Eleanor could only whisper the name of the factory. Grace stared at her for a long moment, then blinked once. “Yes, that’s it. So. Time never stands still, does it? The next day, all New York City turns out. Ellie, it was a parade for those women so huge, it took almost four hours for everyone to pass beneath Washington Square Arch. I know,” Grace recalled quietly. “I was there. I was there because my uncle presided at the arraignment of the women strikers the first time. ‘You are striking against God and Nature,’ he’d told them, ‘whose prime law is that man shall earn his bread with the sweat of his brow.’ My uncle was a thoroughgoing bible-thumping bastard. He thought no more of those women than draft animals, harnessed to their benches. I’m ashamed to be his niece, Ellie, judge and all, six feet under. There,” she said, “that’s my story.” She offered Eleanor the flask, and this time Eleanor drank.
“What are you going to do?” Eleanor asked, passing back the flask.
“I’m going to become a socialist, Ellie, of course. I’m going to be a complete traitor to my class, just to haunt the old bastard beyond the grave. My one consolation is that he’s frying quietly in hell.”
“Grace, you oughtn’t to say that.”
Grace lobbed the flask into the open jaws of her carpetbag. “Ellie, the whole reason I’m even in this damn library is to hear you talk sense. You’ve not a trace of side, Ellie. Don’t disappoint me now.”
Eleanor straightened in her hard chair; her fear of disappointing Grace drew her to her full height. “Your uncle was doing his best by the law, Grace. That was his job.”
“There you’re wrong,” Grace snapped, eyes blazing. “Being clever with the law doesn’t mean you can’t be a human being!” She stood as a hissed shhhh came down the aisle. “Oh, dry up!” Grace shouted back. “Come, let’s get out of here.” With a turn of her head she picked up her luggage and set off.
Her essay unfinished, Eleanor followed.
“Finland, Ellie, Finland,” Grace was saying as they crossed the great green expanse behind the Thomas Library, only crickets for company in the dark. “I want to go somewhere cool and white and pure and get this awfulness off my soul.” She was past drunk now, her eyes slow-moving and big. Eleanor carried her carpetbag. Grace sang a line from a parlor song, over and over, a snippet about the clouds coming and the rain.
“Finland’s certainly cool,” was all Eleanor could think to say.
They came to a path that wandered to the trees and there Grace stopped. She waved her flask in front of Eleanor; a last dram of gin sloshed inside. She turned to the lights across the campus fields. “There it is, darling, Avalon, the dreaming spires! All for the daughters of bankers and lawyers, more’s the pity!” She reared back and threw the flask as hard as she could into the darkest of the shadows. She offered her hand. Eleanor took it, a warm, vibrating thing, utterly alive. Grace led her once again, this time to her dormitory, the select Pembroke West, home to the “big beautifuls,” the college royalty, in silence.
Her single room, a coup for a freshman, was a doss-house. There were clothes piled everywhere, books in heaps, luggage thrown open and pillaged for whatever it was Grace needed that moment, then abandoned. An untidy stack of newspapers meant a dogleg past the bed.
Grace barreled through, pausing only to fetch her fur coat off a chair back. Throwing open the window to the autumn night, she scrambled onto the sill and out, expertly collapsing her skirts, a parasol of linen and lace. “Come on, Ellie! There’s a balcony—kick off those nun shoes and get out here!”
A dozen scrawled notes were jammed into the frame of her dressing mirror, reminders of Grace’s windmilling obligations—Anarchists Tues seven or Garment workers Valleyfield 9 23 ask for Sarah and more Eleanor might have read had not Grace called out again.
Eleanor crawled through the window and settled on the stonework next to Grace, a Shiva in mink. A flash briefly lit Grace’s face yellow-white and then the tobacco smoke curled away.
“There you go,” Grace said, offering her hand. “Wrap yourself,” she ordered, extending her coat over Eleanor’s shoulders. Eleanor could feel the warmth of Grace’s hip against hers. “Welcome to Gracie’s roost. A girl can smoke up here without setting the sheets on fire. Here, this one’s Turkish.”
“My God, Grace! How can you—” Eleanor coughed at the harsh smoke.
