Louise's Blunder (6 page)

At the end of the day Royal gave the terminus supervisor a copy of the victim’s picture and his card with the request that the supervisor would post it in the drivers’ lounge.

At seven thirty he knocked off. He stopped at a pub he knew well and ordered clam chowder and a grilled cheese sandwich. And a beer. He’d done all he could until the fingerprint girls at the FBI gave him a positive identification of the victim.

Rose Dudley lived in the Potomac House Apartments off ‘I’ Street on 25th, a long four blocks from my boarding house. The evening was lovely so I decided to go on foot, but I was winded from the walk and three flights of stairs when I finally knocked on Rose’s apartment door. I hadn’t known what to wear or whether I should bring food with me, so in the end I stayed in my work clothes and picked up a bag of Fritos at the Western Market on the way to Rose’s apartment. Rose answered the door in a scarlet flowered kaftan that grazed the top of her bare feet. She had a cocktail in one hand and a celery stick heaped with pimento cheese in the other.

‘Come in, dearie,’ she said. ‘Fritos! Yay! Sadie won’t let me buy these, she says they’re not healthy.’ She looked at my demure suit with amusement. ‘You are the picture of the conscientious government girl. What do you like to wear on the weekend?’ she asked.

‘Jeans and a sweater,’ I said.

‘Wear that the next time you come over. We don’t believe that women should be forced to wear clothing they aren’t comfortable in,’ said a petite blonde woman with cropped hair who came into the room. She stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Sadie,’ she said, ‘Rose’s room-mate.’ Sadie was comfortable in black leggings, a white shirt that hung below her fanny and a red scarf tied around her neck. She was drinking what appeared to be beer out of a Mason jar.

‘Of course we must wear what our job dictates at work,’ Sadie said. ‘But not when we’re in our own homes.’

‘What’s your poison, Louise?’ Rose asked.

‘Do you have any gin?’ I asked.

‘I’m drinking a gin sour myself. You want to try one?’

‘I’d rather have a Martini if that’s OK,’ I said.

‘Of course it is.’

‘No olive, though, please,’ I said.

‘I’ll just wave a little vermouth over it, shall I?’ Rose said, parting a beaded curtain that hid a tiny kitchenette.

‘Sit,’ Sadie said to me, pointing to an upholstered chair with its back shaped like half a large keg. Dubiously I lowered myself into it and found it quite comfortable.

‘What kind of chair is this?’ I asked.

‘A barrel chair,’ Sadie said, draping herself over a matching chair and crossing her feet over a packing case that served as a coffee table.

Rose, trailing the hem of her flowered dress behind her, drifted back into the room with a tray and set it down on the trunk. It contained my Martini in a jelly jar, a bowl of Fritos and a carton of pimento cheese. She used the battered leather sofa between the chairs as a chaise, her bare feet crossed at the ankle across the arm of the sofa.

Sadie finished her beer and hopped up from her chair. ‘Want to listen to some music?’ she asked. ‘What do you like?’

‘Anything that’s not Frank Sinatra!’ Ada owned every Sinatra record and I could hear it from her room next door constantly. Not that the man didn’t have a good voice. In fact I didn’t much like crooners or big band music. Too mellow. I loved hillbilly music like The Carter Family and Roy Acuff, or Bob Wills. I was alone in my musical tastes in my boarding house. When I tuned the radio to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights the lounge cleared out quickly. I didn’t even think to suggest country music to Rose and Sadie. I could just imagine what they would think.

‘Do you like jazz?’ Sadie asked, flipping through a stack of twelve-inch seventy-eights that lay on the table where their record player sat.

Jazz was Negro music, though I knew lots of white people liked it and went to the colored nightclubs on the weekend to hear it. My only experience with jazz was the snatches I heard in the kitchen when Madeleine controlled the radio. Which wasn’t often. Dellaphine usually changed the dial to a gospel station.

‘I’ve not heard much jazz,’ I said, ‘but I’m willing to try it.’

‘I’ve got lots of Duke Ellington,’ Sadie said. ‘He was born here in Washington, you know.’

We listened to ‘Take the A Train’, ‘Cotton Tail’, ‘Stardust’ and ‘Jump for Joy’ until it was time for seconds on our drinks. I liked jazz, I decided. It was loose and fun and had personality.

‘I’m getting another gin sour,’ Rose said, swinging her legs off the sofa. ‘Another Martini?’ she asked me.

