Gone to Soldiers (63 page)

Until the day Kay left for college, this apartment had felt barely adequate. Kay could expand to fill any space with magazines, rumpled sweaters, sneakers, tennis racquets, hair curlers. Then all at once it was too big. Louise was traveling a great deal. What she missed most was a person at home when she returned, someone who had prepared a welcome.

When she was thirteen, this would have been her idea of paradise: room upon room to herself with no one to intrude. Yet while she had enjoyed little privacy in her days as a foster child, she had also been lonely all of the time like an ache in the bottom of her belly. Now she shook herself roughly: dwelling in the past again.

Grumpily she made herself breakfast, the radio on. When she had poached her eggs, toasted her English muffin and sat down with a cup of dark coffee before beginning her morning's work,
The Times
arrived, permitting her to kill an hour and cover the drinking of still more coffee, to make up for the sleep she had not enjoyed. The Soviets were attacking along the Dnieper. The Germans had taken Kos in the Aegean, wiping out the British garrison. In Italy, American forces had reached the Volturno.

Suddenly she glanced at the clock and ran for her bedroom. She made it a point of professional pride to be dressed before Blanche arrived; now she had exactly seven minutes. At nine o'clock Louise sat at her desk, going over the day's work. Nonetheless she felt bleak: a tree whose leaves had fallen. She disliked feeling sorry for herself. In the middle of a world war, she had little to complain about.

A decision began forming in her. Why not take up OWI on its constant attempts to woo her to Washington? Blanche could take care of her mail until she got back. Don't moon about, don't hesitate, she instructed herself: act. They say you will be useful. Give it a try. As soon as she had finished dictation, she reached for the phone.

By the end of October, Louise was glad she had decided to move temporarily to Washington, because she was too busy and overworked to brood. However, living in hotels was untenable. The law said no one could stay more than five days in a Washington hotel, so on the last morning, she had to hike to another hotel, followed by a bellboy carrying her suitcases and her portable typewriter, and meeting a stream of other Washington visitors, trekking to her hotel with their luggage. It was absurd and exhausting, and the night she went home in a rare taxi at one
A
.
M
. to the wrong hotel made her swear to solve her housing problem at once.

At once was not quite what happened. She asked every acquaintance, but mostly she heard bad jokes about the scarcity of housing. Ramsay in her office said he had always believed in polygamy, and she could move in and be wife number two. It was through Franz Widerman, whom Louise suspected of recruiting his old student Oscar for OSS, that Louise finally heard of an apartment. Something about it did not quite sound on the up and up. Louise thought she detected suppressed amusement in Widerman's voice.

She tried to guess what was wrong as she questioned the woman who was living there now. Louise would have to share the apartment with Susannah for some weeks, but then it would be hers, free and clear. Was the woman an alcoholic? dipsomaniac? round heeled? Susannah seemed normal, although obviously well into the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy. She had married recently and was leaving Washington at the end of November.

The joker materialized as soon as she talked to the super, for this apartment had been occupied by Oscar's girlfriend Abra, now in London. Thus Franz knew of the apartment. He thought it was amusing to install the ex-wife in the current girlfriend's abode. Louise almost gave up.

She walked around the block trying to decide if it was injurious to her dignity to move in. She had not found any other apartment whatsoever. She had seen rooms in private homes, exorbitantly priced and offering accommodations much worse than the hotels. This would be all hers by the beginning of December. There would even be room for Kay when she came home on her periodic visits.

She imagined dragging through the winter moving every five days from hotel to hotel, never able to make herself breakfast or a late supper, never able to have her books, her desk, her privacy. From the end of the block she came trotting back at a clip that left her breathless, to tell Susannah and the super that she was extremely pleased to take over the lease.

