The job itself was laborious and, at times, maddeningly dull—accessioning, cross-indexing, circulating, and filing the thousands of dispatches, orders, and espionage and sabotage reports that flowed in from Washington and OSS field operations all over Southeast Asia—but it carried with it a grave responsibility. In September alone, Julia plowed through 365 pouches from Washington, which were broken down into about six hundred classified intelligence inputs that had to be filed and then stored under lock and key in the Registry. After much trial and error, Julia developed what she hoped was a “fool-proof locator system,” with master cards on each current field operation including the names of all the agents and student recruits, and their various code names. The nightmare was that the theater commander, Air Force, OWI, and other branches all had their own systems. Julia vigorously campaigned for them to settle on one uniform procedure so their documents could be related and communications streamlined.
She was known to relieve the tedium by making fun of OSS’s obsession with opaque codes, once writing to the Code and Cipher Branch to air-pouch a little black book, “one of those you have giving people numbers and funny names like Fruitcake #385,” and adding, in a deprecating tone, “frequently we find references to them here and no one knows who on earth is being referred to.” In case the paranoid denizens of the Cipher Branch mistook her flippancy for a lack of caution, she concluded solemnly, “This document will be kept very securely in a fireproof Mauser safe, and will be available to no one except Col. Heppner.” Over time, her droll style became immediately recognizable to her OSS colleagues, as did her refreshing attempts to cut through the red tape. One urgent request for information from headquarters in Washington contained this memorable postscript: “If you don’t send Registry that report we need, I shall fill the next pouch to Washington with itching powder and virulent bacteriological disease, and change all the numbers, as well as translating the material into Singhalese and destroying the English version.”
Thinner and browner, Julia exhibited a new directness and ease—especially around men. The nervous giggle that had once punctuated her sentences had been replaced by a loud, whooping laugh that was contagious. Always warm and engaging, if a bit awkward at times, she had morphed into the social butterfly of Detachment 404. To Guy Martin, she appeared “exuberant and extraordinary socially outgoing—if you put her with a hundred people, by the end of the afternoon she would know fifty.”
During the time Betty spent in Kandy, she, Jane, and Julia went on a number of sightseeing trips around Ceylon. One afternoon, they went elephant riding, and it transpired that the large male pachyderm carrying Julia got a three-foot erection. “Julia was so embarrassed,” recalled Betty. “She was just beside herself. It was her time of the month, and she didn’t want anyone to know. We all thought it was hilarious—who knew elephants had such sensitive noses! But whenever anyone mentioned it she would blush and get terribly flustered.” It did not stop them from teasing her relentlessly, but Betty remembered thinking that “in some ways Julia was not as mature as she might have been.”
Betty could see by the way Julia lit up around Paul Child that she liked him. “It was already obvious,” she said. While it was true that Julia found him extremely intelligent and attractive, she also confided to her diary that he was taciturn and remote, “not an easy man.” Much as it pained her, she also knew she was not his type. She had watched him flirt with Jane and Peachy and was aware that he liked “a more worldly Bohemian type.” She had learned enough about him to know that he was widely traveled and highly cultivated, and that he sought out similarly capable, adventurous companions. With her, Paul was chatty and chummy. They often went to dinner and the movies and on occasional day trips with others from their little group. But that was as far as it went. She was afraid that was as far as it would ever go.
While she commiserated with herself (“Wish I were in love, and that what I considered really attractive was in love with me”), Julia was not one to mope. She hid her disappointment and soldiered on. Perhaps hoping to be seen in a new, more alluring light, she gave Paul a photo of herself posing on her cot in an elegant dress and pearls, smiling up into the camera, one bare leg coquettishly crossed over the other. If there was any implied invitation in the photo, Paul missed it. He sent the picture straight on to his brother with the explanation that it was an interesting interior shot of their quarters. Identifying the female as “Julia, the 6′2″ bien-jambee,” he continued in a pedantic tone, “The room is a typical 10 × 18 with its coir matting, woven cadjan walls, wooden shutters, and army bed with folded-up mosquito net above.”
