The War Against Miss Winter (9 page)

She put her hands on her face like a silent film star expressing shock. “That’s great!”

“Don’t get too excited. It’s a lousy play with a rotten company.”

“A role is a role—this is fantastic news.” Jayne succeeded in pulling me to my feet and forced me to hop up and down with her. “See? It’s going to be a good year after all.”

“As you pointed out, it’s only one good thing in a long line of bad.”

She grabbed the meat of my upper arms and gently shook me. “You stop that. No bad thoughts. Oh, my goodness—now you have to go out with us on Friday.”

I stopped bouncing. “Didn’t you hear a word I said?”

“We have to celebrate. I’m not taking no for an answer.” She fished out the gin bottle and examined how much remained. “Should we have a toast?”

“We’ve put down for lesser occasions.”

My change in moods coaxed Churchill out from under the dresser and back onto the bed. He stalked about our plates and the newspaper. When he was certain he had my attention, he stepped into the middle of page one and sprayed it with his foul liquid.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed. He responded with a second wave of urine.

“Shoo, shoo.” Jayne accompanied her weak discouragement with a
series of limp arm movements that were supposed to say
Stop that, now!
but in simple-minded feline meant
This joyful arm dance is meant to encourage you to keep peeing
. Churchill rotated like a lawn sprinkler until dehydration set in, then he stepped into his puddle and off the paper.

I stared at the mess pooling on part one of
Raymond Fielding, Playwright
’s obituary. The liquid made a lazy path down the page until it kissed the top of
NEW YORK OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION DECRIES NOW IS THE TIME FOR PATRIOTISM.

“I’m going to kill him,” I told Jayne.

“We can get another paper.”

“Yes, and we can burn our sheets and put clothespins on our noses, but that isn’t going to save his life.” I took hold of the paper’s upper-right and lower-left corners and lifted them inward. The urine dribbled toward the Office of War Information article and drew a yellow line through the words “New York director Henry Nussbaum.”

“W
HAT
’
S THE
O
FFICE OF
W
AR INFORMATION?”
asked Jayne. I shrugged and scanned the article as best I could without soiling myself. Henry Nussbaum, the man the Fake Fielding had fingered as the lead for the missing play, was apparently the high pillow of the New York Office of War Information. It looked like it was a government agency, but given that such things were a dime a dozen during the war, calling it that was as generic as calling a cat an animal.

I dumped the paper into the wastebasket, marched into the hallway, and rapped on a door across the hall from our own. Restless activity emanated from the room. Paper rustled. A drawer opened and closed. A pen rolled across a hard surface. “Who is it?” asked a distant voice.

“It’s Rosie and Jayne,” I said. “Can we come in for a minute?”

Harriet Rosenfeld peeked her head into the hall and silently ushered us into the room. She closed the door behind us so rapidly that had Jayne lingered a second longer half of her would’ve remained in the hallway.

Harriet’s upper lip was covered with wax. A strip of paper was drying to the substance so she might, in one painful motion, remove the fine hair that grew too dark beneath her nose. Her hair was in rollers, her eyes magnified by Coke-bottle spectacles. By day she was a very pretty girl; by night she was that pretty girl’s homely cousin.

Harriet had no roommate, a choice that upped her rent and her space. Half of it was taken up by the normal trappings of an actress: too many clothes, Max Factor’s complete line, piles of plays, back issues of
Variety
and
Cue
. The other half had become a memorial to the war. A wall was covered in clippings, the floor was stacked with newspapers, a shortwave radio hummed with the latest news straight from Berlin. Harriet was a Jew and while for us the war was an inconvenience, to her it
was a daily exercise in reminding herself what was important.

“What can I do for you, girls?” she asked us now.

“We thought we’d stop in and say hiya,” said Jayne. She looked at me and silently asked how we’d get what we needed without becoming trapped in the room for the remainder of the evening. It’s not that we were uncomfortable with Harriet’s interest in the war, or that we cared one whit about her religious beliefs, but the girl could jaw about both topics until the cows came home and neither of us was game for that.

“You in anything?” I asked.

She moved toward the actress’s side of the room. “I just landed something at the Yiddish Art Theatre.” Harriet was one of the few actresses I knew who reveled in political theater. Despite her willingness to prettify herself for public consumption, her concept of what theater should be had moved progressively left. Many nights she sat in the lobby with the other girls, lecturing them about how what roles they took shouldn’t be about the advancement of their careers but about the advancement of ideas.

It was a nice thought, but it didn’t feed you.

“That’s swell,” I told her. A light went off in my head. “You ever read any of Raymond Fielding’s stuff?”

“Fielding. Fielding.” Harriet eyeballed two teetering towers of plays that served as a temporary bedside table. “What did he write?”

