Louise's War (3 page)

I didn’t answer her. I’d never have the money to go to Europe. Besides, I was getting married in three weeks.

‘Remember our pledge,’ Rachel said. ‘We’re going to name our daughters after each other. You’ll have a baby before I do, though.’

I didn’t respond to that either. Bill and I had already decided not to have children until the Depression was over. We simply couldn’t afford it.

‘You’ll marry soon, too, I’m sure,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ she said, smoothing the skirt of her new traveling suit.

‘Rachel . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Someday I’ll repay you . . .’

Rachel interrupted me by placing her hand over my mouth. ‘You promised not to speak of that again, ever. Besides, how would I have gotten through this year without you?’

After we finished packing we sat on my bare mattress and held hands, silent, afraid to speak for fear we’d burst into tears. At last the porter came to pick up Rachel and her luggage and take her to the train station.

‘Goodbye,’ I whispered to her.

‘
Non
,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘In France we don’t say that. It’s
au revoir
. Until we see each other again.’

After Rachel returned to France we wrote each other every week. We shared the details of our marriages, her baby son, our lives. Hers was infinitely more colorful than mine, and I longed to visit her, but my family didn’t have that kind of money. As the thirties came to a close Rachel’s letters described France’s growing fear of Nazism. For months after I stopped hearing from her I wrote her every week, I begged the French embassy for help in locating her, and I pestered the New York office of her father’s bank. I wrote dozens of letters and got not one in reply. After Pearl Harbor I stopped trying to find her, but I wondered every day whether she was homeless and hungry, or even alive. I didn’t think I’d know what had happened to her until the war was over, if then.

But now I knew that Rachel, Gerald and little Claude were still in Marseille and desperate to get out of Europe. I felt just as desperate. And powerless. What could I possibly do to help them? I’d learned from reading the newspaper what financial resources were required to sponsor a Jewish European refugee for an American visa, and I didn’t have them.

I felt thankful that I was alone in the office. I couldn’t have hidden my emotions from anyone. I felt alternately feverish, freezing cold and shaky, as my body responded to my anguish. For a few minutes I thought I might need to rush back to the bathroom to faint again, or maybe spew. But I commanded myself to calm down. Giving in to panic would be useless.

What could I do to help Rachel? Could I even admit to anyone at OSS that I knew her? Would that influence the decision to respond to Gerald’s overture, or not? I’d never felt so helpless in my life.

I could think of only one option.

With Bloch’s file tucked under one arm, I knocked on Bob Holman’s office door and waited for him to call out for me to enter. Holman, the head of the Europe/Africa desk, was a very fat man. In this stifling heat he often stripped to his underwear to work, and he wasn’t the only man in Washington who did so. After a bit of shuffling around he called out to me, and I went into his office. Holman, his round face red, forehead streaming perspiration, sat at his desk knotting his tie. A cot with a rumpled pillow stood in a corner. The files on his desk, weighted down with whatever he could find to keep them from being scattered about by the breeze from his Philco floor fan, lay stacked in piles all around him.

Holman would decide whether or not to forward Bloch’s file to the OSS Projects Committee, which had the authority to direct Special Operations, the glamor boys and girls of OSS, to smuggle the Bloch family out of Marseille. Over the last six months I’d earned Holman’s respect by recommending specific dossiers to him, and he’d asked me to flag material I thought could be important. He got the credit for whatever I suggested, which I resented, of course, but that’s just the way it was.

Truth was, I knew as much about Holman’s work, and what went on in OSS, as he did. The difference between us was, Holman got briefed officially along with the other men in our branch while I picked up what I knew from the papers I filed, gossip in the girls’ restroom and coffee-break conversations.

‘I’ve got a good prospect for you, Mr Holman,’ I said, handing him the Bloch file instead of tossing it in his pending basket.

‘Let’s see it,’ Holman said, taking the file from me after resting his thick Havana cigar on the rim of an overflowing ashtray. ‘Wait a few minutes, Louise, I’ve brought fresh lemonade from home,’ he said, as I turned to leave. He read through the contents of the file.

‘A hydrographer familiar with the North African coast,’ he said. ‘Interesting. Might be very useful to us.’

