Louise's Blunder

by Sarah R. Shaber

  That meant that when I checked into Hughes’ file use on Tuesday, when I visited Mrs Nighy on Wednesday, Hughes was already dead. Tucked into a refrigerated drawer at the District police morgue until his fingerprints were identified.

  I poured a cup of coffee and carried it and the section of the Post I was reading up to my bedroom, where I added sugar to the coffee cup from the dwindling pound I’d bought on the black market a couple of months ago. OK, so I wasn’t a perfect American patriot. But there were far worse violators of the ration rules than me. Take Henry, now. Last winter he’d stocked the garage with jerry cans of black market gasoline he’d bought somewhere. And driving Phoebe’s car, fueled by that illegal gas, he’d criss-crossed the Virginia countryside in search of an illegal source for prime beef. He justified himself by explaining that rationing was illegal under the Constitution, and besides, Roosevelt just didn’t understand the concept of supply and demand. Phoebe had finally insisted that Henry stop violating the Office of Price Protection regulations, afraid he would get caught and she might be in trouble for not reporting him.

  I was a curious person. Too curious, my parents used to say. Paul Hughes’ story fascinated me, so I climbed on to my bed with a notebook and a pencil to lay out the chronology of the week’s events.

  The last time anyone at OSS had seen Paul Hughes was Friday at the end of the workday. This was confirmed by Don Murray, my old boss, who now worked in Hughes’ division as Assistant Head. According to his landlady, Hughes went to Fredericksburg on that Friday after work to visit his mother. He didn’t take a suitcase, as he kept spare clothes and toiletries at his mother’s.

  Sunday Mrs Nighy got a telegram from Hughes’ mother saying he was ill and wouldn’t return to the District until he’d recovered. Mrs Nighy didn’t have either an address or a telephone number for Hughes’ mother. Monday Hughes didn’t show up for work. On Tuesday Major Wicker assigned me to find out what files Hughes had been reading, with no explanation, except that it was a convenient time as Hughes was absent. After I turned in my notes I was dismissed until Wicker asked me to go to Hughes’ boarding house to inquire after him. That was on Wednesday.

  When I visited Hughes’ landlady she gave me the telegram from Hughes’ mother telling her that he was ill. There was no way that OSS could have been notified. Neither Mrs Nighy nor Hughes’ mother would know that Hughes worked for OSS. No OSS employee would give out that information – no one in my boarding house knew I worked there. Joe had guessed but we never discussed it. You would think that Hughes would have thought of some way to notify his office that he was ill. Unless he was so ill he just couldn’t. But then why did he return to the District on Sunday after his mother sent that telegram?

  On the east side of the Tidal Basin, the streetcar terminus underneath the Bureau of Engraving and the railroad stop just where the Railway Bridge entered the District were just footsteps away from each other. Hughes could have disembarked from a northbound Virginia train and walked a section of the Tidal Basin path to reach the streetcar stop. From there he could hop a streetcar to Foggy Bottom and his rooming house.

  Then there was the note Hughes had scribbled at his desk. About meeting one ‘G’ on Sunday. I had assumed this meeting was to happen in Fredericksburg, since I thought he had gone to his mother’s there. Now I wondered if Hughes had returned to the District to make that meeting with ‘G’.

  And I could swear that on Thursday, when I went to Rose’s apartment, Peggy Benton said Hughes was coming back to work as soon as he was well. Don Murray had said much the same thing when I talked to him. I had assumed that OSS had somehow checked up on Hughes, but maybe not. Perhaps Major Wicker and Don Murray had simply taken Hughes’ mother’s telegram at face value and assumed that Hughes would return to work as soon as he was well. I mean, why wouldn’t they? With the Trident Conference on, OSS had enough to do without worrying about a sick employee.

  What I couldn’t figure out was why Hughes wasn’t identified until after his fingerprints were processed. Didn’t the man have his wallet on him? And who the hell was ‘G’? Was ‘G’ an old friend Hughes intended to meet for drinks? Or a contact related to his job at OSS? And why did Major Wicker want me to check on the files Hughes was reading?

