Louise's War (4 page)

As a genuine country girl I was in charge of the chicken coop and the Victory garden. On the back stoop I took off my shoes, put a straw hat on my head, poured corn into an empty coffee can and padded out into the yard. The dirt was hot and dry under my bare feet. I stopped at the outdoor spigot, filling a watering can with water. Though it rained most evenings, it wasn’t enough to keep the garden green and growing in this heat.

Since I grew up in coastal North Carolina I had plenty of experience with heat and humidity, but I couldn’t remember a June this withering even on the Cape Fear River. Heat waves shimmered over the facades of granite and limestone government buildings. The waters of the Potomac River, crowded with yachts, sailboats and houseboats docked two-deep, most serving as living quarters, lay still and reflective as a mirror. Men looked swell in white linen suits for about an hour after they dressed, until the linen sagged into wrinkles and dust coated their shoes. Squirrels gathered in the shade of the White House porte-cochere, splayed on their bellies, panting, not moving until Fala was nearly upon them. One Sunday I’d read in the
Washington Post
that the British Foreign Office classified Washington as a tropical hardship post, which allowed the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, to wear khaki shorts and a pith helmet like his colleagues in South-east Asia and Africa. Fortunately for his dignity and ours, he demurred. A grainy newspaper photograph showed him going about his duties stiff-upper-lipped in a dark suit.

I rattled the door of the chicken coop, built in the shade of one of the pecan trees by Joe and Henry before I came to town, sending the chickens running and clucking to the other end of the wire enclosure. Once inside the coop I scattered corn on the ground and filled the water pan. Dellaphine collected enough eggs for breakfast and baking every day, and recently we’d been thinking about raising some chicks, too, because of rumors of food shortages.

I pumped water three more times from the well and toted it to the garden, drenching tomatoes, okra, beans and squash. I collected a few ripe tomatoes and went back to the house, washing my feet at the back door with a bucket of water I’d saved for that purpose.

‘That brings back memories,’ Joe said, in his fluent but accented English.

I hadn’t noticed Joe lounging on a kitchen chair, his thumb between the pages of a book, in the shade of the house near the back door, and started.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Seeing you reminded me of my grandfather’s farm outside Prague. The milkmaids always washed their feet before coming into the kitchen with their pails.’

When I’d first met Joe I instantly thought he looked exactly like I’d always imagined Jo March’s professor husband Fritz Bhaer from
Little Men
looked, except younger. He had jet-black hair and a neat beard, wore thick rimless eyeglasses and carried a handsome gold pocket watch on an intricate fob even when he lounged around the house in baggy flannels.

Joe didn’t talk much about his past, except for an occasional remark like the one he’d made about his grandfather’s farm. I did know he’d grown up in England and taught Slavic languages at George Washington University.

Henry Post, the other male boarder who shared a room with Joe on the third floor of the house, was positive Joe was a Commie pinko, all these refugees Roosevelt’s crowd let into the country were. I didn’t know if that was true, but I’d be Red, too, I thought, if the world had stood by and let Hitler occupy my country.

‘Have you been out here long?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘watching you go about your pastoral duties.’

Don’t blush, I told myself, don’t blush. Joe came out here to relax and read, not to admire you. You’re way past admiring age. I took off my straw hat and stowed the watering can under a bench. Dark, heat-generated clouds had begun to gather to the south, so Joe followed me inside, bringing the chair with him and restoring it to its place at the kitchen table.

‘After spending all day inside a classroom it was nice to be outside for a bit, even in this heat,’ he said.

Dellaphine was downstairs changing for her Friday night women’s sewing circle at the Gethsemane Baptist Church, so I washed the tomatoes and left them on the drain board.

‘Want to go out to get something to eat?’ Joe asked.

‘Too hot, too crowded,’ I said. ‘And it looks like it might rain. I was going to make a sandwich. Want one?’

Dellaphine appeared at the door wearing a flowered shirt-waist dress, carrying her piece bag in one hand and white patent-leather pocketbook in the other.

‘You all can have some of the leftover ham,’ she said. ‘And there’s bread in the bread box. Miz Phoebe is upstairs in bed with a sick headache.’ Phoebe Knox’s two sons served in the navy somewhere in the Pacific, we didn’t know exactly where. ‘Miss Ada’s playing at a tea dance,’ Dellaphine continued. ‘And I don’t know where Mr Henry is.’

