Hydrography was the science of charting the oceans, I learned. Wet geography. Humor aside, I figured that hydrography would be critical to winning a world war that was fought on the sea as well as on land and in the air.
Bloch’s file contained a letter from an instructor in the geography department at George Washington University, one Marvin Metcalfe, who’d met Bloch at that international conference in 1936, and thought he fit the OSS description of a ‘foreign expert’. He’d enclosed the program from the conference, which listed Bloch as a speaker.
That wasn’t all. The file contained a photostat of a letter from Bloch dated in May of 1940, as the Germans advanced on Paris, to the American consulate in Marseille. My French, and his handwriting, wasn’t good enough for me to translate it, but I did recognize the words émigrer and demande de visa. Bloch had been trying to escape France for some time. The final document in the file was an article from a Marseille newspaper, probably clipped by an OSS employee at the Bern office combing old French newspapers. The piece was brief and in French, of course. I gathered that Bloch received some sort of award. A photograph accompanied it.
Bloch was a slender, fair man with a thin mustache. His wife, holding their baby son, stood next to him proudly. I felt my chest contract and my stomach roil. Bloch’s wife was Rachel.
Waves of heat washed over me; darkness, pierced by flashes of light, dropped like a curtain over my vision. I just barely made it into the bathroom before I slid to the floor.
I revived to find myself stretched out full length on the cool tiles. For the first time in my life I’d fainted. I grasped the edge of the toilet bowl and pulled myself to a seating position leaning against the wall. After the room stopped tilting I was able to stand and brace myself on the sink. I soaked a handful of towels and sponged my neck, and opened my blouse and cooled myself under my arms and neck.
I waited for my panic to wane before I returned to my desk and let the hot breeze from the office floor fan dry what was left of the dampness I’d sponged over my face and neck.
Thank goodness I’d been alone in the office when I’d recognized Rachel in the newspaper photograph. Otherwise my girls would have made a scene and the whole office would hear I’d fainted. I detested attracting attention to myself. And fainting, like crying, was one of those behaviors that men thought confirmed women’s weakness, their unsuitability for important work. I didn’t want anyone to think for a second that I couldn’t do my job.
I’d calmed myself down a bit before I looked at the photograph again. Rachel’s dark hair was longer than when I knew her, pulled up in a matronly bun, exposing her long elegant neck. The picture was grainy and distant, like the memory of the last hours we spent together, on our graduation day, almost ten years ago . . .
‘Oh, zut!’ Rachel had said, in her excellent, but accented, English. ‘Help me! Sit on this thing!’
I had perched on one of the bulging cases, squashing its contents, while Rachel fastened the latches.
‘You’d better tie this case up with rope,’ I said. ‘If it bursts open in the hold of your ship, what a mess.’
‘It’s so mean of Papa, making me leave so much behind.’
‘The other passengers on the Majestic need room for their luggage, too, you know,’ I said.
My eyes filled with tears, and Rachel dabbed at hers with the edge of a lace cuff.
‘I can’t believe you’re leaving,’ I said, ‘that I might never see you again.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Rachel said. ‘You’ll come and visit me in Marseille, and Papa might be transferred back to the States again someday.’
I didn’t answer her. I’d never have the money to go to
Europe. Besides, I was getting married in three weeks.
‘Remember our pledge,’ Rachel said. ‘We’re going to name our daughters after each other. You’ll have a baby before I do, though.’
I didn’t respond to that either. Bill and I had already decided not to have children until the Depression was over. We simply couldn’t afford it.
‘You’ll marry soon, too, I’m sure,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she said, smoothing the skirt of her new traveling suit.
‘Rachel . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Someday I’ll repay you . . .’
Rachel interrupted me by placing her hand over my mouth. ‘You promised not to speak of that again, ever. Besides, how would I have gotten through this year without you?’
After we finished packing we sat on my bare mattress and held hands, silent, afraid to speak for fear we’d burst into tears. At last the porter came to pick up Rachel and her luggage and take her to the train station.