Her office was in the limestone and brick new Social Security building on Independence Avenue in the heart of governmental Washington facing the Mall, right near the Botanic Garden and the Capitol. She had a cubicle with a window onto one of the courtyards, which indicated her middling rank. This Monday she was lunching with a New York—based radio and print journalist who was the chief writer for “Now It Can Be Told.” That was a show designed to whip up enthusiasm for the war by telling stale secrets, no longer classified tales of derring-do and danger. He felt he wasn't getting what he needed out of the OWI, and she was there to hold his hand and soothe his irritation. Louise wanted to help him prepare a program on concentration camps, but her bosses had strictly forbidden that. OWI had a policy she disliked of putting out no information on what was known about the camps and the fate of the Jews in Europe.

By midafternoon, Louise was feeling mildly rebellious herself. She had gone directly from lunch to a meeting on the campaign that was supposedly in high gear already, to recruit more women into war work. Survey after survey showed that women worked primarily for economic motives, but they were not allowed to gear any propaganda toward women's desires to make money. Their propaganda assumed all women were housewives who had never worked before, married to middle-class men.

All the ads prepared for the campaign stressed emotions she thought far less compelling. Some were based on guilt. The bullet she didn't make was not there to save her husband. “You know, most men in the armed forces are not at the front, and their wives know it. I frankly don't think this kind of approach will work as well as stressing the money she'll make and what her family can do with it—after the war, if that's more patriotic.”

“We want to appeal to them as mothers, as wives.” Ramsay sucked on his corncob pipe, wreaths of smoke around his head and floating toward her.

“Why? Why not appeal to her as herself?”

The guidelines were going to maintain an emphasis on women's nurturance supporting husbands, boyfriends, brothers and sons overseas or stressing glamour, showing beautiful young models working on assembly lines. OWI had launched a big campaign in September to get women into factories, targeting areas of severest labor shortages, but they would only sell the war to women on terms that did not alarm men. The slogans Louise had worked up were going to be ignored.

Well, at least they were recruiting. Louise had seen a recent intelligence study released to key people in OWI—and to her because she was a resident expert on women—that indicated that although there was a far more acute shortage of laborers in Nazi Germany than in the United States, the Germans were using foreign workers, slave labor, anything rather than their women. There was a perfunctory effort to get women into factories, but it was hampered by the Nazi party's dogma on women's place. Fascinating. Even in wartime, maintaining sex roles could be felt as more important than victory.

Moved into her new apartment, Louise asked herself, Do I feel emanations from Oscar's affair? She could not imagine him crawling into Abra's bed with Susannah in the living room. She had seen his Washington digs, and they were far more sumptuous than this place. No, she doubted Oscar had spent much time here. Visiting her New York apartment on a weekend Kay wanted to be home, Louise felt as if the deserted rooms were reproaching her. Kay was on the phone half the weekend to old friends, telling them about her new classes, her professors, her roommate, practicing her elementary French and giggling.

Louise brought back to Washington a load of books, papers, some cooking utensils and a few accents, a vase, a Klee print, a Ukrainian bowl. Her major decorating, such as it would be, must await Susannah's departure. Neither Abra nor Susannah seemed to have done much to the place. It was graduate student scruffy.

She and Susannah were ill-suited as roommates. Susannah was a young twenty-three, mainly concerned to create the illusion that she and her master sergeant had been married for months instead of weeks. She related to Louise as a surrogate mama upon whom to dump her troubles, who would surely love to take care of her. Louise marked the days until her departure.

Thus when the young man upstairs began hanging around on Sundays, although Susannah seemed used to him and saved up little tasks—putting things on the high shelves or getting them down, carrying out the heavier trash—Louise decided to make her position clear. “Look, Daniel, that's your name? I don't mean to be unfriendly, but I don't like being appointed anybody's part-time mother. I have a daughter seventeen at college, and if I'd craved more children, I would have had them.”

“Susannah has been leaning on you.” He grinned. “She does that. Don't worry. I'm just curious about you.”

“About me? Why?”

“I was Abra Scott's confidant. She claimed your ex-husband was still in love with you. You were the looming figure in her romance. How could I not be curious?”