Julia was not wrong in surmising that Paul did not reciprocate her romantic feelings. He thought of her as “a warm and witty girl” with long legs and a good if relatively unexercised mind. The perfectionist in Paul found much to analyze and to critique, as was his habit when describing available women to his married twin. He cringed at her uninformed, simple-minded pronouncements—“She says things like this, ‘I can’t understand what they see in that horrible little old Gandhi’”—and mannered, “overstressed” way of speaking that led to “gasping when she talks excitedly.” He saw Julia as the typical product of her Pasadena childhood, “safely within the confines of her class and station,” with the predictable limitations in terms of knowledge, culture, and sophistication. He also saw how badly she wanted to break away from the controlling influence of her father. He theorized that she was “in love” with her father in the classic Oedipal formulation (if in an entirely unconscious and harmless way) and had spent her life deferring to him “for much of her thinking and acting.”
At thirty-one, Julia was “a grown-up little girl.” He was genuinely fond of her, and he empathized with her predicament, but only up to a point. “She is trying to be brave about being an old maid,” he told Charles, adding that he felt sure she would marry him “but isn’t the ‘right’ woman from my standpoint!” Her virginity put him off. Her “wild emotionalism” and “slight atmosphere of hysteria” got on his nerves. He could sense her sexual shyness, the neophyte’s frustration: “I feel very sorry for her because while I see clearly what the cure is, I do not see clearly who will apply it.”
Having carefully considered the matter, he concluded that she was altogether too inexperienced and overwrought for a randy old goat like him—“it would be too much for Dr. Paulski to risk attempting.” Julia had potential, he continued, but was in need of “training and molding and informing.” She enjoyed good food, art, music, and literature and would doubtless develop a taste for the finer things if they were in her orbit. She was eager and pliable, but just thinking about all the work it would take made him tired. Referring to his earlier treatise on the Zorina, Paul reminded his brother that his ideal type was confident and refined, someone “who has been hammered already on life’s anvil and attained a definite shape.”
As for when his dream woman would appear, Paul was still in the dark. After a deep malaise following the death of Edith, his longtime lover, he had sought the advice of an astrologist. Her name was Jane Bartleman, and he was so impressed with her powers of foresight that he paid her more than one call in Washington before going overseas. Paul had written down her prediction word for word and pinned all his hopes to it. He quoted bits of it often in his letters to his brother, as if convincing himself of its truth, almost willing it to happen. The New Year, Bartleman had advised, would bring “many changes, sudden moves, unexpected shifts,” and with them heavier professional responsibilities. There would also be great changes in his personal life. He would fall “heavily in love.” The woman in question would be “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful, a combination of many facets,” someone who can keep house, yet is a modern woman.” As Bartleman’s predictions about the path his career would take had always been “onthe-button,” Paul took heart that her promise of romance would also prove true.
In the meantime, he would have to make do with his little fan club. Not long after departing for Ch
ina, he wrote Charles that he had received the “best birthday present imaginable” in the form of a batch of mail, his first since leaving Ceylon, including greetings from “my three Jays”—Jane, Julia, and Jeanne. In another letter, he good-naturedly scolded his brother for having trouble keeping track of the many girls mentioned over the months of correspondence—“Your confusion concerning … Janie, Julie and Peachy is prob’ly natural: only names to you”—adding, “I suggest you adopt the system I used when I read War and Peace; keep a chart.”
