Against the Wind (9 page)

Mariah’s thick mane wagged. “It’ll never do! Y’sound like Marlene Dietrich tryin’ t’ blend in at a Galway pub.”

Raquel agreed. “
Sí.
Most unappetizing accent. The Germans. All of them. Speak of love like they are clearing their throats.”

Mariah nodded. “Right. Clearin’ dere troats.”

Raquel instructed, “Eleesa, you must try to speak like this.”

Mariah sniffed and cocked an eyebrow at Raquel. “Hush now. Don’t you be tellin’ her how t’ speak proper English, Raquel. Sure, you’ll be havin’ her soundin’ like Carmen Miranda. We’ll have to put your frutti-tutti hat on her head.”

My accent was hopeless in those days. I was too freshly escaped from Vienna to fit in comfortably in any English conversation. “I’ll just smile and play my violin.”

Mariah clucked her tongue and surrendered. “Hopeless all right.”

Raquel narrowed her eyes and reached into her bag for a red blouse. She held it up to me for size. “Yes. Wear something low-cut, eh? A little off the shoulder. Like a gypsy. You wear this. Men will not notice your accent. Tell them you are Hungarian.”

“May I say Czech?” I giggled. “Prague. One of my passports was Czech.”

Mariah agreed, “Sure, darlin’. Hungary. Prague. Whatever y’like, then. Smile and bat your eyelashes. They’ll never know the difference.”

As Mariah and I howled with laughter, Raquel hiked her gown, showing her gorgeous legs, and sashayed around the room in demonstration of the proper way to greet a wounded soldier. “See? He will throw away his crutches and follow you out of the hospital.”

My lessons in proper pronunciation came to an end when a knock sounded at the door. Had we been too loud?

Mariah opened it a crack.

The innkeeper’s wife peered in suspiciously. “There’s a trunk call. London. A man, American sounding.”

Mariah tossed her hair. “Well then, for one of us, is it?”

The woman replied, “Are you Missus Murphy?”

Mariah swept her hand toward me. “Murphy. Such a nice Irish name, isn’t it? Elisa darlin’, you’re bein’ paged.”

I smiled and, without uttering a sound, threw a dressing gown over my nightclothes and followed the dour woman down the narrow stairs to an old-fashioned telephone on the wall beside a cluttered desk.

It was Murphy on the line, sounding very far away and very excited. “Elisa! BBC just contacted me. Looking for you. Something’s up, honey! Big things. You and the girls get back down here to London on the two o’clock train tomorrow.”

The bulbous nose of the BBC’s headquarters pushed into Portland Place like the prow of a ship run aground right before colliding with Oxford Street. “More like a wedge of cheese, if you ask me,” Murphy intoned irreverently.

Armed soldiers parading out front confirmed the fact the British government believed Broadcasting House was a top priority target for sabotage, but it was also in German bombsights. The amount of destruction in the surrounding neighborhoods supported this opinion. Even before air raids on London became commonplace, Broadcasting House was attacked. A nearby block of flats had been leveled by an explosion that narrowly missed a crop of moviegoers watching
Gone with the Wind.

Above the entryway, statues of Shakespeare’s Prospero, the magician, and Ariel, the spirit of the air, peeked out of sandbag colonnades like typical Londoners of the day. The stone images from
The Tempest
showed brave faces and stiff upper lips but still sought shelter as needed.

We were led through a series of recently installed steel blast doors and down multiple flights of stairs to the third sub-basement. Stiff upper lips were all very well for public morale, but the actual business of broadcasting went on from belowground.

The air was fetid and reeked of the aroma of over-boiled cabbage drifting from the cafeteria sadly misplaced one floor above us. “How the Brits can turn somethin’ as delightful as cabbage into this,” Mariah waved her hand around her head, “is beyond me.”

“It is not altogether their fault,” Raquel said, touching a perfumed handkerchief to her nose. “Proper cooking of cabbage requires a window, I think.”

We assembled in a makeshift conference room. It was furnished with a threadbare camelback sofa, a desk apparently rescued from a reformatory from the amount of initials carved into its scarred surface, and a half circle of mismatched chairs.

One of the chairs was occupied by Cedric Barrett, a playwright for both the London stage and BBC radio dramas. The author, in tweed coat and spectacles, smoked a pipe that challenged the cabbage odor, and thankfully was actually an improvement.

Mariah, Raquel, and I took the sofa. Where had Murphy gone? He disappeared without warning at the last turning in the subterranean maze.

When he reappeared moments later he apologized. “Ed Murrow is setting up a broadcast down the hall. I had to say hello.”

Opposite us, across the table, were two men: Eugene McDonald, assistant chairman of ENSA, and another figure I did not recognize—American from his tan complexion and well-tailored clothing.

McDonald, with his suit coat not quite able to button across his paunch, his unshined shoes, and his rumpled hair, was a sad contrast to the carefully styled American, introduced to us as Gerald Snow. From that moment on, the American took charge.

“You three ladies really shook things up! You did indeed. Mister Goldwyn is very impressed.”

“Mister…Goldwyn?” Raquel repeated.

Murphy’s grin extending from ear-to-ear made me want to punch him.

“Yeah, Samuel Goldwyn. You know, MGM Studios? I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

“Some miscommunication,” I said, frowning at Murphy, who grinned impishly back. “Please, continue.”

“Mister Goldwyn loved the impersonations of Lamarr, O’Hara, and Miranda. Thinks it’s a scream. But it’s more than that. Mister Goldwyn thinks you are great representatives of the refugee plight. Think of it: Spain, France, Austria, Germany…”

“Ireland?” Mariah noted.

