by Susan Isaacs
The American flag behind John’s desk, with its thick pole topped by a gold eagle, the long view of the Capitol dome from his window, and his executive secretary, who was fluent in French as well as German, showed just how far John had come. Okay, the office was only slightly larger than an orange crate, but it had a carpet. And while his secretary was a strange, bent-over woman with coarse, shoulder-length brown hair, who resembled a grizzly bear, she did have a Phi Beta Kappa key from Barnard College.
“Edith,” John said to her, “this is my wife…” He paused for a fraction of a second. Normally, as wife, I’d be introduced to a secretary as “Mrs. Berringer.” But since Edward had flown off for three weeks of mysterious meetings in secret places, I’d been sent over to work for John. “…Linda Berringer,” John said, leaving it up to Edith what to call me.
“I am pleased to meet you, Mrs. Berringer.” Actually, she said “Frau Berringer.” John was going to spend the morning interviewing refugees from Germany, and we were warming up our German.
The refugees were key pieces of the puzzle Edward’s unit was trying to put together. The more information we had—on everything from changes in train schedules to the extent of the flour shortage in eastern Germany—the better we were able to get a picture of how their war effort was going and, just as important, to check if our sources were giving us accurate accounts.
“I’m glad to meet you, Edith. And please, call me Linda.” Her small, too-wide-spaced eyes fluttered a little when she heard my accent. She spoke the same educated hoch Deutsch John did.
“Edith,” John said, “would you be good enough to take down the preliminary background information for Herr Doktor Schwerin? Also, you might want to offer him some coffee.” Edith nodded, did an about-face and walked out the door, to the anteroom where John’s visitors waited. Walked is maybe too normal a word for what Edith did. Her legs were heavy, short and strangely far apart, so her progress was more like an animal’s lope. If she’d growled or scratched the scalp under her thick hair instead of saying “Yes, Mr. Berringer,” it wouldn’t have seemed out of character.
“Poor girl,” I said, after she shut the door. “To look like that. I wonder if she’s ever had a boyfriend. I mean, do you think some guy can see beyond her homeliness?” John shrugged. Edith’s love life was obviously not an item on his agenda. “Is she a nice person?”
“I don’t know. She’s all right, I suppose.”
“Is she madly in love with you, John?”
He let himself go enough to smile for a moment. “Probably.” He was behind his battleship of a desk; it took up three quarters of the room. I left the straight-backed chair I’d been in and went to sit on the edge of his desk. He motioned me to come over further and pulled me onto his lap. I rested my head against his shoulder. He massaged the back of my neck, then slid his hand down the back of my blouse and stroked my skin. “Edward’s let you sit in on all his meetings with Schwerin?” he asked.
“Yes, he needs me there. Schwerin doesn’t speak a word of English. What could he do? Play charades? Can you see Edward pantomiming ‘panzer divisions’?”
“Your hair smells nice. I wish you’d wear it loose.”
“It doesn’t look right at work.”
“I guess not.” John kissed me.
The more Edward trusted me, the more attentive—and affectionate—John became. “Schwerin’s not one of these refugees you should get all teary-eyed about,” I murmured into the woolly lapel of his navy chalk-stripe suit. “He’s a two-bit Berlin lawyer who happened to be at the right place at the right time—and did the wrong thing. He got involved in some sleazy black market stuff—selling silk that was going to be used for parachutes to a company that made ladies’ panties. He’s lucky he got out.”
John’s deep-blue eyes blazed at me with such intensity they seemed to be lit from within; he was madly, passionately in love with my inside information. At first, John could barely believe that I was allowed to sit in while Edward made phone calls to Donovan. Or that, riding around in the Packard, Edward would analyze the differences between the French and Dutch resistance movements—or tell me about the love affair between Wendell Willkie and the book review editor of the New York Herald Tribune. John had gaped when I told him: The Democrats got hold of some of Willkie’s letters to her! “Dolly notes,” they were calling them, and they were actually going to release them, except the Republicans found out that Wallace, FDR’s running mate, was tied in with some weird Russian mystic and had written some crazy religious-nut letters. John had asked, “He tells you all this? Or do you overhear it? He tells me, I’d answered. You know, when we’re driving around, or sometimes when it’s slow, like when we’re waiting around for a transatlantic call.