What
did
he write? “Lots of stuff. Including a book called
On Theatre
and a play called
Journey’s End
. I think most of his work was published anonymously.”

Recognition flashed across the Coke-bottle lenses. “I know the guy. Why do you ask?”

“I’m curious about him. He just died and when I read his obituary they listed all these plays he was known for and I realized I’d never read any of them. I figured if he was important enough for the front page of the
Times,
I should probably make his acquaintance.”

Harriet nodded, too enthusiastically. “That’s great, Rosie. I wish
more of the girls around here cared about theater that mattered. If I have anything of his, you’re welcome to it.”

“Thanks. That would be swell.” I lighted on a framed photo of a man in military dress. “Who’s the GI?”

“Harold Leventhal.” Harriet lifted her left hand and wiggled a chip of ice at us.

Jayne leaped to her side and examined the rock. “You’re engaged?! Congratulations. When did this happen?”

“New Year’s Eve. He shipped out two days later.”

“That’s swell, Harriet, just swell,” I said. So this was what the war was like for some women; instead of getting the brush-off, they got a ring and a promise. “Where’s he been sent to?”

“I don’t know and he can’t tell me.” Her tone suggested she did and he had. “He writes for
Stars & Stripes
.” Harriet moved to the side of the room taken over by the conflict and we moved with her. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be much longer until the two halves merged into one, the magazines on the floor growing into a hybrid of audition notices and war propaganda—wanted: women, aged 20–30, average build, with dance training and munitions experience.

Jayne tossed me a look that encouraged me to get to my point.

“Actually, I do have another question for you,” I said. “Do you know what the Office of War Information is?”

“You mean the OWI.” She sat at a desk piled high with letters vandalized by the war censor’s heavy black pen. Beside them was a pad of paper on which she’d scribbled guesses as to what had been deleted from the correspondence.

“That’s the one. What’s the wire on them?”

Harriet pushed her glasses up her nose. “They used to be part of the COI.”

“The CO what?” asked Jayne.

“The Coordinator of Information. It’s a government division set up to handle propaganda. Both ours and theirs.” She nodded at a bleak poster of a sinking ship captioned, “Somebody talked!” “They’re the people responsible for the posters.”

“And they’re here in New York?” I asked.

She nodded. “New York and Washington. They might have other offices, but those are the two I’ve heard about. Why?” There was a sense of desperation to the question, as if Harriet wanted to learn there was someone at the Shaw House as concerned about the war as she was. I understood her desire for commonality, but neither Jayne nor I wanted to get roped into a discussion we didn’t understand. It wasn’t our war the way it was hers, and while it felt cold and small to think that, at the time we believed if we kept our noses out of Europe it would be kind enough to do the same for us.

“No reason,” I told Harriet. “Just another mention in the
Times
that made me curious. Jayne and I figured if anyone knew what it was, you would. Any idea where their offices are?”

She dove into a stack of books and newspapers.
The Red Cross First-Aid Manual
collapsed into a pile with
Mission to Moscow
and Walter Lippmann’s
U.S. Foreign Policy
. She triumphantly pulled out a copy of the
Times
from earlier in the week and eyeballed an article on U.S. war agencies in New York City. “It looks like they’re in Murray Hill. One twenty-two East Forty-second Street. I think that’s the Chanin Building. If you want I could…”

“No,” said Jayne. “That’s all we needed, but thanks just the same.”

That night I dreamed of Jack. I guess I missed him. It was opening night of the People’s Theatre show and he’d gotten leave to come see me perform. As the curtain went down, I spotted him third row center. While the rest of the crowd politely applauded from their seats, he gave me a one-man standing ovation replete with wolf whistle. I tried to get out to the audience, but the velvets and scrim thwarted my efforts. When I finally broke free and made my way into the house, the lights were off, the seats were empty, and Jack was nowhere to be found.

The next morning I awoke with a terrible headache and lay in bed until the light shining through the window no longer made me wish for
death. Jayne was up and out, though she’d left a note behind to let me know she’d gone to Fat and Smiley’s audition and would like to meet up for lunch.

My dream stayed with me. I’m not one for signs, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this meant I was supposed to write Jack. I started a letter in my head but couldn’t get past, “Sorry I haven’t written,” because the apology felt so wooden and inappropriate. We’d never had occasion to write each other before. Oh, there were little cards in opening-night flowers, but the messages were pithy and traditional, not like the woo-pitching tomes I’d seen Jayne unfurl from past boyfriends. I was proud we didn’t need to fake sentiment in order to declare our feelings. Like all great actors we expressed our emotions through our actions.

