Louise's War

by Sarah Shaber

  ‘Around ten o’clock,’ Dora went on, ‘General Donovan came and told us that we could all go home, that the doctor had said that Mr Holman died from a heart attack.’

  We stopped gossiping as we drew near to the head of the line. When it was my turn to speak to Mrs Holman, she gripped my proffered hand firmly. She looked tired, but her eyes were clear.

  ‘So sorry about your husband,’ I murmured. I really was. Even though I hadn’t been close to the man. No one, especially someone with young children, should have to die in the prime of his life.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, but she didn’t ask how I knew her husband, and her attention had already moved on to the next person in line.

  Dora, Joan and I returned to the buffet. No one ignored free food in Washington, especially on a Sunday, when many restaurants were closed and boarding houses often didn’t serve meals. Mine was an exception, but I still wouldn’t get dinner at ‘Two Trees’ that night.

  Joan reached over the platter of deviled eggs for a ham biscuit. She was a big woman, over six feet tall, with an appetite to match. She had a deep, easy laugh and a jolly sense of humor, which might explain why she had lots of friends but no beaux.

  Dora left us to join a group of the branch researchers across the room.

  ‘She has to watch herself,’ Joan said. ‘Can’t hang out with us clerks too much. Doesn’t want to be taken for one herself.’

  ‘I admire her so much,’ I said. ‘She’s got a real career. Of course she’s not married, she couldn’t do both.’

  ‘You don’t want to spread it around how much you admire her,’ Joan said. ‘You know she’s a lesbian, don’t you?’

  ‘A what?’ I asked.

  Joan pulled me aside and explained.

  ‘Good God,’ I said. I knew there were men like that, but I’d never heard of a woman doing such a thing. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s not a secret. She taught at Smith before the war. I took her class on Asian cultures. I was shocked at first, but now we’re great friends.’ I glanced over at Dora. She didn’t look like a pervert. She was a tiny woman with short coal-black hair and thick glasses, thicker than mine even, but a lovely smile.

  ‘I want another ham biscuit,’ Joan said. We went back to the buffet and reloaded our plates.

  ‘Were you particularly close to Mr Holman?’ Joan asked.

  I took a chance on her discretion.

  ‘Not really, but I left some important information with him the afternoon he died. I’m worried about what became of it. I read in the newspaper what a mess his office was.’

  ‘How important is this information?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. Mr Holman seemed to think it should go to the Projects Committee.’ I paused, wondering if I dared tell Joan about Rachel.

  Joan noticed my hesitation.

  ‘We can’t talk about it here,’ she said. ‘You’ll be in the cafeteria for coffee break tomorrow?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘If my girls have recovered from food poisoning by then.’

  The crowd thinned quickly, but the widow didn’t seem to mind. She took her hand off her husband’s coffin and breathed a sigh of relief.

  All the mourners leaving the wake murmured about paperwork they had to get back to, but I knew better. The Washington Senators and Detroit Tigers game was about to start.

  ‘Can you come over to my place for the rest of the afternoon?’ Joan asked me. ‘I’ve invited Charles and Dora too.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That would be fun.’

  The funeral director mopped his face and under his arms with a damp towel. He was sure his shirt was ruined, the second one this week. He’d been a nervous wreck since Bob Holman’s corpse arrived at his funeral home escorted by two FBI agents. He glanced out the window. The same two agents sat in a black Packard that waited at the curb, engine running, poised to follow the hearse to the cemetery for the deceased’s burial. There wouldn’t be a church funeral as such, only a minister speaking a few words at the gravesite. It’d had been like that since the country had gotten into this war. Not enough time or gasoline to drive all over town for separate services.

  He’d embalmed and arranged Holman’s corpse exactly as the G-men had instructed him, obscuring all evidence of the wound at the base of his neck. It was barely visible anyway. Puncture wounds closed quickly, leaking only a trickle of blood. He’d caked foundation a quarter of an inch deep over the mark and powdered it liberally, dressed him and settled the man’s head into the deep folds of the thick silk pillow in the coffin.

