by Susan Isaacs
A week and a half? I repeated.
Well, I knew it was right. And so did she. But for all my persuasive abilities, it was she who convinced her parents to let us get married right away. She was very strong-willed.
She must have been very smart, I said.
He turned his inkwell around and around, as if he was thinking of his wife’s intelligence for the first time and needed to concentrate. Finally he said, I honestly don’t know how smart she was. Most of the time, we’d just talk about everyday things. Who I spoke to in the office. What I ate for lunch. Did I like potted palms…
That second, if Edward had been almost any other man in the world, he would not have had the self-control to keep his eyes from welling up; the potted palms had obviously reminded him of something terribly tender he hadn’t thought about for years.
But he just went on. If she wasn’t a great thinker, he said, at least she was bright enough, and lively. And very, very kind. He looked straight at me. She died three years later. Cancer of the liver.
That stinks, I said.
Yes, it does.
Do you think about her a lot?
Not so much anymore. But at first, all the time. Do you know the strange part? I think back to Caroline now and I really can’t remember…the texture of our life together. What I have are very clear memories of certain events, the moments I recalled over and over right after she died. But after a while, the memories themselves—a hike we took in the Adirondacks, the night Nan was born, a pink hat with a plume she bought for Easter and I’d laughed at—the specific memories became the reality. That’s when I knew that I’d truly lost her.
I said softly, I guess in a way you mourned her twice.
Yes. First her death and then…her spirit. I can say: Caroline was lively. But I say it more than feel it. I hate…Edward’s voice got very quiet. I hate it.
You never found anyone else?
Caroline made me happy. That much I do recall—vividly. And no one else ever did.
I worked for John from January 1942, when Edward left, until April, when he came back to Washington. He might have stayed away longer, in “San Francisco,” as the cables said but that I knew was London, or at a so-called army base, Camp Brady. The wires would read: “Farmer [that was Edward’s code name] and Matthew in San Francisco Stop Farmer on to Camp Brady to check tractors Stop.”
I went ice cold the day I read that wire, because what it really said was that Edward had gone into German-occupied Poland. No one, not John or any of the other men who worked for Edward, knew the entire code, so for all they knew, Camp Brady could have been some dirty, sweltering army facility in Mississippi or a swank officers’ club in Los Angeles.
Of course, they sensed he was somewhere important. Dangerous. But all those lawyers and corporation men and Yale professors had modeled themselves on Edward. They were little Lelands, not only courageous but casual, so they didn’t go cold with fear. They murmured, Wonder when Ed’ll be back, or, Funny, you’d think Ed would’ve sent a postcard from Camp Brady: “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” Chuckle, chuckle. A couple of million Nazis couldn’t scare the little Lelands.
I remember coming home very late one night in March with John, both of us taking tiny, cautious steps up the iced-over front stairs of our house. It was old snow, with specks of coal soot frozen solid since February, when René Villiard of the Free French had come to Washington, and John was so busy meeting with him (and I was so busy typing up transcripts of his meeting the day before with German refugees) that we didn’t get home before midnight. But almost every day had been like that. By the weekend, by the time we bought a shovel, the ice was rock hard, too hard to make a dent in, and so it stayed.
John and I zigzagged our way up the steps, finding small patches of stair safely unfrozen. We skidded across the small wood porch with its snowed-on glider. As I opened my change purse to get to my key, John asked, “Do you know where Camp Brady is?”
“You mean where Edward is? Yes.”
“I just wondered if you knew. Don’t tell me.”
I opened the front door, and a blast of dry, overheated air hit me. “Why can’t I tell you?” I asked as I switched on the light and walked into the house.
He followed me, closed the door behind us and said, “Shhh!”
“What do you think, some Nazi secret agent has been hiding under the bed all winter, waiting to hear me whisper classified secrets to you?”
I opened the closet and reached for a hanger. John leaned against the wall, and in a voice too casual to be his, said, “Really, Linda, it’s of absolutely no consequence. If Ed wanted me to know, he would have told me.”
