Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  Two

  Years later, when her time in Washington had receded from memory, when her youth was like a faraway place she’d visited but could scarcely recall, Dorothy Novak would remember the Chinese woman.

  She remembered a gray Saturday in early March: a wet breeze blowing in from the Potomac, cars crashing through puddles on Nineteenth Street, spraying water onto the sidewalk. Dorothy was heading downtown under her old black umbrella; in her pocket was a dollar she would not spend. It cost nothing to wander the department stores: Hecht’s, Garfinkle’s, Woodward and Lothrop, the brick buildings flanking F Street like majestic ships at port. Her Saturday entertainment was Domestics, Ladies’ Shoes, Better Dresses. She was no fashion plate; she simply loved touching the fabrics, the wartime rayon that felt to her like silk. She lingered at the perfume counter, inhaling Shalimar or Chanel No. 5, trying to memorize the scent. Later she’d be unable to re-create it; the fragrance would hover at the edge of her memory, just beyond her reach.

  She was standing under the canopy in front of Garfinkle’s, tying a scarf under her chin, when a limousine stopped at the curb. A driver stepped out and opened the rear door; then a woman emerged, a tiny thing in a long mink coat. Her gloves were red, her hair twisted into a chignon, dark and glossy as the mink. She wore high-heeled slippers, a strand of pearls at her throat. Dorothy hugged her old coat around her, her hair flapping in the wind, fuzzy from the permanent wave her sister had given her back home.

  The woman leaned in and spoke to the driver. She paused a moment, as if waiting to be photographed, then stepped delicately around a puddle and disappeared inside the store.

  Dorothy blinked. For a moment the scene had seemed orchestrated, composed like a painting: pedestrians rushing past, heels clicking on the sidewalk; the cloud of smoke rising from the car’s tailpipe; the Chinese woman standing at the center of it all, exquisite and improbable.

  “What do you think of that?” she asked her friend Mag Spangler that night at the Federal Diner, where they’d each had a slice of pie.

  “The Chinese embassy is close by. It must have been the ambassador’s wife.” Mag said this casually, as though she often rubbed shoulders with diplomats. In fact she spent each day typing government paychecks in a crowded office at Treasury, just as Dorothy did.

  Dorothy finished her pie. They’d seen the early show at the Capitol Theater, John Wayne in The Fighting Seabees. Mag had vetoed Lady in the Dark. She considered musicals frivolous.

  “A mink coat.” Mag sniffed, horselike, a burst of air through her nostrils. “It hasn’t snowed all winter, for Pete’s sake.”

  Dorothy smiled. The impracticality of the coat hadn’t occurred to her; it wasn’t why she’d told the story. Since arriving in Washington she had witnessed remarkable things. Her first day in the city she noticed a Negro deliveryman standing on a street corner, singing deeply and carrying an armload of orchids. Seeing the Chinese woman step out of the car had given her the same feeling, as though at any moment something extraordinary might happen.

  “We’d better go,” she said. Customers stood three deep at the front of the diner. “People are waiting.”

  They each left a nickel on the table. Mag slid out of the booth, removing the napkin from the neck of her sweater.

  “A mink coat,” she said again. “For Pete’s sake.”

  THEY WERE WORKING GIRLS, typing for the war. Dorothy had answered an ad in her hometown newspaper. A government recruiter had come to interview girls in the junior high cafeteria. The only requirement was a high school diploma.

  Mag had come to Washington two years earlier and had acquired a jaded air. Dorothy hadn’t known her back home—in school Mag was several grades ahead—but their mothers were acquainted; Mag’s father owned the hat shop in town. In the way of small towns, their mothers had put them in touch.

  When Dorothy arrived in Washington, Mag had come to meet her train. Dorothy recognized her immediately on the crowded platform—a sturdy girl with a wide bosom and a determined mouth, the type who’d always seemed older than everyone else, like a chaperone at a dance. She wore stout boots and a brown tweed coat, a hat Dorothy recognized from the Spanglers’ shop in Bakerton. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Mag had said, leading her through the crowd: soldiers in uniform, WACs and WAVEs in their navy blues. “Leave everything to me.”

