Louise's Dilemma

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘The news is bad,’ Ruth said. ‘Very bad. Convoy ON-166 has been attacked; they’ve lost fourteen ships in three days.’

  Ruth dropped her voice even lower.

  ‘If we can’t stop the U-boats, everyone says we’re going to lose the war. We can’t invade Europe. We can’t supply North Africa. We can’t locate the U-boats when they are out at sea. Every person here has been assigned to search for targets in Europe that the RAF can bomb that might affect the Kriegsmarine’s ability to function. And have you heard about Hans and Sophie Scholl?’

  Hans and Sophie were brother and sister, leaders of a German student non-violent resistance group called the White Rose at the University of Munich. They’d been arrested recently for handing out anti-war leaflets and charged with high treason.

  ‘What’s happened to them?’

  ‘They were executed, by guillotine.’

  No wonder a pall hung over OSS. The student anti-Nazi resistance movement was our best path to infiltrate Germany. Without doubt OSS had been supplying the dissenters; perhaps we even had agents placed in the group. The Scholls’ execution was a disaster. Guillotined! I shuddered at the thought of those two young people dying so horribly.

  ‘Any more good news?’ I asked Ruth.

  ‘Just don’t look at a newspaper,’ she said. ‘It’s scary.’

  I walked through the Reading Room on my way to my desk. Every chair was filled. Files crowded the tables, and library trolleys filled all the available space. Men, mostly in uniform, and a few women combed through documents seeking Nazi weaknesses. This railway station, were supplies for the submarines loaded here? That bridge, did supply trucks for submarine bases cross it? Was that building a torpedo factory? Possible targets would be fed to the RAF and American Army Air Force in Britain. Which got their supplies from the convoys. It was a vicious circle that had to be stopped.

  I forced myself to forget everything else except my own work. I ploughed through two documents, analyzing and indexing them. Then I took a short break to write a brief report on l’affaire de carte postale française to deliver to my boss, Laurence Egbert. He would pass it on to the Foreign Nationalities Bureau.

  I gave Egbert a straightforward account of my time in St Leonard and summarized Agent Williams’ conclusion that Leroy Martin had been murdered for reasons that had nothing to do with Richard Martin’s postcard. I was careful not to criticize Williams, but I did say that I was concerned that the murder of Leroy Martin had obscured OSS’s original inquiry about the postcard. Simply because we’d run into a domestic crime didn’t mean that there was no meaning to the postcard. I did agree with Williams that there was little that could be done now that Leroy Martin was dead, though.

  As I dropped my report off with Egbert’s secretary I wondered if I’d ever have another chance to work in the field.

  The bustle of the crowd and steady roar of conversation in the OSS cafeteria cheered me up a bit. I didn’t see any movie stars today, but I did catch sight of Joan waving her arms at me from a table across the way. Gripping my tray of chicken potpie, milk, and Jell-O, I forced myself through the crowd and slid onto a chair next to her.

  ‘Dearie,’ she said, holding my tray for me as I took off my coat, ‘it’s been as much as my life is worth to hold onto this seat for you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and realized how fond I was of this big hearty woman. She was about the only person in Washington I felt I could talk to without reservation. I needed badly to tell her everything that had happened to me in the last few days, but even the OSS cafeteria didn’t offer the privacy I needed.

  ‘So how was your adventure?’ she asked.

  ‘Less than adventurous.’

  ‘That’s too bad. How come?’

  ‘The company was terrible,’ I said, thinking of Williams and his condescension. ‘But the guesthouse we stayed in was lovely. We should go there for a weekend when the weather is better. And –’ here I leaned into her – ‘the subject of our investigations was murdered!’

  Joan’s mouth dropped. ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I am not. But it had nothing to do with our mission,’ I said. ‘It’s the FBI’s case now.’

  Just as I raised a forkful of pot pie to my lips, an enormous Scotsman knocked my elbow, sending my bite of pot pie splat onto Joan’s shirt. I knew he was a Scotsman because of his tartan tam o’shanter. Otherwise he looked like any other British soldier. Then there was his accent, of course!

