Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  “Mom,” I said, trying to sound calm, “you’re not allowed to drink anymore. You know that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it ain’t good for you,” Cookie blurted out. “You know that, Missus.”

  My mother stopped, so abruptly that Cookie banged into us. “And you know and you know,” she blared out to me and Cookie, “that I got six months, a year, tops. You don’t think I listened in when Dr. Creep came over?”

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think how to answer her. Then I started to cry.

  “Come on, Linny, your mascara’ll run in front of Johnny, and you look so pretty.” I tried to absorb my mother’s calm, collected knowledge of her doom. I peered into her eyes—outlined with seven or eight times the amount of mascara I had on, coated with pistachio-green eye shadow—when she leaned toward John. It was a jerky movement, and he had to catch her so she wouldn’t fall. “You’ll take good care of my little girl?” she asked, still in his arms. “Promise?”

  I think he was touched. At least his voice had a catch in it. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I promise,” and stood her upright. Somehow, we got her to the restaurant.

  “Wow!” she said, looking at the wood-paneled walls and the eight-arm brass chandeliers. “Johnny, you sure can pick ’em!” She picked up a water glass and clinked her nails against it. “Nice stuff.” Then she smiled at John. “Well, cocktail time!” It was two-thirty. “Come on. A big-money lawyer like you can afford a little gin. Order me a double, okay?” I made no move to stop him—I was too numb. How could my mother bear knowing? But I was also a little numb anticipating what her next move could be, once she’d had her double: making a pass at John; telling a few Jew jokes while winking at me broadly.

  John called over the waiter, ordered us drinks and slipped away to the men’s room. It could have been in Cleveland if you judged by how fast he took off. “Oops,” my mother said, as soon as he was out of earshot. “Sorry about the rich business, Linda, lamb.”

  “That’s okay, Mom.”

  “I know I got a big mouth.” I didn’t give her an argument. “But listen, while he’s gone…” I could see her trying to come up with her version of maternal wisdom. And she did. “He’s built like a dream! And he talks so cultured, Lin. He’s really smart. You know, smart-smart. And so-o-o good-looking you could die.” Suddenly, her chirpy, life’s-a-party tone fizzled out. She touched my chin with her fingertips. “Baby, watch out for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Deep down, he’s a rat.”

  It took me a minute to find the words. “What makes you think that?”

  “Oh, Lin, I know guys. He’s not good, like your father. And I can see it in your eyes, how he feels about you. Don’t tell me no.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Oh, Linda, I wish you could’ve found someone to love you.”

  15

  North Africa, the Balkans, East Africa, Crete, Iraq, Yugoslavia. The black cloud grew bigger, more poisonous, but I remember waking from an afternoon nap in May 1941—a few months after we moved to Washington—and, still in bed, looking through the sheer curtains at the red geraniums in the window box and thinking: My life is nice. Okay, almost.

  At first, the best part of moving to Washington was putting all the New York furniture in storage; the sight of the movers carting off Nan’s couch was—up to that point—the greatest moment of my marriage. The next-best part was renting a pretty furnished house in a neighborhood not far from Washington Cathedral. John insisted the area was exclusive, but in spite of that, it felt comfortable to me; our block could have been plunked down in half a dozen spots in Brooklyn. The big difference was the rent (high) and the tranquillity (total). The streets were absolutely silent. No one in Washington hung out their windows and waved or whistled hello when you walked down the street on your way to the fruit man’s or the candy store—if there’d been a candy store, which there wasn’t. People sat back on their private porches, not on their it’s-okay-to-be-nosy stoops.

  Maybe they’d decided life in Washington was too predictable to bother. What was there to look at? The men worked for the government and looked like lawyers, even if they weren’t. The wives all seemed to have been born in Alabama. They said “Ha” instead of “Hi,” and they never sat down unless they were sewing something. They needle-pointed pictures and piano bench covers and eyeglass cases: they repaired their mama’s old lace tablecloths; they made quilts for their beds and everybody else’s beds; they took endless hems up and down.

