A Woman of Intelligence

by Karin Tanabe

  While we’d managed our fair share of fun in the waning days of the war, everything changed once peace had officially been declared. Silk dresses were selling, sugar was being sprinkled like snow, and optimism and money abounded. Because of that money, there was a feeling that America, especially Manhattan, was going to shine again. It all seemed to pump extra oxygen into our young lungs, but the best thing that happened was that the pool of men expanded overnight. They brought with them the delicious scent of testosterone. The second-best thing that happened was that I didn’t stay at City Hall much longer. In the middle of 1946, a girl I knew in passing, Elisabeth Braun, stopped me in the hall after hearing me speak French to a visitor I had escorted in.

  “Rina, I didn’t realize you speak French? I thought just German and Italian,” she said when we were alone in the hallway with a sunny view of Centre Street.

  “Just?”

  She smiled, and shook her head. “Sorry, in my family, if you don’t speak at least four then something’s not quite right.”

  “I’m Swiss, my family is from Fribourg, so I understand that perfectly. And I do speak four.”

  “Well, did you know that the United Nations is hiring French interpreters? English to French and French to English. But you have to be really good.”

  “The United Nations?” I felt my world grow larger simply saying the words.

  She nodded. “It’s headquartered, for now, on Lake Success in Nassau County. Long Island. But the General Assembly meets at the New York City Building in Queens. It’s all a hike, but it’s the United Nations, so it’s worth the shoe leather. Or the Long Island Rail Road ticket.”

  “Nice of you to tell me,” I said, already feeling the excitement, ready to bound out of City Hall and into the world. “I’m interested.”

  “It’s actually extremely self-serving,” said Elisabeth quietly. “I’m only telling you because I want your job. I can’t work for Braden anymore. He thinks my backside is fair game. I’m sick of having it grazed and pecked at. I’m about to put a book in my skirt. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse than grazing and pecking. The other day he…” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Anyway, I want your job. And your boss.”

  “I’m sor—”

  “My cousin Marianne is there,” she said, cutting me off abruptly. “She grew up in France with American parents and worked as a secretary for the French embassy. She told me about the job opening. But you have to be able to translate as they’re speaking to you. Simultaneous interpretation they call it. Are you good enough in French to do it?”

  I had an aunt who had done simultaneous interpretation. And I’d spent my life rotating languages, easily, fluently.

  “Mais bien sûr,” I replied, rolling my R until it bounced off my tongue.

  “I’m good enough in French to say mais bien sûr,” said Elisabeth skeptically.

  “I’m good enough,” I assured her.

  “Meet my cousin after work?”

  Marianne Fontaine walked into a café across from the New York World Building, wearing a little black beret of all things, declaring herself in love with every single delegate at the UN but also with a World reporter named Frank (who insisted she call him Frisco). Instantly, I knew I had to work with her. I wanted to be wherever she was. More than that, I wanted to live just like her. The next morning, I dialed Fieldstone 7-1100, the Lake Success information office, and asked how to apply. A month later, I was exiting the Long Island Rail Road at Great Neck, boarding a bus to Lake Success to go say a lot more than mais bien sûr.

  Before I started, I’d written to my aunt Hanna, the simultaneous interpreter, and told her about my plans. She was thrilled, I was thrilled, my entire family in Switzerland was thrilled. I’d asked Aunt Hanna for advice and she’d replied, “Anticipate. Just as you can anticipate someone’s physical moves, you can anticipate someone’s words. You need to learn to hear what’s coming.”

  It was hard to hear what was coming, much harder than I thought, but I kept up. Even though French and English were the official UN languages, every day I spoke Italian and German to people who had them as second, third, even fourth languages, though neither country had been admitted to the UN. I even tried my hand at Mandarin when a Chinese delegation visited, the representatives all wearing thin black ties and sharp double-breasted suits. In 1947, I listened in awe as the Arabic-speaking translators clicked through the halls as fast as possible when the United Kingdom delegation raised the question of the independence of Palestine. The translators scurried to the Egyptian representative, who then had to revisit the application of the Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and then we all had to take a break to welcome Siam as the newest member of the UN. If that wasn’t reason to celebrate, what was?