  Holman’s widow was the last person to leave. The mortuary assistants lifted the heavy coffin onto a gurney, rolled it out to the curb and heaved it into the hearse. The vehicle pulled away from the curb, trailed by the G-men a few car lengths behind. He’d be glad when Holman was safely planted six feet deep. Then maybe he’d stop ruining shirts.

  SIX

  I’d visited Joan’s studio apartment at the Mayflower Hotel a few times before. I wished I lived there and owned everything in it, from the Pullman davenport that opened into a bed, to the club chairs slip-covered in blue-flowered chintz, to the sculpted wool rug that perfectly matched the chintz, to the mahogany sideboard that held a china coffee service and a silver cocktail set. There was even a tiny kitchenette set into an alcove. A crystal chandelier that blazed with light hung from the ceiling, highlighting ornate Federal ceiling moldings. The apartment was refrigerated, but today Joan had left the tall casement windows open wide to a view of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The bathroom looked like something out of a Greta Garbo movie. It was lined, floor, walls and ceiling, with white marble, and spacious enough to accommodate the walnut vanity that matched the dresser in the other room.

  Bill and I had lived in a tiny apartment over the Wells Fargo office where he worked, but it was nothing like this, and it wasn’t really ours.

  I’d been taught in Sunday school not to covet. Well, I coveted Joan’s apartment and her car. And it was clear to me that living that well depended on money. I figured that to live on my own like Joan I needed to make twenty-five hundred dollars a year, and I wondered what on earth I could do to earn that kind of dough. Nothing, I shouldn’t think. Another good argument for remarrying before I got too old to find a husband, I supposed.

  Joan took my hat and hung it alongside hers on a coat rack near the door. She stuffed her pajamas, they were silk, I believe, into a dresser drawer, and rang the front desk for ice.

  ‘What do you think about gin and tonics?’ Joan asked. ‘So refreshing in this heat.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ I said.

  A knock on the door signaled the arrival of the ice. I quartered limes while Joan dumped peanuts into a silver compote and wiped down the cocktail table.

  Dora Bertrand and Charles Burns arrived together. Burns was a tall, handsome man with an upper-class Yankee accent like Don’s. He had a thin David Niven mustache. I’d run across him many times at work but didn’t know him well. As a division head he was senior to the rest of us.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said to Joan, who greeted him with a gin and tonic. ‘So nice to be here. Otherwise I’d be forced to listen to the baseball game with my room-mates. I don’t know why, I just don’t care for the sport. You ladies don’t mind if I take off my jacket, do you?’

  ‘Not at all, be comfortable,’ Joan said. ‘What’s going to happen, I wonder, if all the baseball players get drafted?’

  ‘I hear talk that women might form professional teams,’ Dora said.

  Charles lounged on Joan’s davenport, and took a gulp of his drink.

  ‘How silly,’ he said. ‘No one wants to watch women play sports. There some things women can do adequately while the men are at war, but not that.’

  ‘I can’t say I’d want to watch women play baseball myself,’ Joan said.

  I wondered why Charles wasn’t in the army, he looked healthy enough to me, but I decided that he might be too old. Or perhaps OSS needed his expertise
.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Joan asked. ‘Bridge? Monopoly? Chinese checkers?’

  We settled on Monopoly.

  Dora and I set up the board while Charles found a music program on the radio. Joan refreshed our drinks and we settled down to while away the afternoon. When we selected our tokens I reached for the red one. I saw a bemused look flit across Dora’s face.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘My dear, you surprise me. I would never have guessed you would choose red. I took you for a blue person, maybe green.’

  ‘Do you want the red one? You can have it.’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t give it up,’ she said. ‘Yellow is fine with me.’

  We finished our drinks, had another, and concentrated on accumulating real estate. Inevitably, though, our conversation turned back to Bob Holman’s death.

  ‘I saw him,’ Charles said, ‘a couple of hours before his wife found him. He seemed the same as always to me.’