‘Goodbye,’ I whispered to her.
‘Non,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘In France we don’t say that. It’s au revoir. Until we see each other again.’
After Rachel returned to France we wrote each other every week. We shared the details of our marriages, her baby son, our lives. Hers was infinitely more colorful than mine, and I longed to visit her, but my family didn’t have that kind of money. As the thirties came to a close Rachel’s letters described France’s growing fear of Nazism. For months after I stopped hearing from her I wrote her every week, I begged the French embassy for help in locating her, and I pestered the New York office of her father’s bank. I wrote dozens of letters and got not one in reply. After Pearl Harbor I stopped trying to find her, but I wondered every day whether she was homeless and hungry, or even alive. I didn’t think I’d know what had happened to her until the war was over, if then.
But now I knew that Rachel, Gerald and little Claude were still in Marseille and desperate to get out of Europe. I felt just as desperate. And powerless. What could I possibly do to help them? I’d learned from reading the newspaper what financial resources were required to sponsor a Jewish European refugee for an American visa, and I didn’t have them.
I felt thankful that I was alone in the office. I couldn’t have hidden my emotions from anyone. I felt alternately feverish, freezing cold and shaky, as my body responded to my anguish. For a few minutes I thought I might need to rush back to the bathroom to faint again, or maybe spew. But I commanded myself to calm down. Giving in to panic would be useless.
What could I do to help Rachel? Could I even admit to anyone at OSS that I knew her? Would that influence the decision to respond to Gerald’s overture, or not? I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
I could think of only one option.
With Bloch’s file tucked under one arm, I knocked on Bob Holman’s office door and waited for him to call out for me to enter. Holman, the head of the Europe/Africa desk, was a very fat man. In this stifling heat he often stripped to his underwear to work, and he wasn’t the only man in Washington who did so. After a bit of shuffling around he called out to me, and I went into his office. Holman, his round face red, forehead streaming perspiration, sat at his desk knotting his tie. A cot with a rumpled pillow stood in a corner. The files on his desk, weighted down with whatever he could find to keep them from being scattered about by the breeze from his Philco floor fan, lay stacked in piles all around him.
Holman would decide whether or not to forward Bloch’s file to the OSS Projects Committee, which had the authority to direct Special Operations, the glamor boys and girls of OSS, to smuggle the Bloch family out of Marseille. Over the last six months I’d earned Holman’s respect by recommending specific dossiers to him, and he’d asked me to flag material I thought could be important. He got the credit for whatever I suggested, which I resented, of course, but that’s just the way it was.
Truth was, I knew as much about Holman’s work, and what went on in OSS, as he did. The difference between us was, Holman got briefed officially along with the other men in our branch while I picked up what I knew from the papers I filed, gossip in the girls’ restroom and coffee-break conversations.
‘I’ve got a good prospect for you, Mr Holman,’ I said, handing him the Bloch file instead of tossing it in his pending basket.
‘Let’s see it,’ Holman said, taking the file from me after resting his thick Havana cigar on the rim of an overflowing ashtray. ‘Wait a few minutes, Louise, I’ve brought fresh lemonade from home,’ he said, as I turned to leave. He read through the contents of the file.
‘A hydrographer familiar with the North African coast,’ he said. ‘Interesting. Might be very useful to us.’
Holman laid the file aside. He hadn’t tossed it into his ‘to be filed’ box yet, which was good, but then again he hadn’t stacked it in the Projects Committee box either.
‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘Have some lemonade.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
Holman pulled a Thermos bottle from a desk drawer. He sat it smack down on the Bloch file, leaving a wet circle on its Manila jacket.
He poured me a glass of lemonade, which I drank appreciatively. It was still cool.
‘Where did you get the sugar?’ I asked.
Holman chuckled. ‘I have my ways,’ he said. ‘Or rather I should say, my wife has her ways. She’s a resourceful woman.’