  I took the train to either Lake Success or the United Nations stop in Queens every workday for six years, going through books of commuter tickets faster than the delegates went through cartons of cigarettes. It was exhausting, exhilarating work, and I never stopped loving what The New York Times had dubbed “United Nations patois,” a conversation made up of many languages, plus the hand gestures that accompanied them.

  That LIRR train left Pennsylvania Station on the half hour for Great Neck, passing the United Nations stop on the old World’s Fair grounds in Queens. Then it would squeak into Nassau County and the shiny United Nations buses would be waiting there to take us to headquarters.

  I adored walking off the bus and into the Lake Success building with fifty-five proud, high-flying flags in front of the wide, squat thing, which had once been the Sperry Gyroscope company. How could a person not feel awash with success at a place with such a name? But it wasn’t just the name, it was the sights and sounds. My brain felt alive speaking an endless circle of English to French, French to English, with the interpreters from France and Belgium. I adored greeting the Indian girls in saris serving as secretaries and file clerks and watching them float in their magentas and blues down the hallway, or smiling hello to the tall, elegant Ethiopian girls as they hurried to put carbon paper and letter paper in the rollers of their typewriters.

  Almost weekly, I’d stop to gawk at Eleanor Roosevelt, one of five American delegates to the General Assembly, or admire the formidable presence of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate of the Security Council.

  I loved having picnics on the sloped lawn at Lake Success with Marianne and interpreters and translators from all over the world, or having cocktails after work at the UN restaurant, sneaking up to the Delegates Lounge, which was closed to the public. It felt like the world had descended on Long Island for the best possible reason—peace, the kind that might endure—and somehow, I had snatched up an invitation to join. Working at the UN made us feel like the world was trying extremely hard not to repeat its mistakes.

  As good as the work was, it wasn’t the best part. How could it have been when it was “All City ‘Let’s Go’”? From the day I started in 1946 to the day I met Tom in ’48, I didn’t go to sleep before midnight once, except for a bout of the flu in January 1947, which had me in bed at 11:59. The rest of the time, I was busy soaking in the new city.

  At the end of the workday, I’d fly back to Manhattan on the express, exit at Union Square, and start running around town searching for conversations to be had and drinks to be sucked down. Gin martinis, gin and tonics—anything with gin would do. After the war, young women could have three eyes and they’d still be taken to bed. But if you were decent-looking and spoke French, it was watch out, world.

  The first day I saw Marianne at work, her blonde curls were tamed to perfection, and her hazel eyes outlined with kohl. She took my hand and pulled me straight to the spot where we could spy on the delegates in their private, prestigious cafeteria. Like most of the other young female interpreters, Marianne lived downtown with roommates who were working girls, at least until they found the right man. But Marianne was looking for all the wrong men, and I was thrilled to join her. For years, there had been very few men our ag
e left on the island of Manhattan. Now they were back, and we were ready to bask in the light of their adoration.

  “Just say it like it is, Katharina,” Marianne declared to me one night at a party at the Betty Parsons Gallery. “There are few things better in the world than being a young, beautiful woman.”

  “I turned thirty this year, and I should be all upset about it, but I’m not,” I said, throwing down another gin and tonic. In summer, they were all we drank.

  “Why should you be? You look twenty, so who gives a damn? And you’re too smart to get married. Marriage and babies are for women who are perfectly comfortable performing their own lobotomies,” she said, angling her head as she took in the new big thing, Abstract Impressionism. “Come on, let’s go talk to those men over there. Insinuate that we’re good at removing our clothing. I could use another drink.”

  Marianne didn’t have a French accent when she spoke English. Having American parents will dilute anything, but when she was out fishing for compliments, or a bedroom companion, she dialed it up so high that the roll of her Rs could have cut glass.

  We inched over to some good-looking suits at the bar, and Marianne started babbling to me in French about the who’s who of the art world. Half the names sounded made up, but I just nodded and said, “Ah oui, j’ai entendu parler de lui.”

