by Sarah Shaber
‘Can you find coconut?’ I said, slipping into another chair at the table. ‘It makes fruit taste sweeter.’
‘There’s always honey,’ Dellaphine said. ‘It’s too close to the end of the month to find marshmallows.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Phoebe said, ‘see what you can find, coconut, honey, maybe there will be some condensed milk, and cobble together some desserts from that. We’ll buy a real cake from a bakery on Thursday and have it Thursday night.’ She slammed her cookbook shut.
‘I wish this war was over and life would go back the way it was before,’ Phoebe said. ‘I understand that the men have to fight and girls have to get jobs until the war is over. But I hate all the rest of it. Girls wearing practically no clothes, crazy music, bad language, families living in trailers and tents, single girls living on their own, children growing up in day nurseries, no servants. It’s not civilized.’
Phoebe reminded me of my mother – Southern and traditional in her outlook on life.
I’d expected Washington to be strange, even foreign, but except for all the war activity the city didn’t feel much different from my hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. The city’s native residents I’d met drank iced tea with lots of sugar and fresh mint, ate fried chicken and ham for Sunday dinner, rocked and fanned themselves on their porches in the summer, inhaling the fragrance of wisteria and gardenia, and gossiped about politics and society with a soft drawl. I could see why, less than a hundred years after the city was founded, Abraham Lincoln stared out of his office in the White House across the Potomac into Virginia, and wondered how many Washingtonians would welcome General Lee with open arms should he invade the city.
These days, with the influx of politicians, soldiers, refugees, diplomats and ‘businessmen’ any Southerner would straight away spot as carpetbaggers, the city’s Southern hospitality was stretched to the limit.
I wandered into the lounge to listen to the radio. Ada stood at the window, peeking outside from behind the dim-out curtain.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
Ada jumped, placing her hand over her heart.
‘You startled me,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Soldiers across the street. Parked in a Jeep. They’ve been there for half an hour. What do you suppose they’re doing?’
I glanced out the window. ‘Smoking a cigarette, I expect, before catching the bus to Fort Myer.’
‘They don’t need the bus. They’ve got a Jeep.’
‘Maybe they’re drinking beer. They can’t once they get back to base. Why?’
Ada drew the curtains closed. ‘I hate seeing so many soldiers in the streets. It seems like—’ She stopped short and glanced at me nervously. ‘It’s like living in an occupied country.’
‘It’s just because of the war.’
‘I know, but how can we be sure, well, that things will go back to normal someday? I mean what if Roosevelt doesn’t ever want to give up the Presidency? All these soldiers are used to taking orders from him.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, though I wondered myself sometimes. Roosevelt had already won a third term. What was to stop him from running for a fourth? ‘Come and sit on the porch with me. It’ll be nice and cool once the rain starts.’
‘I’d rather stay inside,’ she said. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?’
I went out onto the porch alone to watch the sky light up and blamed Ada’s nerves on the dropping barometer.
Once tucked into bed that night I had nothing to distract me from my fears for Rachel. I’d have given anything to know how she was.
‘We must do this,’ Gerald said.
‘I understand,’ Rachel answered.
‘I know what it means to you.’
‘It’s just a piece of furniture.’
Rachel couldn’t remember a time that her great-grandmother’s sideboard hadn’t stood in her home, crammed with a couple of generations of family treasures. The treasures were long gone. She’d sold the Germaine monogrammed silver, the antique Limoges china, and the rest of the family objets de valeur for a pittance to buy food and fuel.
Gerald slipped the crowbar under the edge of the sideboard lid and leaned his weight on it. Old glue and dovetailed joints split with a crack, and he pried the heavy mahogany top from its base.
They worked by candlelight. Claude slept soundly through the racket in the bedroom they all shared. They’d stripped the extra rooms in the flat of furniture to sell, besides, she rested better with Claude beside her. They’d have the new baby in its basket in their bedroom too, squeezed between the suitcases they kept packed and Claude’s cot.