  She took Dorothy to Straub’s, a women’s boardinghouse on Massachusetts Avenue: a shared room, breakfasts and dinners for ten dollars a week. (Mag paid nine dollars for a similar room across town; but such bargains were a thing of the past, she assured Dorothy.) At one time Straub’s had been a showplace. Now the upper floors were divided into tiny rooms, just big enough for two twin beds. Each floor had a bathroom; every morning a line formed at the door, girls waiting with towels and dishes of soap. Meals were served downstairs—most nights, potatoes with stew. Breakfast was half a grapefruit and a bowl of oatmeal. On Sundays they each got a strip of bacon.

  Mag walked Dorothy to work her first morning at Treasury. She pointed out the watercooler and powder room, and indicated with a look which girls Dorothy should avoid: the snooty ones who thought they were God’s gift, the two-faced ones who’d smile to your face and cut you behind your back. They met each day for lunch, nickel sandwiches and orange sodas at Peoples’ Drug Store. Saturday nights they saw a movie. In this way, months passed. At first Dorothy was grateful for Mag’s company. Only later did she realize that she hadn’t made any other friends. The girls at the boardinghouse remained strangers to her. She knew them by their sounds and smells: the middle-aged, slightly deaf schoolteacher who played her radio at high volume; the blond stenographer who monopolized the lavatory, leaving a trail of rose perfume and a few golden pubic hairs clinging to the rim of the bathtub.

  Dorothy had a roommate, Jean Johns, a timid, dark-haired girl from Kentucky who ran a switchboard at the Pentagon. Jean slept in flowered nightgowns and was always cold. Every night after supper she’d climb into bed, pull the blankets around her and listen to the radio. They liked the same programs: Theater of Romance at eight-thirty, Famous Jury Trials at nine. At ten o’clock they turned out the lights; a few minutes later Jean would begin to snore. Eyes closed, Dorothy imagined herself back in her own room, her sister Joyce asleep next to her. In this way she learned to ignore the traffic noise, the hissing radiator. She was not alone.

  From their beds they monitored the war. Europe was quiet that March. Hitler hadn’t been seen in months, and people speculated that he was dead or dying. Reports came instead from the South Pacific, a part of the world no one had heard of until soldiers—Dorothy’s brother Georgie among them—were sent there. Los Negros, Talasea, Bougainville: pronounced, always, in the American way, in a firm male voice that made them seem familiar and knowable. Dorothy’s geography was hazy; she imagined each place the same way: a tiny verdant island, the immense surrounding sea. She had seen the ocean only in photographs. In her mind it was brilliant and calm, a vast expanse of blue.

  She hadn’t seen Georgie in a year. He had missed the funeral, hadn’t even known their father was dead until several days afterward. He wrote her often, if not consistently. Once she’d received six letters in a single week. At other times he didn’t write for months. Once Jean asked what he’d written, a question Dorothy couldn’t answer. Whole sentences had been blacked out by the censors; all that remained were detailed descriptions of the weather. She didn’t mind the lack of content. What mattered was the familiar handwriting, the letters drawn by Georgie’s own hand. The sheer volume of his communication delighted her. For years—her entire adolescence—he’d seemed embarrassed by her presence. At school he’d ignored her. In the corridor, walking with Gene Stusick or another of his silent, awkward friends, he would not meet her eyes.

  He’d been a frail child, prone to fevers. At seven he caught diphtheria and was pronounced contagious; Dorothy was forbidden to enter his room. He slept poorly; she could hear him on the other side of the wall, his fever
ish tossing, his guttural cough. Carefully, so as not to wake Joyce, she climbed out of bed and crept into his room. She sat at the foot of his bed and told him a story—about what, she could no longer recall. She invented the stories as she went along, until his eyelids began to fall.

  “Good night,” she whispered as she rose from the bed.

  “Come back tomorrow,” he answered as she closed the door behind her.

  Now she listened to the reports, her heart racing, her hands moist. The navy bombarding the Palau Islands; ships moving into Hollandia and Aitape. Whether his was among them was impossible to tell.

  SHE TYPED ALL DAY in an office filled with women. The supervisor was a gray-haired man named Howard Leland, whom the typists rarely saw. Nearly every week a new girl came, from Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Ohio; a girl with bangs or pin curls, her sweater dyed to match her skirt. One by one they disappeared into the flock of Mr. Leland’s girls, like ingredients folded into a cake batter.

