Louise's Blunder

by Sarah R. Shaber

  She glanced at a drum table, where a telephone must once have stood.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘my old one couldn’t be repaired and I haven’t been able to get it replaced.’

  ‘Is Mr Hughes in town? Have you heard from him?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s not here. He left to visit his mother in Fredericksburg and hasn’t returned.’

  My heart skipped a beat. Was Hughes on the lam?

  ‘But I’ve had a telegram from his mother,’ Mrs Nighy said. ‘Just a minute.’ She went into her tiny kitchen and came back with a square of paper. ‘He’s ill,’ she said, ‘and can’t come home until he’s better.’

  She handed me a Western Union telegram dated last Sunday evening.

  ‘My son Paul is ill stop cannot travel stop more later stop,’ the telegram said. It was signed ‘Mrs Hughes’. That was all. There was no return address on the telegram, which wasn’t unusual. The Western Union code of numbers and letters above the message could tell us from which office the telegram was sent. Out of habit I memorized it.

  ‘This has concerned me so,’ Mrs Nighy said. ‘I haven’t heard anything since. I don’t know his mother’s phone number or address. And of course I couldn’t call Mr Hughes’ office since I don’t know where he works.’

  I didn’t enlighten her.

  ‘Can I take this back to my office?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we can find a way to contact Mrs Hughes.’

  ‘Would you let me know what you learn, please?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  I went back to OSS with two scraps of information. A Western Union telegram and a cryptic note on half a sheet of notepaper. On the bus I reviewed what had happened so far. On Tuesday, May 11, Hughes didn’t show up for work and I was asked to take notes on his file usage. On Wednesday he still wasn’t at work. I was sent to his lodgings, where his landlady handed over to me a telegram from Hughes’ mother indicating that Hughes was ill. It had been sent Sunday the 9th. In Hughes’ room I’d found a note referring to a meeting with ‘G’ on that same Sunday. The circumstances of Hughes’ disappearance were suspicious, all right. OSS Security would track him like a coon until he was found, even if that turned out to be in an innocent sickbed at his mother’s and ‘G’ was his barber!

  I wanted desperately to be involved in the search for Hughes. Going back to the file room, never to hear the answers to all these questions, would drive me to the loony bin!

  TWO

  When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. [ … ] older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves, and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy. It’s always well to impress on older women the importance of friendliness and courtesy.

  ‘1943 Guide to Hiring Women’, Mass Transportation magazine, July 1943.

  I turned over the telegram and the note I found in Hughes’ room to Wicker.

  ‘Well,’ was all he said, as he sat studying the telegram and the note. Then after a minute he said ‘Huh’. I shuffled in my seat. He looked up at me and nodded dismissively. ‘Thank you for all your help, Mrs Pearlie,’ he said. ‘Good work.’

  I hesitated to rise from the chair. ‘Major Wicker,’ I said, ‘I can trace the telegram from the Western Union code. Hughes’ next of kin will be listed in his personnel file. Once we have Mrs Hughes’ address we can find her telephone number. If she doesn’t have a telephone perhaps we could reach her through a neighbor. We have research materials in the Registry that I can access quickly.’

  Wicker seemed not to have noticed I was still in his office. He glanced over at me. ‘What?’ he said. I repeated myself. ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Pearlie, of course. But we’ll take it from here on out.’ He smiled at me. ‘We have resources too.’

  I left Smith’s office and Wicker. The secretary didn’t bother to notice me as she typed away from her shorthand notebook.

  I was furious. Damn Wicker! One minute he tells me how important this task is, the next he treats me like an eighteen-year-old!

  As I stamped down three flights of steps and across the street to my own office I forced myself to calm down. OSS was an intelligence agency. It was neatly sectioned so that no one knew more than he or she needed to, except for the top men. Raiding another section for help with the clerical work of examining Hughes’ file usage, and even calling on Mrs Nighy, had been a clever thing for Wicker to do. He knew from my personnel file that I could be counted on to keep my mouth shut. Perhaps he had good reason to let few people at OSS know that Hughes’ absence might be questionable. Anyway, no matter how curious I was, it was out of my hands. Who knew, Wicker could well be on a wild goose chase. I might see Hughes wandering around OSS tomorrow, fully recovered from the flu! And with an acceptable reason for checking out files that weren’t in his field. Though I was sure I would go to my grave wondering who the hell ‘G’ was!