Two nights ago a brick had sailed through their front window, and last night’s sniper fire sounded closer to their street than ever. ‘We have to find a way to bar the door,’ Gerald had said. He constructed notches for the bars from the thick stretchers of an Empire daybed. Only the sideboard was long enough to furnish the wood for bars.
Gerald laid the heavy sideboard across two chairs and Rachel held it steady while he sawed it lengthwise into three boards, one bar for the door and two for the front windows. The other windows had heavy shutters he’d nailed shut days ago. Rachel didn’t miss being unable to look out over the Old Port to the Mediterranean. Nazi gunships filled the harbor and blighted the view.
Monday morning, the office buzzed with talk about Bob Holman’s sudden death. The girls lingered longer than usual in the ladies’ restroom to gossip while the men stood around the halls in little groups, smoking, no doubt speculating about who would get Holman’s job. But there was a war on, so by mid-afternoon talk turned to the shocking news that had greeted us all in the morning newspapers – the arrest of a group of Nazi saboteurs at, of all places, the Mayflower Hotel.
My clerks had returned to work, thank goodness.
‘Would you believe,’ Betty said, throwing back her typewriter return with a clang, ‘the U-boat that dropped those Germans off, it was only three hundred yards off the Long Island coast. Makes me shiver to think about it.’ She stopped typing long enough to reapply bright-red lipstick and check her matching painted fingernails for chips. Betty was boy-crazy, or as they said these days, khaki-wacky, but I tolerated it because she was an excellent typist.
‘They’ll all be dead before Christmas,’ Ruth said. ‘Hanging, most likely.’ Ruth was a Mt. Holyoke girl who wore her pearls to work every day. Her typing wasn’t much, but she could file faster than any of us. I swear she could recite the alphabet backwards in thirty seconds.
Barbara didn’t join the conversation, as usual. She was a war widow on a mission. Each day she pored through the Washington newspapers, typing index cards for every person mentioned, her contribution to winning the war that had taken her young husband at Pearl Harbor and separated her from her child. She didn’t allude to her background otherwise, but a tiny Star of David on a gold chain hung around her neck. Mostly she wore it under her clothes, but sometimes you could catch a glimpse of it if she wore a scoop-necked blouse.
Because of Barbara’s absence her stack of newspapers reached from the floor to the top of her desk.
I didn’t have to wait until coffee break to talk to Joan. She stopped by my office a few minutes after I arrived at work, appearing at the door and crooking an index finger at me.
‘Mrs Pearlie,’ she said.
‘Yes, Miss Adams?’ I answered, rising from my desk.
‘General Donovan would appreciate it if you’d help me straighten up Mr Holman’s office this morning.’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, as we walked down the hallway together. ‘Now I can look for that file.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, lowering her voice to an uncharacteristic whisper. ‘Guess who’s taking over Holman’s desk?’
‘Who?’ I whispered back.
‘Donald Murray,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he your beau?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘
definitely not. I haven’t got any beaux. Don’t want any either.’ That remark, about not wanting a beau, surprised me. It slipped out, and I wondered if I was just being defensive, or if I really meant it.
‘Wish I could say the same,’ Joan said.
I did allow the thought to cross my mind that Don’s promotion might be useful to me, and then chastised myself for such a cynical thought. Anyway, I’d find it easier to talk to Don about the Bloch file than if Holman’s replacement was someone I didn’t know.
Don sat at Holman’s desk, smoking his pipe. He nodded a greeting at us. ‘Must have been some heart attack, huh?’ he said.
The desk, which had been piled high with documents and folders when I last saw it, was almost bare. Files and papers littered the floor. A file cabinet lay on its side, its contents spilling out of open file drawers.
‘Okay,’ Joan said, all business. ‘Why don’t Mrs Pearlie and I go through the papers and sort them, reconstruct the files, then pass them to you so you can familiarize yourself with Mr Holman’s work.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Donald said.