Churchill stalked around my bed, waiting to see if I was going to respond to his lead from the night before and contact Henry Nussbaum. I decided confronting a total stranger was easier than attempting to mend things with someone I knew, so I dressed and hit the subway. By ten o’clock I was at the ornate Chanin Building on East Forty-second Street, staring at a bronze bas relief of the New York skyline while waiting for the elevator. Ten minutes later I was on the twenty-sixth floor, where I’d found my meat and was crabbing what to do next.

From what I could glean from their lobby, the OWI was a clearinghouse for nutcases who believed their neighbors, or their neighbors’ neighbors, were secretly assisting the Nazis through wiretapping, illegal use of the mail, or radio waves. A group of very serious people with shifty, nervous eyes waited in a meandering line before a receptionist’s desk. I couldn’t eyeball the gal in question, but I heard her bark her refrain, telling each Joe to fill out a form, put it in the pile, and if their claim was worth following up on, they’d be contacted. Every third person disputed her order, which only prompted the doll to increase her volume and repeat her message.

I passed the time reading posted government warnings about what would happen if I said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Once the line had dispersed, I checked my appearance in the elevator’s doors, cocked my hat jauntily to the side, approached the receptionist, and
asked if I could see the man of the hour.

“You don’t ask to see Mr. Nussbaum. He asks to see you.” She was a heavily made-up gal with an Andrews sister kind of style. She would’ve been fetching if it weren’t for a large mole beside her nose.

“I think he’ll want to see me,” I said.

She squeezed a pencil between her first and second fingers and tapped out Morse code on a stack of pamphlets lauding the contributions of black soldiers. “And why is that?”

I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. “Because I have some information for him. About the Germans.”

She pushed a clipboard toward me. “Fill that out, give it back, and if it’s important, you’ll be called.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked. “This war could turn on what I have to say.”

The mole shifted, creating the illusion that it wasn’t skin but some terrible parasite she didn’t know was there. “Look, sweetheart, I see fifty people a day, all of whom are dead certain whatever they know is the key to victory. Nine times out of ten, they’re crackpots. So I’m telling you, unless you’re Hitler, you’re not getting into that office.”

I searched the contents of Miss Pleasant of 1943’s desk until I found an interoffice memo directed to two women: Violet and Edith. I flipped a mental coin and whipped a pen and notebook out of my purse. “I’m impressed, Edith.”

“How do you know my…?”

I opened the pad and scribbled some nonsense on the first blank page before giving her the up and down. “I apologize for the ruse, but you must understand there’s no better way to check security than to pretend to be part of the problem. I’m with the Department of Efficiency. I’m afraid we’ve been fielding a number of complaints about this office.”

“Complaints?” She set her chin in her hand.

“The higher-ups have been questioning the numbers coming out of this department. The output isn’t matching the input and when that happens you better believe heads are going to roll.” Confusion moved the mole north and her kisser south. “There have been some suggestions
that instead of routing claims through normal paperwork procedures, OWCs have been sent for a face-to-face, slowing things down especially in instances of dubious claims.”

The mole began its retreat, signaling that while Edith may not know what I was saying, she was starting to believe I was who I claimed to be. “What’s an OWC?”

A random acronym designed to make me sound officious. “Objective Witness Claim. We call them that because it sounds less accusatory. Anyway, you’re providing a great first line of defense. If this is how you handle everyone who comes through this door, I’ll assure Mr. Nussbaum that his complaints are without merit.”

A wad of gum she must have been storing in her cheek since I’d entered regained its buoyancy. “Mr. Nussbaum’s been complaining about me? But he seems so nice. He gave me a holly bush for Christmas.”

“May I sit?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I grabbed a metal chair and planted myself at the side of her desk. “I like you, Edith. You’re clearly a hard worker and, let’s face it, we gals in government have got to stick together. What I’m going to tell you is in absolute confidence. I trust you’ll keep it between us?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Mr. Nussbaum lodged a number of complaints that indicate your professionalism left much to be desired. I came here today to do an inspection at his request, but given what I’ve witnessed, I’m starting to suspect Mr. Nussbaum is, as we say, passing the buck.” I scooted forward in my seat and lowered my voice. “It’s been my experience that when someone higher up blames a subordinate for his department’s shortcomings, it’s because he knows he’s failed and wants to make sure we won’t trace his mistakes back to him. In his mind, you’re clearly dispensable, but if we were to fire you as he wanted…”

Her mouth dropped open and the gum plummeted to her desk. “He wants to fire me?!”

I shushed her with my hand. “
If
we were to do that, the same thing would happen to the next person and the one after that. So instead of
letting him bunco you, I’m going to pay him a surprise visit and find out what’s going on behind his door. Will you help me, Edith?”