Authors: Susan Isaacs
Shining Through
SUSAN
ISAACS
SHINING
THROUGH
In memory of
Gloria Safier
She lived.
Contents
In 1940, when I was thirty-one and an old maid…
1
“Linda, honey, put on some rouge, stick your boobies in…
28
John Berringer could hardly bear the loss of his wife.
46
The window behind Edward Leland’s desk was open, and the…
58
The sun sparkled, and the surface of the dark water…
74
The file room had Blair, VanderGraff and Wadley’s records starting…
84
They never touched this one in business etiquette.
Not one…
99
All those nights I had been working—legitimately working—I had never…
110
119
Snoring, my mother sounded like a huge, slow, rusty machine.
September 7, 1940. The Battle of Britain was in its…
138
The high-ceilinged room in City Hall smelled of cigarettes ground…
154
Henry and Florence Avenel lived somewhere in West-chester, in an…
168
During the bleakest days of the Depression, in 1931, the…
181
December was a miserable month, bitter cold. And almost the…
197
North Africa, the Balkans, East Africa, Crete, Iraq, Yugoslavia. The…
211
I’d never thought my life could be so interesting, but…
223
John had a new office, but that was only to…
249
The fourth of July fell on a Saturday, and for…
272
John wasn’t at his office. As I came through the…
288
“This isn’t foolish!” Edward’s fist crashed down on a table.
308
“Say as little as possible,” Konrad Friedrichs muttered. We walked…
334
“There’s an old berlinersch expression,” I said. “‘Eine jute jebratene…
350
If he’d lived in the United States, the best a…
369
Bombs scared me as much as the Gestapo. Maybe more,…
386
I didn’t dare risk sleep, so I sat up. All…
405
The linen napkin I put over the wound was like…
423
My bed was like a crib, with high white railings…
442
I
n 1940, when I was thirty-one and an old maid, while the whole world waited for war, I fell in love with John Berringer.
An office crush. Big deal. Since the invention of the steno pad, a day hasn’t gone by without some secretary glancing up from her Pitman squiggles and suddenly realizing that the man who was mumbling “…and therefore, pursuant to the above…” was the one man in her life who could ever bring her joy.
So there I was, a cliché with a number 2 yellow pencil: a working girl from Queens who’d lost her heart to the pride of the Ivy League.
And to make matters worse, John Berringer bore absolutely no resemblance to the typical Wall Street international lawyer, the kind whose gray face was two shades paler than his suit.
Sure, a girl could wind up losing her heart to one of those dreary men. There’s nothing quieter than an old maid’s bedroom, and in that black stillness it’s so easy to create magic: A lawyer with the profile of a toad—Abracadabra!—is transformed into an Adonis, pulsating with passion under his pinstripes.
But John didn’t need any of that midnight magic to turn him gorgeous. The big joke in the law firm was how could I
not
have a mad crush on him. “You’ve got to be made of iron, Linda,”
one of the girls said at lunch, “not to go nuts for those blue eyes.
They’re blue like—” Someone at the far end of the table called out, Twilight! And someone else chimed 1
2 / SUSAN ISAACS
in, No, like a clear lake…but with a funny kind of depth, like on a cloudy day. John Berringer made poets out of stenographers. Someone else piped up, Come
on
…blue like pansies, and Gladys Slade, my best friend, called out from the head of the lunch table, “How can anybody even
think
of the word ‘pansy’
in the same sentence with ‘Mr. Berringer’ in it?” Everyone giggled.
In private, Gladys said, “Listen, Linda, don’t kid a kidder. I’m the first person to understand your not wanting to make a public announcement, but even if you didn’t care about looks, think about brains. I mean, you’re always reading the papers and wanting to talk about—oh, God, you know—English naval power. Or French politics. So aren’t you attracted to someone brilliant like him? I bet he loves all that boring stuff.”
“It’s not boring. Three quarters of the world is—”
“He’s
so
charming,” she cut me off. “Like a blond Cary Grant.”
“Gladys,” I explained, “when you sit across the desk from this guy day in and day out, you realize he’s
always
charming. It kind of wafts up from him, like B.O. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t mean anything. And his looks…Yeah, he’s handsome, but what’s behind it?”
“That’s for you to find out,” Gladys ho-ho-hoed.
“I’ve got to tell you,” I said, “there’s something deep-down unappealing about a man who knows he’s stunning and uses it.
You know, like it’s six-fifteen and you’re so tired all you want to do is suck your thumb, but he has forty-seven letters he still wants to dictate. So he flashes that five-thousand-watt smile and that’s supposed to brighten up your life and make you want to go on. But see, a guy who pulls that sort of thing isn’t…”
“Isn’t what?”