  None of this was any of my business, but I loathed loose ends that refused to tie themselves into a neat bow.

  ‘Louise!’ Ada hollered up the stairs to me. ‘Telephone again, for God’s sake!’

  For one brief thrilling second I thought it might be Joe. But it couldn’t be. It was too expensive to call long distance. And I remembered, with a deep pang of guilt, that I hadn’t written him back after receiving his letter on Tuesday. I had to write him tonight. But just the thought of putting my thoughts on paper made me feel terribly lonely. I almost wanted to avoid that depth of feeling by not writing. But he’d wonder why he hadn’t heard from me and I couldn’t bear to cause him any unhappiness.

  ‘Coming!’ I answered. Shoving the newspaper section and my notebook into the top drawer of my dresser I ran down the stairs to get the telephone.

  ‘Honestly,’ Ada said, handing me the receiver, ‘you’d think I was your secretary!’

  It was Clark Leach.

  ‘Louise,’ Clark said, ‘I’m calling to find out if you’re feeling OK? Your friend said you were napping earlier.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I ate and drank too much last night, that’s all.’

  ‘But you had fun?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

  I heard voices in the lounge, so I stuck my head in to be polite and greet my housemates before I went hunting for leftovers in the kitchen.

  Phoebe and Milt sat together on the davenport. Milt still wore his pajamas and held a tumbler of bourbon and ice in his only hand. The bourbon bottle on the coffee table was less than half full. Henry was seated on the matching armchair, or it used to match before Phoebe threw a crocheted bedspread over it to hide the worn spots. Ada and I had been plotting to slipcover the lounge set for her – we knew its shabbiness embarrassed her – but we hadn’t found enough good fabric at the right price yet.

  ‘Hi, Louise,’ Henry said. ‘I’m trying to convince Milt and Phoebe to let me take them out to supper.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out in public,’ Milt said. ‘Besides, I’m not hungry.’ He took a swallow from his drink. ‘I had plenty at dinner.’

  ‘Dear,’ Phoebe said, ‘I could fix you some scrambled eggs.’ She drew a lap robe further up Milt’s body. Milt pushed her hand away roughly. ‘Don’t, Mother, it’s too hot,’ he said. Phoebe replaced her trembling hand in her lap.

  ‘Milt just needs more time to recuperate,’ Phoebe said to Henry. ‘He’s had such an awful time.’

  Milt poured himself another drink.

  Henry shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘of course. Anyone else want to go out to eat with me? Phoebe?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry either.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m off then. I won’t be late.’ He left and I heard the door close behind him.

  ‘I’m going on upstairs,’ Milt said. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Oh, honey, please don’t,’ Phoebe said. ‘Sunday nights we all gather here and have popcorn and listen to Walter Winchell.’

  ‘I want to be alone,’ Milt said, dumping the lap blanket on the floor as he stood up. ‘I have my own radio.’

  After he left the room Phoebe turned to me, hands twisting in her lap. ‘I just don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘Milt’s so unhappy.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much anyone can do, until he makes peace with losing his arm,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s all so awful. He thinks his life is ruined.’

  I’d grown up in Wilmington, North Carolina where men made their living fishing the open ocean and building ships. It was a rough and dangerous life. Men drowned, dragged off their boats when their nets tangled around them. They fell off scaffolding in the boatyards. Or had legs amputated when they
were caught in canning machinery. I was used to seeing men, and some women, who’d lost fingers, or an arm or a leg. As long as I could remember, one of my daddy’s workmen, who shucked oysters, picked crab and cleaned bluefish, limped around on a peg leg. No one thought anything of it.

  But Milt was a college boy and from the city to boot. Good-looking, young, destined for a job in banking or some such profession, the possibility that he’d go though his life without an arm hadn’t occurred to him. And he wouldn’t have had any example of surviving a terrible injury and adjusting to it. He didn’t yet appreciate that he was lucky to be alive.

