by Sarah Shaber
‘Hello,’ I said, stupidly holding out a cup. ‘Would you like some lemonade?’
‘No thank you,’ he said, ‘I favor something a bit stronger.’ He retrieved a highball glass half full of amber liquid from the windowsill.
My hand trembled as I dipped lemonade into my own glass, sloshing it onto the tablecloth. As I wiped at it with a napkin I bumped the table, sending the punchbowl sliding towards Gable. He stopped the slide with one hand, and held tightly to the bowl while I cleaned up the mess.
‘You must be used to rescuing yourself from star-struck fans,’ I said.
Gable gulped from his highball.
‘Oh, I suppose so,’ he said, ‘but it’s a good problem for an actor to have.’ He smiled at me again, more authentically this time. Crinkly laugh lines spread over his face. I felt myself relax.
‘And what is your name?’ he asked.
‘I’m Louise Pearlie. I work for the government.’ I was tired of using the words ‘file clerk’.
‘As do we all, these days,’ Gable said. ‘I’m here to persuade all these rich people –’ waving his glass at the crowds in the ballroom – ‘to buy war bonds instead of giving expensive parties.’
‘Is that why you’re hiding out in this alcove?’ I asked.
‘I admit to being a bit tired of being on display,’ he said. ‘I’d like to contribute more substantially to the war effort. I’m joining the Army Air Corps, but I doubt anyone will let me fly real missions. I’m too old, for one thing. But boot camp and training will keep me busy.’
We both ran out of small talk. Gable contemplated his glass for a few seconds and his shoulders slumped. Then he straightened up and seemed to rouse himself.
‘Must go make the rounds now,’ he said. ‘Duty calls.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
He squared his shoulders and made his entrance into the ballroom, attracting all eyes instantly, and left me remembering that his wife, Carole Lombard, had died a few months ago in a plane crash while touring the country promoting war bonds. I’d read that Gable had to be restrained by rescue crews from trying to reach the crash site himself.
My brief encounter with Mr Gable that night reminded me that no one, no matter how rich, how famous, how insulated from everyday life, was exempt from loss during this horrible war. Phoebe could lose one of her sons any day, as could the Roosevelts and countless others. Gerald, Rachel and little Claude might be loaded onto a filthy cattle car and shipped east to a labor camp next week, and here I was acting the merry widow, jitterbugging and drinking champagne.
I went looking for General Donovan. I scouted every room, cased the veranda, hunted among the dancing couples in the ballroom and even staked out the men’s room.
Just when I was about to give up, I heard the General’s voice. I found the OSS director, a kindly, chubby, pink-faced man, why they called him ‘Wild Bill’ I had no idea, in the billiards room drinking with a group of serious, dark-suited men.
One of the men was Don. That instantly squelched my plan. How naive could I be? Of course General Donovan wouldn’t ever be alone at a party like this, or anywhere else I might run into him, for that matter. I couldn’t possibly have a private conversation with him. My spirits sank, and with them my hopes for helping Rachel. Suddenly I had no patience for this pretentious party, the politicians and refugees jockeying for advantage, and society women weighed down by their jewels. I just wanted to go home and nurse my sick heart.
Don saw me standing in the doorway, and inclined his head toward the door to the ballroom. I nodded, slipped out, and waited for him, listening to ‘The “A” Train’, so mellow and melodic compared to the earthy music at the party next door.
‘Did you see?’ Don said, taking my arm. ‘I was talking to General Donovan. Holding my own, too.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you made a good impression.’ I couldn’t have cared less, actually.
‘I hope so.’ Don glanced at his watch. ‘Are you about ready to leave? I know we haven’t spent much time together this evening, but I want to be in the office early tomorrow. Have you had any dinner?’
‘Oh, I’ve danced, and eaten,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind going now.’
On the drive home I created a wonderful fantasy to put my mind at ease. Rachel and her family had already escaped France and were living happily in Switzerland. I hadn’t received any of her letters yet because of the war. Rachel didn’t need me to help her escape; she was fine, and Claude too. I grasped on to this fictional straw and held on for dear life. What else could I do? I was out of ideas.