‘Sure,’ I said.

As Rose vanished into the kitchen the apartment doorbell rang.

Sadie answered it and in breezed Peggy Benton.

‘It’s about time,’ Sadie said. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I had to cook dinner and clean up,’ Peggy said. ‘Hi, Louise.’

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘So now that your conjugal duties are completed satisfactorily you can come have a drink with your friends,’ Rose said, coming out of the kitchen and handing me my Martini. ‘I am never getting married. The usual, Peggy? Dubonnet on ice?’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘and yes, Sadie, I had to feed my husband. But he’s safely ensconced at his desk working now, just like every night.’

‘It’s a good thing your apartment house is just across our alley or we never would see you,’ Sadie said.

Rose handed Peggy her tumbler of Dubonnet. Still a little breathless she dropped on to the sofa and sipped from it.

‘What a day,’ Peggy said. ‘There is one piece of good news, though. Apparently Paul Hughes is OK. He was taken ill visiting his mother and since his landlady didn’t have a telephone his mother sent a telegram.’

I perked up my ears.

‘Paul is a friend of ours,’ Rose said to me. ‘He hasn’t come to work this week and there was no word from him. We were all worried.’

‘The office sent someone to Paul’s boarding house and his landlady had gotten this telegram from Paul’s mother. So I guess that he’ll be back at work when he feels better,’ Peggy said.

I didn’t volunteer that I was that first ‘someone’, or that I had spent a day documenting Hughes’ file usage at OSS.

‘So, Sadie,’ Rose said, ‘what clever things did Mr Churchill say today?’ She turned to me and said, ‘Sadie is Terence Layman’s secretary. She sees whatever crosses his desk.’

‘You’re joking,’ I said. Layman was the most prominent gossip columnist in Washington. His column ran in the
Washington Times-Herald
, the conservative newspaper run by Cissy Patterson. Patterson loathed Roosevelt.

‘Yes, I work for Mr Layman,’ Sadie said. ‘I don’t agree with him politically, but I don’t have to. I rarely see the man. He’s out at parties most nights, comes into the office at all hours and leaves me instructions on the Dictaphone. The most interesting things cross his desk, you wouldn’t believe. And no, Rose, I don’t think Churchill said anything clever today.’

‘You don’t like Winston Churchill?’ I asked.

Rose hooted.

‘Of course not,’ Peggy said, ‘he’s a Tory.’

‘Although he makes an excellent speech, you have to admit,’ Sadie said.

‘That’s just about his only positive trait,’ Rose said.

I’d never before heard anyone speak about Prime Minister Churchill this way.

‘Don’t look so horrified, Louise,’ Rose said. ‘Oh, and don’t worry, anything we talk about here doesn’t leave this room.’

‘So why don’t you admire Churchill?’ I asked.

‘Let’s see,’ Sadie said, ‘He’s an aristocrat. And a royalist. You know, keep the servants in the basement just as God ordained it. Some people are simply born to be rich and powerful.’

‘And the British Empire must keep its colonies. Like India. No matter how much the Indians want their freedom,’ Rose said.

‘Just wait until after the war is over,’ Peggy said. ‘I don’t think speechifying will help Churchill much then. The British people will demand social reforms, not a return to feudalism.’

‘I just hope life in this country doesn’t revisit the thirties. Remember Herbert Hoover? Dear God,’ Rose said.

I agreed with that.

‘That does worry me,’ I said. ‘I want to keep working after the war is over. But will there be as many jobs for women?’

‘Don’t forget the Negroes,’ Sadie said. ‘After fighting in the war and working regular jobs do you think they’re going to want to go back to sharecropping and cleaning houses?’

I thought of Madeleine. She wouldn’t live her mother’s life without putting up a fight.

‘We’re all going to have to work very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen,’ Sadie said.

‘Which is why people like us have to meet and plan now,’ Rose said. ‘We must be prepared to act.’

I had been thinking much along the same lines. Worried about what would happen to me after the war. But I’d kept my thoughts to myself most of the time. It was liberating to talk openly to other girls who felt the same about the future as I did. Girls who did not want to go home to their parents or get married for marriage’s sake after the war because there were no jobs for them. I felt a pang as I reminded myself that I’d avoided a romance with Joe to avoid offending anyone at OSS.