“With a little self-discipline.” She looked him over carefully. A young man with a pleasant-looking open face and black curls. “Were you involved with Miss Scott?”

“Only in the line of friendship. She needed a shoulder to cry on.”

He was a friendly type, not at all threatening. Accent of the Bronx toned down by time away. She wondered idly if he were homosexual, like her agent Charley; perhaps that was why he gave that impression of relaxation with women. What she must do was restrain her sudden curiosity about Abra. The less she brooded about Oscar, the better for her. A translator: one who put off queries about his work and put in long hours. She said, “I suppose it seems absurd, even masochistic, that I'm living here.”

“I've been around Washington too long. I know couples who don't break up because they can't. After the war, they'll divorce. In the meantime, who would get the apartment?”

Claude had not sounded pleased when she told him she was taking the position in Washington. After Thanksgiving she learned why. She phoned the hotel where he always stayed. He was out. When she finally went to bed at one in the morning, he was still out. The next day, he called her. They had supper together. She was appalled how frightened she felt as she went out on his arm in her perennial mink and her best black dress. She wanted, she needed, the relationship with him, but suddenly it was not there.

He was impersonally ebullient. “This will be my chef d'oeuvre. I'll bet you've never heard of Marshal Zhukov. There's a big move on to explain Russia to the American public, and we're going to make a battle epic about Kursk. Do you know that was the greatest, the most decisive battle of the war, and nobody here has heard of it? Thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, cavalry—yes, believe me, they use horses! The Russian horses in their thousands beat the German horses in their thousands, because they bear cold better. This is a movie Eisenstein could make, but I'm in charge, and it's going to be brutally beautiful, realistic and epic at once.”

She marked time through his description of his Marshal Zhukov epic until she could find out exactly what was going on. She found out.

“Louise, my precious, we all have many commitments. We have lived long and full lives, both of us, and we have old friends. I wish you had talked to me before you decided to pick up and transplant yourself.… But as adults, we can work things out to everyone's mutual benefit. Trust me.…”

It turned out that in Washington, Claude had another friend, a French singer in a local supper club. Claude was in the habit of seeing Monique in Washington, as he saw Louise in New York. Now he would have to divide his Washington time between them.

Sitting there, growing chilled at the table in the restaurant of his hotel, where they had eaten together that first evening a year and a half before, she knew she could not oblige him. Why had she thought the relationship more serious than it was? Nobody had given her an emerald before. She was not used to expensive presents, so she had thought that meant more than it did to Claude.

“But you do mean a great deal to me, Louise. I value your company. I adore you. Surely you know that.” Across the table he was as handsome, as charming, as ever. With the same gesture that had so often warmed her, he swept up her hand and pressed it against his heart. “You can't doubt my love for you?”

“Love is a word too widely used nowadays,” Louise said, freeing her hand. “I don't think in this case, it quite applies.”

“Darling, I know you never thought you were the only woman in my entire life. After all, we live three thousand miles apart. I'm a married man, even if I don't know where my wife is.”

“What I thought seems to have been largely wish fulfillment. That would be the most charitable view.”

“Louise, when we're together, you're happy, I'm happy. That isn't real? It's real, it's beautiful, and it's something we can give each other again and again.”

“Not me, Claude. I need a few illusions. Now that I don't have them, the frost is on the pumpkin with a vengeance.” As he looked puzzled, she added, “Monique is an older commitment, and I bow out in her favor.”

When Susannah finally left, the landlord gave Louise permission to paint and actually presented her with a couple of prewar gallons, for which of course he charged exorbitantly. Daniel helped her do the living room ceiling. When they stopped, they were both speckled with white, and had to help each other turpentine off the spots.

“I'm trying to figure it out, how it feels to you,” he said. “The equivalent is if I found out Ann was sleeping with another guy two or three nights a month. My relationship with her was just as partial and just as distant as yours with Claude. I'd feel betrayed, even though I didn't love her and I didn't give her what she wanted.”