  “Ha, Linna,” my across-the-street neighbor Lucy MacPharland said. She stood at my door with her sewing bag and a chocolate cake. At the beginning, I thought the cakes were welcome-to-the-block gifts, and they were, but later I realized that while it was okay to drop in unannounced, you never knocked on any door without at least a pound of baked goods.

  “Hi,” I said. “Come in.”

  “Sure you’re not busy?” she asked, as she pushed past me and walked down the hall into the kitchen. She set her cake on the table, where there already was a pecan pie. “Katie-Lou was here?” The evidence was undeniable; Katie-Lou Wilcox edged her pie crust in overlapping scallops.

  “This morning,” I said. I opened a drawer, got out the roll of waxed paper, and covered the evidence of Katie-Lou’s visit. I put it in the refrigerator, next to Bessie Campbell’s sticky buns.

  Lucy elbowed me aside and snatched the percolator out of the dish drainer. “Well, now,” she said, and then murmured, “three, four,” as she measured coffee. “Tell me every little thing that’s occurred since I”—they all actually said “Ah” instead of “I”—“last saw you.”

  “Let’s see. What’s happened since yesterday?” I murmured. “Oh! I know! Cora Sue Young left”—I paused dramatically—“for a visit to her mother.”

  “No! She said she was visitin’ her mama?”

  “Rita Harwood saw her leave the house with a suitcase and get into a car.”

  “Mah word, Linna!” She wasn’t just whistling “Dixie.”

  What all the fuss meant was that one of our neighbors, whose husband was third man at the Argentinian desk at the State Department, had discovered a driving school instructor who had no interest in Argentina but a lot of interest in her. His parked Ford had caused comment long before Cora Sue confided in yet another neighbor, Rebecca Jean, that she was having an affair and was making plans to spend a weekend with her instructor—and not to practice shifting to second, either. She was using a visit to her mother in Opelika as an excuse, knowing (she disclosed to big-mouth Becky) that her husband was too involved in South American trade routes to even think about her, much less check up.

  What all the fuss meant to me, personally, was that finally I was one of the girls. I was included. On the five blocks that made up Rosedale Avenue, the only person who cared that I hadn’t gone to Mount Holyoke College, didn’t play tennis and couldn’t whistle Das Lied van der Erde by Gustav Mahler was my own husband.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a social plus to be a Yankee. And I couldn’t thread a needle. But I was a whiz in the kitchen; I could bake a cherry pie with the best of them, to say nothing of Apfelkuchen and Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, and after all those years of lunches at the law firm, I could gossip like a champion.

  The fact that I was a cultural minus didn’t matter at all, since hardly any of the neighborhood wives had gone to college—and those who had didn’t bring it up all the time, the way they did in New York. And while a lot of them seemed to come from wealthy families—Mama missed goin’ to Paris in the spring for her clothes, what with the war on, and Daddah was always callin’ on his brokah—my neighbors didn’t act Wall Street Lawyers’ Wives rich: clannish, heartless, indifferent to any hurt their coldness might cause anyone (me).

  Strangely enough, for a person from Queens, I looked like my neighbors. I blended in with a group of pretty women who worked much harder at being pretty than I did; if we’d kept silent, you wouldn’t have known I didn
’t come from where they had.

  In Washington, I didn’t feel wrong. In New York, all the other wives seemed to buy their shoes in a top-secret store; they put on their private-color-you’ll-never-be-able-to-find-it lipstick in exactly the same way, as if they had a classified blueprint for thin lips in a drawer in their vanity table. In Washington, no one gave me a mean once-over; when Lucy, whose husband was an economist in the Treasury Department, said, “Ah adore that blouse, Linna,” she wasn’t being snide. It was the sort of blouse she’d buy, or Mama would run up on her Singer and send up from Tuscaloosa.

  After three months, there wasn’t any one of these women who I would have sworn would be my friend for life; it was still a little hard to distinguish them. Sure, I knew Lucy was vivacious and had a low, loud voice, and Katie-Lou was dreamy and always crocheting doilies, but I couldn’t get far enough past the southern accents and hospitality to see which of them—if any—I really cared about.