Although married, Betty was not insensible to her friends’ plight. She, too, felt the nagging loneliness when she returned to her room at night and no one was there to warm her bed. There was small comfort in the wedding band on her finger. Her long-distance relationship with Alex seemed more painfully stretched and tenuous with every passing month. The war had disrupted all of their lives, and there was a natural tendency to look for affection and tenderness close at hand. Under the stress of work, and the instability of their surroundings, all kinds of alliances—however impetuous and fleeting—developed. In contrast to Julia, who had confided a degree of anguish about her situation, Jane was suspiciously silent on the subject, all the while appearing more carefree and buoyant than ever. If she read her friend’s character correctly, Betty had to hazard a guess that Jane was enjoying the attentions of someone in Ceylon—someone whose identity she had her own reasons for wanting to keep secret. Betty could well imagine why.
When confronted, Jane confessed all. Shortly after arriving in Kandy, she had met a thirty-seven-year-old American navy officer by the name of Manly Fleischmann, the handsome son of a Jewish father and Quaker mother who had in adult life opted to become Episcopalian. He was a Harvard graduate and a successful lawyer in civilian life, “but not one of Donovan’s.” In 1943, he joined the OSS and was sent to Mountbatten’s theater in Ceylon. He led a hundred-man mission to Japanese-occupied Burma, where he helped direct espionage operations behind enemy lines. He was in Colombo organizing additional intelligence-gathering schemes, and he boasted that he had recently managed to enlist a Burmese postman to steal Japanese mail sacks and rifle the contents for war plans, the disposition of troops, and other helpful bits. Jane liked him right away. He was brilliant and witty, if “a bit of an intellectual snob.” He joked that he and Jane were the two smartest people in the OSS but that sometimes he had his doubts about her.
He was married, of course. Worse, he had a child. When he and Jane realized all too quickly that what had begun as a roll in the hay had turned into a full-blown affair, they agreed they would “be true to each other” during the war but would make no claims on each other when it was over. For the time being, however, they were very much a couple, enjoying all the conjugal benefits without the complications of the Real Thing. Jane liked pretending to be the captain’s wife and keeping house, at least in their little Sinhalese home port. No model of domesticity, she admitted that every time he got promoted she would endeavor to sew another stripe on his uniform, “unevenly, of course.” None of this came as a shock to Betty. “There was a lot of that sort of thing going around,” she said years later with shrug. “The war was hard on a lot of marriages.”
Manly was often called away on missions to India, Burma, and Assam. In his absence, Jane kept up a pretense of going out with other men but in practice kept to a “virtuous” monogamy: “No one else ever crawled under my mosquito netting, except [her chipmunk] Christopher.” They kept up a funny, fond correspondence, trusting the services of an odd selection of “fleet-footed couriers, firemen, and tourists who plied the Colombo-Arakan route” to be, in his words, their “Cupid’s messengers.” He would write her when he expected to be coming her way so she could arrange to be free, making almost no effort to disguise his lascivious intent from the army censors. After one reunion, he wrote, “I can hardly tell you how much I enjoyed our brief interlude. I am bound and determined that they will never say that all work has made MF a dull boy, and my ruthless will is now fixed on a repeat junket ere many moons.”
Jane tried to be discreet for obvious reasons, not the least of which was that “the U.S. armed forces did not officially recognize sex.” After receiving one of her messages, Manly teased her for going to absurd lengths to safeguard their privacy. “It is not necessary to enclose them in stamped, air-mail envelopes,” he wrote. “My ancestral blood boils at this proof of your Basically Bourbon nature. It is such conduct that makes COMMUNISTS, or worse.” They thought they had everyone fooled until the morning Manly crept out of her bedroom at the Queen’s Hotel and across the lobby with her “red-and-white dressing gown trailing from his back pocket.” He was halfway in the jeep when his GI driver pointed out the incriminating peignoir.