We necked for a while in Don’s car outside my boarding house. I was curious how I would feel about, well, you know. What a dud! I felt not a single spark, not one! I got a better tingle from hearing Joe knock on a pipe in the bedroom above me, not to mention the seismic activity I felt during his kiss on the staircase! So much for Don. I couldn’t marry him, no matter how much money he had.
Apparently I wasn’t in the market for a husband, despite my parents’ instructions. What was I in the market for, I wondered. I needed to think about that before I went out Friday night with Joe.
Once inside and upstairs I slipped into Ada’s room.
‘Ada, Ada,’ I said, shaking her awake.
‘What!’ she said. ‘Did you have a good time? Tell me everything!’
‘I met Clark Gable!’
‘You did not!’
‘I did so!’
‘Oh, my God! Did you talk to him?’
‘A little, but not before I almost tipped a punchbowl of lemonade all over him.’
‘What was he like?’
‘A hunk of heartbreak, just like in the movies.’
She jiggled my arm. ‘Tell me more.’
‘Mrs McLean did wear the Hope diamond. But I’ve got to go to sleep. Work tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything else at breakfast.’
Back in my room I hung my new dress, new for me anyway, carefully in my closet and drew my nightdress over my head. I was terribly hot, but I couldn’t run the bath or I’d wake Phoebe. I tiptoed across the hall and soaked a washcloth, lifting my nightdress to sponge myself. After brushing my teeth I slipped back into my bedroom.
Someone had placed the vase of dahlias Don brought me on my dresser. And a letter from my mother. I’d seen it when I’d gotten home from work but had been too busy to read it. I was wide awake, so I sat on my bed cross-legged and slit open the envelope. My mother’s letters didn’t vary much from week to week. The fish camp and marina, church, my brother’s children, how crowded with soldiers Wilmington had gotten. But when I opened the envelope, a rectangle of cardboard fell out.
It was a postcard from Rachel.
She was still in Marseille.
FOURTEEN
My heart filled my chest and my lungs seemed to stop working, like the time I fell out of a pecan tree in the back yard of my home in Wilmington, landed flat on my back and had the breath knocked out of me. After what seemed like many minutes I gasped, drew in air, light-headed with relief to know Rachel was alive, disappointed that she was still in Vichy France.
Headed ‘Marseille, June 3’, the card was postmarked in Lisbon three weeks ago. Rachel must have given it to some lucky friend with an exit visa to mail for her in Portugal.
‘Dearest Louise,’ Rachel wrote, her familiar handwriting cramped into the tiny message space. ‘No time to write a letter. Can you help us get out of Vichy? It’s very bad here now, we can’t get a visa. Love, au revoir, Rachel.’
‘Can you help us?’ I’ve been trying, I telegraphed my thoughts toward France, I’ve been trying.
I turned the postcard over. It was a simple tourist card, with a view of the Château d’If, the island prison off Marseille where Edmond Dantes, the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, languished for so many years. I’d told Rachel that if I ever got to visit her, I wanted to see that famous island first thing. She’d laughed and teased me about being a bookworm.
I
went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. My mind wandered from the McLean party – where I’d ogled the Hope diamond, been seduced by a Frenchman, eaten caviar and drunk champagne, seen two men dancing together, chatted with a colored woman who was better dressed than I and met Clark Gable – to my fears for Rachel and her family. Terrible, awful fears.
Since I’d failed to speak to General Donovan at the party I was at a loss to know what to do for Rachel next. ‘Can you help us?’ she’d written. I felt hopeless and helpless.
Finally I fell asleep. It’s not surprising that a haunting dream disturbed my rest. In the dream I searched a frozen landscape strewn with corpses, inspired I’m sure by the pictures I’d seen in Life magazine. Of course I was looking for the remains of Rachel and Claude, turning over the bodies of every woman and child I saw. There were so many of them. And I wasn’t alone. Phoebe and Eleanor Roosevelt, holding hands and accompanied by Fala, sought their sons. I saw Clark Gable, in an Army Air Corps uniform, carrying a shovel, hunting for his wife’s grave. None of us found what we were looking for, and at last the dream dissolved into a new day.