‘I expect he stopped somewhere to eat, since you don’t cook for us on Friday nights,’ Joe said, teasing her. ‘What we’re paying forty dollars a month for I don’t know.’

Dellaphine snorted. ‘You be lucky to get Sunday dinner,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t whine no more if I was you.’

After Dellaphine left I fixed ham and tomato sandwiches, which Joe and I ate with leftover Waldorf salad made the right way, with lots of apples, nuts, raisins and Duke’s mayonnaise, and tall glasses of cold milk. After we finished Joe took our plates and glasses over to the sink and washed them. He was the only man I knew who’d ever washed a dish. The first time I saw him do it I just plain gaped.

Whenever Joe and I were alone, I had a heightened awareness of him that was almost electric, like the tingle I felt looking out over a rough ocean before a thunderstorm. I’d never felt that way before, not even with my husband, although I told myself that was because I’d known Bill since we were children.

That must be what made Joe different from my husband, from any other fellows I’d had crushes on. Bill had been just a boy, and I only a girl, really, even when we married. Joe was a man. And I was now a grown woman, away from my family’s, my neighbors’ and my church’s watchful eyes, emancipated by my widowhood and my move to Washington.

I didn’t know what to make of my feelings and had no reason to think Joe noticed them. Besides, this, whatever it was, infatuation, desire, maybe just curiosity, embarrassed me. I flushed, wondering if everyone else in the boarding house noticed that Joe affected me so.

When alone, silence tended to fall between us. I never knew what to talk about with Joe. He was so well educated and worldly it tied my tongue, though he wasn’t a bit conceited. I felt sorry for him, too, what with what was going on in Europe. Only yesterday we’d gotten news of a second Czech village burned to the ground by the Nazis in retaliation for harboring enemy agents. That made me think of Rachel and her family, and I had to remind myself to put them out of my mind, for the sake of my sanity. I’d done what I could for them.

Joe rescued us from silence.

‘Want to go into the sitting room and listen to the radio?’ he asked. ‘Kate Smith is on. I’ve had enough news for a while.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but then I’ll have to knit. I pity the GI who has to wear a pair of socks I’ve made.’

‘It won’t matter, as long as they’re warm.’

A crack of lightning shook the house, and the heavens opened, discharging the moisture that saturated the air during the day. A few minutes later Henry Post burst into the kitchen, furling his umbrella.

‘That was close,’ he said.

‘Have you had supper?’ I asked. ‘There’s ham and stuff in the refrigerator,’ I added quickly, so he wouldn’t think I was offering to fix him something. Damn it, I paid the same rent Henry did and he could make his own sandwiches, the same as the rest of us.

‘I’ve eaten,’ he said. ‘I waited in line at a diner for an hour. There was only one waitress. It was all she could do to take everyone’s order. We had to pick up our own plates from the kitchen.’

Ada Herman and I lived on the second floor of Mrs Knox’s boarding house, in Milt Jr. and Tom Knox’s old bedrooms. We shared the floor’s single bathroom with their mother, Phoebe Knox, who occupied the large master bedroom at the front of the house. Mrs Knox must have had some money left after the Depression, even though her husband tragically drowned – Phoebe’s euphemism for his suicide – the day after the stock market crashed, because she managed to keep the house and raise her sons. And she could have squeezed twice the boarders she had into her home. Both Ada and I could have room-mates if we moved the boys’ desks out of our rooms. Joe and Henry shared an old servant’s room on the third floor, but the box room and cedar closet on the same floor could be converted to bedrooms. Joe and Henry’s room had a cold-water sink, I figured, because the pipe that fed it ran up a corner of my room, near my bed. I didn’t believe there was a full bathroom up there because both men took their baths in the copper tub in the laundry room, and I think they shared a chemical toilet. I’d seen one or the other of them carrying a pot out to the old outhouse on several early mornings.

Dellaphine’s bedroom and bathroom, which she shared with her daughter Madeleine, were in the daylight half of the basement. The laundry was in the dark half at the front of the house. The Knox house was at the end of the block, so it had a porch and a bigger yard than its neighbors. I didn’t know how anyone could live without a screened porch. If it weren’t for the men, I’d sleep out there every night.