For a while, John couldn’t accept that Edward actually talked to me. I think he tried to come up with excuses for these lapses: Maybe Edward was thinking out loud, or perhaps he was tired. But finally John’s awe won out; Edward was so perfect, so sound in his judgment, that if he talked to me, I was—for whatever reason—obviously worth talking to.
What I never told John about were what I called the private talks. About a week after Edward told me of his concern over the COI boys in three-piece suits playing Cowboys and Indians, we’d slowly drifted into conversations I knew we never could have had with anyone else. In my case, the need for someone to talk to was obvious; no one, least of all my husband, showed any inclination to listen to all the things I wanted to say. And in Edward’s case, I guessed it was that he had a lot on his mind—too much—and needed more than an ear; he had to have a mouth that would stay shut.
So what began on that dirt road in Virginia kept going. The next talk had taken place about nine o’clock one night in the middle of December. Edward, not looking up from a letter he was proofreading, told me he was going to have a late dinner and a brandy with Donovan in an hour; Pete would drive me home. I said fine. But a minute later, as I was collecting his day’s mess of paper clips, which were scattered all over his desk and on the floor around his chair, I suddenly squeezed all the paper clips tight in my hand. Their metal edges made painful little pinholes in my palm; my mouth went dry. But I stood up from the rug and asked him, Why do you think all the wives in the law firm hate me so much?
Scared as I was, I somehow knew that he wouldn’t think I was going too far in asking that question, or that I was a jerk for thinking such thoughts. And I was right. He got out of his chair, went over to the antique cabinet where he kept a couple of bottles of liquor for visitors (and a bottle of schnapps for hysterical refugees), took out two glasses and inquired: Scotch all right for you?
Yes, I said, and he poured me enough to anesthetize a patient for a twelve-hour operation. He poured himself a lot less.
They don’t hate you, he told me.
Well, they give a pretty good imitation of it, I replied.
It’s that you’re not one of them. Then he said, Sit, and pointed to the wing chair where he usually sat when he talked to other lawyers. He sat on the couch, put his drink down on the coffee table and leaned toward me. Linda, they’ve created a nice, neat little world for themselves, where everyone speaks the same language, knows their place, where wives are wives and secretaries are—
Less than human.
I thought he’d disagree, but all he said was, Well, perhaps not quite as high on the evolutionary scale.
But why are they so rotten to me? You know what they do every single time? They say, “Oh, hello-o-o, Linda, dear,” and then ignore me for the rest of whatever dinner party we’re at, and let me tell you, lawyers have too many damn dinner parties. If they’re so classy, why aren’t they nice to me? You know, like they are to their cooks? “Dear old Martha. She’s one of the family.”
Are you going to drink that Scotch or look at it? he demanded. I took a sip. All right, he went on, the reason they can afford to be nice to dear old Martha is that she probably is old and rather plain, and even if she’s not, she doesn’t marry an attorney an
d want to join them for lunch and matinees.
I never wanted that!
I’m talking in generalities, Linda.
Maybe talk in specifics. I didn’t go to Radcliffe.
Specifically, you frighten them. You lured one of the most eligible lawyers in Manhattan—
Oh, stop it! They all know what kind of a lure it was, and I’ll bet anything they spent weeks gossiping about how noble he was to marry me. And I’ll bet you double they all knew I had a miscarriage and he wound up stuck with me.
He said quietly, You’re very hard on yourself.
I said, You know how everyone admires you, calls you tough-minded, a realist? He nodded. Okay, I’m a realist too. I understand my own situation.
He took a long drink. Do you want to know why they don’t like you? Let me be direct. You have blond hair, a nice figure—and a bit of a Brooklyn accent.
Queens, I whispered.
You attract their men. You are precisely what they fear when their husbands call and say, “I’m working late tonight, dear.” And there’s more. Shall I go on?