  “Des Françaises!” the man to our left exclaimed in perfect French.

  “Merde,” Marianne murmured.

  “No, we’re Swiss … Belgian. Swiss Belgians,” she said, putting her drink on the bar. “Come on, Rina,” she said, pulling me out of the gallery and onto East Fifty-seventh Street. “I’m in no mood to flirt with my own kind. The charm of my accent is completely lost on them. Let’s go somewhere safe from French people.”

  “New Jersey?”

  “That’s no good. We’ll go way downtown, find some terrible jazz. It’s only two o’clock!”

  By the time we got to a place where Marianne was sure no French people would turn up—Battery Park—the music was cheap, and the rats were out, as was our cleavage.

  “Being around you ladies is like traveling without having to buy a steamer ticket. What else you got to show me? You’ve got the Eiffel Tower in your pocket?” one very cute rat said to Marianne as we listened to some of the worst jazz New York had to offer that year.

  “Sadly, no. Only lint,” she proclaimed.

  “Well I’ve got the Eiffel Tower for you in my pan—”

  “That’s enough of that!” I said, holding up my hand and laughing. “Where did you learn to talk to a woman that way?”

  “Way downtown, baby. You speak French. I speak downtown. I also speak dockworker, factory worker, porter, washman, and soldier.”

  “Are those Latin languages?” Marianne asked, flapping about her eyelashes like she was ready to take flight, right into that man’s bunk bed or sleeping bag or wherever he slept.

  “More like prison dialects,” he said, laughing. “Come on, ladies. I grew up on Lung Block. Cherry Street. That’s between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges for you foreigners.”

  I rolled my eyes at Marianne, but I was grinning like a girl on a homecoming float.

  “It’s a shock I never got tuberculosis. Hell, it’s a shock I can speak at all. But us tenement kids have charm for days. Raze our apartments but can’t raze our ways, you know? Helped me better than anything else would have during the war.”

  “Were you overseas?” I asked.

  “Germany. Came back blind.”

  Marianne stared at his two brown eyes. “You can’t see!” she exclaimed, suddenly not understanding where his Eiffel Tower was springing from if it was not from her angelic face and thirty-six-inch bust.

  “Only in my right eye. Trust me, my left can see all of that,” he said, waving his hand near her chest. “And the rest of me works just fine.”

  She seemed contented.

  “Let’s get out of here, kids,” Marianne said. “You too, Downtown. Back up we go.” She looked at our half-blind friend and kissed him on the cheek. “You may have lost half your perspective, but we’ll help you regain a new one.”

  The UN and Marianne Fontaine certainly gave me a new one.

  Even when we ventured to the edges of the island, we always ended up at Café Lafayette in the Hotel Lafayette with its chandelier that looked brought over from Versailles and a dirty floor that looked brought in from Rikers Island. It was packed with French speakers, but after three a.m. Marianne no longer cared. It was one of the only places that still spilled out onto the sidewalk at that hour, even when the cold came in. Plus, it was in the heart of Greenwich Village and was equal parts blue-collar and French aristocrats.

  “I’ve always wanted to swing on a chandelier,” I said to our foulmouthed, blind, yet somehow still charming new friend.

  “Give me five bucks and you can swing on the chandelier. Or, take off your dress, and I’ll give you five bucks to do it,” the bartender, Pierre-Henri, said laughing at me.

  “I don’t need your five dollars,” I said, letting him take me to the back, slide his hand up my dress, kiss me, and then kiss me some more. “I work at the United Nations, remember?”

  “A man dropped a stick of dynamite on the building today. You’re lucky we’re even alive,” said Marianne as the sun started to come up, which was actually true.

  “To imply how dynamite-looking you all are?” asked Pierre-Henri.

  “I think it had a lot more to do with tension in North Korea.”