  But if they didn’t matter so much individually, they mattered a lot as a group, because they were the only people in my life. I hardly ever saw John, although I often felt him, when at two or three in the morning he’d wake me, slipping underneath the cover, and come up beside me or on top of me. Unlike Bessie’s husband, a colonel assigned to the War Department, John was not “limp as an ol’ dishrag, an’ I do mean limp” after his eighteen-hour day. John’s interest in me thrived in darkness. In those late nights, he wasn’t just hot; sometimes he was tender, stroking my hair, curling around me and cradling me in his arms as he fell asleep.

  The only fly in this warm, loving ointment was my tendency to—now and then—open my mouth and say things like “How are you?” That blew it for him. “Fine,” he’d answer, and get busy making the perfectly puffed pillow. “A little tired.” And I’d say, “Well, you have a right to be,” and he’d say, “Hmm-hmmm,” in agreement as he’d shift away from me, just enough so we were no longer touching, and fall off to sleep.

  One night, though, there was no chance for me to work up to being anonymous. John came home about eleven. I was in bed but still wide awake. It was an awful early-June night, hot and unbearably humid. The air was so thick it almost hurt to breathe. I’d thrown aside the thin patchwork blanket, but was half covered with the already read Washington Times Herald and New York Times. I held Time magazine against my chest and said, “You’re so early! What did they do? Throw you out?”

  John’s white shirt clung to him and was sheer with his perspiration. “No. I just had to get out of there. The place is a hellhole.”

  The COI’s main offices were bad enough, but John and a French professor from Yale shared what sounded like a room not much larger than a stall in a men’s room, in a mysterious subbasement in the State Department.

  I got out of bed, cleared up my reading matter and said, “I’ll make you some lemonade.” I was juicing the lemons when he came into the kitchen and practically flopped into a chair. He’d taken off his shirt and pants, but looked too drained from the heat to do anything about his underwear, which was drenched. “Are you sure you’re okay, John?”

  “I’m fine.” He watched as I added water and sugar and slammed the ice cube tray around to get the ice unstuck. “I appreciate this,” he said, and took the glass and held it against his forehead before he guzzled it down.

  “Not so fast,” I said in German. “If you drink something cold too fast it will give you a headache.” I switched back to English. “That’s what my grandma used to tell me. That and”—I spoke German again—” ‘Potato soup is good for a chest cold’ and ‘If you sing at the table you’ll get a crazy husband.’”

  “Did you sing at the table?” he asked in his impeccable German.

  “Probably. Before I knew what could come of it.”

  We always spoke English, so when he reached out, pulled me onto his lap and kissed the tip of my nose, I assumed it was the change in language that had loosened some screw and was making him so…I couldn’t think of any word except affectionate. “I want some more lemonade,” he said, “but I don’t want to let go of you. How do we arrange that?”

  “I’ll come right back.”

  I made another glass of lemonade, and as I handed it to him, he pulled me back into his lap. “Can you stand being so close to me?” he asked. “I must smell like something that’s just come out of a jungle.” That took me a second to figure out, because I’d never heard or seen the word before: Dschungel.

  “Some wild jungle beast,” I said, but then I sat back and eyed him closely. “No, some exhausted, pathetic, half-dead animal.” I took a paper napkin out of the holder and wiped his face.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” I eased off his lap. Unfortunately, he didn’t try to stop me. I guessed that was it for affection, so I shifted back to English. “Why don’t I run you a cool bath?”

  “That would be nice,” he said.

  I walked up the stairs, one of my favorite places in the house. A steep, old-fashioned staircase, it had a carpet runner of dark green, with big roses that were even darker green, almost black.

  Everything in the house was unstylish and very old, but it didn’t look down-at-the-heels. Thirty-eight Rosedale Avenue had an all-American classy shabbiness that said: I was furnished with quality materials in 1903, and I expect they will last for quite some time.