It was his little-Leland, fake-Edward voice that got me upset. Whenever any of the guys in counterespionage wanted to show how brave and noble they were, they put on that voice, and no matter where they came from—Long Island like John, or Ames, Iowa, or Charleston, South Carolina, they pitched their voices low and talked slo-o-ow, the way Edward did, even down to the trace of the Vermont accent, like when they talked about the Republican Pahty.
It didn’t get me angry when all the Yale guys talked as though they’d spent their golden boyhoods pitching hay on some New England farm. Half of the COI (which had just changed its name to OSS, Office of Strategic Services, probably because someone’s uncle had the contract for government stationery), maybe even three quarters, had graduated from Yale, including Edward Leland, and if he was their ideal of what a Yale man should sound like, it was okay with me. But it was another thing to hear my husband, whose only connection to Yale had probably been a football game they’d played against Columbia in 1925 and he’d gone to. What bothered me about John’s fake nonchalance, his false I-can-go-face-to-face-with-Adolf attitude, was that it showed him—like all of them—to be exactly the opposite of what he was trying to be: brave.
Talk about Cowboys and Indians. It wasn’t just that they were playing games with people’s lives; it was that they saw themselves as heroes. They put on Edward’s hat and became the marshal who moseys into a dangerous town with his trusty six-shooter and gets rid of the no-good varmints.
Edward was the sort of man who thrived on going eyeball to eyeball with no-good varmints. But John was a thinker, a legal scholar, a born puzzle-solver. Why couldn’t he be happy being what he was? What he was was so impressive.
I put my coat away, gave John a hanger, and asked, “Is it okay if I just make eggs tonight?”
“With toast.” His voice was muffled by the coats in the closet. “Not too dark.”
What I wanted from my husband was not a lot of talk about honor and valor, but a display of it right where we were, at home in Washington, D.C. I wanted him to be what he was, to be real. Let him just say to me, Hey, I’m dying to know where Ed is. Tell me, and I swear to God I won’t say a word to anyone.
And I didn’t want to see him in a warm kitchen, eating scrambled eggs and buttered toast and pretending to be lighthearted after a grueling, eighteen-hour day. He and all the Yale men and even the guys from Ohio State and City College who had somehow managed to sneak in—they all acted easy, relaxed, as if nothing fazed them.
Listen, I wanted to tell my husband, you’re an extraordinary man. You’re doing important, exhausting work, work you should be proud of. I’m proud of you. Don’t pretend to be someone else. I want you here, John. I want you safe. Do you think I could stand it if you disappeared for months, like Edward? Do you think I want you to have his crazy, rigid sense of honor, so that you won’t endanger anyone else by sending them to meet what’s left of the Polish underground, and you insist on going in yourself? And most of all, do you think I want a man who deep down cares so little about what happens to him that he has no fear?
“You look exhausted,” I said to him, as he came into the kitchen.
He shut his eyes and shook his head, as if to deny his fatigue. “It’s nothing I can’t bear,” he said. But he pronounced the word bayah, as if he’d spent his summers in
northeastern Vermont. Come on! He’d been caddying at the Sands Point Golf Club. “Linda, you have to understand. I have to bear it. This is war.”
No, this was war. At the end of June, Norman Weekes called a conference in his office. Six of his men and John and Edward sat at one end of an interminably long table with fat feet and a deep red-brown shine so rich it looked like it had been stolen from the White House dining room.
Norman’s secretary, a man in his late forties wearing a light brown suit so crumpled it resembled a paper bag, sat next to me; our rickety, government-issue chairs were placed against the wall. We both took down every word that was said. I considered myself something of a shorthand whiz, but he was faster, and determined to prove it to me. He obviously knew I was there because my boss didn’t trust his minutes of the meeting, but he was a prissy man, full of stenographic pride, and didn’t get that I was there because of OSS politics; he viewed the meeting not as a critical discussion of our Berlin espionage network but as some fight-to-the-death shorthand contest.