“Shhh. Can you hear that, darling? The wind? It’s like a last breath.” Grace shivered; Eleanor felt that too. “A thousand people at my uncle’s funeral. No one of them spoke the truth. It was all I could do not to shout ‘bastard’ during the damn elegies.”
Eleanor watched Grace for a long moment, a suspicion forming. “Grace, what is it?”
“What’s what?”
Without thinking, Eleanor took her friend’s hand and pressed it to her own chest. “What you came to the library to tell me.”
Grace left her hand in Eleanor’s grasp but finished her cigarette before answering. She dropped the stub into a cleft in the stonework, then lit another. “Very unladylike. My mother would kill me. You know, Ellie”—her voice changed, soft now and low—“you’re a witch. No one else figured it out.”
Eleanor was thinking of Mo Reavey and the dark house behind the cooperage. “We can just sit here if you like. We don’t have to say anything.”
“I tried to tell my mother once. At our summer place, up near Albany. I wrestled with it all the way there in the back of the car,” she said, staring into the night. “Oh, it was Tiffany’s, that flask. What the hell.”
Eleanor let her pick up the thread in her own good time, thinking, as she waited, of Foster fishing, his patience while the line lay still.
“I couldn’t. You know, I think back on it now and I realize I couldn’t tell because I had no idea what demons I’d let out if I told her. That was cowardly, I think.”
Eleanor let her sit with it.
“What the hell,” Grace said. “What the hell.” She sniffled again and this time she didn’t stop. “He used to take me away at parties, to his library. Close the door and lock it, as if he hadn’t. It was always the same, that locking—behind his back. Then the desk. That desk …” Grace barely moved, her head down. “I didn’t understand, you see, Ellie. I—I didn’t understand at first what was happening.”
Eleanor held her, listening to the broken memories, until nearly two, when Grace, finally exhausted, consented to bed. “Don’t go, darling,” Grace ordered sleepily, once under the coverlet. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Eleanor switched off the electric light and readied herself to sleep on the floor, under Grace’s fur coat, folded her own sensible mackintosh square for a pillow. She lay flat on her back for some minutes, then she saw a white shape over her head, moving slowly, like seaweed. She reached for her glasses and fitted them.
“It’s all right, darling,” Grace said, reaching for Eleanor. “You’ll be more comfortable here. Really you will.”
There came a knock at the door at nine. Eleanor woke first, but Grace knew who it was. “Annamaria!” she called, rolling her eyes. “Come back in an hour, damn it, I’m exhausted!” My maid, she stage-whispered.
“Yes, miss,” said the maid called Annamaria. Her heels clicked down the hallway and were gone.
Only then did Grace allow herself a hoot of laughter. “Well, we’ll be the talk of the campus, won’t we?” she said, gasping for breath. She looked at Eleanor and stopped. Eleanor lay next to her, her eyes shining. “Oh, God, Ellie, what’s wrong?”
“You’re so brave, Grace,” Eleanor said quietly.
Grace gently stroked Eleanor’s hair. “It’s easy to be brave with you, Ellie, really. You listen, darling. You care.”
“What you told me … it’s our secret, Grace. To the grave.”
“To the grave, Ellie.” Grace nodded, curling a length of Eleanor’s brittle hair around her fingertip. “And what’s your secret, Miss Dulles of Watertown?”
Eleanor sat up. “You know, all I do is work. I don’t kno
w how to chase boys or play bridge or even ride a horse, all the things the ‘beautifuls’ do in their sleep.”
“And I’m one of them? One of the ‘beautifuls’?” Grace smiled. “Don’t be fooled. I’m no popularity princess. Here …” Grace leant toward Eleanor and cupped her chin in her hands. Grace’s lips were cool and full and gentle, and the kiss delighted Eleanor. “There,” Grace said, leaning back. “That seals it. We’re best friends. We’ll look after one another, come what may?”
“Yes,” Eleanor replied, her heart pounding. “Can I show you something?” she asked, her shyness returning in a flood.
“Ellie, don’t ask. Act. That’s the best way.”
“I’m so nervous,” she said, staring hard into Grace’s unmoving green eyes. “I just want you to know …” She slipped closer to Grace, remembering the ice-white fingers waving, seaweed in the still dark above her, and then gave herself over.