  As I crossed ‘E’ Street for the second time that day I skirted a pothole brimming with spring rainfall. The air was clean and fresh from another brisk morning shower. This would be another day I wouldn’t need to water our garden. I resolved to forget all about Paul Hughes and spend my evening reading Hungry Hill. It was overdue at the library.

  So I resolutely filed away all my questions about Hughes and focused on summarizing and indexing the usual stacks of intelligence documents. All of them were boring numbers and statistics, except for one about Hitler’s contingency plan to escape to Japan by air if Germany fell. It had been told to an OSS operative in a bar in Switzerland by a very drunk ‘reliable source’. The ‘documents’ were paper napkins stained with wine glass rings. Red wine.

  I filled my tray at the OSS cafeteria with tuna casserole, cabbage salad and canned pineapple. It was edible, but I looked forward to the fresh vegetables from our Victory Garden.

  I squeezed in at a table next to Joan Adams and Betty Burnette. Joan was my closest friend in Washington. She worked for General Donovan himself. Not surprising, since she was older than most government girls, from a wealthy California oil family, and had gone to Smith College. She fit in well with Donovan’s crowd.

  She was also an old maid, and hated it.

  We had to lean our heads together and shout over the din of clattering trays and conversations to hear each other. Although we had gotten pretty good at reading each other’s lips!

  ‘How’s the Scotsman?’ I asked her.

  ‘Gone back to Britain,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Orders. He said he’d write, but I know how that goes.’

  ‘He’ll write,’ Betty said, ‘He really likes you.’ Betty spoke from the optimistic vantage point of a young, pretty, blonde newly-wed. She had been a gently used government girl with mediocre prospects until she fell in love with a middle-aged District policeman named Ralph Burnette. He adored Betty despite an unfortunate misjudgment that landed her in jail for a few days. In fact, they had met there. I didn’t understand it but they seemed quite happy.

  ‘We did have a lot of fun together,’ Joan said, ‘but I’ll wait until I see an airgraph with a Scottish postmark in my mailbox before I’ll hope to see him again.’

  A familiar-looking woman set her tray on the corner of our table. ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ she asked, grabbing a chair from another table seconds after it was vacated.

  Betty and I scrunched further together so that there’d be room for her.

  ‘Thanks,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Peggy Benton.’ Spencer Benton’s wife, I thought.

  ‘Peggy works with me in the typing pool,’ Betty said. ‘Three desks to the south.’

  ‘I’ve met your husband,’ I said. ‘I work in the Registry. I see him in the Reading Room almost every day.’

  ‘He’s ruining his eyes and his health,’ she said, tucking her napkin in her lap. ‘But he won’t listen to me.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’ Joan asked, her thoughts as always on the domestic s
tate.

  ‘No,’ Peggy said. ‘Not with the war on. Maybe after.’

  ‘We were discussing boyfriends,’ Betty said.

  ‘No we weren’t,’ Joan said.

  ‘Louise dates a university professor,’ Betty said to Peggy. I saw a frown cross Joan’s face. She deeply disapproved of Joe. She didn’t think I should even be friendly with a refugee with a Slavic accent.

  ‘Not any more I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ Joan asked. She tucked into a slice of honey cake. She was a large woman who loved to eat.

  ‘Joe moved to New York City,’ I said. ‘He’s teaching at NYU now. They’re short on Slavic language professors there.’

  ‘Where does this Joe come from?’ Peggy asked.

  ‘He’s Czech,’ I said, ‘but he’s lived in England most of his life. He’s got a British passport.’

  ‘Is he a Communist then?’ Peggy asked, picking diced pickles out of her macaroni and cheese.