  ‘Oh, lassie!’ the guardsman said to Joan, dismayed. ‘I’ve dirtied your blouse!’

  ‘No worries,’ Joan said, ‘it will come out,’ as she scrubbed at her shirt with a napkin dipped in her water glass.

  The two caught each other’s gaze and I could feel the current pass between them.

  ‘You take my seat,’ I said to the Scot. ‘it’s time for me to get back to work anyway.’

  He didn’t object, sliding into the chair I relinquished.

  Joan grasped at my arm as I left. ‘Meet me after work,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a martini.’

  After remembering that it was Wednesday, when Joe was often late getting home, I agreed. ‘I really need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘Could we go somewhere other than a bar?’

  The Scotsman had taken my seat by now, and his large body came between me and Joan, who had to lean around him to speak to me.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at the corner of G and twenty-first,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to my apartment.’

  Joan poured me an ice-cold martini from her sterling silver shaker.

  ‘No olive, right?’ she said. ‘How about a twist?’

  I accepted, watching her carve a sliver of yellow from the skin of a lemon and arrange it on the lip of my martini glass. I sipped from the elegant glass, savoring the sensation of Gilbey’s gin rolling down my throat. Thank God for the juniper berry!

  I had been raised to believe drinking was a sin. Then I came to the big city and rejected most of my upbringing within months. Okay, weeks! It no longer seemed wicked to me to drink cocktails in a bar, skip church, or date a man I had no interest in marrying just for the fun of it. My poor parents! I hadn’t been home to visit since I left North Carolina, and it was getting more and more difficult to write them letters about my life, since most of it would horrify them. They had no idea I worked for a spy agency, lived in a boarding house with male residents, and made more money in a month than my father did in three.

  Joan had other lovely possessions to keep company with the silver martini shaker. Like silk pajamas, a mink coat and diamond earrings. Her family had plenty of dough and supplied her with an allowance that let her keep a studio apartment in the Mayflower Hotel. I adored the Mayflower. Much of my first foray into fieldwork involved time spent at the Mayflower. To me the grand hotel felt like a fairytale palace, with its huge crystal chandeliers, frescoed walls, and the three-story ballroom where I’d gone to my first formal affair, a USO gala. I’d eaten twice at the Presidential Restaurant where the movers and shakers of Washington lunched every day.

  My dream was to keep working after the war and get my own apartment and car. Or go to college. Not to remarry. Which was what I was supposed to want more than anything, a second husband who made a good living. I just didn’t. Despite the war, or maybe because of it, I was happier than I had ever been in my life.

  ‘You’re not listening,’ Joan said. ‘You’re ruminating! What about?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I was thinking about, well, how good, in a way, the war has been for me.’

  ‘Me, too,’ she said.

  ‘You?’ I was surprised.

  ‘Dearie, I was so bored, I cannot tell you. Keeping house for my father, the Junior League, tennis and swimming. I was doing all the things I was supposed to, but the days went by so slowly.’

  Joan didn’t mention her biggest disappointment, that she didn’t have a husband. So I asked the obvious question. ‘What happened between you and the Scot today?’

  ‘His name is Andrew M
cRoberts. It was too loud to talk much, but he did ask for my phone number. And what about you? Seeing anyone?’

  She immediately saw the indecision on my face.

  ‘Not that professor from Czechoslovakia? We’ve talked about this. You shouldn’t – he’s a foreigner. Do you know any more about him?’

  ‘No. But I don’t care.’

  Joan shook her head. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re a widow, so you can get away with dating someone mysterious, I suppose.’

  ‘Since I don’t need to protect my virginity?’

  ‘You can make fun if you want. But it’s a serious thing for an unmarried woman. And for OSS staff with Top Secret clearance.’

  ‘Joe taught in England for years. And your Scot has an accent.’

  ‘It makes a difference if it’s not British, dearie.’

  The bus I caught home dropped me at the Arts Club on ‘I’ Street, just a block from my boarding house. As I crossed the street I stepped onto a two-foot wide swathe of discarded chewing gum frozen into a slick patch. My feet went completely out from under me, and I landed hard on my fanny, knocking the breath out of me. I gasped like a dying fish in the middle of the dark street, gazing powerless at the headlights coming right at me, when someone grasped me under the arms and pulled me onto the sidewalk.