  ‘He was terribly overworked,’ Dora said. ‘He slept at the office several nights a week.’ She threw a six and moved her pawn to Park Place. ‘This is the last time you see this block without houses, so be warned.’

  ‘It’s a mistake to spend all your money at the beginning of the game,’ Charles said. ‘What happens if you have to pay rent and you’re broke?’

  ‘I always buy the purple or green properties if I land on them,’ Dora said, ‘because one always passes “Go” shortly and collects two hundred dollars. I’ll take two houses, please.’

  ‘Did you see the corpse?’ I asked Charles.

  He shook his head. ‘No. I’d already left for the day. Read about it in the newspaper.’

  ‘Me, too. But Dora was there.’

  ‘Was she?’ Charles asked, glancing at her. Dora said nothing, counting her money.

  ‘That must have been a shocking experience for you,’ Charles said to Dora.

  She shrugged, not rising to the bait.

  I opened my mouth to speak again, but Joan noticed and gently nudged my foot. Okay, so I had asked Dora enough questions at the funeral home. I wished she would be more specific. I wanted to know exactly who had gotten to Holman’s office when, so I could figure out who might have seen the Bloch file.

  ‘I believe I’ve had enough gin for this afternoon,’ Charles said. ‘Can I get myself some water, Joan?’

  ‘Of course,’ Joan said. Charles sauntered over to the sideboard as if he owned the place and poured himself a glass of water from a cut-glass pitcher. He didn’t ask if we wanted any, but we were still working on our highballs.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said, when he returned, scanning the game board. Dora had acquired the most property, with Joan a distant second. I’d landed on both the income tax and luxury tax, not to mention going to jail twice, so I might as well be living in a Hooverville. Charles still had lots of cash, which was a good thing since he would need it to pay Dora’s exorbitant rents.

  While Charles pondered his strategy, Joan casually asked Dora the question I’d wanted to earlier.

  ‘The newspaper said Mr Holman’s office was a mess.’

  ‘It looked like a tornado had struck it,’ Dora said. ‘Mr Holman didn’t die tidily. He must have pulled the desk over, and he was face down, spreadeagled on the floor. Papers everywhere.’

  Dora had us beat at Monopoly, and we all knew it by now.

  Charles’s failure to trounce us embarrassed him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, scanning the board. ‘You girls aren’t bad at this game. I should have been playing closer attention.’ As if Charles lost because he neglected to play to his usual manly standard, the jerk!

  Dora ignored him, quietly sorting her stacks of money and returning it to the Monopoly box.

  The afternoon had passed comfortably, and now the sun angled low in the sky, pouring intense light into the room. Joan pulled the curtains closed to keep the glare out of our faces. Charles leaned back in his chair and took a cigarette out of a chased silver case. Dora fumbled in her purse for her packet of Lucky Strikes, and Joan reached for her cigarette box on the coffee table, but Charles insisted they each take one of his. They were elegant, quite long, with gold-wrapped filter tips, Sobranies, I think. He offered me one, but I demurred.

  ‘Quite wise,’ Dora said. ‘Nasty things. Can’t be healthy.’

  Charles held his lighter for Dora first, then Joan. In that instant I saw Joan look at Charles with an interest that he didn’t notice, much less return. I realized that Dora and I were there to chaperone Joan and Charles, without Charles’s having a clue, and I felt sorry for Joan.

  ‘Must go,’ Charles said. ‘The baseball game should be over, and I can return to my apartment and read the Sunday paper in peace. I’ll have to find supper somewhere, unless one of my room-mates decides to scramble eggs. I don’t know how to boil water, myself.’

  ‘I’m going to order supper from room service,’ Joan said. ‘You could stay and eat with me.’

  Charles shook his head. ‘Thanks, ducks,’ he said. ‘But I must go. Work tomorrow.’

  How humiliating for Joan, I thought, that Charles would rather read his newspaper and eat eggs with his room-mates than have supper with her. She was a lady, though, and gave no indication that he’d hurt her feelings.

  Charles said goodbye to all of us and pecked Joan on the cheek at the door.