Yes.
You’re intelligent and you’ve got, well, let’s call it guts. Deep down, they recognize you’re as good as they are. This nice, pleasant world they’ve created is really a rather fragile one, dependent on the illusion of their superiority. And, Linda, you walked into the Avenels’ living room that night and, very simply, they sensed their world starting to crack a little around the edges. So they did what they had to do to save themselves—and their illusions. They forced you to remain outside.
I must have drunk too much; all of a sudden I wanted to laugh. I asked, Will they ever accept me? Like in thirty-five years?
Edward’s deep voice had been so soft I could hardly hear him: How hard are you willing to try to emulate them? Are you willing to bend? Break? How much do you want to become what they are?
I don’t.
Then, Linda, when this war is over, and if we are all still here, free, alive…
Then what?
Then you’ll live happily ever after with your husband and, I’m certain, your children…except for a series of obligatory dinner parties where you’ll be ogled by doddering attorneys and snubbed by their wives. Does that answer your question?
So there I sat in my husband’s lap, cradled in his arms—somewhat happily, although not in Cinderella post-glass-slipper ecstasy. Maybe it was because I’d learned that John was not affectionate by nature. Sex, sure. But as for cuddling, only for cause, as the lawyers say. What he wanted from me, at that moment as he kissed my forehead, was the inside scoop on the low-life Berlin lawyer Herr Doktor Schwerin.
John, of course, was no male Mata Hari, seducing state secrets out of me. He had as much right to know what I knew as I did. Of course, he was too much the gentleman to ask directly. But I’d discovered he liked to hear what was going on so he could test his theories, his conclusions: to see if they jibed with Edward’s. “This Schwerin’s not important for himself,” John observed.
“No. Just for being able to corroborate Sunflower’s information.”
Sunflower was Edward’s best source inside Germany. He was head of one of the country’s biggest mining firms, a brilliant financial planner, a manager, and a man who, right from the beginning, had hated Hitler and all he stood for. He was one of the German industrialists who were great believers in boosting their economy through amerikanisches Geschäft, doing business with America, and he’d gotten to know Edward in the late 1920s. By 1933, when the Nazis came to power, he had started keeping Edward informed about the ties between business and Hitler’s government.
Once the Germans went on the march across Europe, the relationship between these two men became less casual. They would meet every few months in Paris and, after Paris fell, in Switzerland. Through his family, Sunflower had ties to upper levels of the military. Through his business, he spoke with other industrialists. And finally, the treasurer of his company was a fanatical Nazi—and a boastful one. The man was proud of his stature in the Party, and he’d brag about his coffees with Himmler, his dinners with Göring and, most of all, his frequent lunches with his old school pal Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Silesia. Hanke was a powerful man in the Third Reich—a friend of Mrs. Goebbels, who was the patron of Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect. And because Sunflower was so charming, so interested, his treasurer gave him elaborate reports on the smallest details of Nazi high society. And these details eventually found their way back to Edward.
Sunflower’s only liability was his honesty. He was discreet in his office, but for years, among friends, he’d made no bones about how much he hated the Nazis, about how they were duping not only the German man in the street but the upper classes, and how they would bring the country to ruin. Because he was so successful—and wellborn—most people ignored Sunflower’s rumblings, or passed him off as an eccentric, foolish for speaking his mind, but harmless. Edward, though, was always afraid that someday, someone in government would catch on to Sunflower; at worst they would kill him, and at best, feed him false information to pass on.
“So far,” John asked, “Edward seems satisfied? Schwerin’s information dovetails with Sunflower’s?”
“Yes,” I said. “So far.”
“Did Edward say anything else?”
“No, nothing else.”
Not about Schwerin. Actually, he told me a lot else. And there were some things he didn’t have to tell me. One was that he’d chosen John to run the counterespionage show in Germany and France not only because of John’s proven ability but—since there were two other trilingual geniuses who could have fit the bill—to keep him out of Norman Weekes’s clutches, and also to prove to Norman how well he could defend his own territory.