“Yeah, that too,” Snow continued undeterred. “So here’s the deal: Hollywood first. Newsreels for sure. A short feature with the three of you gals. We get Barrett here to write a script. Then he stays in Tinseltown to work on the feature Mister Goldwyn wants: Europe crushed under the Nazi jackboot, England fights on alone, bloodied but unbowed—that sort of thing—while the three of you go off on a speaking tour. Raise American awareness about what’s really going on here. Plight of the refugees. What do you say?”

Mariah, Raquel, and I were stumped, which was saying a lot for the three of us. Finally I managed to ask, “Mister Goldwyn asked for us…personally?”

“Yeah, well, I saw the newspaper reports on your exploits first,” Snow admitted. “I encouraged him. ‘S.G.,’ I said, ‘you gotta give these gals a chance. They’re boffo.’”

From Raquel’s expression she was still translating
boffo
when the studio executive grew unexpectedly serious. “My last name—Snow—don’t let that fool you. Couple generations back it was Schneemann. Jewish as it gets. My wife and son…wait’ll you meet Robert. Six years old and already a handful. We’re going back to America on the first boat after I get all my business settled. Anyway, I thank heaven my great-grandparents got out of the old country when they did. But more bad things are gonna happen if more folks don’t get the chance they got, and that’s where you come in.”

“My children are in Pennsylvania,” I said.

Snow was ready for that objection. “Another month out of your life, tops, and MGM will pay all the expenses.”

“I have three little girls I’m responsible for,” Raquel suggested. “I can’t abandon them. And Pablo, my accompanist.”

McDonald volunteered, “Pablo Garcia. Famous guitarist.”

“Bring ’em,” Snow offered. “Same deal. Real refugees.”

That left only Mariah. “There’s me sister,” she said slowly. “And her two babes. She wants to go to America in the worst way. Always has.”

“Bring ’em.” Snow was smiling now, certain we had all agreed. “Had me worried for a minute,” he admitted. “Mister Goldwyn said ‘all or none.’ That’s what he said: ‘Those three or find me three other ones.’”

Knowing how eager Snow seemed to be to have the matter settled allowed me to ramp up my courage. “One more thing,” I said. “Real refugees? All right, there is one more requirement. I met a group of Westminster choirboys. Five of them. They sing like angels, and they’ve been working on American folk songs. I want”—I favored Mariah and Raquel with inquiring looks and received confirming nods in return—“we want them included as well.”

“Five boys, eh? All right. You drive a hard bargain, but bring ’em on. What’s S.G. gonna say? ‘Send ’em back?’ So, we’re agreed?”

We were.

Hours after news of our upcoming journey to the U.S. was announced, Murphy received a phone call from Eben Golah asking for us to come to a meeting at St. Mark’s, North Audley. Murphy and I arrived at Grosvener Square a few minutes past eight in the morning, following days of the worst bombings of the Blitz. Loralei and Eben greeted us when we stepped off the bus. Concrete tank barricades, mountains of sandbags, and barbed wire surrounded the buildings on the leafy square.

Loralei hugged me, looked deeply into my eyes, and placed a hand on my cheek. I knew that something big was underway. Murphy shook Eben’s hand and shared news as we made our way up the street toward the church.

I spoke of our experience in the shelter of Westminster Abbey and my concern that all the boys must surely be in great danger.

Loralei confirmed my belief. “The damage around Parliament Square is no accident. The Germans are targeting landmarks. The Abbey school has been closed. Boys sent home. Several have lost parents and are on the list of evacuees. At least you have managed to gain a place for five on the list of entertainers.”

Eben spoke quietly. “The Blitz has done more than burn down the East London docks. It has awakened those who have been sleeping in the halls of Parliament these many years.”

Loralei held my hand. “Awakened them to what Jewish children and parents went through trying to get someplace safe…anywhere.”

Eben added, “The intent of the Nazis is to bomb England into submission. To make her surrender.”

“It won’t happen,” Murphy replied, staring up the block toward the church’s sandbag-shielded portico and the blacked-out, stained-glass windows. “Not with Churchill finally at the helm of this ship of state. It’s going to be sink or swim here.”

“Then Hitler will do all he can to sink the ship. Many thousands of innocents will be killed as he carries out his plan.”

I thought of Katie and Charles and Louis, safe in America, and how soon I would be seeing them again. Unlike parents stuck in this island under siege, I was free from the worry about my children’s safety.

Neither Loralei nor I spoke as Eben and Murphy sorted out the facts.

Murphy stepped around a broken sandbag on the pavement and asked, “Official word on the numbers of dead?”

“There’ll never be an accurate count. East End. Whole families killed. Today’s casualty list is filled with the names of English schoolchildren from the poorer parts of London. Meanwhile your American newspapers publish photos of wealthy British children posing happily on country estates on Long Island.”

“And sightseeing in New York,” Murphy added grimly.

Eben held Murphy in his gaze. “Your children? In America? Is this correct?”

Murphy answered. “We’re lucky. My folks made the crossing from America before things got bad, then took the kids back home with them to Pennsylvania. And Elisa, going on an ENSA junket to Hollywood.”

“What about you?”

“My work is here. I’ve decided to stay on a while. Got a job to do now that the fireworks have really started. Someone’s got to report what’s going on. America may have her head in the sand, but I mean to kick that ostrich in the rear, hard as I can.”

“Time is short. Soon it will be too late for anyone else to leave. I mean, if America is drawn into the war.” Eben’s gaze rose to fix upon the white clouds sailing across the sky.

Murphy drew a deep breath. “Trouble is, American isolationists are too strong to let that happen easily. Roosevelt is committed to keeping us neutral. There’s lots of sentiment for America to stay out of a European war this time.”