“Isn’t masculine.”
“Oh, come off it!”
“I’m serious, Gladys. And he’s
much
too blond. Girls are fair.
Guys should be dark. And with those big blue eyes. It’s like some artist made him up to illustrate ‘Cinderella.’ Can’t SHINING THROUGH / 3
you just see him, with green stockings and those bubble shorts, holding a glass slipper?”
“I can see him
with
green stockings…and
without
green stockings.” This was a very racy remark for Gladys, whose idea of wild sex was Fred Astaire loosening his tie.
“He’s Prince Charming,” I said. “Who needs it? I’ve got to stay late when he asks me, even if he looked like a pile of you-know-what. It’s my job. But he thinks: Ha! I’ve charmed her.
I’ve got her where I’ve got
all
the girls, in the palm of my hand.”
I looked Gladys straight in the eye. “You know why he doesn’t do a thing for me? Because he’s a woman’s man. Not a real man.”
Naturally, I was lying through my teeth. But I kept my secret love a secret. I would not let myself (as his secretary) be honorary president of the John Berringer Fan Club. What I felt for John wasn’t meant to be shared with the girls. It was precious, and different.
Because even way back then, I felt
I
was different.
But was I (am I?) really different in any way from all the women from Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx who trekked up the stairs from the subway every morning and got lost in the dark canyons, the gloomy buildings that loomed over Wall Street? Well, I’m not in Queens anymore. I’m certainly not a secretary. I’m not the girl I was.
But how did I get all the way here from there?
Because when America finally did go to war, the other subway secretaries fought Hitler by saving their bacon grease in tin cans and putting makeup on their legs instead of silk stockings. My fight, though, was different—perilous, real. I wound up in the middle of the Nazi hellhole. Me, Linda Voss.
So what I did during the war: Was it my fate? Was it courage?
Or was it inevitable? Did I finally realize that all those people in Europe could be me, so that I
had
to be responsible? Or did I just take so many small, stupid steps that I slipped over the edge, into an abyss where I had to either do—or die? Would any girl in my shoes have done the same?
4 / SUSAN ISAACS
Now they say I’m a hero. But who are the heroes, anyway?
The brave? Or the terrified ordinary?
I still don’t know. The only thing I do know is that when I start going over all that happened, the first thing that pops into my mind is not one of those major moments, which proves: Hey, that Linda!
So
special. I had more than enough of those major moments. If you saw them on a movie poster—PASSION!
BETRAYAL! WAR! DEATH! LOVE!—you’d assume you were getting one hell of a double feature.
But when I look back, it’s funny. What I remember first is just a regular day—the last before my life slowly began to change.
At home that morning, I put the old, dented coffeepot on to perk and looked out the window. Nothing unusual: a dull white January sky, like a bleached-out sheet. The attached houses of Ridgewood, six in a row, were as lifeless as cardboard cutouts: no hyacinths popping up, no maple trees turning red, no kids on roller skates. My down-the-street neighbor’s cocker spaniel, Champ, came and did his business on a Christmas tree that had been lying on the curb all week; then he trotted off, leaving drippy tinsel and a yellow stain on the dingy snow.
At work, the view of Manhattan from the forty-sixth floor wasn’t what you’d call thrilling, either: not at all that exquisite jagged line of skyscrapers you see in those turn-me-upside-down-and-I-snow paperweights. I glanced out at the narrow streets and overpowering buildings. New York looked gray, tired of itself.
In the office, the radiator clanged, reheating the air it had already overheated. My face flushed hot and red. My lips were so chapped it would have hurt if I smiled. And my sweater had fuzz balls.
But who cared? John Berringer, the man I loved, was there.
He sat at his desk. Naturally, he didn’t bother to look up.
“Are you positive you gave me the Kunstadt contracts?” he asked. I stood up, put down my pad and pencil, walked around his desk and stood by his chair. His hair gleamed SHINING THROUGH / 5
gold and soft under the light of his desk lamp. I imagined touching it.
Was this one of those magic moments they’re always singing about on the radio? Did I somehow
know?
No. But still, looking back, that ordinary day in January 1940 is lit so bright that I can see everything about it: even the streaks of bronze and platinum that shot through John’s beautiful fair hair.
“The contracts are right here, Mr. Berringer.” I tapped the pile of papers with my finger, and it slid back the quarter inch into his line of vision.
“Oh. Thanks.” He paused, then looked up and smiled. “What would I do without you?” Probably get up, go to the men’s room, then come back, pick up the telephone and call the employment agency for another bilingual secretary. “You’re the best there is, Miss Voss. You know that, don’t you?”