Norman rested his elbows on the table, made a tepee with his hands, rested his chin on the tips of his fingers and contemplated Edward. “Shall I begin?” he asked.
“It’s your meeting,” Edward responded.
“Very well. We are here to discuss Alfred Eckert. A second-rate little dress designer in Berlin, although quite popular with the wives of high-ranking SS officials, women not generally revered for their chic.” Norman’s men looked amused. Once he saw they were—and my guess is that besides a Harvard degree (his unit was the big exception to the Yale rule), finding Norman Weekes amusing was part of the job—Norman glanced toward Edward.
But Edward’s expression was absolutely blank, almost scarily empty, as though he’d vacated his own premises. I had never heard of Alfred Eckert, and I couldn’t tell if Edward had or not. Norman waited, a little uneasily, for some expression to appear on Edward’s deadpan face. When it didn’t, he quickly turned away and looked to John, who was sitting with his back to me. Still, I didn’t need to see John’s face. I could read his back; he was edgy, anxious even.
“Well, whatever our Mr. Eckert’s weaknesses in couture,” Norman continued, “he was a first-rate agent.”
John said, “‘Was’?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, he died.” Norman turned to one of his men. “Martin, can you bring us up-to-date on the situation?”
Martin looked like the rest of Norman’s gray-suited, striped-tied men, except he had rimless eyeglasses that kept sliding down his nose. “We’re in a bit of a bind,” he said, his Boston voice so nasal he sounded as if he had a clothespin on his nose. If there were little Lelands in counterespionage, there were miniature Weekeses in espionage, German division. “You see, whatever Alfred’s motives were for working for us—they were always a bit unclear, and alas, now we shall never discern them—we do know he was fervently anti-Nazi. Since ’38. Until then, he was just…what he appeared to be. With suspiciously thin, arched eyebrows, I might add.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Edward broke in. Martin jerked up in his chair, as if he’d gotten a violent shock. “Do you think I have time to listen to talk about eyebrow arches?” He turned to John. “What did this fellow do for us?”
“I believe he worked for us, Ed,” Norman interrupted.
“I meant us, the United States of America, Norman.” He looked back at John. “Do you know what his role was?”
“He began by passing gossip he picked up from the wives of Party officials. That was during ’38 and the beginning of ’39.”
“Who was his contact?” Edward asked.
John was direct: “I don’t know. I’ve only been following his work for the last eight months.”
So Edward looked back to Martin, who was still upset after Edward’s last words to him; he fidgeted around in his chair as if he had a sore behind. “How did he pass on his information to us?”
“A florist. A friend of his who did all the flowers for the American ambassador’s wife. Very efficient. We’d often get it out the same day we received it, by diplomatic pouch.”
The secretary sitting next to me was scrawling away at top speed, glancing over now and then to my pad, just to make sure I was behind him. I always was. Unlike him, though, I was consumed by what was being discussed. But he just wrote on; the nine men in the room could have been discussing a Securities and Exchange Commission regulation or comparing apple cobbler recipes.
“And what happened in ’39 to change this fellow’s status?” Edward demanded.
“I’d gotten wind of him,” Norman said. “That he was quite an asset. So on my next trip to Berlin, I brought my wife along. She was a brick. Loathed his dresses, of course, but went through fitting after fitting at our hotel.” Norman added, “Didn’t want to arouse unnecessary suspicions, so I had him carry away a pile of pinned-up dresses. Actually bought the damned things. Priced like they came from Paris. My wife gave them to the maid. The ugliest colors and—”
“What did you talk to him about, Norman?” Edward asked impatiently. “Hemlines?”
Norman pretended Edward was joking and chuckled. Then all his men chuckled too. “Obviously I recruited him.”
“As?”