  In the bathroom, the tiles were small black and white squares; some of them were cracked, but they gave the floor character. The big tub had claw feet, and its thick porcelain was chipped. I put in the plug and turned on the water, sitting on the edge of the tub, occasionally holding my fingers under the flow to make sure it wasn’t too hot or too icy.

  John came in, dropped his underwear and socks, and eased into the water with a soft “Aaah.”

  “Is that what they call a sigh of relief?” I asked. He smiled. I closed the lid of the toilet, sat down and watched him. He threw back his head, scooped up some water and poured it on his neck. It was the best sight in town—much more beautiful than the Washington Monument. “Do you want me to wash your back? Like those Japanese women.”

  “Geishas. No, thanks. Um, Linda…”

  “What?”

  “Ed Leland’s back in Washington.”

  “I know. I read about him. He was at the White House last week, the night Roosevelt made the national emergency proclamation.” The Germans had been sinking British boats much faster than the British—or we—could replace them, and FDR had issued a statement saying we had to strengthen our defenses “to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.” What he was saying was: This is our next step toward war. I handed John a washcloth. “The paper said everybody was pretty tense after Roosevelt spoke, so they had music. ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ Irving Berlin was there. And Donovan.” I paused. “Have you ever seen Ed Leland tense?”

  John put the washcloth over his face. “No.”

  “Intense,” I said. “That’s what he is. Anyway, how is he? Has he been up to anything you’re allowed to talk about?” I reached over and pulled away the washcloth.

  “We went for a walk this afternoon,” John said.

  “A walk? It was ninety-seven degrees.”

  “I know, and it was a long walk.”

  He lowered his entire head into the water. When he brought it up, his hair dribbled water down onto his shoulders. He gazed, seemingly fascinated, at a little stream running down his arm. “Are you going to play Watch the Water? Or do you want to tell me about what Ed wants?”

  “Why do you think he wants something?”

  “Come on, John. What does he want?”

  “He wants you,” John said, very, very seriously.

  “As what? A human sacrifice?”

  “Be serious.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask why he wants you?” he said at last.

  “I know why he wants me.”

  John looked annoyed. “Why?”

  “He needs a bil
ingual secretary who can get top-secret clearance, and he probably needs one fast. Hey, don’t look so disappointed I guessed.”

  “I’m not.” His chin had sunk down almost to his knees. But then it perked up. “Well, what’s your inclination?” he asked.

  I remembered being pulled into his lap downstairs, about how it felt to receive his affection, even though I now understood the reason for it. “What’s yours?”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would take some pressure off Ed.” And make him indebted to John: Say, old boy, thanks for your wife. “And I know I’m no prize, working these hours. It would give you a chance to get out a little more.” Into a ninety-eight-degree sub-subbasement in the Interior Department, or an elevator shaft in the Bureau of Mines. “Do something for your country.”

  “Oh, come off it!”

  “Don’t be so touchy.”

  “I’m not touchy.”

  “Come in the bathtub with me.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me so I’ll do anything you want?”

  “Is seduction necessary?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll do anything you want.” And then I took off my nightgown and climbed in.

  Two days later, at two-fifty in the afternoon, I stood inside the lobby of an office building on Massachusetts Avenue in one-hundred-and-two-degree heat, waiting for five minutes to pass so I could get in the elevator and arrive at Edward Leland’s office precisely at three. The hundred and two degrees was the outside temperature, but there was nothing—not the smallest stirring of air—in that marble box of a lobby to convince me that inside was any cooler than the streets I’d just survived.

  Still, the marble was so white it looked like the walls in some delicious, frosty waiting room just outside heaven. I leaned against it, but all I got was an icy jolt. I pulled away. My whole body felt disgusting: My skin was gummy and my slip clung to it like a revolting phantom in a horror movie.

  I was watching my watch, trying to hypnotize it into moving faster so I could get upstairs, where I imagined Edward Leland sitting in an office with two fans: a small one he’d managed to requisition from the government and a huge one he’d gone out and bought himself. And suddenly there he was: Edward Leland.