It was a little after ten o’clock Thursday morning when Barbara snapped. I was longing for my coffee break, since I’d gotten so little sleep the night before. Ruth was loading files onto her file cart. Betty was typing yet another report, single-spaced, with nine sheets of carbon paper squeezed between ten sheets of typing paper.
Barbara rose from her chair, lifted her typewriter and flung it with all her strength across the room. It crashed against a wall and thudded to the floor, loose keys scattering everywhere. Betty held up her arms to fend off the airborne bail, and Ruth flinched. I got up from my seat to go to Barbara, but her expression stopped me.
‘It’s no use,’ she said. With both fists she slammed the two-foot stack of newspapers in her in-box, it teetered, then collapsed, pages slithering along the office floor.
‘There’s nothing we can do here,’ she said. ‘We can’t stop them.’ She gathered up a neat pile of newly typed and alphabetized index cards and flung them in a wide arc about the room.
Ruth spoke first.
‘Dearie,’ she began.
‘What dimwit thought all this could help win the war?’ Barbara interrupted, gesturing around the room. ‘It’s just paper. I wish I were a man. Then at least I could enlist and kill Nazis.’
‘Barbara,’ I said. ‘We are all doing everything . . .’
Cold-eyed, fists clenched, she glared at me. ‘There’s not one American over there yet, and people are dying every day. Every day! When in God’s name are we going to invade Europe?’
Betty tried next. ‘It takes time,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to train soldiers, build airplanes and ships . . .’
‘Do you know what’s on page one of this worthless excuse for a newspaper?’ she said, gathering up the morning edition of the New York Times and shaking it at us. ‘Not starvation, not the refugee crisis, not cold-blooded murder, it’s all about Governor Lehman donating his tennis shoes to the war effort! With everything that’s going on in the world! The Governor’s tennis shoes! And if I have to hear one more time about how Fala sacrificed his chew toys to the scrap-rubber drive I’ll strangle the spoiled little beast with my bare hands!’
I wondered if Barbara was having a nervous breakdown. I’d never witnessed one before, but this appeared to fit the bill. I didn’t know what to do. Should I call the security guard? Don? If I did that, what would happen to Barbara? And her child?
Barbara opened her pocketbook and removed her powder compact and lipstick. She calmly repaired her face. Then she replaced her cosmetics, snapped shut the pocketbook, slung it over her shoulder like a rifle and strode out of the room.
‘Aren’t you going to do something?’ Betty asked me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not. Let’s see if she comes back today. Or tomorrow. I’ll put her down as sick. If she doesn’t show up on Monday, I’ll report it.’
‘By then she might have left town with the baby,’ Ruth said.
We were civilians, but OSS reported to the Joint Chiefs, so we were disciplined like soldiers. Leaving OSS without permission was tantamount to going AWOL.
‘I know, I know.’ I said. ‘I’m still going to wait. For now let’s get this mess cleaned up, before somebody comes in and sees it.’
The three of us stacked and sorted until Barbara’s desk looked normal, like she’d be back from the ladies’ room any minute. I wondered how soon we could replace her if she didn’t return, there was an awful shortage of clerical workers. I didn’t want to think about dividing her work up among the three of us.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I need coffee. Hold the fort for me for fifteen minutes, then I’ll come back and you two can go.’
I joined Roger Austine at a table in the cafeteria. He was alone, so I got right to the point.
‘Roger,’ I said. ‘What’s happening in Vichy?’
‘Good morning to you, too! Why do you want to know?’
‘One of my girls had an attack of nerves after reading the New York Times this morning.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry. Well, the news is bad, of course. I expect by Fall Vichy won’t exist, the Germans’ll occupy it. With all that entails.’