IV
SWITZERLAND
SEPTEMBER 1917
At this altitude, Eleanor could see her breath as it mingled with her brother Allen’s tobacco smoke in the bright autumn air. She swayed a little in her sensible side-laced boots as the Schilthorn cable car thumped over its iron guide wheels, floating weightlessly up the Swiss mountainside. A fortnight ago she’d left New York, aboard the SS Espagne, bound for Le Havre and the grim adventures awaiting a callow aid worker on the Western Front, impelled not a little by Grace’s groundbreaking solo trip ahead of her.
She’d had a brief walkabout of Paris three days ago. The city’s romantic spark barely flickered, the passersby on the quaysides walked glassy-eyed, distracted, trapped; it was hardly the entrancing gaslit belle époque Paris of her schoolgirl visit of 1909. The Germans were barely an hour away. She’d taken the Paris-Bern wagons-lits express here, a family mission of her own in mind before heading for the end of the world—Verdun. Eleanor sniffled as the cable car pitched in the crosswind.
The seven Bryn Mawr girls she’d traveled with on the Espagne had devised a smart uniform for France: a big flat-brimmed black hat, a white linen shirt under a heavy tweed jacket, a matching tweed skirt, all gathered by a broad Sam Browne belt, and a vast wool scarf, the ends tucked smartly into the Sam Browne. The girls had gathered for a photo in Paris, taken in the forecourt of a fine apartment building, the curtain lace prim in the windows. The group stood, hatted, gloved, and booted, on the pavé, before donated trucks, clearly sobered by the prospect of war up close but, in their smiles, secretly thrilled to be there and alive and doing something. Eleanor had beamed into the lens, her teeth and spectacles glowing in the magnesium photoflash. Then nothing: the whole project hung fire for two weeks, strangled by red tape. Eleanor, restless, caught the overnight train to Bern to haunt Allen.
Allen was smoking the pipe he’d come to affect; he’d contracted gout and for relief he’d propped his foot across the aisle. He’s become an old fogy without even trying, Eleanor observed. They were the cable car’s only passengers, the last ride up of the day. “Wonderful for sunsets, isn’t it,” Allen said. “Mother’d love it. Father’d want to know what it cost Grandpa Foster. And Foster would sue the sun, just to keep the shareholders in line.” His booming laughter rattled the cable car’s sheet metal.
“Aren’t you witty all of a sudden, Allen Dulles?” Eleanor replied. She didn’t laugh, but then Allen rarely amused her. In her purse she carried a letter from Major Foster, intelligence officer, to Allen, on U.S. Army letterhead. “Look Allie over but good, see what’s making him tick, get word back,” he’d said in the telegram from Washington. Foster, unfit for combat because of his vision and fighting a paper war as military intelligence liaison to the Alien Property Custodian’s outfit at Treasury, had his gimlet eye, as ever, set on Allen.
She stood at the prow of the cable car, wrapped in her new woolen coat. “Feels like a ship up here. Or a Zeppelin.” Ahead, on the great peak’s vast windswept belly, stood stretches of stripped pine. Eleanor cricked her neck to peer up at the looming skyline: there were no trees at all, only a frozen granite wave, then ice, then sky.
“An Englishman on the Espagne told us a story,” Eleanor said. “The Zeppelins came over London one night. A splinter bomb blew his windows out. ‘Cracked the Regency oak desk open like an eggshell,’ he told us, ‘but didn’t budge the sherry decanter.’ What’s that, down there, with the metal roof?” Far below, the mountain road was thin as wire; above, the deep whine of the great pulleys thrummed.
“Stechelberg weather post. They measure the snow, and the winds, I think, for avalanches,” Allen replied. “Hateful thing, bombing civilians. The Germans should hang for that.”
“You haven’t said a word about your war work.”
Allen fashioned one of his benign smiles. “Not supposed to.”
“Suddenly a sphinx about politics? That’s a change. Well, then, are you a success yet, Allie? Has Switzerland been good? Got the Kaiser on the run?”