Peggy took a long sip of her Dubonnet. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘this tastes so good.’ She slid out of her light jacket and threw it on to the packing case which served as a coffee table. When it landed a pamphlet flew out of the pocket.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I almost forgot! I picked up one of these at work. If you want to be outraged take a look.’

Rose reached for it. ‘Listen to this,’ she said, reading the title, ‘“Relocation of Japanese-Americans”.’ She read to herself for a few minutes. ‘Disgraceful!’ she said. ‘The government is interning American citizens! A hundred thousand Japanese-Americans who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong at all!’

I noticed the publication line on the pamphlet: ‘War Relocation Authority, May 1943’.

‘Peggy, you didn’t take that from work!’ I said. ‘You could be fired!’

Peggy shrugged. ‘There were stacks of them,’ she said. ‘No one will miss one. I figured Sadie could take it to her boss and perhaps he’d write an article about it.’

Sadie hooted. ‘Not a chance; he works for the
Herald
, remember?’ she said. ‘But I know a cub reporter for the
Post
I can slip it to.’

‘Don’t look so horrified,’ Peggy said to me. ‘The pamphlet is being routed to the Library of Congress and bunches of other places. It’s not secret.’ She picked it up and tossed it to me. I could only bear to read the first paragraph.

‘… with invasion of the west coast looming as an imminent possibility, the Western Defense Command of the United States Army decided that the military situation required the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from a broad coastal strip. In the weeks that followed, both American-born and alien Japanese residents were moved from a prescribed zone comprising the entire State of California, the western half of Oregon and Washington, and the southern third of Arizona’, I read. What military situation, I wondered? Did the military really think that if Japan invaded the west coast Japanese-Americans would join them? What about the Japanese military dictatorship would appeal to them? It was absurd. I felt sick.

‘I need another drink,’ Rose said, lifting herself from the sofa and heading toward a makeshift bar.

My God, I thought. Innocent Americans from four states imprisoned without due process. For once I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. ‘Of course,’ I said, after browsing the rest of the pamphlet, ‘the internment camps have all the comforts of home, behind their barbed wire fences.’ I tossed the pamphlet to Sadie. I didn’t think it would matter much if she could find a reporter to write the story. Most Americans agreed with the government’s internment policies. I did too, once.

As I walked home from Rose’s place in the soft spring evening I felt as tranquil as I’d been in ages. I’d spent the evening with women like me … well, Rose and Sadie were more radical than me, but still we were simpatico much of the time. Where I could actually say out loud much of what I thought without Henry or Phoebe tut-tutting me. And have a cocktail in a lounge instead of in my bedroom. And listen to new music instead of the same old big band stuff.

‘I hope you’ll come back next week,’ Rose had said as she walked me to the entrance of her apartment house.

‘I’ll be here,’ I said. Next time I’d bring a bottle of gin with me to restock the bar.

As I turned into the front gate of ‘Two Trees’ Ada came out of the house, shutting the door softly behind her.

‘Hi,’ I said, surprised to see her.

She raised her finger to her lips and hurried up to me, taking my arm and leading me back out to the sidewalk.

‘What on earth—’ I began.

‘Shhh,’ she whispered. ‘Come, we need to stand where we can’t be seen from the lounge.’

We moved down the street a few yards. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Milt,’ she said. ‘Oh, Louise, it’s terrible. Awful.’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘He was badly hurt. Much worse than he told Phoebe. She got the phone call from the hospital right after you left and she and Henry went to pick Milt up. He’s gotten so drunk since he got home. You need to be prepared to meet him.’

‘What happened to him?’ I asked, afraid of the answer.

The door to ‘Two Trees’ opened.

‘Louise,’ Phoebe called out, ‘I thought I heard your voice. Come inside and meet my son!’

Ada squeezed my arm hard. ‘I need to find a taxi and get to the hotel. I’m playing ten to two tonight.’ She hurried down the street toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

I found myself inside the entrance hall of ‘Two Trees’, being led by Phoebe into the lounge where Henry and Milt sat. At first I didn’t notice anything, but then Milt stood up. His left shirtsleeve was neatly rolled up and pinned under his shoulder. He was missing his entire left arm.

Thanks to Ada’s warning I was able to react without shock.

‘Louise,’ Phoebe said, ‘this is my oldest son, Milt.’

Milt stood up, swaying slightly, and extended his right hand.

‘So you are the delightful Louise,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’