‘What are we doing about it?’
Roger shrugged. ‘We sit on our fannies and research and write newsletters and circulate reports and memos and issue recommendations. What General Donovan and General Marshall and the Big Chief do with all that, they decide, not us.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Dora’s lost her Top Secret clearance.’
I was stunned. ‘You’re joking.’
‘I wish I was. I think Guy had something to do with it, that fascist. Not only that, I think Don, with Guy’s connivance, didn’t protest.’
‘Why? She’s brilliant! Everyone says so!’
‘Dear girl, she’s Red and sleeps with women. So much more important than the quality of her work. Remember, our beloved nation was founded by Puritans, and they still move among us!’
‘She’s not Red.’
Roger shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she did favor a very deep pink. The question is, is she untrustworthy? I don’t think so.’
‘Donovan admires Dora, so maybe he’s trying to protect her.’
Roger raised an eyebrow. ‘You thought of that, too? If she doesn’t have access to secrets, she can’t be suspected of passing them. At any rate, she was quite calm about it. Packed up her books and notes and toted it all over to the Library of Congress. She commandeered a table in the reading room and got right back to work.’
‘Her Catholic University students are working there already.’ I tried to picture Dora spending every day with a couple of seminarians. Would they be wearing monks’ robes? Or black cassocks? I stifled a giggle brought on by nerves as much as amusement.
One thing you had to credit to the Nazis, they’d united a lot of very different sorts of people in opposition to them. I wondered if that camaraderie would last after the war.
Roger left and Joan joined me. She looked stricken.
‘You heard about Dora?’ she asked.
I said I had. ‘Roger implied that Guy might have had something to do with it.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’ She stirred her coffee compulsively. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘looking around, I wonder how that lost file of yours figures into all this.’
I felt my heart rate pick up speed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘General Donovan asked me today if the file had been found. Very unusual for him. He’s too busy to worry about such things. It wasn’t but ten minutes later that I heard Dora had lost her clearance.’
‘It could be a coincidence. If you think about it, it’s not surprising she lost her clearance,’ and I stopped without finishing my sentence, wondering if I should.
‘Why?’
‘She’s not m
ost people’s idea of a regular American.’
Alone in the office for the few minutes that Ruth and Betty were at their coffee break, I laid my head on my desk and permitted myself to feel overwhelmed; by Barbara’s despair, by Dora’s demotion, by my ambiguous feelings for Joe, and my fears with Rachel’s safety.
I alone knew that Bloch’s file had been stolen, not lost. Someone had taken advantage of Holman’s death to swipe that file and to steal Bloch’s index card, wiping him off OSS radar. Why? And who? A mole, or a sleeper, here at OSS, who wanted to neutralize Gerald Bloch’s usefulness to the Allies? I didn’t much care about Gerald, truthfully, I just wanted Rachel and Claude to escape France, find safety somewhere until the war was over.
What more could I do? Without documents to forward to the OSS Projects Committee there was no hope that any attempt would be made to rescue the Bloch family.
Receiving Rachel’s postcard had reconnected us after years of silence, in a cascade of emotion that reminded me of our friendship so poignantly, and made me more determined than ever to help her if I could.
In a single flash of inspiration, it came to me, the entire preposterous scheme. This city was one gigantic file cabinet. If we had a file on Gerald Bloch because he was a prominent hydrographer who might be useful to the Allies, some other government office might have one too.
I would reconstruct the Bloch file from paperwork I located elsewhere, pretend I had found the missing file and present it to Don to forward to General Donovan and the Projects Committee.
I was congratulating myself on the genius of my plan when Don appeared at my door.
‘Hi there,’ he said, smiling at me.
‘Hi.’
He sat on a corner of my desk.
‘I had a very nice time last night,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. I was in a tough position here. This man was my boss. I wished to be polite, but not encouraging. I couldn’t directly say I didn’t want to date him again.
‘I was wondering if you were busy on the Fourth?’ he asked. ‘I thought we could go sailing on the river, take a picnic.’