  ‘Good God,’ Joan said, ‘what a question!’

  ‘Why?’ Peggy asked. ‘All the Eastern Europeans here are Communists. Or socialists. Except for the royalty, of course.’

  I didn’t feel comfortable answering her question. I barely knew Peggy Benton. And I didn’t want to put words in Joe’s mouth.

  ‘Joe wants the Allies to win the war,’ I said. ‘Just like the rest of us. That’s all he’s ever expressed to me.’

  Peggy shrugged.

  ‘Peggy is really interested in politics and the news,’ Betty said. ‘She’s always reading the newspaper on her break. I can’t wait to win the war either. Then Ralph and I can buy a house with our war bonds.’

  Despite my earlier resolution my curiosity about Paul Hughes refused to go away. I had ten minutes yet before I was due back at my desk. It seemed to me that if Paul Hughes hadn’t been seen since the weekend except for a telegram from his mother – and today was Wednesday – that was most peculiar. I supposed he could be delirious with flu somewhere. Did he ever get to meet ‘G’ on Sunday? Was meeting ‘G’ part of his work, or an independent rendezvous?

  Who could I pump for information about him?

  I stopped on the sidewalk outside the huge apartment house on ‘E’ Street, across from the main OSS campus, that was the headquarters of the Research and Analysis Division of OSS.

  The Registry, the library really, was a vital division of R&A, which had six hundred scholar/spies working on evaluating and analyzing overt and covert intelligence. Several of these scholar/spies owed me a favor.

  It was my lucky day. Don Murray walked out of the front door with his pipe in his hand. He sat down on the steps, stretched out his legs and pulled his tobacco pouch out of his jacket pocket. I knew Don well. Before the OSS reorganization he’d been my boss. I’d solved an embarrassing problem for him. We’d even dated a few times until he realized I wouldn’t be as appropriate a wife as he’d thought, which saved me the trouble of jilting him. Now he was head of the economic subdivision of the Europe/Africa division. He’d know Paul Hughes.

  I patted my hair and adjusted my skirt before going over to him.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  Don stopped drawing on his pipe. He seemed pleased to see me.

  ‘Louise!’ he said. ‘Do you have time to chat?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, gathering my legs sedately under me and sitting down one step below him. I noted that we were far enough down the stairs for the GI guarding the door not to hear us.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you liking your new job?’

  ‘At times,’ I said. ‘And yours?’

  ‘It’s not much different from what I did before, although it’s more oriented toward military strategy than it used to be. But you know that.’

  He drew on his pipe. He smoked a different tobacco than Joe. I longed for its odor.

  ‘I need a favor, Don,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. If I can do it I will,’ he said.

  I lowered my voice. ‘Has anyone heard from Paul Hughes? Do you know where he is?’

  Don groaned. ‘The rumors have started already! Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Just curious. Is it a secret?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘the entire Division knows he hasn’t been heard from since he left work on Friday. I did hear a rumor that he might be ill, but that’s all I can say. Don’t spread it around, OK?’

  ‘You know me better than that,’ I said.

  Something about missing the odor of Joe’s pipe tobacco plunged me into a despondency deeper than I had felt since arriving in Washington. Ever since Joe had left for his new job in New York life seemed so tedious.

  Even parts of my life that had no relation to Joe were less appealing to me now that he wasn’t around. The importance of my work, my financial freedom and my new friends, none of them filled that hole in my life that he’d left. Or were as much fun as they had been.

  I pulled a file from my in-box on to my desk. It contained several single-spaced, typed sheets on onionskin paper, with multiple cross-outs and typos and an occasional foray into French. Far from being intrigued by it I just wanted to stick it on the bottom of the pile and do something challenging that would take my mind off my problems – like find out where Paul Hughes was!