  It was Joe, of all people.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You took quite a tumble.’

  The car that had been about to run me down went past, way faster than the wartime speed limit, and on ice, too.

  Fool.

  ‘Thank you!’ I said to Joe. ‘You got here in the nick of time. Where did you come from?’

  Joe grinned at me. ‘We were on the same bus. I was rows behind you, too far back to speak to you. I thought I’d surprise you when I got off at the back door.’

  ‘You surprised me all right,’ I said. ‘And you might have saved my life. That car was coming up fast.’

  ‘He saw you,’ Joe said, brushing off my coat. ‘I saw his eyes. Avoiding you would have sent him up on the sidewalk though, fast as he was going.’

  Joe glanced down at the packed hard layer of chewing gum that stretched from the curb out into the street. ‘Sometimes I just don’t understand Americans. What a filthy habit! And if you must chew gum, why not discard it properly?’

  Without thinking I rubbed my bottom, which was smarting from its contact with the street.

  ‘Here,’ Joe said, ‘let me.’ He led me deep into an alley and took me in his arms, gently stroking my bruised hip with one hand while holding me tightly against him with the other. His lips found mine, and we stood there locked together for I don’t know how long. I can’t pretend I felt much, cold as it was, but my imagination was certainly stimulated, and I remembered it would be just a few days until we’d be together on a houseboat, alone, on the Potomac River. Where we’d be very warm and could feel every inch of each other’s body. A few days!

  I felt panic hit me, and I pulled away.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Joe said, releasing me.

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘I just need to catch my breath.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And it’s freezing. It’s supposed to be warming up, but I don’t believe it. Have you eaten anything?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. And I’d had two martinis at Joan’s. Maybe that explained why my stomach was turning cartwheels.

  ‘We’d better head home,’ Joe said. He paused for a minute and kissed me on both cheeks, sweetly. ‘You’re still okay with going away with me this weekend, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You can change your mind, you know.’

  ‘I’m not going to change my mind,’ I said. But I realized that I almost wanted to. Why? I didn’t understand my own feelings anymore.

  We slid all the way back to ‘Two Trees’, holding hands. We only took a tumble once. Joe slipped, and I fell right on top of him, and the two of us skidded along the sidewalk like a sled with a passenger hanging on for dear life. We laughed so hard that we could barely get up. Finally, Joe grabbed at a fence and pulled himself to his feet, and I sort of climbed up him.

  ‘We’re going to be covered with bruises tomorrow,’ he said.

  We made it to our boarding house without further incident. Inside it was toasty warm, at least downstairs, and welcoming. We pulled off our coats and went down the hall to the kitchen, ravenous, where we found that Dellaphine had saved us fried chicken and biscuits with honey, which we chased with glasses of cold milk.

  The kitchen was empty, except for the two of us having our supper at the kitchen table. A domestic scene straight from a woman’s magazine, I thought, except that I hadn’t cooked the fried chicken and Joe and I weren’t married. Which was fine by me! Shocking, I thought, that a thirty-year-old widow with glasses wasn’t desperate for a husband. What else about me would change before the war was over?

  Joe pulled a folded section from a newspaper out of his coat pocket. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘tomorrow night is the last time the Park Service is going to allow skating on the Reflecting Pool. Want to go?’

  ‘I can’t ice skate! I grew up in North Carolina!’

  ‘You can roller skate, can’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ll help. Skating on the Reflecting Pool might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. And you can rent skates there. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Can you meet at the west end of the pool? About six thirty?’

  ‘Sure.’ Why not? Ice skating in the moonlight in front of the Lincoln Memorial – yet another new experience to add to my wartime adventures.