Holman laid the file aside. He hadn’t tossed it into his ‘to be filed’ box yet, which was good, but then again he hadn’t stacked it in the Projects Committee box either.

‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘Have some lemonade.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

Holman pulled a Thermos bottle from a desk drawer. He sat it smack down on the Bloch file, leaving a wet circle on its Manila jacket.

He poured me a glass of lemonade, which I drank appreciatively. It was still cool.

‘Where did you get the sugar?’ I asked.

Holman chuckled. ‘I have my ways,’ he said. ‘Or rather I should say, my wife has her ways. She’s a resourceful woman.’

I drained my glass.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That tasted wonderful.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Holman said, mopping his face with a fresh handkerchief. ‘God, it’s damn hot. The family and I are going to spend this weekend at a friend’s camp on the Potomac,’ he said. ‘My wife’s picking me up after work. Just thinking about getting out of the city makes me feel cooler.’

‘I’m planning to relax on the porch with Agatha Christie’s new novel,’ I said. How lame. I was never good at small talk. I tried not to stare at the Bloch file, now pinned under Holman’s fleshy elbow.

Holman mopped his forehead again and glanced at his watch. This was my cue that he was done being familiar with the help and I should leave him to his paper-shuffling and get back to mine. I ignored his signal. I crossed my legs, which are shapely, if not long, thank you very much, and settled in for a chat.

Holman was enough of a gentleman that he didn’t directly ask me to leave. Instead he screwed the top back on his Thermos and stashed it away in a drawer. He took his cigar out of the ashtray and chewed it, dribbling ash on Bloch’s file. My determination weakened. Holman smoked the smelliest cigars in the building.

‘So,’ I said, trolling for more conversation, ‘is your wife still looking for a job?’

Holman harrumphed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Silly notion, to go out to work and hire a colored woman to look after the children. I don’t think it will happen, thank goodness. She can’t type worth a damn. She’s flunked the test three times.’

‘She could work in a factory,’ I said.

‘Over my dead body. I’d look like a sap, with a wife in coveralls. I won’t allow it.’

Holman glanced at his watch again. I’d overstayed my welcome, I knew, but I wasn’t leaving until I knew what he did with that file, one way or the other.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what did you think of the file I brought you?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, ‘thanks for reminding me.’ He picked up the file, waved it about to shake off the cigar ash and tossed it into the Projects Committee outbox. Rachel and Gerald and Claude now had a spark, only a glimmer mind you, of hope of escaping Marseille.

Back in my office I was again grateful to be alone.

Behind the closed door I put my head on my desk and wept.

I tried to console myself by remembering that I wasn’t by any means the only American with friends or family in Europe. And Rachel and her family were French citizens living in Vichy, unoccupied France, so they were safer than most. I couldn’t dwell on them or I wouldn’t be able to sleep or work. And I’d done everything I could for them, hadn’t I?

THREE

A
t quitting time I joined the throng of weary government workers who streamed out of dozens of government buildings and waited on steaming sidewalks all over the city, hoping against hope to get a bus or trolley home. Many of us waited in vain. Capital Transit refused to hire Negroes to take the place of their drivers who were drafted into the military, despite newspaper editorials, government pleas and public demonstrations by both races. It astonished me that some people in this country didn’t have the common sense to understand that if colored men could fight in this war, they could certainly drive buses. Fortunately most folks with cars picked up as many riders from the slug lines as they could on their way home. A girl I knew once got a lift from Eleanor Roosevelt and rode home in the President’s armored Cadillac limousine!

A big gray Packard drew up next to me. A young man wearing a straw panama hat leaned out of the window. ‘Where are you headed?’ he asked.

‘I can walk from Washington Circle,’ I said.

‘Get in.’

I squeezed into the back seat next to a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen and a baby-faced army private. They were holding hands and looked scared to death.

‘These two are on their way to the magistrate to get hitched up,’ the driver said.

The couple looked at each other as if they couldn’t quite believe the driver’s words referred to them.

‘I ship out on Monday,’ the young private said. ‘And Clara here is going to work at the S&W cafeteria near the Capitol.’