Two hours later Joan and I had reassembled Holman’s scattered files and stacked them on Don’s desk. I’d rummaged quickly through the undisturbed file cabinets, too. The Bloch file was nowhere to be found.
Joan went to get Donald coffee. Now that he was a desk head, God forbid that he’d sit in the cafeteria with the rest of us.
‘Mr Murray,’ I said, as casually as I could.
‘Yes,’ he answered, without looking up.
‘Friday afternoon I brought a file to Mr Holman. It concerned a hydrographer, a Frenchman in Marseille, an expert on the North African coast.’
‘Sounds interesting. Where is it?’
‘Mr Holman reviewed it and placed it in the Projects Committee box. I can’t find it now.’
Don leaned back in his chair.
‘Maybe he took it upstairs himself,’ he said. ‘Or changed his mind and sent it back to the main file. It’ll turn up.’
‘Do you want me to look for it?’
Donald frowned. ‘If you have time,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t interfere with your other work.’
I didn’t want to press the matter any further. He fiddled with a pen for a second before addressing me again, as if he was nervous.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘about Wednesday night. Can you come to the cocktail party with me?’
‘I’d love to,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no, and since he’d asked me I’d gotten excited about going.
Joan came in with Don’s coffee, and the two of us left him and went across the street to the cafeteria for our own coffee break.
We were later than usual, so we sat at a table by ourselves. Joan sipped from her cup, and made a face. ‘I can’t get used to drinking coffee without sugar. I’m going to buy a pound from Mr Black this weekend, and I don’t care how much it costs or how unpatriotic it is.’
I poured cream into my own cup, watching it swirl around as I stirred it.
‘That file I told you about is definitely missing,’ I said. ‘I’ve looked everywhere.’
‘As much paper as stuffs this building it’s not surprising.’
That was an understatement. The girls in my office needed ladders to reach the top rows of the card files alone, and those were just our branch’s indexes. Many of the three-by-five cards contained only a couple of typewritten names or a single sentence that directed us to one subject file, others referred to dozens. Those subject files filled every available wall, nook and cranny in our building, including conference rooms, bathrooms, offices, stairwells, hallways and broom closets. Only six months after Congress declared war, our branch of OSS had already moved twice, from an annex at the Library of Congress, to an abandoned ice-skating rink, to our current quarters.
‘You don’t suppose the FBI lifted Bloch’s file while they were in Mr Holman’s office, do you,’ I asked.
‘Why would they? Europe’s not their territory – they’re domestic and South America. When are you going to tell me why you are so interested in this file?’
I scanned the nearly empty cafeteria, and lowered my voice. I had decided to tell Joan the truth. ‘The subject of the file, Gerald Bloch, is the husband of a dear friend of mine from junior college. My room-mate.’ How could I explain my friendship with Rachel to Joan? Rachel and I were both outsiders at St Martha’s. Rachel because she was Jewish, me because I was ‘middle class’. Oh, the other students and the faculty were politely kind to us, but we didn’t fit in. For two years we just had each other. I got really good at mah-jongg, and Rachel learned to listen to the Carter Family singing ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ without putting her fingers in her ears.
‘Oh, no,’ Joan said. ‘I am so very sorry. You must be worried sick.’
‘It such a coincidence that I’d find Rachel’s husband in an OSS file,’ I said. ‘Hard to believe.’
‘Not really. Lots of us here have friends and family still in Europe. Did you hear what happened to Julia Cuniberti?’
‘The clerk on the Italian desk?’
‘Her family’s Italian American, and she speaks the language. Well, she learned through the documents and cables she filed that the Nazis had commandeered her uncle’s lodge in the Apennines and forced his family, including four children, to live in the attic! The Italian partisans identified the lodge as a Resistance target, and Julia couldn’t do a thing to warn her uncle. All she could do was pray for them. The lodge was bombed twice! She had to file all the intelligence about it!’