  Enough of Milt. He wasn’t my problem. I was hungry. Back in the kitchen I ran into Madeleine foraging in the refrigerator. Dellaphine, on her regular Sunday night off, was enjoying a potluck supper at her church and visiting with her friends. Together Madeleine and I heated up leftover fried chicken, butter beans and mashed potatoes. We sat together at the kitchen table to eat. Phoebe would have preferred that I sit at the dining-room table by myself, but I was a poor Southerner, not a rich one, and I was used to living and working in close quarters with colored people.

  ‘Miss Ada said you went to the Club Bali last night,’ Madeleine said. ‘And you heard “Satchmo”!’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘It was swell. Ever been there?’

  Madeleine shook her head. ‘Too expensive. My friends and I go to the Howard Theatre.’

  ‘You still dating that piano player?’

  ‘Yeah, and it’s still a secret, too. Momma would hang me out to dry with the rest of the laundry if she knew I was seeing a musician.’

  ‘My lips are sealed.’

  Sometimes I felt I was keeping enough secrets for my fellow boarders that they qualified for the ‘L’ file room at the OSS Registry.

  I sharpened my pencil. I’d learned a couple of months ago that I had to do a rough draft of any letter I wrote to Joe on cheap paper, otherwise I’d be wasting good stationery. ‘Dear Joe,’ I began. Sweet heaven, what a weak way to begin a love letter! ‘Dearest Joe’. No. Who was I trying to fool? Go ahead and write it down, coward. ‘Darling’. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

  ‘Darling, I miss you terribly too. And I promise, promise faithfully, that I am coming to visit you just as soon as I can get away. It might be a last-minute decision because of work. That wouldn’t be a problem, would it? If I sent you a telegram on a Friday afternoon saying I was just that minute catching a train?

  ‘Your apartment sounds lovely. And it must be nice to live alone, at least for a little while. To be able to sleep, eat and read whenever you like sounds like heaven!

  ‘Have you heard from Phoebe yet? Milt Junior has returned home. He’s lost his left arm and will be living here for good. He was kind enough to move in with Henry so that Ada and I wouldn’t lose our rooms. So when you come back to the District you’ll need to find a new place to live. Do you know when that might be? When you might come home, that is?

  ‘Miss you.’ No! I missed my cat back home. Joe was my sweetheart. ‘Darling, I can’t wait to see you. Since you left my life has gone from Technicolor to grey.’ So, so cheesy! But it would have to do. ‘Love, Louise.’ Not ‘Love always.’ Nothing was sure in life, especially during wartime.

  I copied my draft on to the new stationery I’d bought at Woodies. It was cream with my initials engraved on it in sky blue. I’d never dreamed that someday I’d own monogrammed letter paper.

  The large reception room on the first floor of the main OSS building was jammed with OSS staffers paying their respects to Paul Hughes. Since Hughes’ remains had been shipped to Fredericksburg, his home, for his funeral, this small reception was his only memorial in the District. His co-workers had brought in vases of spring flowers for the tables, there was a picture of him on a table at the entrance to the room, and more friends had brought punch and cookies made with honey and molasses. He must have been popular.

  I was at the reception out of morbid curiosity. I barely knew the man. But I still wondered about his death and I wanted to observe the people who attended his funeral, like the detectives in Agatha Christie’s novels. Not that I had any evidence that Hughes’ outlandish death was anything except bad luck. But I was obsessing over ‘G’. Would ‘G’ be here? Was ‘G’ an actual initial, or some kind of shorthand? I mean, ‘G’ could be his barber! And last of all, was Paul meeting ‘G’ in Fredericksburg or in the District?

  The most senior men in the room were Don Murray, my ex-boss and now Hughes’ boss, and Major Wicker. When Wicker spotted me he shot me a look that ordered me in no uncertain terms not to speak to him. I wasn’t insulted. He didn’t want anyone to know we were acquainted.