‘Senators and generals eat there every day,’ Clara said, ‘and the pay is really good.’

Wait until you find out how much the hot, tiny room you’re going to share with three other girls is going to cost you, I thought. And try not to get pregnant tonight. One of the clerks who worked for me was already a widow with an infant. She shared a bathroom with twenty-one other roomers in a rat-infested boarding house. Her baby boarded at a cousin’s home in Maryland somewhere. For goodness’ sake, Clara, go to Union Station instead of the courthouse, sweetly kiss Private Dogface goodbye, go home and finish high school.

‘Congratulations,’ I said instead.

‘Here you go,’ the driver said, pulling over at Washington Square and Pennsylvania Avenue.

I climbed out of the car and waved as it pulled away from the curb. Since I’d gone to work this morning a bogus anti-aircraft gun constructed of wood had appeared next to the equestrian statue of young Lieutenant George Washington in the grassy center of the circle. At least the gun wasn’t manned by a couple of artillerymen scanning the sky with binoculars, like the fake ones on the roof of the White House.

I walked south to ‘I’ Street. My boarding house was just outside the ‘K’ Street boundary that separated the rarefied air of Dupont Circle from the middle-class environs of George Washington University. The brick row houses on our street were narrower than the elegant town houses further north, our back yards were smaller, and sometimes we could catch a whiff of the Potomac and the Heurich brewery from our porch on a breezy day.

I wasn’t yet used to seeing my boarding house, ‘Two Trees’, named after the tall pecan trees in the back yard, without its wrought-iron fence and Juliet balconies. Henry and Joe dismantled them last weekend and added them to the towering pile of scrap metal at the end of the street, waiting for the scrap collectors to tote it all away. Henry said the war would be over before they got around to it. The pile ruined the looks of the street. Circled by a tall chicken-wire fence, the stack held all the scrap metal our block could scrounge, including an astounding number of kitchen pots and pans and a garden statue of a naked cherub meant to sprinkle a backyard fish-pond.

Inside the narrow dark hall I hung up my hat and breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be out of the sun. I quickly sorted through the mail on the hall table. None for me, thank goodness. Letters from my parents inevitably asked when I was coming home. They thought it was noble for me work for the war effort, but they assumed my life in Washington was temporary. I supposed I’d have to go home after the war, unless I remarried, but it made me cringe to think about it.

I dumped my purse on a frayed needlepoint chair and walked back to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Dellaphine, who didn’t cook for the household again until Sunday, sat at the kitchen table with her feet up on another chair, nodding off to the sound of the
Dinner Music
show on WINX. Her radio, a big Silvertone that droned on and on all day, sat on the Hoosier cabinet next to the mixing bowls. Dellaphine started awake as I tiptoed over to the sink.

‘Good evenin’, Mrs Pearlie,’ Dellaphine said, stretching her arms over her head. ‘You’re home mighty early.’

‘I got a lift,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I woke you up.’

I filled a glass to its brim twice from the faucet over the sink and drank my fill. The scarred white porcelain sink stood stolidly on iron legs, wide enough and deep enough to bathe a child in, and reminded me of the one in my parents’ kitchen. I’d often watched my mother rinse beach sand off my younger brother in ours. I rarely felt homesick, but for some silly reason this kitchen sink caused an occasional pang.

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ Dellaphine said. ‘I was just restin’ my eyes.’

Dellaphine Stokes was our landlady’s colored cook and housekeeper. She’d worked for Phoebe Knox, or the Knox family, since she was fourteen years old. She had kin in Wilmington, which is how I came to live at Mrs Knox’s boarding house. Lily Johnson, the colored woman who took in my family’s laundry, sang in the St Stephen A. M. E. Zion Church choir with Dellaphine’s cousin.

Dellaphine was a warm milk-chocolate color and so skinny she could wrap her apron strings all the way around herself and tie them in front. Once there were two other servants in the house, but they’d left when war broke out, the driver to a government motor pool and the maid to a commercial laundry. Dellaphine and Mrs Knox ran the boarding house themselves, but the four of us boarders were more than happy to pitch in. We lived in tall cotton compared to most of our fellow war-workers in Washington.