  Mag disliked the new girls uniformly, without regard to their abilities or personalities, their friendliness or lack of it. “We don’t have room for them,” she complained, as if she’d been charged personally with finding them desks and typewriters. “That last one is still sitting at a card table, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I suppose we need the help,” said Dorothy.

  “Some help. That what’s-her-name from Youngstown types twenty words a minute.”

  The quality of the new hires was a sore subject with Mag, who’d taken the commercial course in high school and scored well enough on the Civil Service exam to land what was then a coveted job at Treasury. Since then the government had lowered its standards. The exam was no longer required. Dorothy, who hadn’t taken the commercial course, was paid the same as Mag, twenty-eight dollars a week. Feeling wealthy, she’d sent home half her first paycheck. Later she realized she’d sent too much, that she’d left herself barely enough to live on; but it was too late. She could not send less. Since her father’s death, the family got a monthly check from Social Security. In warm months it would be enough. But this was March; the jarred vegetables from last summer’s garden had all been eaten. Her mother still owed Baker for the winter coal.

  At night, in dreams, Dorothy returned to the dress factory where she had worked: the gloomy, airless upstairs room, the windows covered with dark paint to keep the fabrics from fading; heat rising up through the floorboards, from the dozen large press irons on the level below. The ancient machines had malfunctioned as often as they worked; five, ten times a day her machine had snapped the cheap cotton thread, chewing the fabric into an unusable mess. When the foreman fired her she felt relief, then terror. The job at Treasury had seemed a godsend; but now her mother counted on her paycheck. She would never be able to go home.

  ONE NIGHT she came back from work to find Jean Johns packing a suitcase.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Home.” Jean tucked a flowered nightgown into the space between her sweaters.

  “How’d you get the vacation time?” Dorothy had accumulated none yet, herself. She hadn’t even gone home for Easter.

  Jean met her gaze. Her eyes were red. “I quit.”

  There was, she explained, a boy back home. They had gone together all through high school. That morning he had asked her to marry him.

  “Back home?” said Dorothy. “He isn’t overseas?”

  His number hadn’t been called yet, Jean explained. It could happen any day.

  “When’s the wedding?” Dorothy felt the envy in her stomach, squeezing her insides like sickness. Not because Jean was getting married. Because Jean was going home.

  “As soon as possible,” said Jean. “A week or two, at the most.”

  “So fast!” said Dorothy, though of course she understood. Jean’s fiancé could be called up at any moment. Naturally they would be in a hurry, not knowing how much time they had left.

  “Can you imagine?” she asked Mag the next day at lunch. “A week from now she’ll be married.” It seemed an incredible feat. Washington in those days was a city of women; you could go weeks without seeing a man older than eighteen or younger than fifty. Though according to Jean, the Pentagon was different. At the Pentagon you were surrounded by men.

  “He proposed in a letter,” said Dorothy. “She had a fellow all this time and never said a word about it.”

  “That’s an awfully quick engagement.” Mag bit into her sandwich—the same kind she ordered every day, chicken salad on toast. “Sounds like she got herself in trouble.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say.” Dorothy thought of Jean’s eyes, swollen as if she’d been crying. Then she remembered a morning when Jean had left the breakfast table suddenly, her hand over her mouth.

  “Believe what you want,” said Mag.

  When Dorothy returned to her room that night, Jean Johns was gone.

  EMPTY OF JEAN’S possessions, the room seemed hollow and drafty. One afternoon Dorothy covered the walls with photos she’d clipped from Screen Stars: Veronica Lake, Tyrone Power; a close-up of Hedy Lamarr, whom people said she resembled. She caught herself glancing at Hedy each morning before she left for work, a more confident, more glamorous version of herself.