  Instead I focused on the intelligence in front of me. Its puzzle drove Joe out of my mind. The document came in a diplomatic pouch from Lisbon with no provenance attached. According to our agent’s memo it had been slipped into the covert mail slot he kept at a tobacconist’s by person or persons unknown. Clearly the thin sheets were the carbon copies of another document. The blue carbon ink bled into the crevices of the thin cheap paper. I opened my top drawer and drew out a magnifying glass and set about deciphering the papers. Before long I was engrossed in the subject matter. It appeared to be a carbon copy of a poorly typed document concerning British diplomatic attempts to sign a separate peace treaty with Hitler. It was crinkled up as if it had been tossed in a trashcan. I had no way of knowing if this was a real document or Nazi disinformation designed to divide the Allies. Once I finished the index cards I didn’t file them. I walked the cards and the document over to the X-2 Branch. An expert there would decide if the material was genuine.

  It wasn’t until I stepped outside the door to walk home that despondency settled on me once more. I felt that I had nothing to look forward to. Joe and I had planned a summer of fun. Concerts at the Watergate, barbecues on Rock Creek, exploring the Virginia side of the Potomac by canoe, seeing all the new movies. And yes, spending as many weekends as we could on his friend’s houseboat on the Potomac. Alone.

  But our romantic plans fell apart. Because of me. I’d backed out. I was afraid that an affair with Joe would jeopardize my place in Phoebe’s house, and maybe even my job. I couldn’t afford an apartment on my own. And OSS frowned on women with Top Secret clearance having love affairs with foreign refugees. And besides, how did I know that anything Joe said about his background and his work was the truth? I’d already learned that his ‘professorship’ was a cover. I loved him, but he was still keeping secrets from me.

  I felt tears form and slipped behind the building so no one in the crowds of government workers collecting at the bus stop at the main entrance of the building would see my distress. Once I had backed out of the relationship with Joe, living together in the same house became torture because we were still so attracted to each other. And then Joe was reassigned to New York with a new cover. Or at least that’s what he told me. And then a new, enticing possibility opened. I could visit Joe there on the occasional weekend, away from the prying eyes of my friends, my landlady and my OSS colleagues, and we could have our wartime love affair. With no strings attached. An arrangement that would never have crossed my mind a year ago. But then I wasn’t the woman who’d left Wilmington, North Carolina, in January 1942. Not anymore.

  The truth was I still hadn’t made up my mind.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Rose Dudley asked. She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I
don’t mean to intrude,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said, wiping lingering tears from my eyelashes.

  ‘It’s a wonder we aren’t sobbing all the time, the way the world is,’ she said, linking her arm in mine.

  I smiled at that. So true. How silly to pine over a lover when the world was in flames.

  ‘Listen,’ Rose said, ‘my room-mate and I like to have friends over on Thursday evenings, girls like us who like to work and have the same opinions. You are a New Dealer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t talk about anything we shouldn’t, just the news and some harmless gossip, and we don’t have to worry about what we say. We have cocktails, snacks, and play records. Sometimes we invite a man friend or two, but they have to be well behaved.’

  ‘Sounds lovely,’ I said. Since Joe left there wasn’t anyone at my boarding house I could really talk to. I was fond of Ada and Phoebe but I had little in common with them. Joan was a swell friend but her crowd had all gone to college and had family money. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable around them.

  Rose squeezed my arm. ‘So you’ll come?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to.’ Finally, something to look forward to!

  ‘Here,’ Rose said, digging around in her purse and pulling out a little pad in a leather case with a tiny pen attached. She scribbled something, tore it off the pad and gave it to me. ‘Here’s the address, see you Thursday!’ Rose lived in the Potomac House Apartments, a big complex in Foggy Bottom. I could walk there in good weather.

  Like much of the District, Foggy Bottom had become more like a barracks for government workers than a true neighborhood. It was studded with apartment complexes and nearly every row house or cottage took in boarders. Mrs Nighy’s little cottage, where Paul Hughes boarded, was just across the street from Rose’s apartment building.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, tucking the address into my own pocketbook. ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven,’ she said. ‘We break up around nine thirty. We working girls need our sleep, you know. Lord, there’s my bus!’ Rose dropped my arm and took off running, waving her hat to keep the bus driver from leaving her behind.