“As an agent. You see, I saw war coming, saw we didn’t have much time left in Berlin—wouldn’t be able to rely on the florist and the old diplomatic pouch—and needed more than ‘society’ gossip. We needed specific intelligence, and we needed it fast. That’s where our friend Alfred came in. He had friends in high, fashionable places. He had a car, all the gas ration coupons he could possibly desire, and was welcome everyplace, be it a villa near the Grunewald or a disreputable nightclub where what was left of the city’s demimonde gathered. And most important of all, he had the wife of one of the most powerful foreign office officials as his confidante; she considered him her closest friend—her only friend—and he was always welcome in her quite splendid home…a home confiscated, I understand, from a wealthy Jewish mercantile family.”
Edward nodded to Norman, then turned to John. “Alfred Eckert was reliable?”
“Yes,” said John. “As good as they come. He was able to glean an enormous amount of information from this official’s house.”
“I see. And now we have lost our gleaner.”
“Yes,” Norman responded.
“Any candidates for the job?”
“None. You know what it’s like there, Ed. You can’t slip a refugee into the home of a foreign office official, a man who is a prominent Nazi to boot; the danger of his being recognized is, well, enormous. And you can’t expect to pass off a Yale German major.” No, I thought. Even someone like me, an ordinary person with a working-class accent; if I worked as this guy’s file clerk or as one of his wife’s maids, even, I probably couldn’t pass. No matter how much a person knows—and I knew a lot about Berlin and its ways—it would still be a foreign city. To a German major from Yale, it would be another planet. “And who over there is going to take the chance? A clandestine meeting in a private house, perhaps. A word whispered in passing in a men’s room. But who would risk going into this man’s house, sneaking into his study, searching through his papers? No one is that brave.”
“Your little dressmaker was,” Edward said.
“Ah, yes,” Norman agreed. “But he’s dead now.”
“Assassinated, I assume?”
“Yes.” Norman lifted up his yellow legal pad and his pen from the table before him. All six of his men pushed back their chairs, ready to leap up the instant Norman rose. “Well, I thought it was important to pass this on to you and John, Ed. It puts us in somewhat of a pickle. We’ll all have to give it some thought.” He stood, and his six men sprung to their feet. His secretary closed his steno pad with an embarrassingly loud slap.
But Edward remained seated, and so did John. Edward said, “One moment, please, Norman.” I took it down. The other secretary was in agony, not knowing whether taking down Edward’s words would be viewed as his jo
b or as an act of betrayal. He peered around, then finally, with one of those overdramatic silent movie gestures, clutched his pad passionately against his chest. “This recruit of yours worked for us in one capacity or another for four years. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“He had powerful friends, people willing to vouch for him? Other fashionable women married to influential men. Perhaps a highly placed deviate or two.” Norman said nothing. “Am I correct in that assumption?”
“Yes.”
“No untoward incidents before this? No hairbreadth escapes?”
“None.”
“And yet suddenly he is assassinated.”
“Yes.”
“Obviously not by our man, the one who replaced the florist, who passed Eckert’s information on to us.” He inclined his head toward John. “That is code name Cactus, correct?” John said it was. Cactus was a German citizen, a surgeon, whose mother had been American and who had a brother, also a surgeon, in Ohio. “And we’ve cleared Cactus?”
“We’ve checked him over and over. He does eye surgery in Berlin, and every month he flies to Switzerland, to a clinic he owns. He operates there for a day or two, buys medical supplies unavailable in Germany and returns. We know he’s clean, and even better, they are convinced he is.”
Edward turned back to Norman. “Let’s move on, then, shall we? Was your man held incommunicado for a while? Tortured?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“That isn’t the usual pattern, is it? They must have been afraid that he was a threat to them.”
“Possibly.”
“And—I’m just thinking out loud now, Norman—they weren’t afraid of us. Once they had him in custody, he couldn’t give us any more. But perhaps they were fearful that his friends in high places could help him get free, or just manage to speak to him. What information could he pass on to them that was so threatening?”