And without Edward’s saying so, I knew this latest trip of his would somehow get extended, and that sooner or later I’d get a static-filled telephone call, and he’d say, Bad connection, and I’d know he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, in Philadelphia or San Diego, but at an air base in the south of England, or an island off the coast of northern Africa. He’d say, Take down these messages for Matthew (Donovan’s code name): Mr. Cannon has two dogs. And: The rose garden is in full bloom, especially the yellows. Repeat that, Linda. I would, and then I’d say, How’s the weather in San Diego, Ed? and he’d say, as the phone made loud, crackle-of-lightning noises, Very pleasant, thanks.
It’s funny; whenever you read articles about diplomatic negotiations, you keep coming across the phrase “tacit agreement.” Without saying a word, there’s an understanding. And that’s what Edward and I seemed to have—an unspoken understanding that some of the things we talked about were never to be talked about again: not to outsiders and not to each other. Talk about tacit: I don’t know how I knew what subjects came under our agreement, because neither of us ever said, Please don’t repeat this. Some discussions just seemed to have an invisible asterisk next to them.
Like the time, about eight-thirty one night, right before he went off on his trip, when I brought in a transcript of an interview he’d had that afternoon with a banker from Zurich who had sources—high sources—inside Germany. The banker, one of the fifty million people who had done business with Edward over the years and become his friend, had given him an earful: Hitler’s whole Russian strategy was based on seizing the Soviet oil fields. He’d failed, and so had his whole Russian dream. The Germans, the banker reported, didn’t have fuel enough to attempt to occupy Moscow. The only major German offensive would be on the southern front.
I walked across toward Edward’s desk, still reading the transcript and going Wow! to myself. This was golden information—information that, incidentally, should have been unearthed by Norman’s unit, so in Edward’s eyes would be doubly golden. When I reached his desk I looked up, expecting him to have his hand out, ready to receive it. Instead, he seemed to be staring down at his desk blotter, in another world.
I wasn’t going to do anything like say “Ahem,” because
he was so clearly taken up with that world that a rustle of paper or even a throat-clearing could set him off on one of his mean-rotten-icy binges. So I just stood there, sensing that even tiptoeing out the door would not be a plus.
But then I followed his eyes and saw that he hadn’t been diving into the depths of his blotter. He’d been staring at the silver-framed picture of his wife.
He lifted up the picture and asked, Have you ever noticed this?
Yes.
But he handed it to me as though I’d said no. I put down the transcript and took the picture. She was young, as young as Nan or younger, so they looked like sisters. But pretty as Nan was, Edward’s wife had been prettier. Her features weren’t quite as fine, but they were sweeter. Her eyes had a slight Oriental slant to them, although they were very light, probably that blue-green shade that’s so pale it’s almost white; they were the sort of eyes you couldn’t look away from.
I met her after the war, he said. The last war. I’d spent eight months in a hospital in England, having my face and my shoulder put back together.
I knew I couldn’t just stand there like a totem pole, holding the photograph, so I sat down.
Her father was the judge I’d clerked for right after law school. When I came to New York, Judge Bell and his wife asked me to dinner. We were in the parlor, and Caroline walked in.
He paused, so I asked, Did you fall in love with her right away?
I think so. I’m not an expert in the fine gradations between infatuation and love at first sight, but I remember thinking: This is absurd. I’m thirty-one years old. I know a great deal about the world, perhaps more than I ever wanted to. And here I am, a man who earns his living by being, well, articulate. Calculating. Rational. And I was struck dumb by a seventeen-year-old girl. She wore a black velvet ribbon around her neck.
What was she like? I asked.
High-spirited. Good-natured. Edward smiled to himself. This was 1918, he said, and she appeared a very proper young lady, and she was proper, but…she had a great sense of fun. And enormous energy and determination. I got her permission to ask her father for her hand—we did that sort of thing in those days—and her parents were quite taken aback. Not that they didn’t like me, but I came from a rather undistinguished background and I’d only known Caroline a week and a half when I proposed.