  Sundays were the longest days. In the morning she went to mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Then, for hours afterward, she walked. Up Massachusetts Avenue past the grand embassies; the whole length of Connecticut Avenue, from Rock Creek Park to the White House. She walked for distraction, for warmth. Some days she wandered the elegant neighborhoods around Dupont Circle. She knew the owners’ names from the society pages: Cissy Patterson, the newspaper heiress; Mrs. Sumner Welles, the diplomat’s wife. One Sunday evening the Welleses had thrown a party; Dorothy had joined the small crowd on the opposite corner, gathered to watch the guests arrive: men in white jackets, bare-shouldered women in dark silk. Oddly, it was the men’s hair that most impressed her: long enough in back to touch their collars, slicked with something to make it shine. In a time when most fellows wore army cuts, the curling forelocks seemed more extravagant than jewels.

  IN THE SPRING a new girl came. Looking back, Dorothy would remember it as the beginning of everything, a door swinging open, a dark room filling with light.

  She arrived on a Sunday night. Dorothy returned from her walk to find the bedroom door ajar. A girl sat on Jean’s old bed, polishing her nails. A radio played in the background; the girl hummed along with it, her voice low and husky. A cigarette burned in an ashtray near the window.

  “Hi there,” said Dorothy. “I’m Dorothy Novak.”

  The girl started. “Good Lord, you scared me. Patsy Sturgis.” She offered her hand, then withdrew it. “Wet,” she explained, blowing on her nails. “Sorry about the mess.” On the bed lay a suitcase, half unpacked; an open steamer trunk stood in the corner, trailing scarves and sweaters.

  “I brought too many things.” She was small and blond, with a perfect rosebud mouth. “Lord knows where I’ll put it all.”

  “Here. It’s for us to share.” Dorothy opened the flimsy metal armoire. The cupboard was already crammed full of dresses. Her own skirts and blouses had been shoved to one side.

  Patsy laughed, a trilling sound. “Sorry, Dottie. Looks like I hogged all the closet space.”

  Dorothy smiled. Nobody had ever shortened her name before. She liked the sound of it.

  “That’s okay. You have more clothes than I do.” She fingered the sleeve of a dress, embroidered with tiny flowers. The fabric was sheer and light, soft as a person’s skin. “This is beautiful.”

  “Oh, that. I’ve had it for ages. I can’t squeeze into it anymore, but I hate to part with it. Lord knows when I’ll get another silk dress.” Patsy butted her cigarette. “You can borrow it, if you like.”

  “Really?”

  “Try it on.”

  “Now?” She had never undressed before a stranger. She and Jean Johns had waited until the other left the room, or gone down the hall to
change in the washroom.

  “Go on,” said Patsy.

  Dorothy turned away and unbuttoned her blouse. Her brassiere was yellowed from too many bleachings, the elastic of her girdle puckered and worn. She stepped quickly out of her skirt, then pulled the dress over her head.

  “Well, look at you,” said Patsy.

  Dorothy approached the mirror. The dress fit perfectly, close at the waist and hip. The rose color flattered her complexion. She looked like someone else entirely. Like Dottie, she thought.

  Patsy helped her with the zipper. “God, I’d love to be so slim. In my family we’re all top-heavy. Turn around.” She frowned. “Fits like a glove, but it hangs a little funny.”

  “It’s my posture. My mother’s always after me to stand up straight.”

  “Tall girls! You make me sick. When you’re five-one you can’t afford to slouch.” Patsy glanced at the photo on the bureau. “Is that your fellow?”

  “My brother Georgie. He’s in the South Pacific.”

  Patsy leaned close to examine it. “He’s nice looking. Does he have a girl?”

  “Back home he went with Evelyn Lipnic. Now, I don’t know.”

  “I’ll bet he does.” Patsy straightened. “This room isn’t much. I thought it would be bigger.” She squinted at the photos on the wall. “Are those yours?”

  Dorothy flushed. “The other girl put them up,” she lied. “The one who lived here before. You can take them down, if you want.”

  “Whew.” Patsy wiped an imaginary bead of sweat from her brow. “That’s a relief. I’d get the willies looking at Errol Flynn all day. He’s queer, you know.” She giggled, seeing Dorothy’s look. “You didn’t know? He likes boys.”

  Dorothy thought of a Sunday afternoon, months ago, when she’d seen two blond-haired fellows walking hand in hand in Lafayette Park. At the time it had given her a strange feeling. Now she put it aside to think about later, how such a thing was even possible.