  After the guests mingled for a bit Don stood on a chair and began to speak about Hughes. How well liked he was, how hard-working, and how he would be missed. His final words were cut off by a strangled sob. Lots of the girls were dabbing at their eyes, but this was loud sobbing. I turned and saw Peggy Benton crying with a handkerchief pressed to her face. Her husband, Spencer, had a grip on her elbow. He looked quite embarrassed, even angry. I moved toward her to comfort her.

  ‘Hush, be quiet,’ Benton said to his wife, ‘You’re making a spectacle of yourself.’

  ‘Paul was a very good friend,’ Peggy answered him. ‘It’s all so sad!’

  She buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed again.

  Benton turned to me. ‘Mrs Pearlie, would you take Peggy outside, please, until she gets control of herself?’ he said. ‘I can’t stand her bawling.’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, taking Peggy’s hand and leading her outside on to a narrow covered veranda. We perched on a bench. A wisteria vine that twisted around a marble column dangled its blossoms over our head.

  ‘I know I embarrass Spencer,’ Peggy said, breathing in short gulps, and rubbing her arm where her husband had gripped it. ‘I’m always so emotional.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘If you can’t cry over a friend’s death, what can you cry about?’

  ‘Spencer thinks I should restrain myself in public. It reflects on him, you see.’

  I didn’t comment on that.

  ‘I didn’t know you and Paul Hughes were so close,’ I said.

  ‘We were good friends. He came to Rose and Sadie’s apartment several times. He didn’t think that it was stupid for women to talk about serious subjects. Clark’s the same way.’

  Peggy’s handkerchief was a sopping mess. I pulled out my own. ‘Let me go dampen this,’ I said. Inside I soaked the handkerchief in a water fountain, but not before I saw Don Murray and Major Wicker go into an office off the hall. Alone.

  Peggy wiped her face with my handkerchief, then applied lipstick and powder.

  ‘I hope I’m presentable enough to assume my role as Spencer’s wife,’ she said. ‘Shall we go back inside?’

  More people crowded the reception room, taking time off from lunch to pay their respects. I saw Rose talking to Clark and joined them while Peggy, pale but composed, went to her husband. Both Rose and Clark looked grim.

  ‘Peggy is terribly upset,’ I said to them. ‘I had to take her outside.’

  ‘She’s very emotional,’ Rose said. ‘Cries over everything. Not that Paul’s death isn’t sad. And such a freak accident!’

  ‘Sounds like he tried to come back to the District before he’d fully recovered,’ Clark said.

  ‘I’m surprised he tried to walk to the streetcar stop,’ I said. ‘You’d think he’d have caught a taxi home if he didn’t feel well.’

  Clark shrugged.

  ‘If he had a fever he might not have been thinking clearly,’ Rose said. She looked at her watch. ‘I need to get back to work,’ she said. We all did.

  The reception room emptied quickly and I joined the crowd of people crossing 23rd Street to our building.

  Just as I took the first step up the steep stone staircase to the renovated apartment house that housed the Research and Analysis Division a man touched my shoulder from behind.<
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  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘can you wait for a minute, please? I must speak to you.’

  Startled, I pulled away. ‘I don’t know you,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

  He pulled out a small leather case and flipped it open, displaying a Metropolitan Police badge.

  ‘Let’s get away from this crowd,’ he said, nodding down the hill to a spot where a bunch of forsythia bushes clustered, blooming bright yellow.

  ‘I need to get back to work,’ I said.

  ‘This won’t take a minute. I insist.’

  I glanced around. None of my co-workers, scurrying back to their offices, noticed us.

  The two of us sheltered behind the thicket of forsythia bushes. I had a powerful sense of foreboding. What did this policeman want with me?

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Royal, Metropolitan Police,’ he said to me, showing me his badge again so I could see the number clearly. ‘Write it down if you like, check me out.’

  He was an older man, plenty old enough to be retired. He probably still worked because of the war. He was dressed in a well worn but respectable suit and tie. A dilapidated fedora, which looked like it had repelled a lot of rain in its time, covered grizzled hair. Deep frown lines scoured his face between his eyebrows. Royal leaned heavily on one leg as if the other one hurt him.