He shrugged. “I’ve made a name for myself, of sorts. At least I’m no longer just Bertie Lansing’s nephew.” He tapped his pipe out and let the dry black shards fall to the metal floor. “Your letter said the aid people gave you a job.”
“I’ve been assigned to the Marne, up near the Belgian frontier. It’s a disaster area. I’m joining my friend Grace from college there.”
“Well, that’s something,” Allen said absently. He was preoccupied, packing his pipe.
Eleanor counted to five: Allen’s pipe smoking struck her as pretentious. “There’s no clean water, Allie, no shovels, no blankets. People are living in tents or barns, in the open. They’re the lucky ones. Disease is a nightmare.”
Allen nodded. “I’m sure you’ll do well, Ellie.” He sighed; he found evangelism tiresome. He wondered what Hannigan was up to for dinner. He felt the need to talk shop with someone who knew what the hell was going on, not his mannish sister, with her flat stares and flatter questions.
“I will,” she said simply. “It’ll be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ll do my best.”
Allen looked at her speculatively through the pipe smoke. “There’s this rumor at State. Uncle Bertie’s seen the paperwork. The President’s interested.”
“What rumor? Interested in what?”
“That we’re going to build the best spy network in Europe, from Paris to Petrograd and all points in between.”
“Allie,” Eleanor demanded, “what in God’s name has spying got to do with refugee work?”
Allen dropped his foot carefully to the floor, then walked up to the front of the car and sat against the rail next to her. They could see the cable car’s mountaintop terminus just ahead. “The Russian refugee work is the spy network,” he said quietly. “Informants, agents, in every corner of the continent, right under the noses of the police. Follow the grain sacks and the bandages, that’s what.” Allen drew hard on his pipe. “It’s in the works. I wish I’d thought of it. That kind of thinking makes a man’s career.”
Eleanor took a seat beside her brother. “Foster said you’d find your feet here. He was right. You’ve found a new religion too.” She put her hand on his sleeve. “Allen, are you asking me to work for the State Department?”
Allen stared at her for a moment, then let go a shout of laughter.
“Well, I don’t know how these things are done,” she said plaintively. “Why are you laughing?”
But Allen only laughed harder. She could feel the warm gusts of tobacco smoke on his breath. Eleanor blushed furiously. There were times she hated him. This was one.
It was a small family-run place, Italian, candles in Chianti bottles, checked tablecloths, all they could afford on the money Foster had sent with Eleanor less her train fares. They were alone except for a pair of morose Germans eating silently together. Allen had a second grappa and Eleanor anisette after the marinara. Their waiter was the chef’s kid, a poker-faced fifteen-year-old with a wispy unshaven mustache.
“The Germans in Bern come here as well?”
Eleanor asked. This struck her as curious.
“All the time,” Allen replied. He was quite subdued. Perhaps it was the wine: he’d drunk most of the merlot himself. “There’s never any trouble. This place is no-man’s-land. We all need a spot that’s offlimits. Everyone’s very correct, very polite. In a way, we’re all in the same business.” He shrugged.
“And what happens when there is trouble?”
“The Swiss get damn angry. It’s their country. Their police get lots of practice watching everyone else spy on one another.”
Eleanor shook her head no as the boy walked past with a steaming kettle for tea.
“It’s good, living by one’s wits,” Allen went on. “But sooner or later you get fooled. It’s only ever a matter of time.” He sat in silence for a long moment.
“Have you made a mess of things yet?” Eleanor asked, smiling. It occurred to her that Allen didn’t want her asking questions—all the more reason to press on.
Allen nodded. “I told Foster about it. Or rather, he wrote to ask, because …” His voice trailed off. “Look, it worked like this, since you must know. I had a pacifist Austrian and a German with connections. If they talk to us, on the quiet, maybe we can engineer a separate peace. That was the idea. Problem was, everybody who shouldn’t have known knew. The day before. The whole thing made a complete fool of my Austrian, got my friendly German nearly hauled up on treason charges—the Germans guillotine for that—and everyone in town laughed at the big dumb American. It was,” he recalled glumly, “most embarrassing. But that’s small potatoes compared to Lenin.”
“Lenin? The Russian?”
The Witness Tree Page 4