I was almost asleep when Ada came in, too late to fire up her record player, thank goodness. I was a fan of Frank Sinatra, who wasn’t, but I’d heard ‘Blue Skies’ enough to last me the rest of my life.

After last night’s rain shower it was cool on the porch, where I sat drinking coffee and eating a biscuit spread thinly with some of Dellaphine’s last pot of home-made strawberry jam. The ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. I resolved to have a quiet day, stay out of the heat, read
Five Little Pigs
, maybe fix myself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch. And on Saturday night everyone in the house knew the radio in the sitting room was mine.
The Grand Ole Opry
was my only relief from Glenn Miller and his kind. Not that I didn’t like swing and jazz, it’s just that I missed hillbilly music.

Ada slammed the porch door behind her. Ada was a busty woman in her thirties with platinum-blonde hair arranged in a long pompadour she often contained in a snood. She never left her room without make-up, and always wore a dress, never trousers or a housecoat. She clipped her nails short to hide her nail-biting habit.

Ada came to Washington from New York City to play the clarinet with the house band at the Willard Hotel. Rumor had it that girl musicians made eighty-five dollars a week. I almost believed it, what with the number of cocktail dresses and record albums Ada owned. She often stayed out at night long after her set was over, and had gone through several beaux since I’d arrived six months ago. Henry swore she was a divorcée.

Ada flapped the morning newspaper at me.

‘Guess what’s happening today!’ Without letting me answer, she burst out. ‘Marlene Dietrich! She’s going to be at Jelleff’s this afternoon! We have to go!’

‘Dearie,’ I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere today. It’s too hot.’

‘Louise, we could meet Marlene Dietrich in person! All we have to do is buy a war bond! Besides, Jelleff’s is refrigerated.’

‘Not outside, where we’d be standing in line for hours, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘I admire Miss Dietrich very much, but you’ll have to go without me.’

‘I swear, I’ll never understand you,’ Ada said, shaking her head. ‘Oh, well.’ She stood up, eyeing my empty plate. ‘Is there any strawberry jam left?’

‘One jar. Dellaphine says we can have a teaspoon each. And are you done with the paper? I haven’t read it yet.’

‘Can I tear out Miss Dietrich’s picture? Maybe she’ll autograph it for me. There’s just a Safeway ad on the back.’

Ada left me with most of the newspaper and went off to the kitchen to fix her breakfast.

I opened the newspaper, where a headline on the front page caught my eye. ‘Tragic Death in Foggy Bottom’, it read. The story left me immobile with shock.

One Robert Holman had died of a heart attack in his office at an unnamed government agency early yesterday evening.

FOUR

I
was so jolted I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading the newspaper story. Instead I went into the kitchen for another cup of coffee to bolster my courage, adding sugar even though I had used all I should today. Back on the porch, while drinking my coffee and watching a trio of hummingbirds busy at Phoebe’s bee balm, I tried, without success, to convince myself I’d misread the news article. After finishing my coffee I picked up the paper again.

According to the newspaper, Holman’s wife, who’d been waiting for him with their children in the family car to go away for the weekend, discovered his body and raised an alarm. Must have been quite an alarm, I reflected, for word of a death at the OSS offices to find its way into the newspaper, even if OSS hadn’t been identified by name.

How terrible, I thought, for Holman’s wife, his children and anyone still in the office when the body was found.

Morbidly the article dwelled on the disheveled state of Holman’s office, a file cabinet overturned, the desktop swept clean, papers and files tumbled onto the floor. The man must have thrashed about mightily as he died, perhaps struggling to get to his telephone or out into the hall. His corpse lay spreadeagled on the floor, in the midst of a heap of papers. Poor man.

I read the story twice before I absorbed the news and accepted it. Bob Holman was dead. My boss. I had seen him, what, an hour, two hours before he died? Stupidly, I felt saddened that the man had died before enjoying his weekend on the Potomac.

Bob’s funeral was tomorrow, only two days after he died. That was fast. Of course, it was extremely hot this summer and ice was in short supply.