‘Oh, my God! What happened?’
‘She has no idea. None of the reports mention her family.’
Neither one of us spoke for a few minutes.
‘Maybe Mr Holman took your file upstairs himself before he died,’ Joan said.
‘Maybe.’ I took a breath. ‘Joan, could you look for it in General Donovan’s office? He’d have to initial it, wouldn’t he, before it could go to the Projects Committee?’
Joan crossed her legs and lit a cigarette, the flame leaping from an engraved silver Tiffany cigarette lighter.
‘I must warn you, Louise.’
I knew what she was about to say.
‘We can’t let our feelings get in the way of our work here. There are thousands of unfortunate families in Europe. We can’t save each one. Besides, going behind the backs of your bosses to help your friend could lose you your job.’
‘I understand.’
‘But I don’t like the idea of files in this office going missing, for any reason. I’ll take a look around General Donovan’s office. Only a look, mind you.’
‘Thank you. That’s all I ask.’
It was easy for Joan to caution me. She couldn’t possibly understand what I owed Rachel – so much more than friendship! But I’d promised Rachel never to speak of it to anyone, and I still felt bound by that promise.
EIGHT
I spent the rest of the morning mimeographing reports to send to agencies all over Washington, where undoubtedly they’d be filed in more file cabinets. I did slip out once to check the ‘B’ files to see if the Bloch file had found its way home. It wasn’t there.
At noon Joan and I walked to the Water Gate Inn on Rock Creek Drive, where the huge, puffy popovers were heaven sent, for lunch. The dining room was hot and crowded, overhung with a fug of cigarette smoke, so we lounged outside at a picnic table by the Potomac River, shaded by a cottonwood tree drooping with thirst. A small colored boy fished on the riverbank below us.
‘Much against my better judgment,’ Joan said, ‘I did check around my office for the Bloch file. It wasn’t in the Project Committee’s box. I got a look at the General’s desk, too. Not there.’
She saw my speculative look.
‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ she said. ‘What is that word? Don’t get paranoid. That file may have been mislaid, thrown away even, we don’t know what state Mr Holman was in before he died. He may have been quit
e confused before his heart attack. Who knows what he did with it.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
‘Anyway,’ Joan continued, ‘I talked to Dora this morning, and she told me the whole story about what happened Friday. She didn’t want to go into details outside the office. She, Don Murray, Guy Danielson and Roger Austine were having a late meeting about some report or another, and having their usual disagreements, when they heard Mr Holman’s wife screaming bloody murder. They rushed to Holman’s office and found him dead with our security guards standing over his body, guns drawn. The guards shooed everyone out of the office, including the widow, and waited there until three FBI agents showed up. The Capitol police arrived, but they weren’t allowed into the office either, so they left. A while later a doctor arrived, examined the body, and then men from a funeral home showed up and removed the corpse.
‘What about the FBI agents?’
‘Two went with the body and the special agent stayed behind in the office for a while, arguing with General Donovan and Dr Linney. The special agent was one of the G-men at the wake, the one with the feather in his hat. Finally everyone was allowed to go home. Dora said there were GIs still standing guard all around the building when she left.’
The little colored boy, dejected, packed up his fishing gear, a bamboo pole and a tin can of worms, and climbed up the riverbank toward us.
‘Any luck?’ I asked him.
‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot.’
Joan watched the child walk off before she spoke to me again, her voice lowered.
‘There is something else,’ she said. ‘Now don’t work yourself up over this.’
‘What?’
‘We keep copies of every communication from the London office in General Donovan’s personal files.’
I felt my pulse quicken. ‘What do you have?’ I asked.
‘A typewritten translation of the original note from the Resistance operative and a carbon of the memo forwarded to your branch requesting what information you might have about Bloch.’
So there was still some tangible evidence of Gerald Bloch at OSS.
‘I don’t suppose,’ I began.