  We’d sleep it off on Sundays and be fresh as daisies on Monday, shuffling between the cafeteria, offices, meeting rooms, and press and radio rooms, peeking in on the delegates’ dining room before taking up our perch in the interpretation booth, mais bien sûr. I was still living with Patricia and Ruby, but my City Hall days, and friends, were feeling more and more domestic. We were still tied together in some ways—eating rushed breakfasts together, sharing stories of our escapades, the rent, and the magic of making our own money. But as much as I loved Patricia and Ruby, and as smart as they were, neither could compete with Marianne. They were like two perfectly charming Moulin Rouge dancers who got demoted to extras when Jane Avril walked in. Running around Manhattan with Marianne and our band of linguistically gifted foreigners made it feel like a different city altogether—and I was the delegate from New York, ready to sell what we had to offer.

  Who needed parties at the Plaza back then? Who cared whether the ceiling was gilded or chipping apart, as long as the bar was open and the drinks were flowing? All of us, no matter which language we were speaking, were New Yorkers. The great city was alive again, and I couldn’t see an end in sight.

  But it’s always when you’re not looking that someone starts looking at you. And in 1948, the man who started looking was Tom.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dr. Tom Edgeworth. Harvard undergrad. Yale medical school. Surgical residency at New York-Presbyterian. Only forty-three years old and already a highly regarded surgeon. He smiled as he gestured to the audience to stop their applause, which kept going. His dark brown hair was as thick and well styled as ever, his green eyes sparkling. His tuxedo was so perfectly tailored that it barely creased at the elbow when he gestured again for the applause to stop. He gave a speech. I listened intently, nodding my head as my newly cut black hair, with painstakingly placed Elizabeth Taylor–style waves swished against my neck. The speech was laced with genuine humility and passion. It was true, Tom Edgeworth was a very good physician. “My calling. The reason I wake up in the morning … and go to bed just four hours before I have to get up again.” Laughter. Excited whispers among the women. “… the addition of an intensive care unit, more research dollars for childhood diseases, a commitment to curing leukemia, better treatments for bone malformations and congenital heart disease … never turning away a sick child whose family cannot pay.” The sight of men shuffling in their chairs, straightening their spines because their wives were about to press them to give the hospital larger check
s. Who could say no to an impassioned plea from such a man?

  When the applause died down, Tom began thanking people for supporting him, for enabling his work. His mentor, a tall bald man named Jack Armstrong, was thanked first. His parents received a long mention, though they weren’t present. “… just returned from a trip around the Orient for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.” Coos from the crowd. Of course, the father of this man was a romantic. “Oh, but he’s William Edgeworth’s son. You didn’t know? How could you not know? Look at those hands. Just like his father’s. Bedroom hands.” Half the women in the room had probably felt William Edgeworth’s hands on them. “And of course,” Tom said loudly, interrupting the wave of female murmurs. He looked out at me and smiled. I smiled back.

  “And, of course, my loving wife, Katharina.” He paused. His smile turned to a grin. He waited as a collective “aww” was let out by the women in the room. I smiled, the corners of my mouth quivering, exhausted.

  I felt my table companion, Mrs. Morgan, reach for my arm, the cold metal of her rings waking up my warm flesh. She gave my right forearm a light squeeze and then went back to her Chablis.

  “I’m humbled and hope I can…”

  I let Tom’s words trail off, though the rest of the audience was still enraptured.

  “Isn’t that nice,” Mrs. Morgan leaned over to me and whispered in her raspy alto, a voice redolent of years of smoking L&M cigarettes.

  “It really is. He’s always so thoughtful. ‘My loving wife,’” I said with a half smile, my voice cracking slightly. Mrs. Morgan was too many drinks in to notice.

  “We all said he was one of the best catches in Manhattan when he was young. I think we started saying that when he turned thirteen and switched to long pants. Mrs. Henry van Asletson desperately wanted him for her daughter Charlotte. You know that, of course.” She leaned back in her chair as if to take in my reaction from the level that her eyes worked best.

  “I don’t know much about it,” I whispered, not eager for this conversation. Everyone in Tom’s circle, including myself, knew that Charlotte van Asletson was ready to rip her Paris-made underpants off for Tom and suction cup her body to his the day she turned eighteen. All the girls from his set were.