I drained my glass.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That tasted wonderful.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Holman said, mopping his face with a fresh handkerchief. ‘God, it’s damn hot. The family and I are going to spend this weekend at a friend’s camp on the Potomac,’ he said. ‘My wife’s picking me up after work. Just thinking about getting out of the city makes me feel cooler.’
‘I’m planning to relax on the porch with Agatha Christie’s new novel,’ I said. How lame. I was never good at small talk. I tried not to stare at the Bloch file, now pinned under Holman’s fleshy elbow.
Holman mopped his forehead again and glanced at his watch. This was my cue that he was done being familiar with the help and I should leave him to his paper-shuffling and get back to mine. I ignored his signal. I crossed my legs, which are shapely, if not long, thank you very much, and settled in for a chat.
Holman was enough of a gentleman that he didn’t directly ask me to leave. Instead he screwed the top back on his Thermos and stashed it away in a drawer. He took his cigar out of the ashtray and chewed it, dribbling ash on Bloch’s file. My determination weakened. Holman smoked the smelliest cigars in the building.
‘So,’ I said, trolling for more conversation, ‘is your wife still looking for a job?’
Holman harrumphed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Silly notion, to go out to work and hire a colored woman to look after the children. I don’t think it will happen, thank goodness. She can’t type worth a damn. She’s flunked the test three times.’
‘She could work in a factory,’ I said.
‘Over my dead body. I’d look like a sap, with a wife in coveralls. I won’t allow it.’
Holman glanced at his watch again. I’d overstayed my welcome, I knew, but I wasn’t leaving until I knew what he did with that file, one way or the other.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what did you think of the file I brought you?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘thanks for reminding me.’ He picked up the file, waved it about to shake off the cigar ash and tossed it into the Projects Committee outbox. Rachel and Gerald and Claude now had a spark, only a glimmer mind you, of hope of escaping Marseille.
Back in my office I was again grateful to be alone.
Behind the closed door I put my head on my desk and wept.
I tried to console myself by remembering that I wasn’t by any means the only American with friends or family in Europe. And Rachel and her family were French citizens living in Vichy, unoccupied France, so they were safer than most. I couldn’t dwell on them or I wouldn’t be abl
e to sleep or work. And I’d done everything I could for them, hadn’t I?
THREE
At quitting time I joined the throng of weary government workers who streamed out of dozens of government buildings and waited on steaming sidewalks all over the city, hoping against hope to get a bus or trolley home. Many of us waited in vain. Capital Transit refused to hire Negroes to take the place of their drivers who were drafted into the military, despite newspaper editorials, government pleas and public demonstrations by both races. It astonished me that some people in this country didn’t have the common sense to understand that if colored men could fight in this war, they could certainly drive buses. Fortunately most folks with cars picked up as many riders from the slug lines as they could on their way home. A girl I knew once got a lift from Eleanor Roosevelt and rode home in the President’s armored Cadillac limousine!
A big gray Packard drew up next to me. A young man wearing a straw panama hat leaned out of the window. ‘Where are you headed?’ he asked.
‘I can walk from Washington Circle,’ I said.
‘Get in.’
I squeezed into the back seat next to a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen and a baby-faced army private. They were holding hands and looked scared to death.
‘These two are on their way to the magistrate to get hitched up,’ the driver said.
The couple looked at each other as if they couldn’t quite believe the driver’s words referred to them.
‘I ship out on Monday,’ the young private said. ‘And Clara here is going to work at the S&W cafeteria near the Capitol.’
‘Senators and generals eat there every day,’ Clara said, ‘and the pay is really good.’
Wait until you find out how much the hot, tiny room you’re going to share with three other girls is going to cost you, I thought. And try not to get pregnant tonight. One of the clerks who worked for me was already a widow with an infant. She shared a bathroom with twenty-one other roomers in a rat-infested boarding house. Her baby boarded at a cousin’s home in Maryland somewhere. For goodness’ sake, Clara, go to Union Station instead of the courthouse, sweetly kiss Private Dogface goodbye, go home and finish high school.