  ‘I must be going too,’ Dora said. ‘Gail always cooks a big meal on Sundays and she’ll be expecting me.’ Gail must be Dora’s room-mate? Lover? What?

  Pretty soon I’d be so darn worldly and sophisticated, if the folks back home could see me they would shake their heads behind my back, and talk about how I was putting on airs. But maybe they wouldn’t be too surprised. I’d always been different. Peculiar, my mother said. More interested in reading than was healthy for a young girl. I remembered well my Great-Aunt Edna, who found me holed up in my room, reading The Age of Innocence, instead of outside at a family picnic pitching horseshoes like the rest of the kids. She’d rested her fists on her ample hips and shook her head. ‘You’re not like the rest of them, are you?’ she’d said. I assumed she was being critical of me, until after she died leaving me a small bequest designated for my college tuition. Thanks to the Depression the money shrank until I had enough for just one year.

  Joan hugged us both goodbye, but I could tell the afternoon hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned.

  Outside the hotel we found Charles waiting for us. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out on the sidewalk with his shoe.

  ‘Louise,’ he said, ignoring Dora. ‘Can I give you a ride home? I’ve got my car. Perhaps we could find a cafe and have supper?’

  I was so shocked I couldn’t answer right away. The man had dismissed Joan’s invitation, and not five minutes later he was asking me out? I ransacked my brain for a civil answer. I had to be careful what I said, the man was senior to me at OSS. I was expendable, he wasn’t.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to walk in this heat. And you’ve got to eat.’

  ‘I’ve already offered her a lift,’ Dora said, rescuing me. ‘We live quite near each other.’

  ‘I must go,’ I said to Charles. ‘You know how it is. Work tomorrow.’

  Dora’s car was a Model A, maybe ten years old, but it purred along Pennsylvania Avenue nicely. ‘I take care of it myself,’ Dora said, ‘change the oil, inflate the tires, everything. I hate to rely on some man at a filling station.’

  ‘Do we really live near each other?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re on “I” Street, aren’t you? Close to Washington Square? I’ve noticed you at the bus stop. I share an apartment with Gail in the Whiteville building.’

  Dora and her Gail were two more women who earned enough to keep their own apartment. The place had a real kitchen, too, because Dora had mentioned cooking dinner. I swallowed my envy and changed the subject.

  ‘Charles is a louse,’ I said. ‘Imagine being so rude to Joan.’

  ‘
Women like Joan grow up believing their lives are worthless unless they’re married. They imitate their mothers, learning to be deferential and self-deprecating to attract a beau who’ll become a husband. And most men behave accordingly, they can’t help it, that’s what they grew up expecting from women. Remember that remark Joan made about not wanting to watch women play sports? She was the captain of the Smith College field hockey team, for God’s sake.’

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought that Dora could hardly judge Joan. Dora didn’t want a husband, but Joan did, very much. Being self-deprecating was a tried-and-true way to attract men. That and having nice legs and a deep cleavage.

  SEVEN

  Dora dropped me off at my door. ‘Come across the street and visit us sometime,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sometime I will.’ And I wouldn’t care who knew it, either.

  Once inside I went upstairs and changed out of my black dress into blue jeans and a red checked shirt. The usual late-afternoon clouds gathered on the horizon, and I could feel the static electricity lift my hair as I unpinned my hat. Before I left the room I lowered my windows in case it rained, leaving them open a crack and turning on my fan to draw in some cool air.

  Phoebe and Dellaphine were in the kitchen at the table planning menus. Grocery-store ads clipped from the newspaper covered the tabletop.

  ‘Let’s have beef twice this week,’ Phoebe said to Dellaphine. ‘Henry’s been complaining. Ham once, chicken twice. Unless you see some nice fish.’

  There was no such thing as ‘nice’ fish, in my opinion. They were all slimy and smelly. I’d cleaned and fried enough of them to know.

  ‘What should I do about dessert?’ Dellaphine said. ‘Everyone’s tired of sliced fruit.’

  Phoebe flipped through the pages of her Boston Cooking School cookbook. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Any ideas, Louise?’