At the end of two weeks, Betty’s TD (temporary duty) was up, and Jane drove her to the airport for her flight back to Calcutta. Tired of teary goodbyes, they made funny faces and grinned back and forth foolishly. It was easier to make light of the occasion. Betty would shortly be headed to Kunming along with a number of their colleagues from Detachment 404, including Paul, Julia, and Ellie. With so many of her old pals gone, Jane was in need of new playmates. It was the only way to endure the ludicrous monotony of life in Kandyland. She soon found pleasant diversion in the person of Peggy Wheeler, an OSS colleague she had befriended in Washington, who was the administrative secretary to Colonel Coughlin, along with her father, “Speck” Wheeler, who was now the top American commander in the theater. Peggy, by virtue of being “the only child and the apple of her father’s eye,” as Coughlin wrote in a cautionary memo to Donovan, had rather unusual status and privileges. “While an ardent supporter of OSS,” she saw all incoming and outgoing messages from Washington—except those marked “eyes only”—and it was understood, Couglin added, that Wheeler would “depend on her to keep him informed.”
Jane immediately endeared herself to the general by persuading Peggy to abandon her tiny room at the Queen’s Hotel for his much-larger suite at the Hotel Suisse across the lake. In recent months, conditions at the Queen’s had gone steadily downhill. In addition to the dicey plumbing, the power was frequently on the fritz. They had all grown accustomed to running up and down the stairs carrying flashlights, trying to dress and apply makeup by the light of one spluttering candle, and more or less camping out indoors. Peggy had at first refused to leave, gamely insisting she would stick it out with the rest of her OSS pals. Jane finally convinced her to go by arguing that if she moved in with her father it would be to their advantage, as she could then invite them all over for hot baths. Even Peggy could not counter the obvious wisdom of this argument, and she relented. As a result, Jane enjoyed her first really good scrub in months and swore she emerged several shades lighter.
Wheeler, the new deputy supreme Allied commander, was rumored to have an entertainment allowance of ten thousand dollars, and he was generous with his hospitality. Jane was frequently invited to the general’s dinner parties, and she enjoyed being wined and dined at Uncle Sam’s expense. Wheeler was a top army engineer, intelligent and humane, and was popular with both his fellow officers and the troops. As a young West Point graduate he had worked on the construction of the Panama Canal and had spent the better half of a century tackling the army’s heaviest jobs, building roads, railroads, harbors, and dams in almost every part of the world. He was the kind of tough-minded pioneer they could count on to get it done, no matter how hellish the conditions.
Stilwell assigned him the tremendous task of completing the Ledo Road, a two-hundred-mile lifeline hacked through jungle and swamp, connecting India and China. After the Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942, the Allies were forced to airlift the majority of war matériel to the Chinese over the Hump, so establishing an alternate land route from Assam to Kunming was a priority. Wheeler directed fifteen thousand American soldiers and some thirty-five thousand local laborers, laying down a winding double-track road across steep mountain passes, roaring torrents, and sheer drops. The worst section, a series
of hairpin turns following a narrow trail across the Patkai Range, was nicknamed “Hell Pass.” Altogether, it was an amazing engineering feat. The job won him an oak-leaf cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal, and the British named him an Honorary Knight Commander. Touched as he was by the honors, Wheeler confided to Jane that the work he was proudest of was the salmon ladder of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. Apparently, a side effect of this great barrier taming the river had been that the salmon could no longer swim upstream to spawn, so Wheeler, with his customary ingenuity, had conceived of a series of steps that the fish could traverse.
Tall and lean, with a bristling mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, the general, Jane thought, looked like a “straight-backed Groucho Marx.” He had punctilious but easy manners and a nice dry sense of humor. The story was that on his first visit to Burma, Wheeler asked Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Williams, aka “Elephant Bill,” the famed British elephant wrangler, how long the gestation period was for a baby elephant. Two years, he was told. A little while later, he saw a teak forest and commented on how convenient it was that teak—a valuable wartime resource used for everything from the decks of combat ships to docks—was in such ready supply, and just “rolled into the river and floated downstream.” He was informed that teak had to be dried for three years before it would float. That evening, he observed to his British counterpart: “If it takes two years to produce a baby elephant and three years for teak to float, I have a feeling things are not going to happen very rapidly on this front.”
A Covert Affair Page 14