  OSS forbade its staff to keep journals or diaries. I expected I would regret that someday. How could I remember all the little bits of my new world that crowded on me every day? Oh, I could never forget my first paycheck, the day I swore my oath and pressed my inky fingers onto my OSS fingerprint card, the first time I had dinner alone with a man whom I hadn’t known since I was a child. I wondered if I would lose the little things, though, like making a war cake without butter or sugar, crowding onto the steps of the Water Gate for a concert, or trying to make a spool of thread last for three dress hems and a pocket repair. I think that’s when I first thought of it – as soon as the war was over I’d sit down with a notebook and list everything, every tiny item, I could remember. And I resolved to add new mementos to the shoebox in my closet to join the tickets, photos, and letters already tucked away there.

  Joe washed our few dishes while I had a cup of tea. I thought I would never get over seeing a man working at the kitchen sink!

  Joe retired to the lounge and its blazing fire with the evening newspaper. I wiped the stickiness off the honey pot at the sink and restored it to its place in the pantry.

  I noticed the newspaper clipping when I closed the pantry door. It had been thumbtacked to the wood, its headline underlined in black ink.

  ‘Common Mistakes Regarding China and Japan,’ it read. I’d seen the article before. It was an advertisement from Life magazine placed in the Washington Post. What the government called white propaganda, probably written by our own Morale Operations Division. Posting the clipping here was Henry Post’s doing, no doubt. He was always eager to broadcast his political opinions.

  I read the article through. According to Life magazine, it was understandable that a decade ago Americans believed the Japanese people were like us. They seemed progressive, efficient and modern. Japanese trains ran on time and their best hotels were as luxurious as ours.

  The Chinese, in contrast, were subsistence farmers or simple craftsmen. Chinese trains rarely ran on time, and their guest accommodations were barely adequate. The Chinese seemed as un-American as could be.

  But, Life continued, the 1937 Japan-China war exposed the Japanese as they really are – brutal, arrogant, ruthless in their quest for power. And the Chinese revealed themselves to be kind, self-sacrificing and prepared to give their lives for freedom. Just like us Americans.

  According to Life, after the war China woul
d evolve into the great democracy of the East. It was our job, as freedom-loving Americans, to support them by sending the planes, tanks, trucks and big guns they required so they could keep the Japanese at bay.

  I suppose this kind of propaganda kept Americans working beyond their limits to win this enormous, terrifying war. But working at OSS had taught me to look at the world not in black and white, but in shades of gray. I was party to more war information than the average American, even if I did pick much of it up in the ladies’ restroom and the OSS cafeteria.

  The Japanese military government ruled Japan, keeping its foot firmly on the necks of superstitious Japanese peasants who thought their Emperor was a god. If we were successful at defeating them, as we must be, what would those people be capable of becoming?

  And the Chinese harbored more than one revolutionary movement. The Reds, supported by Russia – which was our ally too, of course – were decidedly undemocratic. We weren’t supposed to be worried about this yet.

  It was the quiet conclusion of our scholars at OSS and their colleagues at the State Department and in Great Britain that sorting national relationships out after the war would take years.

  I suppose what bothered me most about the article was the photographs that accompanied it. Why did the common representation of the Japanese man, with his hair neatly parted and slicked, round glasses, and small mustache, look so sinister? While the elderly Chinese man, lined and white-bearded, wearing a simple skullcap, seemed so kind and unthreatening.

  And, of course, the United States had its share of Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans, who were being treated by their fellow citizens according to these stereotypes.

  I couldn’t think about great national issues any more tonight. My brain hurt. I was going to fill my hot water bottle, dash upstairs into my cold bedroom, don my long underwear, flannel pajamas and knit cap and dive into my bed.

  The next morning I found a note from Lawrence Egbert, my boss, on my desk asking me to come by his office as soon as I arrived. He’d read my report and wanted to discuss it with me.

  My heart pounding, I wound through the stacks of files and desks until I got to his office, a glass-enclosed cubicle along the front wall of the Registry. I could see him through the window, standing at a table stacked with documents, talking to a man I didn’t know. Actually, he was shaking his head more than talking, holding a handful of the yellow slips of paper that requested files from researchers in our reading rooms. The second man in the office shrugged and gestured wide with his hands. Egbert nodded at him again, a sort of ‘do your best’ kind of acquiescence, pushed the forms into his hand and opened the door for him to leave.